#incoming game industry crash

[djinnpot]

How can a bunch of Norwegian douchebags make the most vile shit imaginable? Let's turn to Dustborn for the answer

Silencing Dissent, Gaslighting and Straight up mind control are the tools of these Evil Anomals. The protagonist deserved to be shot which brings up another question as to why none of the communities in this game are armed to the teeth.Small American towns usually don't take kindly to strangers, and I imagine less so to super powered ones.

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: Factorio: Space Age (pt 1)

Factorio is my favorite game of all time. I played it very early on, then periodically after that. When I started, the graphics were much uglier, there was no nuclear power, biters dropped little purple orbs you needed to use in science, ninety percent of the current QoL was missing, and it was still one of my favorite games.

Before the Space Age expansion, I had ~1200 hours in the game, partly because it was my go-to game when I was a stay-at-home dad and my son was napping beside me on the couch. I've played not only vanilla Factorio, but a lot of overhaul and other mods. These are the overhaul mods that I've finished:

Bobs

Bobs + Angels

128k

Krastorio 2

Space Exploration

Exotic Industries

Freight Forwarding

Additionally, I made it to the terraforming stage of Nullius and py science 2 of Pyanodon's, but didn't finish either of them. This is all for context, where I'm coming from in this review. I have no idea what it's like for a new player, but my guess is that it feels complex as all hell.

The Space Age expansion expands the game by adding in 4.5 new planets (Vulcanus, Fulgora, Gleba, Aquilo, and space itself) as well as a major-but-optional mechanic, quality. I'm dividing up this review along those lines, which is the natural way to do it, but in theory all these things are meant to work in harmony with each other, so I'll be trying to take that into consideration. Spoilers will follow in each section, but the Factoriopedia has everything right from the start, and the devs consider it a game that does not actually have spoilers, so take that as you will.

In my opinion, the real spoilers are the designs for things you build along the way, but there will also be some screenshots of those.

The Same Old Early Game

You start on Nauvis with a crashed ship, a pickaxe, and abundant mineral deposits. If you're new to the game, red science and green science can easily take 20 hours to figure out, particularly if you're playing with biters on. For me, it was about two hours to build designs that I have built maybe dozens of times before. The basic furnace stack that handles incoming iron, copper, and stone has not changed, and will not change.

If I consider the basic gameplay of Factorio to be the design and decision process, then there's no gameplay here. Each entity needs to be placed by hand, and you can make rows of things by running up and down, but still ... it felt like a slog to me, and this is the first ~4 hours of Space Age, assuming you're going moderately fast and making a beeline to bots.

Once you have bots, it gets much less tedious, and you can start slapping down blueprints, expanding the base as rapidly as the machines can turn raw materials into finished buildings. There are a few differences from the base game, including terrain generation, some stuff with trains, science checkpointing ... but it'll all be well familiar to veterans, and in my opinion, is pretty skippable. I set up walls to keep the biters out, trains to supply the variety of turrets on the wall, solar and nuclear, and outposts for as much resources as I would need for the next few dozen hours, then made my first space platform and began the actual expansion stuff.

Space!

Space platforms are created by launching a starter pack up, which you can then send materials to. Bots aren't allowed in space, and your character isn't either, and it seems to me that a lot of the game design was built around wanting the player to grab resources from out of space and do some complicated belting to keep everything organized and prevent it from locking up. There are no chests allowed in space, and the only thing that acts as a container is the central hub of the platform, of which you can have only one. This means that if you want storage, you have to route everything through this big warehouse, and it gets complicated the more you have items going in and out.

I would say that generally I think this works from a gameplay perspective, but there are a few things that are needlessly obtuse or unfriendly, getting in the way of the platform design stuff that's supposed to be the star of the show. One of them is definitely "automatically request materials for construction", which will send up an entire stack of something you only need one of. This is an issue in the early game, assuming you didn't overprepare on Nauvis to have a base with ~20 rockets per minute. Frontloading this difficulty, which becomes less serious later, is bad design, and you end up having to manually go through rocket loading to not waste enormous amounts of resources.

(The easiest way I've found to do this is to make a blueprint of the ship, click "add section" on logistics to make it a logistics group, set a requester chest to that logistics group, then unselect that logistics group once everything is there, then use an inserter to feed that stuff into a rocket and manually launch it every time it's full, and even that sort of sucks, because the blueprint makes a logistics group that will have the hub and extra platform in it, and holy hell is none of this intuitive or friendly, why could they not just have coded it so that rockets would auto-combine things into groups?)

Going slightly out of sequence here, but I'll talk about the space stuff all at once here. Over the course of normal play, I think the intent is that you design approximately five ships:

A space science ship that sits in orbit, collecting materials from asteroids and doing bare minimum processing on them to turn them into space science, which gets sent back down to the labs. I made one very early on and then didn't ever have much cause to touch it again, except to send up some better assemblers and slightly expand it with no major changes.

An inner planets ship with chemical plants, engines, furnaces, and an ammo assembler that feeds turrets to shoot down asteroids, which the grabber arms then take chunks of for the materials to run the chemical plants and be made into ammo. (I dubbed this the Dart-class, pictured below is the SS Christopher Wren.)

An Aquilo ship with rocket turrets to shoot down the larger asteroids that the normal turrets have problems with. This requires advanced asteroid processing to get sulfur and coal synthesis to make coal, which gets made into explosives to make rockets. Probably at the same time you're switching over to advanced fuel processing with calcite. (I dubbed this the Jacknape-class, pictured below is the SS John Napier.)

An outside the system ship with rail guns to shoot down the largest asteroids. This requires making rail gun ammo, which needs steel and copper wire, and to power all that you're probably not going to use solar, which gets much worse out at the edge, so likely you'll be doing nuclear or fusion. (I used a lightly modified Jacknape-class for this, though it would have been better to do a full redesign.)

A shattered planet ship that is capable of harvesting promethium, which I have not actually made yet, but requires scaling up even more.

Overall, I found the increasing complexity of designs to be very pleasing, even if it sometimes felt a little bit forced. Not having bots I can maybe understand, but not having chests felt like a very blatant design decision rather than something that came about naturally from considering space and what it means, especially since the belts still work. Designing the SS John Napier was one of my favorite parts of the entirety of Space Age, partly because it was so constrained, and I knew that my individual decisions were creating individual problems of my own making.

I will say that space is where Factorio shows its limitations far more than elsewhere. In programming terms, Factorio uses something called a "surface", and each planet is its own surface, as is each ship. Surfaces cannot interact with each other, and in the mods I've tried where they do (more than just hooking up inputs and outputs) it's always been a bit jank. Still, this means that there are a lot of things that cannot be done:

Docking one ship to another

Having a ship land on a planet

Having a ship have any verticality to it

The ships also look a little ... well, bad. They look like a bunch of things have been placed on a flat slab, especially when they get larger. This can be helped a little bit by adding walls around the ship, but it doesn't help much, and there's no aerodynamic consideration, so the ideal design is probably a big box of some kind, and the space platform that everything is built on looks even less ship-like than everything else. The exception is the engines, which look awesome, but I don't think having one element look really cool makes up for the rest looking a bit weird.

Funny enough, the Space Exploration mod actually does do some of the things that these ships don't do, like docking, landing on a planet, etc. It was a bit jank there too, but it did kind of sort of work. And those ships needed to take aerodynamics into consideration, though I can't remember what the formula was like, and it was pretty opaque.

I do not need to have the entirety of Kerbal Space Program inside of Factorio, but I do think there are a lot of things that are neat about space that they just decided not to touch. The planets are in static positions, always the same distance from each other, and there's no need to worry about launch windows or delta-V or gravity slingshots or light-speed communication delays any of the other cool rocketry things. Some of that would be a nightmare to implement, other things would probably not be very fun, but it feels like there was a lot left on the floor.

It's interesting that spaceships in this game are self-sufficient by nature, gathering materials from asteroids and never needing resupply. It's also interesting that there are two basic modes for ships, in-flight and in-orbit, with different considerations for defense and production, though I don't think they ended up doing all that much with this distinction. If spaceships could land on planets, you could have three distinctions, and if they could be flying through interstellar asteroid-less space you could have four, and I think that would be cool, but the focus of Space Age is mostly on the new planets, not on the spaceships.

It's at this point that I've realized that this review is going to be very long, so I'm splitting it into parts. The four planets will be the next part, but before I wrap this up, I can talk about one of the other things that came with the expansion: quality.

What Quality is Quality?

I would say that of the 140 hours that Space Age took me, about 30 hours were spent messing around with the "quality" mechanic, and of those, most were "wasted" in the sense that they did not meaningfully make a better factory, even if I enjoyed the process.

Quality divides almost everything in the game into tiers, with higher tiers having better features, which depend on the specific building or product. Resource extractors do less resource drain. Production buildings get better crafting speed. Weapons get better range. Some things get faster and require more power for that speed, while others get speed without needing more power.

There are a few sticking points with quality.

One of them is that machines cannot use a quality product if they're not set for a recipe that requires it, meaning that an "uncommon" gear cannot take the place of a common gear. I assume that this was either an engine limitation or a deliberate challenge for the players, but either way, I don't like it. Quality does kind of make sense, since it's something that exists within real world manufacturing, where parts need to be within certain tolerances, but it wouldn't be the case that a gear that's inside a narrower band couldn't be used for purpose that's in a wider band. Factorio is the wrong game to be making real world comparisons for, but the argument is that an uncommon gear shouldn't be enough to gum up the works.

