But let’s say that the internet wins, here. Let’s say IAP is out. Woo hoo! Hey, *I* think that’s a perfectly fine thing. As someone who did IAP for a long time & justified it to myself, I’m much happier not having to think about it. But I like games. And games are $$$$$$ to make.

So what happens? The audience doesn’t instantly double in size. Yet some companies right now are making 50%+ of their revenue in IAP. So you cut out 50% of revenue. What happens next? The execs lose out on their huge-ass bonuses? Sure. That’s part of it. But then cut down the development budget of your future game, and make it a lot higher risk for a company to make a big bet.

What’s the result? Smaller and *more conservative* games. More things that riff on existing successes. Less willingness to take chances. Will it be a heyday for smaller devs? Of course not, don’t be stupid.

But it will make fulfilling the ever-increasing expectations and entitlement of the AAA-gamer crowd more and more difficult, more risky, etc. I think the internet thinks that this means that devs will be free to work on premium games without IAP. I think they’ve just traded one devil for another.

We’ll see.

That is, I *love* the NaNoWriMo stream-of-consciousness model for “shaking ideas out”, but it results in a terrible *story* because it’s just essentially a long string of pseudo-random events, and I’d never developed enough structure for the stories to be interesting or meaningful beyond whether any random event was interesting or meaningful.

Whereas my favorite stories are all a distillation of a single idea, and that idea pervades everything about the story. So about five (?) years ago, I was thinking about what I wanted to write for NaNoWriMo, and it was a story about someone who woke up in unusual circumstances, and had lost their memory (cliche so far, I know), but was face-blind.

And the whole point of this was that as they unraveled what was happening, the way they perceived other people would change. The story would start with everyone looking like those blank drawing mannequins – literally no distinguishing features, so that the audience has no distinguishing features to pull from. But then as they discover things about what is happening, they start to see everyone as representations of a celebrity that embodies that “thing” – whatever it is. But *everyone* looks like that person. It’d be kind of like Being John Malkovich, but the fact that it’s John Malkovich in the moment is a reflection of something specific, and the person changes from scene to scene. The idea was that I wanted people to be recognizable as someone, but for that someone not to really mean anything other than acting as a symbol for an idea. If this were a movie, though, it wouldn’t be like Being John Malkovich, where it’s all digital replacements. You’d have to find just a shitload of lookalikes. Different in subtle ways, but in ways you wouldn’t pick up on unless you were really observant, and even within a single scene of the main character talking to that person, the actor might change every cut.

As they circle in on things, and start piecing things together, they realize that the character elements within the celebrities that are who they’re seeing are indicative of ways in which they have interacted with the world by giving those things away. They’re too passive. They’re too agreeable. They’re too accommodating. They do this maybe in part because of their condition, but they also do it because this is what a lot of society conditions us to do – to give ourselves away to fit in, and this is essentially the extreme version of that. The character is face-blind and can’t distinguish anyone from themselves, but functionally, no one could distinguish who *they* are, either, because they have no distinct personality of their own.

At some point (and this is where things really start to escape me), the pieces of those personalities would come together, you’d grow to understand that those things are the distinctive person that this person *is*, and you’d start to get a clearer picture of who they are. And of course, in true Film Noir style the person at the center of whatever this mystery is is themselves, who they saw in a reflection but thought was someone else, because they can’t recognize themselves by sight.

And the story probably ends with that – they’ve begun to figure out who they are, but their condition doesn’t change, and because of that condition they can’t themselves solve the mystery, even though the reader can. But the progress & growth for the character is they do begin to understand who they are, and that journey of self-discovery is what leads them to the solution, they just never get the satisfaction of feeling it.

It sucks. But I want to know. I don’t want to stick my head in the ground & get to appreciate their work on the pile of bodies they leave in their wake. Some people can separate an appreciation of the work from appreciation of the person, but I can’t. I understand the connection between appreciation of the work, money, and the resulting power they receive as a result. I can’t appreciate the work and *enable the abuse* as a result. I can’t do it.

So it’s gonna suck, but air it out. All of it. Get the people responsible for the abuse, the misogyny, the racism, the homophobia… all of it. Get them out. Throw their work in the garbage, and pay the price of doing the right thing. Enable better creators. Enable them to make the things that I will love next, and let me support people whose character is accurately reflected in the quality and content of their work.

The second was a blazer. I’m not normally a blazer person, but this jacket fit *perfectly* and was just more stylish and well made than any piece of clothing I’d ever owned. It was also more expensive than any piece of clothing I’d ever bought, and so I tried it on, thought a lot about it, then sent it back.

