Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I’m sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it’s still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn’t changed over the years.

I remember Reddit after I started using it, around the time of the Digg exodus. It was a fun community of nerdy people. Just doing some things because it was cool.

A few years later, I had the weirdest feeling that that vibe was gone. That both behind the scenes, and more overtly, they had to be prepping for accommodation of corporate interests. A little bit of officially sanctioned promotion here, a dash of ignoring guerrilla marketing there.

And for several years now, it’s not even subtle anymore. Reddit does what some dude with money bags says must be done, users be damned.

I remember the last time I got messaged by some misogynist dipshit, way back in Halo 5, blaming me for losing the game. …When he was the worst performing player in the team. I just stared at the post game report and wondered how the heck the dude even managed to get a ranking as low as he did.

Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”

There’s this Finnish joke that doesn’t translate well, about a physicist who got pulled over by police. “Uh, I guess I accelerated a bit.”

I’m in Finland, the week starts at Monday, Wednesday is “keskiviikko” (mid-week), and I always thought it was called that because it’s in the middle of the work week. Because naming the middle of the work week is very important, and nobody gives a damn about the calendar in the weekend, because it’s time to chill.

Some people may be asking “is that a bit too many crabs?”

The answer is that it’s an adequate amount of crabs. For that task at least.

I’m from Finland. It’s late winter now. It’s not Smiling Season yet.

I’ve often been like “I don’t know why people complain about Fandom, this is fine”. And then I saw what the site looks like without uBlock. Sweet merciful heavens. Hey, there’s some ads. Let’s cram some ads in the ads. Some prime blank space? Shove some annoying video things in there. Autoplaying. See that navigation bar over there? Let’s make it pointless. (If you come to the article via web search, surely you want to read about some completely random stuff in another game!)

Fandom is garbage, Fextralife is garbage (and at this rate will probably be bought by Fandom one day). Indie wikis rule.

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

Aka “karate chopping the Plausible Deniability right in the throat”

Reminds me: long ago, one comedy website made a bunch of awards that you could put on your own website with if you didn’t get awards from anyone else. (Having a bunch of random awards was the style of the time.) One of these was the coveted Titanic Navigation Award. I don’t think it can be awarded to anyone any more, as the developers of React have been the most deserving one to receive it in recent years, for their unending efforts in making navigation more confusing for everyone.

Yay, I didn’t get spammed! …so the stuff I have on Codeberg is officially stuff nobody but me cares about. (Sadness, or an opportunity?)

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.

When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.

What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.

And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.

Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator’s politics.)

Despite him not posting, I visit his Mastodon profile from time to time. It has such a cute sea turtle banner. Glad to see that despite him being a kernel developer titan, he still spares a thought for the humble shell programmers too.

Heh, back in the early 2000s when I was busy reading up on computer history I was very surprised that a lot of Internet standard pioneers and computer science giants were still alive. Like, people from the stone age. This is such a young field.

I seriously thought John McCarthy (creator of Lisp programming language) had reached such a status of existence that he would probably never die. (sadly, he did.)

I have provided sources to support this claim.

Again, the sources you provided did not back up these claims.

I find it difficult to recall the exact point of our discussion, as you continue to introduce minutiae and nuance that, while relevant, stray from the core argument.

So, let me get this straight: You asked me to elaborate on my assertions. When I did so, you then label that as an irrelevant digression.

Thanks, I guess.

I have kept my points clear and concise, consistently attempting to keep the discussion focused on the central issue.

I… don’t think that’s accurate.

However, much like Sean Hannity, you have managed to fill an entire comment section with excessive verbiage while ultimately saying very little.

Entirely your fault. I’ve done my best to cut down my replies, I can’t say the same about you.

I have no doubt that you will now argue this with an even longer response with more quotes for my comment but I don’t think I’m going to respond to it moving forward I’m going to let you have the last word. Sorry. I’m tired.

See, this is a prime example. 45 words that could have been left out entirely.

You’re asking me to prove that the game’s messaging and story issues were a major reason for its failure, but you’re not holding yourself to the same standard.

This isn’t true. I’m perfectly willing to prove my viewpoints. You’re continuing to jump the gun here. I’m about to explain my viewpoint, eventually. I was just hoping you would prove your viewpoints first. We’re having a conversation online, we have all the time in the world. Everything in due time, right?

(It’s as if you’re engaging in this kind of complaints as a stalling tactic. This conversation would go so much smoother if you’d just address the points. Furthermore, you’re repeating yourself a lot, it makes the comments hard to read. So please, address the points. I’m cutting this down for brevity.)

The Dragon Age series once had strong audience trust, but that eroded over time, largely due to shifting priorities in writing and design.

Are you absolutely sure it had nothing to do with several key players in Bioware leaving over the years and EA quietly gutting the studio, replacing the talent and increasing their meddling? Because, as I said before, that raises the fanbase’s eyebrows. The Bioware that made DAV simply isn’t the same company that made DAO. Bioware hasn’t really been independent of EA’s meddling since 2016 at least - Mass Effect Andromeda was the clearest example of what happened when EA decided to assume more direct control of the process. Fans have had every reason to be suspicious of Bioware’s output ever since. It’s frankly a miracle Dragon Age Inquisition was anywhere near as good as it was.

Bioware doesn’t exist in vacuum, they’re not the only ones who are making decisions here.

Who exactly made the shifting writing decisions here? Can you give me concrete examples? I’ve not played DAV so it’s harder for me to compare the things.

I’ve seen EA put this same kind of ruin on a lot of studios over time. Many classic game series - including celebrated RPG series - have been ruined by EA’s meddling. What happened to Origin Systems has been happening to Bioware for over a decade now.

That is part of provable history. I would link to sources, but I suggest you read up on the history of EA and their studios (in particular Origin) on yourself - the information isn’t hard to find, the ones in Wikipedia are a very good start.

If industry trends were the dominant factor, we’d expect similar pushback against every game in this space—not just DAV.

Just reminded me: Are you seriously saying DAV is unique in this regard? This kind of pushback is levied against a lot of games these days. There’s so much of this kind of cries aimed at a lot of games these days. As long as people keep making lists about “woke” games on Steam, I don’t think DAV was a special case at all.

[Sources]

These sources appear to confirm that Dragon Age Veilguard was not as great success commercially as EA hoped. This was not part of our dispute, and I was never even claiming that DAV was a financial success story. The opposite, in fact.

These sources do not, however, appear to support your particular claims about the message being the primary reason why the game failed commercially.

Also, I see you did not respond to the more interesing questions I asked earlier, so allow me to reiterate: Was the whole polymorph magic issue ever addressed in the Dragon Age lore? And allow me to expand on that - what did you think of the narrative ideas I presented? I’m just curious about that.