Facebook spy

I've obviously googled myself too much lately when Facebook suggests me buying my own book:

Mhm. I can't help but wonder where they got that info. Is Facebook and Google sharing through NSA these days? Is that the new cewl thing after torrent file sharing?

Fuck Freedom

Would you rather be free or alive? 99% of all people would pick the latter, the last percent are depressed. Oh, some might say that they value their freedom higher than life, but cant words lose all meaning should the choice become a reality. And as little as surveillance can mean to freedom, it's astounding to see (hypocritical) European politicians go through the roof and from a news perspective more than twice as high interest as that of civilian killings (albeit Arabs).

For the record, I previously endorsed stuff like PRISM. It's just that as the surveyor slowly but surely turns totalitarian, so does my conviction that the good guys will keep protecting human lives a top priority fade. I don't believe they're there yet, but in this pace it won't be many years. But nonetheless, this is still a non-question compared to waging two simultaneous wars in which 130,000 civilians have been killed. Thus far.

I've never counted to a thousand. I thought I'd do it when I was a kid, but I never got around to it, and I never will. It's hard to imagine a figure 130 times that number. And these days I have a hard time imagine dying, except for when I'm dreaming; and it never fails to give me a swooning sensation. It's impossible for anyone to understand the meaning of 130,000 civilian kills, and for what? Nothing.

In a couple of apps, I'll try to make one that could help oppressed people feel a little bit less oppressed. I don't know how, but trying is the least I could do.

Firestatah

(To those of you who see the above.) Well... I had to take a HTML brake tonight. And yes, HTML still sucks ape-dick. This tiny experiment took me a good two hours, even though I had some plasma source code to start with. Developing without a debugger and without knowledge about APIs suck as badly now as it did in the 80'ies. Just it's not 30 years ago any more. HTTP rock while HTML5 is a travesty of itself. Tomorrow I'm back in the chopper saddle again.

How you feel when Hungry's reviewing your code:

Gone 2D

The rest of us hates it, so there is no chance we would do a 2D game if it were up to us, but no-one has dared bringing it to Hungry, the new CTO. We haven't even reported Beaver, the killed co-worker, missing to the authorities. The stench is horrendous and Beaver's skin and has taken on a blackish color. Hungry just steps over him every time he passes in and out of his cubicle, like there's nothing there. We might be able to sneak him out during meeting week, which have have every other week, nobody's paying much attention during that week.

This is what he's had us do so far:



(Gravity Force, anyone?) Fortunately, the 2D part of the nightmare is going to be over soon, this game reeks of death and a missing dimension. We're going to sell it in tire 1 or 2, not sure yet. Depends a bit on how good we get the visuals, the feel of it is actually quite good, but right now it looks like shit. Good looking games always stand a better chance. Take this game for instance:



It's in tire 4! And it's not even any fun, although it looks good enough and won some prices. On some of our levels we've decided to steal the black foreground, saturated background-design. "The populace is mad for it", hungry says, and adds "nothing can go wrong"! Mm, I wonder...

CTO

I met this hipster in the sauna the other day. Good looking-guy with the odd first name "Hungry". He said he wanted to be CTO for some company. So we hired him on the spot, and immediately started calling him names behind his back. He’s going to be in charge of meetings, of which we’re going to have plenty hereon, and he’s also going to take the blame when the shit hits the fan (each release).


His first decision was to scrap the Cyber Sled remake we’ve been working on for months. Fortunately we’ve only done game engine development anyway.

He says his first game will be another remake, a 2D-like game. The rest of us hate 2D games, so not a chance, but apart from that he actually has some good ideas. He drinks too much in the office though, I just don’t dare to confront him; he’s already bitch-slapped one of the colleagues to death over some stupid Mac vs. PC argument. Mm. I should place frog statuettes in the office for distraction before I bring up the company policy on booze.

Inhumane Corp.

At the day job we're going to sit in meetings all day. For two weeks! Estimation meetings. And the reason is... tada! not that we should re-estimate the work left ahead of us (for the third time, it's been done twice before - for real). No, the reason is that the requirements folk don't want to clarify the input, and the project managers can't tell it to their face. I shit you not! Inhumane company politics to a net worth of $100,000.

The other day I ran into a bug in one of Big Fish's point-and-click "hidden object" games. Twice. First time I wasn't sure how to I had caused it, but it caused the game to stall so I couldn't get passed that point. So I replayed a couple of hours and ran in to the same thing, in the same place once more. Mhm. So I sent this bug report to Big Fish explaining to them exactly how to reproduce the bug, which was somewhat serious. I'm certainly not the first one to run in to it (though quite possibly the only one who did it twice and still retried it for a third time). I kept it simple and clear, and I wanted to give them the information to help them become better. That's what people do with companies they keep in high regard; customers will try to help them improve. After a few days I got a 90-line mail back from a Big Fish support guy stating that:

1. he knows it's no fun when a game stalls;
2. I could get another Big Fish game as a refund;
3. otherwise he'll certainly want to fix this; (otherwise?)
4. he passed me a link to a walkthrough of the game;
5. he also added a link to a forum page

If the above won't resolve my bug (duh!) he goes on to ask what items were in my inventory when the bug occurred. Did the "hint" button still work? Had I tried re-installing the game at all? He then informs me how to re-install the game. I gave them 30 minutes of bug-reporting time, apart from the three hours of replaying required to start over three times; and now he wants me to experiment and try this and that. I've been more then generous: I've paid them money, I've invested hours in one of their bugs, I've reported an error which he/they could easily reproduce and fix; and yet they fail to recognize that all I wanted was for them to improve. The tech in their point-and-click "adventure" games are based on XML charts, so they could quite possibly have fixed the bug in minutes, but instead they mailed me this... insult. Inhumane support.

I hope I, for as long as I live, never lose sight of the human at the other end of the company. It may not matter much to others, but it does to me.