It might not be unreasonable to ask if we really need a Civilization VII, but there it is, having been announced at Summer Games Fest.  We’re getting Civ VII.  Do we want lucky number 7?

And I don’t even mean that in some of the more obvious ways, like “do we need another 4x strategy title?”  I mean, sure, my Steam library already has enough unplayed or underplayed titles in it, why would I add more?

But there is always room for another GOOD game in the world, and few titles have engendered as much support as the Civilization series.  Just last year I went back to see if I could play all of the Civilization series variations.  And I could.  And you can to, if you have the patience.

Maybe what I mean is whether or not we really need another Civilization launch experience.

As a day one purchaser of Civilization versions II through V, I can attest that the experience became remarkably predictable.

The game will, of course, be extremely resource intensive.  Traditionally a Civilization title will barely run on any but the most current hardware and won’t run at its full potential until we’re a few more processor generations down the road.

That will lead to turning down the graphical settings… and the graphics will always be completely overblown with tiny levels of detail that you will see once, then cease to notice or care about half a dozen games into your experience… and being unable to take on max opponent matches unless you are willing to patiently wait for the computer players to get on with it already.

Then there will be the bugs and crashes.  Fortunately, we’re now in an era where patching is automated… though that has the perverse effect of many publishers just pushing whatever they have on launch day with an eye towards fixing things going forward.  So the game crashing on day one is practically a hallowed tradition and one I expect will continue.

The fact that the plan is to ship on PlayStation, XBox, Switch, Windows, MacOS,and some flavor of Linux (probably the SteamOS version) doesn’t make me feel better about stability.  I mean, one of the traditional broken aspects of a Civ launch is some portion of the multiplayer, and adding in the promise of full cross-platform play just multiplies the things that could go wrong along with the compromises that will need to be made.

As an aside, while I have played a number of titles that work well cross-platform, I have also had to endure my share of UI choices that are slow and awful on the PC, but which were put in place because of console requirements.  I hope Sid doesn’t forget where most the units are going to sell.

And then there is the game itself, which has reached a state where it seems to require a couple of expansions before it really settles down to a solid representation of the vision the team had when they set out… or to be really enjoyable… though Civ VI just became more gummed down in minutiae for me.  Will what we get in 2025… and you can bet it will be more like Holiday season 2025 than New Years Day 2025… be worth rushing out to grab?

Then what will the price point be?  The new normal is $70, but there will no doubt be additional premium versions in the $100-$150 range that add additional civs and other digital items.  And Sid might decide it is time to roll the dice with $80-$100 as an initial price for a series so well known.

In with that initial price, plus the day one DLC, plus the forthcoming paid expansions, there will no doubt be a game pass to buy as well.

As an MMORPG player, the who concept of the “game pass” still isn’t clear to me.  It feels like a bet, like you pay up front with the promise you’ll get all the new content for the next year covered, but there is no guarantee as to what that content will be and so it could be “great, best purchase ever” or it might mark me as a huge sucker.  And the industry hasn’t done much to reassure me on all of that.

Finally, we get to the big question, the giant freaking elephant in the room, the raison d’etre that must underlay this whole announcement… after six runs at the Civilization idea… or eight if you count Alpha Centauri (which you absolutely should) and Beyond Earth (which you can freely ignore in my book)… what is going to be new, different, or otherwise make what might be iteration 9 stand apart from its predecessors?

Well, Sid sure as hell isn’t saying.  The line on the official site is:

The award-winning strategy game franchise returns with a revolutionary new chapter. Sid Meier’s Civilization VII empowers you to build the greatest empire the world has ever known!

And the teaser trailer does do much save imply that there will be the usual overwrought cut scenes that you’ll turn turn off after a couple of runs because they’ll become dull on repetition or crash your system… both options have precedent.

I have been turning those options off since the palace thingy in the original Civilization.

I mean, I like the idea of reworking the franchise, but “revolutionary new chapter” could mean many things.  In my head I would like a reexamination of what may the early titles great and keeps them playable to this day in a way that might unencumber the state of play now exemplified in Civ VI.

But, with the state of tech right now, it might mean AI, blockchain, VR headsets, and an attempt to create a metaverse 4X title.  Has anybody seen Marc Andreesen skulking around?  That would surely be a bad sign.  I don’t think Sid Meier would need to stoop to that level, but then again, I could say the same about some other industry luminaries who have sold out early and often in the last decade.