About a year later, my company got acquired, and as a present to myself, I wanted to buy that jacket. But I didn’t know anything about it. I hadn’t thought to look at the manufacturer. So I got in touch with the folks at the company that sent it to me (Trunk Club), and they both found the manufacturer (Sand Copenhagen) and sent out the “current style” of the jacket. This was different – it was a beige houndstooth, it had elbow patches, and instead of a bananas vibrant insanely colored lining in an otherwise very straightforward jacket, it had a gold paisley lining.

It became my favorite jacket. It’s not flashy when you look at it – looks pretty bland & professorial. But it’s got interesting details. Subtly different buttons on the cuffs. An orange metallic paisely lining under the collar. That gold interior lining with bright pink detailing. I loved that about it.

But over the last 5 years, I’ve gotten fatter, and it hasn’t fit in a long time. Still fits great in the shoulders, but the chest/waist just don’t fit anymore. I brought it to the tailor (the first time I’ve been to a tailor in … ever? Other than when I’ve bought a suit & had it tailored before delivery) to see if they could let it out, and the problem is the way it’s cut, there’s no extra fabric. Figures.

*sigh*

So the jacket’s moving on, to someone who will hopefully give it more use.

But it’s strange. I’m not a clothing guy. At ALL. But this, for some reason, is sort of an aspirational thing. I can find other jackets, I’m sure, but I want to hit some sort of milestone, and I want to get another jacket by this company. I know I can’t get the same style, but that combination of outwardly staid but inwardly outrageous – I *love* that about this jacket, and the quality of it is so far beyond anything I’ve seen in other clothes.

Someday I’ll find its successor. Until then, I suppose it’s a goal.

I’m not talking necessarily about some market elements for how we get things. A lot of capitalism works better than other systems that have been tried, blah blah blah.

But re: income inequality, the more I think about how money translates to power, the worse it all gets.

Why do we have people like the Mercers – billionaires backing Trump, or the Koch brothers & Sheldon Adelson, who’ve fueled the GOP for ages? What right do they have to have this *wildly* disproportionate impact on our country & our government & our rights? This is so far removed from any rational definition of a democracy that it’s absurd, and what’s it come down to? Money.

I read about folks like Jennifer Lopez giving a million bucks to the relief efforts in Puerto Rico, and I think, “That’s awfully nice of her, but why does she have the *ability* to give a million bucks to PR, and why should anyone have the power to make a call with that much impact arbitrarily?”

It’s not just the folks I don’t like who are doing things I don’t like. It’s folks that I do like, doing things I do like. Why should so much power rest in the hands of folks like Mark Zuckerberg, or David Benioff? They aren’t humanitarian experts. They aren’t policy folks, or community experts. I’m glad they’ve done some of the things they’ve done, but it’s *insane* to me that we’ve given them the power, effectively, of *millions of people* and concentrated it in the hands of just a few folks.

I keep going back to the idea someone said of, there should just be no way for any person to have more than $X. Where X was floated at 100 million, but I’d suggest could *easily* be lowered to $10 million with almost no practical impact on capitalism other than we cut off the top top top end of concentrated wealth/power *without* disincentivizing say, the materialism that drives folks to amass more and more.

What happens beyond $10M? I dunno. Maybe it’s just taxed at 100%, and it’s all funneled into education or infrastructure. I’m sure there are folks that have better plans and models that show how these things could work.

But what is the *point* of someone having more than $10M? It’s practically-speaking more than most people can spend in their entire lifetimes, and it guarantees a level of indefinite financial security. Particularly if we get to some sort of universal healthcare. And it’s even a fairly absurd number, right? It protects the fantasy that people have that one day they might hit it big, but reins in things that are fundamentally absurd. Can you say, realistically, that boy, cutting me off beyond $10M really negatively impacts my…? Anything? Ability to buy a private island? Great. You shouldn’t be able to have a private island or private beachfront property. Fuck off if you think you should own that shit.

But yeah. I dunno. It’s just weird. Celebs donating giant piles of money to causes – that power shouldn’t rest in the hands of individuals. Jackasses funding bigotry and hate? Why should your ability to say, run a hedge fund let you basically control abortion rights? It’s nuts.

Basically, I hate what “competitive gaming” in a world where everyone has instant access to maximum information has done to game, and what streaming has essentially done to make single-player narrative games … more or less valueless. Sure, I get that the arguments about Twitch expanding the base, etc. whatever – I’m just saying *personally* I want to make a game you can’t ruin either through streaming or competition, or specifically, if you can make these things *better* by doing so.

