Unless you’re a hater, pretty much season 15 will keep you occupied for a good few days at least. Leveling I think will be quick just because the season quests and War Plans activities alone should boost you very quickly especially now that the reputation season quest component has returned to compliment your season journey. Even leveling on normal, you will get through fairly quickly and barely touch stuff like Strongholds (which I normally do) just because of trying to split your time between the seasonal quest and leveling up your War Plans activities.

One thing I noticed (at least from watching people play the PTR) was that the Pandemonium Ruptures, which I believe was the season 14 mechanic. So it looks like these are permanent additions to the game and I do believe I fought a few of the Realm Walkers that spawn (and died to one) But these can be a bit brutal especially at a lower level. While I didn’t do Season 14, I am pleased that the team decided to keep this type of content just because it does add more variety to the game (despite me dying).

But the really big stuff is a lot of the hidden stuff that was hinted. For instance, some people have already found Whimsyshire. Then the Capstone Dungeons themselves have been modified yet again and retrofitted as remakes of key portions of the original Diablo 1-3 series. I just did a special Waking Nightmare dungeon based on the Act 2 Caldeum city rescue with Belial as the final fight and I need to complete the Den of the Fallen on Penitent (later today) to move to the next season tier.

Also, in doing War Plans, you can see how the season influences the Activity Tree. I don’t have specifics but I am pleased that they gave War Plans more flavor here. I still would like to see more activities as I’ve stated numerous times before but it’s clear that War Plans won’t be static (at least until Diablo 5 gets released).

One of the biggest shadow drops here was Diablo 2 Runewords along with a secret Horadric Cube recipe. Because these weren’t listed in the Patch Notes, I haven’t really seen them used in any build guides thus far. But the idea is you take some of the class Runewords and apply them in order onto a white piece of gear to create the Ethereal/Runeword item as you would from Diablo 2 with similar effects. One of the early season dungeons gives you two runes and a white chest piece that you can create Stealth. So that was really cool. Also, I think these runes can still be used as rune words because they have their own properties and cost. But this just shows that there might be yet another interesting item hunt here. One person has even created a post on reddit to show you these recipes.

Build-wise, I don’t know if things will improve much because of the various nerfs. I don’t really believe these D2 Runeword items are going to have a huge impact on the game though outside of potentially being used for leveling and/or novelty. But they are being treated as a Unique item and I have to wonder if you can use them as a charm. Even if you can’t, I do like the fact that these are optional. Also, I think their item level scales but I haven’t tried making anything else yet besides the Stealth item.

I haven’t really touched the end game to comment at this stage. My eyes on are Mythic items since that whole system got revamped. From what I can see the Iconic Mythics aren’t as emphasized in these builds compared to before, which actually is a great thing to be honest. Instead, build enabling Mythics are what seem to be the key. But those are pretty far out of my reach since I only hit 70 last night and am starting Penintent (yeah, I’m slow but I also took a nap and grabbed dinner for a few breaks yesterday)

Regardless, I think the real thing for this season is to encounter all the Easter eggs spread throughout. On reddit, I’ve already seen Cow skins that you can find, some drops for the Staff of Herding and that recipe list for D2 Runewords. Some people think there is a cow level beyond the one that came with Lord of Hatred. More importantly though, despite the hiccups with SSF and the launch, the people who are playing this season really are enjoying it just for the content. Not only that but people aren’t begging for the season powers; they just want the latest content because it obviously just increases the depth of the game and amount of things we can do.

The real takeaway for Blizzard here is that people want large patches of content where there’s tons of additional activities. I’ve been saying that while the season powers are fine on a per season basis, the real thing people want is just more things to do. I think many of us are burnt out on Helltides, boss farming, Inferno Hordes, etc. If Legions, for instance, had a real motivation where it got a massive revamp, more people would do those. Same with World Bosses, normal Whispers and Strongholds. Coming an increase in the types of activities available and making them more dynamic through player agency is the direction the game (for what remains of it) should go (and where Diablo 5 ought to go). I honestly don’t think based on what we’re seeing in this current season that it’s not impossible for the team to execute on that level. The fact that this season is showing one of the biggest surges in players ought to demonstrate how there’s something real key that players want. Even a player like myself who is cynical and cautious in my approach towards my attitude with the game is willing to keep an open mind and recognizes when something is good and am willing to give credit where credit is due.

So to answer the initial question, come on back and stay a while.

The post Diablo 4: Season 15 Launched (Kinda) Yet is it Worth Playing? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Probably, the most relevant announcement to me for the purpose of this blog is the revealing of the details for Season 15 for Diablo 4. I’m going to defer that portion to focus on the other Diablo related announcements thus far from Blizzcon 2026 so I can do more of a deep dive at least with regards to the PTR notes.

Diablo the Animated Series on Netflix

There had been rumblings about some creative collaborative project between Blizzard and Netflix recently. The keyword used during the keynote speech was describing Blizzard as an “entertainment” entity besides being focused on gaming (any call backs to the WWE?) Considering that Blizzard has been leaning more and more into crossovers lately, this collaboration isn’t necessarily a surprise. I know people who have wanted Blizzard’s studio side (the movie group) to produce something purely story driven. Heck, I’ve argued that getting an Overwatch animation series would actually be a decent idea. But Diablo?

I have to pause here and offer a great deal of hesitation. First, Diablo really doesn’t strike me as a good series to build an animation series around. Diablo has always been more about horror and the colors and themes just don’t lend themselves. At least for American animation that I’ve seen. Obviously, this is going to be heavily dependent on who handles the series. But will is be something like a Dark Horse comic style?

The other reason I’m not overly fond of this idea is that the Warcraft movie just stunk. I think having in game cinematics with light story/dialog is fine when you have just the right amount. Thus far, I just don’t think the people within Blizzard have the capability of writing a good story beyond a game format. And even then it feels lame a lot of the time. Vessel of Hatred was just rotten to me when it came to story telling and I didn’t even give Lord of Hatred a chance.

At least from my experience, the style that Blizzard tries to project in their games does not serve anyone over the age of junior high well. I heavily dislike the mixed mode of a Disney gimped Ralph Bakshi mode. It comes off more like Dragon Lee’s Bruceploitation because you get a cheap copy that can’t live up to the original (i.e. Tolkien and to a lesser extent Dungeons and Dragons). The best way I can describe my fear is similar to what we ended up getting for Star Wars 8, especially that horrible Mary Poppins sequence with Princess Leia. So this new series doesn’t appeal to me especially when I have my own novel published that I think is far darker and better than anything Blizzard can put out.

Diablo V in Spring of 2029

This is one of the big two announcements so far at Blizzcon 2026. I know there’s World of Warcraft Forever but I honestly have no idea what that’s supposed to be. But let’s focus on the major annoucement that relates to this blog post more directly: the next Diablo V game. Not an expansion, a supposedly ground up written game aimed for 2029. The announcement itself seemed to initially pop the room but I think the date killed off the excitement.

There was a discussion/panel led by Blizzard’s current CEO along with the main people involved with this new project. And I have to be honest here: they said almost nothing of value. Anyone with half a brain could deconstruct the vague wording used. The trailer itself was very brief (0:48 seconds total). You barely could make out anything. There were concept art shown but almost nothing really concrete. The panel themselves seemed to receive a rather cold reception from the audience, who after 2 years of no Blizzcon, were probably starved and hungering for something huge.

To me this was utter bullshit. I got super pissed at this announcement because that’s all it really was. The only things mentioned of note were some caravan your character travels with, the return of procedurally drawn zones, the end of the open world (how ironic too) and the Demon Hunter and Monk as returning classes. There was some hints for the gear, which looked as though the team just reverted everything back to Diablo 2. But what the flying fuck was this nonsense?

Here’s what I think really happened. I think Diablo 4’s design has proven to be problematic for the developers in managing to create a stable game. The open world simply made no sense, had various issues like rubberbanding, scaling, etc. Also, I think the initial design especially once seasons got incorporated conflicted with one another, giving them impossible problems to solve such as the art direction conflicting with the game’s increase in speed in conjunction with the power creep. Itemization looks to be going through yet another revamp in Diablo 5, which may allude to how the Diablo 4 system might just be too rotten to fix at this point. Usually, when you get into this state where a system becomes unmanageable, you just end up tossing it into the gutter and start from scratch.

Also, I think that in seeing yet another game director show up tells me that the vision for Diablo changed again and he probably evaluated the current version from top to bottom and decided that there’s not enough to really build off of because of how the core causes too many problems whenever it gets modified. This is the only explanation why they can’t balance the game well and have problems pushing out content without a ton of frustrating bugs spring out each patch/season.

But I read this Diablo 5 situation more as a PR move to buy them some time. They’ve given themselves to 2029 for this release, which to me looks like a death march. The talk itself was just too vague which makes me believe the bulk of this game is currently in discovery mode and that they were desperate to get anything to excite the fans since there honestly wasn’t a lot for the Diablo series. That’s probably why the CEO came out to host the talk herself since she probably knew what a clusterfuck this situation is. I mean most of the panel there looked as though there was a shotgun aimed at the back of their heads while they spoke. I think the audience realized this too especially as that Xbox CEO person recently just cut a ton of people in the division. The worst part is that if this was one of your biggest announcements but the crowd ain’t buying, something really is wrong.

My other comment is that a lot of these people looked super old and worn out. I know I’m not young either but holy crap did the panel look ancient. And think about this: if Blizzard manages to hit that 2029 mark by some miracle, it’s still 3 years out from now. 3 FUCKING YEARS. By that point, I’ll qualify for the Denny’s senior specials. Someone like me who has physical ills can’t wait another three years for this type of game. I can’t even tell if the planet is going to be around given that there’s been talk just of AI decimating things, climate change (see Nepal and even the recent SoCal heatwave we just are finishing up), the craziness of the various small wars and hostile fervor, not to mention the Anti-Christ himself and his legions of brainwashed minions (and you know just whom I’m talking about here) quite possibly turning the US into a wasteland. And I have to wait at least three years for a game that barely has any definition about what the hell it’s supposed to be? Fuck this.

Diablo 4 on the Nintendo Switch

I read how some people sounded excited for a Switch announcement (maybe all those backstabbed Sony PS people). But again this didn’t receive that huge of a reaction. The meme iterated in a few chats was, “Do you not have Switches?” I mean, if you’re not a Switch owner, why is this relevant?

Summoning Spawn into Diablo Immortal: Live Drawing with Todd McFarlane

I mentioned previously how Blizzcon and Blizzard have devolved into this self-indulgent, ego inflated, sycophantic entity. The fact that they’re bringing this comic book artist for Diablo Immortal more or less reinforces my view. I mean, really who is this convention for anymore? And what is it about? We’re seeing more crossover garbage than ever. What happened to just the games portion that players could get excited over? It just feels like this whole entertainment world with their leech executives just enjoy masturbating each other in a giant circle jerk.

Diablo 4: Return of the Amazon

Announced for early 2027, we’ll see the return of the Amazon class from Diablo 2. More details are scheduled for Sunday’s “What’s Next” Panel. So far they described the Amazon as being split into four distinguished archtypes: Champion, Skirmisher, Ranger, and Commander where the two weapons of choice will be the Bow and a Javelin, which is going to be new for the Diablo 4 world.

I will admit that I am disappointed in not actually getting a playable class at this point. While the Warlock just got released for Lord of Hatred, the Paladin itself had been shadow dropped, which I think did Blizzard a major disservice in the long term because it simply setup high expectations for their own Blizzcon convention. But the real question I think plaguing people’s mind is whether this class will be part of an expansion or DLC.

They already mentioned that the Lord of Hatred is pretty much the finale in the series with the Hatred theme. In that sense, one would assume there ought to be no more expansions especially with Diablo V getting a hard deadline. If that’s the case, are we expected to see just a continuation of seasons mixed in with a DLC or two for the next three years?

I noticed that a lot of people have become skeptical especially because of the whole “10 year roadmap” for Diablo 4 (which honestly seemed more a lipservice thing from old Rod) as well as how many of us felt Diablo 3 ended up getting the shaft. Now, I will admit that once the season aspect really started to ramp up in Diablo 3, the game became kinda cool especially as more features went into the core of the game such as Emanate for Follower gear, the Altar and Visions. But the only major release after Reaper of Souls was the Necromancer DLC, which is what I think most of us are expecting.

The other problem is that Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred were a little on the pricier side. Even if they were expansions, they honestly didn’t feel as though much thought nor effort were put into both, especially in comparison the ever growing Path of Exile 2 (and it’s impossible not to compare both games at this stage). Lord of Hatred for me was particularly obnoxious in that it wasn’t just expensive but anyone not owning it really had no reason to play Diablo 4 anymore. And for those people who have money issues, that expansion felt like a slap in the face. As a result, I’m not hyped up for this new class right now in the current context.

Diablo 4: Season of Hell’s Legacy

Once again leaning into that nostalgia factor, Diablo 4 Season 15 is centered around the return of Deckard Cain as a zombie j/k, he’s a “lost soul” where you track down three dark wanderers and enter their memories/nightmares to fight the big baddies of the past in Baal, Mephisto (didn’t we just defeat him too?????) and Diablo (whoa! A Diablo in Diablo 4 finally!) to gain a special kind of soul shard/splinter.

From what I’ve seen from some of the machines at Blizzcon (Datmodz gave a demo), these fights were mostly an updated version of their Diablo 2 counterpart. Also, there was this cow lord boss that I think is active now. But I’m not sure if he’ll be around for the next season. The boss fights themselves don’t look that bad especially in comparison to the horrible Lilith and current Mephisto fights and will at least be part of the season story quest.

