Rumored Gaming Industry Layoffs

The word layoffs in 2026 seems common place and strikes fear but is not to be unexpected in the turbulent economics of a world that has been infected by the Mad Human Disease that struck it around the same time COVID hit. The latest industry that might be seeing big numbers come up is none other than gaming. Sony and Microsoft in particular are being cited as keys to watch out for as the gaming world shudders. Comments in the article and reddit point out that the insane budgets for blockbuster games are not meeting the results companies desire. Furthermore, people have pointed out that the typical key target for games in the younger generation have moved towards mobile, F2P, gatcha/microtransaction heavy types. On the other hand, prices for these so-called AAA games have equally skyrocketed and attempted to add things like seasonal passes to be competitive especially if they’re live service oriented.

My take is that this is a normalized pattern. I’ve seen some of those game trailers and many seem more impressive as a film short than an actual game. The market itself is simply too competitive and I doubt most people have time to really dive into anything that last more than an hour or two during their busy schedule on a given day at best. Large companies like Sony and Microsoft are going to face stiff competition from small studios that can move faster without the bureaucratic red tape and strict KPI management practices that infect the larger spots.

But if you think about it, gaming is just entertainment and entertainment has become a luxury in 2026 because of the general increase in lifestyle. Most places have sought to deal with budget issues and shareholder demands by raising prices. In turn, consumers are forced to heavily consider their priorities even more. It gets especially dicey when basics like food, gas and housing itself have become outrageous in cost.

Let me take Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred as a prime example of where I think Blizzard completely fucked up their pricing model. To me Blizzard already had insulted most people with Vessel of Hatred where people overreacted on the initial $60 price tag (it was less but they probably saw the premium editions). They didn’t learn their lesson in a more lenient time but decided to swing their tiny dicks by making LoH at a $40 price tag. In conjunction with that, they released the Diablo 2: Resurrected Warlock DLC at at a whopping $25. That’s easily $65 before tax for any Diablo fan.

The majority of my friends opted for the cheaper Warlock DLC but said that they would’ve bought LoH if it were $15. I’m guessing by the end of the year, especially after whatever Blizzard supposedly will announce at BlizzCon later this year, Lord of Hatred will come down in price because people won’t be buying it for the remainder of the year and that their only chance at making big money was through a surprise announcement at a gaming show. But I find these tactics just more reason to distance myself in the future from the company because it simply sets up more bad precedence without even going into the lack of creativity shown in the expansion (which barely had any actual new content that was worth more than $15). I think if Blizzard had priced it at $15, they would’ve gained a lot more sales and the goodwill of the people for a short period. Instead, it’s business as usual for them.

But I expect that Blizzard is going to feel the heat down the line because of these tactical errors. I think Diablo 4 has some bad foundation that’s causing it to be difficult for them to maintain and build on top of. Also, they simply can’t compete against GGG’s Path of Exile 2 at this stage. Even if I haven’t decided to play that game, I can see from various streamers just how much more content is offered at nothing. So Blizzard is going to probably take a nasty fall being under the Microsoft umbrella and I think Diablo 4 is going to be in a lot of trouble, despite all the various promises the executives have stated. Things change and I don’t see better numbers for this game and the complexity of the engine was a horrible misstep, which is symptomatic in this industry.

Diablo 2: Resurrected Thoughts

Although I don’t talk much about Diablo 2 in general, I will say that occasionally I might pop in and give it a whirl. A while back I figured on picking this title up on discount but didn’t progress far. I started up multiple characters and died once, losing all my gear apparently. That incident demotivated me and I probably quit for something else (better) at the time. Well, a few days ago a bud of mine started playing again and I mentioned it. I think he’s doing non-ladder so I told him I’d like to join. But I found out my highest character was a level 22 Sorceress and I’m sure that’s the one who ended up dying.

This time around, I started playing a paladin that I only got to level 9 or so. While I gave this character a spin, I honestly wasn’t having any fun. Maybe the graphics, even with the update, appear dated, the game play is painful, the inventory management still sucks and my hand/wrist ended up hurting badly. The worst part was how impossible it was to see anything. I hated the map overlay, the difficulty of trying to pick up little worthless items and just the general dark atmosphere. If you need to clear a zone, the slow moving monsters hidden in poorly conceived walls or trees make it terrible. Also, the skill tree setup is something I think only certain nostalgic fans must enjoy.

But I think this game honestly sucks. I remember playing it for a while when it was initially released (the OG D2) and that was fine back then because the standards were a lot lower while I wasn’t as broken down physically. Not to mention I used a trainer and didn’t really care for grinding since I had a lot more time and less sense about the direction my life would go. I can see why some people continue to flock towards it as they probably were the ones in junior high or high school that played hours in LAN style parties. For myself, I simply moved on to games like Diablo 3 or ones with better interfaces.

And people might ridicule me for how I can confidently say that I prefer Wizardry 6 or Bard’s Tale 3 over Diablo 2. Here’s the reality though: I can play those older, turn based games from the comfort of my couch. Diablo 2 I’m still stuck at my desk wrestling with a mouse and dealing with lame, dark graphics.

But it got me thinking about the whole ARPG genre and what might’ve gone wrong back then. I remember when Ultima started moving more towards a real time game how complex it had become. Ultima 7 was the worst offender because they dumbed down the strategic game play and made you upgrade your PC to a 386. Does that situation sound familiar? I think as games aggressively tried to up the ante, the downside was increasing the requirements, which meant this battle for upgrades. The game play itself mostly is graphical but the interactions haven’t improved that much. So maybe the problem isn’t so much the need for better graphics and these fancy particle physics engines but just more content for simpler games. Another article talked about the conversion to turn based games. I’m wondering if we’ll see a trend there because of how people probably don’t want to deal with the ADHD catered game play that more contemporary games have moved towards.

I mean if you look at Diablo 4 the game is about bullshit numbers and the only challenges are bugged mechanically fucked up boss fights. None of these things would matter if the game adopted a turn based solution where people could theorycraft and not deal with stupid multipliers and nonsensical math. But I would play such a game on a phone (not Immortal) if it were turn based and done better.

Tech Talk

CTO Speaks on Low Moral at Meta

I find this hilarious after I mentioned the mandated “fun” by the Zuck the other day where the CTO for Meta mentions the low morale. Well, no shit sherlock! Maybe back in 2007 or so, Facebook was trying to accomplish something and had a major focus on engineering. You’d hear about their version control culture with karma, the hack-a-thons, working with Ford in figuring out how to bring social to the auto industry, their contributions to the Open Source movement with things like Hack or Mysql. Collaboration and the open floor plans were revolutionary means of working especially for a young, highly motivated workforce. Instead, you have a burnt out group who are only about numbers because the company has adopted the Goldman Sach’s policy of the bottom 10% layoff scenario. Worse yet you’re forcing them to adopt AI when there is no vision for how AI should be used outside of that they must use it while giving some assclown fuckface a huge sum in extracting him from another company before he’s even proven one iota of what he could can concretely do to improve AI at Meta. Then there’s been people who describe the AI engineering group as a “gulag.” Considering that AI ought to be one of the most sought after, highest paid positions out there, I find this hilarious and all those sell outs who decide that money is everything deserve all the stress, the sleepless nights and every pang out guilt that hopefully gives each of them ulcers. I can’t be sympathetic for a place where theft not only is encouraged but has been celebrated and turned into a part of the American pop culture with The Social Network movie. So fuck them and everything that they’re worth.

