Man. I’m going to vent and go on a nostalgia trip for a second because I had an excellent dark beer and I’m living my best life.

There’s a documentary on Netflix called “High Score” that I recommend to anyone interested in the gaming industry. The people and stories they highlight are wild. I grew up in the 80s and 90s as the video game scene was taking off and that documentary does a great job talking about those years.

My first game that I owned was X-Wing. It came on 5 or 7 3.5" disks. It was amazing. TIE-CD-Rom, Wing Commander III, Caesar II/III, anything by Westwood, Sierra, and Blizzard. All of that is gone. It’s a shame and I’m glad indy gaming is thriving right now, but something doesn’t quite hit the same. All of this innovation and awe around such a new and novel industry just evaporated in the 2000s/early 2010s as small corpos sold out. We can’t forget that. It’s not so much the a giant corp just took over, but a small studio decided to get bought or absorbed and then died. Even a MUD I played sold to Sony Online Entertainment and then get trash binned.

Don’t know where I’m going with this, but, there it is. Great brewery, Alchimiste in Quebec. Alas, I miss gluten and La Fin du Monde.

This is a dizzying reorganization. I’m reading the article but I’m just not processing the changes. Why? Streamlining development with an MS “games studio” or just corporation being corporation?

Yes. Absolutely floors me. Given the research on bots vs humans, fascism, etc. that plagues Twitter, playing the “but the audience” card holds no merit.

Why…why is it nsfw? Like I’m afraid to click it. People know me. They can find me. To be caught in such a precarious predicament as looking at a blurred image on a strange forum with a pointer hovering over the succulent delicacy? Tragic accusations could fly, wrecking what little credibility I have left.

I clicked. Nice tofu!

Valheim and Kingdom Come Deliverance II.

Oh! I know this! Yes its cheap. But a few years ago, Industry pushed really hard to get OSB fire code compliant for tall builds. That’s why.

Rather than banning raw OSB, the modern building codes including updates under the International Building Code (IBC) and the National Building Code of Canada (NBC) implemented strict “Fire-Resistance Assembly” and adopted new rules for use of fire resistant treatments and build parameters for it.

Hell yes! Nice to see a happy internet moment in the wild. Hope it works for you and game on friend.

True. I do wonder if there’s a bit of a second wind after getting out from under EA. Not the same as the Blizzard of the 90s and early 00s, but something a bit refreshing at least.

Either way, I’m thankful a staple of joy in my childhood didn’t meet the EA executioner. RIP Westwood, Bioware, et al.

Man. Hyped and then apprehensive. If they went with a Helldivers style gameplay I’d be OK with it. But I was hoping for an RTS. Oh well.

I’m hesitant to jump in here, seeing how far off the rails this went, but AI Data Centers have a plethora of problems. Potable water depletion (The Dalles, OR, USA), Exhaust (Boxtown near Memphis, TN, USA), Noise and lowering water tables (Sydney, Australia). The issues they present over “old school” data centers are amplified because of the speed they arise in communities, resources they use, and power (as in influence) disparities that are part of the package.

They are being built rapidly, with little oversight or research, and suck up enormous resources that “old school” data centers did not. Toss in the ethical concerns as wide ranging as stealing art styles to destroying books; to be normative, that tends to piss people off.

To get us back on rails, all of that contributes to me using theater of the mind rather than Gemini to draw me a portrait for goblin Yipyip in my campaigns.

Yeah, that’s sad. I don’t let AI touch my RPG sessions. As a DM, the imperfections and winging it are part of the fun.

In my experience, yes. Its not great. Chronicle of Higher Education and The Conversation have good articles on the publication process. The writers there do a better job exploring the process, and its pros/cons, than I can in this space.

I could have stated it better.

The quantity of publications is important. The number of citations is important. The number of high impact journals and citations in those journals is important.

It is a combination of money and prestige. The grant, depending on its conditions, funding exactly how you say. But also the prestige to the PI, or grant winner, from winning large grants to fund long term projects, entire research institutes, etc.

One would think, but no. That is changing a little in some areas as AI is getting push back. I don’t know what the future holds for the academic world, but when I left it was like this:

The publish or perish world of academics rewards quantity over quality to a degree. You need to turn one set of findings into multiple papers for multiple journals, push out dozens of papers annually, push out anything to get into good journals and fall back journals, even if some don’t stick. If the science behind it is right, you’ve got a 6 month to 2 year process until it gets published. You a bullet point on a CV then. So you absolitely need to publish, or try to, early and often. If you don’t, you perish.

If you can publish, get grants, bring money and prestige to your university or department, you are rewarded. Its hard to find wrong doing, easy to turn a blind eye, or difficulty holding people accountable in the system as it exists because of these pressures and how the process actually works.

I apologize for not understanding your question. Grants would be possible, if a grant was made specifically to support a journal and reviewers in that process. But you run into new problems a voluntary system was meant to prevent.

It’s not a bad idea at all. In fact, I agree that it could work and be better. You just need guard rails. Prevent review speed runs to get paid, internal review processes that highlight one type of research over another. Hard, but doable and there are enough people that, I surmise, want to work within a better system.

Former academic with publications here! Peer reviewers are not paid. Editors often are not either. You work for free for the prestige. Seriously. Journal publishers exploit that and make bank from institutional subscriptions and individual purchases.

Its an antiquated system that was meant to produce good science and understanding and has become a beast of burden for thousands of academics with no good alternative.

I know nothing about game design, but here “poor optimization” often regarding such large games. Is this an instance if that? What exactly is optimizing?

Battle bits was pixel COD/MW. Not sure if its atil going strong.

For an absolutely hilarious yet challenging experience (you need the right people honestly), Hold Fast. Nothing says fun like a second rate crewed by Americans doing bad British accents and Brits doing bad American accents trying to sink a French second rate crewed by Germans.

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