so, I've always thought that blind's "we'll verify your presence by sending you shit on your corp mail" (which, y'know, mail logs etc....) is kinda a fucking awful idea. but!

this is remarkably fucking unhinged:

you probably don’t know this, but this post is so much funnier than you probably meant it

and it (probably) still won’t save you

my heuristic: I can understand a shitty past giving crescent to bad reactions, but the moment you start choosing bad things with current-era things I rapidly start losing grace and patience

(and yeah I know there's a continuum of stuff between A and B, but anyone showing up in a fucking news article of this shape is generally well past accident)

yeah I was grimacing at the partlist, but I think I'd still do it

I haven't meaningfully touched lego in like 15y and haven't engaged with basically any of the starwars-y or latter-decades kits at all. but for this.. it'd make a hell of a sweet display piece

the other thing about this that's often come to mind for me is that the "who" picked in such things tends to be telling of the speaker, and of their perception of "impenetrable"

relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was "it's greek to me". I don't know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.

which leads to my sidebar and sneer: it'd be nice if it were easier to research things like this, and good god the modern internet makes it hard to do that. holy fuck what a tsunami of dogshit. and then fucking LLMs and openai come around, going "HOLD MY BEER". le sigh.

it's even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)

primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been "crypto = bae" for going on 5~6y now (that I'm aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it's been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)

in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they'll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.

and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime ("plexing"). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.

so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of "we want to add NFTs to tq" came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, "not well received" would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase "Not For Tranquility"

which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little "gem". it's hard to get specific details because they're fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn't want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely "get fucked", and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)

I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival

[0] - it took less than 2mo from the "would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve ...." survey going out to the announcement "hey surprise! we have an fps!"[1]

[1] - again. they've failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.

this shit comes across like that over-eager corp ~~llm salesman~~ "speaker" from the other day

what on earth kind of post is this

poster name checks out, and I didn’t even get to see the dumb

LAION reckons it's finally dealt with the CSAM

and I'm sure everyone who trained on that can easily integrate this change, right. right?

oh, right, they can't, because none of the chucklefuck shit works that way. but I'm sure they'll totes jump right onto a full retraining cycle, because they're such good and ethical people who totally live the values they claim

are you sure that you understand the context and meaning of what you just quote-replied on?

if nothing else, their willingness to always and rapidly tell you who they are is definitely a useful marker for when to turn on the egress-o-matic for the whole domain