These splinters will modify certain activities that are associated with War Plans as well as the Tree of Whispers. Also, they will be used for the reputation aspect usually associated to the season journey system and allow the user to erupt with a power corresponding to their owner. I do think this modified version of War Plans with regard to the activity trees will be interesting. So this part alone might be worth checking out since it does change up how the game will play. In addition, I think having these splinters will cause the player to be hunted partly because they too become a dark wanderer and they make the player more vulnerable to the boss associated to the splinter. However, only one splinter can be used at a time but can be changed out.

In addition, there will be three new dungeon types called Waking Nightmares. Effectively, these are another nostalgia play where the largest resembles old encounters and their layouts but are treated as set level Capstone type of dungeons until T10+ where they get upgraded to a more challenging version with appropriate rewards. The middle sized one are set in locations around the world and have set ups similar to famous spots like the Den of the Fallen. Finally, the smallest ones are single encounter/event rooms that may have a boss or some older encounter like fetishes from act 3 in Diablo 2.

Now, there are gem-like Soul Splinters that were in the PTR. I didn’t care for the downside effects. However, you can put one in each jewelry slot to replace your normal gems. They have quite a bit of resistance in addition to the power which varying levels of bonuses and penalties. But you’ll have to optimize which ones to pick so you don’t gimp yourself too badly (e.g. losing all of your critical hit). Effectively, these are the “new” seasonal powers here and remind me a little of the ones introduced during Season 11. They will be upgradeable too in the Horadric Cube with the Amalgamation craft and you find these mostly from bosses.

Streamlined War Plans

This is the feature that most people have asked for in terms of the “shared account” form of War Plans. This is mostly a quality of life feature where characters on a partition (e.g. season HC vs season SC and SSF versions of each) will have the same amount of experience for activity trees and can spend points per character. So this is a major plus overall and it is something that will go into the core of the game.

Updated Mythic Uniques

There seems to be some rollback here. The classic or Iconic Mythics are returning and becoming a chase item again, which sounds good while crafted uniques are going to be treated like Primal Ancients in the Horadric Cube where you can do a direct upgrade in a deterministic mode. Once again, uniques crafted in this manner like crafted Primal Ancients, will only get a single slot for being equipped and cannot be done to an Unmodifiable item (which kinda makes sense).

Also, they are adding a new crafting option to the Blacksmith so players can semi-target farm Iconic Mythics. But Mythics crafted with the Jeweler’s Rune Crafting mechanism or Blacksmith’s Mythic Unique cache won’ have the crafted tag and thus can be equipped beyond a single slot.

I’m still not a fan of Mythic becoming a quality because I think what they ended up doing is transferring the ideas from Chaos Armor onto Uniques via Mythic crafting rather than keeping Mythics as a pure chase item. I would’ve preferred if Uniques were just a low drop rate aspect that could be crafted onto a piece of gear and given a new name since the static affixes make these things less special feeling. But I guess this is still better than what S14 presented so we’ll see how this goes.

New Horadric Cube Crafting Recipes

• Affix Value Reroll – Allows you to reroll all base affixes on both equipment and Talisman items (Charms and Seals) — while protecting desirable traits like Greater Affixes, any Enchanted affixes, Tempers, and Transfigurations (as long as that Transfigured item is not Unmodifiable).This sounds like a really good recipe. My complaint with the current implementation is wasting an item that has a greater affix role that you wanted. My argument has been that you should minimize RNG on crafting once you’ve received the desired material since the RNG should be the hunt, not the craft. You don’t really want to spend that much time just slaving away and hurting your hands on some project because a crappy RNG generator isn’t in your favor. So I’m very happy with how this sounds.
• Horadric Reroll – A second option for rerolling Charms and Seals, with a few differences. Available for Legendary+ Charms and Seals, Horadric Reroll fully randomizes all base Affixes on Charms and Seals, without touching Set Bonuses or Unique/Mythic charm powers. Unlike Affix Value Reroll, Horadric Reroll will not change the Charm Set Bonus Affixes on Seals – just base Affix.So another really good recipe because you don’t have to do that weird craft where you waste a ton of set Charm in the hope of getting an upgrade. It kinda reminds me of recipe #4 from the old Kanai’s Cube where if you had the materials, you could reroll certain set items except here you’re rerolling just the affixes. I assume you can be able to get greater affixes too with this method.

I think the real story here is that there’s more opportunities for growth in the Horadric Cube. Right now, it just seems to be used for quality of life advancement but I’m hoping more recipes will continue to evolve, even though Diablo V now is on the horizon.

Legacy Uniques

These are familiar items from Diablo 2 and 3 like the Stone of Jordan and are permanent additions to the game. In addition, quite a few are marked such that you can convert them into a Unique Seal. The main issue I see with these is that they simply bulk up the limited room for aspects and unique seals. Since we’re not going to see any more updates to the actual main core engine for Diablo 4 (which sucks), these feel wasteful as we won’t get more gear slots and be forced to continuously shuffle around pieces to figure out how to fit stuff like this in.

One comment I have focuses on Nemesis Bracers. I’m sure that the power is to summon elites at Shrines. But unlike Nemesis Bracers from Diablo 3, these take the glove slot rather than a bracers slot, which we don’t have in Diablo 4. On top of that, I think not having Emanate continues to hurt since Mercenaries remain as buffs rather than something we can do more to customize.

Horadric Post

This is another touted quality of life thing. Basically, it’s a way for Blizzard to send you mail one way. I imagine things like gear, transmog and rewards can find themselves towards you as well as be accompanied by a nice (system) message for additional context.

Rebirth

This is one of the last real major quality of life type of features players had requested as a carry-over from Diablo 3. Effectively, you’ll convert an Eternal character to become a seasonal character, which is an interesting way of looking at the situation. But the bullet points for how this feature will resolve itself goes:

• Class, name, appearance, and state (Normal or Hardcore)
• When saved as part of an ensemble, cosmetic preferences including transmogs and pigments, mounts and accessories, pets, portals, and headstones can also transfer.

I like this a lot personally because I would constantly create new characters each season and lose their name or be forced to come up with a new name like “RudeRickSix” (for my Druid) and figure out how their original portrait would look during the character creation process. I wasn’t a huge fan of going through all of that just to redo someone every few months. So it’s a nice time saver that is overdue.

Other Season Features

I’m not going to go into the season rewards and reliquaries themselves nor a deep dive into the patch notes. Anyone can just scroll to the bottom of that link and see for themselves all the adjustments. But the main things I’ve read is that Warlock is going to be the main star for the season while other classes like Barbarian got the shaft pretty badly. For myself, I might give Companion Druid another try just because I really liked the build and would consider giving it another shot.

Other Blizzcon 2026 Comments

For non-Diablo related comments, the big thing to me was the announcement of a new Starcraft game that’s set for 2030. By then I’m definitely going to be qualifying for the IHOP senior special so I probably won’t play it. As far as I’ve read as rumors go and by the hints from the video, it looks like it’ll be a shooter game where you play a marine. I’m going to guess that they’ll use some of the foundational first person shooter game play from Overwatch with heavily updated graphics. But for me it’s 40 years way overdue and my interest in anything Starcraft or RTS related is dead at this stage because I simply can’t physically play that type of game at my age with my ailments.

A lot of the other things like Warcraft III re-reforged or whatever was released but still being paid for which to me is silly. But it merely emphasized the nostalgia plays Blizzard are doing as they grasp for straws in trying to retain whatever audience still clings onto their every word. Same thing with WoW Forever, which makes Blizzard sound like a heroin dealer.

Quite frankly, what I’ve seen so far from Blizzcon 2026 was pretty much a letdown even though my expectations are really low. I just read that there won’t be anymore expansions for Diablo 4 as well, which is disheartening and makes me wonder just how they’re going to handle the Amazon class. I mean, at this stage, is the Amazon class just going to be like the Diablo 3 Necromancer DLC? I know they said they’ll continue to work on seasons at least up until Diablo V gets released but it really feels like a letdown because in all likelihood we won’t see any real major feature updates.

I feel kinda bad for anyone who was stupid enough to buy a ticket this year. I mean you want to talk snake oil, well this was it. The opening speeches were really hard to watch and the audience just seemed dead most of the time whenever a speaker made a proclamation. But this was bad. I mean, Diablo Immortal was bad but at least they had something people could play on the floor. Diablo V was mostly just concept art at this point and a trailer that was less than a minute. Anyone can do all of that with AI these days. They didn’t even have a single thing working that they could show. Why even announce Diablo V this far in advance?

I realize that Blizzard is notorious for the “Soon TM” meme, which in reality is just these long stretches of what feels like inactivity or lack of communication to the point where players lose interest. But now they’ve basically said well fuck Diablo IV because the player base shat all over all the bad design decisions so let’s give up and start from scratch YET AGAIN. Why not fix the core problems or make an attempt? Was Diablo IV just so badly written and conceived that some person managed to sneak in and convince management that it’s better to start from scratch?

I guess I’m mad because of how Diablo 3 ended up getting treated. Diablo 2 with Blizzard North was a different scenario for me because there was a team that was successful that ended up splitting but put out a culturally defining game (at least the genre). So we heard about the fights and problems which gave us the initial version of Diablo 3. But Diablo 3 though being treated like the red headed stepchild probably was more like the abused child from an adopted family where some stork just dropped him off. I think the fact that we not only have to wait 3 whole years to get a completely new game with an unknown, vaguely defined situation, we also are aware that Diablo 4 is going to slowly be put out to pasture. The thing I read was that they will continue to keep support for Diablo 4 via seasons (because Transmog and Battle Passes) but these seasons aren’t going to really lead anywhere anymore. There’s not going to be an expansion where the lessons and features from seasons will get reincorporated. At least, Lord of Hatred managed to demonstrate bits of that.

Then there’s the problem that you know they aren’t going to devote resources into fixing the real core problems of the game. Whatever is around right now just will end up staying in that manner. So the broken Dark Citadel, the half baked Mercenaries, the unwanted PVP zone, etc. are all useless at this stage. I mean why not just toss the adopted child in a trash bin and run off like some early 80s made-for-TV movie.

I guess the real problem for me is that I’m just about through with believing in Blizzard. I’ll continue to play Diablo 4 when there’s something that interest me but Blizzard is just full of shit to me these days. The old gaming spirit that I loved from the mid to late 90s is long dead especially since a good chunk of the original group have moved on. Corporate M$, Activision and their CFOs killed that spirit and now it’s just KPIs that make no sense, a revolving door set of leadership, no visionaries, etc.

Maybe for me once Diablo V comes out, it’ll mark my retirement from contemporary gaming. I keep mentioning how my age and physical ailments are slowly preventing me from doing anything remotely stressful. Gaming can be very stressful and I can’t see this modern version of Blizzard satisfying that old itch I used to have for games. Instead, if I see an encounter and it’s frustrating or that the path to get what I want is hampered by moronic decisions, I’m just not going to bite. I’ve spent a lot of money and tried to have some faith but I’m just too discouraged to really continue. It is sad though that these large companies aren’t fostering a positive future but being driven financially more than ever. The only bright points I’ve seen in recent years is the independents but nothing really has caught my attention beyond small mobile games.

The post Diablo 4: Announcements from Blizzcon 2026 and Related Stuff appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The idea of MMORPG aspects are things I think were intended in the original Diablo 3 game. I recall reading about similar ideas of towns being these major areas where players could hang out. I’m not sure if they wanted an open world at that point but one article by David Brevik himself mentioned how some of the original Diablo 3 aspects were influenced by Ultima Online. The big idea in that article points to the social interaction between hundreds of people in a town hub. Apparently, you still would have instanced areas but I have to imagine certain aspects made its way into Diablo 4 as it was compared in that article with that vision. In addition, the original Diablo 3 had begun development in 2001 with Blizzard North, which was pre-World of Warcraft release, although WoW started after Starcraft’s release in ’98.

Now, I focused on the MMORPG aspects of Diablo 3/4 because I feel both were somewhat linked in designing the open world. I really don’t know what the actual goal was in having an open world. At least the way it was initially implemented and presented, Diablo 4’s open world seemed as a nod towards World of Warcraft since Blizzard has heavy experience in creating that type of setting. I feel that part of the idea here was to provide an exploratory experience where players could discover things along the way such as the tiny Cellar mini dungeons or the old Altars of Lilith. Along with that aspect, the game was meant to be more atmospheric with slower play initially. I remember during the original campaign at how overwhelming the world map felt initially as it slowly opened itself up over the course of the campaign and you were able to gain access to these colorful regions.

However, once the campaign was done and you conquered each region, your Renown would progress to provide rewards such as paragon points, skill points, increase Obol storage, etc. Later, this system was phased out in favor of the seasonal system. But having this old Renown system in place made exploration a huge deal originally. Part of the problem though was the tedious nature of certain aspects such as Altars of Lilith (which I think wasn’t a bad idea but the designers probably had too many which made it a pain to hunt down)

Then as Seasons became a larger part of the game where each season represented roughly 2-3 months total of effectively a specialized larger patch, Renown gradually was reduced then completely removed. In addition, having this shorter lifecycle for playing a character meant increasing the optimization for that character’s growth (or characters for alt-a-holics like myself). Increased quality of life would show up in the form of being able to teleport to dungeons rather than ride to them (which was silly in the first place), improving the horrible jankiness of the mounts, even including the Whisper turn in during one season. With regards to the open world portion, the meme of the “green Helltide” zones ended up becoming the method for Blizzard to salvage dead regions and get players to return to older zones for a short period. I think once players started prodding Blizzard with this negative stigma, the alternate colored seasonal zone died down as key features, which also meant those zones died down again.

