Your sentiment is not specific to the tech industry. Many who work in tech are quite blessed to have careers that, despite the supposed realities you mention, give them a quality of life others can only dream of.
Since the backups are encrypted with my one time pad, I don't need a ton of trust, just reliability that they'll send me the encrypted codes. I already have them on the subreddit I made in my other comment, buuut, it's always nice to have another layer of redundancy, right?
The biggest problem is re-using passwords. Remember when that LinkedIn password database with plaintext/md5 (easily brute-forced) was leaked a few years back? And who knows what's going on with Heroku right now. There's been dozens, hundreds, thousands of leaks like this, from well known sites like LinkedIn to that small independent webshop where you ordered something a few years ago. And for at least some people those credentials that worked on LinkedIn may also work on GitHub.
Having a unique password per service solves that particular issue. But you're right that there's a "price" in that losing access to your passwords would leave you screwed. I'd strongly recommend making sure you at least memorize your email password, as well as backing it up in several places.
The way my mind understands this as actions across the passage of time:
1. Ron created the games back then
2. People played the games back then. Some people absolutely loved the games and had a profound impact on them
3. 20+ years of life happened to Ron and those who played and loved the games. During that time, great distortions occur: nostalgia, rose-coloured glasses, older memories become shinier memories
4. Ron decides to make sequel based on who he is now
5. Step 3 causes fear of the ruin of a legacy and tainting of protected childhood memories (cough Star Wars cough). This is the present.
6a. Game is released
6b. Some hardcore fans love it, some hardcore fans hate it. As it ever was.
And specifically to this comment:
>There's a proper way to take criticism from a passionate fanbase of 20+ years.
There's some kind of ridiculous level of entitlement in dictating how an artist should take criticism. Were I to have any say in it, I'd dictate this:
Fucking ignore it and be true to your own creative vision. After all, that's the same way the magic has been created previously.
His response seems entirely reasonable, and some grumpiness is definitely expected from someone whose domain is literally grumpygamer.com. As a fan of the originals, I also see nothing wrong with the art style of the new game.
Honestly there's very little good about video calls. I would prefer In-Person ideally, but if that is not possible, it is always more productive to just use slack or email. Or just a short audio call.
I think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully.
I love working from home more these days, but those days I do go into the office I find that meetings are way more engaging and productive. Being face-to-face with folks it's just much harder to disengage and focus attention elsewhere.
"People think there is more social connection.. ..but we found the exact opposite. So we found in the virtual condition, people are looking significantly more at their partner, almost double."
If anything, the video suggests video calls are problematic because individuals focus too much on being presentable and looking at their conference partners, rather than putting their focus on the actual activity. Quite the opposite of tuning out deliberately (even if this is still possible).
In one on ones, or small groups, maybe, but most of my meetings are just board rooms full of glassy eyed people, staring, trying not to look like they're going to fall asleep, caching JUST enough of what's being said to respond without looking entirely stupid if called on by the only person who actually cares about the meeting: the person running it.
Most meetings can (and in my opinion should) be emails or chat messages. My rule is that I only go to meetings where there is a demonstration of some kind that cant be sent in an email, or cake.
for me the biggest problem is how the flow of natural conversation is broken in video calls.
1 person gets to talk as long as they dont get interrupted or leave a long enough gap for other folks to speak up.
its like talking but with a 5 second latency.
so what ends up happening is people dont like to be rude, so they dont speak up unless theres a long gap of silence.
but gaps dont happen because usually 1-2 people hoard the discussion, you know the type who never pause between sentences and drone on and on.
in real life those people would be sidelined because people look away and have side conversations. but in a virtual meeting these people hijack every conversation for the entire hour
Then that is a failure of the person running the meeting.
You, as an individual, can also deploy several redirection techniques to shut those people down in either virtual meetings or in-person meetings.
Tacit approval is either given by non-verbal acknowledgement (looking at them), vocalized agreement, e.g. "uhuh", "yeah", "and then what happened?", or by silence.
I have an internal count that I do when someone starts talking and I become conscious of the interlocutor:
"Hey, I need to interject, you raise a valid point about X but I have a question around it, <name of other participant>, what do you think of <completely unrelated subject>?"
And you repeat the "Hey, I need to interject,hey, I have a question, Hey, I need to interject" until the other person stops long enough.
Some days, you just have to be firm and get into the conversation.
You can also just butt in with "Hey, that's interesting but it sounds like we are lost in the technical weeds, could we please take this offline or move it to a different meeting?" If the person running the meeting doesn't pick up on that, they shouldn't be running the meeting.
I also like to drop in "Hey, I have to cut this short, I've got another meeting I need to run too, can we move this along?"
People are very unaware when talking on the phone or in a video meeting. Like literally they become deaf. After three or four attempts of interjecting in a very short period of time of just 15 seconds or so, if the person isn't listening, I've just started talking directly to the meeting running directly over them and saying "we need to move on. Can you mute him?" It might be considered rude, but it's what everyone is thinking.
