My ass. I wish the mods had banned obviously disingenuous “let’s let Trump win to make a point, what’s the difference anyway” made-up critique that blamed Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation, under a tissue-thin pretense of “I just care about the country sooooooooooooooooooooo much that I’m giving well informed constructive criticism.” Instead we had to just yell at y’all about it in the comments, which since there were hundreds of posts and comments every single day with that viewpoint was always a losing battle. Even trolling of crayon-quality transparency of the UniversalMonk variety was explicitly allowed by the mods, and people who objected to it too strongly got banned for it.

The whining about how you’re not allowed to get your message out, which is constantly broadcasted on every channel where you’re claiming you’re being silenced, is just part and parcel of the alternate reality you’re having a good bit of success in constructing. MAGA does it too, it’s part of the package.

Wait. I found it, looks like you were subscribed to !404media@rss.ponder.cat, from your Piefed account. Was that the account it invited you to, did Piefed maybe present it to you as a topic community or something without it being really emphasized that it was an RSS community or anything? Do you see that one from rss.ponder.cat in subscriptions currently?

You really scared me lol

Oh

Oh no

I feel like maybe I sent every single DM to some random user ID instead of to the right one… I swear I thought I tested it. You’re definitely not subscribed to anything on rss.ponder.cat.

Oh no

RSS feed communities. See the sticky post on !meta@ibbit.at.

Thanks! Yeah, I just hesitate about any kind of blasting like that… to me it seems fine. But sometimes people have differences of opinion.

No reading in bed, no phone in bed, just go and go to sleep. Also make my bed in the morning.

I expected it to have some kind of debatable impact after a while, but my insomnia cleared up instantly. Like within a couple of days.

The problem is that there isn’t that much to do for these armies of people during the early stages, when it’s mostly a handful of programmers and designers fleshing out the core concept. Then, during the late stages, you need tons of QA people, grunt workers to create tons of art and fiddly little bits of implementation, localization and bug fixing, and whatever else. But, if you haven’t planned ahead so that there is another game perfectly in the pipeline to transition all the grunt-workers over to when the first one ships, they’ll all literally just be standing around doing nothing until the next game gets in shape that it’s ready for them, and usually the solution is to fire all the people who just made millions of dollars for you pouring their heart into something. It’s upsetting.

There are many things that game companies do consistently very very wrong, but this is one thing that isn’t completely “their fault.” It is possible to moderate the impacts but it’s very hard and it doesn’t really completely go away even if you work hard at it (which most of them don’t care enough to even try to.)

It’s not unique but the games industry is worse than most.

There’s a natural cycle to the development of a video game that’s very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you’ve been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that’s what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.