Oops. The links got a little messy.
“Mamma-mia, does Nintendo know what’s happening at CES 2024?”
“If Civilization Was Set in Hell…”
“Echo’s Kingpin is just the latest Marvel showcase for Vincent D’Onofrio”
Friday Afternoon Links
About The Author
Riven
[riv-uhn]
noun
1. a gaming, lifting, shooting, intoxicated, ravenous, and happily-taken nerd.
2. often aims to misbehave.
3. and though she be but little, she is fierce.*
And rumor has it that she (and her husband) are also delightful dinner companions. You didn't hear it from me, though.
Whenever a business determines that change is necessary, it is important to remember that consumer interests, tastes, and preferences take precedence over the interests of the firm.
Minor quibble: I’d say that consumer interests *are* the interest of the firm. You’re catering to consumers, not the other way around.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek’s predecessor, aptly declared that although there is a beneficial relationship between producers and consumers, it is the consumer who is in charge.
That’s more like it. Forget that at your peril (looking at you, Bud Light and Target).
They a) lose touch with their target market and/or/because b) they don’t like their target market because they’re icky people and bring the brand down.
Heaven forfend Target turn into People of Walmart and Bud Light stick with their rednecks.
I swear Marketing folks assume their existing customers are locked in as well (which is odd, since there’s almost always discussion about getting market share from the competition… why are their existing customers going to move but yours never are?). As such, they’re always chasing that “new and upcoming” demographic and typically in the most stupid, transparent fad chasing way. (Again, see Bud Light and Target).
I’m of the opinion that you could replace the marketing department with the cleaning staff and get better results in many companies.
See also, incessant GUI refreshes.
My undergrad is a double in marketing and finance. After my first marketing class I said no way can this be my only major.
That said there are marketing disciplines and degrees that are heavy on statistics and actual math. Naturally they get much less respect.
I was somewhat involved in Engineering support for Packaging operations (totally different company, but still a consumer product) when the Tropicana thing happened. That redesign is still my go-to example for stoopid ideas that completely fail for obvious reasons of bad design.
“There’s the message you think you’re sending, and the message you’re ACTUALLY sending, and they can be wildly different things.”
The problem is when a new marketing team comes in and wants to leave their mark.
Similar to any change in leadership. Unfortunately you don’t get high marks for “It works well so I didn’t change it.”
New Coke >> Classic Coke was to switch the recipe over from cane sugar to HFCS with no one the wiser. Brilliant ploy, actually.
Solium Infernum’s version of Hell isn’t the fire and brimstone you may be imagining, though. Heavily inspired by Jonathan Milton’s Paradise Lost, it’s a cold and ashen place run by an intractable bureaucracy that doesn’t so much reflect childhood nightmares, like being attacked by shadow monsters, but more adult ones, like having to deal with the DMV.
Think “February in Cleveland,” but without the occasional bout of sunshine.
What bout of sunshine?
I was thinking “Like 2K’s board room politics?” myself.
My two big problems with Civ style games over the last 4 or 5 years — they never let you eXplore much anymore — you immediately hit one or more AIs because “combat is fun!” think the developers… but it just means the AI (that never has Fog of War because that would Be Hard(tm)) rushes to all the nearby resources. Which annoys the crap out of me.
And launchers / monetizing by the publisher / other crap. See my low opinion of 2K.
I picked up Old World a while back, and it had some interesting systems built into it. It’s got a demo available on Steam to give it a shot. It’s from the designer of Civ 4, and has some dynastic mechanisms that seem similar to the Paradox Crusader King series.
Yeah, I got it a while back — was playing through the tutorial and iirc, the combat mechanics of “You get to move 1 tile… the AI gets to dance behind all your troops and kill your weakest unit with impunity… Nyaaah!” made me put it down and not come back to it.
After Civ 4 the games declined sharply. I just opened up steam to check Old World out and it was right there on sale this weekend. Hmmm…
That was my experience the last time I played a Civ game about 10 years ago.
But my preferences for game balance between combat vs. anything else seem to be wildly different from the rest of the universe so there is that.
I always wound up going for a science victory. Everything else seemed like a dodgy way to try to win.
