Category: Fails

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For too many years, I failed to be this kind of example to my children.

I didn’t deal with stress appropriately.

I didn’t deal with my emotions in an intelligent or healthy manner.

I spoke about toxicity without fully seeing it in myself.

The world needs more kindness.

For a time, I had thought that finding what I’d figured was a more correct “alignment” had finally configured things in the right places.

I was wrong for longer than I would like to admit. It caused problems to which I was blind in my ignorance. I ended up needing some help.

I fully believe people can change. You may not be able to lead them to it, and they have to want to change, and it can be a ton of hard work over a long time, but we can change.

I had to change; I’m still changing. And learning.

Maybe it never stops.

You can change, too.

❤️

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To be perfectly honest, I have been planning to write this for some time, but there are a couple of other posts that have been floating around for a bit in the past week that I thought would make good reference points for how I feel about cryptocurrency in general.

It’s well-known at this point that the computation necessary both to generate and to process cryptocurrency and its transactions consumes enough electricity to power a decently-sized nation. And that—while not the sole reason by far—cryptocurrency mining has begun to price computer components beyond the reach of many individuals, as we approach the second year of GPU shortages and are now hearing that storage space will soon be used for a new type of cryptocurrency.

On September 1st, 2020, GitLab announced that their free CI offering was being restricted in response to “usage.” Two months later, TravisCI announced that a similar restriction in response to “significant abuse.”

Concurrently with these pricing changes, the market capitalization of mineable cryptocurrencies has exploded.

These events are related: As the market capitalization of cryptocurrency surged from $190 billion in January of 2020 to $2 trillion in April of 2021, it’s become profitable for bad actors to make a full time job of attacking the free tiers of platform-as-a-service providers.

–Colin Chartier at layerci.com

Crypto mining is beginning to encroach upon services that many people in technology use for their own projects (for legitimate purposes). It’s beginning to become a literal menace for systems folks:

Cryptocurrency problems are more subtle than outright abuse, too. The integrity and trust of the entire software industry has sharply declined due to cryptocurrency. It sets up perverse incentives for new projects, where developers are no longer trying to convince you to use their software because it’s good, but because they think that if they can convince you it will make them rich.

[…]

Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it.

[…]

That’s what cryptocurrency is all about: not novel technology, not empowerment, but making money. It has failed as an actual currency outside of some isolated examples of failed national economies. No, cryptocurrency is not a currency at all: it’s an investment vehicle. A tool for making the rich richer. And that’s putting it nicely; in reality it has a lot more in common with a Ponzi scheme than a genuine investment. What “value” does solving fake math problems actually provide to anyone?

[…]

And those few failed economies whose people are desperately using cryptocurrency to keep the wheel of their fates spinning? Those make for a good headline, but how about the rural communities whose tax dollars subsidized the power plants which the miners have flocked to? People who are suffering blackouts as their power is siphoned into computing SHA-256 as fast as possible while dumping an entire country worth of COâ‚‚ into the atmosphere? No, cryptocurrency does not help failed states. It exploits them.

–Drew DeVault

(In response to the request from his post, I disclose that I at no point have owned any cryptocurrency.)

As the discussions regarding cryptocurrency continue, I can only conclude that both mining it and support it via using it (or trading in it) is explicitly unethical and immoral. It accomplishes nothing it theoretically sets out to do:

  • It does not provide for freedom from fiat currency, as its value is explicitly pegged to a fiat currency—or another cryptocurrency that is pegged to one.
  • It does not have a substantive use other than as a speculative “investment” that does not actually have a value as a tangible object, in the way that, say, futures or precious metals do. And this investment will only go up in value if current crypto holders convince new fools to start going in on cryptocurrency as well, further perpetuating the cycle.

Instead:

  • It is generating tremendous amounts of environmental waste, in the form of ridiculous energy usage and e-waste from discarded components used for mining.
  • It is well-known that it is being used significantly for transactions that are essentially money laundering or other criminal activity.
  • It is contributing to an ongoing crisis in the consumer availability of semiconductor-containing equipment and products.

Cryptocurrency takes and takes and takes, and provides nothing of value back into any economy or ecosystem, other than enriching people who are modern-day carnival barkers, shouting from their stalls for hapless “investors” to try their luck.

In the face of our contemporary climate crisis, the perpetuation of cryptocurrency is—at best—irresponsible; I now argue consistently that it is unethical and immoral. We have a responsibility to future generations to tackle the problems of climate change, poverty, and inequality, both of which cryptocurrency can only worsen significantly.

It’s past time cryptocurrency was not only regulated, but made illegal to produce or use.

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Steam looks vulnerable, so it’s only fitting that others are jumping at the chance to steal some marketshare. First Epic and now Discord:

So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.

90/10 split is ambitious. And I hope this kind of competition combines across more than one storefront to give both developers and players more options. I just wish they hadn’t followed that paragraph with this one:

We will also empower developers to communicate with their players by improving Verified Servers, extending their ability to add great content to the Activity Feed, and more. We believe if we iterate and work with developers, we can reverse platform fragmentation in the game industry while connecting developers and players closer together.