Firefox Shares Roadmap

Firefox has a neat roadmap of their future. Their Nova is updating the layout and people say that the settings aspect is quite good. Privacy is at the forefront with adblocking/trackers built in, passkey support, VPN (for mobile), containers for different logins on a given site, translation built in, PDF editing, etc. It looks quite good and might even convince me to update my current version on my main laptop. I definitely will give this a shot on my work Mac just to see how it goes.

One reason I typically keep my browsers out of date is that I don’t necessarily trust Mozilla nor most browsing companies. I think when Firefox forced all plugins to stop it killed my old browser. Admittedly, that browser had issues but I didn’t visit many places to make me concerned. I was more concerned about Mozilla as a company and the fact that Firefox has become annoying with nearly trying to force updates. And while people may argue that it’s for security purposes, it also can cause issues where a trusted plugin might stop working or that they may simply decide to stop supporting something. So I’m very wary about using the “latest and greatest” of any kind of software.

Another article mentioned the roadmap but pointed out how Firefox is losing numbers too. My guess is that Chrome, Safari and possibly Edge make it harder for Firefox to gain traction especially on Mobile. However, with the upcoming Chrome update in ending support for adblockers, I’m guessing there will be an inevitable jump back to Firefox. One thing that has been mentioned by the Firefox update is the speed increase. The only places where Firefox has issues are YouTube, Google Docs and Facebook (for me at least). I’m dead sure this is intentional.

For me though, none of these apps really matter anymore. YouTube has become mostly reaction videos with low decent content and tons of AI crap. Facebook might as well be dead for me except for a single group that I belong to. And I have alternate pieces of software than Google Docs that I’m not forced to update. So if Google ends up shooting itself in the foot by adblockers, not muc really changes on my behalf because I doubt I’ll use other browsers, even on mobile. And for that matter, anyone reading this ought to swap too (even though I am using AdSense here but I still have some level of integrity)

State Level BS

Oklahoma Votes to Block Minimum Wage Hike

Let me start by saying I really don’t enjoy talking about politics because it’s not only a touchy subject but I get upset and find that it’s a waste of time. This one is something where I feel like there’s a this massive trickle down effect taking place all over the place. And while I don’t live in Oklahoma nor would I ever want to, I have to agree with the stop on the minimum wage hike. In California, we’ve seen that the consumers ended up taking part of the brunt of this with fast food costing a lot more. Along with that, various places have shut down where companies are blaming the inability to pay their employees being an issue (which probably is partly caused by the general rise in cost of fast food). While fast food has been notorious as being a low margins type of business, one thing it’s never truly been for certain is a skilled labor type of spot.

Of course, minimum wage goes beyond fast food but I generally see this type of role as being the bottom of the barrel when it comes to employment. In the case of fast food spots (which I tend to target mostly because it’s the only business where I have interactions with this type of personnel regularly), I don’t expect much from these people except one thing: my order. My expectations are so low when it comes to fast food that I already know what I’m getting. When you add missing items, cold/stale food, wrong things, you get kinda pissed after a while. Maybe back before fast food became ridiculously overpriced, I wasn’t as unhappy by these situations because the cost matched the output. Now, the attitudes haven’t changed much but the price has. It’s almost impossible for me to want to avoid hitting up any fast food ever again when the service itself is so low and apathetic half the time.

But I think that’s kind of the toxic nature of these types of jobs. It’s problematic when some of that labor were from say a certain ethnic group or economic/cultural background (to put it mildly) and forced to accept this type of wage, which is what keeps these types of industries alive. However, without a group that are willing to take lower wages and put up with the BS of customers, these places are going to feel the pinch hard.

I think California in particular really fucked up badly when they tried to push minimum wage to compete with inflation. The problem is that taxes went up alongside these wage increases so you can’t tell me there wasn’t a hidden side agenda. The real solution ought to have been keeping the cost of living low by enforcing maximum rent hikes, affordable housing and preventing companies trying to lure employees with insane salaries. I really believe a lot of the crap you’re seeing in California is because of what California did to itself.  But that leads me to the next parts.

Newsom Trying to Close Billionaire One Time Tax Law

I’ve seen some arguments saying how this bill is being done by a special interest group and that the idea of a one time tax against people of a certain income level is ridiculous, even though the title in spirit seems to be what liberals generally want. What I dislike is Newsom’s response on it in saying how it’ll shut down innovation because of how California already has driven away various billionaires like Larry Page. Well, it’s not like Newsom tried to prevent more of this crap from getting to this level under his watch in the first place.

While I’m sure there’s going to be a bunch of red tape that happens before a law like this can pass, I kinda want to see it happen just because things are so fucked up right now, I want to see just how far this situation will go and what the consequences will be. I would prefer there to be a better solution like a mass force function to lower the cost of living by 40% in general and cuts to state taxes like sales tax that has gone up. People will say, “Well, we need roads for all those pot holes that them big rigs are causing.” etc. But when those pot holes get patched, the construction crew create a bigger mess with blocking lanes down. So is the solution just this weak, high level pie in the sky dreams? Shouldn’t California be looking at better long term solutions that actually make living here worth it besides the massively overrated beaches and weather (that gets horribly hot if you’re in SoCal right now)? All I can say is that given Newsom’s tenure, he hasn’t really improve this state much. Which again leads me to the next issue.

Newsom (and His Family) Being Investigated

Now, anyone who knows me will realize that I’m no fan of our current model president. But the same people will realize that I’ve never been a vocal supporter for Newsom. Newsom has always struck me as a career politician. I’m sure if there was some centrist party that catered to big business and economically liberal types, he would be involved in that rather than the democratic party. But he’s on the democratic side of the equation because he’s been able to get his seat here and certainly will make an attempt at presidency I have no doubt (despite him saying he wouldn’t; but I think it’s a matter of time).

A lot of the gestures I’ve seen this guy do seem more as political theater to me and trying to gain the good will of certain special interest groups. But I haven’t really seen things being done for just someone who’s been a long time resident here and deserves something for putting up with all the rest of the bullshit of this stupid state. Now, he’s using the California government site to basically bitch about this investigation. My main comment here is whether there is something or not, I think he kinda brought this onto himself even before all this nonsense with our current head of the US in charge. I don’t think much is going to come out of this except inconveniencing him but I’m already mentally done with politicians. If there’s one thing I have to say about the democratic party, it’s that they really fucked up for a while. A lot of the crap you’re seeing is really from a history of people who should’ve long stepped aside but didn’t or pushing up the wrong person, etc. Even if we have a nut in charge, the dems shot themselves in the foot a while back, maybe as far as Billy boy Clinton with the whole political correctness nonsense in the 90s. So I find it hard to sympathize with this party at this point in my life.