In 2019, Ina Steiner published an article on the couple’s newsletter EcommerceBytes discussing a lawsuit eBay brought against Amazon. Half an hour later, eBay’s then-CEO Devin Wenig sent another executive a message saying: “If you are ever going to take her down…now is the time,” according to court documents. The message was forwarded to Baugh, who responded that Steiner was a “biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN.”
This is a $20B company we’re talking about. Were they run by a bunch of teenaged mean girls? I mean, why even take notice of this couple?
La Cosa Nostra Dons read article, think, “Geez, those guys are scary!”
Christ, What A Company Of Assholes.
Well that was fun. i suddenly got this wild notion to fire up my Win10 desktop for the first time in about three years, to see if I could get it to boot from my linux demo disk. It didn’t go well. It tried to update itself. Update failed, and a prolonged period of confusion ensued. It finally managed to get back to a home screen, or whatever you call it.
I guess I need to ask duck duck go about Win10 boot disks.
There is a way to disable the updates and also disable notifications/nagging to install the updates.
I’ll ask my husband and post instructions if you want. It’s been years. I have neither updated nor seen a nag to update.
You don’t need windows to boot to install Linux.
If you’ve got the Linux disc in, you should be able to boot directly from that instead of going into Windows first. You’ll likely need to go into the BIOS and change the boot device order, or hit a function key during boot to access a boot menu. To access the BIOS, it’s usually F1 or F3.
Tru dat.
My father just called me to alert me to this gem.
Has it been covered here yet?
https://dailycaller.com/2024/01/11/world-economic-forum-global-risks-report-2024-klaus-schwab-misinformation-disinformation-free-speech-technology/
I mentioned Schwab to one of my engineers last evening as we were working in the lab. He’d never heard of him so of course I had to stop and enlighten him.
He was astounded by the pics and the quotes. Our CEO attends those meetings, to my shame.
Half our C-suite does, too. Invariably, there will be some stupid initiative that comes out of WEF. Thankfully I’m on the productive side of legal where I can say “too busy doing real work, sorry.”
Try not to touch yourselves inappropriately, ppl.
Rand Paul launches “Never Nikki” website.
Define ‘inappropriately’.
without consent?
Well, Nikki is the worst.
Has anyone ever seen the two Nikki’s together? Are we sure they aren’t the same person?
Does Nikki Haley have kids?
Starting to smell of a VP nod to Rand?
Well, Rand isn’t going to get a Cabinet appointment when the Nikki/Michelle fusion ticket wins in November.
Climate change is making the gravitational pull of the sun and moon even stronger. https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2024/01/12/with-climate-change-king-tides-could-be-the-new-normal/
Will this interfere with this week’s Horoscope?
It is also the old normal.
They are on about that again? How fucking tiresome.
Riiiiight… “Be afraid! My model says so! Never mind that it doesn’t match history!”
Well, duh. It models the future not the past.
I thought that happened fifty years ago.
Arent we all dead now?
According to the IPCC sea level is rising about 4 mm/year. Between now and 2050 that’s 104 mm, or about 4 inches.
According to the NOAA it’s between 4-8 inches.
Even if we take these estimates at face value, it’s nowhere near 2 feet. This must be some of that misinformation that the WEF finds so troubling.
I know some ladies that are happy with 4 inches
Translation: “the seas have not risen and rather than complicate the narrative with orbital mechanics we can say ‘climate changes!
Bwahahahahhahahahaha
.
Bwahahahahahahahahaha
King Canute shakes his head.
Narrator: People actually fall for this shit.
Climate freaks near where I live post lots of pictures of king tides, always captioned with, “Climate change will do this, and worse.”
Speaking of brands… I was in the cereal aisle recently, and there are about 42 different flavors of Chex cereal now. But you can still buy original corn and rice.
Transpose that to Budweiser. They have a multitude of flavors aimed at different segments. Why drive off an established loyal customer base in pursuit of a different (and much smaller) group of people for the Bud Light brand? Partner the female impersonator with a different flavor. Create a new one.
They live in a bubble and don’t know their desired demographic is as small as it really is.
They have. Off the top of my head, Cutwater (Ready to Drink cocktails) is AB-InBev, and I believe they have at least one hard seltzer line.
Our man Dylan might’ve been a good fit for a new hard seltzer rollout.
If it works, everybody gets rich. If it doesn’t and needs to be drowned like a kitten, no big deal.
A seltzer flavored with nuts?