One of my plans for quality was to "skim" quality parts. The last machines in a stack of assemblers would be given quality modules, and of the thousands that they made, a few would be high enough quality that they could go into a chest, and that chest would be used for making personal equipment and spaceship parts, where they potentially make the most difference. At a certain point, I misconfigured one of these setups, and some quality gears got on the belt, which gummed up the entire factory and required me to clean several lines and restart a bunch of processing. This is a skill issue, yes, but it's an unpleasant complication of quality generally.

Quality comes from quality modules, and in general, the modules are a matter of trade-offs, whether you want more speed, more efficiency, or to make the most of materials. Quality ... well, quality is an enormous complication. You can't simply put in machines. You need entirely new setups for it, and even skimming feels like kind of a weird and gross way of doing things.

Here's how I wish it worked: You put quality modules into machines, and they can make quality things at a set chance. Those products can go down the line and be used in any recipe that requires lower or equal quality. Uncommon gears and chips would get consumed by machines that make normal quality engines or whatever. This would instantly solve at least half of my frustrations, but it would also be simpler, and not so much of a challenge.

How it works now is that you either silo away all qualities from each other, or you engage some kind of recyclotron that attempts a craft and instantly junks it if it's not quality. This is one of my tileabale parameterized recyclotrons:

Blue chests request normal quality materials, machines make the base product, anything not at the desired quality gets recycled, materials go on the belt to be made into more of the desired thing. There are some circuit conditions set up, one to shut down the machines if the desired number of quality machines have been made, and another to set the inserters to only pull from the chest if there are no materials on the sushi belt.

I think this is interesting, but if this is all quality is, then the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Before building my final ship, I set up full quality on Fulgora, at a place isolated from the main base. It separated out every item at every tier, then used roboports to put things together. It was more interesting than the recyclotron, with better/faster/cheaper results, but still kind of meh, and I kept wondering why I was spending all this time trying to make a chemical plant that was twice as good when I could have built a second chemical plant for half the cost.

My other major gripe with quality is that it makes blueprinting a pain in the butt. First, because the speeds of machines are different, which throws off ratios, but second, because if I want my machines to be of the best quality available, there's no way to easily do that. What I want is to have a tool where I drag across a bunch of machines and say "upgrade these in accordance with the highest quality in the logistics network", but what I have to do instead is count the number of each type of machine, then manually go through and replace them, and if I do this, then I have to manually go upgrade machines as more become available, and this means that I can't just copy sections of the factory to duplicate them, because they'll be at a mishmash of quality on buildings. I spent a lot of time fiddling with the upgrade planner, which I didn't enjoy.

The Fulgora setup, at endgame, is currently making the legendary quality modules necessary to make the legendary quality modules necessary to make legendary quality buildings of all kinds. I think pouring enormous resources into that makes for a megabase, but mixed quality faces lots of usability concerns, and I think of all the approaches (skimming, recyclotron, mass sorting) the recyclotron is the one that I'm most likely to end up actually using in future playthroughs.

Which is to say that I think quality as a mechanic is one or two steps away from being good, as much as the rewards do often feel worthwhile. The puzzle of quality has not, for me, been a highlight.

In the next part of the review: the four planets.

[wolverina2002]

Whittle´s crew

My boy Whittle got a promotion to Sergeant! Here´s he and his proud little squad of batshit insane flightdeck engineers.

Whittle

Our man himself. Enthusiastic, cheerfull, no hesitation to do something crazy with a fighter to achieve the result he wants. Can and will test new fighter updates himself and has a few scars from crashes as a result. The one of his nose is from a sparring accident, though.

Cogs

Serious, detail-oriented, observant. Whittle´s 2IC and the quietest member of the group. Always looking out for mistakes before they escalate - or standing watch against the brass if neccessary. Designated Holder of the mandatory industrial grade Fire Extinguisher.

Ctrl

The slicer and programmer of the squad. Can and has slice just about every fighter console. Thinks the basic programming of Incom and Subpro fighters are flamming heaps of trash and not in a good way. Loves to program flight sims and has dreams to one day write his own game.

Wires

Expert in starfighter engines and can make them do just about anything. The oldest member of the squad and looks the calmest, until you find out the Explosion Statistics. Thinks Whittle has a few loose screws for letting his squad run free, but certainly isn´t going to say anything. The main reason fire extinguishers are mandatory for the squad.

Chrome

Design oriented and with a fascination for historical starfighter designs. Loves to design somewhat impossible things sometimes. Named himself for the Naboo method of covering their ships in chrome, absolutely adores the design style. Wants to one day design something similar.

Wrench

The jokster of the squad. Most likely culprit when there´s once again slime, glitter or a mixture of the two oozing somewhere. Also the youngest in the group and not above abusing that fact to get an extra pudding cup.

Chute

If you want the torpedo or rocket capabilities of your fighter modified, Chute is your guy. Occassionally experiments with making the rockets they´re issued go boom twice as big. Second main reason for the fire extinguisher mandate and banned from proton torpedos by medical orders, citing allergies.

Radio

Coms expert. Weather fudging with frequencies or wiring the actual devices of any size, ask her. The reason Whittle always knows where his squad is and what they´re up to. Thinks GAR coms security is about as useful as pissed on flimsi. Curses more than anyone else and will throw her tools.

Laser

Can, will and has put laser cannons in the most unlikely places. There is no such thing as "enough turrets" for this engineer, or "enough firepower". Pilots fear him. Chute´s batchmate and the third reason for the fire extinguisher policy. Actually the most likely to give Whittle gray hairs.

Ashley Antilles

Fresh graduate from the academy with a degree in hyperdrive engineering. Was not planning on going to war. Is now in a war. Does not like this. Thinks crawling through machinery capable of crushing them, covered in grease and grime, is the best thing in the galaxy. Drinks everyone under the table and actually helped assemble that still everyone pretends doesn´t exist.

[mossfvcker]

fucking sick whats happening to my friends and the games industry right now. to wish it to crash is so tone deaf it's incredible. over 9000 people have been laid off just THIS YEAR from studios, that's 9000 creators that are without income. ive been affected by it, my friends have been affected by it, and it's not getting better until gamers actually value the people putting their life and soul into creating video games

[sukimas]

in a broad sense, video games, unless they are intended to be quite literally a resource hole with no expectation of return, will always be moderated by the same market forces all things are under capitalism. social democracies or centralized economies fundamentally have to gamble on which luxuries should be supported (and they do- non-essential industries get subsidies all the time in plenty of places.)

due to the way that programming works nowadays with dependencies and such, making a game at minimum requires a good 5-6 people working on it at one time to complete. use of previously existing libraries does in fact mean the people who build and maintain those libraries count for dev numbers, even if they don't show up in the credits. most, of course, require many, many more.

therefore even under an idealized economic system, you require 3-4 NEETs on UBI working around the clock for years on end to publish a single good game. many indie teams fall apart or if their early games don't get good reviews they no longer want to keep making them. but in a more common scenario (because, let's face it, people are more likely to play big AAA-style games, even if they aren't quite AS big as the AAA games of today- marketing is necessary even if your product is totally free) the game that people are likely to play simply won't get made without outside funding. not everyone who works at a big game studio would rather work there than anywhere else excepting the paycheck; many people would in fact not make games if they had to collaborate with large teams for enough income to survive and have a little left over. in addition, hardware and software packages are needed, and not everyone who works on making THOSE only wants to do it for UBI, either. you need increased incentives for things you want to exist beyond the minimum necessary for existence, because while people do work together, they only work together well up to Dunbar's number and then it all goes to shit.

so, what's the most likely scenario under a non-capitalist economic system for the creation of video games? remember, luxuries ARE created under non-capitalist economic systems, because they make life worth living. it is plausible that some people would find video games a reason life is worth living, therefore you would want to fund it.

i expect they would be created under a system of government grants. you apply to the government with your game scenario, concept art, perhaps a short demo, and they give you grant funding. however, there's a small problem- presumably, the government cannot afford to fund every game that people want to make. perhaps some of those which aren't funded go on to become indie games made by NEETs, but the majority probably crash and burn because their concept was too ambitious.

so, you have to convince the government that your game will be well liked, in order to get the grant money, to make your game. they want to fund things that will increase the satisfaction and well-being of their constituents as much as possible, you see. do you see the issue with this?

yep, it's exactly the same issue with pleasing investors in the modern day. creative endeavors that require large teams and need to aim for an actual specific goal rather than ars gratia artis = people creating proposals that aim for specific keywords and things that are currently in vogue, not for the wildest and most interesting. this creates games that are just like modern AAA games- attempting to appeal to the market as much as possible.

now, how do I know this incentive structure will be created? well, you might have heard of heard of a small organization called the "National Science Foundation"...

[swordshapedleaves]

I love playing 5e. I love dungeons and dragons. I love being a regular player and being the DM both. I spend around 8 hours a week on this game. I spend a lot of money on it too, both directly to WotC and to third party creators.

But I loved 3e too. And when 4e came out and it sucked I walked away and played other games. If WotC fucks up the OGL like it seems they're going to. I'm gonna fucking walk away.

WotC is making more money from d&d than anyone else has ever made from a TTRPG in human history and their CEO thinks it's not enough. They have a goose laying a dozen solid gold eggs a day and are holding the knife to cut her open.

It is genuinely heartbreaking for all these indie and third party creators. There is an entire industry built up around 5e that will all come crashing down when the goose is killed.

