December or Keshet. 25. Biologist. Bisexual. Genderfluid. Proud nerd and feminist. Anti-semitism won't be tolerated. He/him pronouns, please! I also run expositascientiaadadstra and decembertransistions.
Diver convince octopus to trade his plastic cup for a seashell
imagine if a fuckin……. giant alien just showed up and stuck a huge hand in front of your face and then proceeded to offer you three different houses and wouldn’t stop until you moved out of your old shitty apartment and then helped you fuckin move
choosing breeds of Christianity like do you prefer austere and minimalist antisemitism and homophobia or ornate and baroque antisemitism and homophobia, or perhaps Russian antisemitism and homophobia?
In love with the usage of “breeds” here like
Catholicism owners: This is an 85th generation purebred system of antisemitism and homophobia, we feed it only the finest organic grass-fed teleological proofs for the existence of God
Protestantism owners: This is Luther he likes bigotry
Sometimes I think about Red Dead Redemption 2’s development where the devs were begging people to not boycott the game to protest the news about their absurd working conditions because their bonuses were dependent on copies sold. I remember one of them made a statement around the lines of “We worked ourselves to the bone on this and we want to at least see people experience the fruits of that labor”, which makes me think about how we talk about blockbuster games developed under crunch.
I was given a copy of RDR2 to review it, and I couldn’t help but think about how I kept seeing so much that was technically impressive and yet just not necessary. Did some poor guy really work overtime for weeks just so Arthur’s horse had realistically shrinking testicles in cold water?
I honestly did not know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this at the time. I still don’t. Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished - I couldn’t deny that - but it didn’t have to be that polished. I could have connected every bit as strongly to Arthur if every horse in the game had no realistically shrinking horse balls, or even no balls at all. I would much rather have never had it and known the hardworking people who made the game enjoyed their lives more.
Still, I was impressed by the technical proficiency on display. Do I acknowledge that when I talk about RDR2?
I haven’t read any of the reviews for Cyberpunk yet (I want to form my own thoughts and I promised to play through it for a trans friend worried about whether or not she would have a good experience with the game) but I’m betting there’s going to be plenty of praise from people rating specific features as very good. Of course they’re very good; too many people have spent too much time on those features for it to not at least be good. The question is if it even needed to be that good. Could we just have not had this very good part in exchange for the developers living better lives?
The answer should be yes, but all people will really see is “this part was good” and sing its praises and demand more of it. Upper management watches these reactions and concludes that their methods are working splendidly. The company executives laugh all the way to the bank, tickling themselves with the dollars stuffing their pockets as more talented developers vow to never work in the industry again.
It sucks.
I don’t know if I properly expressed this in the original post but there is a specific pain I’m probably failing to capture here. There is a special hurt, an anguish, for when you work in games as a smalltimer and you see the fucking magic that the veterans at AAA studios are pulling off and knowing that it was accomplished through crunch.
These developers are accomplishing feats that can only be described as insane when you understand what they need to do to make that shit happen. The thing they made is incredible, and it must have no less than to have its praises be sung in every corner. That it was made under abuse and that your words of admiration that the devs so rightfully deserve to hear will only ensure their continued abuse is heartbreaking.
Adding onto this… I think we’re hitting a real wall. Not in what’s technically possible, but what’s technically feasible.
Because I get it. I get it. We started in a place where video games looked like this:
and then this:
And the desire was: How can we make this more like real life? The landscape, the models, the dialogue, the ability to simply interact in the world.
And you know what? We’ve made it pretty damn far. More than once I’ve seen a clip from a video game and literally not been able to tell at first that it wasn’t live footage.
But
How viable is that really? To have giant, sprawling open-world games where every character, no matter how minor, is fully voice acted? Where you can see every pore on peoples’ skin and the subtle shift of the hairs on their heads?
Cyperpunk 77 was in production for seven years. It was delayed what- twice, three times? CDProjectRed forced its employees into grueling 100+ hour work weeks to get it all together. And by most accounts, it still came out a buggy mess with entire missing systems.
To me, that’s evidence that this style triple AAA hyper-realistic game is getting so out of control that this scale is simply not tenable.
And do we even.. need all this? Really? Because I have had plenty of fun with smaller, less-realistic video game titles like Hyperlight Drifter, Slime Rancher, and Abzu. Near-perfect emulation of reality isn’t the be all and end all of gaming. Maybe it’s time the industry stopped chasing it so desperately.
The thing that messes me up about the whole “the butler did it” trope is that we literally have no idea where it comes from.
The earliest known piece of detective fiction in which the butler, in fact, did it? Published in 1930.
The earliest known article calling out “the butler did it” as an egregious cliché in detective fiction? Published in 1928.
Obviously there must have been earlier examples of detective fiction in which the butler did it, but none of them have survived to the present day, leaving us in this bizarre situation where the earliest known callout post about the trope pre-dates its earliest known actual use by a full two years.
Maybe butlers were offing people in real life at an alarming rate, and folks were getting tired of all the fun being taken out of detective work.
Oh I know this one actually!
So media is always a window into like… culture. They’re these little time capsules full of double meaning, allegory, coding, applicability, etc. and detective fiction is a pretty intense one.
The trope wasn’t really written into novels or scripts or what have you. They were serialized, most commonly in radio shows (which were not recorded) or these little magazines made from cheap wood pulp. This is literally where the term “pulp” comes from in reference to fiction. They were literally printed on pulp and mass produced, designed to appeal to a broad audience. Detective stories (especially whodunnits) were massively popular.
The reason this wood pulp was so cheap, however, was because it was insanely acidic and would uh. basically melt after a little while. Most didn’t survive for more than a few years unless they were being well maintained by someone who knew what they’re doing. I once had a professor who had a copy of a pulp magazine from 1945 and he literally refused to take it out of the plastic cover because it would break apart like a dry leave.
Also this trope was a bit of a cultural thing rather than just in media. Because, and I’m paraphrasing an essay about detective fiction here, before “the butler did it” was a trope of mysteries, it was a very real fear.
And this has everything to do with the fact that these pulp magazines and radio shows were popularized during the Industrial Revolution. You see, the classes had been very clearly separated previously. The lower classes had no chance to interact with the upper classes because literal space decided them. But as the Industrial Rev chugged along, more and more people moved into cities. The riffraff and the wealthy? In the same space? Absurd!
Rich people were super paranoid about lower class folk trying to steal from them because for the first time, they were all congregated in the same general space. But also rich people apparently couldn’t learn how to cook so they still needed to employ those of the lower class to do shit for them. This is kind of where police also enter the picture cause their job was to uhhh *checks notes* beat up poor people. And of course, they had detectives as well. Because this idea of “poor people are scawwy” was so big in the upper class, most of the police just sort of adopted it and from there it became a thing to suspect the butler, the maids, the cook, etc.
Funny how in most detective media the victims are rich people… weird, isn’t it? because that certainly isn’t a reflection of reality.
TL;DR: classism sucks and blamed poor people whenever something bad happened to a rich person, all the printed media with these stories were made cheaply or were played on radios.
Found in: Lives on the forest floors of tropical rainforests, where it camouflages impressively well with leaves. They are sometimes found in secondary forests and rural gardens.
Fun fact(s): They are a very popular pet, and unlike many other popular pet frogs, are not threatened by the pet trade. They are incredibly abundant in their natural habitats, and are considered to be Least Concern on the IUCN red list, meaning as of right now at least, keeping them as pets is considered ok.
