Notices by Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)

@ifixcoinops Stick?

We're getting up to 8 inches of snow starting as early as 7am tomorrow.

My wife has decided we're going to go grocery shopping now. At 9pm. The night before a snow storm.

I figured out too late the shape of the #skyPirates video game.

It's a reverse Carmen Sandiego. It's 1919 (the distant future). You're on the run from international detectives as you fly around in a zeppelin with your polycule bombing government buildings, stealing from billionaires, and generally being the best kind of problem.

But the game itself is packaged up like a geography and history education game. It's just a series of quiz questions about where stuff is, and also the history of labor action around the planet.

But it's also sky pirates!

I think I could do the whole thing with twine, and I could probably pull it off in 2 - 3 uninterrupted weeks, but I won't have that in the next month (and the toy show is less than a month away.)

If you're reading this and you have any interest in doing a small educational game about a crew of queer sky pirates with the energy of Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego (in twine or renPy) in the next 25 days in exchange for my gratitude, credit on the game, and a few hundred dollars, let me know!

If the FCC essentially destroys the American internet (as seems likely to happen under this administration)... what's the plan?

I suppose Veilid or Tor might enter (back) in to things? But, at this point, I personally have no faith in Tor and I don't know enough about Veilid.

Things like Mastodon get way harder to operate if you suddenly find yourself liable for anything anyone you federated with posts.

And "freedom of speech" has been essentiall illusory for a while, but we have every reason to believe it's about to become more so. How long before saying "fuck the police" or "free Palestine" is grounds for imprisonment rather than just a severe beating by the armed militia masquerading as law and order in this country?

What happens then?

This is not an attempt at fear mongering or catastrophizing.

The internet as a platform looks more precarious by the day. It has since the Obama administration, frankly.

We're going to see a contraction of digital rights eventually, and it's likely to come from this administration, and we need to have already worked the kinks out of the replacement tooling (or be ready to go without.)

If there are people you care about, get their email addresses, get their matrix handles or their signal numbers. Have more than one way to reach them, in the event that the way you reach them right now becomes illegal.

From a technical perspective, we move to encrypted overlays and sneakernets.

And we eschew anything that looks too much like a distributed immutable ledger. Mutability is fine. If you want to trust the message, get the message signed.

When was the last time you bought a movie or TV show on something physical?

@aral @FediThing @laura I've run in to your writing a few times. What kinds of software are you working on right now?

Hey video game developers:

I want to do a video game showcase program on our new cable network.

This might take the form of an esports style tournament or it might take the form of just having someone play the game for twenty minutes and talk about it.

I'd need to get clearance for the materials in the game so that we can broadcast it. Small but growing in person audience, plus medium sized and growing web audience.

Does this sound like your cup of tea? Reach out to have your game included! (Here is fine, or via email.)

Boosts appreciated.

Post-Halo, console games became focused on online multiplayer.

In the ps2 era and earlier there were lots of AAA games that I was interested in (and plenty that I wasn't.)

In the PS3 era, there were basically no AAA games I was interested in. The games my friends played were a bunch of arena shooters and MOBAs and it was all high intensity PVP or gross grindy bullshit.

I do not enjoy these things.

Alright, I've owned a modern game console for about 24 hours and I have thoughts.

So, first up: Who the fuck am I and what do I know?

I grew up with video games. I played a lot of video games. We were usually a few years behind state of the art, because everything I had was second hand, but I spent a lot of time with an NES, a SNES, a PS1 and a PS2 at a kid and teenager.

As a teen, I got real in to microcomputer games and early home video games, so I played every atari 2600 game and spent some time writing about them, and what made them work. The majority of Atari games which can be beaten, I have beaten.

And then, thanks to emulation, I played most games released for the SNES. Not all of them, but probably 3/4s of them. I didn't beat nearly as many of these, but I've put a few hours in to most of them.

I also played a lot of gameboy and GBA games. Certainly not all of them, but a lot of them. I'd suspect more than most people.

I wrote some games. I read about games. I wrote about games.

For a period of my life, I probably played video games like 40 hours a week. (That period of my life was from ages 6 - 19 or so.)

I used to be really in to this shit, and then I just suddenly wasn't and I'd like to talk about that a bit before I talk about my experiences over the last few days.

But, even with all of the above said, I did slowly just fall off of games. Eventually I filled my time with other stuff.

Every 18 months or so I'd go check out the games that were coming out, and I'd try to get excited about them, but I couldn't.

I didn't care about any of them.

My friends were really in to a couple of PC games, but I absolutely couldn't bring myself to care about those games.

At the time, I assumed this was a *me* thing. That I was no longer connecting with video games.

After 24 hours owning a ps5, and a lot of self reflection, I now believe it was a *video game industry thing*.

This will not come as a surprise to anyone who plays video games regularly, probably.

So we're talking like 2008/2009. Lots of things happened in the world and in my life around that time.

I started working full time for the first time in my life. I bought a house.

But also, the 7th generation of game consoles was in full swing. People stopped making games for the ps2 and the rest of the consoles of that era.

The global economy went in to a freefall.

I nearly died in a flood.

But also, it's not fair to say that I suddenly wasn't in to games. I had less time, but I didn't have a television subscription or home internet, and I still had a Wii and a PS2. I played SNES games. I played PS2 games. I got to know the GC and Wii catalog reasonably well. (For reasons that will become obvious later in this thread, I'm not counting Nintendo consoles as "current" for the purposes of the things I'm about to say.)

As an archivist, let me say clearly:

Modern copyright law is actively harmful to the preservation and study of our culture.

It harms artists by giving undue power to publishers. It harms artists by limiting remixes. It harms preservation and research efforts.

It's broken. It's bad. It should be massively reformed.

I just got a copyright claim against a video I posted on youtube 10 years ago.

The video is a film by Georges Melies that was shot in the 1890s.

Someone is attempting to claim copyright over a film that is 130 years old, who's director died 86 years ago.

Now 1) I don't give a shit about this clip on youtube. 2) The person who made this claim is clearly in the wrong. 3) I can't be the only one that they have targeted illegally. 4) Youtube is a problem.

Wait, did Microsoft just make 2024 the year of Linux on the desktop?

I'm working on a little portfolio site to make it easier for people to know that I am accepting freelance work.

It's a work in progress right now.

https://impractical.computer/

I am accepting productive feedback, if you have any.