I still think this is much more of a problem with video calls. Sure, the person running the meeting can take concrete steps to mitigate it slightly, but it's still added friction relative to in-person sessions.
What you are describing may be a better way to hold a generic video meeting but it does really highlight how bad video calls are for brainstorming in particular. What you are describing would be terrible for that.
The redirection process though is a huge amount of effort which might be why OP (or someone else in the thread) mentioned their thought process specifically around video calls being a more painful way to engage in discussions
My team has (not entirely consistently) tried to encourage people to use the "raise hand" button in the video call software if someone would like to speak. The currently person talking can either pause, or finish up what they're saying and then hand things over to the person who raised their hand.
Yes, that is a good method. But some are oblivious, and again, it comes down to the meeting runner to enforce that. "I need to cut in here, Justin has had his hand raised for some time and I want to address his points or questions before we wander away from the topic." Again, meeting running/manager needs to be firm. The people that drone on and on are frequently oblivious to everything except what they want to say next.
Absolutely. Sometimes with coworkers I'm relatively close to, we'll have those side conversations in a Slack chat...but then that's just making the argument for Slack.
> I think part of the problem is that video calls make it super-easy to context switch and do something else the minute the meeting becomes uninteresting (e.g. a topic that doesn't apply to you, or just a very dry discussion). Once your attention wanders elsewhere, its hard to reengage meaningfully.
This is as true in in-person meetings where people are allowed to bring in their laptops. It was a common problem pre-pandemic, and I'd often criticize meeting organizers for having a poor meeting format (e.g. team meeting every week or two weeks with unclear agendas, or having agenda items where each item only involves 1-3 people, but since it's a different set of 1-3 people for each agenda item, everyone is forced to be present for the whole meeting, etc).
Even when no laptops or phones are present, people who are not interested in the current topic will find a way to zone out. Especially in longer meetings with more than 4-5 people it is an illusion to have everybody engaged all the time.
I hardly use video on my meetings. I tend to use screenshare and voice only except in circumstances where a higher fidelity is required.
I find working together on a document keeps attendees focused (along with a few tips/tricks like polling individuals, aligning current discussion with others' previously stated ideas and writing what people say as verbatim as possible)
I miss landline telephones. For whatever reason, the audio clarity of video conferencing still has not touched the quality we used to get out of old fashioned analogue over copper.
Some of it might be nostalgia, but some of it is definitely latency and jitter. Even into the 90s there was only so much latency on a phone call and most phone lines tried their hardest to _act_ circuit-switched. The average video caller is on WiFi, so there's packet buffering at the AP (which can be quite large since most people are running meh quality consumer routers at home), again at the router, then however many hops until the RTP endpoint. Jitter can be quite large. That doesn't even get into the scourge that is modern NAT and the possibility of TURN relays along the way.
One quick "hack" is to do your conferencing on a box connected to your router via Ethernet (or through switches). It can help bad connection paths but it's not a panacea. Another is if you have a slow internet connection, try to get a router with QoS and apply that to prioritize your VoIP packets.
Unfortunately other than cellular standards, there's no good way way to easily get a low latency, low jitter connection as most packet switching is optimized around throughput. Personally we use Zoom at work and I know the Zoom edge has low jitter to me so if anyone needs to VC me at work, they should get "as good as it gets". For my personal VC needs I ended up using Matrix and hosting a TURN server in a DC that peers directly with my ISP. Folks in my area can call me on it through WebRTC and get latency on the 3-6ms range.
Analog voice service is limited to 300–3,300 Hz, and being analog, subject to line noise/static/etc. About the only constant with it was that people would hold handsets up to their heads that were purpose-built, and reliably had a decent minimal level of quality.
With IP-based conferencing, you get as good as the worst link. A lot of people use built-in microphones on their laptops in a noisy room, and so the audio sounds like garbage. The people with consistently high quality have gaming-style headsets (or really, any >$100 headset). There's a couple people I talk with that have (inexpensive) studio-style microphones on boom arms, and they sound phenomenal.
Of course it could be you. If you're listening using garbage headphones or the built-in speakers in your laptop, it doesn't really matter how great other people's microphones are.
You're clearly misremembering the quality of analog phone lines; at their worst they're better than a bad IP-based service, but at their best they are blown out of the water by people that put even a modicum of effort into their setup.
Jitter and buffer bloat are huge issues with VoIP. People that deploy audio VoIP solutions often terminate VoIP at the nearest router to the WAN they can and use DECT to serve wireless VoIP phones because of how bad WiFi can be for jitter. It's not as simple as your setup and codecs.
Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.
Monkey Island 2 is a masterpiece. The 2D hand drawn style and animation are a huge part of it.
I'll take any Monkey Island sequel, but if you take a closer look at say the Tales of Monkey Island sequels, you'll see what people are worried about.
Monkey Island 4 was TERRIBLE. Fully 3D and tank controls. Tales of Monkey Island was great but completely ruined by terrible tank controls.