We can also add in the fact that Sid isn’t getting any younger.  He’s Jerry Seinfeld’s age, and look how out of touch Jerry has become, an old man yelling at kids to get off his damn lawn.  And while I can’t speak to Sid’s views on cancel culture and the ability of comedians to be offensive, it does feel like, at the historical rate of release for Civilization titles in the 21st century, he might not be around for a Civilization VIII.

As such, he may see this as his legacy project and be tempted to pour in everything he has ever dreamed about in the past.  It is a temptation.  I hope he can restrain himself and maybe channel a bit of the Steve Jobs “less is more” philosophy… though who am I kidding?  What Civ title has ever showed such restraint in any quarter?

All of which is a whole lot of speculation because, aside from the teaser, we won’t get any REAL information about the game until they do a game play demo in August.  So we’ll have to wait.

In the mean time, I went over to Steam and did as commanded.  It is now on my wishlist.  For all my gripes above, I want to see where this is going.

One last roll of the dice Sid, for you and me both.  You might not have it in your to make another Civ title after this and, given the history of Alzheimer’s in my family, I might not have it in me to wait around and play another Civ title.  At some point “one more turn” will become “one last turn” for the both of us, so make it good.

Related:

• 2K Site – Civilization VII Announcement
• Steam – Civilization VII Page
• PC Gamer – Civilization 7 exists, but if you want to know more than that you’re going to have to wait for its full reveal in August

 

Blizzard came pretty close to recreating 2012 by dropping an expansion release on top of a Guild Wars 2 launch date… not that I believe the conspiracy theories from the Mists of Pandaria era, but it was a memorable enough moment that I made reference to it when posting about the Guild Wars 2 Janthir Wilds expansion last week.

And so it goes, the Janthir Wilds expansion will launch on August 20th, and The War Within will start rolling out with early access… for those who spent the most money on the expansion… on August 22nd, with the poors joining in on August 26th according to the launch schedule posted by Blizzard.

That will be a busy week between Tuesday the 20th and Monday the 26th.

As for what is coming with the new WoW expansion… well, nothing as deep as actual player housing, but there are the usual more levels, more zones, more dungeons, and more raids along with some new features:

• Delves: Deep beneath the surface lies treasure vaults waiting to be discovered. Explore these world instances solo or with up to four friends, along with an NPC companion, to defeat bosses and gain epic end-Learn more about Delves in our overview article.
• Warbands: Expand the potential of your alternate characters with account-wide progression across your family of characters on your Battle.net® account. Share your Warband Bank access, War Within Renown, achievements, collections, and more. Visit our latest article to learn more about Warbands.
• Hero Talents: Rise to new heights of power with new Hero Talent trees. Each class specialization has access to two choices of self-contained Hero Talent trees inspired by iconic Warcraft® universe archetypes. Revisit our previous Hero Talent previews to get a glimpse at what is in development.
• New Battleground: Deephaul Ravine
• Professions: New Recipes and Enchantments, updated NPC Work Orders
• UI Updates: Improved quest icons to make types of quests clearer.
• Skyriding (previously Dragonriding): Take to the skies on one of your favorite flying mounts with all new flight mechanics. Learn more in our Skyriding overview article.

Blizzard also has an announcement cinematic to go with the news, as one has come to expect… though I do remember a time when they were so rushed to announce something that the cinematic wasn’t ready yet.

Meanwhile, Blizz is still encouraging people to join The War Within Beta and to please pre-order the expansion, which comes with a level boost at all tiers so at least one of your retail characters can avoid the bland voyage through the Dragonflight content.

I am personally a bit attracted by the idea of this expansion, but not enough to throw any money at it yet.  I am happy enough in WoW Classic for now.

Related:

• Blizzard – World of Warcraft: The War Within Goes Live August 26!
• Massively OP – World of Warcraft The War Within launches August 26
• WCCFTech – World of Warcraft The War Within, WoW’s Most Ambitious Story Arc to Date, Launches August 26
• PC Gamer – World of Warcraft: The War Within gets a release date, marking the exact start of the MMO’s new 3-expansion long era

Last time around I vented, more than a bit, about Voice XML and how the end result was arguably worse than any problem the standard set out to solve.  You’re as locked into your platform provided are you were 20 years back and apps are harder to build and maintain than they were on the villainous “proprietary platforms” VXML replaced.

Voice over IP, VoIP going forward, gets no such criticism from me.  It was inevitable and, honestly, a pretty good idea.  I mean, who wants to pull two sets of cables through an enterprise, one for phones and another for data, when you only need one set?