Where competition & metagame adherence evolves the metagame in unpredictable ways – so the more you find someone “meta-ing” if part of the core-game system changes the overall balance or goals, or what have you, and where if a player is streaming, that streaming itself changes the narrative in a way that maximizes entertainment value *for streaming* the way that stuff like the newest Tomb Raider did, but in a more extreme way.

There was a point where I thought, “Christ, are all men in power just fucking awful?”

Whether it’s Weinstein, or Cosby, or Louis CK (dammit), or half the staff (probably more) at Fox News, or 45, or blah blah blah – let’s face it, at some point it’s going to be nearly *every single man in power* before the scales finally tipped and harassment finally became not ok – it seems like no man who wields a significant amount of power is safe from accusation. And not because “money-hungry accusers” are coming forward, but because when given unlimited power to use people, powerful people *use people*.

Whether it’s Terry Crews (!!!) or any number of the thousands upon thousands of women whose accusations get ignored, or shoved under the table, or publicly mocked and humiliated, there’s some moment where the accusations start to gain momentum, where it’s *obvious* they’re true (listen to the Weinstein audio tapes), and that it’s clearly just an extension of unchecked power, where you’re faced with the reality that if these accusations are true, it extends to almost *everyone*, and the realization isn’t that the accusations must not be all true but that instead they almost all ARE true and the reality is that this kind of abuse and harassment are everywhere, *particularly* among the rich and powerful and then two conclusions become clear:

1.) It makes a LOT more sense why 45 is President

2.) Just like BLM & systemic racism, there’s a fucking huge-ass culture problem that’s about to start turning over (finally) because it’s becoming *inescapable*. You’re either going to have to start believing the accusers and accepting that there’s a massive, pervasive, systemic abuse of power, or you’re a willfully oblivious *asshole*.

In general, I’ve believed women who have come forward with accusations of abuse. But I don’t believe them all, because so often the narrative of “powerful person is target of false allegations for $$$” makes *sense*. But I think it’s high time what we say makes *more sense* is “rich and powerful person thinks they can get away with whatever the fuck they want without consequence.” Because at some point, without that shift in narrative, everything’s really starting to get absurd.

And I’m not gonna say if it is or isn’t, because I can’t say with any authority whether it is or isn’t. But what I do think is that a.) it’s a logical extrapolation of an existing universe which was a story about whether androids that were primarily used as heavy labor & sex-bots were human, and b.) the characters aren’t all saints, and it’s never implied that they are.

I mean, K is a Blade Runner. Which means fundamentally, if you agree with the core themes of the original movie, means he’s a murderer. Of course, there are other elements, like the fact that he can’t say no. So is his relationship with Joi meant to be aspirational? I certainly didn’t think so. I thought it was meant to show how sad his existence was, but then also evolve into an echo of the “more human than human” theme. Is their relationship a facade? We certainly get clues that it is an illusion (the giant holo ad referring to “Joe”, for instance) and not something real – but at the same time, it certainly feels like a real emotional connection, and we feel real emotion over Joi’s fate.

Then there’s the whole thing with Luv, and whether showing K strangling her was “over the line” or not. Maybe? Certainly it’s questionable to show this kind of violence against women in our current society. My interpretation of it in the moment was that she was *relentless* and how *hard* it was to kill her, but it was definitely a kill-or-be-killed situation, and the slowness of it was meant to be counterbalanced by whether Deckard was also drowning or not. Misogynist? I dunno. Kind of depends on the context one brings to it? Maybe? Also felt like part of the point was that Joi, who was *less* human, was more human than the human-ish Luv.

Maybe I’m missing things (I genuinely believe I’m blind to some). But yes, women were objectified. To me that was a direct extension of the 1st film. Then you’ve got Robin Wright’s character, who’s framed somewhat villainously, but at the same time, from what perspective? From the perspective that Replicants are humans. Which is not what she believes – and from her vantage point, her job is to protect humanity (more narrowly defined), and she does that vigilantly. Is her character misogynist? I dunno – I didn’t think so. I thought she was the hero in her mind, in a situation where the morality is really ambiguous, even if the perspective of the movie frames her in a particular light.

Curious what others’ perceptions are.

What happened? The nerds finally came into power, and it turns out that they’re complete fucking assholes.

Someone said the other day that the nerds turned out to be scumbags and the jocks are fighting for social justice. It’s fucking weird, but whatever.

For a very brief moment, it was cool to be a nerd, and it felt like things would be better.

Now, I want as little to do with this toxic, entitled mass of raging assholes with no sense of perspective as possible.

I almost can’t believe it. But then I read about the Rick & Morty/McDonalds thing, and it was really clear. Fuck this shit.