Friday Bullet Points about Legal Battles, Stupidity, and Cataclysm

It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy.  So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories.  Can you put each in its correct place?

• The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order

The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.

A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?

The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back.  The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before.  But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games.  One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.

This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.

This should have been no surprise.  The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement.  I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times.  They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.

None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.

• Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu

Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.

In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.

Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.

Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch.  I’d much prefer them on my PC.  Alas, no longer and option.

• Apple and Epic at it Again

Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess.  As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.

The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront.  And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.

Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed.  This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.

How do I feel about this?

Survey say… let them fight!

It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.

A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.

• Elon Invents Blogging

Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle.  And so they have announced Articles.

From the @write account

You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text.  And images!

Freaking amazing, right?  RIGHT?!?

Oh yeah.  Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile.  We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!

I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.

• EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon

I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room.  And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff.  So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently.  Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right?  So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that?  Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!

Truth in Headlines

I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.

There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action.  Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.

That is probably being too hard on him.  As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up.  This is a classic “making shit up” performance.  He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.

• Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins

Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.

Can you re-run a cataclysm?

I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters.  However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit.  Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.

And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.

The Twitter Blue Check Mark Apocalypse Fails to Appear… Except for the New York Times

I wasn’t going to post today, but apparently stupid never sleeps.

I was actually in Las Vegas yesterday, my wife and I enjoying a bit of away time together, and I woke up in the a too-soft hotel bed and looked at Twitter on my phone expecting to see the new blue check mark order on Twitter, as had ordained.  I wrote about all of this last week.

Who will be the fool

Now I know they said “begin winding down,” but if I made a big announcement like that I would have had the company prepared to move.  And doubly so since April 15th is the second of the one-two punches of this verification effort.  I know people were expecting it, and in getting glimpses of the site on Friday it was becoming one of those group hug, glad to have met you, the titanic is going down at last events.

But come Saturday, all of those legacy blue check marks appeared to still be around.

Well, give them a day I thought.  But here it is Sunday, and the legacy blue check marks appear to still be around.

Did they have a change of heart?  Thousands of businesses and celebrities have said, “NOPE!” to the idea of paying Twitter for the privilege of having a blue tick mark next to their name that will now only signify that they paid to get it.  The reason the whole verified system was created was being destroyed, so who would want to be a part of this new pay to play vision?

The statements of rejection became so loud that Twitter back tracked yet again to declare that the top 10,000 most followed businesses would be exempt from the $1,000 annual fee being asked.  I am sure that won’t end in tears as the bottom 5% of that list vie for dominance.

Were they going to see sense and bag the whole thing.  No, of course not!

As it turns out the whole blue check mark thing is a very manual process and it could take months to get it sorted out, because we remain on the dumbest possible timeline.

So, as far as I could tell, only one account lost its blue tick this weekend, the New York Times, because they pissed off Elon Musk, being one of the first, and loudest, news organizations declaring that they wouldn’t pay.  Also, every MAGA nut job thinks the NYT is all leftist propaganda… and we all know where Musk falls on that front.  He has shown is totalitarian leaning stripes time and again.

Musk’s petulance runs Twitter

I am not saying that the NYT doesn’t deserve scorn.  As a news outlet there are few that feel as self-important and come across as fatuous and condescending as the Times.  Doug Balloon’s New York Times Pitchbot account often has a predictive quality to it, writing parody that soon becomes reality.

And if you think it is a paragon of wokeness (“woke” having recently replaced “communist” as a catch all for things dumb people hate, though it also does double duty as a code word for racism as well, the way the mention of George Soros has become a code word for anti-antisemitism, so you have to take care to check the context) you need to spend more time actually looking at its headlines.  The NYT will “both sides” any issue, no matter how repellent, in some sort of desperate attempt to preserve a sense of impartiality that nobody on either end of the political spectrum believes.  The only thing they have proven is that they can be dumb with an authoritative tone on an incredibly wide range of  topics because they feel like their prestigious masthead lends legitimacy to any drivel they care to spout.

And don’t get me started on how far they will go to prevent anybody from seeming to use their name.  I remember back in the 80s the Times went after Infocom because they had a news letter named the New Zork Times.  Clearly a news letter for a few hundred computer nerds that was a play on their name could potentially harm the reputation of the paper by causing confusion.  People might think the Times somehow wrote or endorsed that venture!

So yeah, the New York Times isn’t conspiring against you or your political ideals.  They annoy everybody.  It would be a genuine relief to all if they just picked a lane frankly, because trying to have it all has failed.

Anyway, the New York Times has been chosen, out of all possibilities, to lose its blue legacy verified check mark first even though I strongly suspect that it would qualify based on the number of followers it has.  But Musk will have his way.

The Times without a blue check mark

Of course, because dumb is the new Twitter brand, ONLY the MAIN Times account has had its verification removed.  All of the sub-accounts for the Times are still verified.

Politics? You let the politics account slide?

All of which has a certain ring to it.

There is a Dril tweet for all occasions

Meanwhile, the Twitter algorithm is now out in the wild and being analyzed, and there are a few good threads on it to read if you are interested.

Some highlights:

It is much better to get likes and retweets than to get replies to boost your visibility.

• Each like gets a 30x boost
• Each retweet a 20x
• Each reply only 1x

So if you like a tweet, it is something of an endorsement, no matter what your profile says.  Also, Tweets that have images or videos get a bonus, but those that have external links are viewed as spam most of the time, so my auto-posting links to my blog posts is hurting my engagement.  That makes up the majority of my Twitter posting.  Oh well.

