23 02 20
The new Cold War
The Pais says the war between China and the US has become a new Cold War. The statement is Russia is the storm, but China is Global Warming.
President Biden did a surprise visit to Kyiv on his European tour. They made sure to play the air raid warning to make it seem more dire.
Meanwhile Chinese delegates are visiting Russia with assurances that they will share their weapons for this continued war.
The phillipines begins to show camaraderie with the US for safety.
Propaganda: Global Warming
China and all of Florida will be the most affected by Global Warming. Pictures of cars underwater, and warnings of great dangers, with a little finger wagging are shown.
Every coastal home is a stick of dynamite says the Atlantic. Rich people continue to buy homes near the coast, and wag their fingers at poor people.
We are destroying the world with Light Pollution.
James Cameron (Director of Terminator) Agrees with Thanos on Depopulation
Failed Greatness
After years of work to restore the property, and store front to the original family of a shop that had been taken over by the government, the land is sold by the family. The article talks about reparations because the family was black. There's some history about how racist and terrible the government was to these hard working Americans. The reality is the family has no use for a shop no one lives near.
Spain will open its borders to anyone who wants to work online and pay a lot to be there. All the grandstanding about it, but they only want rich people.
A building plan was stopped so an archaeological team could mark and take care of the human remains found under cement. The tribe from that area has asked that the dig be stopped because it desecrates their ancestors.
Remember how we were supposed to feel bad about big book sellers during the Amazon take over? Well, Barnes and Noble is doing better, and has begun to grow again. What I found interesting is how much of the store seemed like a laundering and shipment front, and that GameStop came from them. This makes sense because of a shop in South Seattle near a mall having the two as one.
Retailers are told to prepare for low sales and to cut costs by CNBC. Glorious Biden not to be blamed.
Plant Based burgers are failing in every way, including sales.
Google is falling behind to AI and the propaganda people are falling behind at the same time. Watch how they try to find ways to complain.
Propaganda
A woman changed the Canadian National Anthem at a game, and is being praised for it.
Parents raise concerns that they can't change their kids gender because Florida said no.
Seattle considers law banning caste system prejudice. Indian only, the one being built up now by California is cool.
Videogames: Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto really enjoyed working with Universal when designing the new theme parks. The archive is off, so I include the original as well.
https://gamerant.com/super-nintendo-world-universal-studios-collaboration-good-shigeru-miyamoto/
Miyamoto does not like being compared to Spielberg, but accepts Nintendo being Disney in people's minds.
Miyamoto says he is working with his hands and enjoys designing again.
Videogames
Duke Nukem 3D has a randomiser now.
Have a level created by AI for super Mario bros. They used the base levels from SMB and the Lost Levels to create this.
Nintendo has a console that was redacted in a UK court filing. The case is on the Activision Microsoft merger, and Nintendo is listed as a competition in the market. This is leading to wild speculation again, which will likely lead to nothing even if there is a console being made. No one wants a cloud based Nintendo console
The great Metaverse known as Ultima Online. It's a stupid title, but a fun read. You can see where a lot of ideas came from in our modern game design.
VRcades and large experiences are doing better than most retail and even VR home systems.
A dev build of Atomic Heart may have been released with all the code and models in a few files. Even the article writer doesn't know if it's true though.
Star Trek Ships in Minecraft.
AMD doesn't want expensive AI stuff in their cards. That's a nice cover story for they don't have anything close to what NVidia has created.
Polymega has an app and dongle that lets you hook up any console game to your computer.
Videogame Previews
Check out a spaceship control game set in an anime universe.
An open world souls like made by an Indie team looks promising.
Mods use AI
Modders have been using AI voices to cover up not having actors. In April last year the voices were obvious but not annoying.
A mod was released recently with Weeping Angels hunting you in a maze. The AI voice acting is convincing except for a few bad parts. This is how far we've gotten.
Archaeology
China 2,200 years ago had flushable toilets.
An 1,100 year old 'bible' is being sold for $30-$50 million. Said bible was kept in a synogauge and is in Hebrew.
CNN says a hammer looks phallic and thus must be a pleasure object.
Why McDonalds and Pizza Hut became so boring to look at. I think we still need ball pits and play places.
Tech
Big Tech cases are coming to the Supreme court. The article worries that any decision could be a bad decision.
Tech companies used to lavish their workers for being at the job. Now in hard times those same companies have dropped the amenities and many of the jobs on offer. The term Exceptionalism is brought up again.
Chrome gets a new power saving mode for desktop.
Car Stuff
The automotive convention is heading down the same river of irrelevance as videogame conventions. However, the concept car still seems to take some interest and power. Hence why Hyundai is showing off the N Vision
As far as the duping there were a few methods over the years. The most popular was server line duping. The most common place was Buc's Den. Later there were other methods using house sign mechanics, bags + amazing timing, etc. The GMs weren't needed to help dupe. Corrupt GMs simply just created and gave out items (or sold them ebay, etc). There wasn't any corruption from the top down. You got caught doing something like that you got axed. The items would get hunted down and destroyed via their unique obj number.
Now.. if they meant a GM created an item, and that item got duped. Maybe. But, if a GM/Dev member was doing it, it would be easier just to copy the scripts on the item, and paste it onto another. 'Duping' would be far more labor.
The biggest item scandal I can remember happening was a dev team guy, invisibly crashing an IDOC camp, and placing a house before any players could react. Since the god client would let you make an illegal placement. Illegal I mean, get around some of the restrictions, like distance from other houses etc. The crowd of players waiting for the IDOC (In Danger Of Collapse) to happen, knew these rules/idiosyncrasies by heart. So when they saw this little house appear and it looked off. It was an instant 'riot'. Tons of complaints/tickets and they wouldn't let it go. So it made it into 'the queue' and live GM shows up. Starts looking into it. The dev guy panics, (he doesn't want scrutiny into the mule account he's using to place/sell the houses) deletes the house. ICQ's (yah we were using ICQ then later Skype haha) down with some BS about 'just testing'.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what retribution came from that. A lot of the corruption got axed when much of the old guard left. Basically when EA got super handsy, and it drove the founders away. They had lot of friends/family leave with them.
Then a different kind of corruption sank in with EA.
It's been so long it was just fun thinking about these times. I've probably gotten a few things wrong, but that was the general vibe of it.
I've had friends tell me about dupes, and even read about it online, but this is the first actual explanation I've seen. Thank you.