Tag Archives: Just Rambling

Computer Generated Nonsense on Tap

It has come to this, I am going to post about ChatGPT.

AI and ChatGPT have been very much the rage online as it has been proven that a computer program can, with enough data input, imitate the most empty and banal writing known to man. Or at least this man, if man I be. The world is so stupid sometimes that I am not fully ruling out the whole “brain in a jar” hypothesis.

I am not wholly against the idea. I can see potential in the tech for many things; idea generation, creation of mundane filler text (no more Lorem Ipsum), structuring information, and the occasional silly poem or song about a specific topic, though apparently ChatGPT has its limits.

It’s full potential will never be realized until it creates porn

Though it seems the former president is the inappropriate or offensive content. I asked for a song about his hair being sucked into a jet engine and got the same response.

Anyway, I started thinking about this when somebody dropped a Washington Post quiz in a Discord chat that asked people to try and identify the AI generated content. I came away from that really not caring about the answers as the text versions were not only really bland boiler plate style text, but were also on topics that I neither knew nor cared about. I could barely read them I was so aggressively uninterested.

Meanwhile, Bhagpuss was fiddling around with ChatGPT last week, having it write reviews for games he hadn’t played, and the output was also superficially convincing though, again, not about anything I had any real knowledge of, so it seemed fine to me because I couldn’t care enough to check any of it.

So I decided to run a few things through the bot about topics on which I was more fully versed. I played around with things like biographies of people like my great uncle. This is where I noticed ChatGPT’s tendency towards flights of fancy as it got most of the material facts of his life wrong.

But that was also a pretty narrow topic. So I decided to go on to video games, asking it to write a press release for Blizzard announcing that NFTs will be part of the next World of Warcraft expansion. I got this.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Blizzard Announces NFT Integration in the Next World of Warcraft Expansion

IRVINE, Calif. – Blizzard Entertainment is thrilled to announce that NFTs (non-fungible tokens) will be a part of the next World of Warcraft expansion, Shadowlands: Chains of Domination.

The integration of NFTs will allow players to own and trade unique in-game items, such as mounts, weapons, and armor, that are backed by blockchain technology. This exciting new feature will provide players with a sense of ownership and authenticity, as well as a new level of value to their in-game assets.

“We are excited to bring NFTs to World of Warcraft,” said J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment. “This integration allows us to explore new avenues for player engagement and opens up a new world of possibilities for the World of Warcraft community.”

The introduction of NFTs in Shadowlands: Chains of Domination will provide players with a new layer of immersion and engagement, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the game’s rich and expansive world. The integration will also allow for greater player autonomy and control, providing a more democratic and inclusive gaming experience.

Blizzard is committed to ensuring that the integration of NFTs in Shadowlands: Chains of Domination is a safe and secure experience for all players. The company has taken extensive measures to ensure that the NFTs are tamper-proof and secure, and players can have confidence in the authenticity of their in-game items.

Shadowlands: Chains of Domination is set to release later this year, and Blizzard looks forward to bringing this exciting new feature to the World of Warcraft community. For more information, please visit the official World of Warcraft website.

About Blizzard Entertainment Best known for blockbuster hits including World of Warcraft®, Hearthstone®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, and StarCraft®, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (www.blizzard.com), a division of Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI), is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment software renowned for creating some of the industry’s most critically acclaimed games. Blizzard Entertainment’s track record includes twenty-two #1 games* and numerous Game of the Year awards. The company’s online gaming service, Battle.net®, is one of the largest in the world, with millions of active players.

That is a pretty convincing simulacrum of a Blizzard press release… if you not very little about World of Warcraft. If you know that Shadowlands was already and expansion or that J. Allen Brack has been gone for a couple of years, it is less convincing. And have they really had 22 #1 games?

But I was asking the bot to speculate, and maybe that wasn’t fair. So I settled down on something more direct. I asked it to write a short history of Sony Online Entertainment. After all, that is something I have some knowledge of, having thrown together a timeline of the company previously. And just to spice things up, I also asked Microsoft’s Bing ChatAI and Google’s Bard AI to answer the prompt as well.

The Bing AI was direct and to the point, lacking any flourish.

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) began with Sony Interactive Studios America (SISA), an internal game development studio of Sony, formed by 1995. In 1996, John Smedley was put in charge of SISA’s development of an online role-playing video game. The game would evolve into the MMORPG EverQuest ¹.

In April 1998, SOE was formed by merging parts of Sony Online Ventures with Sony Pictures Entertainment ¹. Within a matter of months after this change, Sony Interactive Studios America was renamed 989 Studios ¹. Towards the end of 1998, 989 Studios shifted its strategy to making PlayStation games ¹.

In February 2015, SOE was sold to investment firm Columbus Nova and rebranded as Daybreak Game Company ¹.

There isn’t a lot going on there, but that seems to be the way of Bing’s AI. It doesn’t go into great depth, but the details of the different organizations that eventually coalesced into Sony Online Entertainment are a bit foggy to me to this day. Gaming magazine articles from the time often used the names like Verant, 989 Studios, and various groups within Sony interchangeably, sometimes in the same article. The fact that 989 went off in another direction doesn’t seem much on point.

Bing, despite its brevity, did link to sources. I will give it that. And it is certain that SOE was sold to Columbus Nova, something Daybreak has been deceptive about, to say the least. But the AI also seemed content to pull everything from the same Wikipedia article, like a 5th grader writing a report.

Google’s Bard, on the other hand, holds no tuck with reality and spins a unique tale that diverges considerably from the reality in which I live.

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) was an American video game developer and publisher based in San Diego, California. It was founded in December 1997 as a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, but was spun off to an independent investor in February 2015 and renamed Daybreak Game Company.

SOE was one of the leading developers of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Its most popular games included EverQuest, EverQuest II, PlanetSide, Free Realms, and DC Universe Online. SOE also developed and published a number of single-player games, including the EverQuest expansions, The Matrix Online, and The Agency.

In 2015, SOE was acquired by Columbus Nova, an investment firm. The acquisition was seen as a way to help SOE expand its reach into new markets. However, the acquisition was not successful, and SOE was shut down in 2017.

SOE’s legacy lives on through the games that it developed and published. EverQuest and EverQuest II are still popular MMOGs, and PlanetSide is considered one of the best first-person shooters of all time. SOE’s single-player games have also been praised for their graphics, gameplay, and story.

SOE was a pioneer in the development of MMOGs, and its games have helped to shape the online gaming industry. The company’s legacy will continue to live on through the games that it created.

Oof, SOE, you are missed. But your legacy lives on through EverQuest and all those single player titles, like The Matrix Online and The Agency.