A proper Monkey Island games needs to be
1. Point and Click
2. Have excellent puzzle design and structure
3. Ideally 2D hand drawn art and animation
4. Least important, Pixelated style like MI2 or Loom
People who are critizing the trailer are worried we're getting another Tales of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 4.
As long as you nail #1 (proper point and click controls) I think you will still make a better Monkey Island sequel since Curse of Monkey Island
> Ron you really should not be bashing your oldest most hard core fans.
I don't read anything Ron said as "bashing". He explains why he is not interested in making pixel art games. He is also promising you this is the best possible Monkey Island game he can make, one he is proud of.
CTRL+F of "hate" and "hating" gives zero results in that page. This is what Ron actually says about some fans:
> "It's ironic that the people who don't want me to make the game I want to make are some of the hard core Monkey Island fans. And that is what makes me sad about all the comments."
And that's it. He's not "bashing" all fans, not even some fans. He's just explaining his vision and what his goal is for this Monkey Island game, and also expressing disappointment that some fans don't want him to make the game he wants.
I think his points are solid. Monkey Island I & II weren't retrogames, and so it makes sense he won't try to turn this Monkey Island into a retrogame either.
My mileage certainly differs. I loved how it looked, but to me it is by far the weakest of the lucasarts games I played (and I played all but the first Maniac Mansion and Zac McKraken). It is far too difficult! Far too many locations and items, you just get overwhelmed in the middle part of the game.
The new game isn't 3D, you're right. At least from the trailer I can assume so. But I wouldn't rule it out completely. Let's see when we actually get some gameplay.
But it still feels like a major downgrade to Curse of Monkey Island or the originals.
It looks like every other game, very generic style. It's lost the charm of the original games IMO.
I think Ron has an opportunity to differentiate his game from all the bad sequels we got before it.
"All the bad sequels"? From all Monkey Island games, I'd say only Escape could be considered somewhat bad. It felt rather uninspired compared to others, control scheme was awful and it aged the worst way of all MI games. All the rest are really great.
Monkey Island series has been drastically changing the art style in its every single installment. When it comes to this new style, I find it hard to judge from still unpopulated screenshots, as they feel way too static to me. The trailer looks nice though.
If you ignore the awful controls and equally awful minigames, I think Escape is still a fun pirate tale with a lot of things to love about it. I think the plot's overall is pretty inspired about the gentrification of the pirate islands, and it's the natural progression from Curse's exploration of the same themes (which in turn those themes going all the back to things like Secret's used boat sales lot). A lot of Escape is extremely funny, too. It just has that huge grind in the middle made worse by awful controls and environments that were both too big and too densely packed with sight gags and too empty all at once.
"Somewhat bad", sure, given those qualifications of pretend the controls and their grind don't exist. But also, more inspired than many give it credit for and still "worst Monkey Island" is a relatively high bar compared to other franchises we could mention.
To me, Escape felt a lot like a fan fiction story. A pretty good one, sure, but it still hatched onto the themes that you mention (which used to be more or less background gags in previous installments without much relevance to the actual story) the way fans usually do when writing their own stories. So you got bombarded with callbacks to previous games, characters you already knew, jokes you already heard, and stories that didn't really feel like natural progression of the lore but more like "what if?" scenarios. Ozzie, Herman, your old crew, LeChuck's role in the whole conspiracy, Giant Monkey Head, Planet Threepwood... compare that to Curse, which genuinely moved the series forward into a new and fresh adventure. It also called back to previous games - it even started with Wally right in the first scene who didn't really need to be there - but it always felt like an addition to the game's story, or a glue that makes a Monkey Island game a Monkey Island game, rather than something it relies on to be funny or interesting (after all, we meet Murray right after meeting Wally in Curse, and I don't think any character introduced in Escape is even close to how strong Murray is as a character).
Escape would be a great spin-off - it's still a genuinely fun and engaging adventure game if you can look past its shortcomings. However, as an entry in the main series, it feels a bit wrong, and definitely the weakest. It's not "a pirate tale with good share of silliness" anymore, but rather "a silly tale with good share of pirates". I bet that most of the stuff in the new game that will end up contradicting older games' canon will be stuff that goes at odds with Escape in particular, mostly thanks to its plot twists for the sake of plot twists and taking previous games' gags way too seriously :P
I know Schafer wasn't involved in EMI and so had no direct interest in doing it but with the huge underlying similarities in the engine it would have been nice to get an EMI remaster side-by-side the Grim Fandango remaster with similar controls improvements.
One of these days maybe SCUMMVM will finally get around to gifting us the right controls for EMI to make it truly fun to experience.
Yes we did. MI1 and 2 was great because they were pushing the technological limitations, trying to be the best puzzle games they could, and were made by a great, talented, and enthusiastic team. Not because it was catering to entitled fans with rose tinted glasses.
and then has to fill up on gas but decides to just walk