If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
No means No, even if it's a big name author with tons of lawyers behind them. When they say "please don't show me fan fic," that's enough, and, if they give more detail about why, you don't get to judge whether you think they're telling the truth or not
To clarify: I saw a post where someone said they didn't believe that Big Name Authors were genuinely afraid of being sued, but that instead they were just snobs who hated fanfic and thought saying "oh no I could get sued" was more polite than sharing their true feelings
Another author shared a detailed, eloquent explanation of what a bad take that was, and all of the points were 100% valid
but
No Means No
and I was just so baffled that the OP was more willing to spin a tale of authors all agreeing to the same lie about not wanting to get sued so they could hide their disdain for their fans, than just respecting the requests not to do it
Authors who hate fanfic are not afraid to say so.
Authors who love fanfic are not afraid to say so.
We are not collectively in the business of lying for free. We get paid for that. So no, we're not running a mass conspiracy to lie to you about our feelings.
Cyprus the Microraptor! 🦖🌲
another CraftyIntention’s pattern that i’ve been meaning to do for a while. a challenge, but a fun one!
EA's motto right there.
So, before I say anything else: yes, EA's monetization model is bad, I do not have high hopes for ~Project Rene~, I'm honestly not planning on picking it up, especially not with Life With You coming out soon
But that last panel is uh... probably being taken out of context.
In game dev, you have something called the Minimum Viable Product. The Minimum Viable Product is the smallest amount of game you can make that represents your game fully-- if you released this, people would still get the intended experience. You need to make sure that the Minimum Viable Product is rock-solid before you add any new features, because if it isn't, people aren't going to enjoy your game.
For example, the Minimum Viable Product for a Mario game would be a couple worlds' worth of increasingly difficult platforming challenges, with basic platforming, mushrooms and fire flowers, and a Bowser fight. Anything beyond that-- additional levels, new power-ups, new bosses, individual level gimmicks-- is not part of the Minimum Viable Product. It's worth spending time on them, and time making them good-- fancy features move product!-- but if you spend too much time on them, and not enough time on the Minimum Viable Product, your game is going to suck asssssssss.
Project Rene is still in ludicrously early development. Like, "I'm shocked they're showing us this much" early development. Like, "every single asset in these scenes is a placeholder, except for some of the animations probably" early development.
They're, uh... pretty clearly still working on the minimum viable product. The core gameplay loop. The basics of how Sims interact, take care of themselves, and progress their personal stories. The basics of how the player interacts with Sims and the world. The basic look and feel of the game.
And when you're working on your minimum viable product? It is genuinely important to figure out how little you can make to get the most bang for your buck. If you spend a whole bunch of time working on something that isn't a core feature, and it gets cut? you've wasted a bunch of dev hours on something players aren't ever gonna see. if you spend a whole bunch of time working on a game system, and it sucks ass and everyone hates it? you're back to square one.
People do not make bad games on purpose. I guarandamntee you everyone in the trenches is a Sims uberfan and wants the game to be as good as it can possibly be. The EA execs, not so much-- but the people doing the coding and art and programming, absolutely.
Recently, a number of public intellectuals have claimed that we're getting increasingly closer to artificial intelligence that can solve a wide array of problems as well as a human can. However, these claims overlook fundamental barriers in the field that we are still decades from solving. To discuss this, I turned to alcoholic grad student James Belmini at MIT.
"It's just these fucking packages, man", James told me, while pouring himself a glass of straight vodka at 3 in the afternoon. "The 'language comprehension' package requires pyflubnugget at version 3.8.6 or less, but this 'Superintelligence' git repo requires conkflonk of 1.1.2 or greater, which conflicts with pyflubnugget. So any speculation of the capabilities of true AGI is purely hypothetical, because it's gonna take at least 5 years to work this shit out."
Asking about James' thesis progress did not yield anymore information about the problem, but did cause him to pour himself another shot and down it wordlessly, all without making eye contact
The singularity put on indefinite hold while pip insists on downloading every release of every library in existence in order to resolve a simple dependency chain.
i was present a few months ago when my best friend found out that outlier isn’t pronounced “oot-lee-yay” and i haven’t been the same since
“average person thinks outlier pronounced oot-lee-yay” factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. No person thinks outlier pronounced oot-lee-yay. French Canadian Georg, who has mispronounced word for 39 years, is an ootleeyay adn should not have been counted
This phenomenon (not this *specific* instance, but in general) is *extremely* common in people who read a lot as kids and know a great many words but haven’t actually heard them said aloud.
“oot-lee-yay” makes perfect sense to me since your friend is French Canadian (not Georg). -ier is a common suffix and I’m sure they’re familiar with oubliette and other such words.
But very few people are willing to admit that they’ve been caught up by this, too, because it’s embarrassing and makes them feel foolish or unintelligent (they’re neither).
(I’m only not confessing to mine because my memory is shit and I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. But my father for years thought hors d’oeuvers was pronounced “Horse d’overs”. )
*raises hand* I also thought that was the pronunciation, and that “ord-erves” was an entirely different concept. I loved reading about Percy-phone and when the God of the Underworld abducted her. And so on and so forth. A previous housemate was greatly entertained by my continuing mispronunciations.
So many people I know originally read ‘misled’ as ‘myzled’. I still like ‘myzled’ as a word, although it has connotations of confused/befuddled to me, which ‘misled’ doesn’t.
'nostalglia’ is not pronounced like I thought it would and I learned the difference in my 20s
Until I was 9 I pronounced “racism” like “fascism”
I once misread “omicron” as “omnicron”, and I thought the first syllable rhymed with “mom” rather than “home.” This caused much embarrassment when covid variants started going around.
I've decided to use the term "convenience food" instead of "junk food."
I think it's more honest, and less loaded. It's all food, some of it is more appropriate when you don't have the spoons left for food prep. It takes slightly more energy to peel a banana than to open a bag of chips.
We try to save the convenience food for days when we need something easy, so eat a banana.
ENNH! WRONG ANSWER
All food fuels your body. If it contains calories, it is fuel. Some foods are denser fuels, some foods have nice additional benefits, but all foods fuel you.
Some foods are really good for building muscle, or supporting your bone health, or giving you energy. Some foods are really good at tasting nice. All of them fuel your body.
Good food/bad food is just puritan dichotomous thinking in service of the Shame Industrial Complex- let's get those "should" hooks intob everything you enjoy.
Food is fuel. Your relationship with it is personal. Almost all dichotomies oversimplify beyond utility.
So, I had to do a bunch of therapy as a kid because I had anorexia. My dietician drilled into me "food has no moral value. there's no such thing as Good Food or Bad Food; if it's edible and you're not allergic to it, then it has a use in your diet, even if that use is just 'enjoy eating it'. Enjoyment is part of your diet and happiness is a vital nutrient." Basically, even if ice cream "isn't healthy," if it helps you feel better after a shitty day then it's fulfilling one of your basic needs: happiness. So eat the fucking ice cream and feel better.
ENJOYMENT IS PART OF YOUR DIET AND HAPPINESS IS A NUTRIENT
