As I was not watching the Super Bowl going on in town, I could feel it.
Everything was so quiet on my bike ride. And then even more a couple hours later.
But then, the energy came back and it was time for fireworks.
GG LA or whatever.
There Are Too Many Video Games. And too much entertainment.
Over 30 new games per day, just on Steam. Around 60,000 new songs on Spotify per day. What is happening? The usual: bottom 90% scraps around and the top 1% swims in wealth to the point of finding amusing and interesting to create artificial scarcity.
The huge problems with games is that they’re the worst work/profit ratio of any creative endeavor: you can compose a great song in one hour. You can’t produce a good game in a year.
This leads me to the good old Systems VS Narrative debate. It’s an old debate in video games, but it’s starting to describe a lot what’s going on in the economy at large: we live in systems and people want to force narratives on them. Which doesn’t work. The solution is to modify those systems and make them work for a better output.
Example: people love the narrative of unions protecting employees and love to push the idea in tech: “get unions!” they will yell. But the system we are in, 2000s capitalism, doesn’t allow unions. It’s a done deal. For unions to work you need leverage to bargain, you need tangibles. The world of tech and game development are full of intangibles, from which tech to use to which market to aim. It’s bet over gamble over “I hope this works out”, times a random amount of luck. This is not a situation where you can call for unions! Yet people love the idea that we are still in 1912, working for Henry Ford. Just form a union, and you will be fine! Sadly, this is not reality.
Interestingly, the same people who want unions will –in CA, a relatively chill state- vote against Uber drivers becoming Uber employees because they don’t want their Uber costs to skyrocket. Because that’s how the system (capitalism) works: it delivers value, spits out profit, and churns out bodies. Even when voters have the option to change the lives of thousands, they vote in favor of the system that allows them to get cheap(er) Uber trips. To hell with unions and decent compensation right? I don’t think people are horrible, they just don’t want to be accountable because the systems are complex and you can always find a way to think about a problem to make you feel like it’s not yours (“Uber has to be a side gig, I don’t care!”). Which I always find funny because well, we are indeed in this together. More now than ever before.
Anyway would you write stories, build video games, compose music, edit movies, skate and do all kinds of creative stuff that makes you feel alive, you need a support system. The more you do, the steadier the support has to be. Obviously to make great games, which takes years, the support needs to be very resilient.
Universal Basic Income, y’all. That’s not a narrative. That’s a system fix that would work. 100%.
The amount of entertainment we have is ridiculous. It is directly correlated to our inability to shake some stuff up in this society of ours. So I feel like we should pay attention to this but anyway, I was overwhelmed during Christmas break even though I barely use any entertainment. I had:
3 or 4 movies (but virtually all of them). 2 documentaries. Noita. My friend’s PS4 with a dozen games. 4 or 5 books. Eating candy.
I was overwhelmed. I ended up reading a book in the sun and watching one movie. That’s not even a quarter of the amount of entertainment I had available to me! And I totally suck at entertainment. If I didn’t suck at it, I would have binged 24/7 on anything and barely remembered anything either.
I have an immense back catalog of things to entertain myself with. 48-hour days, when do we get them?
Happy Valentine’s or whatever.
Dear Tyler James Williams,
My man, you need to stop aging that fast. Totally unnecessary. Love you bro.
This is where the Super Bowl is happening. This picture gives me the runs. I can only imagine the floodlights all evening and the noise when there’s an event there. Must be nice.
On one hand, my fellow Americans are partying around an annual event centered around a game of “football”.
On the other hand, we have one of the biggest stadium ever built right in the middle of a 30+ year black and brown enclave, displacing folks and doubling the rent or mortgage for others since the construction of that concrete whale started, to watch a bunch of mostly black men destroy themselves on a field while mostly white folks from across the country and the city watch, yell and scream for hours from their $4,000 seats, during Black History month, in a still going pandemic that hits black and brown neighborhoods the hardest.
Lovely.
“California will end its indoor masking requirement for vaccinated people next week but masks still are the rule for schoolchildren, state health officials announced Monday amid rapidly falling coronavirus cases.”
No one has a granny out there, apparently??? Cases are down but deaths have been constantly up for weeks; right now in the US, we’re #2 peak death (17K/week) after last year’s January (23K/week). That’s with vaccines VS no vaccines. That’s really bad.
Omicron is still a real danger for elderly folks. I deal with them a lot and this is not good. They barely mask up.
No masking requirement for vaccinated people means no masking requirement for anyone.
This is dumb, and will kill more people. Because masks are so hard, right? smh
I’m just going to point that out:
My Windows 8 laptop with 8GB of RAM and a USB hub with a dozen devices on it cold boots FASTER than my Windows 11 laptop with 16GB of RAM and no devices attached to it, WAKING UP.
Barely faster, but still. Twice as much RAM, waking up, still slower. That’s so messed up.
I think the most beautiful thing about Windows 8 in 2022 is that I don’t have to worry about updates; I control them. I’m a grown man.
The stress of automatic updates is unbearable. Will my settings be gone? Did I save? Did it crash, what happened? I absolutely hate automatic updates.
“Betty’s music has been on regular rotation in my life since the early 2000s.” I wrote in 2018.
I guess it’s time for me to get my hand on that documentary.
Look, I’m not nostalgic about the ’80s. Lots of things were wrong with the politics of the ’80s. But think about what happened here. The science was explained to ordinary people. They listened, they distinguished it from lies and conspiracy theories, and ordinary people banded together and pressured their politicians to act. And even quite unlikely politicians who were very hostile to government regulation, like Margaret Thatcher and George Bush Sr., came together. And as a result, the ozone layer is now healing. I feel absolutely confident that would not happen now if the ozone layer crisis happened.
I think you would get some people who would wear ozone layer badges, you would get other people who would film themselves spraying CFCs into the atmosphere to own the libs and make them cry. You would get people saying, “How do we even know the ozone layer exists? Maybe George Soros made the hole in the ozone layer.” We would become lost. We would not be able to summon the collective attention.
Sobering truth. Still giggling at “own the libs and make them cry” by spraying CFCs into the atmosphere lol. That would definitely happen.
The positive thing is that pressuring politicians and investing in elections and civic stuff, still works! We just need to be mostly together on topics.
And these days, that’s the most complicated thing.