And for the record, no I’m not a Republican. I’m more anti-government and anti-establishment. I don’t believe in groups, I hate groupthink, I think politicians suck as a people and type and I find the whole thing frustrating to watch no matter which side is in charge. Evil is evil, one wrong and a right doesn’t make something right, etc. Lastly, I disagree with Plato’s “Lesser of two evils”. How about no evil and just rejecting everything if the choices plain suck? That’s what I did with most TV and I’m happier for it.

In the Wrestling News

Jim Cornette/Brian Last Review A Letter from a Former Six Flags Employee on Mark Shapiro

There’s a great video that Jim Cornette/Brian Last posted on their YouTube channel regarding an employee who had to deal with TKO’s current president Mark Shapiro. Basically, the person blast Mark Shapiro as this know-nothing typical management fuckwit who turned Six Flags into a joke. Later on, someone mentioned that this was the same person that Papa John’s owner said how he (Shapiro) knew nothing about the pizza business (probably in reference to the partnership with Six Flags). But my quote for Shapiro is that I’ve never known a Shapiro that didn’t have some shady controversy surrounding the name.

I think what there needs to be is instituted a law where any corporate executive must take some sort of ethics and code of conduct test where they have some sense of social responsibility rather than pure greed (i.e. being an addict of some form of sin). Then if they fail or are shown to fail during their tenure, they ought to be stripped from the position, relinquish all wealth to a public trust fund and their family and any relatives connected to them must be heavily audited for a generation until proven otherwise. Maybe that ought to improve how corporations behave with these cretins running around.

Dark Side of the Ring for Season 7 Returning

In something wrestling related that I am looking forward to, Dark Side of the Ring Season 7 will air on July 7th on Vice. The big topics for Dark Side of the Ring Season 7 will involve:

• Jeff Jarrett and TNA
• Paul Orndorff
• Ray Traylor (i.e. Big Boss Man/Big Bubba Rogers)
• Missy Hyatt
• Necro Butcher vs Samoa Joe
• Zach Gowen
• WCW’s Renegade (aka Rick Wilson or as we used to call him “Rent-a-gade)

Jim Cornette did release a video on his YouTube where he discusses the various topics with Evan Husney as he partook in a few episodes here. For myself, I’m looking forward to the most with Missy Hyatt as she’s still alive. As a long time fan of Missy Hyatt, it’s interesting that her story was turned into a Dark Side type of tragedy. I know she’s had her share of controversies over the years and fans get on her case for certain incidents. But when I think of how she earned her nickname as the real “first lady of professional wrestling,” it really is true.

Most people consider the first valet as Miss Elizabeth because of her association/marriage to Randy Savage. But over in WCCW in Texas, they were far ahead of the game where Sunshine and Missy were having main event cat fights. Missy certainly is the blueprint of the bitchy/girlfriend/snob type of valet that could get heat. And if you can get around her nasally southern voice, she does come across fairly knowledgeable about the business. Plus, she’s brutally honest not just about the business, fans but about herself, which is pretty rare. So that episode, much like the Sensational Sherri one, is going to be something I really want to see.

Foodz Stuff

McDonald’s Fried Apple Pie Coming Back

Even if I’m trying to swear off most fast food, I’m going to have to get a few of these when it returns on June 23rd. Now, I didn’t realize that the baked version had been sold since ’92 but I do believe it’s nowhere near as good as the original fried version. Apparently, these won’t last long so there’s probably going to be a rush while it’s available. I’m thinking this might be a marketing ploy at McDonald’s testing the waters for a nostalgia play and that if successful, these fried apple pies will surface periodically just like the winter McRib sandwich. The thing that angers me though is that I honestly preferred the cherry pie version much better back in the day. I do hope that they’ll last for a few months at the very least because I don’t want to deal with a competitive drive thru just for a stupid pie that probably won’t be the same.

Cheap but Good Dinner Idea

Finally, on the home “cooking” front, I ended up buying one of those in store rotisserie chickens at Albertsons the other day just because I was too hungry to clearly think and didn’t want to deal with some chicken thighs I already had (and ended up freezing). Along with the chicken, I picked up some chicken gravy and rice pilaf (RiceARoni). The RiceARoni was something that was cheaper than another brand I normally buy. Unfortunately, the instructions wanted you to cook it in some pan. Last time I did that for rice, it set off my fire alarm. However, I’ve made rice pilaf using a small pot with a cover before with some olive oil. So I used a similar method to cook this and it came out better. The first night though the chicken was pretty dry and not flavorful, so adding the chicken gravy was the move. I had extra gravy and used one of those plastic containers for lunch meat to store the leftovers. So tonight will be my third night with this meal. Maybe altogether it’s $4-5 per meal, which isn’t bad when you think about the general cost of food going out.

The post Hodgepodge – To Tax or Not to Tax (Billionaires), Other California Issues, Gaming Layoff Explosive Diarrhea Inevitability and Pies and Chicken appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Chad Gable’s Fall/Redemption Arc

Chad Gable is a talent that seems to have various starts and finishes. The matches I’d seen him in remind me of a younger, smaller Kurt Angle. Despite his lack of height, Chad Gable does present himself as very athletic with a legitimate background in amateur wrestling as well as boasting a really good physique. I see him as a more vocal version of Dean Malenko to be frank visually. That said, I think the various angles he’d been involved in made him look like a goof mostly because he was paired up or against goofs.

Apparently, he had been injured a while back but started wearing the mask as El Grande Americano. Initially, I absolutely hated the angle because it involved stupid backstage type of skits/vignettes about his search for figuring out how to beat the luche libre stars. Then I guess in recent months, he had been the focus over in AAA where he was involved in a major feud with another El Grande Americano character played by Ludwig Kaiser. This feud got some major attention because at one point the situation became serious and heated down south, leading to a recent event where both faced off in a mask vs mask type of scenario that pretty much caused the internet to rave about it, especially giving praise to the Undertaker as one of the key bookers behind the story/match.

I had taken a glimpse at the match and thought the early part was a little boring for me but halfway through, I got involved. They did pull out all the stops with a lot of outside interference and gimmicks, some parts I didn’t recognize. But I was more amazed when these two could just focus themselves in the ring. I was actually more impressed by Ludwig Kaiser’s selling especially in a luche libre style match. But if you focused on the drama involved, it was one of the better “modern” wrestling matches lately along with a perfect post match ending that showed Chad Gable remove the mask, perform the ceremony respectfully along with having his family with him and mentioned that he would return. I think the audience gave him a great ovation mostly because they recognized the performance.

When he returned to the WWE, he received a massive pop and has been on a “redemption arc”. In fact, the WWE are calling this the “Chad Gable Redemption Tour” (which I fucking hate because it makes their shows sound more like a concert, which reveals their mind set about pro-wrestling). The latest incident involved Rey Mysterio Jr and someone else (Dragon Lee?) saving Chad Gable as payback for when Chad helped them when Rusev and Ethan Page tried to get the best of the luchadores.