The problem was the same problem we always have with tech.  We thought we were all ready for VoIP about five to ten years, depending on the enterprise, before we really were.

I mean, we had been through Y2K, we had upgraded everything we could, gig EtherNet was most places, and your CEO had heard about Skype.  We were clearly there in the minds of many.  Our marketing team, ahead of their time and also reading the same airline magazine as the CEO, declared that 85% of our new sales would be on VoIP in 2003… and we didn’t even have a solution yet.  Work to be done.

Along the way we had to dispense with a bunch of silly ideas before we got down to the reality of how things had to work.

On the list of silly ideas were stand alone VoIP phones.  Perhaps silly is the wrong word… but practicality didn’t quite enter into it.  For a stretch in the mid-aughts I had a blue Pingtel Xpressa phone on my desk.  Really a nice looking phone.  It won a design award.  It was a solid piece of equipment.

It had a web server in it so you could configure it from your desktop and was entirely run in Java, because we were still thinking that the JRE was a good idea back then. That means if you can find one today… and there are some on eBay… that they will still work.  I mean, they are a security nightmare and would be running a Russian or Chinese bot net within 5 minutes of being exposed to the open internet, but it would still make a SIP call if you could configure it correctly.

We had some other, more pedestrian physical SIP phones

In our lab we had an OnDo SIP server (later Brekeke PBX) setup in the lab and could make calls into other lab systems through it.  We also setup the server so that dialing specific error response number would return that response.  Dial “404” to get a 404 error sort of thing.  Handy and lots of fun and of no practical use at all outside of a testing environment.

The base theory was that we’d all buy a phone we liked and subscribe to some sort of VoIP phone service or some such.  But non-tech people have issues activating freaking cell phones.  In what world was a phone you needed to get on your wired network… Wi-Fi need not apply at that point in time as it was still in the slow ages… and then configure from your PC going to be a viable solution?

Pingtel and a few other SIP phone manufacturers faded away.  They were all kind of expensive, and the Pingtel itself was super pricey in a world where people love a quality product right up until they see the price, then they buy the cheapest, low effort unreliable garbage they can find.

Pingtel itself was purchased by Northern Telecom, Nortel, which was desperate for anything that might save it from itself.  Pingtel was just another rock thrown to a drowning man.  The joke about Nortel was that if you had spent $1,000 on their stock around Y2K and $1,000 on your favorite domestic beer in the can, five years later the redemption value of the cans the beer came in were worth more than the stock and you at least had the pleasure of drinking the beer.

A few such vendors, Pingtel included, tried to pivot away to a soft phone idea, but for consumers that removed the reassurance of a physical phone, left the config issues, and put them in a market where Skype, which mostly just worked and was free to start while they were expecting you to BUY their soft phone AND subscribe so some service or another to be able to dial… who exactly?

Skype you could pay a bit more to and dial not just your pals on your friend’s list but real phone numbers.  I used to use it for that.  Hell, for a while I had a ten digit phone number so you could dial into my Skype account from the public phone network.

The SIP phone thing was going to be cheap public options, like Skype and expensive proprietary options, like Cisco’s phones, and specialized implementations for things like call centers. And it remains pretty much that way today.  Sure, Skype has gone away, but Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and similar software has replaced it.

So it wasn’t too much later that I ended up with one of these incomprehensible bad boys on my desk.

I mean, it is a UI nightmare and almost overtly hostile to the average user, but that is what the IT department loves about it.  It makes them feel good to tell end users to RTFM when they cannot negotiate the garbage menu system of an overly complicated device that they forced on their company.  I mean, it must them feel good, right?  They wouldn’t keep making these sorts of fucking decisions if they didn’t enjoy it, right?

Not that I don’t still see old PBX systems and Nortel phones still in use.  But if your company buys something new, they probably buy a full service solution from Cisco or RingCentral or Mitel, or a few other minor players in the market.  Or they just force Microsoft Teams on you and let you figure out how the Teams app client and the Teams web client are actually supposed to be the same product.

But the market had to make that choice, and that took a few years.  If you work in an office now you probably have some ancient relic system, some spiffy but over complicated integrated VoIP phone and service… or you have a cell phone that you use exclusively and you can’t even remember if you have a phone on your desk, much less what it is.

Meanwhile, as this was shaking out, the network infrastructure had to be made ready.

