If I know anything about financial systems, I expect that some super critical process in Treasury is coded in like assembly via punch cards in some yellow aged plastic box using an Intel 4004 with like 640 bits of RAM supported by like a single centenarian on an as needed support contract because that’s literally the last person on earth who knows how it works and why.
Can we channel Hideki Kamiya and wish they “will be cursed for the rest of their lives to always have poop on the soles of their shoes when they get home.”
Just putting this here if anyone is interested in someone actually trying to have done something similar.
Some human ones are also just actively really bad at it. As both a manager and applicant, I’ve seen they can hinder hiring good candidates.
If we’re copying Witcher 3 levels of content anywhere, can we leave behind like 95% of the ocean based points of interest? That was the absolute lowest point of the game for me by a mile.
Science Fiction is largely used as an allegory to explore the real human condition in a way that is parallel to political and cultural topics of the day without the inherent baggage that people would bring to exploring the real topic.
While the original quote and topic is about deploying a military as a policing force, it actually also holds true in the reverse as well, as policing forces shift towards an adversarial militarization against their community, leading directly to the issues you raised in the first comment about the failure of them to live up to the “protect and serve” motto.
While fictional events aren’t real, they are written by real people with views, desires and goals. Good writers will have internal consistency for their characters and try to ensure their external interactions have the authenticity of the ring of truth, because that’s how people will relate to the characters and story.
Good fiction is just a random meaningless story, it’s a platform for education and safe exploration of the real human condition.
Other than meeting rooms, I’ve seen some with the little privacy pods too.
Marvel Snap serves up poorly hidden bot matches and penalizes you for leaving as well. For example, they “reset” the ranked ladder every month, but retain their hidden mmr, and people with a really high mmr are MORE likely to face bots, because the system is designed to align your rank with their MMR, but if you leave the match, you forfeit what is essentially an ante used to determine your rank. But everyone gets some bots, and the amount varies based on several things, basically all of them manipulative to the player and their rank system.
It feels like assuming a lot of positive intent to guess that the match against bots is so that people can learn rather than trying to feed them a dopamine hit so they don’t get discouraged and fuck off, but maybe I’m a cynic.
The Kickstarter wasn’t just selling “the book”, it sold four things (we’ll get back to this) and wasn’t trying to “get back at Amazon”. I believe the Kickstarter was an appropriate option, even without considering his inability to independently bankroll the final scope of the project.
The four things:
A Premium Hardcover of the novels. This is the first time that the initial print version of one of his novels was released as a Premium Hardcover (albeit they did glue the binding), demand was very much not predictable and using KS helped to ensure everyone who wanted the limited print hardcover could get one (over 90k of each were needed).
DRM-free ebook of the novels. This was entirely risk-free for the consumer, they already essentially existed. This was essentially a pre-order, it is really only justified on KS because of #1.
Audiobook of the novel. Similar to #2, however I guess there was some minor consumer risk in that the audio needed to be recorded still, but Brandon does have reliable narrators and though he tried and failed at getting special narrators, that wasn’t part of the pitch.
Swag Boxes. This is the biggest item type to justify KS usage, they needed tools like they get from KS to be able to properly manage the monthly subscription box fulfillment. This did have some consumer risk, because it isn’t what they normally do, Sanderson couldn’t bank roll it himself (even after the $40M Kickstarter, he’s only got a 6M$ net worth) and it was largely an unknown in the book publishing space.
Back to the Amazon bit, it wasn’t a selling point to the KS, Amazon isn’t mentioned at all. He did decide to support competition in the Audiobook space as part of his fulfillment. In fact, all 4 of the novels are available on Amazon as print and ebooks, published through deals with his traditional publishers.
The way in which he decided to sell these novels (bundled content types and subscriptions) wasn’t something his traditional publishers were agreeable to and the KS was used as a proof of concept for that.
The KS raised $41M dollars, it’s the largest KS campaign ever by double. There’s a 0% chance the project would have been any where near remotely successful (and enjoyed by fans) if he’d tried to deliver it in a more traditional way. He didn’t have support of his publishers for that, he couldn’t afford it himself and the only other option would be a business loan, which we don’t know if he could have received a large enough one. Regardless of funding, the demand smashed expectations, less people would have got what they wanted in a traditional purchase method.
Yeah, there are bad board game companies on KS, take your complaints up with them. Which reminds me, I need to see when my physical edition pledge of Z from 2013 is due…
Contracts are no where near that standardized, it might just come down to the specific language/clause that was used, either done deliberately or just some lawyer group’s normalized process.