I suppose this caught my attention more than anything in wrestling lately because wrestling has become incredibly stale to me. But this story actually has been going somewhere and it’s logical. I think people backstage are realizing just how much talent Chad Gable has (and hopefully Ludwig Kaiser down the line) where he might be taken seriously after all these years. There is one caveat in my mind though: the chance that Chad Gable turns. I know it doesn’t seem possible at this stage given the setup, but this is the WWE and the creative is stale and terrible and it wouldn’t surprise me that the writers think he should just go back to square one, kinda like those 80s/90s sitcoms where the main characters are about to get a break but something fucks up so they’re back in the hole. All I can think of here is WWE don’t fuck this up. The booking is so goddamn stale, no one changes, there’s too many turns, there’s no growth. Finally, you have a guy who got himself over and seems to be sincere. Let this be the start of a new chapter where he gets to be a serious wrestler and get pushed up the card. Just don’t fuck this up. It’s so easy.

Will Osprey Mouthing Off about NJPW

Speaking of ass clowns, one of the biggest around, Will Osprey, has been spouting off again, this time about NJPW, Gabe Kidd, etc. on creating stars, some guy now talking about defending the title, etc. The thing about NJPW is that they haven’t created real, money drawing stars for ages. I would argue that their last great batch of bookers were Riki Choshu and Jushin Liger. While the talent on top seem to be doing more, they aren’t over the same way the Great Muta/Keiji Mutoh, Masa Chono and Hashimoto were back in the day when NJPW was doing 65k at the Tokyo Dome in the 90s. I think a chunk of that was through interpromotional wars as well as the UWF stuff that made the UWF look bad.

And while Tanahashi would become their top ace and a pretty decent worker, I never really saw him as a real top guy. I do recall some earlier stuff in the earlier 2000s with him and he was good but over time that style just wore him out. Seeing him in a few times in AEW, it was clear this guy needed to hang it up. The guy was barely moving. Luckily, he didn’t Misawa himself and got out while he was still ambulatory.

But Osprey also talks about “performances” with Gabe Kidd and Kenny Omega as being the thing to push a guy to the top. I used the word “performance” to describe the El Grande Americano situation in AAA. But the difference is that the fans were completely vested into the performance and story. The story dictated how the performance would operate which is how you should portray pro-wrestling. When you hear about how Konnan just got his legs amputated, it makes you wonder what these “modern” wrestlers are going to be like when they’re in their 50s and 60s. And Osprey just got back from a major neck surgery. But I’m convinced this guy has the intelligence of an amoeba at best, which is why he can do the crazy stuff. It’s just that his body hasn’t connected to his brain yet to tell him to stop but that won’t happen until it’s too late.

Yum Brands Changes

Pizza Hut to Be Sold Off

As someone who keeps up with various major chains in terms of recent updates, I saw that Pizza Hut will get sold off. Apparently, there’s a Yum Brands in China which is separate and will just up the rest of whatever is going on out there. And the rest of it will, of course, in the states be sold to a private equity firm. No doubt, we’ll see the complete decimation of this brand once that part of the transaction completes and maybe what will be left are the small franchises that keep the old school decor (like one did) and return to their older menu (hopefully with the lunch time buffet)

But one of the interesting quotes was reading how the brand was underperforming or Yum Brands’ biggest loser in their portfolio. Here’s what their director of data revealed:

“Pizza Hut has long been the weak link in Yum’s portfolio,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, wrote Tuesday. “Despite efforts to revitalize the brand and shut underperforming locations, it has become increasingly clear that pushing the division back into growth will require a level of investment and patience that Yum is just not prepared to commit to.”

So the fact that this anus head called Pizza Hut part of a “portfolio” just demonstrates how these large corporate entities don’t give a shit about customers nor how their businesses operate. It’s just another thing they can show off to their investors in short. Also, he mentions “efforts to revitalize the brand.” What efforts? First, these numb nuts decided to pair with DoorDash for delivery, which means unreliable drivers. Second, changing the decor won’t do anything to alter people’s minds when prices are not competitive in 2026. The last time I ordered Pizza Hut was in August of 2024 through Uber Eats (because I hated DoorDash). Guess how much it cost back then? $76.31. At that point in time, I had still been employed so the cost was relative the inconvenience of the situation but the price obviously left me highly angry. I’m sure in 2026 that price might as well be $100 flat.

And to connect the situation to my recent Fat Tomato Pizza story, this rising cost is precisely why I stopped doing delivery pizza. Pizza Hut was a good niche type of thing for me where I could get wings, stuffed crust and some other sides with maybe a drink thrown in. Once the prices and inconvenience of unreliable deliveries mounted, there was no way I would continue. The closest Pizza Hut to me is on PCH and it’s in a strip mall next to a major busy street. Why go there myself when you can find dozens of better joints for cheaper if you’re just going to end up picking up?

The other thing that’s bugged me for a few decades is the closing of the eating area inside of Pizza Hut. There used to be on off of Hawthorne Blvd and Sepulveda Blvd that shared its location next to an old Wherehouse store back in the 80s and 90s. They ran a reasonably priced lunch buffet that had some favorites like your pepperonis, meat lovers, Hawaiian as well as some unique dessert pizzas with jelly on top of a graham cracker crust. Obviously, it wasn’t a healthy spot but it was nice to go there for the price, being able to sit down and enjoy lunch on an off day and walk off full. This type of spot would do exceptionally well in 2026 if the exact same setup was provided at the exact same prices as in the 90s. Of course, that won’t happen because private equity companies are what’s causing all the economic problems. But if you want to at least create a reason for customers to order from Pizza Hut, just return to something like this concept.

The point of a chain like Pizza Hut though is to have a reliable service with maybe some points to get a free pizza once in a while and not deal with driving to some spot. It’s just too competitive of a market with low margins but the increased cost of doing business (especially in a state lik CA) while not providing something that’s miles better or cheaper than what you can get in the frozen section of a super market. Obviously, if I’m craving pizza and want to avoid frozen, I’ll just get up on my own but it won’t be to some poorly located, hole-in-the-wall spot when there’s more options around with better quality and prices.

KFC Updates

Yum can’t seem to keep things simple as we see how KFC is going to undergo some changes too. One thing they mentioned was retaining the familiar Colonel Sanders image after the Cracker Barrel incident that caused Cracker Barrel to revert their logo. The sad reality is that Colonel Sanders really is all that KFC has left in terms of the nostalgia factor, which is what fast food brands can use to sell anymore. Before I rant even more on the fast food problems, I have to paste this quote from their CEO:

“We have a history of keeping pace with the consumer, and now everything we’re doing is in service of making sure we’re setting the standard for the modern chicken quick service restaurant.” – KFC Global CEO Scott Mezvinsky

What the heck is “modern chicken quick service”? I get that companies are trying to digitize things with mobile ordering or using contemporary payment systems but the quick service part is what got me. Also, what is “modern chicken”? Yes, I know that there’s the “restaurant” portion I left out, but doesn’t that whole line and that particular section just come across as someone who has some cushy job in an ivory tower while collecting a monster paycheck for doing absolutely nothing useful in the world?