Still, it was also on point about Columbus Nova, I’ll give it that.

Now Bard is the newest player on the scene and I just got access to the beta this past week, so it has, perhaps, not been fed all the data it needed to get that prompt right. Still, its willingness to run with the prompt with abandon, creating its own alternate version of the facts, is something to keep in mind… it you’re into some alternate reality fiction.

Finally, there is ChatGPT.

Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) was founded in 1995 as Verant Interactive by John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost. The company initially focused on creating video games for personal computers. Verant Interactive released its first game, “EverQuest,” in 1999. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) quickly became popular, and its success led to Verant Interactive being acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2000.

After the acquisition, Verant Interactive was renamed to Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). SOE continued to develop and publish online games, including “Star Wars Galaxies” and “Planetside.” In 2005, SOE launched “EverQuest II,” the sequel to the original “EverQuest.”

SOE also expanded its offerings beyond traditional MMORPGs with the release of “Free Realms,” a family-friendly online game that offered a mix of different gameplay styles. In 2011, SOE released “DC Universe Online,” a massively multiplayer online action game set in the DC Universe.

In 2015, SOE was sold by Sony to an investment firm and renamed Daybreak Game Company. The company continued to operate many of the games previously released by SOE, including “EverQuest,” “EverQuest II,” and “DC Universe Online.” Daybreak Game Company also began developing new titles, including “H1Z1,” a zombie survival game, and “PlanetSide 2,” a massive multiplayer first-person shooter.

In 2021, Daybreak Game Company was acquired by Enad Global 7, a Swedish video game company. The acquisition included the rights to all of the games previously published by SOE and Daybreak Game Company. Today, the company continues to develop and publish online games under the Daybreak Game Company name.

There are issues in that piece as well. Dates are incorrect… we know that, in the end, no new games were launched under the Daybreak banner that hadn’t been started under SOE… and I am pretty sure Verant was not “acquired” by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2000, at least in the way a one might buy and independent entity. But as I noted above, the early history of SOE and the organizations that ended up being combined into it are a bit murky.

It skipped the whole Columbus Nova thing… coward… but it did carry on to the acquisition by Enad Global 7, though it ends on a pretty generic “still continues to develop and publish online games” phrasing, which is not supported by any direct observation. No new games have been published in years.

So I wouldn’t trust any of them to write anything authoritative. At a minimum I would want to fact check these AIs on any but the most obvious details. I’ll take “the sky was blue,” though I’ll see what the date is and if it was during winter I’ll go check the weather report. (ChatGPT won’t talk about the weather, even for past dates. It tells me to go check the weather report.)

Instead, the most striking thing is probably the assumed authority that comes out of these AI bots.

I saw somebody compare them to a 20 year old male on the internet; completely sure of their facts and wrong in some way on most of them.

Likewise, I think a comparison to news reporting is somewhat apt, that the closer you are to a story, the more likely you are to find errors… and I have never read a news story that I was close to that did not contain errors in fact… but the authority of the news is such that you will assume truth if you have no first hand knowledge.

I suppose the lesson is to be wary, since people seem keen to take short cuts and use these AIs to write news stories rather than just filler text, and the AI makes mistakes as fundamental as any human.

I have no plans to rely on AI for anything other than occasional humor at this point. In any case, I do not believe it could generate a blog post that would fool any regular reader here. I am hesitant about many things in the way the AI (or a 20 year old male on the internet) simply is not.

Still on Twitter

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We had another panic this past week when Elon Musk had API access turned off and nobody told him that their own app uses those very same APIs. The whole Musk venture continues to be one fiasco after another.

Me, on Twitter

This is in parallel to Twitter threatening to charge for access to its API last week… which got pushed to next week. Some companies have already pulled their Twitter integrations, like Blizzard, while others are sending warnings to their customers. I received a message from WordPress warning me something might be up.

Hi there,

Twitter recently announced they would end free access to the Twitter API on February 9th. A recent update extended that date to February 13th.

As a result of these unexpected changes, it is possible that Jetpack Social may experience some temporary outages when automatically sharing your posts directly from WordPress to Twitter.

We’re working with Twitter to find the best solution for our mutual users, so your workflows are not disrupted. We will reach out again when we have more information on the path forward.

Please feel free to connect with support if you need any help.

The WordPress.com team

I have, for about a decade, let WP.com auto-Tweet my posts as they have been published. This might be the last post that goes there automatically. Time will tell.

Then there is the threat to restrict how many posts you can make in a day unless you pay a subscription. Don’t threaten me with a good time… though that would kill off a couple of accounts I stay on the service to follow. But that trial balloon got such a negative reaction that I suspect it won’t come to pass. We’ll see.

Despite all that has happened since Musk took over, Twitter is still running… most days… and I still log in there. In fact, I spend more time there still than any other social media site. Why?

Well, there is the whole drama aspect of it. Netflix has funded 8 episode seasons of shows that aren’t as engaging as watching Elon Musk fuck around and find out in ways that would get a spec script rejected as being completely unrealistic.

Just this past week we had the tale of Elon being upset that his engagement numbers on Twitter were down and, when presented with data indicating that people just didn’t find his antics that interesting anymore, he fired the engineer who dared disturb is self-image like that.

This was a double pay off because various self-invested blow hards, including Scott Adams, have convinced themselves over the years that Twitter has been shadow banning based entirely on their unshakable belief that they’re more popular and engaging than they really are.

Yes, it sucks for the remaining employees of Twitter, and will continue to suck for them. The operating theory here in the valley is that Musk is being egged on by VCs like Peter Thiel to keep driving his insane plans because they see it as a giant test case to find out if they too can fire a bunch of well paid staff and keep more of the money for themselves. No obscene levels of wealth will ever be enough and the only good they want in the world is things that are good for them at the expense of everybody else.

So I hope the remaining employees are able to find better jobs and sponsorships for their H1B visas.

But even the Elon Musk drama gets tiring… as his engagement numbers show. While I am committed to sticking around just to see the inevitable end as the Titanic sinks, that really isn’t the main reason.

More so I remain on Twitter because it delivers the content I want out of social media.

Here is a surprise: I like the For You content on Twitter. It is not that I don’t like the people I follow… I am sticking around for them… but the algorithm has my number and rather consistently delivers content from people who I sometimes forget I am not actually following.

And there is a whole cadre of accounts that I do follow that have carried on as before. Not everybody has stuck around, but a surprising number of people, including some who have sworn to leave, continue to post because Twitter remains a somehow magical mix of content and personalities and engagements and even the hated Elon shuts up now and then… or so I am told.