Some people on reddit in that linked comment section mentioned how more of the focus ended up going towards instanced content like Dungeons, the Pit, Boss Lairs, Inferno Hordes, etc. In turn, there wasn’t as much focus on the open world part it felt, although things like Helltides would incorporate seasonal mechanics such as Duriel’s bugs, Chaos Portals, etc. Yet the other zones that weren’t normally affected by Helltides almost served no purpose.

Another sharp observation made was how an open world concept is better served when there’s an interactive environment. I think there were threads of an idea in place such as mining and herbs but over time those too became moot especially as crafting materials changed. Or you had the ill fated dedicated PVP zones, which now are ghost zones except for people who want easy whispers. Legion events are almost empty while Strongholds have become distant artifacts that are more of a nuisance each season as opposed to having a real purpose.

Beyond that, I think the open world for me has generally made the game unstable. Transitioning from one zone to another especially on horseback would cause these weird delays or rubberbanding. Part of optimizing your game was effectively killing off cross play because having additional players in a region would generate a lot of lag from network issues. Heck, even opening your Stash in town still causes problems with slowdown that makes no sense to me. It makes this concept of a true open world almost moot because of technical flaws that still exist.

But there are a few key causes here where I think we can see how this open world idea has failed over time. First, I think promoting seasons as a first class feature has effectively made the open world less appealing because of the conflicts in design. The original Diablo 4 leveling and progression experience were far slower. At the same time, you only had the Eternal Realm (which honestly wasn’t even a thing at that point). But not having to re-create your characters every few months encouraged this design where you could step back and enjoy checking out every nook and cranny in this giant world. It’s kinda like how World of Warcraft felt incredible the first time through but passe each time you created an alt.

With seasons though, you’re rebooting your character every few months. So the loftier goals that the older team(s) may have had in mind would be eliminated as the emphasis was on short term goals both as a monetization effort (BattlePasses!) Having this short lifespan for a character meant less attachment and trying to get through as much as possible quicker. Redoing just the Altars of Lilith or blue quests every single season just weren’t going to be feasible for most players much less enjoyable especially when the value proposition just isn’t there.

The other major issue is more an internal one from my perspective where you have a kind of team rot. This is a far larger problem because of how scandals and just the revolving door situation have made the game less about someone or a key group really having a core vision of what the game ought to be and more about KPIs as I’ve accused Blizzard/M$ of pushing in terms of what we’ve seen. But the clear outcome at this stage seems completely dictated by KPIs based on the game’s current direction.

For instance, I think when Season 2 was highly praised as a major success for the game, it may have given the team/Blizzard the wrong signals about where to place the emphasis on the game. I don’t have actual internal evidence but you can see where the game would make detours such as not pushing the old seasonal powers as much after some backlash from the players. I think in the case of seasonal powers Blizzard really shot themselves in the foot with subsequent seasons because they only used seasons to test out future features rather than determining how to reincorporate them back into the core game once the current season was done. Now, there is a clear difference to me when it comes to this idea because I view it as similar to how GGG would figure out how to pull a League back into the core of the game. I feel that many players expected and/or wanted this but Blizzard never has been able to find a sweet spot in terms of figuring out balance (and I argue that they never should have needed it which would eventually go into my standard rant against the esports culture inside of Blizzard, which for an ARPG doesn’t make a lot of sense to me).

Beyond that, the other problem is that a lot of the open world features pretty much were left to rot or that there were constant revamps to existing systems that seemed to eat away at better fleshing out the game. Now, some of those systems did need an improvement especially itemization and crafting. Yet what I’m talking about are things like Dungeons 2.0 or Infernal Hordes 2.0. Some of these revamps didn’t feel like much either to be honest. Like the Dungeon revamp with Escalating Nightmare Dungeons was honestly lame and Inferno Hordes was just boring content staying the same outside of a few updates like Soulspires or Aether Masses because neither were all that great in the first place. And even after those updates, a few like Soulspires remain soul draining (to real people).

While those things have been the focus of most of their core updates (especially now that there’s attention on War Plans to highlight the key activities in the game), the older parts have suffered especially in the open world have suffered. I’ve done my own blogs on offering advice to fixing them (and hopefully this weekend we can see Blizzard addressing these issues). But at least for now, these things aren’t high on the priority list and pretty much have been shoveled under the carpet.

When I think back about the open world problems, I think some of it is the result of having an extraneously long campaign/story mode. Most of the actual exploration occurs during the campaign (this includes the expansions). But once you’re done with the campaign, there’s not a lot of reason to return unless there’s a seasonal element. Also, depending on the season, you may get a reasonable story line to accompany that season such as 2, 3 and 7, which may require you to trek around the world. But I think trying to shoehorn more back stories into those older zones isn’t necessarily the best way to really get the most bang for your buck.

Really though the key point is the lack of interaction in the open world that probably is the number one issue where the concept has fallen short. At this stage, the open world is more of a hindrance than something that feels appealing. The only times I really see much value at this point are World Bosses and summoned bosses in Helltides. The only novel interaction I’ve had is when I used one of those Corrupted Roots in my backpack to kill some person just standing around waiting for a world boss to spawn. Otherwise, I really can’t see why the open world was conceived as a great idea.

Maybe part of it was an older idea inherent in Blizzard where they valued the early success of World of Warcraft. I think that early success was more serendipitous because of the scale and freshness of the game as opposed to the actual mechanics. Then you had the rise of social networks that coincided in timing with World of Warcraft. Those ideas may have influenced one another. However, as with my recent post on the decline in dating apps, I would argue that many of these social integrations are beginning to wear thin on people’s patience.

If we look at the utter failure of the Dark Citadel/Raid feature from Vessel of Hatred, we can see a futile/feeble attempt at Blizzard trying to recapture their early glory days from World of Warcraft’s raiding system. But I think most ARPG genre fans simply don’t want to be forced into grouping. I’ve made this argument in the past and luckily, we haven’t seen any more of this nonsense being updated (and hopefully it stays that way). But that was another case where social/group content was made into a huge feature but just withered away.

I think this idea of the open world and MMORPGs/social aspects are tied together and why neither really work well in an ARPG setting. I’m not arguing against including friends in playing a game like this but it should be more organic in how that type of environment occurs. Like Diablo 3 to me is a far better social game than Diablo 4 because it was done in a pretty straightforward manner. The only change was increasing the damage and life for enemies along with rewards to scale against the player’s team.

The other thing is that the speed in which ARPG players want in these games don’t really fit the exploratory/artistic nature that I think Blizzard had initially envisioned for this game. In turn, that vision and style simply have caused this major clash in what we have today in Diablo 4. I really hope that the team over at Blizzard understand why this game has so many problems though. The open world definitely is one of them at this stage, although I don’t think there’s much they can really do to fix the problems outside of routine maintenance to ensure older content doesn’t become completely deprecated.

The post Diablo 4: Was the Open World Wasted Potential? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The reddit post itself has a plethora of comments about OkCupid and various people’s experiences with the site. The main issue I’ve read is that Match.com’s acquiring of the site and roughly around 2016 are where things seemed to descend into muddiness. In my case, a coworker had mentioned sometime around 2017 – 2018 meeting her husband on the site and said I should give it a try. My experience at that point was that it was a soulless meat market and that there was less ways to match than eharmony (where I only had one date after paying). And I did try paying back for a period but never really got further than a few messages exchanged on OkCupid.

That said, I did try a few other online dating sites, even a so-called mail order brides site that I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit (but didn’t pay for after doing a whois lookup to find out it was located in a suspicious country). The bulk of these sites were almost the same except that they were flavored for a specific genre (e.g. older people, Christians, LGBQT+, etc.) I believe most were owned by a similar parent company that simply skinned these sites to provide the impression that they were different. But at the center of these sites were a similar pattern in trying to mine your data and get you to pay for exchanging simple messages or even doing anything transactional (e.g. look at images, comment, etc.)

Yet there were far more nefarious forces at work. Of course, some were Nigerian scammer type of scenarios. But I recall in one instance how after just signing up, without adding any preferences or personal information whatsoever, I immediately received a like/message from someone. When I inspected the profile, it turned out to be this white woman in her 50s…except the profile picture was of a black person in her 30s. WTF?????

So I pretty much stopped and signed out. Luckily, I used one of my expendable email addresses because most of these places make the bulk of their money selling off your information to their partners. And if you start receiving suspicious spam messages then this is how.

Some of these sites try to gamify their setup. I remember one with a sketchy voyeuristic camgirl type of setup. You’d get these tokens for spending money where you’d get private “sessions” with these people. Of course, none of this would lead anywhere but I’m sure a few suckers dumped their money into these things.

Lately, I’ve mostly avoided dating sites. The only one I occasionally check is OkCupid but I honestly find that site to be hopeless. Right now, OkCupid seems to be driven by bots and fake profiles (maybe worse than before). I’ve been getting these weird Chinese women trying to message me. For instance, I received an “intro” from a woman who claimed to be 55 but looked 35. I could not respond to this intro, despite how “she” had superliked my profile. I got the most minimalistic question which clearly demonstrated she did not read one word from my profile. And this message/like came out of the blue.

I think what happens on OkCupid is that if your profile becomes inactive for weeks/months, they send an automated message/like/intro to try to get you to log back in. Because you can’t really see anything beyond the most immediate and recent intro/superlike, their entire hope is that you’re stupid enough to fall prey for this scam. But the minute you re-log back in, you start getting pelted against by likes and an occasional intro. None of these people seem real though because they don’t really fill out their profile and only give 2-3 pictures at most to make it seem that a person really exist behind the image.

I’m not saying there aren’t real people but the “real” people are buried deep and the match criteria is horrible. You’ll see fake statistics like 85-95% matching based on some stupid, nonsensical questionnaire that honestly has little to nothing to do with your actual core values which are critical in a relationship. And even if you try liking someone, there’s no guarantees for the reverse to occur. Or you might write your soul into a message for it to be ignored, thus making you feel you’ve just wasted your time.

The problem about these dating apps is that they’re utter bullshit. I mean, you hear about success stories but I’m more curious about their failure rates. Even more importantly, I have to wonder how many of these profiles are auto generated from exposed photos on the internet that some unwitting person has provided via social media (i.e. the paid “partnership”). I figure at the least these companies have to be somewhat aware of the scumminess of their sites or at least realize that these profiles are fake.

In addition, at least for me, when I see one of these profiles, I just become really discouraged. It’s like reading a software requirements document for a highly classified missile system. You would think some of these people are just flat out deranged with their bullet points and specifications. Now, those are real profiles but who’d want to deal with that kind of person in the first place?

I just think that online dating sites are expensive for what you get. There’s no guarantees and many put you on some scammy subscription plan that’s very hard to cancel. Most just pray for desperate people to pay but once you get screwed over a few times, you’ll realize that these aren’t worth it.

Sadly, the only place that looked somewhat viable was the old Craigslist relationships section. But that’s long gone since some online law pretty much killed their dating classifieds. I almost would imagine that one of these power house companies might’ve tried bribing the government into pushing that into law so people would be forced to use these shitty dating apps (someone ought to research this to be honest).

But I have to say that the online dating thing never was a good thing for me. I’ve seen that crappy match.com ever since college and even back then it sucked and broke your heart. I don’t think anyone has really figured out how to crack the code for creating a really successful online dating site. Don’t tell me tinder nor eharmony because those either become gamified or require you to pay. I’m talking about just something decent where you can actually find someone you really want as you’re wading through the white noise of being online.

In addition, I think social media as it’s created worse behavior over time has killed off the desire for meeting people online. Add to this fact is how the internet got polluted by a lot of garbage people, really low class, poorly behaving nut cases. Then these days you have bots so it’s going to make determining whether anyone on the other side of the screen is real anymore.

But even before what you see now, I think just the lack of trust online has been a persistent issue. Not just the people behind these profiles but how companies try to treat simple (or complex) social interaction as being this opportunistic scenario for them to make a quick buck. Like for someone such as myself, I’m at the point where I have zero hope of meeting the woman of my dreams online or at the very minimal from an online dating site. There’s just too many expectations and forces working against someone like myself where it’s not worth the effort, the heartbreak and especially the money. So if the purpose for the online marketplace of dating was to pair up hopeless people like myself, then it’s a dead deal at this stage, especially with the economy in shambles in conjunction with some nutball in charge of the country.

The post Are Dating Apps Dying? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The Disaster Artist is mostly based upon Greg Sestero, who plays Mark in The Room, and his book. The movie is done by the Franco brothers, David and James, along with an ensemble Hollywood cast. From what I’ve read, The Disaster Artist exaggerates and fictionalizes some elements on what actually happened for the sake of a film. But I partly read that not only as a way to serve your usual Hollywood fairy tale story but as a way to pay tribute to The Room, which to me is a fascinating movie for Hollywood insiders since it was done in an unconventional manner while garnering a cult status that rivals The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

While the narrative perspective mostly is done through the lens of Greg Sestero, who provides the back story from his book, the main character is Tommy Wiseau as he’s portrayed as this mysterious person of whom no one has ever learned 1) what his real age is; 2) where he really is from; and 3) how he accumulated his wealth. And you have to consider Tommy Wiseau a character in a very literal sense of the word as he is distinct from anyone one may encounter and seems to operate on his own wavelength and perpetually surrounded by a reality distortion field.

