Anomander

The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.

OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.

I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?

It's definitely a spiritual successor to EV, but it deviates in ~~just~~ enough ways that it's not quite living up to it's predecessor. It's very fun and it definitely scratches the nostalgia, but it doesn't fill in as a full-blown successor.

• It's heavily fleet-focused, rather than being more of a solo-pilot experience. I found several missions that were functionally impossible without fleet support, but were relatively trivial with a reasonable backing fleet, and the end-game is assembling not just one ship with the best gear in the galaxy - but a fleet of them. EV series' relationship with escorts was not as significant - they were very rarely the deciding factor in missions or battles, and you weren't able to change their outfits from default, so the total power available was far lower.

• Because there's more of a focus on fleets, ships ability to be upgraded has much wider balance implications than just pilot experience - so despite there being far more and far more interesting breadth of outfits available for customizing a ship, it feels like ships are far less customizable in total - ships sell with far less 'free' space and lower total outfit space, while sectioned space like weapons or engine capacity adds further constraints. Ships in EV had enough 'spare' space that the gap in power between your ship and a default version was much more meaningful, so that you could be asked to take on several at-level ships for a mission and that wasn't a prohibitive task.

• It's definitely open-source. In absolutely the best and worst ways - there's a lot of really diverse ideas and a lot more creativity among the various factions you meet than EV offered. There's way more story and depth to most factions than EV really offered, and it seems clear the intent is to build that level or deeper for all of the major factions over time. At the same time, they're all sectioned off and have varying narrative tone or content development, and there's not really a ton of interaction - so it does wind up feeling a little patchwork as you explore. The various pieces don't connect to each other well, so you really do get a vibe where the faction over here is Steve's pet project, while over there is Laura's faction, and these two factions were done by the OG dev, while the new guy made this faction over here but it's really new so there's not really anything there, and...

• Holy fucking beam weapons, batman. EV always was very hesitant about using beam weapons, and a lot of plugin content followed suit - as beam weapons tend to be incredibly hard to balance while also being very difficult to do well on an audio/visual front. Endless Sky uses a ton of beams in almost every faction. Whatever noise they make is guaranteed to get annoying after it's your primary weapon for a while, and often drowns out other cues, while the clutter of drawing N permanent glowing lines at all points you're holding the trigger gets really busy really fast. If the damage is even slightly too high, the ability to deliver it continuously and with near-perfect accuracy makes them busted, while if the damage is a little too low they're wasted dev effort. With turreted beams or on AI pilots, beams become a guaranteed source of damage. You can't out-pilot weapons that just draw a hitscan line to your ship, where out-piloting the 'projectile' weapons was one of the major feelings of player skill expression in the original EV series.

It's good. It's definitely good. It's amazing at the low low cost of "free". It's still in-progress so a lot of the content is still incoming and a whole bunch of tone and meshing issues are quite likely to get fixed. Just, some of the gaps between the games that inspired it and the game it wants to be happen to exist in the same spaces that fans of the originals vibed with hardest.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one's yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one's mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren't quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We'd get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who'd been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and ... shit started going downhill. The couple weren't bad. Their friends weren't bad. Their friends' friends were awful. I didn't like the new crowd's vibe, I didn't like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn't get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn't want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone's patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we'd built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn't drop the grudge and didn't see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn't want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy "why are you here?" old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections ... to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends' defense - we had agreed we'd make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn't have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I'd never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad's charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn't care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I've connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don't think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don't want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn't. I took the low road and went behind my friends' backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult's perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn't concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn't a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room ... I just didn't like how there was more of "them" than "us" and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

This would make excellent satire, but it's pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who 'work on the internet' have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that's still true - it's just less and less likely to include someone's twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called "change" occurred and it's no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. [...] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They're doing it all over again; and in ten years we'll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that's one of the best changes they've made in ages and I'm glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it's been an occasional frustration to hit 'hide' by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

To refine further, I think there exists demand for a "middle ground" of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it's die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren't giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game ... and there's lots of posts in a specific games' space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players' perspective.

But there's not been a successful venue or single leading voice that's really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don't think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I'll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than "better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR".

In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking "what is fun"; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.

Yup. It's still "LCG Entertainment" operating as Telltale Games, same folks who bought up the IP firesale when Telltale Incorporated went under.

Yeah, I just learned about these folks' existence from this post - but I'm saving their name for later for sure.

While googling trying to get a sense of who they are - they have a hour-long concert on youtube that's really dope already.

Their official bio on their website doesn't even directly acknowledge it, so it doesn't seem like something they front-load per se.

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn't risk teleportation.

Which, conversely, is also why I don't care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location ... all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they're all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don't think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

My main difference is that I don't believe a "soul" transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of 'self' is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

But trying to make you understand.

Yeah, there's your problem. You're trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.

It's an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.