Might’ve been financed on credit - but even still, it takes a lot more than $12k for a down payment.

Assuming the median price for a home is $500k, you’d need $100k for a traditional 20% down payment. Sure, $12k is 12% of the way there… but it’s nowhere near what is needed for an actual down payment.

[3/3]

As far as unionizing goes - it’s a mixed bag. I myself am very pro-union; I was a Teamster for years (Local 495). And many gamedevs are left-leaning (but not all! I knew some MAGA/QAnon guys). This in turn makes them supportive of unions on paper.

But when conversations stopped being theoretical and started being, “No, really, why wouldn’t you?”, the holdouts tend to think:

• Union leadership is corrupt/greedy, and they don’t want to give union leaders money for “nothing” (as they see it)

• Being in a union means everyone would need to be bound to strict regulations - keeping exact track of time worked, having exact lunch breaks, documenting everything. As-is in the game industry, the “standard” at most places is hands-off, take lunch whenever, stay at lunch however long you want, clock in/out whenever, nobody questions you as long as your work is getting done. People like this and don’t want to risk losing it.

• Being in a union threatens close relationships with management. I can say that when I was a Teamster, management was outright adversarial and conversations with them weren’t fun. In the game industry, management is quite literally my friends and people I chill out with. There’s a very, very blurry line between “friends” and “bosses” - some bosses are horrible, to be sure, but the general vibe is casual.

• There’s a lot of benefits in the office like free snacks, free swag, a place to chill out and play games at work, etc. People are afraid that this would count as “compensation” and thus being unionized would mean that you’d have to pay for snacks or swag or whatever - or that it could be taken away as retaliation from management.

• Retaliation is a thing. It’s illegal. US government doesn’t care. Corpos get a slap on the wrist because of plausible deniability. EA has been downsizing recently and they “coincidentally” cut the contract with a QA team that just unionized. Hmm. That sort of stuff has a chilling effect - EA has no qualms shutting down studios. Why rock the boat and risk being locked out?

There are counterarguments for each of those points. Benefits can be made contractual, union leadership isn’t necessarily corrupt (although I did dislike the leadership of my Teamster local - for being too close to management and too soft). Etc. But it is an uphill battle if people are generally already happy where they work - and the jobs are plentiful enough that people can be comfortable moving studios until they find somewhere that lets them vibe.

We’ll see what happens if the market continues to tighten.

I can see a place like Blizzard unionizing, just from the horror stories I’ve heard. Maybe Epic as well. But it’s a lot harder to make a union happen in today’s day and age.

[2/3]

Other studios are more, eh. Devs stick together and are honest with one another about the state of different studios. I was in the pipeline to get hired at one studio when multiple people explicitly told me that it wasn’t a place that treats their workers well, so I backed out.

I got hired somewhere at the recommendation of a former mentor, who has been in the industry for 30 years and whose judgement I trusted. I don’t want to speak as to where I work now, but I can say that he was right and that the place I’m at has been an ocean of calm amidst the chaos that’s the rest of the industry right now.

You hear horror stories from co-workers in the office. A friend of mine was ex-Blizzard and told me all about what was happening there well before it became a national news story. There are places which will work you to the bone and crunch you until you can’t stand it anymore.

Some people love that stuff. I don’t. But you get paid extremely well if you work for a place that works you hard. I could’ve made triple my salary at one of the places I was in the pipeline for, plus sponsorship for moving to the EU. I just would have to basically dedicate my entire life to that company, and I don’t think I had it in me… but I can see why people would.

[1/3]

I’ve been a gamedev at a couple AAA studios for almost 5 years now. I can say it’s a bit of a mixed bag, and very much depends on the studio.

The studios I’ve worked at have treated me well. I started out working at EA, which - for all its faults when it comes to gamers - does treat their staff very nicely.

We had free snacks in the office, flexible schedules, a generous remote work policy pre-pandemic (one of the best engineers on our team was permanently in Chicago, another was permanently in Oregon), and leadership that would listen to our complaints and respond honestly. We had weekly board game lunches and D&D sessions on the clock, and a comfy place to play all the latest games whenever we wanted.

