I was looking this up because I was looking up Ethereum benchmarks and got a banner ad for a cryptocasino, which I decided to poke around, and found their live Megaball game, where the biggest payout was 702.35 mETH, which from what I can work out is about 3¢?
I'm not confident in that because it's either a fractional value of Ethereum, or it's a completely separate crypto "backed by interest-generating real-world assets which initially include car equity loans." (kill me)
I have spent days trying to give the NFT artist community the benefit of the doubt, reading their twitter feeds and blogs and the way they speak to one another and come to the simple conclusion that they absolutely have no idea what an NFT is beyond "magic pay-me box"
"NFT" also gets used liberally as an aesthetic shorthand to describe short, abstract animations. Many of the artists are simply excited that literally anyone is paying attention to these types of artworks in the first place.
And to a degree the willingness to ignore the details is understandable. The details of NFTs, how they function, what they really are, is boring AF and deeply stupid. Short, abstract animation is basically impossible to monetize outside of direct patronage.
The Biden COVID task force is particularly interesting to me because it suggests that the Biden/Harris transition team are just going to immediately start operating like the Executive branch in any capacity that they can.
And, thing is, they probably can get away with a lot?
And this creates a weird situation because the current executive is 1) dysfunctional, 2) only likely to become more so over the next couple months, and 3) when not dysfunctional actively evil.
So "it's not official yet, but let's just listen to the new guy" is REAL appealing.
But does that then create a precedent for new admins to basically start soft-governing before the EC has even met, or does everyone just go "no, that was a 2020 thing, it was a strange year"?
"If you manually place your ad breaks, avoid placing breaks at disruptive points
Ah, yes, because the auto-place system is so good at choosing non-disruptive moments like <squints> 44 seconds into the video.
Seriously @TeamYouTube, I can't tell which I hate worse, the midrolls less than a minute into a video or the midrolls immediately before the credits, but both have to go.
What's happening is so many creators like to have a cold open, then play a small title card, and that creates exactly the kind of pause that the auto-placement looks for. But the system isn't considering how users actually use the system.
Okay, so, I was re-watching some of James Randi's debunkings and I got to his encounter with James Hydrick and, wait, something's off about this... he's not... is he...?
Oh no.
Oh no.
Oh nooooooooo.
Now, maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing in the life of this convicted child molester, but, yes, James Hydrick used to goose his psychic act by putting on "oriental" makeup.
Between the original production, promotion, reshoots, distribution, Snyder Cut, and god knows what else, this is going to have cost WB almost $600 million.
Parent AT&T is already over-leveraged AF and getting desperate, so definitely nothing good.
The Q faithful have started showing up in the comments, and this one long heartbreaking post is, I think, a good example of synthesis and integration (in addition to many, many, many other things)
The thing I want to call attention to is the "only 9% of child abductions are reported."
At some point a Q pundit made some ludicrous claim about how many kids are abducted from white, middle class, American neighbourhoods every year. It get repeated credulously.
Someone, at some point, pushed back and said "wait, that's a lot, way more than are actually reported." They tried to debunk with facts (reporting numbers) and logic (parents would be looking for their kids). Instead that debunking gets folded into the mythology.
For the record this hike is amazing, and I don't recommend it.
A commenter on YouTube asked "what's up with the bear bells? Doesn't that just announce your snackability?"
The riskiest encounter with a bear is if you surprise each other. Bears don't *hunt* humans so if a bear knows you're coming they will either leave or try to scare you off
As I've been talking a lot about the hangups in captioning on YouTube lately, it's deeply unfortunate that they've decided to drop this (flawed) feature rather than improving it.
The main reason they're discontinuing is "low use". The issues with the community captions system which contribute to that low use are that it's vulnerable to abuse and it's largely invisible to channel owners.
The alerts system has been broken for ages, now. Either you get a notification with every single subscription (i.e. potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions) or you get none.
I spent a lot of the day thinking more about apocalypse fetishists who like to compare themselves to wolves and other predators, but the funny thing is that they know so little about how predators actually behave.
First of all, most predators are actually pretty bad hunters on paper, failing the vast majority of their hunts.
But there's a very good reason for that: they're well aware the odds aren't in their favour.