It is interesting where the article talks about their competition in naming Raising Cane’s, Dave’s Hot Chicken, Chick-fil-A, and Popeyes as far as them being in the US. The sad truth is that KFC is considered some of the worst fried chicken around, only slightly above something you can find in a Hungry Man frozen dinner. What makes matters worse is that the price for KFC doesn’t match the quality. Back around 2018 or so when the chicken sandwich war happened, KFC was one of the least remarkable especially when Popeyes decided to become king. And Chick-fil-A had their own niche with their simple but reliable chicken burger and waffle fries. The others just blew up in the past few years. I think Dave’s Hot Chicken is another niche but I haven’t tried it. Raising Cane’s though isn’t a bad offering; I’ve been going periodically because they’re open late at night and fulfill a specific craving for me.

Another point the article makes is about failing to capture younger consumers’ attention while remaining being left in the dust compared to Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane’s, and Wingstop in US consumer spending. My two comments here is that KFC is probably more associated to an older crowd like myself because there were limited choices for fast food style chicken growing up. For me, we had KFC, Pioneer (which barely is around) and Church’s. Church’s was one spot we never hit up because I heard it wasn’t good (another Hungry Man-like quality). Pioneer though was my favorite. I thought they did a better skin and still do. So KFC kinda won by default.

Chick-fil-A was a thing but operated only in a mall growing up and wasn’t open on Sundays. But they focused on the sandwich and nuggets, which made them unique compared to KFC’s offerings. Popeyes came up later and truthfully, I wasn’t a fan until people talked about their sandwich. The one place the article failed to identify which has become a major hit out here in California is Jollibee, which does a Filipino version of fried chicken with sandwiches, mash n gravy as well as spaghetti. But it’s got a unique flavor that’s growing a nice cult around it. Better yet the food always is hot when I get it. Then there’s El Pollo Loco which does grilled chicken and was considered the “healthier” option between the two.

When it comes to the specific changes KFC management are talking about, they’re looking at a new global beverage platform, called Kwench, boneless chicken products with regional sauces like Chimichurri Ranch and Hot Honey Habanero. Interestingly enough, another key quote talks about the foundation of KFC:

“Our brand was built around buckets of chicken,” Kubizniak said. “That’s not how people eat today.”

So I think this pivot is going to fuck KFC up. I honestly have hated all the changes places like Taco Bell made over the years where their current line up resembles stuff you’d find in 2001: A Space Odyssey all mashed together rather than the old ground beef, freshly grated cheese, etc. I think KFC had two major issues that has plagued them over the years that they cannot admit: 1) the morbid obesity crisis; 2) the increase in prices. I haven’t talked about the chicken crisis that happened a few years back either. But the morbid obesity crisis kinda killed a lot of the fast food market because of the stigma of how the ingredients, heavy amount of processing and quantity led to various health issues, including Type 2 Diabetes. KFC has to be partly to blame for that issue based on the nature of what they serve.

The increase in prices though are the biggest problems they’re facing now. The idea of “building a brand around buckets of chicken” don’t work when you’re charging anywhere between $30-40 for a family meal. And even if they pivot, the type of food they serve for the price might not be what people really want or need. Like in an urban zone, KFC would be one of the least appealing type of meals especially if you work in a corporate office (or even at home) where you’d get into a food coma right after.

While they may think they understand the problem, I think that the issue is the core audience for what they had sold has evolved. KFC worked for nuclear families back when there was little competition, the parents needed a night off from cooking and they could have leftovers for another meal (maybe the dad or children might have some the next day; at least, that’s what my family did). When you’re asking families to spend $40-50 for a bucket that barely last a day in conjunction with shrinkflation, people are going to search for alternatives.

Also, I mentioned Raising Cane’s as a spot that I occasionally go to. One thing I did notice was how there’s a lot of young workers and kids inside the restaurant eating after 10pm. I think part of the problem with these fast food spots is that they’ve been optimized to death and forgot what their core audience is in favor of shareholders and quarterly profits. Yes, there’s the experience factor but the only reason to eat at a fast food joint is to get out of the house anymore. And I think with KFC, they’re missing the bucket (pun intended) when it comes to the price and open hours factor. But I wouldn’t compromise on the OG selling points. I don’t think a rebranding is going to help much. Prices and convenience will though.

Gaming Stuff

Diablo 4 Scheduled Next Developer Livestream for Season 14

On June 23, 2026 at 11am PST, Blizzard is going to have another Diablo 4 related livestream based on the Season 14 content. This comes after the PTR so I’m guessing that they’ll address the various changes coming up for S14 on Twitch, etc. I have to wonder based on some of the feedback on PTR I’ve read on reddit whether further adjustments will be made. The big problems to me is that there’s a ton of nerfs with nothing given back. Some people think these nerfs are to improve the health of the game but I argue that they’re wasting their time making percentage differences on their slider based so-called “game development” rather than focusing on adding more content like skills, nodes for the new skill tree, modifications for the paragon board, etc. While I might watch, I don’t expect the chat for the livestream is going to be positive though.

Stop Destroying Videogames Movement Denied in the EU

There’s an ongoing movement for video games where people are demanding that the government step in to compel companies after a game no longer is being sold. The high level concept is that publishers should not “makes games unplayable after ending support, especially when those games were sold to customers as complete products.” However, the EU made it official that they won’t enforce anything, despite the 1.3 million signatures requesting for this action.

I do think the situation is a slippery one mostly because live service games has become more or less a standard. I can understand that a company shouldn’t have to continuously support software after a certain period; that’s simply part of end-of-life agreement. I know there’s exceptions such where additional support get special cases (like say hardware for a bank). Otherwise, such software becomes something akin to COBOL where you end up having to maintain something that just becomes vastly out of date and the knowledge is specialized while the cost isn’t worth it.

However, I think with game publishers, the problem has been the advent of always-online, which is something that I think companies like EA pioneered as a means of combating piracy. I remember one of the Sims games (I believe) being controversial when it was clear that nothing in the game itself really needed an online mode to work. Now, I can understand games that need an online component such as social games like MMORPGs, but you’re pretty much taking on a liability in building such a game. First, you need to hire a server team and either build your own server farm or outside it from the cloud. Second, you need people on your team who are willing to commit to terrible schedules. Game studios tend to already have major issues since publishing is rough and there’s a high degree of stress. Then you have to deal with problems like security and other legal issues down the line as we’ve seen with the various child protection laws.

I kinda knew this would come down the line eventually when I saw the way games like WoW were being built. Wildstar is the perfect example of why doing an online game is so risky. I think it’s better to make games offline and just suck up the piracy problem. It’ll exist but you can just let the federal government do their job for that rather than put additional resources on the problem. Likewise, I think if people have issues with the way games are made, the better option might simply be to avoid buying them at all or going to a game archive like GoG where you can find cheaper but still relevant games that you’ll own and can play.