But we as consumers are gonna have the same disposable income we did before. We'll have the same attention spans. We can spend it on those same creators when they start making stuff that isn't d&d. We can watch streams and buy books and art and play games. We can all walk away and WotC will be left with a dead goose.

[tatertotcosmonaut]

I’m looking at the internet and I’m getting such huge feelings of deja vu because it feels like I’m back in the era of 2014-2017 internet but in the worst possibly way. I’ve seen all this shit happen before bar for bar.

I’m genuinely concerned with the steep rise of far right ideology that I’m seeing, and it’s coming not only from the governments ruling our countries but even more alarmingly from the fandom communities online.

The increasing layoffs of creatives in the creative industry, the potential incoming crash of Triple A gaming industry, the growing lack of media literacy but also a lack of discerning disinformation, the inability to disengage with content that angers you, “woke” just being the new “anti-sjw”, a rise in the loneliness pandemic, the destruction of third spaces both in real life and online, a lack of social etiquette, the rise in pseudo-intellectual YouTubers, near dangerous conspiracy level thoughts without any lack of self awareness.

We are literally in or about to enter another Gamergate era of the internet but somehow worse. And it’s not even just Western focused, I’m seeing this problem rapidly increase everywhere in and outside online communities.

[mariacallous]

For the last three decades, the Chinese economy has resembled an impressionist painting: beautiful from afar, but a jumbled mess up close. China’s economic model has centered around investment-led growth made possible by the supply of cheap capital extracted through domestic financial repression, using a combination of policies—such as interest rate caps, capital controls, and restrictions on credit allocation directions and financial market entry—to channel capital into state-prioritized sectors. While this model has contributed to China’s rapid rise, it has also led to the entrenchment of structural issues that began to emerge well before President Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012. Instead of taking the chance for reform, though, Xi’s policies have only worsened these issues.

China faces three major structural challenges that expose it to the risk of economic stagnation akin to Japan’s “lost decades”: Escalating debt coincides with decelerating growth, sluggish household consumption lags overextended supply, and adverse demographic trends have blunted China’s edge in cheap but skilled young labor, which amplifies social welfare costs and causes housing market demand to dwindle. The inevitable reckoning of China’s structural challenges has been accelerated since Xi’s ascendence.

The fuse on this economic time bomb is steadily shortening. In recent months, critical economic indicators—from industrial profits and exports to home sales—have all recorded double-digit percentage declines. In July, while consumer prices rose globally, they fell in China, raising concerns that deflation could worsen the difficulties faced by heavily indebted Chinese companies. A convergence of idiosyncratic factors now threatens to ignite a crisis in the property and construction sector, which makes up nearly 30 percent of Chinese GDP. China Evergrande’s recently filed for bankruptcy. Coupled with the impending default of Country Garden, another major property developer, after missed bond payments this month, it has deepened the already profound sense of uncertainty and fear among the business community.

This economic uncertainty is further heightened by the Chinese Communist Party’s ever-shifting targets of anti-corruption and anti-espionage campaigns. Health care is the latest sector to fall under the gaze of authorities, even as the effects of previous campaigns against tech, private education, gaming, and finance still linger. In the background, the friction between China and the United States continues largely unabated. Private conversations among Chinese citizens, particularly the young, reveal an undercurrent of pessimism and unease. Among the contributing factors is the looming specter of military conflict with the West regarding the future of Taiwan. China’s one-child generation would shoulder the weight if such a conflict were to happen, an existential threat of unparalleled proportions.

Milton Friedman was partially correct when he famously stated that “[i]nflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” In China, the manifestation of economic deflation symptoms—even transitory—has been shaped by Xi’s departure from the reform and opening up policy and the return of expansive political, ideological, and geoeconomic aspirations reminiscent of the Mao Zedong era. We might dub the resulting phenomenon “Xi-flation,” deflation with Chinese characteristics. The cumulative policy shocks of the last five years have exacerbated, rather than quelled, the structural challenges that have been dragging—but not crashing—China’s growth.

The posture of China’s teetering-but-not-tumbling growth trajectory has long called for careful structural reform. The goal should be to squeeze out the property market bubble without bursting it, to alleviate income inequality without stifling entrepreneurship, and to foster fair competition without hurting productivity. The success of these reforms hinges on a calibrated policy orchestration. Instead, Xi’s policy has produced grandiose political rhetoric, such as “common prosperity” or “shared human destiny,” mixed with clumsy and misguided enforcement.

Economically, Xi has been a bull in a china shop. His economic policies have often shifted focus but always emphasize the party’s overarching control across nearly all dimensions of China’s economic and financial activity. Since 2017, foreign companies operating in China have organized lectures for employees to study the role of the party and Xi speeches. As of October 2022, 1,029 out of the 1,526 of the mainland-listed companies (more than two-thirds) whose shares can be traded by international investors in Hong Kong acknowledge “Xi Thought” in their corporate constitutions and have articles of association that formalize the role of an in-house party unit.

In fairness, Xi did not create China’s structural woes. However, the reform and opening up policy suffered a quiet, unheralded death as Chinese policy thinkers attempted to compensate for the absence of prudent economic strategy under Xi by ceaselessly leaping from one grand idea to the next under the banner of national rejuvenation.

For example, since December 2016, the phrase “houses are for living, not for speculation” has become the principle to curb the property sector. In 2017, the “thousand-year project” Xiong’an New Area was launched as a city of the future. In 2019, “establishing a new national system for innovation” entered the lexicon for state-led science and technology innovation. Since 2020, “common prosperity” has become the mantra behind which to launch antimonopoly and antitrust probes into China’s tech sector. And since November last year, when Xi suddenly reversed China’s zero-COVID policy, the new catchphrase has shifted to “consumption promotion.”

Xi-flationary policies have exacerbated China’s latent structural problems and rung up a steep tab. For instance, Xi’s regulatory crackdown on China’s leading tech companies wiped out more than $1 trillion in market value, a figure comparable to the GDP of the Netherlands. The zero-COVID policy incurred costs of at least 352 billion yuan ($51.6 billion) for Chinese provinces, almost twice the GDP of Iceland ($27.84 billion in 2022).

The financial cost of these policy missteps is not their worst aspect. The most profound cost of Xi-flation so far is an unprecedented run on confidence in the Chinese economy from within and without. Beijing’s old economic playbook has run out of pages when it comes to tackling this crisis. China cannot export its way out of today’s economic challenges or stimulate its way toward a full recovery without also addressing the underlying political cause. As China moves up global supply chains, foreign companies are increasingly looking for alternative countries to sources for inputs and locate production to ensure they do not fall on the wrong side of any lines drawn as part of Western policymakers’ drive to “de-risk” their reliance on China.

This is, in part, a belated reaction to the willingness of China under Xi to use economic coercion. Researchers from the International Cyber Policy Centre found that between 2020 and 2022, China resorted to economic coercion in 73 cases across 19 jurisdictions, a marked increase compared to China under Xi’s predecessors.

China’s waning comparative advantage is a long-term structural problem, but political and geopolitical factors drive the current run on confidence. As Xi continues to consolidate power, the once lucrative China premium will be further discounted due to the growing regulatory and geopolitical uncertainty. Chinese technocrats cannot fully address this run on confidence using only their limited economic toolbox, such as the People’s Bank of China’s use of the so-called precision-guided structural monetary tools to selectively provide credit for state-preferred sectors.

Xi’s global assertiveness has caused negative spillback for China’s economy. Amid China’s fraying ties with the West and multinationals hastening to diversify their supply chains, ordinary Chinese households are left to deal with mounting anxiety. They are economically less secure as a consequence of Xi’s zero-COVID policy, and they are increasingly concerned that geopolitical forces beyond their control have limited their individual futures. Xi’s commitment to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, by force if necessary, has created the perception among some in China that conflict is inevitable—the same as in the United States. This loss of confidence aggregates across hundreds of millions of Chinese households, underpinning an economic condition that James Kynge has characterized as a “psycho-political funk.”

An essential factor behind China’s economic success during the reform and opening up period was what economist John Maynard Keynes termed “animal spirits��—those emotional and psychological drivers that push people to spend, invest, and embrace risk. For decades, China not only benefited from the inflow of foreign direct investment and technology from the West, but also enjoyed a steady tailwind from the optimistic outlook of Western business leaders eager to capitalize on the globalization trend. When Western companies briefly reconsidered their involvement with China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests, Deng Xiaoping rescued the situation by embarking on his influential southern tour in 1992. During his tour, he the world of the party’s commitment to economic reform, stating, “It is fine to have no new ideas … as long as we do not do things to make people think we have changed the policy of reform and opening up.”

However, Xi’s policies have undone much of Deng’s legacy and upended China’s prior economic success formula. China’s appeal as a destination for both tourism and business has dimmed, and a growing number of the country’s elite look beyond the border for their future. If this trend continues, China may fall into the dreaded middle-income trap or face even graver risks such as a financial crisis. A financial crisis in China would have far greater consequences than any other previous emerging market crisis. The size of China’s economy and its level of integration dwarf that of South Korea in the late 1990s, when it was at the epicenter of the East Asian financial crisis.