Yeah, we installed a lot of gig Ethernet switches for Y2K.  It was a big bragging point to get that gig port in your office for a time.  But the network is more than just a speed.  There were a pile of issues to get through, starting with things like class of service… how do I know what this data even is… and quality of service… how do I prioritize things correctly… and a bunch of subsidiary issues that early solutions caused, like the great buffer bloat crisis, which I always denigrate largely because it was an issue of our own making due to everybody having the same easy solution to whatever their immediate throughput issue was, all of which meant coming up with standards that would work across equipment from different vendors… or even equipment from the same vendor but configured by different individuals.  I mean, I was there in the 90s when we couldn’t get caller ID to reliable talk across phone companies.

And those are just a few of the real issues and doesn’t even get into some of the dumb bits.  We had a customer buy the IP Contact Center package I inherited at one point and, despite the very clear language about network requirements, they expected it to work over their WAN between offices which consisted something like a 5BaseT coax connection that had no QoS configured and was being actively used for real time database replication.

These sorts of issues always start with the customer calling up and saying the software doesn’t work and then, hours to days later, the discovery of the actual issue.

Then there was the question of the IVR servers and how they would handle VoIP traffic.  We came into the 2000s with a few vendors like Dialogic and NMS selling very expensive PCI telephony cards.  They were making money, were happy with their margins, and did not want to spoil that.

The card vendors were doing so well that IBM bought Dialogic because its mark up on their products were so good, and IBM wanted them to get better with VoIP.

NMS, our chosen vendor, offered up IP integrations that worked with their pricey CG-6000 cards, while IBM had a software solution that used the Dialogic software interface that so many vendors had already integrated with, but a software VoIP stack that charged, per port, the same price as the physical card solutions from Dialogic.

There was a lot of that sort of thing going around.  One of the RAD Group companies was likewise offering up a VoIP stack for license at a rate that boggled the mind.

This in a world where your typical CEO thought VoIP was going to be cheap because they could use Skype without charge to call their kid at college.

And, along those lines, there was the question of how many lines could a software VoIP stack handle.  Yeah, NMS wanted tens of thousands of dollars for that 4xT1/E1 card, but it had the processing power to handle it and leave your server to do the other work it needed to do, which often included network calls to back end systems like the database, speech reco server, and TTS server.

Let’s take a quick time out to remember a major mobile and long distance provider, Sprint, that was a customer of ours who had outsourced their IT to IBM.  Everybody who did that regretted it because IBM was very much in the “promise everything just to get the contract signed, then do as little as possible” mode.

The IBM people told Sprint they could solve server network load issue by running all of those external servers on the IVR server.  So each one ran its own copy of an Oracle database, a Nuance reco server, a ScanSoft TTS server, and a few other items.  That not only did NOT solve the network issue… all those Oracle databases needed a constant replication scheme to stay in sync… but loaded up the local CPU so that each server could only handle a small number of VoIP sessions which meant they needed more servers which exacerbated the replication issue and… well, it wasn’t my problem so I could laugh about it.  Oh, and it cost the customer a ton to license all of that software for so many servers.  Our implementation guide explicitly said not to do dumb things like this, but you cannot fight stupid some days, and IBM level stupid was some serious world class stupid.

Tales from the old days.  But Sprint has since sold itself to T-Mobile a deal, like every such large merger, promised to add more jobs to the company and improve consumer choice, and led to huge layoff and less competition in the mobile phone market… which should have been the obvious outcome to anybody alive since the 1980s, but which somehow is always surprise when the lies are revealed.

Anyway, it took about a decade or so for infrastructure to catch up with the idea and for the market to figure out how this was going to be handled.  NMS went out of business.  IBM spun off Dialogic, which is still around, but is a shadow of its former self.  Meanwhile the big network hardware companies, already pals with the IT teams, stepped in and took their place, setting up the IP versions of call queues and call routing.

Once laid out, VoIP just followed the path that the web did.  VoIP is more prone to issues with network disruptions, but after years of upgrades and learning, it settled down to being pretty much an analog of how the web works.  Voice browsers take the call, routed to the by a load balancing mechanism, then requests the VXML pages, reaching our to the reco or TTS servers at need.  Those sit in front of the app servers which dish up the VXML pages and handle all the backend data issues, like querying a database or using some other connection method to support the app.

All in all, it is probably easier in the end as well.  I mean, I find it easier to use something like WireShark to figure out what is going on than I did trying to piece together data from a line analyzer and the call detail record that whatever platform we were using might have been keeping.