I actually have his account blocked. The Elon era has seen me block a lot more accounts. I now block both the performatively offensive seeking attention and those that give them that attention by calling out their offensiveness. But that is what the feature is there for… for now. Elon is threatening to take that away and his sycophants are going on about an imaginary right to be heard. That might push more people off the service and actually reduce his engagement even more so.

So the main reason I remain is that, even in this era of the platform I get an experience on Twitter that I cannot get elsewhere, an experience that suits my needs.

I do look at other social media sites. I made a new Mastodon account back when the Musk era began and I do keep an eye on it. But Mastodon is like the Linux of social media sites. At a glance it looks a bit like Twitter and it has a very loud group of tech people singing its praises and telling people it is absolutely going to be the replacement site they are looking for.

But it isn’t.

It has all the hallmarks that we in tech have been trained to admire. It is open source, crowd funded, run as a distributed network servers so there is no single point of failure, and gives you a range of options for joining in.

However, it is also something of an exclusionary model, and proudly so. The thing I most remember hearing about Mastodon over the years is how you don’t have to see all the garbage you see elsewhere. So every server has a choice to include or block any other server and you, the user, never see anything you didn’t explicitly go looking for.

Which makes it all a pretty dull place, more of a slow motion Discord server rather than a Twitter alternative. And I know, go explore the Fediverse is the response. But I don’t want to. I can’t be bothered to expend the effort on social media unless I am looking for something very specific at a given moment.

Add in the fact that half the people I follow on Mastodon still cross post everything to Twitter and I am not an enthusiastic user.

I’m not against Mastodon. (Though I won’t cross post this there.) It is still the next best thing to Twitter, but that is also because everything else past that is complete shit. There is Post.news, a ghost town, and the MAGA Twitter clones that I wouldn’t use unless you paid me… and you would have to pay me a lot.

Beyond that there is Facebook, which bores me, Instagram, where the algorithm seems intent on fighting tooth and nail to not show me things I want… I spent a month trying to train it to show me 70s French and Italian cars, then I liked one with a woman in the frame and it got all, “Oh, you like women, let me show you nothing but that!” for the next three days… and LinkedIn, which is the only thing more boring that Facebook, and probably a few others I am forgetting.

TikTok. I won’t be using TikTok. I’m too old for that.

So I sit and scroll through Twitter still when I have a quiet moment in the morning or evening. And if it falls over and blows up tomorrow… or decides to charge people for the privilege of being content… then we’ll all move on and it will be another bit of internet history.

Musing on the Walls that Age Brings to MMOs

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You can’t go home again.

-Thomas Wolfe, title of one of his posthumously published novels

That quote, expanded on at the end of the novel, is meant to warn that you cannot return to a previous time in your life, that the pull of nostalgia is a false promise tainted by the fact that memory tends to emphasize the good and diminish the bad. There is no happy past state to return to, just a different set of problems.

It is an argument against dwelling in the past. And yet here I am, headed down that path again.

Today, however, I am going to try to avoid pining for some past idyllic state of vanilla WoW or launch day EverQuest or EVE Online before warp to zero was a thing. Instead, I was thinking more about the barrier that change and progression and expansions and the long term effects of an economy of endless faucets does to a game over time.

I’ve bemoaned at times Blizzard’s inability to launch and expansion in anything less than a two year cycle, but sometimes it seems like as much a blessing as a curse.

At the end of last year WoW launched its 9th expansion. But EverQuest, which is just five and a half years older than WoW, will kick off its 30th expansion by the end of 2023.

Thirty expansions.

And even though the EQ team doesn’t throw every class and mechanic in the air with every expansion the way WoW tends to, every expansion, every new layer of content, changes the game. EQ has such a giant mountain of content and such a vast world that it is difficult to even figure out where to go.

That is a lot of walking

Norrath has expanded to such an extent that even the in-game guides that try to direct players where to go can barely communicate how to reach your destination. See my adventures trying to reach the Scarlet Desert a couple of years back.

Meanwhile the game has to make some concessions to new players, so the climb to level 50 or 60 or 90 no longer take as long as they did when those were the caps on the game. So the play through is… not very much like it was back in the day.

That can be both good and bad. EQ has added a tutorial for new player, which I rather enjoy when I go back to the game. The problem is that after you leave it the game doesn’t live up to the promise of the tutorial. While the experience can be much more directed than it used to be back in the day, it is still isn’t a well lit path, so it being speedier is probably something.

And, on top of all of that, there is the economy. I always laugh when I go back to EQ to try and play because you get copper coins as drops, but more than 20 years of mudflation has had its impact on the economy so it is like, say, minimum wage staying where stuck in time while prices rise constantly. The players at that end of the scale aren’t able to afford much.

Okay, EverQuest (and Ultima Online) are probably the extreme examples in this scenario, titles with more than two decades under their belts. They still carry on, but they feel like places that cater to a very specific and entrenched installed base who will stick with the games until either it or they pass away.

And WoW isn’t that far behind, coming up on 19 later this year. Standing in 2023 it is objectively not that much younger than those other two titles. And Blizzard has tried to fight that eventual barrier to entry that is created by longevity, though not always successfully.

A slower expansion cadence helps. You can take a year off and not feel completely out of touch with the game. But other things they have done… I remain mixed about the level squish that came in before Shadowlands. I will grant that it provides a less chaotic path to level cap, at least potentially, than the past need to climb through each expansion, though the constant adjusting down of the level curve meant you barely got very far in any old expansion before the next one was within range.

These are example of older titles, but no title is getting any younger. Any MMO that lasts beyond a few years seems destined to either hang on for decades, even if it means getting bought out and milked for the last few ounces of profit it can provide.

So, while I am just meandering in text at the moment, I do wonder what lessons newer titles, maybe Lost Ark or New World, if the latter can hold itself together, should learn… or probably should have learned before they launched… to be more sustainable over time.

Is there something EQ or UO or WoW could have done along the way that would have made them more approachable in their second decade? Are retro or or progression or fresh start servers the sort of renewal process that helps maintain longevity?

Or am I fighting against the quote I threw in at the top of the post? I put it there more as a warning to myself, but I always somehow manage to bypass my own advice.

Used Teslas

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My wife and I had to make a couple of trips across the valley last week along Capitol Expressway, in the midst of which there is what is called the Capitol Auto Mall, a stretch of new car dealerships lumped together between Almaden Expressway and Highway 87. Its primary distinguishing feature is a series of truly huge American flags lining that stretch, all of which were at half mast due to the passing of Queen Elizabeth II… because… America?

I don’t know.

I also do not know what the expressway is named “Capitol,” it not going anywhere in the vicinity of anything one might consider the capitol of anything, but that is another rabbit hole to go down at a later date.