The West has a genuine interest in preventing the economic downfall of China. Washington and Brussels must closely coordinate to ensure their de-risking policies send a clear message to Beijing on its intended goals and limits by drawing a bright red line around sectors with potential military dual use while clarifying in which circumstances cooperation is still encouraged. Otherwise, the West risks legitimizing Xi’s claims that economic containment is to blame for China’s economic woes, and that further self-sufficiency is the only antidote. The West must be careful to communicate that its policies are designed to avoid the global alienation of 1.4 billion Chinese people.

When the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meets this November in San Francisco, the sister city of Shanghai, China’s economy may be on considerably less sure footing than the United States for the first time in decades. That may prove to be an opportune time for both countries to repair the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.

The Biden administration can take a page from the playbook of Otto von Bismarck: “Diplomacy is the art of building ladders to allow people to climb down gracefully.” A good start would be for the United States to lend a ladder this fall and help China clean out its gutters—if a Xi-led China is capable of accepting the help.

[husheduphistory]

Forgotten for Football: The Horrific Thanksgiving Day Disaster of 1900

Since the late 1800s Thanksgiving and football have gone hand in hand with the fevered fanbase and anticipation staying strong over the centuries. The first college football game was played on Thanksgiving Day 1876 as part of the Intercollegiate Football Association Championship, and it did not take long for fans to choose their sides. By the time 1900 appeared on calendar pages the University of California Berkeley and Stanford University were already fierce rivals, playing against each other every Thanksgiving since 1892 in a clash that became affectionately known as simply “The Big Game.” People always had high expectations for the game, but no one walking into the event ever expected to encounter tragedy.  

The Stanford University football team circa 1900. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

No one can say the warning signs were not there. In the early days of the game there were no stadiums and it was played in any large field or industrial area that could fit them. The last few Big Game events between University of California Berkeley and Stanford were played at Recreation Field in San Francisco and in 1897 grandstands were built to accommodate the crowds. These seats were not meant to last, they were built quickly to fit 10,000 people with meager roofs that were only put there to keep spectators dry and definitely not to be used for extra seating. But, that is exactly what happened in 1897. While over 15,000 people scrambled and squeezed into the stands to see the game many others looked for alternative means to watch. Contractor J.C. Weir saw the danger and tried to warn those in charge, but his words were ignored while waves of young boys climbed up the stands and crowded the roofs to set their eyes on the teams below. They almost made it through the entire game, but in the final moments the roofs began to buckle, and then they broke. Hundreds of children came crashing down onto those seated below them, intermingled with the wood and metal that was never meant to hold their weight. Some people were knocked unconscious, some were left bleeding but remarkably only one 10-year-old-boy was injured enough to seek medical care and everyone else was, for the most part, left unscathed. One witness to the collapse remarked that the fact that no one was killed or left with permanent injuries was “miraculous”, and indeed it was, but not enough for anyone to learn from it. 

The collapse of the grandstands was the last thing on the minds of the attendees of the Big Game taking place on November 29th 1900. The games were always exciting and even though the tradition was fairly new, by 1900 the crowds were massive and the tempers hot despite the teams only having a history of nine Big Game encounters. Of the nine games, Stanford had won seven despite their football team only being founded the same year as their first game and tens of thousands of people couldn’t wait to see if University of California Berkeley would come roaring back. Like previous years, the game was to take place in San Francisco, and once again no one could have anticipated the sheer size of the crowd. It had rained earlier that morning, but when the weather passed the doors of the surrounding neighborhoods and the incoming train cars were swinging open leading to 19,000 people swarming Recreation Field by 10:30am. A ticket for the game cost one dollar, an amount that wasn’t an easy price for many younger fans that desperately wanted to watch the biggest event of their year. So, just as they did several years earlier, the fans got inventive. Some climbed water towers, others tried to dig under fences to get in, but there was one thing that seemed to be an obvious solution for those needing a bird's eye view of the Big Game. 

Flyer for the Big Game on November 29th 1900. Image via Stanfordmag.org.

Across from Recreation Field was San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works, a brand new factory that was gearing up to open on December 3rd. Those putting up the makeshift grandstands remembered the collapse of 1897 and they told those in charge of the factory that they were required to do everything possible to prevent anyone from gathering on the roof. The Superintendent of the factory James Davis was in complete agreement with precautions being taken and he was given six tickets to the game for his compliance, but when the time came the workers that were stationed to prevent anyone from getting on the roof were simply overwhelmed. People dug under fences to get to the grounds, flung open the gates, and they poured in. According to one witness, “It was like trying to turn back the waves at the beach. The kids kept pouring through the fence anxious to see the kickoff." Factory workers who could sense the danger went into the streets, looking for police officers to help control the crowd and get the people off the roof but they could not find anyone who could assist. Soon between 500 and 1000 people were crammed onto the factory roof that was only built to withstand forty pounds per square inch. Even if someone wanted to escape it was impossible to move through the crowd to do so. They all gazed ahead, not paying any attention to the tell-tale signs around them signaling the danger they were all in.  

Twenty minutes into the game the crowds in the stands were electric. Their voices were roaring and the bands for Stanford and University of California Berkeley were booming, beating the thousands into a frenzy. The atmosphere on top of the glass works building was just as ecstatic, but in a matter of seconds it shifted to chaos. A portion of the roof of the building gave way and in a scene that was unfortunately familiar the fans began to fall. But, unlike the collapse of 1897 that had relatively minor injuries, this time the spectators fell into an absolute nightmare. 

This building was a glass factory, and although it was not due to officially begin production just yet, it was partially operational in preparation for the opening day. One thing that was up and functional was a furnace, filled with fires strong enough to melt glass and with an exterior temperature of approximately 500 degrees. Working in the factory that day were Ignace Jocz and Clarence Jeter, and they could undoubtedly hear the roars of the crowd before humanity started to unexpectedly rain down on them from above. The hole in the roof opened at the worst possible spot and between sixty and one hundred people fell forty-five feet into the factory with some of them landing directly on top of the glowing furnace.  

Image of the roof of the factory just before the accident. Image via 30 Nov 1900, Fri The San Francisco Examiner Newspapers.com

It's impossible to imagine the scene and the sounds that filled the factory as they all hit the metal or, if they were lucky, the brick floor. Once they hit most broke enough bones to render them immobile and those that hit the furnace stuck to the sizzling top. To make things even worse the furnace was encased by binding rods surrounding the machine in what was essentially a cage, trapping anyone who fell in the spaces. Those who missed the cage were just as unlucky, some of the falling bodies struck fuel pipes on their way down, severing them and sending boiling oil through the air and dousing the already burning bodies that then exploded into flame. Adding to this already unimaginable tragedy was the fact that almost everyone who plummeted through the ceiling that day were children, some boys as young as nine years old, that were the most likely to not have the dollar to buy a ticket and the least amount of concern about climbing to the roof of a building to watch the game.  

Illustration of the inside of the factory showing the furnace and binding rods. Image via 30 Nov 1900, Fri The San Francisco Examiner Newspapers.com.

Jocz, Clarence, and some other employees of the factory jumped into action doing what little could be done to attempt to save some of the victims, grabbing bodies and throwing them out of the way and using long metal hooks that were normally used to stir molten glass to hook people that landed on the furnace and drag them down. Watching the horrific scene from above were approximately twenty-seven people who also fell through the ceiling but somehow were able to cling to the rafters and the walls to avoid being roasted alive. One witness, young Thomas Curran, survived the ordeal by grasping a ceiling joist with his legs, forced to hang upside-down while chaos erupted under him. He later stated: “As I clung there, I saw the poor fellow who had been chatting with me strike the furnace. He curled up like a worm in that heat.” The sound of the bands and cheers of the game could still be heard filling the air. 

Incredibly, the crowds gathered to watch the Big Game were greatly unaware of the tragedy unfolding nearby. Spectators heard the crash but some believed it was simply a planned distraction by the opposing team, with one fan yelling “It’s a job!” Others believed it was just normal sounds coming from the industrial park and within moments the focus was back on the field. Those who did know that something was amiss were the residents of the surrounding towns and they quickly began to swarm the factory, screaming the names of their sons who had gone off that morning to enjoy a football game. The masses also ran to the morgue and toward the wagons being driven by the coroner, some filled with bodies burned and disfigured beyond recognition and others filled only with what remained such as socks, shoes, neck ties, and the contents of small pockets. Every possible vehicle was summoned to help, and a frantic search began for doctors that could be pulled away from their Thanksgiving meals to help the deeply wounded masses that lay on the factory floor in sheer agony while the smell of burning flesh filled the air. As the players from Stanford were marched out onto the street for an impromptu victory parade to the nearby Palace Hotel, other streets were filled with the screams and frenzy of the tragedy that seemed to have happened in another world from the game that happened only two blocks away. 

As the news spread that day as to what happened and the numbers began to rise the city was plunged into a deep state of sorrow. Hospitals became overwhelmed and the official count declared that thirteen people had died in the factory with eighty-six others critically wounded. As more recovered, others still died and soon the funerals began. On the following Sunday alone there were nine burials that had to take place back-to-back from 9am to 4pm.

Newspaper story about the accident. Image via 30 Nov 1900, Fri The San Francisco Examiner Newspapers.com.

Amazingly, reactions to what happened remained as separated in the newspaper pages as they did on the streets the day of the tragedy. The cover of the New York Times talked about the horror of the deaths at the glass factory, but the Sports section beamed of the Stanford victory as if nothing else had happened that day, calling the game the “closest and most exciting game of football ever played by the elevens of the two California universities." No players or coaches commented on the unspeakable horror that unfolded within earshot of the game that day. The college publications from both Stanford and University of California Berkeley carried on as if it never even happened with the Stanford Daily writing a 1,500-word front-page story about the victory with no mention of the tragedy other than a casual mention of a potential rematch to raise money for the affected families that never ended up happening.  

