Can we ditch this ridiculous notion that "Technology is neutral, it's all about how you use it?"
Technology is POWER.
"Neutral" falsely implies inert, passive, safe.
Technology is *volatile*, *dynamic*, *dangerous*. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be useful!
Technology, fundamentally, has intentionality built into it.
Yes you can use a hammer to build a house or kill a man, but honestly we have much better weapons for killing men, we intentionally designed them for that purpose and they're very good at it.
I am not anti-technology, but I think it's fundamentally disrespectful and disingenuous to think of technology in this wishy-washy way.
You're holding an awesome ball of fire in your hands, be mindful what you do with it.
The other problem with the "neutral" and "it's what you do with it" framing is that it implies that technology needs *bad intentions* to do bad things.
Not at all! Unintended consequences are everywhere and inescapable.
Let's use technology for good things by not worshipping it
We also need to straight up acknowledge how many problems we *create* for ourselves with new technology, and many are not a net gain.
If the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be true, this will almost certainly be the case with gain of function research, for example.
If this is what caused COVID-19, then any supposed gains in "fighting future pandemics" from the research are totally washed away by the unfathomable losses of *starting an unnecessary one*, the millions of dead humans, and the massive worldwide disruption
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Okay can someone tell me why this old thread from last year is blowing up my mentions today? Did somebody big retweet it or embed it in an article or something?
I get it that Funkin is timely and big people are starting to take notice and we should have a full on Discourse probably starting next week about THE FUTURE OF GAMES IS A FLASH TO THE PAST (I probably need to get an article out on that speaking of...)
Ah what the hell here's a crappy tweet draft of my thoughts, for later articleification:
"Instant Games" as the nice fancy people are calling them, are an emerging niche that is as new as it is old as dirt, but this time might be different for interesting and boring reasons: 1/X
Debugging Defender's Quest 2 just now, perplexed by "fire" status having NO effect. Pulled my hair out until I discovered:
"Fire" cancels freeze.
However, I recently added logic that makes freeze degrade into "wet" when it terminates.
"Wet" then cancels "Fire"
D'oh
Obviously, what I need to do is make it so that "freeze" only transforms into "wet" if it was naturally terminated by running out of time, not by being cancelled by an elemental interaction.
One thing that might not be clear here --- fire cancelling when touching a wet target actually makes sense!
The behavior I'm describing is a normal, non-wet target gets hit with fire. Fire then "cancels" freeze (which was not present). Then target becomes wet, canceling fire.
Here's my dump of Steam's Greenlight records, # of greenlight submissions by year of posting.
Then, tracking how many of them were eventually released (regardless of whether they were specifically greenlit or not)
Well, more specifically -- how many of them have a linked store page on their greenlight page. A number of them clearly weren't greenlit/released by the time greenlight ended, and just went through Steam Direct later, but I'm not tracking those down.
One of the things I'm trying to measure (as seen in my famous Clark Tank graphs) is what the patterns in distribution of revenue on Steam over time look like.
Looking back to the early days of Steam you need to account for games that weren't allowed onto the platform at all...
I love these scenes, but stories tend to rush them and it infuriates me:
First contact, esp. working out how to communicate across species
Time traveler convincing someone in the past they're from the future
The first 48 hours of the castaway arriving back in civilization
Now I'm wondering if you can work all three elements into a story.
For extra credit, assemble a story that's 90% composed of scenes that fit those types (can be a mix, or all of one type)
I gotta say for #2, Marty McFly trying to convince Doc Brown in Back to the Future is a pretty solid classic, my favorite bit is when Doc Brown asks him who's president, Marty says confidently, "Ronald Reagan" and Doc Brown bursts out laughing, "The Actor???"