A win in the end and one that, unlike VXML, lived up to most of the key promises.  I mean sure, there was an obsession with “caller presence” and a few other splashy but impractical features early on.  But in just replace what the phone system did… seems okay… unless you have to admin a Cisco implementation.  But IT people tell me they love that sort of thing.

And all that specialized telephony knowledge I had gained up until then?  Mostly just trivia now.

The series so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village
• Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM
• Usenet Newsgroups Part II – What is on that CD and Why Your Hard Drive isn’t a Database
• Usenet Newsgroups Part III – Founding, Fame, Influence, and Foreshadowing
• From the Village to the Island
• YoYo Mechanic
• The Great Failure of Residential ISDN in the US Market
• Set Adrift from the Island
• Thinking on Enterprise Software
• Stock Options and the IPO
• Into the Telephony Subsystem
• Rambling about Speech Recognition
• Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
• The Special Business Unit
• The Very Long Post about “The Move”
• I Pick Sides in the War between the Phone Team and IT
• The Great Failure of Voice XML

I will now admit that Twitter is dead.  I have reached the acceptance stage of my grief.

I still refer to X.com as Twitter out of habit, but the spirit of my refusing to call it X.com… despite the obvious ridiculousness of the name… lived in the hope that Elon was running a business and would make sound business decisions, that perhaps he wouldn’t be a complete tool and ruin a good thing just to stroke his own ego and promote his favorite flavors of white nationalist rhetoric… or possibly just to stop that one guy from tracking his private jet.

There is no going back.  That particularly racist white toothpaste isn’t going back into the tube.

So that brings me back to another episode of how things are going in the land of things that once were, or would like to be, Twitter.  For Twitter is still the ideal, the archetype, the goal for all of them, though the road to getting there looks very different for each.

Anyway, I looked at Twitter alternatives a year ago, let’s see how I feel about them today.

• X.com – Now Actually Rated X!

Elon previously suggested in a post that Instagram was like a strip club… and he’s not wrong on that at least.  But suggesting that our family photos belong on his site then turning around and changing the rules to allow porn?  All in a day’s work for Chief Hypocrite and King of the Incels Elon Musk!

Yes, X.com is now a strip club by design.

X.com does keep booming, at least relative to its chief rivals.  Or so it seems.  Both Elon and Zuck fudge their numbers, so it is hard to tell.  Meanwhile Elon stooge Linda Yaccarino has to keep claiming progress for the site so has gone all 1984 on us and has started posting about how before Elon the site could only be accessed via Gopher and all messages were in Morse code so X.com can look good via the false comparison… I mean, when she can stop promoting Tesla.  You might wonder who is paying her… but then they aren’t looting Twitter to fund Elon’s AI venture the way they are Tesla.

If I could get maybe 15-20 accounts to move to another service… and halt the flow of people wandering back… I could leave X.com behind.  Yes, I have 10x more followers on X.com than any competitor, and I get more every day.  But most of my old followers are inactive accounts and most of the news ones have *N*U*D*E*S**I*N**B*I*O*.

Though I guess with the rule change they can just say “NUDES IN BIO” without trying to dodge the censors.  As Kurt Vonnegut repeated so often in Breakfast of Champions, “Wide open beavers”… or whatever it was.  I read it back in the 80s, leave me alone.

On my desktop, in Firefox, with uBlock Origin running, and staying strictly in the Following tab, X.com is usable and gets me the info I am looking for.  I even see people I follow who have sworn off X.com back and posting, because it is hard to give up the level of engagement and followers.  And in that state I can pretend it is still Twitter if I squint my eyes and stay away from replies by Blue Checkmarks.

And then I am sitting on the couch and look at it on my iPad in Elon’s app and… Good Lord, what is going on in there?!  Ads for crypto, white nationalism, and Trump have supplanted Cheech & Chong edibles, block no longer blocks people but is just a soft mute that lets them continue to harass you, you can no longer block noxious advertisers at all, and the algorithm pushes all the most noxious content straight at you, with Elon the king of the shit pile.

I mean, followers and engagement are cool and all, and it is fun to watch Liam Nissan troll the Nazis… oh, and Tom Nichols is back… but it has also broken some people.  There are a few people I had to unfollow because they clearly felt X.com was reality and had to fight every battle.  The block button is there for a reason people… oh, wait, they broke that, didn’t they?

