Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
The response of the grant evaluator is even worse. Just excuses, no admission that they fucked up. Barely even a consideration that this is the sort of thing people have done with flash games, and created in literal weekends at game jams
Nah man we had so much fucking dosh flowing in we had no idea what to even do with it! I mean, how could I possibly resist not allocating some of it to my friends?
Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it's in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.
The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn't have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told "you're going to regret this"??)
I enjoyed it for what it was (helicopter crimes simulator), but lemme tell you the real fun to be had was in Streets of SimCity.
From the level editor, to the soundtrack (I considered it to be edgy at the time), to the bugs (if you don't create launchers by self-intersecting bridges in SCURK then what are you even doing?), to the ridiculous campaigns and the ability to blow up a nuclear reactor. I didn't even mind that the graphics looked like sawdust.
Come to think of it I always liked blowing up the nukes as a kid, so I also considered Recoil (the tank game) to be the peak of entertainment.
wait, we have a SimCopter & Streets of Sim City subthread now? fuck yes. I’m here to attach missile launchers to cars my dad fondly remembers, jankily load my simcity2000 game into the level editor and play the resulting broken mess, and crash (both my car and the game engine)