Tech News

Zuckerberg “Ordering” Employees to Have Fun

I think this latest PR move is nothing more than the meme of “the flagellation will continue until moral improves.” I’ve always seen Fuckerberg as being this inhuman, selfish, freckled faced, beady eyed twerp that had zero social skills and as much integrity as rotting shit floating around in an unflushed toilet boil at Taco Bell. He’s probably getting a ton of backlash from all the layoffs, the Machiavellian-like oppressive dystopia inside of Meta and the fact that nothing they’re producing anymore is any good, despite all their expenditure. But let put it to you Zitberg: people won’t have fun unless they want to. More importantly, no one likes being told to have fun when they’re under the gun. That said, I’ve tended to think the people over at Meta were mostly these backstabbing types that just would Carter J Burke everyone for a goddamn percentage.

SpaceX Acquiring Cursor

Two seemingly unrelated entities are going to merge; or rather one is going to be consumed for $60 billion into the thing that just went IPO. Most people are looking at this situation as xAI’s way of increasing the portfolio despite it and X being major money losses for Elon Musk. I have no idea why Cursor is worth $60 billion because to me it’s just a plugin to Visual Studio Code with a prompt integration. But I’m guessing the other part of this deal is to allow xAI to “steal” code getting written from a variety of sources since Cursor has to understand a project at scale. Most people probably have been using Github to place their repositories and that place has prevent AI bots from scouring their code base.

Now, the thing for me is that Cursor is a nifty tool and has become one of the leading IDEs when it comes to AI agent integrations. But there’s still plenty of competitors that are as good. Most of the time for myself, I don’t use Cursor for the agent aspects because it’s heavy and costly. The main features I use for coding with regards to AI are code completion and even then that’s to a limited amount. I do feel that Cursor has enabled a whole new generation of “vibe coders” to emerge but from what I’ve seen the output generally is a mess for the less experienced. So if it turns out that this acquisition leads to more distrust of AI, I’ll be more than happy to ditch it and just stick with my Visual Studio Code with some code completion plugin/integration. The only people that will suffer are larger businesses that are demanding their employees use agentic coding at scale to do huge chunks of projects.

Snap with Augmented Reality Glasses

In the latest “I haven’t heard fuck all from you in the past decade,” apparently Snap is attempting to make some news headlines with what I’m guessing has been a project they’d been working on for a while in the form of augmented reality glasses. The project is slated for the fall and is on preorder at a whopping $2,195. The key features of note are:

• Audio and video playback
• AI assistance
• Bluetooth notifications

From what I’ve read, Apple’s Vision Pro wasn’t a hit whereas Meta’s Ray-Ban version was. The real question to me in all of this is: who the fuck needs this in 2026? None of those features appeal to me especially at over $2.1k. I mean is this supposed to be a fashion statement? Why would I want audio and video playback on my glasses? That seems like it would only fuck my poor eye sight up even more. And why would I want or even need AI assistance? If I’m that desperate, I can get it from my phone.

Here’s the thing: I don’t need my goddamn computer on my head. What I would’ve preferred are things that help my vision since I now have to use two separate forms of glasses for reading and outdoors/driving. Stuff like auto tint or screen protection and digital focus would be cool. Or how about infrared and night vision? And with the video part, if the intent is pr0n on my glasses, I’ll say this: I ain’t jacking it while wearing my glasses, augmented or not augmented.

So this just sounds like a rich boy’s fantasy toy. There’s no real world purpose that I think is worth spending this amount of money. Not for someone like me.

Google to End Adblockers for Chrome

In their never ending quest to Do Only Evil as opposed to their original company slogan, Google has announced the end of adblockers, most notably UBlock Origin. I’ve been a dedicated Firefox user since the Mozilla days and only use Chrome for a small set of features (which involves a single Facebook group). My personal Chrome can no longer be updated because I purposefully keep my MacOS out of date. I don’t know if this change will impact my version of Chrone as it won’t self update anymore. But I’ve already moved a good chunk of stuff from Chrome back to Firefox.

But Chrome has been a lousy browser for sometime. Outside of killing AdBlock a while back, Chrome just eats up memory like crazy and most people consider it spyware. Sites like Facebook have been getting around ad blockers by having horribly structured pages with deeply nested div tags that cause their pages to run like a slog, even worse than the old tables within tables designs from the late 90s. The few websites I do go to aren’t places I cannot live without as most of the web practically is dead now for one reason or another. The things that I was using that kept coming back like Instagram are incredibly niche because the content is all crap except for the few celebrities I follow. I stopped using Facebook for any friend related activities. Twitter/X is long dead. So all the stuff I enjoyed is gone.

It does make me think that the web might be dying. Instead, I have a feeling that mobile applications or at least heavy peer-to-peer/client based networked systems are going to become a thing. With the rising cost of data centers, there’s almost no reason to build server side software anymore. Maybe this is a good thing and that along with the trend of protests against online service games seeing EoL situations, maybe the end solution is the return of packaged software. I do miss the Egghead Software days I must admit.

The French Spies Drop Palantir

This is almost a no-brainer where the French are distancing themselves from Palantir because of fear of overreliance. Anyone who works in software should be familiar with the idea of placing all your eggs into one basket. Now, that we have a bunch of crazed cucks in charge, the rest of the world is waking up and pulling away from their dependence on all things made American, especially software. I think what we’ve seen with TikTok and the separation might end up happening for many of these multi-national corporations that have become ingrained inside various foreign countries.

I think this is going to be a great thing. My one hope in all of this is an increase in demand over seas for software engineers to rebuild these platforms or better ones as well as new investments in sovereign nations own technical infrastructures. It would be great to see the other parts of the world really pushing software engineering and having alternatives where perhaps people in the US would be willing to switch over. But the world as a whole definitely needs to start ditching the ugly old guard like Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, etc.

Final Thoughts

That was a long one for today. But I think some of these issues were compelling enough to give more than a few paragraphs. I suppose that some news sometimes is better than no news.

The post Hodgepodge: Chad Gable/Will Osprey/NJPW, Yum Brands Changes, D4 Update and AI/Spy Tech Pontifications appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Mobile Gaming

Recently, I haven’t been playing much desktop games. My interest in Diablo 4 has waned to the point where I think I might’ve talked myself out of the game based on the negative perception of the upcoming Season 14. In turn, I’ve turned back to Wizardry 6 (hence the numerous posts lately) and a few mobile games. There’d been a few 4x type of games I encountered like Whiteout Survival. However, the pattern for those types of games are all the same: start with an interesting tutorial but eventually you’re taken into a town construction thing where you’re forced to join a guild/clan/club etc. to survive. The last one I played was Last Asylum: Plague. I read a few negative reviews that effectively described it as being the same as these others. There’s a few small mini games but eventually you get to the “join a guild” scenario where you will get destroyed by a superior force once your shield goes away. As you’re progressing, this game does a lot to push you into a guild. I accidentally joined one because of inferior UX and the first thing I saw was numerous messages trying to force me into their Discord to coordinate attacks. At that point, I realized that this type of game is nothing more a disguised multi-marketing scheme. I have a feeling that if I joined this random guild’s Discord that I would get compromised and have my information sold off. In the end, I simple deleted it.