It is amazing how large a new brand has to be fro AB to keep it around. Back when I followed this closely, there would be quarterly releases of top brands, and they would always have a new product in the top 10 that they would shut down within the next year.
Sorry, Bud Light Tangelo, you only sold 800k cases, you get the axe!
[product and volume made up]
Yeah, AB torpedoed themselves not necessarily because they wanted to couple with Mr. Dudelookslikealady, but because of that dopey ad woman running her mouth about wanting to get away from their “fratty”/vulgar reputation. I think most customers can understand a brand wanting to broaden its appeal (perhaps in the manner you mention), but if I’m a base customer, shitting on me directly is not going to engender goodwill.
That quote about “fratty” was taken from a trade rag and widely quoted after the debacle.
Doesn’t make it any less stupid, but it wasn’t the direct objective.
I view this as two events. The first was the rollout of the ad campaign which drew a visceral response from the core customer base. The second was the leak of the comments that this was done on purpose to grow the business away from the core customer base.
People may have forgiven the ad campaign if they hadn’t been directly insulted shortly thereafter.
Yup.
The trans thing was the big faux pas, because they put that picture on cans. The marketing ‘genius’ shitting on their core customers was just a blip. You can’t see someone being an idiot if it’s one person talking, but put pictures on your product …
If they had just quietly made up some neon rainbow Bud Light signs and placed them only in gay bars, no one outside the LGBTQ community would have noticed or cared.
IIRC that can was never actually for sale anywhere. It was just a gimmick for social media.
From what I understand, there was only a handful of cans made, it wasn’t even that they put her on a can, it was that they started shouting about it from the rooftops.
Put HIM on a can, I hope you meant.
But you can’t buy the best one — oatmeal raisin.
I asked for a picnic, Stable Diffusion gave me mutants and chaos spawn.
You don’t need windows to boot to install Linux.
I know. That is, I remember dimly, but I don’t remember the secret handshake to tell the computer where my preferred boot disk is.
I’m not planning to install it right now. I want to just run off the cd to test it. I did that for a long time with one of my laptops, until the cd drive went tits up, and it wound up bricked.
During boot, F12 is usually the one to bring up a boot menu, but you also usually have a very short window to hit it.
I haven’t seen F12 recently. I have seen Delete as the key
I’m still looking for the “Any” key. Never have been able to find that one.
So SPAM it like you’re a loser trying to first.
F9?
I told you guys ebay is asshole.
Yes, but I got my creepy panda there.
Obligatory.
Climate change is making the gravitational pull of the sun and moon even stronger.
Speaking of which- I watched When Worlds Collide last night, which is actually an okay movie. I liked the carnival ride launch ramp for the space plane. That was kinda cool. But I kept wondering, as the other sun got closer and closer, why didn’t the earth burn to a cinder long before they were ready to bug out? I know, because movie science. At least somebody could have come down with a severe sunburn.
What annoyed me was when the one scientist doomed the one rocket out of spite towards the man in the wheelchair in preventing him from boarding.
By removing that much weight from a precisely calculated launch and flight plan, they’re not going to be on target.
Are the beings that built the structures revealed at the end extinct?
During boot, F12 is usually the one to bring up a boot menu, but you also usually have a very short window to hit it.
That might could explain the post it note with F12 scribbled on it stuck to the cd sleeve.
I haven’t seen F12 recently. I have seen Delete as the key
There is my problem. The last time I was doing this actively it was on Win7.
As I said, I’ll query the intertoobs before I try firing it up again.
The key is up to your motherboard, not Windows
Yeah. BIOS, pre-OS.
Fucking nerds
In my past it was usually F11.
Our man Dylan might’ve been a good fit for a new hard seltzer rollout.
That makes a lot more sense. To me, anyway.
Or a vodka mixture. Apparently an inordinate amount of vodka is bought by gay people.
Slowly backs out of chat room.
*slowly hides vodka drink*
The key is up to your motherboard, not Windows
Maybe I’ll check for lenovo, too, then.
Get ready for Senator Schiff. https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2024/01/12/california-senate-new-poll-shows-schiff-leading-and-tight-race-for-second-spot/
Dammit man, I just ate dinner.
Make this happen, California. You two deserve each other.
I fart in your general direction
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87821224358?pwd=eW55MTRDbDNtQkh2aHd3M1Nmenlzdz09
That is some Zork vibes right there
That’s a strange autocorrect.