The last thing we need (on PC) is a different monopoly to take the place of Steam. The best possible outcome for consumers is competing storefronts that don’t rely on onerous DRM, so we can purchase and download from the store of our choice but not be limited to running eighteen launchers—and take advantage of sales that might compete with each other over time.

Consoles are, of course, a different story altogether.

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Laura Hudson for The Verge:

Ready Player One’s quixotic ideas about the future of online life aren’t unique, because nothing is unique to Ready Player One. It’s a haphazard mishmash of more meaningful and resonant pieces of culture, a callow pastiche that stands on the shoulders of more interesting works and demands the applause they’ve earned for itself. But Ready Player One is also worse than that, in quietly unexamined ways that speak to the internet’s original sin. If the book has anything to say beyond repeating a litany of cool franchises, it is believing that the internet is a sublime, inherently liberating space where allowing anyone to say and do whatever they want will lead, inevitably, toward an abstract notion of freedom. While that may have been the case for some members of society — notably the most privileged ones — in practice, it’s meant injustice and abuse for a lot of others. 

I’ve been working in the technology field for over a decade now, and what drew me to the Internet and web-based work was this same optimism. It’s taken some time—and meeting many people different from myself—to learn that it hasn’t happened that way for everyone, and in a lot of cases, has made things worse.

But I continue to work in this field and do what I can to push things forward because I believe these things are still possible. It’s just that the road is a lot harder than I thought it would be and will take different approaches than perhaps I’d previously thought.

Ready Player One is garbage, but it’s garbage that can partially reveal to us where we’ve been misguided.

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  1. provision hosting instance
  2. point domains
  3. guess package names for your package installer
  4. clone a bunch of git repositories
  5. try to figure out where everything you installed actually went
  6. install the packages you missed
  7. employ arcane magic and half-written tutorials to write an nginx config
  8. let i = 1
  9. nginx -t
  10. service nginx restart
  11. check app
  12. change one line of nginx config
  13. let i = i + 1
  14. if i < 5000 goto 9
  15. post on StackOverflow
  16. find config option that “works”
  17. get white screen of death
  18. curse person who decided web apps should now require a compiler
  19. question your intelligence and self-worth
  20. delete hosting instance

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Like you needed another reason to think Uber was a hot mess you should avoid at all costs, but for other reasons, you should read this account from Susan Fowler regarding her year working at Uber and the rather horrible treatment she received at the hands of HR and some of her colleagues there:

When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.

It includes a story regarding a case of sexual harassment that happened almost immediately after she was hired:

When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.

I hear from people from time to time that HR departments in general are not hired to do what is best for employees, but what is best for the company.

Don’t let your company decide that “high performance” is more valuable to you than a safe and inclusive place to work that treats other people with respect. A workplace that respects everyone who works there will generate a better company long-term.

(By the way, this also has some parallels to similar things that have happened within the fighting game community. Just because people are top players or have only committed their “first offense” does not mean we should go easy on them for violating decency and harassing others.)

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Welp.

I arrived at Chicago O’Hare airport this morning as my layover only to find that my flight home to St. Louis was cancelled. So instead, I’ll be sitting here trying to fly standby on every flight for the rest of the day. (The first guaranteed seat I have isn’t until tomorrow morning.)

So let’s test Liveblog!

Want to ask me a question about basically whatever? WordPress? WordPress imports? Life? Work? Fighting games? Other games? Send me a tweet or a comment on my Facebook post and I’ll try to answer your question here.

Otherwise, you get whatever I want to talk about. Good luck.

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(title borrowed contextually from this tweet)

I’m really sad about this. wundergeek is closing up her blog Go Make Me a Sandwich, from which I have learned quite a lot over the years about how the gaming (both video and traditional) industry treats women both in depictions and in (lack of) inclusiveness.

She writes:

Before Origins, I ended up crying in a bathroom as I chatted with friends online about the vitriolic response to a thing that I’d written. It made me doubt myself so much that I actually wondered if it would be worthwhile going to Origins. Would I even be welcome there? (Spoiler alert: I was.) Fast forward two months to a different crisis before a different convention, which saw me crying for more than a week in the runup to that convention. Truth is, I’ve done a lot of crying about my blog in the past year. But I didn’t let myself think about that, because I had to keep moving forward. I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I had to keep my head above water and just. Keep. Fighting.

Or at least that’s how I was approaching things until several weeks ago, when the final straw happened. As is the way with such things, it was so small. Such a quiet thing those most community insiders, even, probably missed. Really, it doesn’t even matter what the event was. What matters is that it represented a tipping point – the moment in which I finally had to confront the fact that I haven’t felt passionate about what I do here for a long, long time. And for most of this year, I’ve felt only resentment. That this stupid blog has cost me so much, and I feel trapped by it. A victim of my own success – forever tarnished by my connection to it, and yet dependent on the income it provides, that I require because of the damage it’s done to my reputation. (See what a vicious cycle that is?) The final straw made me realize that I don’t want to do this anymore, and indeed, that I was rapidly approaching a point where I couldn’t do it anymore.