What strikes me odd about these games is that they’re almost all the same. They’re usually run by some company you’ve never heard of and probably backed by Tencent or some other corrupt financer. But the engines are almost identical where the themes and graphics might be the only differentiator. And I think they have adjacent titles because the mini games end up being similar. I wouldn’t doubt some group out in China are making these with some base boilerplate code that they can throw up and skin quickly. But I try to avoid these especially after dealing with Game of War that I read was more of a scam run by the developers who would assault lesser powered groups in the hope that they would spend money to recover their losses.

Instead of these types of games, I’ve been playing mobile games from a developer called Grumpy Rhino Games. Apparently, this group has been around for sometime. The two main games I’ve been playing from them are NecroMerger and Idle Apocalypse. Actually, my friend introduced me to them since I knew about the concepts of merger style games and passively run games. The main highlights to me (which was part of the selling point) was that these games use a kind of an older Ninetendo/Gameboy style graphics and soundtrack. So they’re not high intensity draining games (at least not ones that use crazy graphics)

However, their game play is actually quite addicting. Both games have progressive systems. NecroMerger gets you resources as you merge your monsters and beat opponents or get rewards while Idle Apocalypse generates resources in the background. Both require a small degree of resource management because you need to figure out what your priorities are. Also, both have this weird reset feature where at some point, you cannot progress without doing a “reset”. A select number of resources are retained and carry over to future sessions but your progress gets faster on each successive time through some other currencies or unlocks. Maybe that’s my only real complaint about these games since you have to occasionally perform these resets. But it does provide a fresh outlook when you’re ready.

The other major selling point for these games is that the microtransaction and ad situation aren’t intrusive the way the 4x games were. There are aspects where you might consider buying the ad removal aspect or some other QoL addition. But you can completely play these games without spending a dime and just be required to manage your time/resources (and patience) better. There’s another game that they produce but I haven’t gotten that far into it but it’s somewhat similar to Idle Apocalypse. I’d write about it but I don’t really have much of an opinion on it.

The other game I play is something called Township. Township resembles a 4x game that combines other town building games of this genre along with having a few mini games. But this one is a little more microtransaction heavy in terms of how they try to FUD you out of your hard earned cash. The two mini games involve some sort of energy based quest piece that isn’t difficult as you pick up clues, treasures and sweep out obstacles. But your energy is heavily limited. The reason that occurs is because they want you to play the other mini game which is more of a Tetris-type/Candy Crush of puzzle where you’re given a limited number of moves to solve the puzzle. You get leaderboards from this as well as prizes (like more cards, energy and stuff for your town). But this part of the game is where most of my frustration is because of the limited number of moves. And this is done on purpose so that you have to spend your in-game currency to unlock more moves. The cost is not cheap so you might get frustrated into paying, which is where the microtransaction part can get dangerous.

Honestly, if you just stick with building your town and the quest mini game, then Township is a nice little break game. It does feel like it drains your battery with the graphics and network usage. So I would suggest turning off the music and any vibrations if you intend to play for a long session but aren’t close to an outlet. I will say I enjoy this game more than EA’s SimCity BuildIt, which I had been playing for a significant time over the years. But I ended up stopping a while back because I just ran out of time. When I did return at some point, the game really pissed me off because they added trains, which forces you to re-plan your town. While there was a way around it, I hated how the game simply became too microtransaction heavy and would try to push ads onto at every turn. I still keep it around in case I might want to play but I’d have to be extremely bored to touch it. With Township, thus far I haven’t found any issues where a gap in time might leave me feeling I missed the boat. So in that aspect, I prefer Township as a far better casual friendly game, even though they are microtransaction heavy.

Lastly, anyone who has read my blog will note that I no longer talk about Boom Beach nor Clash of Clans anymore. It’s real simple though: I fell out of the loop. I know that Boom Beach is planning a new HQ 29 soon but I simply haven’t been interested. And Clash of Clans just became too expensive of a hobby around the time I ended both with regards to time and dealing with multiple accounts using a seasonal pass per month. I didn’t like the way either game was going so I merely quit. I still keep both on my phone and iPad but I don’t feel a desire to play.

Wizardry 6

As I mentioned, I’ve gotten back into Wizardry 6 over this past weekend after talking myself into party crafting and playing around with Mad God’s patching/editing utility. Even if what I have done may be considered “cheating,” the real thing is that I wanted to try something different where I decided to give the Ranger another shot. There is a patch that supposedly gives Rangers more attack per swing (or shot) that I enabled. However, I have not seen the effect and my Ranger still does very low damage. I ended up pausing at the point where I’m merely sitting and spinning around the little section on the castle ground level which connects to the Enchanted Forest and have been grinding levels. Pretty much this part of the game is the end game for me. I might do more to optimize the party into its final form but I’m more disappointed by the lack of effect that I can see for the Ranger. All I can think of is just how badly they fucked that class up for Wizardry 6 because of the general lack of gear, poor primary skill (Scouting), no critical hit without a Great Bow or Elven Bow and low damage. I still am planning to take one Ranger into the end game (I’m doing a two female elf party) but my motivation is significantly lower unless I’ve completely missed something here (like maybe her dexterity is too low). Either way, I’ll give it another day or two and see if anything changes.

Household Stuff

Since I’ve been sitting on my couch a lot more lately, I’ve been thinking of upgrades. When I play Wizardry 6, the main irritation is that it uses Dosbox which is a tool to run older dos based games on various newer platforms. But the window has to be setup in a manner that locks your cursor in place. With Wizadry 6, you get another whammy where mapping is old school and you pretty much need some sort of hint book or online guide to figure out where you are. So I use this ViewSonic portable monitor that sits on my Armocity mobile C Shaped end table next to my couch (Note: I have no affiliate program with this blog but it would be nice to get one for the extra munz!!!!). What I like about this setup is that the ViewSonic monitor is lightweight and reasonable big while being able to stand on its folding section in the back and has USB-C connector that I can plug into my old MacBook Pro without additional cables. The end table has wheels so I can reposition it to my preference next to me while I keep my Firefox browser open and can reference maps or other sections of information on Wizardry 6. It’s not the most pleasant/convenient setup but being able to play a game while relaxing on my couch is a huge boon.

I will add one comment about the Armocity end table though. One of the wheels is off balance so it wobbles a bit. I probably have to push down on one of the wheels so it evens out but these are the types that you forcefully have to shove into a hole and locks once it’s inside. I think I might’ve not done a good job. Also, there’s knobs that allow you to adjust the height of the table, which seems great in practice but I think mine are not adjusted well partly because of the wheel problem.

At any rate, part of the reason I’m writing this section is that like my whole Desk 2.0 blog post, I was thinking about End Table 2.0 because I’m on my couch so much. I started looking for extensions to the table like something to hold up my portable monitor or a coffee mug holder (this is to avoid accidentally knocking my cup over on the table or just general leakage when I drink something cold). I have one for my desk but wish to keep it there. Also, because I have a spare 27″ curved Samsung monitor that’s not really in use anymore, I thought about figuring out how I could use it on this small table. I did find some monitor arms but my 27″ curved monitor does not have a VESA connector which is the main thing you want. Lastly, I think larger monitors for this table are a bad idea. The best scenario is to just have an arm that could attach to the portable or bear it would be ideal. However, I simply have not been able to find anything that would work here. Suggestions are welcome.

