Rob Isaac

If you don’t play the terrible FPS part, it’s an amazing novel.

me neither, it’s just one of the few games with a checkbox to express that preference in a highly visible way

this is why i have never played pvp except in-person at a LAN party and i never will

why would i give up my chances of success to a bunch of strangers who are not only motivated but rewarded to thwart me. no fuckin way. for FUN? real life has enough of that.

Turns out I had some angry feelings about this. Sorry. Shout out to Satisfactory and similar games that are still working to scale the good parts.

This post was indeed intended as a public service ❤️

also they drove right on past the whole “75% of World of Warcraft’s billion dollar income stream places an explicit vote against anon PvP during account creation” and kept making shitty games for the remaining 25% because of their dick sizes or whatever

still baffles me that the worst people in the world looked at LAN parties and thought “we can monetise this by gatekeeping the means to extend it over the Internet, and all we need to do is kill every single thing about it that was good!”

I’ve been deeply confused for several days because a lot of people seemed to be talking about Marathon, a long-forgotten FPS from the PowerPC Mac era.

Turns out there’s a newly released Fortnite clone set in the same universe with the same name.

The fact that many of the people reading this know exactly who you mean is in itself a terrifying verification of @abeardedpanda.bsky.social’s original claim.

putting ten babies into the grinder was bad enough, but when they wanted to take it to eleven I was like, enough is enough

stop stop I’m already dead

My most murderously unpopular industry opinion is that we do not understand the roles of fools and jesters like Dorsey and Musk, and consequently we do not understand why the market seems to value them so irrationally highly. It leaves us nerds out of step.

He’s not getting interviews because he’s succeeding. He’s in the news because he’s at the extreme bleeding edge of dumb shit, and right or wrong, extreme bleeding edge gets the clicks.

The industry purpose of people like Jack Dorsey is to serve as a sort of ignorance canary, provided worked examples of the dumbest possible approach that could still work. He fails, but then the worst people in the world calibrate their businesses for Dorsey-minus-10% and are confident of success.

it’s like someone taught a squirrel to talk

there are LIMITS

@tft.io should see this

location scouting for the gritty hyper-realist 70s batman movie that never got made

It’s been decades but it seems to describe a three-dimensional search space that I struggle to visualise. Worth noting that I have mild cognitive difficulties with similar puzzles: my partner painstakingly explained minesweeper (!) to me recently, and it turns out I had several misunderstandings.

Now imagining @jennschiffer.com in a distant bat cave, seated at a gigantic ten monitor battlestation, watching thousands of threads like this evolving in real time, and quietly chuckling.

I hadn’t thought of it like this but that’s a perfect analogy

so much this

Like, to a nerdy child, it’s obviously a trick because everything on the computer is a trick, right? Computers don’t “play” games, they just follow some instructions to simulate it. But exposure to lots of fiction shifts you slightly closer to thinking machine cognition is crudely plausible.

I have this complicated idea I can’t explain very well, about how fiction can still move the window for real-world things, and we’ve got ~200 years of speculative fiction about machine intelligence that might have set people up for these sorts of misunderstandings.

I’ve seen it IRL and it’s mildly scary. People sneaking off to go have one more chat, people typing unbearably personal things into a very dumb chatbot, uncharacteristic flashes of aggression if anyone seems likely to interfere, etc.

@jennschiffer.com Thank you for the “feelings” thread. You nailed it.

(I still don’t understand Hunt The Wumpus and I’m deeply suspicious of people who claim they do.)

Exactly the same experience: a friend’s dad brought home one of the Toshiba CP/M machines and we stayed up all night trying out all the games. Watching reasonable, intelligent, computer-literate adults be completely fooled by Eliza was a “whoah, the world is more complicated” moment for a child.

Luckily, plastic grows on trees and isn’t dependent on crude oil.

my “strong and reliable partner” t-shirt seems to be raising a lot of questions that are already answered by the shirt