Although the city of San Francisco felt the deaths deeply, it seemed they too wanted to move beyond it as quickly as possible. When a grand jury was assembled to determine who was at fault for the Big Game disaster it had an air about it that seemed like it was purely for appearances. The blame was placed on James Davis as the Superintendent of the San Francisco and Pacific Glass Works and then it shifted to the police for not assigning enough people to the game. Shockingly, with no one to blame and people wanting to simply move on, the blame shifted to the dead. Seven days after the tragedy, and with victims still succumbing to injuries, the jury declared that “[T]he deceased had no business being there...No one can be held responsible for their deaths other than themselves." No one fought them on this. In the minds of most, the story of the collapse was over. 

The newspapers and courts might have decided the case was closed, but for many what happened that day never went away. On December 4th 1900 young Fred Lilly died in the City and County Hospital after suffering for months from a fractured skull he sustained in the fall. He never fully regained steady consciousness but in moments of delirium he still acted as if he was watching and enjoying the football game that was playing in front of him before everything suddenly stopped. Three years after the roof collapse twenty-eight-year-old Thomas Pedler passed away after enduring spinal surgery, paralysis, and the amputation of both legs. His demise marked the twenty-third and last death resulting from the disaster, fifteen of which being children that died before their eighteenth birthday.  

To this day the tragedy, known now as the Thanksgiving Day Disaster or The Big Game, is the deadliest accident to ever happen during an American sporting event. Now the glassworks building is gone, replaced with a building belonging to the University of California. The gravestones are also gone and most of the final resting places of victims disappeared from memory and fell into ruin after San Francisco introduced regulations forbidding new burials, also in the year 1900. One small reminder of the incredible catastrophe can be found in the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery just south of the city. Here lies a tiny stone cross that was meant to only be a temporary marker. It is inscribed with the name Cornelius McMahon, a twelve-year-old boy who died in the Thanksgiving Day Disaster and now remains as the only physical reminder of the deadliest day in American sports history. 

*****************************************************

Sources:

“The Big Game Disaster of 1900” by Sam Scott. Stanford Magazine November/December 2015.

“Big Game was marred by tragedy in 1900 contest” by Edvins Beitiks. November 17, 1997.

“The Thanksgiving Disaster that Most People Haven’t Heard About” by Marina Manoukian. November 19, 2022.

“Sudden Death: Boys Fell to Their Doom in S.F.'s Forgotten Disaster” by SR Weekly Staff. Aug 15, 2012.

“Thanksgiving Day Tragedy” ThePigskinDispatch.com

https://pigskindispatch.com/home/Football-Fun-Facts/Random-Football-Facts/Stadium-Disasters/Stanford-Vs-Cal-1900-Tragedy

[pamprinninja]

There have been a number of particularly insightful additions to this chain. Courtesy of crazy-pages:

...Relative to the dollar value of labor, video games are cheaper than they've ever been. It's just that the inequality distribution of wealth has changed so much, and cost of living along with it, that the cost of games relative to people's discretionary income after necessities has skyrocketed.

...And robotsandfrippary:

That's where your $60 goes. To the corporation and CEOs, not the devs... It's killing games, and none of us know what to do about it because we're busy scrambling to find work and feed our families.

...And nerdlingwrites:

Approximately 9,000 people in the industry were laid off in 2023, and so far this year there's an estimated 8,000... I think we've gone past crash, and now the entire industry is imploding.

The pandemic was (I know, I know; Apollo's gift of prophecy) a once in a lifetime event; and for all of the disruption, devastation, and deaths it caused, some industries - such as those offering entertainment at a time of mass quarantine - made out extremely well.

Unfortunately, America's particular brand of short-term, shareholder-centric capitalism demands that the Lines Goes Ever Upwards (even when the explanation for a much-needed correction is as simple and easily-digested as "We experienced an unexpected windfall due to one-time exterior circumstances").

This is why the price of games goes up, even as consumer purchasing power goes down; why massive layoffs are occurring across multiple industries (even as companies report record profits against a background of sustained economic growth).

The entire system is sick, and growing sicker; and until such a time as we stop treating share price as an objective measure of value, it will grow sicker still.

As for what this means for the video game industry at present? Hard to say; although this wouldn't be the first time the medium has nosedived due to mismanagement on the part of major players.

Historically, the industry has bounced back from prior crashes (and often with new captains at the helm). I imagine however that this will bring little solace both to the developers that have lost their jobs, and the consumers that can no longer afford to engage in this pastime.

Unironically I think we might run into another video game crash like back in the day

[sninegame]

S9 Game Download – Real Money App | Latest Version

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S9 Game Download

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If you are facing a problem in login then you have to must watch different videos from YouTube or contact us.

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[johncameronn047]

Bustabit Clone Script: A Comprehensive Guide to Revolutionizing Your Online Gaming Business

The online gaming industry is booming, with innovative games and platforms emerging at an unprecedented pace. Among these, Bustabit has carved out a significant niche, captivating players with its unique blend of excitement and simplicity. For entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on this trend, a Bustabit clone script offers a golden opportunity. This blog delves into what a Bustabit clone script is, its features, advantages, potential revenue streams, and why Plurance stands out as the leading provider of this powerful tool.

What is a Bustabit Clone Script?

A Bustabit clone script is a pre-designed, customizable software solution that replicates the core functionalities of the original Bustabit game. Bustabit is a popular Bitcoin gambling game where players bet on a multiplier that increases until it "busts." The challenge lies in cashing out before the multiplier crashes. A clone script enables entrepreneurs to launch their own version of this engaging game, complete with unique features and branding, without the need for extensive development time and resources.

What is White Label Bustabit Clone Software?

White label Bustabit clone software is a pre-designed software solution that replicates the functionality and design of the popular Bitcoin gambling game, Bustabit. The original Bustabit game is a social, multiplayer experience where players bet on a rising curve that can "bust" at any moment. The goal is to cash out before the curve crashes. The white label software allows developers to create a similar gambling platform quickly and efficiently, providing a customizable framework that mimics the engaging gameplay and user experience of Bustabit. The "white label" aspect means that the software can be rebranded with your own logo, branding, and design, giving it a unique identity in the market.

Key Features of a Bustabit Clone Script

Provably Fair Gaming: Ensures transparency and fairness by allowing players to verify the integrity of each game round.

Cryptocurrency Integration: Supports various cryptocurrencies, making it easy for players to deposit and withdraw funds securely.

User-Friendly Interface: Intuitive design that enhances the gaming experience for both new and experienced players.

Admin Dashboard: Comprehensive back-end management tools for monitoring player activity, managing funds, and configuring game settings.

Customizable Design: Flexibility to tailor the look and feel of the platform to align with your brand identity.

Real-Time Multiplayer Interaction: Players can see each other’s bets and cash-outs in real-time, fostering a competitive and social atmosphere.

Security Features: Robust security measures, including encryption and DDoS protection, to safeguard user data and platform integrity.

Automated Payouts: Efficient and accurate payout system to ensure timely rewards for players.

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Cost-Effective: Developing a gaming platform from scratch is expensive and time-consuming. A clone script significantly reduces both cost and time.

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Scalability: Clone scripts are designed to handle high traffic and can be scaled up as your user base grows.

Customization: The ability to customize ensures that your platform stands out in the competitive gaming market.

Ongoing Support: Reliable clone script providers offer continuous support and updates to keep your platform running smoothly.

Revenue Streams from a Bustabit Clone Script

House Edge: The primary revenue comes from the house edge, a small percentage taken from each bet placed.

Transaction Fees: Charging fees for deposits and withdrawals can be a steady source of income.

Advertisements: Partnering with advertisers to display ads on your platform can generate additional revenue.

Premium Features: Offering premium memberships or features can attract players willing to pay for an enhanced gaming experience.

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Conclusion: Plurance – Your Partner in Success

When it comes to launching a successful Bustabit clone, choosing the right provider is crucial. Plurance stands out as the leading Bustabit clone script provider, offering a robust, secure, and customizable solution tailored to meet your specific needs. With Plurance, you gain access to a team of experts dedicated to helping you create a thriving online gaming platform. Our commitment to quality, transparency, and customer satisfaction ensures that your venture is set up for success from day one.

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[yalek-lembine]

The reason why gamers and gaming companies are the reason why the gaming industry is at its last legs:

Let's start with the gamers:

Gamers:

After further observation of the way you people operate with your stupid political correctness in the form of a slang dictionary, you people give a bad rap to the gaming industry and community because you're also demanding with your 4K and 2K digital waste of resources. This also deals with streamers who are very very popular and waste their network resources on a single stream towards twitch or any other place that accepts that type of medium.

P2p/p2w? I would rather see that fed down your throats as freemium because that is the actual definition and the actual legitimate definition of your slang...

And trust me you don't like me telling you this because you know it's true but instead you act like it's false because you don't want yourselves exposed. Well that's my exposition for you guys because you're just as stupid as the companies which I'll explain about here momentarily.

The only video game that I have ever played was bejeweled and that was it.

But as a result of this, I was lucky enough to start developing a c++ game in popcaps original framework from 2008 called sci jewel. And yes the version number starts at 4.00. uh oh Yalek.... Spoiler alert...oh diiiiick... Yeah. this game will pretty much break all the necessary regulations that were put in place by companies and gamers themselves especially for the PC on Windows Linux and apple/mac OS. Mobile might take some time though...

