What If Your Ape Could Rap? Ft. Ryan Broderick
Added 2022-01-18 12:21:04 +0000 UTCThis week, we finally have to address the big ape with laser eyes smoking weed in the room and is worth over £5 million for some reason. Yes, we are talking about NFTs, the crypto economy, and what's driving this accelerated faith that bored apes and lazy lions are apparently going to rescue capitalism from itself. We're joined by Ryan Broderick (@Broderick) from The Content Mines and the Garbage Day Newsletter, to talk about why Mike Shinoda, the rapper from Linkin Park, seems to think they're the future. Then we talk about a recent-ish essay from Hamilton Nolan about what happens if or when the crypto economy fails. Nolan believes that the most likely outcome is probably reactionary fascism, but is this hyperbole? Or, could something worse actually happen instead? It's like a fun game to figure out what the dumbest way we could all die could be.
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You can read Hamilton Nolan's Essay here: https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-ticking-bomb-of-crypto-fascism
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Subscribe to Ryan's Newsletter at : www.garbageday.email
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Ten Thousand Posts is a show about how everything is posting. It's hosted by Hussein (@HKesvani), Phoebe (@PRHRoy) and produced by Devon (@Devon_OnEarth).
Comments
after seeing Dan Olsen's incredible deep dive on crypto/NFTs (you guys should try get him on - no idea of he'd do podcasts though) I'm now erring on the idea that to believe ABSOLUTELY ANY of crypto/Web3 is useful or saveable for genuine project reasons is as bad as the absolute worst cynic scamming people into it so personally, I wholeheartedly hope the guest here can stop giving credence AT ALL to Web 3 and crypto, no matter how genuine the creators he mentioned are (edit: actually holy shit, I think the guest references or alludes to one of the "benevolent actors" Dan Olsen does) the rest of his analysis was interesting and overall he seems pretty smart, good pick this ep
oranjest1
2022-01-25 03:48:25 +0000 UTCAt the moment, it's a bit hard to tell who is a sucker true-believer, who is a grifter cashing in, and who is just a trend-follower going where the easy money is. There is reportedly a fair bit of crypto-money out there for a studio looking for investors, so you've got a mix of grifters, griftees, and desperate workers in a brutally grinding industry out there, all of them willing to get in bed with some crypto-scheme or another. NFT-games are just kind of the apotheosis of the grifter-victim uncertainty principle. The very problem of needing to leverage NFTs in the game means making game-design decisions that produce terrible, and very predictable outcomes (it will be a collection game - whether that collection game is a gacha-game, a TCG, fantasy football, or a monster battler, its central mechanic will be collection). The result is that you can look at most of them and say "this would not look any different if it were just a scam" and "this would not look any different if it were a true-believer falling for the scam" and not be sure which you're dealing with. And, from my experience with crypto-types, the answer can absolutely be "all of the above" with surprisingly little cognitive dissonance. Good luck with the advert/with getting out of doing it.
Violet
2022-01-21 02:42:32 +0000 UTCI (hussein) would love to hear more about this. it sounds horrible and ghoulish!
Ten Thousand Posts
2022-01-20 10:05:02 +0000 UTCI've been scheduled to start working on a awful nft game advert in a few weeks and I'm absolutely dreading the icky feeling of working on promo for a blatant scam. Hopefully I can wangle my way out of it 🤞 I've seen one of the companies other 'games' and it's basically a spreadsheet with static pictures of swords in it, like laughably bad. God knows how they're affording the advert, probably all that sweet scam money.
Rach
2022-01-19 01:27:32 +0000 UTCYou can follow ryan at @broderick on Twitter (where there are links to garbage day/content mines pod)!
Ten Thousand Posts
2022-01-19 01:09:45 +0000 UTCWhere is the guests twitter all I heard was twitter dot inaudible
GOOBER
2022-01-19 00:07:21 +0000 UTCSo, let’s talk a bit about the whole “games and NFTs” thing. First, let’s get the principle engineer on Valorant to weigh in on game-to-game skin porting. Jules? Take it away. https://twitter.com/heyjulesfern/status/1480333960982908928 Now, the barriers Jules discusses here are real, but, like she implies, there are ways you can work-around these problems. The thing is, to do so, you basically have to sacrifice visual fidelity, gameplay, developer-flexibility, and probably the lives and sanity of at least one entire QA department. You can create hard standards for in-game models so that your transferable content doesn’t become a lovecraftian horror when projected onto the model for some other game. Great, cool, so now there’s a limited set of models a game can include. Is the art team limited by this? Sure, but now you can play your Valorant skin in WoW, so who cares if all the trolls are human-sized and human-shaped now? You can standardize a “skin file” format (assuming you don’t end up trapped in the n + 1 standards loop), establish some system for governing that standard, re-implement games to use standardized models, probably end up making gameplay that was tuned to the specific graphics of the pre-existing game feel janky and mistimed, and leave behind problems of content control (Oh good, a new Safe Harbor/DMCA hellscape!) and quality control (“REND-0145: [Visual Defect] skin-files can use missing vertex data interpolation to create cosmic horror on model_3 (Not safe for Euclidean geometry)”). And once you’ve weakened artistic direction, limited gameplay customization, driven your engineering and QA teams half-mad with bizarre edge-cases, and likely necessitated new case-law specific to protecting Copyrighted content, you will now be able to replace your Valorant weapon with a rifle with a decal of an ape holding a blunt. But you didn’t actually need an NFT to do any of that. All of that could be done via a more-efficient, service-based, centralized system. If game companies wanted to do that, they’d already be doing that, just without needing to torch acres of the rainforest to do it. It wouldn’t even be that hard to implement the “functionality” that being an NFT adds to this proposed system. A Postgres cluster, a simple public API, integration with standard payment providers, and an identity-provider implementation. A couple weeks work for a single dev if they are being meticulous. Maybe a few months for a team of four if you really want to overpolish the turd. Valve could probably build the feature into Steam in the space of a week, if they were motivated enough. All the NFT is is a way of validating that “you own” some abstract piece of content, and all it does is provide an excessively expensive means of maintaining a public system for tracking that ownership. At best, it’s a means of standardizing indicia of digital ownership in a titularly mutual and anonymized manner. It has nothing to do with the sprawling problem of sharing content between games and game-engines. It’s just a very specific receipt made by burning a small piece of somebody else’s future. As is always the case with technological fads, the least important problem has been solved and the technology chattering class are dancing in the end zone. Uber has reinvented taxis and the tech journalist sector are raving about their future fleet of autonomous vehicles (actual engineering solution to vehicle autonomy pending). Elon has invented the idea of a one-way underground road and his Twitter stans are declaring the birth of a new form of “public” transit (actual engineering solution to autonomous vehicles, system scheduling, and not potentially killing dozens of users in a firestorm pending). The reason people aren’t trying to solve this problem isn’t the trivial problem that we’d really already solved, it’s the massive pile of problems that everyone is conveniently ignoring while trying to sell you on a future that isn’t going to happen anyway. But, hey, at least you’ve got a sweet jpeg of an ape-centric version of the Procession of the Magi!
Violet
2022-01-18 22:45:24 +0000 UTCre: the intro, has anyone found MBS’s Steam account
Allen
2022-01-18 20:35:33 +0000 UTC