Anyway, my wife was driving so I was gawking out the window as I do and as we went past the various dealerships I noticed that there were, in the used car sections of several of the dealerships, a disproportionately large number of used Teslas lined up for sale. Like way more than any other vehicle by a wide margin. The Chevrolet dealership alone had 19 Teslas lined up along the front of their lot, while another had an easy dozen. There were so many that I tried to take a couple of pictures with my phone as we drove past. (Out the window of a moving vehicle yielded the poor results you might expect.)

Some Teslas

Now, if Silicon Valley is going to claim to be the capitol of anything, Tesla ownership would certainly be on the list of possible options. The things are everywhere. Seeing a Telsa in the Santa Clara Valley today is like seeing a VW Bug most places in the 70s. If you come to a stop at a major intersection during daylight hours and don’t see at least one… and likely more… it is a notable occurrence.

And used cars are, of course, very much a thing. They are large, mobile, durable goods that hold value. Buying a used car is an every day occurrence for millions.

But used Teslas, that made me stop and think.

A Tesla is a car, sure, so of course there will be used Teslas. And maybe it is because I have stuck with my old Camry for 19 years, a vehicle that came with a cassette deck and is the model of simplicity when compared to current new cars, that got me thinking about what one should consider when buying a used Tesla, or any other electric vehicle.

Batteries make me wonder about if buying one is a good idea. I was already down on the idea of used hybrids due to battery decay over time.

A quick look on Google showed me Tesla itself reassuring people that a used Tesla is a perfectly cromulent vehicular choice, claiming that the batteries in them are good for 300,000 to 500,000 miles. But that is also the end of useful life, and the inevitable performance degradation is unlikely to occur in a single giant leap that many miles down the road. It happens from day one and likely in a smooth but every increasing slope, meaning that there is some point well before those end of life numbers where the batteries are going to be an issue.

Also a Tesla, having been in a couple… they are almost like a iPhone. Unlike my own car, where the radio station pre-sets and the stains on the upholstery are about all the mark I would leave on it, a Tesla is a device, with lots of data about the user stored away.

I am sure there is a way to wipe a Tesla, to restart it as a fresh device. But as with an iPhone, you immediately have to get into contract with Tesla, at least setting up an account, otherwise you won’t get updates and offers to buy new features and the ability to extend your driving range because Tesla limits your battery life with software unlocks that they would like to sell you as upgrades.

I am not down on Teslas in particular. We’re getting past the point where you know who a Tesla owner is the way you know who a vegan is because they won’t shut up about it. It isn’t like I don’t enjoy nattering on about expensive electronic gadgets. But the electric car thing is still not a viable option for me. I already have to deal with my aunt who lives 70 miles away and has a Nissan Leaf. Every visit is a trial about having to recharge at our end and we only have standard outlets which charge an electric vehicle very slowly. Too slowly.

Slow, but I can show you on my electric bill the day my aunt visited and charged here.

Can you spot the day?

So we have to meet up at some place locally that has a free charging station and I drive her back to our place or out to lunch or whatever we’re up to. Her work has a charging station so she rarely charges at home, her car getting topped up during the day. But on a weekend trip it is suddenly an issue.

Anyway, I have digressed from my main point, which is mostly, “Whoa, that was a whole lotta Teslas on the used car lot!”

The question here is really “why so many Teslas?”

The answer could be simply that these dealerships, several of which have the same owner, have decided to go all in on electric and have been scooping up Teslas at auction to stock their inventory. Maybe they are trying to make used electric vehicles their brand.

But that still leaves the supply question, why are so many Teslas available? Cars in general are still in somewhat short supply, and Teslas especially have a reputation of buyers needing to get on a waiting list to get one.

Does the electric car thing not fit in with user needs as well as people thought? Is there something specific about Telsas that people are trading them in for something else?

While I know Teslas are very popular around here, so supply in the used market is likely to have more units available, I also wonder if the used bookstore analogy is in play as well. If you go into a used bookstore and there are a lot of copies of a particular title… say Tek War… and the store even has it on a list of titles they are not currently purchasing, that does tend to be less than a stellar endorsement.

I don’t really know the answer, but it seemed an odd situation.

Addendum: Further thoughts.

The used cars at dealerships are part of their own ecosystem, being made up largely of trade-ins, lease returns, and the occasional other route like a repo that made its way back into the system.

When you trade your car in or do a lease return, if the car is in really good shape they may spiff it up and put it back on the lot. If it needs some work they bring it to the dealership auction and somebody else will buy it, fix it up, and either put it their lot or auction it again for more. If specific cars are in demand in different areas sometime dealers will buy them at auction and ship them across country.

Used cars are very profitable for dealerships since they generally pay for them in what is essentially store credit towards something else you’re going to buy.

Then there is the parallel private used car sales channel, which is largely handled via Craig’s List these days, but use to be a staple of newspapers until the web became big.

So every one of those Teslas was very likely a trade-in or a lease return at which point the owner bought something else.

But it also makes me wonder about the complexities of private Tesla sales. To use my analogy from above, I might trade my iPhone in at the Apple store, but I am not sure I would sell it to a private party even if I wiped it myself, not being wise enough to know what data might still persist.

I speak as somebody who has retrieved a lot of data off of supposedly wiped hard drives.

Achievements, Northrend, and Classic Destinations

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I had this list of things I wanted to write about before Wrath of the Lich King Classic went live, and now it is suddenly happening next week and I am scrambling to get in those last few pre-launch posts.

Another Day Closer

Wrath of the Lich King occupies a very special spot in the history of World of Warcraft. It was the peak of the game’s popularity, it was a point when they seemed to get the flow of content updates just right to keep people engaged, and it was the “before” state of the game to Cataclysm‘s “after” situation, and the slow decline.

The early WoW timeline

And, for purposes of this discussion, it was very much the dividing line between “classic” and “modern” World of Warcraft.

That line, however, isn’t hard and precise, something that changed on December 7th, 2010 when Cataclysm launched. WotLK arrived as the peak of the classic era and ushered in over the two years of its run things that changed the game nearly as much as the next expansion did. The Dungeon Finder no doubt leaps to mind, which made the dungeon running experience a very different experience. Cataclysm shut the door on classic, but Wrath set us on a path towards that.

But there were also achievements, which came in with the pre-patch. I had to look that up because, in my brain, I had the notion that it came in later. But all my earliest achievements are dated October 14, 2008, which makes it part of the 3.0 expansion pre-patch.

Achievements were one of the big splashy features, something that maybe didn’t change the game the way the Dungeon Finder did, but changed the way people felt about the game and how some of us approached playing it.