But the main story is how Greg Sestero, who is your typical struggling actor, encounters Tommy Wiseau during one of his classes while in SF and finds his presentation utterly fascinating to the point where he befriends Tommy. From there, Tommy adopts Sestero as a kind of blood brother where he upends Sestero’s quiet life in SF to have Greg follow him to LA on whim where he own/rents his own apartment. The glossy eyed, naive Sestero agrees to this abrupt change in life where he merely hops in Tommy’s car with his luggage and barely says farewell to his mother (who is played by Megan Mullally here briefly)

In turn, Greg starts to adopt the standard actor life in LA seemingly, getting an agent (played by Sharon Stone), finding small roles, mingling with other actors, etc. while Tommy remains in a separate universe, behaving in an extreme albeit bold mannerism that defies social convention. During this period, Greg forms a relationship with a bartender girl (played by his gf/future wife Alison Brie) while Tommy manages more social faux pas encounters such as aggravating a Hollywood producer (played by Judd Apatow). Still, Greg has problems securing any real roles and the two come to the conclusion of making their own movie.

Tommy disappears to write The Room (which reportedly took 9 months or so) and returns with the script for Greg to read at Canter’s Deli. Thereafter, they begin the process of filming, where they buy the actual equipment rather than rent it (which is what most productions do), hire the crew and go through castings. Once the production starts though, numerous issues emerge, most of all Tommy’s control freakish nature. Also, amongst these issues is Tommy’s utter incompetence as an actor where apparently he forgets the very lines he wrote.

One of the more humanizing aspects in the movie is where Greg has lunch with the other actors on set. This was after the heat exhaustion situation where the woman playing Claudette from The Room (Jackie Weaver as Carolyn Minnott) talk about the whys of acting to Greg. Here, Carolyn mentions how being an actor is better than any other job in the world, which is why they’d drive out for miles through traffic and get up at terrible times to perform, even if they experience uncomfortable situations like heat exhaustion. I don’t know if Sestero himself had that experience with the actual actors on set and wrote it in the book, but it does seem like something the more experienced people involved in this movie would have told the audience, especially aspiring actors.

In one supposedly fictionalized encounter, Sestero and his girlfriend Amber encounter Bryan Cranston (in another cameo). Amber apparently goes to Pilates with Cranston and introduces Sestero as a fellow actor. Since Cranston is filming a Malcolm in the Middle episode with the need of a lumberjack character, he sees the potential of using Sestero as he bears a beard here. In turn, when Sestero tries to talk with Tommy about pushing the production for his shaving scene up by a day, Tommy gets upset and forces Sestero to choose between the two. As a result, Sestero ends up choosing The Room, gets himself shaved and does the infamous tuxedo scene (cheap cheap cheap!) Afterwards, Greg gets into a confrontation with Wiseau where he questions the three things yet to be discovered about Tommy and the two have a scrap which leads Tommy supposedly to end filming and depart.

A little while later after the film wraps up (which apparently was really off schedule), Greg now is working in theater, has broken up with Amber and gets invited to a screening of The Room by Tommy. At this point, the film is wrapping up and things seem to be getting cut off like resolving why Greg no longer possesses his resentment towards Tommy or why Tommy would even bother to forgive Greg after their confrontation. At the very least, it paints Greg’s character in the movie being this passive person who easily gets dragged along and really has no direction outside of this bare bones idea of being an actor. So I found this so-called reconciliation weird.

The two board a limo that Tommy rents and Tommy attempts to treat The Room like a world class premier with a spotlight and even having his vampiric image on some key placed billboards around town. On top of that, rather than arriving like a normal person would, Tommy has the limo circle the block “to build anticipation” (more probably because he expected a hotter, larger crowd than the small one that was waiting outside).

The cast are invited and a bunch of other people that are never identified. Supposedly, it’s a fair sized crowd for the premier. I don’t know if the original crowd was of that same size but parts of the portrayal here were true. But to me this is the best part of the movie because we get to see the “remake” of the movie, the cast and their reactions and how I think a lot of people upon first viewing The Room probably see it. For instance, Seth Rogen notices the two title cards. From there it just goes downhill for Tommy as reactions are mixed as people have no idea what they’re watching, the awkward sex scenes that make the participants highly uncomfortable, Tommy’s hilariously poor acting abilities and the serendipitous and infamously placed non sequitur moments such as “I definitely have breast cancer” lines.

Yet as Tommy perceives the audience as laughing at him, Greg has a different epiphany. Tommy storms out to wallow in self pity but Greg reassures him about his achievement and verifies the special nature of The Room from the sheer joy that the audience is experiencing. Greg encourages Tommy to return inside the theater as the movie concludes with the audience chanting “Do it!” much like a certain Judas Priest incident for which Tommy’s character of Johnny puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, which causes the audience to erupt in mad applause.

Despite the fact that the audience had just effectively cheered on Tommy/Johnny killing himself in the film, Tommy sees beyond that and fully embraces this different perspective where he tells the audience that he’s glad that they enjoyed his comedy as he intended. Also, he invites Greg to join him as his soulmate for helping to make the film.

Afterwards, there’s an outro that gives a little more on the current IRL version of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, mentioning the eventual cult-like success that has made both people into celebrities and even making back the money spent. In addition, the same three questions are not answered at this point about Tommy’s background. Then we get the fun part of the film where both the actual The Room is placed side-by-side with the Franco’s version. You can see in these scenes how dedicated the cast and filming were in trying to recreate as closely as possible certain key scenes. For my money, the person that impressed me the most was Ari Graynor, who nailed her lines and movements almost in scary synchronicity with Juliette Danielle’s a good deal of the time.

So I think The Disaster Artist movie itself really isn’t a true biographical replica of what Sestero’s book probably had written. Instead, it seems to cover the overarching points and fabricate events to create certain artificial tensions at times (or perhaps even underplaying parts such as the high turn over rate during the filming). But I think the movie really was more for insiders of the Hollywood industry as something that examines this curiosity of The Room and this odd character named Tommy Wiseau where the whole thing is a mystery in itself.

A lot of the humor to me is more for people inside of the Hollywood business such as the “two title cards” line by Seth Rogen or the fact that Tommy Wiseau purchased rather than rented the equipment. This is certainly one of those instances of “Hollywood talking about Hollywood” but in this situation it actually works really well because of the surreal subject matter.

I think everyone involved looked like they had a party filming this thing where you had this ensemble cast that were used to make commentary on the whole Hollywood system itself. One of the terms I heard from interviews was the use of “outsider art.” And while The Room itself is flawed, I think the genuineness and lack of convention is what makes it a fascinating case study for those within Hollywood, which is why everyone involved in this film looked as though they were having a blast.

I did center that the real “star” or main character in this film is Tommy Wiseau. To me he is like a real life Joker from The Dark Knight. Someone once explained the Joker from The Dark Knight wasn’t necessarily good “acting” because the Joker never showed any actual motivations, which is the driving force behind every character. Here, Tommy’s shrouded behavior and even his appearance has that Joker quality. So while James Franco is able to highlight Tommy’s quirks, we don’t understand what makes him that way. There’s simply not enough information on Tommy to really make him relatable except that he obviously has this abstract dream of making movies that Greg does.

On the other hand, Greg seems more relatable as this observer character. He’s effectively the prototypical starving artist type, who is desperately trying to find himself. I think like Tommy, Greg’s character is severely underdeveloped but shows characteristics that make him more relatable like his vulnerability, his lack of confidence and him having these big dreams. However, we still don’t get a lot about him as a person. Like why would he suddenly hop in a car with a total stranger on a whim and leave his poor mother behind? In a way, the best way I can describe the Greg character in this movie is the Hollywood “everyman” type. The main difference is that he managed to hitch up with the right person for the wrong deal.

I’ve read some of the criticisms of the movie especially with regards to not being completely factual. Certainly, The Disaster Artist has made the making of The Room into its own standard Hollywood type of movie as much as it could. But I see two agendas within the movie. First, this movie obviously is the Francos way of doing their version of a cover song except for a movie except not doing the entire movie scene for scene. Instead, they were very selective in grabbing the bigger, more memorable parts from The Room. And you can see them really enjoying themselves since they can do their own version.

The second aspect is that I think this is their way of giving praise to Tommy and Greg for their efforts. The audience applauding the pair is not what I read actually happening, although the audience did laugh hysterically during the actual premier and even demanded their money back. However, I think the Francos and various people in Hollywood see a perverse genius in Tommy Wiseau in that form of film making because of how it manages to defy the odds, given how formulaic most of Hollywood has become. Tommy’s disappointment in The Disaster Artist (the character not the real person) revolves around his own exposure of himself with this movie he felt proud of and that uncompromising vision is what I think the Francos and people involved appreciate more than anything.

For myself, I can certainly appreciate the sentiment displayed here as a writer. When you finish something, even if you believe in it, others may not see it the same way as you do. Worse yet, some people might ridicule you and your hopes and dreams can be easily demolished. Probably, the biggest reminder of this notion is the “I definitely have breast cancer” line where you toss something out casually that seems important in your mind but the rest of the audience has no clue where it came from nor where it’s going (or if it just dies as in this case where it comes out of nowhere). Moments like those are what keep someone like me humble and cautious.

Lastly, I have to talk about the swapping of Tommy’s attitude when he accepts the reaction from the audience in embracing the idea that he produced a comedy. I know he’s tried to produce more films (even with Greg) but nothing that I know of has reached the same status as The Room. Some say part of the problem was becoming self aware and how that’s a curse because it forces one to try and replicate the previous state without really knowing why it worked. A frequent comparison to this “outsider artist” type is Neil Breen (whom I had the misfortune of viewing in terms of Fateful Findings). The difference from what people have said is that Neil Breen actually believes still to this day in what he’s doing and writing, which might either be a blessing or a curse. I mention this aspect because as someone who writes in a kind of egocentric perspective, I wonder whether I’m a Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. That kind of thought scares me because I am self aware but at the same time I’m unable to change how I think. But it is something that I’m constantly reminded me and haunts me in my own writing.

The post The Disaster Artist (2017) Review appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Before talking about any hypotheticals, I think it’s important to first talk about what has been announced as per the schedule and floor plans thus far. First, we have a week until Blizzcon 2026 starts, which is Saturday the 12th and Sunday the 13th. The opening ceremony is on the 12th between 10:30am – 11:45am. The bulk of the schedule is various tournaments with the emphasis on WoW Arena, Hearthstone, Overwatch and Diablo Immortal and some classic games mixed in. The rest of the major announcements are on some “What’s next” pieces for Diablo (general), Diablo 4, Heathstone, WoW and WoW: HC. The remaining parts are mostly just the workers talking about their areas such as art or music. The one key differential here is a collaboration discussion with CD Projekt on Battle.net. And from my understanding, CD Projekt is going to do another IP type of integration with some of Blizzard’s games via their Witcher series. Beyond that, nothing really major was announced (unless you count Le Sserafim being invited back for a concert but I honestly have no clue whom these people are)

Despite all this, many people are already speculating on some of the major next things in line. For myself, I’ve been mostly out of the loop except for anything Diablo related. But here’s a few sure hand bets based on what we’re seeing above, Blizzard’s history, the maps and even some hints that were provided earlier in the year during the Diablo anniversary day announcement.

• Blizzard / Microsoft will follow the money. If you examine all the major emphasis above, the bulk is for any existing brand that is making money. Everything else has been relegated to a “classic/legacy” type of umbrella, INCLUDING STARCRAFT.
• Diablo Immortal has become a huge deal because they’re getting a “dedicated” arena and tournament (again, the follow the money philosophy)
• The only games that have a future for Blizzard / Microsoft are ones that have been announced with a “what’s next” panel.
• Recently, Blizzard / Microsoft did mention the massive financial success for Diablo 4 and Immortal, which is why both are receiving these updates, although we have to see if D2:R will catch the same attention given how that was the thing that truly blew hardcore fans of the genre during the anniversary day announcement in the Warlock addition.
• Blizzard itself has learned to lean on nostalgia as a massive selling point. Rather than risk a new IP, it’s far safer for them to salvage an older title that they own and remake it. In turn, quite a few people are speculating on a Diablo remake here. However, if you examine the map closely there is only a small section devoted to the Diablo 1-3 over on the classic games side (which actually includes Heroes of the Storm, which is mind blowing to me because of how “recent” it feels compares to the others). The rest of the Diablo demos are all Immortal and 4, which share Hall B with Hearthstone. I imagine if Blizzard intended to demo a full remaster release, they would have dedicated an entire area for the new (old) game.
• People are never going to let Blizzard down for the infamous “Do you not have phones?” incident. There’s been other controversies such as the Hong Kong incident. Blizzard has been under some scrutiny for sexual harassment and there has been a lot of pressure from the new Xbox boss with the recent layoffs. These things are going to put extra pressure on Blizzard to really deliver (although I doubt it) or at the very least minimize how much they’re going to offend people this time around (doesn’t even have to be a DEI type of scenario; just disappointment)
• Blizzard has been less about the gaming culture and their old values that made them a force in the gaming world and more self-indulgent as well as an artifact of the past with a dwindling fan base. But you can see the heavy emphasis on e-sports as the bulk of the convention is taken up in the schedule by e-sports related events.

Having established these points, I’m going to take a general stab (as opposed to a specific one) for my own ideas of what we may see at Blizzcon 2026.

• Tons of WoW updates because it makes money still (and because there are plenty of people still addicted worse than someone on heroin to this piece of garbage)
• More Hearthstone cards and expansions to further pollute the pool because it makes money
• Some more Overwatch skins, characters, etc. because that’s going to sell with their gacchi setup
• Diablo Immortal receiving by far the most meaningful updates of any game in Blizzard because Blizzard values all the microtransactions the Chinese blindly buy whereas the rest of the world doesn’t care since we have zero interest in opening are wallets up for a soulless game
• Diablo 4 receiving terrible updates that are just going to push everyone to Path of Exile 2 because it’s coming out for FUCKING FREE in December in full and is looking really good. And from my side, I have no desire to play Path of Exile 2 but I can’t deny what GGG is doing for that game compared to the drek that has been spewing since LoH’s release (maybe even arguably after Vessel of Hatred).
• The tiniest possibility of a remake, or at least an announcement of one Diablo I would be the candidate because it’s not a complex game and I think just slapping on better graphics seems like a low hanging effort type of thing to easily sell nostalgia.
• A port announcement. I did hear about this but from my viewpoint, the console industry is going to die a horrible death. Sony effectively shot themselves in the dick with their callous treatment of physical media and their views on purchases not equating to ownership. Then Xbox announced a per hour type of limiting factor for their pass. But to me this is just the beginning of the end and I think anyone who is a sucker to buy a console game port especially for the Xbox will get what they deserve.

As you can see, I really have no enthusiasm for this Blizzcon. In fact, my expectations are so low that I expect to get angry at almost everything they mention because it will feel soulless and just cater to Microsoft’s greed.

But if I’m being so negative, why even write about this situation? Why waste this time talking about a subject that I clearly am at the very least apathetic towards if not receive high blood pressure inducing mania from? So what really instigated all of this are maybe 2-3 goofballs over at Reddit. One in particular has been posting the most outlandish, unrealistic, dick sucking fantasies that anyone with a particle of a brain cell can see through. The best response I’ve read under any of these posts has been describing this person as a “karma farmer.”

For me, this is the kind of person that really gets under my skin. He’s basically the equivalent of Mike Bailey to Jim Cornette for me. I mean, I doubt any form and quantity of coke could ever get me to remotely believe at this stage anything decent will be announced at Blizzcon 2026. Even the Diablo 4 announcement day, once the Diablo 4 developers took the stage, the entire Twitch chat just blew up at them anywhere with apathy towards raw hatred. But I think that’s because like myself, a lot of people who have been fans of Blizzard and the Diablo franchise just are so disappointed because our expectations are dead effectively. Oddly, I wasn’t even unhappy with the Warlock announcement; my real disappointment was that the “announcement” was just a cocktease. People want more meat on the bones not the moldy scraps of disgusting feces infested bread you throw through the prison cell door window.

Here’s the thing for me here. I don’t want to be negative about Blizzard. I actually want to be pleasantly surprised and blown out of the water. But it’s almost impossible not to feel cynical and wary based on history. All of the old guard are gone and what we have left are clearly MARKS, sycophants and grimy slimeballs trying to make a name for themselves in the gaming industry. But the lack of vision over time, the frequent revolving door nature at Blizzard, the various controversies, the bizarre internal mandates for how their games are presented especially with regards to “content” (i.e. let’s just have some dials, flip these around every 3-6 months and call it massive changes to satisfy our corporate KPI overlords), etc. have exhausted me.

I mentioned before that Lord of Hatred effectively gave Diablo 4 a lifeline. There were actual elements resembling sanity and a decent notion somewhere in there. Then they completely fucked it up the following season. How? This is just sheer insanity to me. You finally got some momentum, you got some actual excitement in the game that brought back a lot of old players who had become cynical. Then you just say, “Fuck ’em.” What the hell? Why the fuck would you do this to yourselves?

I figure the MARKS that are left sniffing Blizzard’s jockstrap (like that guy on reddit) suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. I mean, you have to love this type of mental and emotional abuse to not only put up with it but embrace and celebrate it. Otherwise, it really just is blatant karma farming. But this kind of person reminds me of something AlkaizerX once said about your typical Blizzard fanboi: “This is the person who gets excited when Blizzard changes the color of a rock from yellow to pink!” No kidding. I mean, Witcher and Diablo 4 collab? It’s only going to be skins at best but I ain’t paying for that type of nonsense.

For myself, I’ll just watch from someone’s else’s stream (like probably Mathil1’s). I really want them to announce something exciting that gives me hope for the future of Blizzard. I want to feel enthusiastic. I want some killer content that comes out from Diablo 4. I want them to see Path of Exile 2 as a real threat to their existence and become serious about trying to compete in terms of output and features. Hell, I’ve written numerous posts on how to improve things because a blind squirrel should be able to find that nut on a bad day. It’s just really hard to feel any form of hope when you just see this version of Barad-dûr with Microsoft as this great eye of Sauron peering over his orc minions with Blizzard being this man-slave corporate version of the Nazgûl.

Now, am I being overly critical and a bit mean here? Probably. But am I going to apologize for how I feel? No, and I’m not changing my mind. I’m simply really exhausted to the point where it’s not really Blizzard at this stage because I’m just about done with them. However, I look at this Carrot Top type of muthafucka and think what a little ketchup masturbator. What the actual fuck? Stop lying to yourself. Stop making this situation worse. The pain already is there and has been there for so long but now you’re just taking a new rusted blade and stabbing it into my preexisting wounds? That’s how I feel about this situation. I’m not going to sugar coat how I feel.

The post Blizzcon 2026: Should You Be Excited? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, I think it’s important to revisit a little bit of history in reviewing the original Y2K problem. The gist of the Y2K problem was over the format of dates for Gregorian calendars. To conserve on space (i.e. cost/money), the year format would be truncated to a two digit notation (e.g. 1985 -> 85). With the impending 2000 year, 00 would be considered indistinguishable between 1900 and 2000. Depending on the type of system implemented, the effect could be minor to catastrophic where some people predicted billions of dollars in potential losses if it wasn’t addressed.

As a result, consultants were brought in to remediate the issue. Once considered obsolete programming languages like COBOL were in vogue in a perverse manner for a small period at least on the software side (I don’t know exactly how a fix could’ve worked if it were at a lower, hardware level). Either way, a few people managed to make a reasonable living because of this situation.

But there’s a variety of causes we can enumerate here that seem to be typical of corporate behavior (maybe some even being of the anti-pattern nature):

• Build and bury – Some developers probably recognized the issue including one person who brought the problem up. But companies probably either forgot that this issue existed or the present management only cared about the immediate moment.
• Systemic rot – You can look at storage especially for something fundamental like dates as a core architectural design issue. In essence, your foundation is basic built with match sticks next to a termite hole.
• Managerial apathy – Even if the issue was known, until it was nearly too late, it feels as though management was not made aware or just how big of an issue this could have been. And if they were made aware (not in the apocalyptic tone that eventually came upon us), for however long management seemed to do nothing until the very last minute.
• Lack of maintenance/upkeep – I once heard in software that actually development is 20% of the cost while maintenance can go up to 80%. Unfortunately, software is one of those areas where maintenance tends to be quite low on the priority list for companies because I believe upper management tend to view software as a form of sunk cost. Feature development is fine for them because that’s where the money is made supposedly but maintenance doesn’t resonate.
• Lack of education – Part of managerial apathy is the symptom of a larger problem where a general lack of education on software becomes more fundamental.
• Prioritization – Issues like these aren’t huge priorities because of the prior point. As a result, they get buried because management tend to be selfish and near sighted as most times they’ll simply ask whether or not the problem directly affects them in the moment.
• Overall laziness – This isn’t just a managerial issue but one from the developers’ side in agreeing with the rollout. The compliance by developers for knowingly accepting the solution and effectively not giving a shit until things mattered is an issue of ethics on their behalf where they themselves did little to nothing to push back on what could have been a bigger disaster. Instead, as with most people, they simply “went with the crowd” apparently.

With these ideas established here, I think it’s worth comparing this new AI “revolution” in examining whether or not some of this behavior has changed and if we’re looking at potentially similar problems that will infect numerous corporations with their AI mandates.

• Build and bury – A lot of these Agentic tools generate a huge amount of code. A common tale I hear about is that the role of the developer has changed from someone who writes code to someone who reviews code as has replaced the QA person and occasionally the product person. While it might seem from an ivory glass tower that this proliferation and volume of code may appear in favor of companies, what this merely does is create a different version of burying a problem. The developer loses control over the intimate architecture and nuances by handing over the reigns almost completely to the AI. In a worse case scenario, a developer becomes apathetic from reviewing massive PRs where a clear problem may exist but the AI skips over because it only tries to solve the immediate problem its given.
• Systemic rot – Pushing out features and code become more important as companies focus more on KPIs as opposed to valuing quality. QA has been a contentious role in the past because their main function is to push back when something goes wrong. However, their purpose also was to counterbalance developers who try to cover their tracks by generating a sense of accountability. However, in recent years, I’ve seen the role of QA becoming more diminished over time where that responsibility becomes part of the developer’s job (on top of other things like DevOps and occasionally the PM) But this is a conflicting issue as there’s no checks and balances to say whether or not a feature truly behaves as intended. In turn, with the coming of AI, existing developer apathy will only increase systemic rot as less experienced people or those with nefarious agendas will incorporate AI as a replacement for themselves rather than as a side tool to augment their capabilities. We have already seen some of this showing up in various recent systemic failures. So how much more will show up as this trend continues?
• Management apathy – I don’t think this scenario changes much because people on top and the layers in between will mostly only care about KPIs and quarterly revenue to appease shareholders. Only when crucial errors start to appear (meaning that managements’ livelihoods are at stake) will this mental state switch but briefly.
• Lack of maintenance/upkeep – One trend I don’t really hear about for AI that should be one is the improvement on software maintenance. This is something very surprising to me considering that it’s a major problem that’s highly costly in the industry. Usually what I’ve seen from AI in generating code is how the AI loses context as the context window fills up. Over time, AI experiences a kind of “AI Alzheimer’s” as I describe it where its memory becomes distorted because it cannot sort out what the state of a conversation session is while the window evolves. And there have been attempts to fix this problem but it’s not a standard at this stage. The result though that I’ve seen is a constant re-solving of a problem or that the AI tries to build from scratch as opposed to using existing tools and solutions to help resolve a problem. So I think software maintenance is going to be an even bigger headache moving forward for companies.
• Lack of education – If management were clueless before on software (unless they directly wrote it themselves), then I think the lack of education especially on what AI can and cannot do is going to become an exponential issue. The one common problem about management I’ve seen (and this is really a human quality) is that they want the silver bullet/golden hammer solution, which is an anti-pattern that I commonly cite regarding management. Generally, what I see is that there’s this ethereal, imagined hopefulness in management (i.e. those incapable of accomplishing a real feat themselves outside of talking out their assholes) where they might choose a solution that they think will solve all their problems. Equally bad are the sales people that try to pitch to management rather than the developers that they have this ultimate holy grail that will make them millionaires (or more). One meme I read was hearing how some goofball would ask AI something along the lines of, “Tell me how to become rich.” Like WTF? AI is not a genie in a bottle. But this line of thought demonstrates the clear dissonance between reality and what management think AI is and it’s a very state of mind since these people are what controls the direction of these companies.
• Prioritization – In a weird state of irony, AI itself has become a priority and even a type of lifeblood that management believes needs to be elevated as a first class citizen (many times above the employees themselves). But as with the silver bullet idea, this prioritization effort is often misplaced because of the lack of education on what AI can do, should do vs what it isn’t doing. What I’ve seen happen in companies is that this AI mandate comes from above and somehow everyone has to scramble suddenly to learn how to incorporate it even though there probably aren’t actual solutions that might match the problems these people face. You could also call this another square peg round hole issue.
• Overall laziness – There’s no doubt that the acceptance of AI has in part been the result of an inherent human flaw: laziness. However, I’ve stated in the past that there are both good and bad versions of laziness (especially if we embrace the three virtues of a GREAT programmer philosophy). Most times, the laziness is more in the spirit of “I don’t want to think/do the work” as opposed to “let me build things to do the work for me”. I know there’s a split in how veteran developers view AI especially in how each individual developer may embrace or pushback on it. Some people want the old school, “In my day, I used to mine copper for the wiring!” attitude while younger developers might see AI as doing all the stupid stuff without having a solid foundation to understand what the AI is doing.
  However, the true dangerous aspect in all of this is the near blind acceptance and conformity of AI where I can squarely blame on developers. What I mean by this is that I perceive a kind of lack of ethical standing for many people here. I think AI is like another one of these fancy tools that developers lie about on their resume and simply insert it to try and bolster their own value because of selfishness, greed and any moral character as the expense of pushing humanity down the wrong path.
  Again, I don’t see AI as necessarily being a bad thing but developers as a general have a nasty tendency to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to these things. Usually, down the line they’ll pay the price because of shortsightedness which ends up causing problems for everyone.

I think AI has this foundational issue that something like Y2K had where it’s now becoming part of the fabric for numerous companies. What I’m afraid of in part is when a disaster happens and your house of cards built by AI and/or is built upon AI crumbles kinda like that glacier in Nepal. Companies may have heard about the mass amounts of code and features being built up without understanding the actual nature where it counts. And like the build and bury problem, these issues won’t be seen because people have delegated the solutions to AI and in many cases trusted the output.

Another scary issue to think about is how cheap companies can be. I often think of the old The Towering Inferno (1974) movie when it comes to how cost effective minded people on top can be and where that can lead. In the case of the past few years, we’ve seen companies do massive layoffs and a pivot to AI where it seems on the peripherals that AI will somehow be able to replace various jobs. In the case of software, I think one thing I’ve learned is that AI is still quite immature and that you need experienced people guiding the AI every step of the way as well as requiring a core group who understands the problems and the engineering solutions rather than blindly entrusting the AI to handle all the dirty work.