Of course, this is made harder by the fact that I hate losing. And there will be people who will celebrate, people who call this a victory, which only intensifies my feelings of defeat. My feelings of weakness. I feel like I’m giving up, and it kills me because I’m competitive! I’m contrary! Telling me not to do a thing is enough to make me want to do the thing. I don’t give up on things and I hate losing. But in this situation, I have to accept that there is no winning play. No win condition. I’m one person at war with an entire culture, and there just aren’t enough people who give a damn, and I’m not willing to continue sacrificing my health and well-being on the altar of moral obligation. If this fight is so important, then let someone else fight it for a while.

There’s a lot more on the original post, which you should read, because it underlines in very stark detail what the problem is and how pervasive it is within gaming culture.

I could share a bunch here about how I’ve read it over the years, how it helped bring these things to my attention, or how proud I always was that it was on WordPress.com (NB: I work for the company that runs WordPress.com). But I won’t.

Nor will I say that she needs to keep going, keep fighting, because at the least she has realized that doing so is not a healthy option and is choosing to cut it out of her life to move forward in other things. We should support that.

What I will say is that as a community, we need to take a look at this, realize that people within our community have chased off yet another person who stepped up and said hey, something is wrong with what we are doing and how we treat people, and realize that when we see that kind of crap behavior, we need to call it out and condemn it for what it is.

Because the more this happens, the greater the chilling effect that stops other people from raising their voices and bringing unique viewpoints to the table.

And that harms us all.

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This week was the scheduled week for SFV at the St. Louis FGC weekly. For the last two SFV  nights, they have not been able to field an 8-person tournament.

So tonight, they announced Smash 4 doubles for the first time (to replace SFV in the future).

The not-Smash side of the room:


The Smash side of the room:


And there is a Smash singles tournament going on elsewhere in St. Louis at the same time. 

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I’ve lost count of how many nights I’ve done this to myself, including tonight:

  • mid-day: “You know what would be great? Doing some streaming tonight! That sounds like it would be fun and relaxing.”
  • late afternoon: “Today has been really busy; I’d still like to stream some later.”
  • evening: “I still have things to do; maybe I can still sneak in like an hour or so of streaming.”
  • late evening (say, 10 or 11): “I can’t stay up much later; guess I’ll stream tomorrow instead.”

I did actually manage to stream some when playing Burnout Paradise with my son this past Friday, but that’s become the exception rather than the rule. (And it was cut short when my Xbox 360 power supply decided it hates life.)

Streaming is something I often want to do, but getting the motivation up to just sit down and get started has been pretty difficult for whatever reason. I suppose it’s the classic dilemma: when I do it, no one watches, so I have a hard time mustering up the desire to turn everything on and start playing.

For instance, when it launched, I played Tokyo Mirage Sessions on stream for several days straight, and (I’m serious) I never rose above one viewer from what I could tell, and anyone who started watching didn’t stick around for longer than about ten minutes. I stopped after a few days, and even stopped playing the game completely. (I never finished it.)

It then leads to a weird litany of criticizing myself, such as:

  • I’m not very good at this game; why would anyone want to watch me play it
  • This game is something I’m pretty sure only I am interested in; why would anyone want to watch me play it
  • I can’t keep anyone who drops in engaged; clearly I’m not very good at presenting what I’m doing or I’m just not an interesting personality (or the worse bit – do I talk to myself when no one is watching? not talk at all? what do I do?)
  • Is there something I’m doing wrong? Layout? Sound? Stream quality?
  • I have so much work to do and want to spend time with my family in the evening; I’m too exhausted to do this

Those of you I have spoken to in the past regarding impostor syndrome and my trouble with that over the years may notice common themes here.

I’m not sure what the key is here. Do I need a gimmick of some kind? Do I just play a bunch of stuff and not care about what happens or whether I pull in anyone at all? (My motivation for games in their current state makes even this interesting, but that’s another post.)

My annual Extra Life fundraiser stream is coming up in around a month, and I’ll be hoping to meet or beat last year’s donation total. At some point, I can’t depend on the people I work with to make all the donations like they have in the past. I’d like to have at least some people who watch otherwise and would be interested in tuning in to the marathon when I pretty much drive myself insane for a weekend to try to raise money for a good cause.

But every year, I do this with the best of intentions: I do the Extra Life stream, and I tell myself that I’m going to try to build off that, and then there’s a business trip, or something comes up in my schedule, or whatever—and I drop the combo.

Here’s a question for you – and you can answer it where/when you please – when you have something you really want to do, but have trouble getting the motivation up to do it, what do you find that helps you to do that thing?