Anyway, the grand unifying conspiracy theory about X.com right now is that Elon, already an emerald mine racist nepo baby, is going all in on Trump support on the site to woo Trump’s favor in the hope of getting pardons when the time comes… for things like looting Tesla to fund his AI venture.  The one thing that is for sure is that the only speech Elon was ever interested in was his own.

In spite of all that, some pundits have declared X.com is still the center of the debate, and it is hard to gainsay their point.  Plus… you know… porn.  Porn always wins in the end.

• BlueSky  – As Bad as 2010 Twitter?

Perpetual pedantic grump Tom Nichols, who as noted above has been spotted back on X.com, suggested the other the day that BlueSky was as bad as Twitter… but specifically 2010 Twitter, which is one of those very Tom Nichols things where he has an extremely narrow and specific meaning and context in his head that he won’t share, that nobody else could possibly understand, and that becomes a hill he plans to die on.  This habit was probably best exemplified when Tom spent several years fighting against calling Trump a Fascist because real Fascism must come from the Fascismo-Romagna region of Italy, otherwise it is merely Sparkling Totalitarianism.  But I digress.

I wish BlueSky was as bad as 2010 Twitter, because 2010 Twitter was pretty fun in my memory… a lot more fun than BlueSky.  Even Jack Dorsey says BlueSky is making all the same mistakes as early Twitter… we should be so lucky… but it just can’t quite become Twitter.

Also, Jack left the BlueSky board and is also on X.com buying in on whatever Elon is selling because whatever worm was eating RFK Jr.’s brain has apparently afflicted him as well.

Instead BlueSky is where the very serious people have gone to escape the other sites, but where they all can’t stop talking about those other sites.  Seriously, I swear if mentioning or posting pictures from X.com was banned, half the posts would disappear and we’d be left with complaints about Threads and Mastodon.  Nobody takes Threads seriously on BlueSky and everybody apparently was stridently lectured once too often about some aspect of Fediverse etiquette on Mastodon and left in a huff because… their sarcasm and wit were not up to the challenge?  They couldn’t figure out how to block people?  They too have feet of clay?  Anyway, they seem to be universally upset at not being welcomed by a cheering crowd for having deigned to join.

Still, for the slim thread of content that isn’t complaining about or reacting to content on the other sites, BlueSky is pretty good.  It is can go very heavy on politics with very little interest in entertainment, so lacks the diversity of topics that made Twitter great somewhere between 2010 and Elon, but it could get there.

And some people are trying to help get it there… though I am not sure their efforts are all that effective.  I call this the “Neil Gaiman Problem.”  I like Neil Gaiman.  He is interesting and on BlueSky, so I followed him.  Neil Gaiman would very much like BlueSky to succeed so is putting in the effort by interacting with his followers.  That means I can look at BlueSky and see 47 messages in a row that are Neil Gaiman replying with a bland pleasantry to every person who responded to something he posted.  That, I fear, does not make BlueSky very interesting.

Basically, BlueSky could be good at some point, but it is still getting there.

• Threads – Ending is better than mending

Happily news free content since May 2024!

Threads is not being taken seriously for good reason.  To start with, it is very much Instagram for words, with the same sort of algorithm where you see something in you feed, but if you somehow refresh you’ll never find it again unless you are following the person who posted it and go to their profile.  But most of the stuff in your feed is from randos that the algorithm throws at you… and all of it is brands and cat pictures and light, happy fare.

None of it is news, however.  The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, is on Threads telling people that they are actively suppressing news content, and especially politically focused news content, because it makes people unhappy and distracts from the capitalism and the absolute need to foster desire for luxury goods and expensive vacations.  He much prefers content from creatives and you should too!  (Also, this might be Zuck’s trying to duck the election influence issue since that would cost money he could otherwise be throwing at the Metaverse or AI or whatever he is on about lately.)

Just to make things even more banal, Threads is planning a swipe left/right option for content… Tinder for cat pictures and luxury goods… though I can’t remember which way means what and it likely won’t work correctly in the browser for another year if history is any guide.

But my greatest issues with Threads is that they only have a phone app that scales up badly to my iPad and that they took the adequate initial web version and forced it to look like and behave like the phone app so it is freaking awful to use now.  JFC, these people.

• Mastodon – Still the Linux of Social Media

Still the refuge you’re looking for if you want no algorithm and a quiet little silo of people to interact with.  Is that social media though?  Is there such a thing as anti-social media?  Limited social media?  Siloed social media?

The reputation it has for being filled with strident rule makers who will lecture you about how you violated their internal belief system with something you did or did not do is overblown, but not entirely undeserved.  I find that the block button works… in both directions… so that takes care of you intruding on somebody else’s curated reality.

