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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Just my two cents as an assembly line guy: Parts on aircraft fall into three categories

    -Big custom fuckoff parts. They’re not high tech but they’re huge and they’re a specific shape so you need a huge, precise and very expensive mould/die/whatever to make them. Anyone with the aircraft and a decent engineer could design a machine to make these parts but they would be left with a smoking crater where their wallet was after getting the mould made.

    -Easy parts. Sure, an aircraft fuel pipe is worth 20k, but the civilian parts are made to higher standards anyways, we can find one no problem.

    -Secret technical complex parts. Proprietary cutting edge stuff, which is frankly just bolted onto already complete aircraft. Obviously you can’t replace it if you don’t even know how it works, but the US doesn’t let that stuff out of their direct control very often anyways.

    Don’t fucking talk to me about engines though, those are a whole different beast

    TLDR: We can totally keep our F35s in the air as long as the parts we’re replacing aren’t the skin panels, the engines, or the Secret Third Thing. And as long as we have the money.





  • Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

    They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

    -Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

    Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

    All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

    Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive gamesLooks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite


  • Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

    Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

    In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.





  • Oh yeah Bethesda’s actual valuable talents just straight up don’t exist anymore.

    Basically it’s a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I’m aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn’t have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda’s games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on ‘permanent hire’ wages instead of ‘shitty short contract’ wages).

    But it gets worse. A lot worse.

    See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don’t have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

    Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it’s also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren’t talking to each other… well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

    I’m sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.