I have said this before, and I will reaffirm it now, that I have always been a pretty big fan of Blizzard’s approach to achievements. They seemed to me to strike the write tone with few exceptions, made for a nice mix of gimme level items to peak game aspirations with plenty of oddball items in between.

I didn’t spend days fishing for coins in the fountain in Dalaran because it was the best mechanic in the game. I did it because I wanted the Coin Master achievement.

Dalaran fountain fishing galore

So I was into it, at least to some extent. I was good for goofy stuff or things like the explorer achievement, but I never quite made it there for the Loremaster.

And I get that achievements were not universally beloved. Some people saw them as an immersion breaking intrusion in the play time. I would have been fine if Blizzard had given people the option to hide achievements. I’m pretty sure I wrote a post about that at some point, but can’t be bothered to dig up everything I am referencing.

But the message here is that I was largely pro-achievements when the showed up in Azeroth and have spent many happy hours doing things to add one more to my list of those earned.

Which leads me to Wrath Classic achievements. I don’t care for them.

Seriously. One of the reasons I know when achievements came in to the game is that when the Wrath Classic pre-patch dropped and I got my first achievement, I went looking to figure out how the Dungeon Finder got excluded but these made their way in. I’d be willing to trade one for the other if they were from the same era. But no, they were a day one feature so there is no “classic” argument to be made in order to exclude them.

So what is the problem? Why am I suddenly anti-achievement?

It is actually a pretty simple explanation. I’ve already done them.

Seriously, that is it. I have fished in the fountain, danced drunk at Brewfest, run all the dungeons, earned all the mounts, and whatever else I might have been willing to do when I was 14 years younger and seeing all of this for the first time.

I shouldn’t begrudge anybody who wants to go do them, but I’ve been there, done that, and likely won’t put in the effort again. I can log into retail and see them all if I want to reminisce. Now I want the hide achievements feature for myself.

Which I suppose brings up one of the flaws in the retro server experience. I want to go back and rekindle some memories of good time, relive a few good time, and enjoy the game as it was back in the day rather than the state it is in now.

Honestly, I’d like to get on whichever bus to Northrend that plans to stay there. There is already buzz about Cataclysm Classic, and I have opinions… not all negative… about that for another post. I am saying now (and we’ll see if I change my mind) that I’d like WoW Classic to culminate in Wrath and just left there for people to work through at their leisure.

Because another problem with retro servers is that they tend to be accelerated experiences. And maybe in a year I’ll feel that I’ve spent enough time in the cold. But right now Northrend is a destination, not a stop on the journey for me. Perhaps if I am allowed to stay I’ll even go fish in the fountain in Dalaran, just for old time’s sake.

And maybe that is my problem… or the problem with retro servers… the lack of commitment by the company to the experience. If I could just stay on a server that ended at Wrath, would I be happier, more committed myself, and willing to invest in the experience? I certainly think I would. But like most players, there is a notable history of discrepancy between what I say I want and what I’ll actually go all-in on.

Blaugust and What is Content Anyway?

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We are into the third week of Blaugust now. This is the 16th day of the month and my 16th post, so we’re past the half way point and into the back half of the event. Is everybody hanging on okay?

Blaugust time is coming to town…

It is still not too late to get involved. I mean, we’d like to have you. All the information is here:

I’ll probably decide by week five that it is finally too late to join in. But you’re good until then.

Looking at the Blaugust calendar, this week is… um… creative appreciation week?

The Blaugust Calendar

Are we to be creative in our appreciation or appreciate creativity? We might need to workshop that one a bit before next year.

But I know what it means, because this used to be developer appreciation week in older iterations of the event, back when it was a little more focused on video games. But we’ve grown beyond that so the week is now a time to focus on the creative people… authors, musicians, developers, artists… whom we enjoy.

What do creatives create? Content.

And what is content? Hell if I know.

Seriously, I know it when I see it, but I am not sure I could write a definition of content that would survive any serious testing. And I am just going to dive into content and video games for the purpose of this post, because it only gets more complex if I try to devise some universal definition for content.

Plus, we’ve had this discussion before, and I am always a sucker for the oldies.

I can tell you positively that when EverQuest or WoW drop an expansion, that is content. If you you stream or make a video about your first day playing in the new expansion, that is content. If somebody makes a reaction video to your video, that is probably content too, even though I find them mostly tiresome. And if I write a blog post about a reaction video, probably complaining that nobody ever does reaction videos about my posts, that too is content.

And so is the expansion guide on the commercial fan site and the stories on the gaming news site and summary item somebody does to tie together all the content surrounding the expansion. It is a content ecosystem.

But what about a more sandbox style game, like EVE Online? I was just bitching about them yesterday, and a lot of that had to do with content… but what sort of content?

I mean sure, they do create content. There was the Doctor Who event earlier this year which people enjoyed. And there is a content ecosystem around the game well beyond what its player population might suggest.

The question comes up around mechanics, or changes to the rules, or ships. You can certainly create content around those things, but are they content in and of themselves?

Furthermore, if CCP releases a new ship and we all buy one and fit it out and have a big fight, who really created that content. The fight would be content, after all. But CCP had little influence on when or where it happened or who might participate in the fight.

So in New Eden we sometimes get into a row about people who claim to be content creators because they make things happen in the game… or think they do. And what of the other fleet commander, are they a co-creator? How do we apportion levels creation-ness or whatever? How about the members of the fleet, all of those who participated in the battle? If you just flew a ship of the line and shot targets, maybe you didn’t create content. But what if you were in logi, or were the logi anchor, or maybe one of the fleet boosters? You helped enable or sustain content.

The philosophy once espoused by Goonswarm was that every ship mattered.

Every Ship Counts – World War Bee version

How much credit does the person who shot that cyno jammer get as a content creator? Sure, somebody in the command channel got to shout “free fire on titans” which led to an exchange that set Guinness Book world records.

Exchange of fire as the battle began

But who “created” that content? CCP? The titan fleet commander? The line members who broke tether and opened fire knowing it would likely be a bloodbath? That PAPI titan pilots that formed up on grid with us not knowing how things would play out? That person who shot the cyno jammer? Me in my boosting ship?

My Damnation in the middle of the fight helping create that content

And that is an extreme example as hundreds of small battles pop up every day.

These are, of course, silly questions, pushing into absurdity to prove a point that there is no hard line, no velvet rope that separates the content providers from the unwashed consuming masses.

There is, of course, a line between good content and bad, but that is another subject altogether.

These people, who are participating in Blaugust however, they all produce nothing but the finest content. You should take some time out of your day to visit their sites.

Another day in Blaugust.

Reflecting on EVE Fanfest 2022

Five Problems CCP Will Never Fully Solve

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Time to just bang on about EVE Online a bit more before Fanfest.