Here's another thing for you gamers... You don't really understand the open source mindset with video games because you would rather make money with it. That's a problem in my eyes because as I see it video games are software and should be treated as entertainment, and should not hold ownership by a corporate entity. Even Indie / independent developers should have no right to own something unless they are trying to hold a leadership role for it..

Companies, such as EA, Nintendo, Activision, square enix, etc:

What I will never understand is why you think owning an entire genre of video game is the coolest thing that ever happened to you...

Well it's not. Once a genre has been made it can be remade either for the better or for the worse. Depends on the type of person who wants to develop it.

Also you enslave your programmers to do things that would seem disrespectful to their own identity. Well here's the thing okay... The programmer is the one that's writing the code and they can determine whether or not they can listen to you executives or not. They have every right to say no, and if you ignore this, is coercion in the first degree and is an actual federal crime. May not be rape, but coercion is close to it. Also shouldn't the programmer be determining solutions for the executives instead of the executives dictating what goes into what goes out of it? Because one of the executives don't know what the heck they're doing which a lot of them don't...? What are the game accidentally leaks code or crashes their whole system? And there's no way to get community input because you executives try to get your way by having your own system developers /debuggers debug the application instead having the community do it for you.

For both gamers and the companies: start cooperating with each other and start understanding that a piece of software is just a piece of software and should not be treated as a greedy means of existence.

I guess I'll add on to the streamers here too...

Y'all have no right to stream. Because you don't have any understanding of being able to realize that your network bills are going to be much more than what your stream income is going to be. Stream income is one of the worst forms of income to ever come by because there's no way that you guys are going to be able to afford, in today's age, the. necessary housing, water, and bills that the worldwide capitalisocioeconomy is trying to induce unto you all. And I personally believe your guys' popular ignorance will catch up with you in the end.

[the-manneh]

So sorry for the late response but omg Manny, i miss you so much! It's just not the same without you around. But yeah i'm fine. My hours at OG have been cut to like 10 hours a week. No more Sunday morning shifts. Not that i'm complaining. Its about time i get out of the service industry game, anyway. Chris is kinda hinting he wants kids now sooooo eh...The question is, how have you been?! Is it all working out how you planned? You got a nice place to live? Give me updates! Lots of lovexxx

Brace ya'self, Ish. It's gonna be a long one.

Honestly, I'm glad you remembered who I was. I miss y'all too (you especially, you're basically like my she-bro). Sorry about your hours getting cut, I feel like that's something going on with every corporation because at my job (I'm working at Nike now, retail job, customer service), I'm lucky to get more than 12 hours a week and I need at least 30 to keep up with my expenses.

I honestly have no clue how I managed to survive this long but I've been keeping a video journal series on my YouTube to look back on just in case I forget (youtube.com/22aaa).

Chris wanting a family is great! dude making big moves, I just hope that things go well for y'all beforehand because I personally don't trust this economy but if dude wants a family, he also at least has an idea how to manage it so I just hope for the best for y'all :)

As far as quitting the service industry, you have any idea where you wanna go to next? It's a big world out there and it'll drown us if we ain't prepared.

I thought I was prepared but the first two weeks I was out here in Texas, I was sleeping in my car.

I jumped the gun with this job I thought I had set up. Looking back, it would have been smarter if I just requested to come here with vacation time, checked out some things, came back to Georgia and racked up with another tax income check.

Instead, the job I THOUGHT I was gonna get basically told me that they wasn't looking for any new workers. Thankfully, I have a cousin in Houston that was cool with me crashing at her place until I got myself together.

I ended up getting the job at Nike and jumping the gun again with this apartment (sleeping in the car during hot ass August was not the ideal situation for ya boy and I was desperate).

I got the apartment around August and been using what money I had saved up to get myself situated with this place but because I got all these bills and not so many hours, I've been on edge about how I'm gonna pay for a lotta stuff.

If worst comes to worst, I can always go back home to Louisiana, lick my wounds and try again. I'm in surprisingly good shape so I can retain this body for at least another decade before my bones start to go lol.

Positive note, I've been working out a bit more, been training to be a wrestler still. It feels good that some wrestlers know who I am enough to say "hey man, you cool" to me sometimes but dude…every time I go to a wrestling show (I help out as like an usher for seats or like a doorman or something), I just say to myself "I should BE there".

The thing is I need to be able to train for a year straight and the challenge with that is just money and time. I'm willing to do what I need to do to get myself in that action, I just ain't got the money for it as much as I like but when I CAN go train, ya boy has fun every dang time.

Hoping things are working for y'all over there, really glad you reached out. I got scared for a moment lol

[titleknown]

...Okay, this made me angry enough that I felt the need to respond before the actual replies with points that don't viscerally hurt me.

A) The fact is wrt online commission artists, your point that "I don't see why they're unique, everyone suffered in the crash" is ignorant at best.

Like, from my observation, because they're so directly dependent on the incomes of others for their income rather than the logistics of capital, their incomes tend to dry up far faster when things go bad.

It's an effect akin to biomagnification, making artists akin to frogs as environmental indicators in the economic ecosystem.

B) If we're talking about "necessity" under capitalism, you and I both know that the professions that make the most money are decided by the whims and desires of capital rather than actual societal necessity.

Like, for the big example, the finance industry. And also most executives which, let's be real, under a just world would be paid and have the same amount of authority as other logistics and administrative jobs because that's what they are.

And I made my point not to devalue tech workers but talk about how under-valued artistic labor is, because you are essentially justifying them not making a living wage in the name of economic demand, using the same arguments I've seen used to justify; say; underpaying teachers. Or justify why food service workers don't deserve a living wage.

C) If we're talking necessity under socialism... like, I've seen arguments that we don't need computers, following up with the argument that they are so resource-inefficient that we should ditch them for radio as a means of mass communication.

My point on that is that there's a lot we don't overtly "need" but that human life would be worse without, and that includes not just individual works of art, but the broader ecosystems of art that people given the time and money to create it have even if some of the works propping up those ecosystems are "unprofitable" or nitche.

And that argument from pure utilitarianism either goes into that form of absurdity with the "reject computer, return to radio" or; more likely from what I can ideologically tell from your views; treats those who don't make it as disposable for the greater good because some people are more deserving than others.

D) I am deeply unsympathetic to the "Art is a thing you do when you get off work" take I see in leftism, because of how it tells disabled people with relatively little spoons to give to go fuck themselves by ignoring the drain that a "real job" causes.

And that's even before we get into the mediums that take the dedicated time and effort to do that can basically only be viably done if given such, like film or animation or video games.

E) I am also deeply unsympathetic to the take of "If the amount of people who wanted to be full-time artists could be, the economy would break" because like... really?

Like, I see plenty of people who don't get or fuck with art and are fine with that. Admittedly, this one's more antecdotal and I don't have all that much research to back it up, but I'm pretty sure you don't either.

So, we're both going on principle, and yours seems to operate on the principle that "if everyone was able to live their best life, society would fail to function," which is... that's the principle the right-wing operate on. You sound like a Republican.

And, following from that, F)...

...Well, this is getting personal/emotional, but like, people who think like you do hurt people. Like, it's the same mindset my parents used to crush my dreams, with the same language of harsh truths.

The whole "get a real job" schtick basically ignored a big reason why I thought it was the only career path for me, the lack of barriers wrt application, which was the greatest bar to me thanks to disability and trauma over job application from the same people who said "my art dreams were unreasonable."get a real job"

And, you can say "Well, you should be mad at the job application system," but like, a system is what it does, and that includes systems of understanding the world. And what you're doing by justifying the poverty of artists in the name of limited economic space is telling people to shut up about being undervalued, not changing the job application system.

And, what of the other people I know? I know so many brilliant artists, people who manage to make me laugh with just a fucking sketch, but they're stuck in jobs they not only hate but aren't even good at.

Like, beyond art, is it justifiable for ecological scientists to be working at Starbucks during the climate crisis?

Is it justifiable for my friend Trent to be living in poverty; unable to get a "real job" due to his mental health issues; struggling to take care of his also-disabled sister using the funds from his art, despite being one of the most brilliant multimedia artists I know?

Is it justifiable for my friend, who got a degree in baking, to be stuck in a grocery job for years, never being put in the baking department where he can use his actual skills despite him taking the job for that very purpose?

Because that is where the principles expressed in what you said lead, that people being stuck in jobs they not only hate but are bad at is not only justified but economically necessary, because the system does not exist to serve people; but people exist to serve the system.

Like, if you're wondering why this is such a wall of text, here you go. You are justifying the system of people who personally hurt and failed me and others. You are declaring yourself as in their political "corner" so to speak and in some small way contributing to making a world where they win.

And if there's any one takeaway I hope you make from this, I want you to take away that the principles you express aren't abstract and distant, they're real and they hurt people.

While I really hate the narrative of "tech bros" because of how it conflates shitty CEOs with non-shitty base-level programmers, and how it conflates Dunning-Kruger-y early adopters with people who Know Their Shit about computers...

...On the AI art issue, I will say, there is probably a legit a culture clash between people who primarily specialize in programming and people who primarily specialize in art.

Because, like, while in the experience of modern working illustrators a free commons has ended up representing a Hobbseyan experience of "a war of all against all" that's a constant threat to making a living, in software from what I can tell it's kinda been the reverse.

