The Chronicle....

https://twitter.com/PrimevalFantasy/status/1777098377529872531

"In those days, The Chain was in service to the Prince of Capital who, having been dead for three years, was proving a very lenient boss. Very forgiving of sins, suspiciously silent in the Orders & Instructions department. That suits us fine. We're used to taking the initiative."

I wish people understood what's really happening. Because I think this MIGHT be a problem with the audiences' expectations.

Jobs' examples aren't relevant here. The problem we're seeing is as follows:

1: Company spends decades making products people love.

1/

https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1752244748453327108

2: The people who founded the company have had great success but running the business is hugely risky and they want to "land the plane." Sell the company, get a big payout. They achieved their goals, and are ready to retire or move on.

3: They sell to some Megacorp.

2/

I think I mentioned this before, but I only just understood something cool I've known about for decades.

One of the OG Sci-Fi RPGs, Traveller, used *hexadecimal* for character stats. So your stats went from 1 to...F. I now think I know why. It'd go 0, 1, 2, 3....8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. F was as high as anything went, so you never got 2C for instance.

This meant you could express a character (or anything, Traveller used this system for describing planets, starships, everything) in a single unbroken "string."

Against All Kobolds! Hannah enjoys the privilege of having designed her own class for this test. The rest of us have no idea how it works! :D

(I think she's a Wizard!)

A tactician, a conduit, a beastheart, and a talent have tracked the goblins to what appears to be a tomb. The tactician yelled "CHARGE!" and rolled the Cosmic Die! Alas, the cosmos favors CHAOS!

But! The Beastheart favors Chaos and gets a free charge!

But! The goblins ALSO favor Chaos and the snipers got free plinks against him.

So here's the good news. You ready? Lemme tell you a story of what happened when Wizards of the Coast (possibly after the Hasbro buyout) spent a LOT of money on a real market research survey. They found out something ALARMING. Well, alarming for people trying to monetize D&D... There are people on this site who know and could tell this story better than me, but this is how I heard it from the direct source.

Once upon a time, WotC bought TSR and wanted to revitalize D&D.

I tried writing a video script about the OGL debacle but it was literally too depressing, so I scrapped it.

Hasbro is going to get what it wants. None of this other shit matters to them. They're going to convert D&D into a digital loot-box game, it will make them a lot of money. It doesn't matter how many people leave, or unsubscribe. Even if literally every person stopped, they wouldn't care. Because next year? There'll be a whole new class of 13-year olds willing to pay $30 of their parent's money.

The Shadow! Hannah suggested a name with "Shadow" as the prefix, I suggested just Shadow and it clicked.

I liked it because it is a real term for following someone in a stealthy way. I forgot that the Pharaoh's elite counterterrorism unit is called The Shadow on the Surface of the Sun.

Might
Agility
Toughness
Intellect
Intuition
Presence

(Work in progress)
(Subject to change without notice)
(Especially two 'Int' stats?? Come on!) Every decision we make will alienate some people who were hoping we'd make a different decision.

So the faster we rip off the band-aid the better. Focus in on what we're excited by, rather than try and make everyone happy.

Yeah this is what I was talking about when I said "the corporations are going to invest billions in this 'AI' text thing because it makes it easier to isolate and control us online."

https://twitter.com/TomWhitwell/status/1598215340538089474

People don't understand what this means. The Corporations already know viral marketing is the only thing that works anymore. And that relies on people you know praising a product.

So they're building a tool that will surrounds you with "real" people to interact with.

This is insane. Adam is insane.
"So I became an old, 1960s Vietnam Driver's License counterfeiter."

There's something about #eurorack where people HATE seeing racks full of modules. For some reason, the fact that some people love eurorack as a hobby really pisses these folks off. And they all use the same language "no one ever wrote a hit with modular!" "Their music sucks!" Do these folks hang out, outside Guitar Center, shouting at people coming out with guitars and synths? "YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A HIT SONG ON THAT!"

The reason you can find really good programmers to work insane hours at tech startups is because they believe in the product and the opportunity. Folks that worked 80+ hours a week at Oracle became millionaires.

Tesla and SpaceX can attract that kind of talent. Because... ...they believe in the product, and they believe their work will be rewarded. With money. A lot of it.

Compare that to Twitter. The current owner has no vision for Twitter. He says he wants to try random stuff to see what works. That is not a vision. That does not inspire people

Andor 11 spoilers below this tweet. Whoever called Luthan Space Neil Burnside was more accurate than I thought. If Neil Burnside were the intelligence officer in charge of the resistance he would act exactly like this dude.

It's a brilliant character, really well written. Well imagined. Well cast. Well acted.

I had a negative reaction to Andor at first. I checked out after the first three episodes. I couldn't figure out why Cassian Andor was the main character. But I went back to it after a few weeks, picked it up, and I quickly understood. 🧵 Cassian Andor is not sympathetic, he's not particularly likable, although Diego Luna is incredibly charismatic. He has friends, but it's not obvious why. They seem mostly put-upon. They do for him, he does what he wants.

Lucas watched the Western, which he thought as a kind of American Myth, dissolve in the popular consciousness. He thought America needed its own myths and so he tried to conjure one up. It remains to be seen if he succeeded, but I think Andor sort of shows how maybe he did. 🧵 So he makes a Mash-up. Star Wars is not Space Opera, it's not a Western, it's not a Jidaigeki drama, it's not a Swashbuckler, it's not a Hidden Monarch story. It's all of these.

That's part of its success. It's a mash-up.

Reading stories of the rapid collapse of this site. Unclear what the reality on the ground is, but this site runs on servers that cost money. Unless things turn around, sooner or later they will not be able to pay those bills.

However, we should see this as... ... inevitable. Twitter did not consistently make more money than it cost to operate. I believe they had two quarters in the black back in 2019 and I don't even think they were consecutive quarters.

They did their best, they were unable to make the site turn a profit. 2/

Remember; Twitter was the social media platform of choice for Journalists. By a lot.

As long as people stop trusting everything on Twitter, stop believing anyone here is a journalist or an expert, Current Ownership will be happy. Journalists tend to report on things. People in power, political power, economic power, don't like that. We had a President who literally said "What you are seeing, is not what's happening."

In other words, "Listen only to me. Trust only me. Only I can save you."

Urectum

https://twitter.com/ExploreIGO/status/1568673629856043010

Actually that's a silly name, doesn't make any literal sense.

It should be called Mypeenar.

"NASA reports Mypeenar is approaching Uranus."

Telling a story about the forging of the rings in the Second Age. That is, in principle, a good idea. It's cool.

Making Middle-earth look more like...Earth, i.e. casting more women and POC is also good, any modern take on that setting should follow suit, it's a no brainer. My issues are both more pedestrian and more esoteric than the rest of twitter, I think.

I don't think Spending Money automatically makes something good, in fact in this case, the opposite. My favorite adaption of the novels is the cheapest. The BBC Radio Play.

I think the d20, binary, hit-or-miss mechanic is best for a game with very fast rounds, and pulp sword & sorcery stories where life is cheap.

But modern players expect their PCs to be more heroic. Which means they expect dope shit to happen on their turn. Not: 1 roll, “I miss.” Modern players don’t have wargaming roots. They don’t expect their heroes to miss 35% of the time.

I think they expect failure to be “dramatic setback!” Not “I miss, next.”

In other words, I think modern players aren’t happy with “I miss, next.” I think it feels wrong.