Revelations – November 2006 – This is where I came in on things

Illicit RMT

To be fair to CCP, nobody is ever going to solve this issue short of abolishing all player trade and like interactions. If one player can accumulate a lot of something somebody is always going to be willing to pay a little real world cash for it.

And I am not saying that CCP should stop trying to fight it. There is a level of effort beyond which there are diminishing returns, but no effort at all leads to a worse place. Anybody who has been in a free to play game like Lost Ark or Runes of Magic knows what gold seller proliferation looks like… though I wonder if people would even notice in Jita local chat.

But some gold sellers are just going to live in the margins, selling ISK or whatever, because there is some money to be made. Of course, by raising the price of PLEX, CCP has made the margins a bit more habitable. Nothing comes without a cost.

Botting

Like illicit RMT, I am not suggesting that CCP ignore bots. And it does seem that CCP has made headway over the years, at least against the more egregiously obvious botting practices.

But here, as with RMT, there is always going to be an area in the margins where CCP is not going to be able to catch everybody.

In part, that is because the game itself is full of dull, repetitive processes that are easily automated. And it isn’t just mining or courier missions. If you do a little digging you will find bots that do all sorts of things and bot makers have long learned to put some variability in their actions so that you can’t spot them by looking for exact intervals between actions.

And then there is the fact that false positives are a worse than not catching a bot. In a game where I suspect four out of five people complaining about bots think that anybody who warps to a citadel when somebody shows up in local must be a bot… which is manifestly not true… spotting who is actually a bot is much harder than it thinks. Again, the game has enough routine actions that are dull and repetitive that spotting a bot is a coin toss at best.

Capital Proliferation

We have spent the last year hearing from team running the game that cheap capitals are bad. But CCP also made the decision, against the advice of the CSM, to make the Rorqual a mining monster back in 2016, which made minerals so cheap that capital ships… which were all T1 builds so the cost was just minerals… were suddenly everywhere. A titan in every hangar in Delve was the GSF goal at one point.

Then, last April, CCP made the big blueprint change and made capital ships very expensive to build, thinking that would solve the problem of there being too many. What it did was make everybody reluctant to commit capital ships because the replacement costs were suddenly outrageous. But they were all still there, in hangars, and they weren’t doing the game or CCP any good there. World War Bee didn’t end on a glorious capital ship brawl, but on a half hearted sub-cap raid into 1DQ1-A, after which PAPI went home.

When it comes down to it, capital ships being blown up are better for the game than them sitting in hangars. Big, expensive battles get game news headlines. So CCP has begun walking back the capital ship part of their economic starvation plan.

New Player Experience

The new player experience has gotten better over the years. I will stipulate to that. But I rather suspect that it hasn’t moved the needle very much at all on the 30 day player retention numbers, because at some point, no matter how deep CCP goes with the NPE, a player has to leave it and join the rest of us in the core of New Eden… and the game is frankly too deep and too complicated for most people to grasp.

Really, the only long term solution to player retention is a strong, existing community that can find places in their myriad groups for new players to join and learn about the madness that is EVE Online.

Being Anything Besides What It Is

This is something that comes from both within and from outside of the game, the idea that it really needs to be something other than it is. Remaking the game as something else was on my list of persistent bad ideas that won’t seem to die.

But, as I wrote five years back, there is not going back to the launch state, when all things were possible. We are 19 years down the road and the game has cemented its reputation. Millions of people have tried the game, most of them moving on, and thousands of posts and articles have been written about it as well. Even if CCP were to decide to change directions today and turn the game into a huggy, cuddly space teddy bears simulator with no PvP whatsoever, it would still be eyed suspiciously and… well, the UI would still be an untamable monster that still surprises bitter vets with hidden features nearly two decades down the road.

The only way forward is to embrace the game for what it is and make the best… whatever it really is… that it can be.

It’s the End of the Metaverse as we Know It

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It certainly feels that people talking about “the metaverse” have taken the universality aspect of of the “meta” prefix a bit too literally as the word “metaverse” is rapidly approaching the state where it means whatever the speaker thinks it mean in that moment.

Of course, we’ve been down that path before. I remember when “MMO” meant a game with specific characteristics, like hundreds of people in a shared space. Now it pretty much means any online game where six or more people can interact in some way.

There is the grand purist metaverse vision which says, as Bhagpuss so astutely put it, if there is more than one then it isn’t the metaverse. That is the online ideal of sort, the place of Snow Crash and Ready Player One, where everybody goes or has a presence… though if you’ve read either, the actual real worlds they exist in are dystopian nightmares, so no wonder everybody is so keen to strap into their VR gear and get away from it all.

We’re probably never going to get there… or I hope we’re not… though we certainly seem to working hard on making the real world something to escape.

But this past week VentureBeat hosted a Summit on the whole Metaverse idea.

VentureBeat presents

It was preceded by a Facebook gaming summit… now Meta, but we still know who they really are… which has moved big towards the whole metaverse idea despite some skepticism within their own ranks, which I covered previously. While technically not directly part of the metaverse event, it covered a lot of the same ground, so it might well be counted as day zero of the whole thing.

Facebook has been on the metaverse idea for a while, as this now more than two year old trailer for their Horizon product indicates. (For some reason this ad was making the rounds this week as though it was new.)

At that point they were very much locked into the idea that VR would be the domain for the metaverse. Also, legs were clearly not a thing.

However, on the first day of the summit, which was all Facebook, I listened to somebody from from the Oculus group tell the audience that the metaverse would need to be on every device, phones, tablets, laptops, consoles, as well as VR.

The same person also mentioned that when he joined Oculus, before they were acquired, everybody who signed on was given a copy of Ready Player One, which is somewhat telling I suppose. In Snow Crash the metaverse seemed more like something the dispersed internet evolved into. In Ready Player One it is run by an evil corporation. So I guess they were already on board with being bought by Facebook before it happened.

A more disturbing trend to me has been the union of the concept of the metaverse and the crypto blockchain NFT demographic. This has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with money. Venture capitalists have found they can extract money from a crypto investment much faster than a traditional startup so have been pumping and dumping to their heart’s content.

Essentially, the word “metaverse” has become shorthand for “NFT vehicle” for some so, while the Oculus guy didn’t mention them, Facebook is all in on the idea, while other speakers, such as Brendan Greene of PlayerUnknown fame, who helped establish the battle royale genre, spoke about his new project, Project Artemis, a world sized metaverse, which will be on board with the NFT train.

Because somehow over the objection of the developers who actually have to do the work, execs and finance people have seemingly embraced the NFT idea as the way to move assets between games in order to create a single metaverse out of everybody’s own pocket virtual world.