Buying a blue check mark also helps quite a bit currently, but talking about the war in Ukraine gets you highly down ranked.  That is another area where Musk has been called out so it is no surprise he wants to sweep that under the rug.

So that is the way things are rolling at Twitter this weekend.  The usual inability to execute combined with needing to adapt to Musk’s petty grievances as he lives out his billionaire boy dreams of running a media empire while driving it relentlessly into the ground.

Addendum:

Elon just can’t let go of things and tried to defend his removing ONLY the verified mark from the New York Times by… being the petulant man child he always is.

The NYT actually produces content… you may not like it, but it is more than Twitter produces

In the mean time, in order to cover their failure, Twitter has changed the information about blue check marks to be the same for both pay to play users and those previously vetted and verified, so you can’t tell who is whom anymore.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

It would be funny if it wasn’t just a continuation of the defensive, half-assed way Elon has run the whole Twitter venture.

Wordle and Things like Wordle

If you have been paying attention to things over the last two months, or follow anybody on Twitter, you might have heard about Wordle.  It became a huge deal back in January/February and you could hardly go on Twitter without seeing somebody posting their scores.  I had to mute the word “wordle” over there it got so bad.

A decent day at Wordle

It is a simple game web game, and something of an accidental hit according to the developer in a presentation at GDC.  I ended up playing it daily myself.  It is a simple, fairly easy, daily game that makes you think a bit.  You can find it here.

Of course, its popularity spawned a host of imitators.  On dev who made a mobile app that was simply a copy of the game wash shamed off of the app store by public outrage.  However, there are still a bunch of other clones there.

The game itself was bought by the New York Times and we’re all waiting for them to screw it up somehow.

But in addition to the straight up clones, some devs out there have taken the Wordle concept and run with it for different daily experiences.

For example, there is Quordle, where you have to guess four 5 letter words.  You get nine guesses, but you have to coordinate all four columns.  While I get Wordle most days, Quordle I am about 50/50 on.

I missed the last word on the last guess

Double consonants are my Achilles heel in these games.  You can find Quordle here.

If four five letter words are not enough, then there is Octordle, where you have to figure out eight words.  I play the above every day on my iPad when I wake up in the morning, but Octordle I save for my wide screen desktop monitor and let it sit in a tab for most of the day as I think about it.  Even then I am always in a bit of a hurry and I rarely win.

I was down to “theft” and “teeth” and chose wrong… in a hurry so forgot the H placement

If you like that many words, you can find Octordle here.  It has both a daily and multi-play options.  One if its drawbacks is that it needs a lot of five letter words, so you get some oddly rare ones in the mix when compared to Wordle, where the most common word that fits the clues is almost always correct.

Those three all have the problem, for me, where you end up with some letters where there are half a dozen words you could make out of them given the clues you have.

But say you don’t want to guess the word.  Say you want to lose… or just take a long time guessing.  Then there is Antiwordle.  Here you try to avoid guessing the word.

Antiwordle

This has rules so you can’t just avoid the clues.  You cannot re-use letters that have been eliminated.  You have to use any letter that you have guessed correctly, and if you guessed it in the correct spot, you must use it in that spot going forward.

Embarrassingly, I have had days where I have gotten Wordle in five or six guesses and then Antiwordle in three.  Anyway, you can find Antiwordle here.

But suppose you just don’t like word games.  What if you like geography?  Well, there is Worldle, because of course there is.  Daily it shows you the outline of a nation and you have to guess what it is.

I want to say Northrend…

The primary problem for me is that some countries have very distinctive and memorable outlines… and some of them are just roundish, sometimes oblong, blobs.  Out of the context of their neighbors, where I could name them in a flash, places like Estonia, Slovakia, Bosnia, and Botswana kind of blend together in my brain when they are alone.

You also cannot use size to judge, as they scale them all the same in the picture, so Monaco was the same size as Australia when shown, such that you could pick out the detail of the harbor.

If you like maps you can find Worldle here.

But say you like trade rather than maps.  Then there is OEC Tradle, where you guess the country based on its exports and how much they total up to.

The oil and gas was kind of a tell

The primary exports are the general tell.  It is good to know who exports cars or oil as well as some secondary, as well as gauging that with the total export value.  I knew this was too low to be Saudi Arabia, so went for the smaller gulf states.  Oddly, Qatar was also the Worldle answer in the same week.

Then there was Spain, which I knew had a reasonable car export.

Cars, pork, quite the mix

So if you’re up on international trade, you can find OEC Tradle here.

But what if you just want to play again.  Tipa has been playing a daily title called Rogule, which came out of the 7 Day Rogue Like Challenge 2022, in which she also participated.

This gives you a daily web based Rogue-like to play.  But if you die, you’re done for the day.

And I am going to die to a rat almost immediately… welcome to Rogue!

I actually survived the rat with 1 hp, then later died to a snake.  It is a decent adaptation of the Rogue gaming style.

Like all Wordle knock-offs, it gives you a score at the end of you match that you can post to social media in order to annoy your friends, or at least push them to learn how to use the mute feature for words and people.

If you want to try you can find Rogule here.

There are, of course, many others, like Heardle, which has you guessing song titles, at which I am very bad, and various other trivia based versions.  But these are the ones I have found a bit interesting.

Scamville Juxtaposition

There is a nice piece up this morning over at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs where Fake Steve (Dan Lyons) points out (with his usual flair) that while TechCrunch was going after Zynga’s scam ad driven virtual goods business all last week, over at the New York Times they were working on a piece that ran on Saturday about how virtual goods were now bringing in money, which included Zynga as an example of how this market was maturing.

Did the New York Times mention any of the practices that TechCrunch brought to light?

No.

But which will influence people more?

Which article scares you more?