Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 2

@glassbottommeg I feel ya. My coworkers are all 10+ years younger than me now and I can see the same process.

Recently I had a design meeting where at some point I realised I was talking 95% of the time because there was a design complication they saw as a problem, and I just kept listing all the solutions to it that I've seen over the years.

I guess my big blessing in disguise is I used to work under some extremely incompetent directors and learned from their *many* mistakes.

@srebrna @blotosmetek Incel pseudoscience feels to me like it's a "gateway drug" to Tzeentch, but he would have to fight over them with Slaanesh, because those guys are all about instant gratification.

@blotosmetek Tzeentch is an intellectual (sort of), so he has no sway over them. But I think he may be responsible for the prevalence of conspiracy theories.

Current US regime is a WH40k Chaos cult. Epstein files? Slaanesh. All those random attacks on other countries that make no strategic sense? Khorne. RFK Jr.? Nurgle.

In our Discord server, one person remarked our frequency of patches makes them think we're Borg, and another person answered that no, we're just German. Obviously this is all just goofing around, no harm done etc., but still: should I tell them that I'm Polish and our main QA guy is Italian? Or should I tell them that this German team is being led by an Austrian?

@efhastings @cstross Funny how this works very differently for big cities, and especially for capitals. Here in Warsaw less than half of residents are natives as in "born here", and perhaps that's why the definition of a varsovian is "a person who says they're varsovian".

(once every ten years local media try to stir up some locals vs. immigrants animosity, and they fail every time)

@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").

@mkoek @cstross @quinn My almost entire experience is in video game development, i.e. a completely different space, and the 1-7-2 ratio holds, except instead of anarchists we get tech bros who are clearly trying to milk the project's funding dry and don't care if it collapses as a result.

(roughly 15% of commercial game development projects are ever completed; of those that see release, roughly 15% are financially successful)

@cstross On the other hand, my brother chose a career as a programmer for banks around the year 2003. Every single job he had back then just added to his personal list of banks where he wasn't going to keep his money. He had seen their backends and was afraid. I distinctly remember one particular job where his boss was the CEO's wife who knew nothing about software engineering and wasn't above e.g. testing in production.

i.e. sometimes banks manage financial risk by allowing it.

@xeno Meanwhile at Poland's busiest train station, tracks 2 and 4 are actually at the same platform.

@glassbottommeg After a few accidents involving the project, my cats, the keyboard, and/or the webcam, I've started calling them my Junior QA Assistants, and that's how I'm going to credit them if I ever have a say in such matters.

(for the record, they did actually "find" one bug this way)

@quixoticgeek Bonus points if the "captain" sends an ensign to the engineering to do the pressuring for him instead of doing it himself, because he wants the engineering to be mad at the ensign instead of him.

@catdad No, it was the other way around. On Easter he died as an adult man in his early thirties, and *then* on Christmas he was born as a baby. It was a sort of Benjamin Button situation, he lived in reverse. The Romans freaked out when they found him three days after the execution and he was alive and kicking!

@pare @angusm @cstross Given how clueless authoritarian decision makers can be about reasons why regular people have kids, I wouldn't be surprised.

Here in Poland the authoritarian right is convinced they can make people have more kids by simply paying them to do it.

(plot twist: no amount of money works when abortion is banned, housing is expensive, and jobs are insecure)

@nekomimi "Okay honey, I get it, but you really need to learn to use arrays, stacks, and heaps, or one day you're going to run into allocation issues. Trust me, you don't want to end up with 5 minutes to go and nothing to put on".

@cstross @skjeggtroll

I tend to agree this is what games and gaming platforms are, with the caveat this isn't always how they're treated. In fact, it's one of my big professional frustrations that they aren't.

But it does seem that the companies that take the steady approach (Valve, Nintendo, Sony) are long term winners, while the ones that take the startup approach (Microsoft, EA, Embracer, Facebook, btw does anyone even remember Zynga?) tend to get themselves in trouble.

@skjeggtroll @cstross This is true, but on the other hand:

- Valve absolutely does take interest in "Next Big Things", e.g. they did their own experiments with AR back in the day, and there was even some minor drama when they gave up on those

- I haven't seen industry people be this excited about something Valve did since they launched Steam, which is a sign of its own

Against my better judgement, I bought Europa Universalis 5 without waiting for a month, and now I'm stuck with a bugged saved state after I restarted from an earlier attempt where I had to put up with at least two other annoying bugs.("at least" because with Paradox it's sometimes hard to tell a bug from a feature). Now I have to wait a week for the first major patch.

Mini Metro is a power fantasy of being able to move the tunnels under the river around at will and at no cost.

Testing the feature I'm currently working on requires me to have as many bad random rolls as possible, which is perhaps why I keep getting a higher than expected number of good ones.