Deadlines were reasonable, and the choice was always to cut before crunching. Crunch was on the table, but only as a last resort - I only crunched once in the 3 years I worked on that game, and it was for a single weekend when we had live players running into issues. My pay was on par with a traditional tech job. I went from $15/hour at my college job to $25/hour as an intern to $100k/year as a junior. Within 3 years I was making $140k/year, plus stock options and a 30% yearly bonus.

My one complaint is that EA unceremoniously pulled the plug on us. We had started a beta period and player response was… middling. We thought we could rescue the project, but we needed another 6 months to make it happen to avoid crunching. Leadership pitched the idea… corpo execs said “You aren’t getting that additional time; we’re killing the project.” We got shut down and all 150 devs were sent to the unemployment line.

EA’s severance package was very generous, though, and even when they were firing us they went above and beyond what they legally were “supposed” to do. I wound up with my yearly bonus, half a years’ worth of salary, plus 2 months of being “technically employed” but being paid to look for another job - so plenty of runway (plus unused sick time + vacation on top of that).

While it always sucks being laid off, and it sucks that the project we spent years on got the axe overnight… they really could’ve been far worse. Some of my former coworkers decided to do their own thing and it seems to have worked out for them, as they were able to get publisher funding well within the “runway” EA gave us.

That’s all game development.

Baldur’s Gate took 6 years to make. Starfield has been in development since 2015 - that’s 8 years. As gamers demand more, games have grown in scope. The ones that stayed behind have gotten punished.

If a AAA game doesn’t have at least 8 hours of story and realistic graphics in the modern era, it gets panned by reviewers. People’s expectations have been raised - and are continuing to be raised - and in turn, that inflates how long it takes to make a game. People will say “Why should I spend $60 on this game when I can spend $60 on this game that gives me more stuff?” (See: Immortals of Aveum, which itself has been in development for 4-5 years.)

The games that don’t take that long are the stale yearly franchises - the FIFAs and CODs of the world. Even COD alternates between studios, with each installment taking 1-3 years. Some franchises (like Pokemon) have multiple teams within a studio that operate independently of one another; Arceus was made by the Let’s Go team, while Scarlet/Violet was made by the Sword/Shield team.

If studios stop betting on long-term projects, you’re going to wind up with stale yearly iterations - or half-baked games rushed out the door to meet a deadline. If it’s true that you say AAA (and even AA!) dev isn’t sustainable, then that’s effectively calling for stale franchises pushing out cheap content for quick cash grabs (see also: Hollywood movies over the last decade).

It’s also not just games this is happening to. Disney recently canned a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea show that was ready to go. There’s the Scooby-Doo stuff that Max recently pulled before release as well. That stuff isn’t my industry; I don’t know how long it takes to make those things… but I know it costs about as much to make as a AAA game does.

There’s probably a reckoning to be had for both industries, but I don’t think the correction should be that drastic - and I think it will be bad for people who consume that content.

Yep, it’s been a trend all year. My studio got canned back at the end of January. Publisher called us into a studio-wide meeting scheduled during lunch with 1 hour of notice, only to say “The game you spent 6 years on is canceled and all 150 of you are fired. The media will know in 30 minutes, don’t say anything until then if you want to keep a severance package.” (I have since landed on my feet elsewhere.)

These studios are owned by big publishers and generally work for years at a loss. With the costs to borrow increasing, we’re seeing cuts on long-term investments that might not make their money back (like movies and games).

Volition was owned by Embracer, which is now struggling with funding. So anything that isn’t a sure bet is effectively canned - and in turn you see these studios shut down left and right, plus big layoffs from studios that are still open.

I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).

Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).

Also bear in mind that it’s not “just” rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can’t just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of “anything is possible” you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.

With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won’t stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn’t be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there’s a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).

But until that, we’re going to be pretty limited. It’s going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it’s basically a completely different spell.

In the US, expansion packs were the general term used.

For example, RCT2 had the Wacky Worlds and Time Twister expansion packs. Empire at War had the Forces of Corruption expansion. While some were called add-ons, those were typically like tiny things, one-off characters or whatever.

It’s written in PHP, which a lot of devs dislike.

It is drowning in pull requests: 83 open as of right now. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls

Ernest (the lead dev) wasn’t really expecting it to blow up yet. Kbin was created in January of this year, and the first “major” instance was launched in May. It blew up basically instantly due to Reddit imploding, and Ernest has been playing catch-up.

But it still has rough edges - no API means no mobile apps. Lots of bugs and such from being a new project. It’s improving every week (including an API in code review), but Lemmy is more polished and has an relatively mature API.

You can see a list of instances here: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

As far as I know, there isn’t specifically a privacy-focused instance like what Lemmy has. But I also didn’t browse that list of instances too closely.

This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It’s planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.

That’s the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)

There’s still a lot of people who will always stick to Reddit as well (as evidenced by a good amount of hostility in the comment section of the Reddit discussion on /r/rust).

Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It’s also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I’m thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they’ve simply not been the best stewards of the project - it’s succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).

If you follow a Kbin community on Mastodon, the top-level post is the only thing shared to the community’s “profile”. If you click on the post, then the comments section is the Kbin comments section.

Here’s an example of a Kbin post I made displaying on Mastodon. I replied to this post, and my reply shows up as a reply to the top-level post.

Kbin’s federation with Mastodon works as you’d expect it to work.

I don’t know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

It’s one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

Here’s a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

The following is a transcript if you’d rather avoid Reddit:

(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it’s come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won’t be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what’s right. We’re only a team as long as we’re all working together and working for each other. That’s the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don’t solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they’re having a conflict with, we have a chain that they’re supposed to follow.

So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we’re here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won’t tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I’m not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

Um, some of you know us very well, I’ve been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you’ve been here for nine years or nine days, you’re here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

Um, We can’t solve problems we don’t know about though, so on that note, I’d like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

It’s the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you’re not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There’s an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you’re not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that’s okay, that’s fine, we understand, that’s why we have these options - Yvonne’s gonna post it in the general chat.

It’s a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you’re consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

(speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

(speaker 1, Linus) That’s it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

(speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

(speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power’s sake. “Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others” sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn’t agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don’t let them trick you into thinking they’re the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they’re told. The lower class are the people they don’t like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy’s founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don’t mind communists - I’m pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

I’m also in Vulkan on Linux with an AMD card. I don’t get those black boxes.

The main menu has terrible framerate, but everywhere else is acceptable through Proton (45-50). DX11 has great framerate on the main menu, but like 8-10 FPS ingame (my Windows partition can hold a steady 60).

You’re not incorrect, and even “he was a product of his time” isn’t an excuse: when he was alive, even other racists thought that Lovecraft was a bit too racist.

However, at the same time - you have to look at what impact reading his work has.

He’s dead. He doesn’t get money from it. The works are public domain. His estate doesn’t get money from it. Further, the language used is striking, influencing a century of other work.

Does that language come from a place of racism? Yes. But it the work itself isn’t overly racist - or at least, it doesn’t make it more racist than Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four is used in college classes today to teach Orientalism, yet largely people accept such a thing as okay because it doesn’t radicalize new people into the subject.

If you reject every artistic work because the creators had questionable views, then you begin forcing yourself into strange choices. If the artist doesn’t gain benefit from you reading it - then logically, it doesn’t matter if you read something they made or not (contrast this to Harry Potter, where consuming said media gives money to a TERF). When the artist is out of the picture, the only thing that matters is what the work means to you.

You have the right to say “the work is abhorrent because of XYZ”, but said things should be things you can point to within the work itself. If the artist isn’t gaining benefit and their views aren’t the focus of the work - why does it matter?

There’s a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it’s a pyramid. Fascism is when these “some people are better” is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn’t touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where “some people are better” because they know the party leaders or they’re technocrats. It’s a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)

Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn’t have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn’t be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things (“always a bigger fish”).

Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can’t have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as “apolitical”, even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.

Neon FTW. Been my daily driver for a while now with zero problems.