Castle Magus

"Return the power to the workers and separate your boss from their teeth."

---

(As the video warns, mild spoilers for Night in the Woods, incredibly heavy spoilers for Tacoma.)

The video starts with a story about a man who almost froze to death in a transfer truck and then got fired by the company he worked for because he abandoned the trailer rather than freeze to death. A story which, though it was not mentioned in the above video, also involved a certain asshat who would later go on to be a current Supreme Court justice.

So... whereas the previous Night in the Woods video essay I posted mostly discussed Mae's mental issues, this one (by a different guy) uses NitW and Tacoma (along with mentions of Rockstar Games and Telltale Games and others) to talk about how and why Capitalism sucks turgid, encrusted, rancid asshole.

"Working on video games almost always comes with a catch, and most frequently, that catch is crunch."

Just going to say it again: crunch is dogshit. It is counterproductive. It is damaging, both to the product and, more importantly, to the people making the product. As I've also said before, this has been known for decades. Yet, it still happens, to this day. (I'll also say it again, the main thing I learned during my four years at DigiPen was that, ultimately, I really didn't want to be an employee in the video game industry.)

Regarding the Tacoma ending super-spoilers, yeah... like Ted Faro, fuck Sergio Venturi.

"My home, North Carolina..." Ha ha, hey, that's cool. *sentence and paragraph continues* Ah, yes, so depressing. As someone who also lives in The South™, let me just give a hearty "Fuck The South™." That's what North Carolina gets, when the entire state legislature of North Carolina is controlled by the GQP. (It still amazes me that we've had a Democrat governor for the past three terms, including the current one.)

Then back to comparing all that to Tacoma and NitW. Man... too bad Elon Musk doesn't possess enough teeth to share with every employee he's ever wronged in his putrid life. (Donald Trump, either, for that matter.)

Want another game that handily fits this theme? Mouthwashing. (If one doesn't care to buy and play that game directly, one could watch a full LP, found here, done by Woolie and Reggie.)

"Hi. What is the value of watching confounding word wizard Jordan Peterson debate 20 atheists? What can we learn from the intensely frustrating experience of watching one of these Jubilee 'Surrounded' videos? We actually have an answer."

---

Hmm, not sure if it's particularly timely for Some More News to put out yet another over-an-hour-long video about, specifically, Jordan Peterson, considering the overall trashfire state of the rest of the world right now. (Like, seriously, I probably would have never even heard of this assclown if it weren't for SMN.)

On the other hand, spending roughly 35 minutes and 36 seconds[1] watching Cody Johnston dunk on Jordan Peterson could be a "nice" "vacation" from all the other news in the world. So, I guess that's what I'll do. On to the video! Oh, wait, first let's drop that "middle-finger-worthy" tag down there, just to get it out of the way. This video is about Jordan Peterson, after all.

---

( Whole lot of text behind cut )

---

So yeah, in the end, this video was indeed rather timely, after all.

[1] - Not counting the four or five times that that it took to create this post. (Actual time of hitting the "Post to" button: exactly 2:00pm EST.)

"If working overtime on AAA games with giant budgets is the only way to succeed, 'then maybe the industry deserves to die,' says RPG veteran David Gaider: 'There is another way to be'"

"Summerfall Studios co-founder David Gaider speaks in favor of industry unionization and his studio's four day work week."

I'll just say it again. One of the first things they tried to teach us at DigiPen when I started there almost 20 years ago was that crunch is counterproductive.[1][2] In any case, I fully agree with the sentiment that the industry deserves to die.

[1] - And yet, despite that, we still ended up at people's apartments working on game projects until two or three in the morning at the ends of semesters, after the school had literally shut down the on-campus computer labs at midnight specifically to try to prevent such things from happening. That was because we all invariably budgeted our time poorly and left shit until almost too late where we basically had to crunch or else not get our games done by the end of the semester. Or else maybe it was because we had like five or six other classes every semester, each with their own homework and big projects to have to work on, some of which would get sacrificed in favor of group work on the game projects, and thus, those would have to be "crunched" later. Either way, crunch is bad, kids.

[2] - The main thing I learned from four years at DigiPen was that I actually didn't want to work in the game industry as much as I thought I did going in.[3] Too bad I didn't have that realization before all the student loan debt, though. ¬_¬

[3] - And everything I've seen out of the modern video game industry between then and now has only reinforced my belief that working in the modern video game industry would be utter shit, at least at the "big AAA companies" anyway.[4]

[4] - Hey, look, another footnote to a footnote.

---

Yep, that's a thing. It may as well be a Price is Right segment at this point. (Which would be an appropriate place for it.)

On a semi-related tangent, that isn't the first time there's been an actual fire at a Nintendo facility. I recall one day at DigiPen when we all had to evacuate the building and stand out in the parking lot for a while, because a fire had broken out in the NST facility which was on the ground floor of the same building (this, of course, was before DigiPen moved to an entirely different building in 2008-2009 or whenever it was [I graduated in 2008 and never attended at the new building]). Several firetrucks arrived, and, if I recall correctly, the DigiPen staff eventually told us that we were free to just go home for the rest of the day.

This has to be one of the most asinine topics of conversation that I've seen in quite a while, and I listened to the whole thing.

Look, I attended DigiPen for four years. If people could have been disqualified from things back then due to terrible BO, a not-small percentage of the student population of that place would have been asked to leave, that's for goddamn sure.

---

I don't care about the rules of legal tags or whatever, but I will never not find it really weird that I went to DigiPen with the girl who would one day become AEW referee Aubrey Edwards (she was in the year just behind me). It would be even more weird if I actually watched AEW at all, ever, but I don't, so it isn't.

I basically don't watch anything wrestling related anymore, aside from listening to some of the podcast snippets on the Official Jim Cornette Youtube channel, because current day professional wrestling"sports entertainment" is utterly asinine[1], whether it's WWE or AEW or Impact or whatever. I haven't even watched Botchamania since, like, 421 or so, which is around when the Botchamania website apparently died, even though new ones are still apparently being made. Should get back into that someday, maybe. *shrug*

[1] - And that's really saying something, when you consider the fact that there have been a lot of silly, stupid, disgusting, and/or offensive things in professional wrestling over the past several decades.

Same deal as before. Lots of Star Trek Q-related dreams this time, for whatever reason. Also, lots more dreams in which I was female. *shrug*

( Behind cut for obvious reasons. )

Here's a little known fact about this game: It was ported to NES with the help of one of my former teachers at DigiPen. Sadly, Mr. Erhardt passed away a couple of years ago. He was a cool guy. He always took it in stride that he had a hand in one of the worst games on the NES.

The weather took a big snowy crap all over everything last night. I checked schoolreport.org and saw that DigiPen was closed, which is what I used in the past as an indicator as to whether it was wise to try to go out or not.

Still, I sent an email to the guys at work letting them know that I would be willing to try to walk the 1.2 miles or so there, even in the snow/ice, but only if I knew for sure that I wouldn't be the only one there. Will also try calling the office itself in a bit (as I don't have any of their cellphone numbers), but if I don't get a hold of anyone, I'm staying at home.

By the way, it is 15-17°F right now (according to my duo of weather apps on my PC). So much for "almost never gets below 40°F" that my real estate agent told me when I first moved out here. ¬_¬

(EDIT)

I ended up going on in anyway, because my supervisor answered my email saying he was here. As soon as I got there, my supervisor (the only other one on this project to show up) informed me that he would be leaving almost immediately to go help some friends of his whose house had apparently collapsed during the night.

So, while there are a couple of other people here today in other rooms, I am the only one of the three here that is working on my particular project. Sucks. Kind of wish I'd stayed home after all. Then again, if I stay home, I don't get paid.

(/EDIT)

After reading tokoz's post about the cool dream she had, it reminded me of something.

I wrote a short story about a year ago or so for a creative writing class I took at DigiPen. The subject of this particular story was the "false awakening" dreams that I have from time to time and which I loathe so very much. For a while, I'd kept meaning to post it here, because I was actually rather pleased with how it turned out (unlike the first one that I wrote for that class, which was utter shit). But then, I just completely forgot about it until now.

Well, for what it's worth, here it is finally. I've copy/pasted it directly from the doc into this edit window, but it looked like crap when I previewed it so I had to format it a bit, but it still looks a bit bad. The tabs were simply replaced with 5 non-breakable spaces, but the double spacing has been lost, sadly. Also, I had to go back and html-ize the italics and such, because those were lost in the copy/paste as well. I think I got them all. Meh.

( It's a bit long for a LJ post too )

A few notes:
-- The game I mention is Planescape: Torment.
-- Yes, we read Kafka's The Metamorphosis prior to being given this assignment.
-- The line "At that moment I notice a mouse standing on its hind legs: a bald mouse." was required by the teacher to be worked into our stories somehow, whether it made sense or not. I think I stuck it in at a pretty good point in mine, if I do say so myself. It was a bit better in the printed version compared to this LJ version though, since it came directly after a page break.
-- No, I didn't actually have any of these dreams IRL (that I can recall, anyway).