It is the site where, as a percentage, I interact with more of my actual followers… once we pare down the count from all the multiple follows from people who have changed servers… than any other of the Twitter pretenders.

But that number seems to be about six.  Six people make for a pretty quiet Discord server, much less a social media experience.

Yeah, I follow other people, lots of people, often people I follow on the other sites because I am not alone on spreading my bets in the hope of finding the Twitter replacement that best suits me.  That means I see a lot of things on multiple sites… and my followers who do the same see my stuff in multiple locations.  You know who you are.  I like your stuff here and then over on BlueSky and sometimes again on X.com.

This situation stops at Threads because, as noted, nobody takes Threads seriously.  Well, nobody who follows me elsewhere does.  Molly Jong-Fast is trying to take Threads seriously for all of us… but it isn’t working.  It is cat pictures and luxury goods and stolen memes all the way down.

And it probably says something about Mastodon that in the middle of writing about it I went off on Threads again.  It is also dull, in its own special algorithm free way.  If that is what you like, you have found your place.

• Spoutible – When One Topic is Enough

As a site Spoutible has some technical issues… I could never stay logged in and the site totally started breaking in Firefox, another victim of the “everybody uses Chrome” mentality of so many developers… so I eventually gave up on it.

But my persistence there for about 8 months was not rewarded by very much in the way of engagement.  There was no room for video games, or entertainment in general, on Spoutible.

Instead it was all political… which wouldn’t be bad, but it was all very much anti-Trump memes.  And, while I can very much get behind the sentiment, believing as I do that another term as president would be the end of democracy in the United States, I am not sure that goal is moved forward by participating in an echo chamber.  An echo chamber with the right message is still an echo chamber, and I am already on board so don’t need constant reinforcement and reassurance.

• Post.news – Ex Post Facto

Post News is dead, having failed to make the cut.  It will be remembered as more dull than Mastodon and falling over literally any time Elon sneezed and half a dozen people tried to jump ship.

It was not ready for prime time and now it never will be.

• Other Outliers

At one point Automattic was trying to promote Tumblr as a possible inheritor of the Twitter crown.  I feel like anybody suggesting that had either never used Twitter or never used Tumblr.  Also, one follower on Mastodon also follows me on Tumblr where my post go automatically because the same people who own WordPress own Tumblr as well… a fact which might point to the third alternative explanation; lack of a grip on reality.

Substack Notes… well, my opinion there hasn’t changed in a year.  It sucked then, existing only as a way to promote your substack and I suspect it sucks now.

So that gets me through the options and… I feel like the only appropriate response is a standard internet meme.

I just wanted one platform to win out… one that wasn’t run by a horrible racist.  But you don’t always get what you want.  So it goes.

Summer is Coming!

I live in California, so I don’t worry too much about winter as even when it is bad… storms and rain… that is generally good for us.  Summer though… it is going to be a hot one.  It was already up in the 90s this week and the first official day of summer, June 20th, hasn’t even arrived yet.

On the good news front, we got a heat pump central forced air system for the house, so after 17 years in our place we will have air conditioning in the summer.  We’ll be getting solar installed at last early next month so we’ll have the electricity to drive the heat pump which, while it is energy efficient, still draws power.

But that is neither here nor there for this post.  I wanted to list out some things coming up in June.  I know, isn’t that what the “Coming Up” section of my month in review post is for?  Sure, but I forgot some things, found out about some new things, and I’ll put pictures and links in this post.  So let’s go!

• WoW: The War Within Beta – June 5th

Yeah, that was Wednesday, but you’re not too late if you want to participate.  There is a whole page dedicated to the beta, what content will be available, and how to join here.

The War Within is, of course, the next expansion due later this year for retail WoW.  Being somewhat divorced from retail since early in Shadowlands, I have some mild interest in the expansion, but going to retail these days is like going to a foreign country… they do all the same stuff as us… or classic… but it is all slightly different and awkward for a naive traveler like myself.  But I’ve been over all of that already, haven’t I?

But a beta… I haven’t done a retail WoW beta since Cataclysm, and we saw how that went.

• Valheim on MacOS – June 10th

2021’s huge indy survival success, Valheim, will be making the move to MacOS as the developers look for new markets to conquer.

I guess it will be on Steam.  Does Microsoft Games even support MacOS?  Maybe?  I don’t know.