IE, freedom of access to shared code/information has kinda been seen as A Vital Thing wrt people's abilities to do their job at a core level. So, naturally, there's going to be some very different reactions to the morality of scraped data online.

And, it's probably the same reason that a lot of the creative commons movement came from the free software movement.

And while I agree a lot with the core principles of these movements, it's also probably unfortunately why they so often come off as tone-deaf and haven't really made that proper breakthrough wrt fighting against copyright bloat.

It also really doesn't help that, in terms of treatment by capital, for most of our lives programmers have been Mother's Special Little Boy whereas artists (especially online independent artists post '08 crash) have been treated as The Ratboy We Keep In The Basement And Throw Scraps To.

So, it make sense the latter would have resentment wrt the former...

[pocketbelt]

Steam Next Fest, October 2023

Played a score of demos, as I am wont to do, to find new things of interest and confirm if the ones I already knew or not can clear the first hurdles or crash and burn.

I played these 19 demos:

I'll put 9 in this post, and 10 in a second, just so the post editor doesn't shit itself from length issues. Going down the list in the order above - really, Asura the Striker should come first but with the English UI, Steam biases non-Latin characters to the bottom.

I flinched every time the Unity logo came up, those poor bastard devs.

Continued under the read more.

Conscript

Coming from Australian solo developer Jordan Mochi (the studio, Catchweight Studio, is just him at his house), Conscript is a survival horror game set in the middle of the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the longest individual battle in the First World War. While there have been quite a few games, indeed some in recent times, that utilise the horrors of the First World War as their setting and something to reflect on or just as a source of misery or pathos, I actually can't think of any that are just directly a survival horror game.

Conscript acquits itself superbly, using that setting superbly. You are a young French soldier at the frontline trench separating the French and German forces, and the miseries of trench warfare and all that plagued it (enemy artillery shelling, chemical gas weapons, failing roughshod infrastructure and non-existent supply lines) lend to a dirty, grimy brown and grey misery pit that's much more grounded than the usual ones for horror games.

The integration of setting and mechanics, elements and aesthetics come together so well. The chaos of the First World War and its conflicts are used excellently; the opening event of the game, where you are shepherded out to hold the line, has enemies continuously appearing from nowhere. German soldiers, speaking a language your protagonist doesn't understand and can't make out, equally driven to their limits with some appearing haggard and lanky like beasts, wielding only trench shovels or cudgels (as their ammo also runs scarce), they fit their moulds for survival horror enemies very well. The assault ends after a set amount of time, and no clear direction or indication of this is given; you're left to fend against the incoming waves with whatever ammo, guns and tools you can find.

Your primary guns, the rifle and pump shotgun, need you to hit the reload button between shots not to reload but just to chamber a new round/pump a shotgun, which provides that little barrier to seamless combat that a good survival horror needs. Melee combat is awkward and messy. You can stop enemies from respawning by plugging gaps at the trench walls with barbed wire, as if boarding a window from zombies, cigarettes are traded for upgrades/resources, the horrors haunting you are often artillery or creeping gas as they are enemy soldiers. It comes together so naturally.

The graphics are also of particular note; whether they're sprites or models, the character sprites carry the look of 3D models rendered as 2D sprites, a type of style I mostly associate with the Gameboy Advance, where it was regularly used to awful effect. That console's library is plagued with some of the most hideous games you'll ever see, when it was so capable of absolutely gorgeous 2D visuals, a plague spread round the industry by things like Sony America's anti-2D mandate during the PS1 era. Conscript uses a similar style to excellent effect; it looks nice on its own terms and it fits with the moody, atmospheric approach the game takes. It truly is all in how you use it.

Darkest Abyss

Coming from Brazilian indie studio 2ndBoss, Darkest Abyss trumpets its obvious inspirations and goals from its description; it's a 2D platformer in the vein of the classic NES Castlevanias, a style it apes very well, with the usual sneaky breaking of hardware limitations for grander displays.

Darkest Abyss is a very competent take on the formula, if one that's a little easy. Your subweapons in particular are pretty good and the game is generous with refill items, and indeed a lot of rooms seem explicitly designed around subweapons that they hand to you at the start. The diagonal attack one oneshots even beefy enemies and shreds even the stage boss very quickly, the only tricky part of the demo level is the auto-scroller where a giant horse (above) slowly pursues you due to its use of blocks that break under your feet. Go too fast and you'll run out of blocks before you can see where you can jump to.

I have two issues with Darkest Abyss, one a little fiddly thing and one a flavour thing. For the former, in an attempt to be helpful with mounting and climbing the infamously fiddly Castlevania staircases, Darkest Abyss makes them work such that you can just hold left/right into them and your character will climb them, no need to mess with up/down. Problem is, when ascending, your character passes by the bottom step a little, before turning and going back and then ascending. This makes it super easy to be faced the wrong way from impeding or incoming enemies when you didn't mean to be, and you can't extract yourself from the stairs so easily. It also loses a bit of nuance, where in games like Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon or Grim Guardians, you can walk at a ledge where a staircase is going down and just walk off the ledge for a fast descent, either for speed reasons or to tactically escape enemies and pivot to hit them as they approach. This is ultimately a minor issue, though, once you realise it's how stairs work you can just work around it.

The flavour issue comes from the game's intro cutscene, setting the stage of the world and the tale of King Dracula. During it, after describing Dracula's monstrous reign, it pivots to describe at length a demon who looks like an old man with a massive sword called Furcas, and how he's a wandering badass who kills all he sees, summoned by the Church who lost control etc etc. The problem isn't that per se, it's that it then awkwardly pivots to your actual character Lucy, a half-vampire desperately seeking to kill Dracula who turned her to break the vampire curse before she zombifies (and the flavour of how she stalls the curse's progress is pretty rad, an ornament with a weeping demon singing that somehow slows its progress). Then, at the end of the first level, you find Dracula dead with Furcas' big sword in his neck before fighting the first boss, who is not Furcas but just some demon that a wizard has been sealed inside. The characters are then curious about who could've done this, who is this mysterious Furcas, etc etc.

I'm making a lot of hay by explaining it but basically it would've been cooler to not detail and show and hype up Furcas at the start awkwardly between the two points that matter immediately (your character and her initial goal) and instead have the subversion hit properly and the explanation doled out over the course of the game. Narrative matters even for games with simpler, more limited delivery of it.

Still, Darkest Abyss seems pretty cool and I'm looking forward to seeing if it sticks the landing.

Echoes of the Living

Comparing a game to existing ones, especially big brand or prominent/important ones in a genre, is a good shorthand for explaining and introducing them to people or selling people on them, but some can see it as annoying. In posts like this I often do it because a lot of indie games (at least the ones that I play, which is perhaps telling of me) are clearly and sometimes openly directly trying to capture the specific feeling of a specific IP, or to mimic and/or build upon its gameplay and mechanics because the developers loved it (such as Darkest Abyss just above us). It's reductive in some ways, sure, but it's useful and sometimes it's just the only way to sensibly do it.

All of this is to say that Echoes of the Living, by Spanish developers MoonGlint, is a survival horror clearly in the vein of the classic Resident Evils, with visuals more reminiscent of the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil 1. I think that's pretty explicitly the goal; the game opens with a "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore" warning screen of the same exact fashion as those games, which all games referencing or inspired by Resident Evil are fond of doing. And, I think, it mostly gets there!

The movement is perhaps a little twitchier, but its tank controls work, the shooting works the same ways with the same nuances of aiming down to hit downed foes or aiming up to get higher critical chance, you've got your herbs for healing, gunpowder for crafting ammo, and so on. It's got the vibes down, the environments look great, good stuff.

There are a few design issues, though, which dings it a bit. Which is to say, in the 27 odd minutes I played the demo, I couldn't reach the first save room. Not because the game is vicious and finding my way there was too fiendish, no; it's just fucking buried behind a good two dozen or more rooms of zombies and items. This is an issue because the save room is also where the item storage is, and EOTL is actually very generous with items outside of healing ones - you've got more than enough bullets to clean out the initial areas of the pub you reach after the opening streets segment and still have plenty to spare. But your limited inventory also has to hold puzzle items, and if you pick up some keys and can't find the doors they go to they're just going to clog things up and get in the way of more resources or puzzle items. You're dying for that storage crate pretty quick.

Less serious but just kind of odd are melee weapons; EOTL has degrading melee weapons like baseball bats that can be used to kill zombies without spending bullets, but despite being described as being for this use, they are way more scarce than bullets. In fact I only found one, I think, the one it gives you at the start when introducing them, and it's great, it's five or six free oneshots if you aim for heads, but if they're meant to spare your ammo reserves for more important moments their scarcities should probably be flipped.

There is one more issue:

Can you read the text on for that item without pulling the image out and zooming in further? I couldn't on my huge 48-inch TV about a metre and a half from me, and the game was running at maximum resolution and settings and all. It's compacted down to make room because that entire right side of the screen is intended for the storage crate when you get to it. But, well, there's a reason why Resident Evil and others have bespoke separate screens for storage crate item management, it's for ease of use. Compacting the inventory screen like this isn't the best idea, that screen space is wasted any time you're not at a storage crate. It's admirable to want to be efficient, but sometimes you need more menus and screens!

Echoes of the Living is a good effort and I hope to see at least the inventory screen tidied up if not at launch (which is soon) then afterward. The rest would require a bit more shuffling of rooms or item design, but otherwise it holds up well. At some point I may well come back round to it.