However, as we’re seeing, AI is not cheap in any manner. Even a company like Microsoft has cracked down on token spending after one person used up $28k or so within 28 days. And at this stage, it’s really hard to judge the concrete returns AI can bring compared to how much is being spent. Or you have cases where someone is in the middle of a project and their usage halts because of their allotted tokens gets used up. If you decided to replace your senior developers with a bunch of trash level, offshore juniors because you’re being a Scrooge, who’s going to solve the problems that the AI creates?

I have read that some companies are starting to do an about face on the situation. Facebook/Meta is one that has admitted some regret and have been rehiring. However, to me it’s a poor look when you’ve basically admitted that you only value “quarterly revenues” as opposed to your employees in this fashion (although I think part of this was done to get more H1Bs but that’s a different story entirely)..

Nonetheless, what happens when you start having this massive dearth of domain knowledge that the AI does not know nor the junior overseas H1Bs that can’t solve your problems? Do you suddenly make a massive apology and hire back all the people you just canned for double the price because these people have managed to find a better spot? I mean isn’t this a case where these reliable codger types were cast aside and you just insulted them, thinking you had all the answers but ended up holding a bomb you have no idea how to diffuse? That’s how I see this problem. It’s more about history repeating itself even though the names and context have changed slightly.

The post Has AI Become Corporations’ New Y2K Problem? appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Executions from Shaolin (1977)

Perhaps, this is his best epic at least in terms of a role that really made him. In the Shaw Brothers, Chen Kuan-tai received the role of the legendary folklore hero Hung hsi Kuan several times but this one was dedicated to the character and Chen Kuan-tai under Lau Kar-leung in a wuxia type of story of revenge. Here, Hung hsi Kuan tries to overcome his arch-nemesis Pai Mei, who has a special technique that makes him immune to attacks except at certain times of the day where he moves his weakness around. In turn, Hung hsi Kuan undergoes intense practice with his Tiger style but is unable to beat the White Brow Priest at the end.

Rumor had it that Chen Kuan-tai disagreed and possibly did not like Lau Kar-leung, although he did Challenge of the Masters a year before. Nonetheless, if you want to see Chen Kuan-tai at his best with his tiger technique, this is the movie for you.

Challenge of the Masters (1976)

To be honest, I prefer Challenge of the Masters more than Executioners of Shaolin. While the kung fu itself isn’t as good as Executioners of Shaolin, I think the message was better and Chen Kuan-tai was given the role of the elderly, venerable Lu A-Cai who was able to humble Gordon Liu’s Wong Fei Hung and temper him into a true martial artist. But movies like Challenge of the Masters give me the impression that Chen Kuan-tai’s best roles were that of a well respected hero type, who understood the martial arts and honor.

The Boxer from Shantung (1972)

I haven’t seen this movie in some time but I do know it probably is Chen Kuan-tai’s breakout role within the Shaw Brothers. It’s a typical Chang Cheh style movie around that period with the rise and fall of a young man who is swept up in the success of his martial arts skills but eventually becomes corrupted and eventually has a redemption arc that ends in tragedy. This is a movie on my list to review in the future though because it is during Chang Cheh’s peak as a director.

Crippled Avengers (1978)

This is a big time favorite for Venoms fans but it also stars Chen Kuan-tai in an unusual role where he gets to play a villain, Dao Tian-du. After Dao’s wife is mercilessly slaughtered and his son’s arms are sliced off, Dao’s mental condition deteriorates as he becomes a blood thirsty, vengeful tyrant in town. In the early half of the film, Dao ends up crippling (along with his assistant and son) four of the Venoms and they must seek out a teacher to help them learn kung fu to get revenge.

As with many early Venoms movies, this one is fun and humorous with a good entry point that by the end becomes more serious and filled with blood and typical Chang Cheh tragedy. But it also has a lesson where the message is that physical handicaps can be overcome but mental ones are impossible. Again, Crippled Avengers is another movie I have plans to review some day.

Heroes Two (1973)

This is another instance of Chen Kuan-tai playing Hung hsi Kuan except he’s paired up with a very young Fu Sheng as the other folklore legend Fang Shi-yu. Besides Chang Cheh being the director, we also get Lau Kar-leung as credited for one of the action/martial arts directors. But this is a typical early/mid 70s wuxia Chang Cheh extravaganza revenge film where he takes two folklore heroes and has a small plot twist where one mistakes the identity of the other as part of the Manchu plot to corrupt/disrupt the survivors from Shaolin.

Chen Kuan-tai and Fu Sheng would once again be able to reprise their roles in Men from the Monestary (1974) but with Chi Kuan-Chun added as Hu Huei-Chien. I think though that the Fu Sheng and Chen Kuan-tai pairing wasn’t as strong compared to Chi Kuan-Chun’s silent and stoic character, which is why Chang Cheh ended up going with the latter pairing. Nonetheless, Heroes Two is a fun Shaolin type of romp worth checking out.

The Blood Brothers (1973)

The real power trio for Chang Cheh was the combination of David Chiang, Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-tai. The Blood Brothers (1973) epitomizes this relationship as portrayal more than anything (and this is the REAL Blood Brothers movie). Here, we see Chen Kuan-tai as Huang Chang, a womanizer who is married and behaves poorly towards his wife, acting more macho, which causes his friend, the general Ma Xinyi (Ti Lung) to have an affair while Huang goes off on various missions. He receives a grizzly fate which sets off Chang Wen Hsiang (David Chiang) to try and stop Ma but their fates are sealed.

All Men Are Brothers (1973)

This movie is a follow up to The Water Margin (1972). While this movie isn’t really as focused on Chen Kuan-tai as it’s more about the various characters and the ensemble cast, Chen Kuan-tai’s character as Shi Jin (aka the Tattooed Dragon) gets a major upgrade in terms of cast position. The English dubbed version gives him a fantastic sepia colored death along with him telling his foes, “Take a good look at the Tattooed Dragon.” I always thought his end here was highly memorable as his chest with the tattoo on it was covered in dark blood. The movie itself wasn’t as epic as The Water Margin though and seemed more like Chang Cheh tying up loose ends for one reason or another in Chang Cheh fashion (i.e. everyone dies)

The Savage Five (1973)

Pretty much a Chinese spaghetti western with guns and explosions included. Once again, Chang Cheh gathered up the power trio of David Chiang, Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-tai but added Danny Lee and Wang Chung (no relation to the song that I know of) as this group of five that tries to defend a town against a dangerous group of armed bandits. Chen Kuan-tai plays a woodcutter Ma Dao and is the first of the heroes that sacrifices himself. But his death pretty much is the springboard leading for the others to seek revenge. This isn’t Chen’s best role but the movie is another fun one from Chang Cheh around this period. And if you look close, you can see a very young Fu Sheng in a guest role.

The Flying Guillotine (1975)

When people thing of Chinese flying guillotines, this is probably the actual movie/instance that comes to mind. While there are others, as far as I’m concerned, The Flying Guillotine (1975) remains the best of the bunch. The weapon itself is probably the most fearsome as you get to see people being beheaded in this pseudo horror movie where bodies twitch in agony after receiving a decapitating blow.

Here, Chen Kuan-tai gets to play the lead character of Ma Tang, who at the start is an enthusiastic and highly skilled martial artist within the Manshu army. Despite gaining favor with the emperor, his jealous teammate plots against him to gain favor with the emperor and improve his rank. Along the way Ma Tang marries and must protect his family from his vengeful former cohorts.

It should be said here that there was a follow up except that Ti Lung would play Ma Tang. While I haven’t seen that movie, I did hear that Ma Tang ends up getting killed (and possibly his wife) which makes this movie a bit moot. At the very least, if you’re interested in flying guillotines, this is the only one worth seeking out. The rest kinda suck.

7-Man Army (1976)

This is a very odd “modern” movie (by Chang Cheh/Shaw Brothers standards) in that they used more contemporary warfare with tanks, battleships, guns, etc. weirdly intermixed with kung fu. But what makes this movie special to me especially as something people should go and try to find is the ensemble cast. You have the previous generation of Chang Cheh’s power house of David Chiang, Ti Lung and Chen Kuan-tai alongside Fu Sheng, Chi Kuan-Chun and Li Yi-Min. In addition, the villains have on their side Wang Lung-Wei, Leung Kar-Yan (Beardie) and a rare villain role for Gordon Liu. You even get small cameos by two of the Venoms in Philip Kwok and Lu Feng.

The movie itself, to me at least, is more of a propaganda/jingoistic movie (basically their version of Top Gun) to try and enlist people into China’s army (Tang Tak-Cheung’s characters basically looks into the camera as he’s dying and tells people to join the army). Also, the characters’ main opponents are the Japanese. The actual combat scenes to me are over the top and ridiculous where six (7?) men are fighting a small post against troves of enemies until finally they get overwhelmed by bombs, tanks and whatnot. By the end, you’re kinda numb to the sheer stupidity of what’s going on rather than being impressed by these men’s courage. But it is a novel movie to check out just to see these various characters interact on screen.

In terms of Chen Kuan-tai specifically for this movie, he gets to wield some broadsword or scimitar type of weapon. It’s a weird visual to me because of the opponents he faces but they do try to make some digs at Mongol soldiers that the Japanese enlist as part of the subplot for which Chen Kuan-tai’s character has a deep seething prejudice. And of course, like everyone else in the main cast here, Chen receives a heroic death.

What About…?

So I’m sure some people are going to wonder where a few other key films are. A few that might make other people’s lists but I did not put down above are:

• The Master (1980) – I’ve seen this movie at least once but don’t remember much about it. I think the focus ended up being on a younger star rather than Chen and Chen jobs out to Ma Fu Yi so I didn’t really care.
• The Iron Monkey (1977) – I bought a copy at Suncoast back in the late 90s but didn’t really care for this movie as it seemed more like an independent endeavor, even though Ni Kuang did the screenplay. One would think this is significant for Chen Kuan-tai because he directed it. But again it just didn’t seem to have the same oomph without the Shaw Brothers production backing it.
• Men from the Monastery (1974) – I briefly referenced this movie but I think Chang Cheh put out an updated version called The Shaolin Avengers (1976) which I think was eons better. Perhaps, Chang Cheh did too considering it was effectively the same movie minus Chen Kuan-tai. Someone mentioned that Men from the Monastery could’ve been something Chang Cheh regretted or felt he needed to correct. All I know is that I prefer the later one.
• The Water Margin (1972) – A classic Shaw Brothers movie but Chen Kuan-tai wasn’t really a big star at this point and was relegated down the cast compared to the more established David Chiang.
• Vengeance (1970) – If you blink, you’ll probably miss Chen Kuan-tai in one of his earlier roles. But he’s basically got no lines here and is fodder for David Chiang. Based on his limited screen time, one would not be able to tell how big Chen Kuan-tai would become within the Shaw Brothers Studios.
• Shanghai 13 (1984) – Another ensemble cast type of movie. Chen Kuan-tai basically gets a cameo role here (along with virtually every other Chang Cheh guy owing him a retirement favor). I am not a huge fan of this movie and quite honestly Chen Kuan-tai did little here to really make me care.

I know later on Chen Kuan-tai would continue to get guest appearances in various movies against some of the newer generation of kung fu stars. I’ve seen a few but they weren’t huge roles to me at least. In that sense, I still placed Chen Kuan-tai’s best work with the Shaw Brothers. Maybe someone can point me elsewhere but this is how I choose to remember him. Rest in peace my friend.

The post Chen Kuan-tai Passes at 80 and A Tribute appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

I want to pin that blog anywhere between the years of 2003 – 2006 or so. But the idea was that with the rise of increased storage as a result of media (e.g. MP3s, video, phone cameras and even home surveillance), the problem I saw was portability, redundancy, standards, privacy and security. Already by being part of the Unix team at the bank, I was able to preview Sun’s N1 system, which was going to be their version of the cloud. Many of us scoffed at the idea, especially for a bank which has its own standards and requirements. Of course, Amazon and later Google, etc. developed their own cloud based systems which have become more or less the de facto standards for most web based systems these days. But I never truly trusted the idea of having my data on the cloud (as in the aforementioned file types).

In recent months, one of the biggest controversial tech items pushed to the forefront in terms of security has been Flock. Most people have never been comfortable about surveillance especially with privacy at stake. Ring was another that had its own set of issues but Flock was less personal in that these things would be setup by the company and the data shared with the authorities. And as things turn out, some of this data was not used in an ethical manner. At the same time, the CEO has put out ominous controversial statements about the sacrifice of privacy (without any form of compensation for the general public), which has made him somewhat an enemy of the people at the moment (which includes people publishing the CEO’s address on the net in a somewhat ironic statement). But this scenario highlights to me the problem of centralized, walled off data that is handled by corporations as opposed to the individual, the same fear and problems I viewed in my original blog two decades ago.

That doesn’t mean that the need for storage and processing of data is irrelevant though. I still view digitization of things as the way to go just because of the basic idea of removing the need for physical things outside of the storage and connectivity aspects. I know there’s this contemporary trend of going back to analog or other backwards type of things but it’s simply not reasonable in the scheme of things. I think even if society would move back to say CDs and VHS tapes, eventually people would return to digitization out of need. So the problem is going to remain despite the current sentiment.