Bork? Nork? Fork? Dork?
Friday Funbags uber alles!
https://archive.is/Kcc16
I was at a western-themed restaurant last night that had a display of “Rocks of the Grand Canyon.” I checked out the sandstone, limestone, mica, etc. until one mineral caught my eye.
“Hmm,” I thought to myself, “Ain’t that the schist. Very gneiss.”
Now Swiss has warned me about waking him from his hibernation (or in his case, helvetication) with rock puns… ore else. But I’m betting y’all have a few gems.
O, pal! I marble at your puns!
Just don’t take me for granite.
Would you say he is ….sedimentary?
That’s gold!
Hibernation? I thought he was just stoned.
Yeah, we’re all going to have to gravel for forgiveness now. He’ll definitely be crusty.
You know, it isn’t just one or two puns; it’s the aggregate.
*STRONGLY NARROWS GAZE*
lenovo bios = F1 (probably)
It didn’t say specifically if F12 would go directly to boot list.
I’ll give it a whirl tomorrow maybe.
That’s one calloused clit.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/love-sex/i-used-always-fake-orgasms-30832631
The AAP has moved from incompetent to evil.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12956237/Americas-pediatricians-say-denying-puberty-blockers-trans-minors-CHILD-ABUSE.html
I do wonder why the US is now more crazy-pants leftist than, hell, Europe now. I don’t get it.
Kulaks
The IRS announced Friday that it has recently collected more than half a billion dollars from millionaire Americans who owed tax debt.
The agency credited the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act for its stepped-up ability to pursue “high-income, high-wealth individuals,” as well as complex partnerships and large corporations, who are not paying overdue tax bills.
The IRA, pushed by President Joe Biden and approved in 2022, earmarked $80 billion over 10 years to step up the IRS’ enforcement capabilities. While $20 billion was ultimately clawed back in 2023 as part of the deal to head off a debt-ceiling crisis, the agency indicated it had already made use of its initial allotment.
Over the past year, the IRS said, enforcement officers had recouped approximately $520 million from the most well-off segments of society.
Stealing from the government is treason.
So spending $80B to recover $600M
Brilliant.
Well it’s $80 billion over 10 years. So it’s really $8 billion to collect $600M. That should make you feel better.
Beat me to it. But it’s all good.
– J M Keynes
23 Billion got clawed back, so it’s even better ROI!
And notice it’s “collected from those who owed”. I bet that means they sent letters off a list of already known delinquents and those people/corps paid. I doubt the extra billions helped this effort at all.
So how did the IRS really spend their ‘initial allotment’ of roughly 6 BILLION dollars? who tf knows, certainly not NBC.
But they haven’t collected from Hunter.
Is the Pope Catholic?
https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2024/01/12/why_is_pope_francis_working_with_communists_1004497.html
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
More seriously, I’d say this is just one more example of the corruption, decadence and rot present across nearly every Western institution. It’s also telling that the last true stronghold of Catholicism, Latin America, is converting over to Evangelical Christianity (and to less of an extent, atheism) at an accelerating rate. This guy is the exact wrong person to rebuild trust in the Church in the aftermath of the kiddy diddling scandals.
Oh, and he’s working with Communists BECAUSE HE’S A COMMUNIST. Occam’s Razor.
Yeah, we were all calling him the Commie Pope from the outset. Nobody should be surprised.
If it makes you feel better, I know of several American Catholics who are very unhappy with the current Pope, and there’s already tension between some of the American Bishops and the Vatican.
Depends on which Catholics you ask now…
Bow-chicka-wow-wow.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre/25337483/drunken-night-out-questioning-sexuality/
Every male from 15 to 65 is interested in this story
” If I say yes, does it mean I’m gay or bi?”
Honey, you faced the clam. Once you open that door you cant close it again.
She should fuck her mate’s boyfriend – just to re-affirm her identity.
Little old for college coeds but ok.
Back in my 20’s, I remember a girl who we would have to go into the woman’s room at the end of the night to pry her away from whichever girl she had gone in there with that night. When sober, she claimed to be completely straight. Many of us suggested that maybe, just maybe, she should try dating/making out with a girl when sober.
“We are adding staff and technology to ensure that the taxpayers with the highest income, including partnerships, large corporations and millionaires and billionaires, pay what is legally owed under federal law.”
