Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Reposting some thoughts from /r/Civvie11, when Randy Pitchford stepped down: ----- I admire their optimism for a Duke Nukem redemption. I don't share it, but I admire it. Some characters are *deeply* rooted in a particular era. Personally, if I had crazy billionaire money, the route I'd go is less Johnny Bravo (self-obsessed dork with limitless self-confidence) and more like a shameless hedonist who knows what he's into and just does not waste time worrying about anything else. The kind of machismo-driven maniac who'd exit an exploding spaceship wearing a parachute and carrying a rescued blonde, have some one-liner suggesting a dramatic kiss as debris rains around them, take no for an answer, and then have a *followup* line playing off the situation. An egomaniac whose only response to aliens dropping a building-sized effigy mocking him is to admire the likeness - possibly after adding sunglasses, using a rocket launcher and their ships. The durable goal is a larger-than-life figure like Theodore Roosevelt. Some fearless asshole with enough money and fame to try all the stupid shit that sounds equal parts impressive and deadly, and enough skill, brawn, and sheer dumb luck to survive it all. Someone who - if he is not already in the authorities' short list of troubleshooters to call when trouble arises and needs shooting - shows up anyway, kicks a jawdropping quantity of ass, and shakes the hand of whichever military or police leader marches up to call him a reckless idiot. (And if we jump-cut to him in a holding cell, he'd use an improvised hook to reach past the keys and grab his cigar.) Toxic fuckboys are still going to distort that into support for their "nice guy" delusions of adequacy, but it's not like they'd be scared off by cliche scenes of polite respect and private complexity. Duke Nukem is is not a deep character. He's never gonna be the kind of guy to wax poetic about the nature of masculinity. He's unlikely to express any emotion besides anger, explosion, and penis. But the list of people whose urethras he'd invert with his boot includes a lot of assholes who think they're like him just because they drink and curse and piss people off. It should be a fun line to ride. Duke is simple. He's not charismatic. He's not anyone you'd like in real life. He's a shallow dickhead who wants to be surrounded by shallow floozies, until shit goes down, at which point he'll strut through hell rearranging the faces and organs of whoever ruined his caveman paradise, and then he'll want to be surrounded by shallow floozies whilst watching himself on TV. It would be goddamn near impossible to make that both realistic and tolerable, but it should not be terribly difficult to make it entertaining. ----- DNF was a miss on most fronts. However: I think Johnny Bravo is a good example of what not to do, because he's not taken seriously by anyone. Not in his world or in ours. Duke can't have that... epic loserdom, I guess, where no amount of disrespect phases him. He's not Peter Parker shooting finger-guns in Spider-Man 3. ----- Being a loser doesn't mean being a bad person, it means lacking respect from others. It's a sort of social failure. Arguably the whole gag for Johnny Bravo is that he's socially inept in a harmless and predictable way. And either in spite of that or because of that, the near-universal rejection never bothers him. You can't do that to Duke without ruining him. His machismo is not a punchline. He is genuinely a capable and witty protagonist, molded in traditional masculinity, draped in the trappings of late-20th-century excess. The difference between 90s games and now is that no sane dev team would start by saying "and any guy who's not like him is a WUSSAY!" But I feel like actively undermining his self-image for the audience is the same mistake for a new generation. There's nothing inherently wrong with gym rats who enjoy whiskey and cigars and loose women. It is a common archetype that many people strive for, and Duke embodies it with zero irony. He can be that kind of guy without also being a complete douchebag. And the script doesn't have to mock or sideline him to do it. Less Jack Burton, more RJ MacReady.

A recognizable blank slate for action set-pieces sounds like a studio's dream. They can do anything and someone will watch it.

OP: Thank you.

Microsoft does not make processors.

Yeah, I read the other guy's comment. That is already one step too many. I still had to click, for that bait. OP: *put it in the fucking title.*

Put it in the fucking title.

New hit: [Love Letter to a Dungeon Master.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Tkba0aVYY)

It's already serious business in laptops and desktops. Just exclusively for Apple's awful little incompatible fiefdom.

DirectX was always about displacing consoles. Alex St. John was talking about it in 1994. The task is mostly complete. Software has won. The surprise is that Microsoft really hasn't. They assumed they'd dominate whatever computer-ified market emerged... and that assumption is getting shakier every year. Windows suuucks. Linux is already a better way to run most programs and games. Even x86 is not a sure bet, and whatever ARM does to unseat it, that'll transfer smoothly to RISC-V. Everything old is new again. "The best Macintosh is an Amiga." The best WinTel box might be your phone.

> what’s an Xbox even for anymore? PC-ifying the console market, same as always. A task it has almost completed. Sony exiting the console market would be failure. They've been using the PS1 playbook five times in a row - seven or eight if you count handhelds - and it's worked, at most, thrice. Sony's ideal market has games developed for a specific platform, and occasionally ported outside it, so each vibrant fiefdom has its own identity and culture. That made them a mountain of cash on PS1 and PS2 and then nearly killed the PS3. Developers' ideal market is making the game once and selling it to all customers. Platforms are an obstacle. Sony's ideal was fucked as soon as RenderWare looked the same on any console or PC. Microsoft got the message and made the 360 a generic compiler target. Sony almost shipped the PS3 without a real GPU. It took them years to stop fucking around and offer libraries to make their tiny special supercomputer act like any other computer - and that got them better ports, and made them more money. What followed was two and a half generations of lockstep releases for near-identical AMD laptops. You can buy the blue one or the green one. Yet I don't think Sony really internalized what's happened until the Helldivers situation. They suddenly demanded every PC player get in their console ecosystem, because they recognized how much money they could make being a generic publisher, and it scared the shit out of them. Microsoft exiting the console market would be... what they've been planning for a decade, probably. Somewhere after the Xbox One, I mused that they could upset the console race by *not* releasing an Xbox Two, and just treat the upcoming PS5 as a slightly broken PC. They seem to be getting around to it. Albeit with a side of releasing a Steam Deck competitor, because they love showing up late to a trend.

Again, not even Atari itself went away entirely. A crash means line go down. It's not a sudden and definite end.

This user struggles with absolutes.

> It’d be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash. Which can happen. Theaters sure aren't doing well. Movies soldier on without them, but with vanishing distinction from any other form of streaming video. When the superhero genre wanes, it might not be because some other bajillion-dollar trend overtook it. People can just stop caring enough to justify budgets with nine digits. What comes after that is a fallow period. Many large investments fail, capital dries up, a few pricks make headlines for declaring 'movies are over.' There's been several times that making money on music was not a reliable business model. The industry flipped out about piracy... on cassettes, and then also when MP3s came along. Fortunately they solved that through commercial streaming services which also don't pay artists anything. And now you can install a program that invents and records pop songs, just for you, in about as long as it takes to play them. Even in '83, it's not like Atari *died.* They had two more consoles that decade, plus a handheld. They marched on into the 1990s and *then* died. The crash simply meant a whole form of entertainment was no longer an expected feature in people's lives. Subscription MMOs have dwindled. The RTS genre crashed.


'You want competing software stores, yet you run a software store. Curious.' Swing and a miss.

Fantastic, congratulations! A genuine victory for software freedom. Now let's ban Fortnite's entire business model, because fuck that Skinner-box scam.