If you're a megafauna carnivore (i.e. eat things like deer or elk and that don't just pick on things 1/20th your size) your ability to eat is directly tied to your ability to win fights, and injuries of any kind have an outsized impact on your ability to win fights.
Spoilers: it's not a better idea because it means-tests based on "lost your job due to coronovirus-related reasons" which fails to encompass literally the entire self-employed gig economy who will never formally lose their jobs, because they don't technically have jobs.
It also doesn't encompass people who aren't fired but aren't getting hours or salary and people who weren't working but have had their support network collapse.
Worrying about rich people accidentally getting some extra cash is a waste of time and effort. The number of people who really have no use for an extra $1000 a month is dwarfed by the number of people it would literally save.
I'm becoming mildly obsessed with trying to describe exactly what's going on with The Witcher 2's interface, the sheer number of different compartments for commands, and then things are just put randomly 2-3 layers deeper in any given compartment.
So you want to drink a potion?
Open the Quick Action Wheel and select meditate.
Now select "Alchemy and Potions"
Now select "Drink Potions"
Drink any potions, being mindful of your maximum Toxicity rating.
Escape out of the menus, then press space to stop meditating.
Geralt starts with eight spells, but the initial way you have to interact with them is only by their short fantasy names like "Ahm" with no indication what any of them do barring the orange "Flam" which is probably the one that lights things on fire (and is).
At that YouTube workshop I went to a month back, we actually spent a lot of time talking about subscriber purges, and the room was really split on the subject.
The older channels were concerned about the optics of having 2-3m subs but only getting 50-60k views per video, while the newer channels were more concerned about the optics of slipping below a milestone.
It was actually really informative in that the YouTube folks got into some detail about which dashboard metrics influence discovery and which are purely informational.
At the risk of being Old Man Yells At Clouds, it's 2019, The Future™, and somehow our music-listening technology has gotten broadly worse.
I was listening to old albums today, stuff from the 90s that I've heard 100 times, and all the song transitions were ruined. Opening beats were clipped, fades that carry between tracks were missing.
Music does it. The last version of iTunes does it. YouTube Music is trash. Don't even get me started on the wrecking ball that is Spotify.
I haven't talked much about COPPA on Twitter because it is *wicked* complicated.
Obviously for my own channel it's a non-issue. From vocabulary to subject matter to presentation there's nothing remotely child-facing, and in actual practice under-13 viewers make up 0.1% of my audience, which is margin of error.
A lot of channels that are basically kids ""reviewing"" toys or kids ""playing"" with toys that are asserting that they'll have to shut down their channels as though they weren't the FTC's explicit target because they're skeevy AF and ought to go the way of the Reply Girls.
It's always hilarious when cryptocurrency evangelists act like you're the weirdo for being "fixated" on things like "being able to buy food".
"Hey, use our PissTube service and we'll pay you in PissKoin! We empower creators!"
"Uh, okay, what can I spend PissKoin on?"
"You can spend PissKoins at any retailer that accepts PissKoin!"
"Sure, like who?"
"God, why are you so obsessed with spending?"
The BitTube dev team found me this morning and got super frothy over my lack of faith in their scam, but apparently there's one only-mostly-shady website where you can actually spend TUBEs and it is, of course, an online CBD dispensary.
Apparently Death Stranding is clumsy, tedious, bizarre art trash and I'm suddenly excited.
"A train wreck of ham-handed themes stacked atop exhausting, banal gameplay and wrapped in authorial self-importance"
There's a scene in Dolemite Is My Name where Rudy Ray Moore & co. are headed to the premiere of Dolemite, and they're reading reviews in the paper. They're all negative, but one of them calls the movie "coarse, rude, crude, and vulgar" and Rudy says "that's a good one!"
I am actually a little shocked at YouTube's lack of foresight with this. How have they not learned by now how these things go?
Thread on verification, why this isn't a big deal, and why it will be treated like one b/c YouTube are bad communicators.
YouTube verification has historically been a fairly trivial flag, about on par with those "verify your email" messages you get when you sign up for a forum or something: it's there to slow down automated account spam.
And for years everyone has been fine with that.
But Twitter, who ruin everything, created an ecosystem where Verified User became a coveted status, a symbol of import, relevance, endorsement, &c.
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