I wonder how much they spent “recovering” that money.
Meanwhile, as I gather my $5.26 1099s…
You’d be monster if you didn’t laugh at this story
You know that the details of this story would make you laugh even harder if the journalo could have bothered themselves to ask more questions. The spin by the Sheriff is great.
I swear officer, this meth lit itself!
I hate it when my crack pipe explodes.
They should have called in the Hunter Biden Testing Corp.
“It looked like meth but it was actually acetone peroxide”
If you have 3.5 hours to kill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEP5ubPMGDU
Good JP.
He’ll be here in town next month. Thinking about dropping $125 to see him.
He went on to say this is a “stark reminder of the many potential dangers our officers face every day.”
Mostly a danger to themselves.
I finally got something that doesn’t look like a nightmare made flesh to emerge from Stable Diffusion. The first few rounds looked like they were drawn by untalented middle schoolers. After arguing with it about the difference between styles and Loras, I’m at early 2000s video game character.
For a few hours work, that’s something.
Aaaand now I’m back to nightmare fuel.
I made white chicken chili (keto) thats Da Bomb.
whaddup yo
Not a while lot. Playing around with text to image processing on my local machine.
Probably should make dinner soon.
Holy cow. I just approved a $330,000 company purchase from my cell phone.
Does that make me congressional material?
Not enough zeroes
-hangs head in shame-
I didn’t even put aside any for the Big Guy.
Largest gov check I ever signed off was 440000…I felt it..as a FedGov I should have just shruged…but I felt it
Was it for a case of the skillcraft pens they love?
If people knew that the government, mainly the military, procured most of there supplies from the blind…maybe more questions would be asked.
The gov’t issue calendars that show 3 months at a time?
I’ll keep an eye out for those!
Was it for 3 toilet seats for DoD? Or a dozen framing hammers?
If so….yes.
To be congressional material you need to approve $330k for your cell phone not from your cell phone.
Or better, approve $330K for your cell phone from THAT cell phone.
Meta AF.
Hunter is starting to look like his old man.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hunter-biden-backs-down-agrees-to-sit-for-deposition-in-bid-to-avoid-contempt-vote/
Crack is a helluva drug
It’s the sobering up that’s really aging him.
Or the calculated hits between mandatory drug tests
8F, with heat index –7F, and I have to go out at midnight to pick up XY from work.
We stocked up…hunkered down for the weekend. Fuck this noise.
Somewhere up in Alaska, Animal is chuckling at our whining.
We’re getting a lot of teens next week… been a lonnnnng time since I dealt with that shit.
*every parent with teen kids agrees*
Pedos hardest.
Jen was concerned about the Chiefs/Dolphins game. She was asking if they would postpone it since it was “so cold”.
I think the Chiefs have the Dolphins this week, I don’t think they’ll get past the Bills though.
She does know football is a cold-weather sport, right?
Have you been to Tampa in September?
Not really. She’s just starting to get invested in it this year, and I don’t want to scare her off yet. She’s actually learning players names, and has been able to name some of the Browns out of uniform in pictures. There was also the rumor about the Bills/Stillers game getting moved to Cleveland on Sunday due to weather that got her thinking that games get postponed/moved on a semi-regular basis.
Ah. It’s forecasted to be –4F at game time (–22F heat index) and the place will be packed. If the Dolphins lose, they’ll blame the weather.
Tell her the field is heated and the sidelines have warming tents.
The stadium is putting out dress guidelines to cover all extremities, head, face, etc. in many layers.
The coldest I’ve been to a game it was 9F. Husband and XX went to one that was also 9F.
Keeping us safe
How would we all sleep at night until every wrong thinker is charged and locked up.
“Featured prominently on the flag was an image of an M-16-style rifle.”
/fans self….sits down
MSM coverage is endlessly repeating that “140 police officers were injured” on J6. Has anyone ever researched the severity of these “injuries?” How many went to the hospital? How many were “I scraped my knuckles moving the barriers to let people in?”
I’ll bet half were the kinds of scrapes and shit you ignore while doing yardwork on Saturday. And most of the rest were malingerers looking for a few days off and maybe some disability pay? But then I’m a cynical person.
‘Enjoy the fever dream that is this music video.’
If Felix Cosgrove did music videos.