Nuclear Monster

  • If you owned a retail store, would you let a customer start cursing and yelling at your customers or would you kick that customer out?

    Steam’s curator program was implemented a little over a year ago. This program allowed individuals and groups of users to put together a selection of recommendations with a brief text component that appears on everyone’s Steam store page when enough people are following that curator.

    Some curators are what you would expect. Publications like Cheap Ass Gamer, PC Gamer, Giant Bomb, Gaming On Linux, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, have groups and recommendations. It’s nice to see that a publication you like is recommending a game, and it says a lot when none of them are. Then there are community action groups dedicated to specific causes, like one that is a group of made up of non-developers highlighting games that lack features that they feel should be available on every computer game regardless of what era it was developed in or if the lack of such a feature would even be an issue for this type of game.

    Finally, there are curators on Steam that are beyond hyperbole. For example, Waifu Hunter. Normally this name would just imply that the group is operated by anime fans who will never know how to speak with actual women. Their disgusting motto is “I will tell you if a videogame has attractive anime ladies in it.” Here’s a sample recommendation from Waifu Hunter:

    This game is a matryoshka doll of cancer, furries, and Tumblr. Play this if you hate good writing, loathe functional game design, and want to get AIDS.

    Valve allows this to exist in their store, why? This negative recommendation is for a point-and-click adventure that has very positive overall user reviews. 103 positive and 10 negative reviews are shown directly on the store page for the game. Destructoid gave the game an 8 out of 10. This system is intended for positive recommendations, not rants from 8chan users. It is time to kick this customer out of the store.

  • Eric S. Raymond

    Eric S. Raymond:

    The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.

    ESR’s blog post goes on to back up this conclusion with IRC logs from one anonymized source that nasty women are all around trying to destroy him and other self-aggrandizing free software/open source shitlords through false claims of sexual assault. The comment thread on the post is an amazing cavalcade of other mens rights assholes who followed through links from terrible websites such as Phoronix and Breitbart. Surprisingly, the comment thread is a little bit better on the Phoronix post where people call out Michael Larabel on linking to ESR’s garbage as if it were fact.

    ESR calls this an attempt by women to “… smear and de-legitimize the Linux community (and, by extension, the entire open-source community) in order to render it politically pliable.” ESR is the one who has smeared the Linux community. He has threatened harm to other developers, by all accounts is a terrible developer, and a racist who takes credit for coining the term open source when it was actually invented by Christine Peterson.

  • Elias Roman:

    To that end, today we’re launching a portal for podcasters to start uploading their shows to Google Play Music before we open up the service to listeners.

    Translated from Google-speak: The Google Play Music app for Android (and iOS) is going to download podcasts to Google servers and rehost them on their own servers. Podcast publishers will only have access to listener metrics for Google Play Music listeners through Google’s interface. Google will also insert extra ads around the podcasts that aren’t from, and won’t benefit, the podcast publisher:

    Google reserves the right to show display (image) ads alongside podcast content. Google will not insert any pre-roll ads before podcast content starts or mid-roll ads during a given podcast episode. Google reserves the right to serve post-roll video or audio ads after podcast content. Google Play Music does not provide direct payment or revenue share for podcast content.

    Today, podcast publishers put up an RSS feed that anyone can use. It’s an open standard that any client can download one of these RSS feeds, get a list of episodes, and download them. Publishers interpret the one metric that matters, downloads, and use that in addition to occasional surveys of their listening audience to sell ads to advertisers if they choose to run advertising. If Google Play Music becomes the way that most people listen to podcasts it will destroy the open standard and increase the number of advertisements that people are forced to listen to. This is not good.

  • Downwell came out recently, it’s a great arcadey-good time on Windows and iOS. Here’s a little bit of it on Windows.

  • DICE released their Battlefield 4 community map today alongside another large patch to the game. Here’s an hour of it on video. While it is good that they are still releasing free content for almost two years after BF4 was first released, it still feels strange to have a “community map” when they could have released real community map making tools and encouraged hundreds of map creations. It’s not easy to put together a package of tools to make maps for a game, but it is worth it when you’re trying to keep people interested in a series for years between official sequels.