However, I will say that, for the most part, the summit wasn’t over-hyped on the whole crypto NFT thing. There were certainly crypto proponents on the schedule and who sessions were about how this is going to be great once more people jump on the bandwagon. But there was also some recognition that NFTs needed to win people over, something that had not happened yet, though I did hear one speaker go on about how if gamers weren’t going to get on board with NFTs then they would just find another demographic, leaving gamers behind.

I am not sure who else they are going to get to buy into it… well, I have a guess… but Ubisoft, which has literally bought into NFTs, is certainly finding gamers unwilling to invest in NFTs. They feel that gamers just “don’t understand,” which is the most common crypto scammer talking point around. We like to point out how bad Activision and EA are, but Ubisoft is literally the worst and has been for more than 20 years.

Honestly though, while I signed up for the whole event, I would guess that I checked in on maybe half of the sessions, and some of them weren’t all that interesting. There was, for example, a pleasant man from Helsinki speaking about industrial applications for VR and the metaverse and I just took my headphones off and went on with something else.

The only session I was completely in for was the one featuring Raph Koster, who got the last 20 minute speaking slot at the end of the whole thing. I teased him about that on Twitter, though he spun it as getting the last word. Still, they gave some guy 30 minutes earlier in the day to talk some nonsense about The Matrix and promote his book, so I was feeling a little defensive of Raph’s place in the order of things.

But I need not have fretted even a bit. Raph came in strong with that last session, with a short slide deck, which made him stand out from most of the presentations. He was there to talk about how we even get to a metaverse, where you’re able to move from one world to another across vendors, a issue he framed as a social problem. There are standards to be agreed upon and rights and ownership and all sorts of things that need to be sorted out before we start thinking about walking between WoW and Fortnite, which seemed to be the interoperability metaphor of the conference.

Many of the issues that need to be resolved have been under discussion for ages at this point.

He didn’t come up with any specific answers, but blockchain and crypto did not enter into it his talk, those not being solutions to any of the current problems facing the metaverse.

I did stick around for the post-game summary by the GameBeat staff, who were cool on the NFT idea, which surprised me a bit since their parent, VentureBeat, seems keen to cover all things crypto. But, then their audience is more investors and VCs, and crypto is what investors want to head about now. You have to give your audience what they want, even if they want garbage I suppose.

The whole thing is up on YouTube on VentureBeat’s channel if you are interested.

As noted, Raph is at the end of day two if you want to watch his 20 minutes. (Also, seeing Raph live, Playable Worlds might want to update the promo pic they use of him, which must be from 2006 given how much gray hair he has now. Why not play up his age and experience rather than trying to keep him looking forever 35?)

The site also did decent summaries of some of the sessions on their site, which are a little more detailed that the presentations. I’ll link to a few of the more interesting ones:

Those last two are interesting for specific definitions of the word, like if you want to hear the crypto side of things try to rationalize why the metaverse needs them. I think that quote about leaving gamers behind is in that last session.

Not everything at the event was worth hearing, but it was the place to be if you wanted some insight into what the people… mostly money people… want to hear about. The GamesBeat team kept things going, though occasionally the slipped up a bit. I think they were about done with the event when this poll popped up.

Yes? No? Both? Neither?

So it goes.

And, while we’re on the topic of the metaverse, interoperability, and NFTs, I figure I should toss in a video that cam up last week. It is 30 minutes of a developer going through the issues, one by one, about how NFTs don’t solve any of the problems that need to be solved for the metaverse. It is just shy of 30 minutes, but it is pretty to the point.

I’ve seen all these points before, but it is nice to have them summed up in one video. He also has a follow up video because the crypto bros came after him with the whole “but we want to be able own/trade independent of the developer” scenario, which he also picks apart pretty well.

However, if you really want to dig into the NFT/crypto thing and have two hours to spare, I highly recommend this video from Folding Ideas.

It is essentially a documentary look into where cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and NFTs came from, what they really are, how badly designed they really are, who is making money on them, and how the scam really works. Spoiler: It is all based on the greater fool theory.

I don’t think there was a lot shockingly new to me in that video, except for the cost, and the variability of cost, of blockchain transactions, which would make the whole thing a non-starter for any legitimate enterprise.

Seriously, you would have to be insane to use crypto for your business unless it is a scam. Any CEO of a legitimate company that says they are seriously considering NFTs is throwing out a buzzword to boost their stock price or doesn’t understand how they actually work… though you cannot rule out both being the answer.

Anyway, the video did nicely tie together a lot of different threads and I felt it was well worth the time, so much so that I listened to it twice. (While doing some quests in EQII.) Hat tip to Massively OP for linking to this video.

Addendum: If you prefer the written word to a two hour video, then there is David Rosenthal’s Stanford talk that he reproduced on his blog, which gets down into the details of crypto and how it goes so very wrong.

Memories of a Checkstand Lifestyle

A strange thing happened on the way to my COVID-19 vaccine shot. Well, not on the way, but at the location where I got it. In the online concert-ticket rush to get a vaccine appointment the first appointment I was able to snag was at the Safeway on Shoreline Blvd. in Mountain View.

That happened to be the store I worked at in high school and college back in the 80s.

I had not been back to that store for ages. Even in the 90s when I had an apartment just a couple miles down the road I made a point of shopping elsewhere. When I went back into the store for the first time in at least 20 years, I was hit with a reverie of memories, good and bad.

And it isn’t even the same store. At some point in the 90s they tore down the store I worked in, which was done in that somewhat iconic mid-century style with tall ceilings and large front windows that let in a lot of light. I probably have a picture of the store somewhere, but I am too lazy to dig it out right now, so I grabbed an image from the web that gives the right sense of what I mean.

A typical 60s Safeway store design

That image is about the same template as the store I used to work in, right down to the rocky wall style outside the exit door. The store there now is more in the squared off, few windows, design. But every store has a similar feel and even that new style couldn’t repress the flood of images and emotions of being in that location.

Working in a grocery store is kind of a strange retail experience. You end up seeing the same people over and over. And this store, nestled in the middle of several large apartment complexes, was especially prone to the “same faces” phenomena. Apartment dwellers, as I was told, tend to buy groceries more frequently, often stopping in on the way home from work to buy something for dinner. So I often saw the same people every evening I was there.

And, living not too far away, the strangeness was compounded. I would go to downtown Mountain View for lunch or to visit the used bookstore and would constantly see faces I recognized. Some I would be able to place… this guy smokes Marlboro reds in the box, that woman is a pain in the ass about showing her ID when writing a check, and this other person isn’t allowed in the store because we busted them for shoplifting… but others were just annoyingly familiar but lacking the context of the store in which to place them.

