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Greedfall 2
Last night I finished Greedfall 2 and man, it was a pain in the ass at times. The game was created by Spiders, a studio owned by Nacon, a publisher. Spiders created the first game, Greedfall, it wasn't an AAA game, but it was a solid AA game and I enjoyed it. But Greedfall 2 was a different story. On the game's release day Nacon filed for insolvency. The game was rushed out the door and it wasn't quite ready. It wasn't a disaster like Cyberpunk 2077 but it had serious issues. At one point a plot quest was broken and after an hour or two trying to find the problem I found out that in order for the plot quest to work I had to do a quest for my bestie, Nilan. So I had to go back about four hours to do Nilan's stuff and I was lucky, I had a saved game. If I hadn't I would have been screwed.
But I was able to finish the game and got a pretty nice ending (well except for Till, the former member of the Coin Guard but fuck that guy) and that gives me a .500 finish rate, not bad for an elderly gent.
And so my next game will be a FPS: Mouse P.I. for Hire. My record for shooters is pretty bad but as a kid who grew up watching the old Max Fleischer cartoons on television, I had to buy it.
It drops today. And by the way, I'm not angry at the the folks who programmed Greedfall 2. It was a messed up situation and they did the best they could given the financial situation.
April 16, 2026
AI
I've nothing against artificial intelligence, like any other technology it can be used responsibly or misused. And given human history I'm sure the latter will outweigh the former, at least in the short run.
Several years ago I used an app called Dream. It would make pictures based on your prompt and if you uploaded a picture and a gave it a prompt it would do the best it could. So I uploaded this picture of Newton:
Because he looked like a captain on a ship my prompt was: My cat as captain of a ship. This is what Dream gave me.
Not what I expected but I liked it enough to use it as my phone's wallpaper from time to time. I think I posted something about the pictures a year or two ago but I haven't used AI since so they're posted again. I haven't used things like ChatGPT or Google's AI overview out of a sense of moral outrage, it's because they're not particularly reliable. And there's also my age, if I need to find out something I'd rather do it myself rather then kick it to an AI, even if the AI was always right. It's like any other skill, if you don't use it you loose it, amirite?
But we have a lot of folks who are using AIs for stuff they should be doing themselves. If you're going use ChatGPT's medical advice as opposed to your doctor's and you become very ill, well fuck you you're stupid. On the other hand if your doctor punts your medical question to an AI and you become very ill I hope you sue the ignorant bastard.
By the way, this is Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, the company that owns ChatGPT.
According to him, it will take another year before ChatGPT can be used as a timer. My nine year old Echo can do it right now.
Always remember, those thing are chatbots first with a bunch of stuff bolted on top of them.
You know, maybe it's just me but poor Sam always looks like the guy in the party who wants to talk to you about the seven root archons from Venus.
Update: The NY Times has an article on this very subject. Here's a gift link.
April 8, 2026
Newton's 12th Anniversary
This is actually the first picture of Newton, it's not too flattering.
This is the first picture of him in his new home. It's not too flattering either but I blame the camera. Smart phone cameras sucked compared to the ones we have today.
I think this is the first year in a while that I actually remembered to mention it on the correct date. Twelve years later he still gets the zoomies every so often, he still likes curling up on the couch on top of his Doctor Who blanket while I read or watch television, and he still grooms me in the mornings. And it's now safe to let him sleep on the ottoman in the office if I have a quick errand to run. Still not safe to leave the door open all the time, wires you know.
I'm 70 and at 12, Newton is kind of in the same age bracket. We're two eccentric old guys sharing a condo together.
April 6, 2026
The Economics of Streaming
That makes sense, actually.
April 4, 2026
News You Can Use
April 1, 2026
To the Moon
April 1, 2026
Newton spent some time with me watching the coverage of the Moon launch but he got bored and left before the rocket took off.
In my younger years I thought we needed to colonize the Moon, now not so much. Do you guys remember the movie Moon staring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell? Bell was the only person in a station owned by Lunar Industries (not the most imaginative name). The station sent back helium-3 to Earth to power the planet's fusion reactors (apparently there's a lot of that stuff on the Moon in real life). His job is boring and after a three year he'll go back to Earth and be paid a lot of money. The back half of the movie is bollocks as the Brits say but the first half is good. Anyway, guys like Sam will be the only ones living on the Moon. No colonies, no lunar cites, just a few folks monitoring equipment. Maybe long term, say 500 years from now, things will be different but right now no. You want to know why we don't have cities in Antarctica? Because it's inhospitable as fuck, that's why. Get back to me when we have cities there, or in the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia, then I'll start thinking about Moon colonies.
April 1, 2026
Iran
Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Dictators all have the same problem, how to get good advice. In the American system cabinet officials have to be confirmed by the Senate but they serve at the pleasure of the president. And the president picked them because they pretty much agree with the president's agenda. Even so, they may disagree with this or that policy and may bring their disagreement directly to the president (or the monarch or whoever).
In 2014 Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, backed pro-Russian paramilitary groups and in 2022 the Russian government said, "fuck it", and invaded. It was a reckless and incredibly stupid decision and Russia is paying for it. But Putin is a dictator so whatcha gonna do?
Trump isn't a dictator (yet) but he is an autocrat with a short temper and no grasp of geopolitics. And while Trump could be checked by his cabinet officials in 2016, in 2024 he packed his cabinet with rather dim sycophants. And so we're at war with Iran, his cabinet supports him and, so far, do both Houses of Congress also support the war. But it's not having the result Trump wanted, the collapse of the Iranian government, the oil turned over to the US, and Iran reduced to an American client state.
But the world economy is in a tailspin, and folks are worried about a 1929 depression on the way. And that has Republicans scared, that's why they're trying to pass the Save Act.
Weird times for an old man.By the way, I had some errands to do today and I drove down past the borough complex. There were more people protesting Trump on No Kings Day then I would have thought.
March 28, 2026
World of Warcraft
Normally I don't play World of Warcraft when Marie isn't online but son of a bitch the expansion is a lot of fun. I've been playing it since last Monday and I've gone from level 80 to 89 (the level cap right now is 90). I'm not totally up to speed on what's happening, it seems that Xal'atath want's to cover Azeroth in darkness but a bunch of mages are holding it off from the Sunwell. Meanwhile, I'm trying to to build a coalition of folks from around Silvermoon City to, well, I'm sure they'll be doing something when the next part of the storyline drops. And that's more then I usually know about WoW's arcs. Now my goal is to hit 90 and see if I can make it to Voidstorm.
March 22, 2026
The Slow Death of the Power User
The Slow Death of the Power User was an article on a blog called fireborn (I found it via Metafilter). It's thesis is that:
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.
That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.
My first two computers were designed to be easy to use without a lot of knowledge of the systems involved. It wasn't until the early 90s that I had to really learn about DOS, files, and drivers. And the reason I learned about those things was that I bought my Commodore 64 to play games. By the 90s games were getting bigger and required a certain amount of knowledge of the machine itself (DOS and files and drivers, oh my). I could have gotten a console but my first console was an Intellivision and it didn't impress me. And so, kicking and screaming, I learned enough about my computer and its operating systems, DOS and later Windows, to keep the thing running (with a lot of generous support from Rolf). Had computers in the 90s been as idiot proof as they are today, I would have been happy to learn nothing about their workings. But they weren't.
My dad was a car guy and in the 60s he would tune up his car himself. People don't do that today, in fact they couldn't if they wanted to. I know very little about cars but my current (and last) car is 11 years old and has never needed a tune up. Cars are simply more reliable and don't need the procedure. Dad knew a lot about cars but you had to in the 60s. And I suspect that there are car guys who mourn the days when the workings of cars were more accessible. Just like the writer at fireborn mourns the lack of computer knowledge today.
The solution:
Learn how your tools actually work. Not just how to operate them. Use the command line. Set up a home server and break it and fix it. Root a phone or, if you’re on a platform where that’s been made impossibly difficult, buy something where it isn’t. Run a Linux install on bare metal and deal with the driver problems. Learn to read a network capture. Understand what your browser is sending with every request — the dev tools have been there the whole time. Host something yourself instead of using the managed service. Use open protocols where they exist: XMPP, ActivityPub, RSS, SMTP — these are old and unglamorous and they work and you own your data when you use them. Feed the federated alternatives even when they’re worse than the centralized ones, because they’re worse partly due to network effects and network effects respond to participation.
I'm not going to do any of those things but I suspect I'm not the target audience of that blog. Any technology, even consumer tech, starts out hard to use. When I was a kid dad had to climb the to the roof of our house and realign the antenna, which today sounds like Mr. Spock's hissy fit on Star Trek.
And this was 40 years after the television was invented!
I'm wondering about coders and tech support though. Everybody is trying to get rid of humans and replace then with AIs. And are modern tech support people familiar with stuff like:
and is it even necessary?
At any rate, I'm glad I was around at almost the beginning of the personal computer age (the first personal computer was the Altair in 1975, I showed up eight years later) I'm glad things are a lot easier today.
March 13, 2026
Not Coming to America
The Ig Noble prize ceremonies have been held in Boston for the last 35 years. This year they'll be held in Zurich, Switzerland because the United States is too dangerous for the presenters and nominees. And this year's Game Developers Conference will be missing a lot of international game developers, because they don't believe America is safe.
If your business involves getting people from other countries to come here, you're fucked.
March 11, 2026
Next Week on Poor Decision Theater
For all I know, Samsung will lock that potential feature down and it will be safe from people like me, but if your father buys a Samsung phone with an icon for vibe coding on the home screen and you're his tech support, consider bailing if dad likes to tinker.
Contempt
Just to clarify, we're aware of it.
March 2, 2026
An Interview with Seamus Blackley
Seamus Blackley was around at the birth of the Xbox, he's retired now. Xbox CEO Phil Spencer was also around from the begining. He's retiring and his replacement is Asha Sharma. She has no experience in the gaming industry but lots of experience in AI. Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat interviews Blackley about the changes in Microsoft's Xbox brand.
February 23, 2026
Styx: Master of Shadows
The game was pure stealth, straight out of the Thief playbook. Yes, you had a weapon but if you had to use it you screwed up. Combat was very iffy and most of the time if I did engage in combat with a pissed off guard I'd go back to an earlier save, even if I won the fight. Coffee is for thieves who never have to fight.
So what was the final sequence in the game? A three part fight with Styx clones. I had no knives and no amber (the stuff that allows you do do magic) and never finished the first fight. One suggestion, from someone who was trying to be helpful, was to go back to the beginning of the mission and try not to use amber and knives. My answer was to end the game (it's not like I never had to walk away from a final boss fight) and put the developer, Cyanide, on my shit list.
So at the moment I'm 0 for 3.
I did put the ridiculously named Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 back on Kosh. I played it last year and was disappointed. It wasn't a role playing game like Vampire: The Masquerade but as a brawler it's not too bad. These are vampires out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and by keeping that in mind I'm enjoying it, not loving it mind you but I'm having a reasonably good time on the second play through.
February 23, 2026
There Is No Antimemetics Division
I recently read a book called There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, also known as Sam Hughes. The film is based on the first chapter.
February 21, 2026
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Logo courtesy of Mrs. Silverman.