The real problem that technology companies face more than anything is public trust. Even during the dot com era, it took a lot of effort for people to place their credit cards online. Since that time, with the explosion of social media and the gradual build up of these mega tech corps, people have lost faith in these empires because of issues such as the selling off of consumer data, data breaches, algorithmic manipulation of pricing/content, the erosion of rights, mass loss of jobs, etc. Much of the fears presented during the dot com era have manifested and worsened over time.

At this stage, we might be seeing the equivalent of a Luddism 2.0. The destruction of Flock cameras, the rejection of social media, the return to more physical goods, the protests of data centers, etc. are because of this general loss of trust in Big Tech. What’s even crazier (to me at least) is the state of AI which seems to defy the usual technological trend of mass acceptance but has been turning into disgrace by those not involved at the top of the decision making process.

And before I deep dive into my thesis of the title for this post, let me talk about AI itself in how it’s not simply a trend but a gradual evolution of human growth. That might seem like a bizarre statement but AI in reality is nothing more than another form of human laziness. Humans have to be one of the laziest creatures on this planet and their history demonstrates the need for effectively a slave class for the privileged few. Because of economics and how things have “modernized” in terms of social development, the idea of a specifically named slave class has been erased at least as a commonly used thing that may exist in a modern society (just the idea of slave/master read/writes in tech have vanished because of the implications). That doesn’t mean that the desire for hierarchical control has diminished nor how people effectively want to be like a Peter from Office Space. In that sense, the very idea of AI won’t go away because let’s face it, most of us don’t really want to think especially about things we need to do that we don’t want to do.

Given the setup for this post, I want to describe what I see as this inverse problem of data centers, AI and investment. These three things are tightly related and we can see how part of the motivator in the core problem centers around public trust. I think a huge issue in tech has stemmed from the stigma associated/created from the dot com bubble bursting. Since that time, Wallstreet and companies have been far more cautious and, in a way, smarter about how they “grow” corporate entities, which in all fairness, is actually a great thing.

However, I think Wallstreet has long lost its meaning as a result of what investment ought to be. I remember hearing about how electronic/algorithmic trading in conjunction with real time updates for news effectively upended Wallstreet behavior. If Wallstreet was already the symbol of ultra capitalistic greed, then those two elements pushed the line overboard.

We have to briefly talk about the dot com era to see where a lot of what I want to discuss is going. First, the amount of money spent vs how much it generated during that period was ridiculous. And you can say that there were a lot of bad actors involved with some very infamous instances like the company that spent over $10 million for a Christmas party. While that latter case turned out to be a sham run by a scam artist, it wasn’t uncommon to hear about those types of instance around that period of sheer hedonism and lavishness.

What followed was this grimness especially as 9-11 erupted and the country went into a recession. Eventually, new companies did emerge but it was only through the excitement of aspects like social media, web 2.0, Google, etc. and the new IPO regime that jumpstarted Wallstreet again. I think the problem there was that once people got the taste of the sweet addiction of wealth from the dot com period, it never went away.

But to ensure that this wealth would be maintained I think we started to see the tightening of the reigns. Obviously, Enron was another major problem that came around that period and the result was SOX where public companies and certain finance companies (like banks, securities, etc.) would need to fall under certain guidelines and their management (namely the CEOs and CFOs) would be held accountable. I personally think more of the fallout ended up becoming a bigger headache for the people working under this system where you increased the amount of bureaucracy. In some cases, this was warranted like the splitting of duties between production and development as a simple example. But did we really see anything come for the CEOs and CFOs thereafter?

Nonetheless, one thing that seemed more prevalent than ever was the ideas of quarterly revenue and this catering to shareholders. I think there was more scrutiny over finances because investors (reasonably so) did not want companies squandering money away and ensuring that they were properly spending it. That isn’t to say that companies didn’t still throw parties or have their hedonistic ways but at least from what I’ve seen they weren’t as lavish normally compared to the more infamous ones (except in cases where a company might have an outstanding growth period).

But I think a consequence of this change in scrutiny was increased pressure on performance that has led to a great deal of instability in the market. Since the dot com period, there’s always been a constant reminder about a recession generally aimed at tech. Usually with tech, I feel that its very nature makes it a harder sell for investing especially with web tech just because the barriers to entry are so low in the scheme of things. At the same time, because there’s no real guarantee that the tech is going to take off, there is a risk associated where these days you need some sort of vanity numbers before people take you seriously.

Then there’s the layoff problem that probably has created the number one concern for the market at large. The pattern has been when a quarter falls short of investors’ expectations, the quickest, dirtiest, easiest and laziest solution is to layoff. Because of that, you really lack stability and confidence especially long term growth prospects. Not to mention such a mentality breeds resentment not just with employees but the public.

Yet I think the end result of this situation is that investment in tech isn’t really about the tech itself but the ability to make money for these investors. There’s something really backwards on how that operates to me where investment should really mean putting money into something that deserves to grow because the idea, team, company, etc. are good and that the money generated is a natural consequence of something solid. And this is where I think the inverse part is causing chaos in the tech industry in the worst manner possible right now.

So how does this relate to data centers and AI? The thing with AI is that it’s a very vague idea. People have picked up the term and really pushed the idea heavily these past few years but I don’t think most people understand what it really is nor what it ought to be. Instead, AI seems to be entangled with LLMs for the most part, in particular the big names like OpenAI/ChatGPT, Anthropic/Claude, Google/Gemini, X/Grok, etc. Eventually, we started getting more tools and systems for managing agents like OpenClaw.

Yet the thing that has been said about Wallstreet is that there hasn’t been the “killer app” yet. Most of what has been show cased are these chat bots, “agents” for doing minor tasks, code generation (with varying degrees of success or failure even), image/video/audio generation and various other “mundane” type of tasks. Personally, I think this is just another instance of Wallstreet lacking any true understanding of tech and only looking at raw numbers.

But let’s circle back to the idea of data centers. The big thing about AI is the sheer processing power required to utilize it. I mentioned in a previous blog of my own limited experience with running Ollama on my coding machine. The idea there was that I needed to grab a model which contained a set of trained data and use the Ollama server/app to be deployed. The thing chugged hard on what was a very trivial question (present the cast of the movie Alien). After dealing with that situation, I learned quickly that you need pretty beefy hardware to even consider running such a thing.

So it’s obvious that for the current manner of AI succeeding it will require a great deal of computing power. The big issue now is that data centers have become a hot stakes topic in politics where you understandably get NIMBYism. In this case, the sentiment is warranted due to a number of factors:

• Space consumption
• Waste/byproducts
• Extreme usage of water
• Chip cost massive increase
• General hardware depletion on the market
• Backdoor deals with politicians
• Electrical cost that have been dumped onto local residents
• Potential (environmental) hazards
• Pushing people off their land

But there’s another potential problem that I don’t think anyone has identified: information redundancy. Because of the walled data garden problem where large companies are shrinking access to their data (at least without paying steep prices), we no longer have the super information highway but solitary fortresses. Yet we don’t know what exactly goes on behind the scenes. This is worrisome because we can’t tell how accurate the data is. In the case of the Ollama experiment I did, the output for Alien, which is an old but well known movie, provided several cases of bad data. Worse yet the answers to certain queries can vary, making the responses from these LLMs less reliable.

Yet is this scenario where you have competing market forces trying to outdo one another for dominance actually be the thing that is causing a worse scenario? When I read about these investments and Wallstreet in terms of where its placing its bets, it feels like they’re fueling this competition but not caring about the actual consequences as long as a few (bad) actors win. This is flat out wrong and ass backwards.

If I return to my earlier reference to an old blog I wrote, I mention the idea of the home appliance, something like the equivalent of an EMC SAN that families have similar to a water heater that one stores in the garage. When I thought about the various problems that exist now, issues of space, power consumption, long term investment, privacy, security, information redundancy (not in the good way), etc. I came to a solution where I needed to revisit to that blog post idea and show where I see direction of AI, data centers, privacy, media, etc. ought to be going.

Instead of doing a personalized mass SAN type of solution, I propose that homes receive their own version of something like a mainframe that contains all the computing power and storage along with limited processing software. Instead of these companies having your data, you would store your own data locally on this device in say a garage or some dedicated area that is spec’d out for this type of machine (which includes AC, proper power, redundancy, etc.)

Obviously, a new type of building and structure would be required for this type of system. Considering that there is a need for more public housing, perhaps the compromise between these monstrous data centers and housing is the introduction of a hybrid building. Maybe a new apartment complex could have an underground storage facility that contains these units that people hook into and bring with them when they go to a rent a place. Or perhaps, spare rooms in an existing building can be used with some authorization by property management to include these specialized facilities (and some of us have the room capacity for this).

However, here’s where the investment strategy part comes into play. Instead of people paying for these systems in the near term future, these large companies will be the ones paying for these systems. Not only will they be paying for the upkeep and construction, but they will pay you for access. So no longer will people worry as much about some data breach that occurs outside of their control. Now, they just need to worry about managing their own breach. But investors can then pay for these systems so that a new type of DC is built out to reduce the typical behemoths.

In terms of software, I think about my experience working in a bank where I viewed the pre-cloud solution where it was heavy client-server architecture. I think the cloud stinks in all honesty. My belief is that so-called web programming has made computing a lot more difficult than necessary in putting ridiculous pressure on the idea of live service systems with 24/7 support, etc. The front end in particular is dogshit to me since developers can’t make up their goddamn minds in terms of how they want to do things and you end up with these bloated front ends that don’t perform well, expose a bunch of security hazards and create more frustrations for everyone involved compared to a simple C++ compiled app.

I think of how with the problems of the increase in bot traffic have made the web into a human dead zone. The other night I was viewing some recently created YouTube videos for Disney’s The Black Hole and my first impression was that the videos were obviously AI generated. However, I noticed the traffic for a few of these (one had 93k views despite only being up for two days!) which got me interested in checking out not only the content but the comment section. I think a good chunk of the comments were fake too.

Because of this open web that we have, the idea of the information super highway has died a sad and ironically lonely death. So I think that to salvage what exist what we need are these systems that are locked down locally and are managed by us but paid for by these larger companies to gain access. Then for the content itself, we would need something like a sophisticated, heavily authorization based sharing system. That way, people can still broadcast things that they want to share between trusted people but avoid problems with children, data hostage scenarios (like the way these companies convert YOU into the product), etc. Content like blogs would be revised into these texts pieces stored that can be distributed and read through some client reader.

Now, what happens to monetization for old content? I have to be honest here, I think it should go away. I think the way the web has evolved into this low grade reward system where it’s like a broader version of some form of Jackass has harmed society in more ways than one. I really want to see the de-incentivization of things like TikTok and reaction videos where people who are lazy, uncreative and not appealing to look at (if we’re being truthful here) don’t make ez money from this terrible system. It makes people with actual skills at writing or any form of legitimate content creation (meaning you are an actual artist type) feel worthless in the scheme of things vs the way some people are simply better at networking.

AI itself becomes a local processing piece that is an assistant to those in that household. It should learn about the person but that person should be able to give that assistant parameters. And like other information on that person, the person (and household) ought to be able to control what goes out if companies desire access to this data as well as being able to compensate these people for what they are providing.

However, I did also mention the idea of redundant information systems at large. Meaning, what happens with a scenario where one wants to query the cast for Alien? What should happen? My belief is that we need an open source version of mass trained data that is NOT walled off similar to a Wikipedia. No one should be able to own it but the data should be heavily monitored for correctness. I believe that it should be one of the few types of centralized systems of its kind but that people can “borrow” information from it much like a person going to a library would check out a book. I think this is the next version of the Information Super Highway where we remove the commercialism for it and create a new standard because our current standards have rotted underneath us. Then combining this private and public type of systems, I think AI can prosper without the current problems.

The post The Inverse Problems of AI, Data Centers and Investment appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Now, I know a lot of people are going to ask, “Why are you using Gemini? Why not use AntiGravity or some other tool? Gemini sucks!” So, I’ve tried a variety of plugins/IDEs, etc. The last time I updated Cursor, it went from a plugin for Visual Studio Code (VSC) to an agent-first application. I’ve used Windsurf, which is like Cursor but they changed and I haven’t really touched them in a while. The actual Gemini plugin for has been killed off because Google wants you to use their AntiGravity. I don’t touch Claude Code because last I heard they want you to spend money; similarly, I don’t even use Claude except when I’m in a desperate situation. And ChatGPT is in the same category.

But the bottom line is that I’m unwilling to spend a dime right now on any AI agent to do my work. I’ve tried Agent first products and some are okay but at least in my experience, they take a while to do anything, don’t necessarily produce the outcomes I want and are changing frequently to the point where you have to constantly be keeping up with the product to really figure out how to get the most out of anything. I read a lot of complaints on forums where people burn through their allotted PAID tokens quickly then are jammed on projects twiddling their thumbs and staring at their navels until their weekly refreshes come up. I simply cannot afford this situation at the moment. And it is a bummer for me because I do feel as though I’m getting left behind in this “great AI race” in terms of tooling.

At the end of the day though, I’m not here to force myself to learn a tool that I may not necessarily like. I certainly am not going to pay for a tool on my own unless there’s a real benefit. I know some people have been able to make money from their apps created through some AI system like a Cursor. But I’ve also seen the resulting code and it makes me wonder just what the fuck people are doing.

Right now, you seem to have two types of groups and both are extremists on each end. Those that are all-in for AI agentic coding and more traditionalists who do not want to see their skills erode. At the end of the day, I’m going to continue to view AI on a whole as a tool that I will use as long as it helps move my needle forward. That’s it. I’m not going to swing one way or another. But at the same time I’ve been fairly impressed by the results I’ve managed to produce. Yes, the AI can fuck up but I can say one thing clearly right now: I ain’t paying for it when it fucks up.