It was a decent job at the time, though I worked through what was very much a transitional era for the grocery industry. Or one of them anyway. It was a union job. I had to join the United Food and Commercial Workers, which was still a new-ish union at the time, being a consolidation of a couple unions. I showed up just as the union was losing its leverage. There had been a big strike a few months before and the union had to make quite a few concessions.

I started as a bag boy, or a courtesy clerk in the contract parlance, and spent my first year bagging groceries, putting things back on the shelves, cleaning up spills, and rounding up shopping carts in the parking lot. At the time we had electro-mechanical cash registers that looked to be out of the 50s. I remember once, early on, the power went out and the cashiers all had to fish around in the checkstands to find the cranks that attached to the side of the registers and allowed them to be operated manually. There was a journal tape from each register than had to be pulled every night after the store closed and was used to reconcile the books for the day, something that often took hours. Any mistakes made by cashiers had to have a note in the cash drawer to help with the balance.

Those were soon replaced by NCR electronic cash registers, which had a 10 key pad and could take code numbers for specific products to get prices. Those were in place before the summer I went off to checkers school. Learning to be a checker, being promoted to food clerk, meant spending a week up in Oakland at the Safeway training center taking a class that you could fail.

I had to learn to use the 10 key pad by touch, accurately key in prices, know the categories of items which meant knowing the arcane sales tax rules of the state (which meant knowing things like water not being taxable, unless in containers under a half gallon or in frozen form (ice) and prepared food not being taxable unless it was heated), and the dreaded fruit and vegetable identification test. This involved a timed test where I had to identify the fruit or vegetable in question and supply the produce code for it. There was a lookup sheet for the codes, but if you had to look them all up you during the test you might not make the time limit. There were 50 items to identify and you were only allowed to miss five on the test. There were people who did not make the cut. I drove up to Oakland with another person taking the class and we would quiz each other in the car on the ride back and forth. I had college classes that were less demanding.

But this was when the union was still pushing the image of professional food clerks. And the pay, at the time, was decent. As a freshly minted food clerk in 1985 I made $7.68 hour. But, after every 500 hours on the job I got a raid, which capped out after 2,000 hours… basically a year of full time work… at $13.48 an hour.

That doesn’t sound like much in an era when we’re talking about a $15 an hour minimum wage, but that was decent money. And there was overtime, holiday pay (double time), Sunday pay (time and two thirds when I started, time and a half after the next contract), and a 50 cent per hour premium for hours worked between 7pm and 7am. And, if you wanted to run the show, be in charge when the boss was away, there was also head clerk pay, which I immediately signed up for, so ended up earning a lot more during my 2,000 hour run up to journeyman clerk than I might have otherwise.

I made more in 1987 than I did at my first three post-Safeway jobs in tech. I think my total income in 1994 finally passed my Safeway peak. Couples I knew who both worked for Safeway bought houses, raised kids, and sent them off to college on journeyman food clerk salaries.

My health insurance was basically no cost to me. They handed me a Kaiser card and required no employee contribution. Of course, that is also a reflection of how messed up the US health care system has become. And if I worked the equivalent of ten years of full time I qualified for the first tier of the long since gone pension system.

It felt like a bit of a plateau in my life, that I had hit the first step where I had a real job, decent pay, and could be an adult if I so desired. A lot of people I worked with dropped out of college and decided to stick with Safeway as a career. You were getting a decent paycheck every week and the work wasn’t horrible.

Of course, there were a lot of downsides to the job, the general public being a key one. But it was an uncertain life. Only those employees designated as “full time” were guaranteed at least 32 hours a week. Everybody else, myself included, only had to be given 16 hours a week. If business was slow, staffing had to follow, and you could find yourself getting some thin paychecks.

And the work schedule… I blame my own current unwillingness to plan very far ahead on that. The schedule for a given week was supposed to be posted in the store by 5pm on the Thursday of the preceding week, but good luck with that. So, generally speaking, I didn’t know what I was up to until Friday of the week before, and how you got scheduled was the luck of the draw and how much the boss liked you. They had to schedule to cover the store needs, so you might end up working all hours of the day or night. I generally worked 3pm to midnight during the week, which covered the peak evening rush. But I might work 6am to 3pm on Saturday to cover the frozen food or dairy guy’s day off or midnight to 9am if one of the night stocking crew was on vacation. I had weeks where I just worked evenings for long stretches… the manager would get lazy once in a while and just re-used the previous week’s schedule if there were no vacations to cover… and I had weeks during the summer when people were out on vacation where I saw every hour of the day in the store.

Then there was vacation. Even as the lowliest clerk on the list I was allowed two weeks of vacation. But the sign up for vacation was a bit of a challenge. A big chart would go up at the beginning of the year, with all employees listed out in seniority order. Everybody picked their weeks in that order, but the store could only allow so many people to be out on a given week, and once that number was hit for a given week, that week was blocked out. So not only did I have to know when exactly I wanted to go on vacation at some point in mid-January, I could only choose weeks that were still open to me when it was finally my turn to pick.

I think I got a week in April and a week in October that time around, which corresponded pretty much to the two ends of the allowed vacation season. And the weekly work schedule was written from Sunday through Saturday, so your vacation weeks, which had to be taken in week long chunks, were also Sunday to Saturday. If the boss liked you, you might get the Saturday before and Sunday after your vacation off. But you wouldn’t know about the Sunday in advance, since the schedule wouldn’t be up until the Thursday before.

It was very much a lifestyle. I was often working when most people were done with work and off in the middle of prime business hours. I had a new car and an apartment in Mountain View that some Google employee is probably paying more than three grand a month to rent now.

Eventually though it became clear I could finish school or keep working at Safeway. I got a lot of hours, so always had money, but never had time, which led to me taking fewer classes than I should. I never skipped a semester, but there were some weak showing when it came to units. Eventually we got a manager that told me he’d schedule me whenever he damn well pleased… previous ones had been good about at least giving me the first half of the day for classes… and I put in my notice as soon as the fall semester got close.

That was well over 30 years ago but, to this day, when I have anxiety dreams I don’t dream about showing up for a final exam and realizing I haven’t studied or getting to the end of a semester and finding out that I forgot to drop a class or any of the usual suspects. I dream that I have gone for lunch on my shift back then and forgot to get back when my time was up or that I am there and ready for my shift but have forgotten my apron or name badge or some other part of the required uniform. I sometimes dream that I still work there part time, that I never quit, or that I had to go back to help make ends meet.

Anyway, two visits to that store… I have both of my vaccine shots now… shook up a bunch of old memories. If I can filter them down I might make a series about some aspects of the job. There were some humorous bits as well as the usual disappointing human behavior and the reality of having to deal with people every day.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi