Patrick
Which one is worse?
The Westboro Church picketing Jeff Hanneman’s funeral?
or… Continue reading this post…
Over at Mindless Diversions, we’ve begun our Babylon 5 “bookclub”. Jaybird suggested that I advertise this on the front page, and since I’m all about self-aggrandizement, consider this a bleg to participate.
Episode 2 should be covered tonight or tomorrow, I’m behind schedule (sue me, I’ve been sick).
Very well done, Mr. Snider. “These fears aren’t going to monger themselves.”
(updated) Comments on this entry are now closed (/updated)
A tale of the modern development quandary: “What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?”
From the article:
To the players who played the cracked version!
I’m not mad at you. When I was younger, downloading illegal copies was practically normal but this was mostly because global game distribution was in its infancy. To be fair, there are still individuals who either can’t make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game. I don’t have a quarrel with you. To the rest who could afford the game consider this:
- Would you like to see a bigger/better sequel of Game Dev Tycoon in the future? Buy the game! Creating this game was already expensive and this was just a small game. If we ever want to make a bigger/better version we need a lot of support!
- Do you hate the trend towards social or pay-to-play free games? Buy games from independent developers! (start with ours
)
- Do you hate the recent trends in the industry? Buy DRM free games.
We are not wealthy and it’s unlikely that we will be any time soon, so stop pretending like we don’t need your 8 dollars! We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play.
The game is DRM free, you can use it on up to three of your computers for your own use, you get copies for Mac, Windows and Linux, you can continue your game before piracy wrecked your company and we even aim to provide you with a free Steam key once the game is on Steam. All for a mere 8 bucks.
Without discussing the merits of the entire article, I’d just like to say that this makes my head ache:
“When you have a lower-level job, being exceptionally good at it is usually a deterrent to getting promoted,” says Lilit Marcus, author of Save the Assistants: A Guide for Surviving and Thriving in the Workplace. For example, “when you’re such a great assistant that your boss has difficulty functioning without you, it means that he or she will keep you on as an assistant as long as possible and will not consider promoting you out of their service.”
I understand that this is common wisdom… and it is seriously the dumbest thing ever and the reason why almost everybody in management who does this ought to be fired.
If you cannot see why this is a hugely self-defeating strategy in the middle-term, you don’t have any business managing a business, let alone people. You should go back to being a line worker.
(image credit: http://www.plognark.com/)
Chris Erskine, courtesy of the LA Times:
When Sequoyah’s players showed up for Foothill Sports League games, with their ragtag uniforms and a girl at linebacker, the other junior high teams didn’t exactly tremble with fear.
Then the games began and Sequoyah, perhaps buoyed by its free-thinking nature, more likely buoyed by some pretty good talent, trounced the competition.
Before the season was over, Sequoyah would go 8-0. No wait, make that 0-8. Because even though Sequoyah outscored all of its opponents, it was forced to forfeit every game.
The reason? Ella.
13-year old girl wants to play flag football. School team lets her join, and then is informed by the league that if they let her play, they have to forfeit every game. So they vote unanimously to let her play, go undefeated, record 8 forfeits, and miss the playoffs.
At least the next generation isn’t full of complete morons.
You’d think we’d gone beyond this kind of stuff by now. In high school, girls wrestle against boys; they play on tackle teams. At the Super Bowl, a 9-year-old girl — a tackle football sensation from Utah — sat with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Amen to that, Mr. Erskine.
“The league has decided to stay with the status quo, as we offer all genders the opportunity to play basketball, volleyball and flag football,” said Jorge Avila, president of the league.
Foothill Sports League web site is here.
There’s been a sort of devolution in the comment threads lately with people retreating to corners or focusing on negativity or any one of a number of other sub-dynamics that always strike me as odd when they happen to multiple sub-cultures of the blog all at the same time.
Communication breakdown.
So “let’s go to a happy place”. Not a thread about something silly (although we should have more of those). A thread about what positive communications have worked for ya’ll.
In the spirit of Doc Russell’s Not-So-Silly-Tuesday Questions, I posit this head-scratcher:
Since you started reading the League, have you changed your mind about anything, due to a communication with anybody here? Front-pager or some member of the commentariat. You came to the League with an idea, or a notion, or a principle, or (probably in many cases) a completely unknown assumption, and after hashing it out with somebody else, either on a single post or over time (with or without hammer and tongs) you had a change of heart, or a lessening of a held assumption, or an actual “YES! Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ I Have Seen The Light!!” moment?
Especially for the silent lurkers out there! Moments of reading an exchange between two other people and having a lightbulb? Or even, “Hey, that gal said right there something that I’ve been trying to articulate for years and holy smoke that’s the idea that’s been in my head all this time!!”
Who? When? What was it about?
Talk about progress.
Consider this an open thread.
I’m going to start by saying that this is not legal advice, and indeed may be against any number of civil or criminal laws in your local jurisdiction.
It’s generally first and foremost a good idea to keep this wise post in mind.
You carry a smart phone. If it comes to interacting with authorities, or interacting with anyone in an official capacity as a matter of transactions, record everything that you can legally record. Be aware of your legal rights. Understand what is considered expectation of privacy in your jurisdiction.
You hire a contractor? If you don’t have a written contract (note: you should have a written contract for anything bigger than a breadbox), record the conversation where you discuss scope of work and payment.
Back up those recordings, particularly ones that document malfeasance, in the possible event of a dispute.
If you’re going to inform anyone about the existence of these recordings as part of their official capacity, record those conversations too. Because you never know what they’re going to say, or do, or ask you to say or do.
Also, you should occasionally drop by this blog.
(image credit)
Both RT and Reason have reported on a story that apparently got its roots over at Infowars, regarding the Department of Homeland Security purchasing paper targets for law enforcement officials to practice gunning down ordinary citizens. This has been picked up by other blogs, with predictable hyperbole:
This puzzle isn’t difficult to assemble, folks. We’ve got the U.S. government already on record purchasing 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition to be used domestically, inside the united states. The government is also purchasing thousands of full-auto assault rifles, calling them “personal defense weapons.”
On top of that, there are hundreds of thousands of multi-body coffins being stored right now at FEMA camp facilities, and there’s also strong evidence that FEMA camps are being activated with core staff coming on line.
And then we’ve also got the feds saying they want Americans to turn in all their guns and completely disarm themselves so that only the government has guns.
Um… how much evidence do you need, folks? I’m just wondering how so many Americans can still be living in a state of total denial about all this. It is abundantly clear that the current occupying government of America — which is an illegitimate occupying force of anti-constitution traitors and criminals — literally has a plan to mass murder tens of millions of Americans by either gunning them down in the streets, or rounding them up and stuffing them info FEMA coffins (or mass graves).
Well, let’s examine another likely explanation for this phenomena, shall we? Continue reading this post…
The always-excellent Janet Stemwedel (aka Dr. Free-Ride) dissects a case of professional ethics failure. A snippet:
Continue reading this post…
Jaybird 
dexter 
zic 
Brandon Berg 
Burt Likko 
b-psycho 
Fish 
Sterling Crews 