Despite all this, the real meat of the matter for this post isn’t this drawn out viewpoint. Instead, what I want to talk about is my general journey about my current usage with Gemini and potentially other tools in this field. So first, why did I choose Gemini of all the various tools? Why not a ChatGPT even though it’s better, etc.? Again, I must emphasize cost. Even with basic screen interaction, ChatGPT turned me off from the start when it imposed restrictions on usage. While I can appreciate that such a system is going to expensive to run on their backend, as a tool, this is horribly disruptive to my work flow; if I’m in the middle of trying to wrangle out an answer, I want that answer especially if it takes multiple steps.

At least at this stage, Gemini’s basic model that they give you has been unlimited in terms of the prompting and basic response aspect if you go with the default. When Gemini started, it did impose a limit too but at least at this stage, that limit seems rescinded for basic things. For coding projects, if there’s a limit then it probably occurs at a much higher level because I don’t see it. And for someone “who iz po” (I’m poor), I’m going to take advantage of this situation while it last.

When it comes to coding, my setup is pretty simple. I have a dedicated account for doing my coding projects and I try to reuse the same chat session to retain the context of the discussion. Now, with Gemini, the longer the discussion goes, the higher the chance that the conversation can bork down the road. In the past, one of the biggest problems I’ve encountered is that the context window/chat would get too large to the point where Gemini would not be able to respond. But I think that might’ve been older models and how it was handling chats. My recent project and chats do not seem to encounter these issues anymore.

One of the major stumbling blocks that I consistently encounter and does require a great deal of patient is the degenerative memory issue with Gemini over time. What that means is that despite you, the developer, knowing how a file may look on your end, Gemini slowly loses that bit of information and requires periodic “reminding”. That “reminding” ends up becoming this back and forth of uploading files and/or copy pasting bits of code into the chat. I think part of the issue is that Gemini was designed as an LLM so it wasn’t really built with permanent “memory” in mind. This is something the designers ought to work on. Likewise, it doesn’t have your project the way say AntiGravity does; but it’s clear that they want to steer you towards an AntiGravity because they can’t directly hook into Github, which stinks. So in that sense, you sacrifice some efficiency by using the chat mechanism as opposed to a dedicated tool.

When it comes to producing code, my biggest issue when you try to go from prompt to results is that Gemini has a tendency to overproduce or what I consider “overthinking” a problem. I know one of the keys to AI is the ideas of a greedy algorithm; so I think what’s going on is that it’s attempting to be “greedy” in terms of overproducing the results. In turn, it wastes a lot of resources because frequently you’ll see this massive amounts of data with citations, links, explanations, etc. when all you really want is a simple response.

The problem here for me is that combing through a single response becomes mentally exhausting for me. You have to assume that the response is either wrong or there’s problems with it especially if you have an architect’s mind like me (or worse yet, you’re a control freak like me when it comes to code). While it may be easier to simply copy paste the response back into a file as-is, you need to be highly discerning here. I think it’s the same with agent tools where one of the most frequent complaints I read is how developers have transformed into code reviewers as opposed to coders. I will address this idea later. But I treat the situation as though I’m the lead in a project and I have junior and mid level developers who are responsible for the stories/task from a sprint and my job is to organize and coalesce these results into something usable and maintainable. So you’re effectively a babysitter, which is where the mental taxation comes into play.

Now, typically the way I handle the situation is to severely restrict what the AI should be producing. I’ve read how people use something called “skills.md” files, which enforce architectural and product standards in a code base these days with various agent tools. Because I’m not using an agent tool to handle my code, I don’t really need a skill file at the moment. Nonetheless, what I tend to do is generally trust the AI to handle the conventions of a language. For instance, at the moment I’m doing a game project completely in React and Typescript. The AI has been doing most of the file, directory, function and class naming. This is fine for me because I don’t keep up to date with every little nuance in every language I use.

What I do pay attention to is how things are structured and the specific naming. Things like constant, types, etc. are critical because I think the AI/Gemini has a nasty tendency to try and solve the most immediate problem. Unfortunately, Gemini is not good at architecture unless you enforce some sort of standard so it will do things based on the data it’s trained. While I have seen improvement in this area, the one area Gemini and other tools (I’ve read/heard) are bad at is large projects. Then again, I’m not sure if anyone is really good at dealing with large projects mostly because there aren’t a lot of great examples out there (maybe open source ones but those tend to be more tools rather than business type of projects).

At any rate, again the point here is to severely restrict Gemini in the scope of the problem. The best way to handle a prompt is to treat the scenario like a sprint with stories and subtasks. The moment you try to describe a problem that’s too broad (i.e. Gemini, Make me money!), the AI is going to break down. Instead, bite sized chunks of problems are what you need to feed the prompt.

Let me provide an example here. For my current gaming project, I’m now dealing with building a save game situation. If I outright stated, “build me a save game feature,” Gemini would have so little context beyond the things we established that it might’ve created a whole backend solution with Firebase, etc. because the scope is far too large. Instead, what I did (especially because I’m building an RPG) is that I first went through an ideation phase where I brought in examples of other games with a save game feature that involved parties and state. I discussed how Bard’s Tale 3 and Baldur’s Gate 2 handled their saved games. Gemini is familiar with both games, but I need to give Gemini more context on how those games operated to show the aspects I wanted. But I needed to establish that as part of the ideation phase so Gemini could “learn” from my side what I generally wanted. Also, explicitly mentioning that the prompt was for ideation enforced to Gemini that I did not want any coding; it was meant to strictly be a discussion to flesh out the story.

Gemini then asked me a few follow up pertinent questions such as how I wanted to handle created characters and the idea of autosave/quicksaves. These were really good questions because the other games I mentioned have those scenarios or similar scenarios. Auto/quicksave was an easy one and I said simply, “Let’s not deal with that at this stage.” I could see that Gemini was eager to build out the feature, but we don’t want Gemini to do more than a small amount of features because we need to review the ones it produces and test them, which is still a pain in the ass (because I’m acting not just as a product manager here but a QA person too)

Now, the created character situation was far more complex which required more discussion on how other games handled that. Like Baldur’s Gate 2 does a snapshot of the current party but if you use multiplayer mode, you can import/export your own custom characters. Bard’s Tale 3’s saved game would just snapshot the current state of all characters in that moment. These two situations are quite distinct and have their own complexities, which means that the underlying save format/data structure required close examination.

I ended up going for a snapshot of the active roster + characters that are saved in the moment. What that means, is that I would serialize the entire custom characters into the file (actually the browser’s local storage) along with any flags that need to be set. Then if a player wants to start a fresh game, they would get new flags and just use the characters in the created characters local storage structure. But that new game scenario would need a separate process to establish the flags for a fresh game.

Right now, the only parts I have implemented are the saved game structure. I’m working on the new game portion at the moment yet it’s important to note that I needed to view how this scenario was going to play out and review the data structure before proceeding since this is foundational. Also, I needed to ensure that the AI wouldn’t attempt to create the new game screen, the town, the dialog screen, etc. because it was doing that and became too overwhelming to review.

Yet, that’s where I think the AI gets a lot of the errors in bigger projects. The AI generally is pretty decent with syntax but the long term problems end up being architectural if you don’t constantly keep watch and refactor as you progress on the project. This is no different than any normal project a person is on (as long as you have a supportive/reasonable SDLC/management team). But the key here is that only you can control the direction of the project and you should treat the AI as a junior/mid level developer in terms of trust with architectural decisions as well as long term project planning. But again I need to emphasize the bite sized chunk philosophy of features where as a developer, product planner and tester, you should not trust the output especially when these agents overproduce.

Now, I did mention syntax which is a huge thing to some developers. I might be getting brainrot when it comes to my hard coding skills such as knowing the exact syntax for certain idioms or situations with a Typescript. But let’s face facts here. Programming has become this monster with the various proprietary languages and the constant evolution with tools where strict memorization should be considered secondary. Part of the reason IDEs are great is that they help prevent common syntax issues with highlighting, etc.

In my early years especially with languages like Perl and Java, I did not have access to an IDE. I was on Vi (not even Vim!) with no syntax highlighting nor anything fancy. When I had to work on 1000 Unix servers at the investment bank in Japan, my only editing tool was Vi. I once made the error of using a semi-colon rather than a colon for a separator on some stupid ass passwd file that caused a ton of headaches for a lot of people. While that’s a simple error, the results were pretty catastrophic because I simply could not see the difference on a shitty command line between “;” and “:”. So having something that mostly is syntactically correct and helping to error check me is a boon because I won’t make a stupid mistake like that ever again (at least not the same kind).

I know there are developers who are resistant to this because I think having this memorized, privileged knowledge of syntax gives them a sense of power; kinda like that kid back in high school who would memorize the dictionary then use words without really understanding the context to impress his classmates. Generally, that kid turned out to be an asshole with various mental issues accompanying him because of this insecurity problem that was part of a huge self esteem thing. But this is no different. In my case, I value the results and having the tool to help solve a problem more efficiently and sometimes better than I ever could as opposed to showing how tiny of a dick I have. Keep that in mind.

The one thing I will say though and I’ve brought this up in the past where I’ve discovered a weakness is on certain APIs or external frameworks, tools or packages. For instance, one of my biggest frustrations with React applications is validation and managing forms. For web applications, I have commonly chosen react-hook-form in conjunction with Zod. Now, Zod has some major differences between the 3 & 4 versions where the AI may not be trained. So at least in the past when I used these two together and had Gemini write me up schemas and tried to reincorporate them with react-hook-form, it ended up being a pure nightmare. The worst were number formats; to me this is more of an issue with incompatibility and how Zod’s change deprecated the old changes but it doesn’t really solve the other problem where the AI is only as good as its training data.

With my current gaming project though, I’m using very limited external dependencies at the moment; just Tailwind for CSS, Typescript, basic React, Vite and Zustand for the store. There have been limited form elements but I made an early decision to NOT use Zod nor react-hook-form because those are overkill on this project. Instead, I found it better to have custom inputs with their own messaging, which has worked out quite nicely especially because my game has it’s own stylization. If anything the lesson to me with Gemini and external dependencies is the less used, the better because you won’t have to deal with as many incompatibility issues.

What about storyboards and unit testing? While I’ve structured my code to allow for these types of things, I simply don’t feel they’re necessary. I think storyboards are great when you have a larger team and want to give your product managers a way to view how a component may look and behave. And unit testing is good for teams when you have immense amounts of change but don’t necessarily trust your developers. In the case of having this 1:1 relationship with Gemini, I think both are storyboards and unit testing are redundant at this stage.

Overall, the one thing I constantly question myself over is whether or not I’m being as productive as I can be. Does Gemini actually inhibit my speed or does it make me more productive than I normally could be? Or would an agent first tool increase my overall velocity?

My guess is that no matter what, using an AI tool or tools would still require me being a babysitter for the code. I’m an admitted control freak when it comes to code and organization even without these tools so my OCD would get triggered no matter what. In that sense, I am my own worst enemy.

But as far as velocity, I do think that the tool is great for me. Maybe I’m not as fast as some friends that pay for their tools but the bottom line for me is that I’m able to make my limited resources work for me (in a very literal sense). Something like Tailwind would have bogged me down for days in terms of getting a component to look in a certain manner. But I know for certain that for the game I’m building, I would not have been able to come up with the UI without Gemini.

Then for the way the project had been setup, I must admit that I was just copy pasting commands from Gemini onto my terminal. And I have no shame about that because I hate trying to search and find some crappy Stackoverflow page that isn’t outdated or peruse through hundreds of results only to find some authentication walled off post that an asshole is trying to charge for that may not necessarily have the answers I really need. None of that was productive to me before and I didn’t feel like I really learned anything back then. So not having to do that menial part of the job has improved since I can go directly to the AI and it usually gets what I want done in a reasonable manner.

Is the situation frustrating to me? It’s like having any junior or midlevel guy working along side you where the mistakes aren’t as much syntax related but just big picture. I’ve worked with some really shitty people in the past (both in terms of skill-wise and as personalities). Let me tell you it’s difficult trying to find good talent that can coexist with how you do things (especially if you are a control freak like me). So yes, I have to do a lot of babysitting but generally it’s not that bad. There are error corrections and I need to get the AI to correct its course but that’s better than going into a sprint for days and not knowing what your coworkers are going to produce. Then when they go to code review, you’re shocked at how bad the output is and you’re forced to surgically fix everything because they’ve torpedoed the whole project with a bad commit. So I prefer my situation far more than to previous situations in dealing with people.

Is my situation ideal? No, of course not. I’d love to have access to these cutting edge tools but the reality is that I’m budget constrained. If someone would pay for my project, I’d gladly upgrade my situation to use better tools but it’s just not possible at this moment.

But the real point I’m trying to make here is that given my situation, I’m able to make the situation work for me. That’s what a real (good) tool does. It’s not supposed to solve all your problems; that’s the Silver Bullet/Golden Hammer/God Object anti-pattern. Gemini is a good chunk of my current arsenal but in truth the real tool still is my experience, base skills and vision of what I want to accomplish with this project or similar projects where I’ve used Gemini. At least for myself, I’ve managed to get some decent mileage out of it. At the same time, I set my expectations appropriately, which are to produce reasonably error free (syntax-wise) code that mostly works and generally does what I want it to behave. Gemini nor AI are mind readers; nothing is currently. Having unrealistic expectations for such a project are exactly what sociopathic CEOs possess as malformed behavior. I’m enough of a realist and have been through enough where I can see the balance and convergence of these things.

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