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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • A decade ago I was contracting for MSFT as a database admin / data analyst.

    A far older and more experienced contractor told me that he had been part of a team in Saudi Arabia, in 1990, that intercepted computer and electronic equipment bound for Iraq’s air defense command and control systems, flashing the firmware with exploits and backdoors as fast as they could before they were sent to Iraq.

    Supply chain interception has been a thing for a while.

    EDIT: This is a total off topic aside, but hearing about and seeing shit like that at the various tech jobs I’ve worked is why I laugh when people say ‘oh but alexa only activates on keywords’ or ‘no its totally impossible for phones to listen to your convos and then give that data to advertisement systems’.

    Call me paranoid, I don’t care: If you don’t have a hardware disconnect for your microphone and personally have the source code to every bit of software, at every level, then we just have to take the giant tech corpos at their word.


  • Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

    Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

    And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

    Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

    So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

    Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

    What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

    To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

    You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

    All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

    Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

    Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.



  • It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?

    Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise…

    …but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.

    At this point, I propose that ‘AAAA’ applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.

    With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.

    Basically… it doesn’t have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.