But Iron Gate assures us that it will support cross-play, so if you setup a server for you PC buddies and a friend with a Mac shows up, they can play too.  I don’t have a Mac anymore… I mean, technically there are at least three MacOS computers in the house as I write this, but I do not actively work or play on the Mac these days.

• EVE Online Equinox Expansion – June 11th

I suppose if I am listing things out I need to include this.  The big old Equinox expansion is coming on Tuesday.

We shall see then who exactly is seizing control and whether or not null sec will be upended or if it is a great big nothing burger.  The ship SKINR should be neat, depending on how they plan to tax people to use it.

• EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server – After June 13th

The jump back to a more authentic 2006 experience with the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server is slated to land this month.  The beta is slated to end on June 13th… so maybe the following Tuesday, the 18th?  Or maybe the 14th?  We’ll have to see.

It may seem a bit odd to go back 18 years for a 20th anniversary celebration, but the 2006 experience marks the settling point for the game, where it finally decided what it was for the moment and moved forward with content.  I wrote my views on this decision a while back, and plan to give it a peek when it shows up.

• Pax Dei Early Access – June 18th

Pax Dei is entering Early Access.  What does that mean?  All sorts of things I suppose and they have a whole post about it.

As a title it has been kind of on my watch list… I subscribe to their Discord server news channel so updates there show up in the blog’s Discord server… you can join if you like here… but given all the other stuff I have on my list for June, I feel like Pax Dei might not make the cut… especially since they want $40 to be a founder.  I already have $40 unplayed games in Steam, I am not sure I need another.

Also, there will be pwipes.  I don’t have time for that.  Call me when it ships.

• Steam Summer Sale – June 20th

The first day of summer, the summer solstice, and Steam is usually pretty good about kicking off the Steam Summer Sale on that day.

Will I buy anything?  That is always the question.  As noted above, I have my share of unplayed titles already, and I bought a bunch over the Winter Sale… and then ended up playing Valheim.

You can see your own Steam stats over at SteamDB.

Also, as it came out last week, when you cannot pass on your Steam titles.  You die, your account is dead… unless your give your kids your password and have family sharing on or something.  I am sure there is a work around, but it is just a reminder that nothing “digital” you buy is actually yours.  (Word is GoG.com might let you pass things on to your heirs, but there is paperwork involved.)

You want to have access to something it needs a physical… though even that isn’t a guarantee.  Sonus loves to brick their older sound systems and Spotify is bricking their car player later this year… though you might get a refund after a lot of outrage at their “fuck you” attitude about the whole thing… and all sorts of “smart” home devices end up getting bricked by Google or whoever buys the company then discontinues them.

Anyway, side rant there.  But for our new heat pump I got a dumb Honeywell thermostat.  No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no other connectivity or ability to host Russian bot nets, and no way for Honeywell to shut it down without showing up at my doorstep.

• Tarisland Launch – June 21st

Tarisland, Tencent’s everybody-says-it-is-a-WoW-knockoff MMORPG title is set to go live on Windows, Android, and iOS on the second day of summer.

Tencent is promising all the things, diverse classes, challenging raids, a flexible talent system, excellent graphics, all in a free to play package with a cash shop that I am sure will have all the usual items in it.

Still, it is the first MMORPG from a big player to hit our market since maybe Lost Ark.

As with everything Tencent has a big post about joining in on the fun.  We’ll see if I can find the time for it come launch day.

• ICQ Shutting Down – June 26th

Children of the 90s… or maybe those of us who were young-ish adults of the 90s… hear me and weep.  What might have been the first instant messenger platform I ever used, ICQ, is going away on June 26th!

This was one of those one-two punch bits of news where I was saddened to find that ICQ was going away, but first I was surprised it was even still around.

What to say?  Way back in the day we used to use it to tell people to log in for a zone in TorilMUD.  I kept the login going well into the 2000s with Trillian.  Somewhere along the line I let it go, forgot the password, couldn’t remember my number, and basically moved on.

Still, it was quite a thing back in the day.  I told somebody I had a 5 digit ICQ number… but it might have been a 6 digit number.  This was like 25 years ago or more, right?  I had it before I had a Yahoo account, and they sent me a 25 year anniversary notice last year. (I noted the 24th anniversary message they sent me, but decided that didn’t have to be an EVERY year thing.)

Anyway, that was all I had for June.  Did I miss anything?  I mean, at least anything there is a chance I might play?  I am not really primed for things like the Elden Ring expansion of whatever is going on in FFXIV.