Japanese Drift Master

I usually try a racing game out in Steam Next Fests when I see one, because I've always been fond of different kinds of racing and car games, but only ones about high-speed sci-fi racing like F-Zero or Fast Zero RMX really stick with me. I suck at basically all others, even though I like shit like Crazy Taxi and have liked the idea of ones like the older Need For Speed games and all, and especially old arcade racers. I can never wrap my head around games where they behave more like actual cars and not karts or lightspeed hover cars.

This is one of those; coming from Polish developer-publisher Gaming Factory, JDM is more "realistic simulator" than you first might expect given the subject. It has a bevy of detailed control and handling options and fairly straight-laced but nice realistic visuals once in-game. I'm not qualified to say how good it is at those options, but it seemed to have its shit together even to a layman like me.

Perhaps my idea of drifting has been somewhat warped by Initial D memes and more arcadey racers, but it feels like there isn't quite enough space on its realistic tight-streeted world map or in the event I tried in it, but I am inept at this shit. I passed the event with a bronze medal by managing to drift in a consistent circle in a wide enough spot in one of its turns. At some point I need to sit down and pick a game and commit to it to get a feel for how to handle things, otherwise I'll just never vibe with them.

Still, JDM seems pretty neat if you're looking for a fairly realistic simulator with an emphasis on pulling drift tricks.

Koumajou Remilia II: Stranger's Requiem

I still haven't played the original non-Steam PC release of this, or gotten around to the Switch version of the first game (which I own), but I did play the original Koumajou Remilia some years ago and was fond of it. Coming from Japanese indie dev Frontier Aja, this a Touhou fangame that apes Castlevania openly, aiming for its aesthetic and musical style as well as the gameplay, but blended with Touhou. Its character illustrations in particular are fucking incredible.

Regrettably, this port or version is something of a fucking mess. The screenshot probably gives you some immediate ideas; this game can't be full-screened, and there are no graphical or performance options of any sort in its menu at all. There's not really an options at all, which is really unfortunate because the game's default controls are fucked up, with multiple actions bound to the same key by some accident or glitch. The game's tutorial will tell you buttons for swapping subweapons/summons or performing certain moves and they'll often do nothing or just stack up, as they either overwrite each other or clash. You can't actually cycle subweapons with LB & RB on the Xbox controller, for instance, neither of them do anything. One of the cycle directions is bound to Y, which is also your backstep button. The flurry attack performed by hitting Up + X is also bound to B, which is your subweapon usage button. And because it's going at the same time as the subweapon, it often overwrites or prevents their usage.

The game defaults to Switch button layouts so this might even be a bad port of that version, in which case hopefully the Switch ports avoid these issues. I'll have to see by busting it out, and if so that's good, and if not that's a horrible, horrible shame. It does remind me that I still need to get around to Touhou: Luna Nights.

The Last Exterminator

Something that struck me over the last week, amidst news of service games dying away and losing all their money, was how far we've come from the awful bastard days of cover-based shooters. The drift to the current "Boomer Shooter" renaissance was gradual, exploding with Doom 2016 in particular and we're still riding the wave. God, how much better things are now with shooters that actually have to give a shit about enemy design, and level design, and can have challenge that isn't just "you were breathed on, sit behind a wall for seven seconds".

From Australian studio Ironworks Games, The Last Exterminator is a prime example of the new wave of boomer shooters; taking obvious overt cues from Duke Nukem 3D in particular (but with actual 3D graphics for you and enemies, more akin to stuff like Quake but with Duke's art style), it's a boomer shooter in basically every way: sprawling levels where paths interweave and criss-cross and turn back on each other, health & armour meters, the usual suspects for weapons, no forced cover system and a very fast protagonist, on and on. It's fucking sublime. It's just excellent.

The demo is just one level, but it's a good level, guns feel fucking great, movement feels great and it looks really nice. It's a plain ol' fucking treat. The core part of this renaissance for shooters is that these old shooters were just plain fucking great, a lot of the time, whereas the horrid tunnel the 7th gen of videogames went down struggled to produce much of any worth, never mind reach even vaguely similar heights. I would even go as far as saying that the only truly excellent shooters of that time were Vanquish and Resident Evil 5.

Last Exterminator does basically everything right - it even already has great gamepad controls out of the box, a bit of a rarity for boomer shooter demos in my experience. A highlight of this Next Fest, easily.

The Last Faith

Sadly, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a 2D "Soulslike", if I'm being honest. Maybe there is one out there, but I've wracked my brains and I can't come up with any I'd call good. If you count Blasphemous that'd be it, but the thing is I don't, I think that's just a pure Metroidvania platformer and not an action RPG at all. It's not that I decree that it can never be done, just that I've never enjoyed one. Partially because it feels like so many fall into weird traps that don't make sense if you've played the games that inspire them.

And like, look at that menu and art above and tell me this isn't just wanting to be Bloodborne specifically. And that's good, more of that is always good. Coming from English studio Kumi Souls Games, The Last Faith misses the key ingredient of its inspiration: speed.

The Last Faith's issue for me is that getting around in its world just feels tedious and fighting enemies feels like a slog. In the name of challenge they want your animations to be very specific and require you to parry moves if you can't dodge them, but all of that just made me feel like I couldn't ever quite move around enemies properly or quickly. And you don't have a block to make up for that, as far as I can tell, because these gits never have a fucking working block/guard system ever because why would you? Who would ever want that.

The thing about Bloodborne taking the block system away is that your general movement and attack speed was significantly increased to compensate. Your dodge becomes a lunge that can close distance incredibly as well as having great i-frames, and most weapons are very fast or have fast forms. The Last Faith doesn't really have that, and it hurts it so much. Both demo characters feel too slow to get around at a reasonable pace and regular enemies take too many hits to feel good.

There's a bad habit among indie devs of assuming that "hard" or hell, "balanced" means "takes longer", that in a "balanced game" or a "hard game" you need to do some "middling" amount of hits to beat things. This makes them tiresome fucking slogs because nothing ever just dies and getting anywhere takes forever. Basic enemies die terribly fast from the very start in Souls games, and no-one ever seems to notice.

I can't say I recommend The Last Faith. The thing is, Bloodborne's still great and it's playable on PS5 as well as PS4, if you're hankering that bad. Its other inspiration, Castlevania (you can tell by the styling of the brawler character and his backdash especially), is represented vigorously and better elsewhere.

Little Goody Two Shoes

Coming from Portuguese developer AstralShift, Little Good Two Shoes is an astounding visual treat. Its art style, its sprite and animation work and the very tasteful VHS filter are the stuff of dreams. All of the little animation touches, from Elise's portrait in the top left reacting to things to just how she runs or hops across stones to go across a river, all of it is perfect and adorable. It has that 90s anime/PC-98 visual novel art style to it, and its title animation captures the same style immaculately. This is, truly, one of the ideal ways a game can look, frankly.

The demo is remarkably large as this is a slow-burner; a mix of traditional dating sim and a horror adventure game, where you weave your way to one of 10 endings by romancing one of three girls and investigating talk of a witch and demons in the woods around your medieval/early modern German countryside town. It balances these pretty well - there's a hunger meter as well as a health one, giving you a reason to do minigames for money so you can't just devour the dating/horror story immediately, and the minigames are fun besides. It gives the whole thing a good pacing.

It does lay it on thick, too, you get jumped by thorned demon vines minutes into things and get chucked into the thick of time management and arranging dates with your potential girlfriends relatively quick. It's all slickly done, the characters are delightful and mystery abounds pretty quick.

The horror aspects I saw, from the trailer and the demo, aren't my taste for horror exactly but they give the story good intrigue all the same, and Elise is a fun character so seeing her bounce off her love interests and others is a laugh anyway. For its asking price it seems like a fucking steal, and as it's out soon I may well pounce on it quick.

Even if it somehow doesn't stick its landing, I want to see these devs keep at their craft because holy god, it's so fucking pretty.

Little Locked Rooms

From solo developer riolucci, Little Locked Rooms has an adorable premise: a detective making dioramas of locked-room mysteries for his kids to solve. It's a good set-up, and I'm very fond of these kinds of puzzle game, but the demo's single level leaves it wanting.

The demo level involves a thief entering a cabin and then fleeing from it without leaving a trace when the police arrive 30 minutes later, and from the supplied screenshot above you can likely figure it out quick. But the way you have to convey the answer is to pick through a series of questions that aren't always clear in what they want: they want you to pick through the scenario and solve it through the questions, answering each step as if you don't or can't immediately tell waht happened.

So here, you have to answer that the thief exited the house by walking, then specify that he walked backwards through his own footsteps, then specify that he grabbed a tire and then walked back through the tire tracks, using a tire to cover his footprints in the tracks. It makes delivering the answer a little fiddly, but at least with the answers and scoring system, there is some pleasantly surprising nuance: you can pick the tire tracks first when identifying how the thief left, and get explicitly told "not yet" and to find the interim step, and not have your score penalised. It's a flow thing, I suppose; I would prefer giving the answer and then "defending" or "proving it" to make things feel more natural, but maybe that's just me. Maybe the point is figuring out how to work your way there rather than answering.

Either way, the demo level is short and simple. There's promise in this, but I'd like to have seen a more complex diorama and thus what the "average" level of the game looks like, to see what it aspires to. Perhaps at a future Next Fest.

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Part 2 is here!