In addition to adjustments for my end table, I was thinking of adding something for my couch. I’ve seen accessories like an attachment for couch arms. Most of the time, I’m sitting to the side of the couch where I have some pillows and my legs are outstretched. Truthfully, I don’t think this is a great thing for me because it’s probably not healthy. That said, things I’ve been contemplating are a footrest or an ottoman. The ottoman is an interesting choice here because they have storage. I am cautious about getting one from Amazon though mostly because the reviews are less than stellar. Also, it’s hard to determine just how big and sturdy one of these things are based on pictures alone. Yes, they have the dimensions but I would need to measure and plan all this out.

The other thing I’m considering is a couch desk. I have a tray that has a pull out mouse section but it’s not very comfortable. A couch desk though seems more versatile in that you can use it on your couch or in bed while you’re working. The ones I was eyeballing had a side pocket for a book or a cupholder. I like the concept based on how my laptop can get really hot at times and having a desk right on my couch means a more stable surface and avoiding getting burnt. The cupholder sounds like a bad idea though just because you can knee the thing and potentially knock over a full cup, leaving a giant mess on your couch (hence the attachment for the end table instead). The other reason to get one of these is that I could still use the tray and use my mouse on it. Or perhaps, the solution is to keep the laptop on the end table and place the portable monitor on the couch desk along with a keyboard and mouse setup. If I had a second portable monitor, I would definitely consider a setup like this, but in truth it probably sounds better than it is in practice.

Food

On Saturday night, I decided to give this place near my old home a try called Fat Tomato Pizza. It’s located in a tiny plaza by Ted’s Place, which was a favorite of mine (actually Golden Ox was the place my family enjoyed back in the day). What I really like about Fat Tomato Pizza is the late hours. I think they officially close at 1am but take last order around 12:45am. By the time I got there, the parking lot was empty as was the store. But the guy working at the store was very nice to me and made a pretty decent pie. I’m still chowing away at it (I try to eat only two slices at a time for each meal).

The main reason I sought out this spot is because there’s not a lot of good pizza joints in my area. The other one is up the street and in a tiny lot. But it closes earlier. And anytime I have to drive up the street earlier than 9pm, I get anxiety because of the way this stupid road is constructed. The other place is Papa Johns. I wasn’t a huge fan of Papa Johns but it was reasonably priced, close by and would deliver. Once the delivery options change to DoorDash, I stopped using them. I’ve never had good experiences with DoorDash and I think it’s criminal that all these pizza places outsource their delivery to DoorDash.

As a result, I had given up on ordering pizza to my place until a few weeks ago. I did go to an old family favorite called Pizza Machine in Gardena. I got myself some mozzarella sticks and a large pepperoni (forgot if there was additional toppings). The place was still as good as I remember it from my youth. However, the location is just too far where I would consider going as a treat maybe once every few months in a year at best especially with the insane gas prices and general cost of living. But I ended up getting sick of frozen pizza and wasn’t happy making my own. So I guess Fat Tomato Pizza will become my go2 spot for the foreseeable future, even if it means me driving to pick it up.

Another place I went to about two weeks ago was the Wok Experience in Lomita. I ran across a thread on reddit where someone was looking for cheap but filling Chinese that wasn’t Panda Express. This was the main suggestion as this place delivers on overflowing your container with food. It’s family run and like the people on the Google/Yelp reviews mention, the owner remembers your face and is friendly. Oddly, I had driven past this spot almost all my life while living in the South Bay as I’d drive up and down PCH and see it as it was on the corner near a Target I never went to (until this one time). I might’ve tried them at one point back when Eat24 was a thing (prior to it becoming acquired by DoorDash and me giving up on them).

That said, finding good, cheap Chinese food around my zone is actually a lot more challenging than it may seem. And I’ve tried a bunch of spots, some that mix Thai and Chinese, Hawaiian and Chinese, etc. My mom used to hit up the old Hong Kong Gardens and Golden Pheasant in Carson. But Golden Pheasant closed down for good after an arson attack. I think Hong Kong Gardens merged with Hong Kong Bakery & Deli, but they have early hours and are simply too far for me to get to with early hours that discourage me from going. The few times I did order were from delivery and the cost was exorbitant for what you got. I can’t imagine what the prices now would be but I’m sure that it’s more feasible to find a closer spot, which is what I did.

Now, the key to the Wok Experience was the idea that they “filled it up to the brim” where the lady at the counter would pack as much as she could into one of those take out containers. After becoming disgusted by the vast majority of fast food restaurants which charge you an arm and a leg even with an terrible app that doesn’t give you meaningful discounts, I decided enough is enough and to find spots that are more local, cheaper and at least give you increased quantity. Now, this place is definitely an upgrade over Panda Express for a variety of reasons. But I ended up getting two containers loaded with chow mein, fried rice and four items. I think it came out to a little over $20, which these days is a bargain. $20 might seem like a lot still but consider this: I was able to have meals for a few days. So it’s not like I ate all of this at once. Most fast food meals cost almost close to $20 just to fill you up on stuff 10-15 years ago would be around $5-7 max. And even if this Chinese food is greasy, I still can get some veggies in and not feel as guilty. So I’m definitely going to return in the future when I get that craving again.

AI Discussions

Got a chance to talk with a bud/ex-coworker last week. One of interesting points he mentioned was describing how this period might be seen as a down/dark period because of AI. It’s funny because I’ve been mostly neutral in my stance about AI. I’ve been outwardly shifting the blame of AI not on the AI itself but on the people running it (i.e. the CEOs of these firms, shareholders and tech people who make shit tons of money without any actual justification). There’s so much rejection for AI going on at least publicly on reddit or social media that you can see why it’s not gaining the traction you’d think it should.

Mark Zuckerberg apparently wants a company hackathon for AI where everyone inside is less than enthused about. Here’s the issue: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. I think because of the various layoffs and the evolution towards a cut throat, performance based culture, the surviving employees probably see this as another way for people to come up with something so that Zuckerberg can once again steal something, get credit and use it to possibly increase layoffs. I’ve been a proposing that the government should enforce a policy where companies over a certain headcount that perform a mass layoff ought to penalize the CEO and CFO (much like SOX does for public companies) and force the CEO/CFO to take a reduction and/or be forced to quit with no golden parachute as well as wear a stigma for the next few years to prevent them from joining another company. Here’s the thing, when you have two people that are responsible for the livelihoods of many and they only are trying to bump up their numbers, they need to be held to the highest standards and have some sense of social responsibility for their roles. I often think about how Japanese executives take a bow and quit because of the embarrassment of a major mistake (like the merger that formed Mizuho that also caused a huge disruption for customers’ banking). Without such an enforcement, these CEOs act as kings and the public and employees lose trust in these places.

Along those lines, I read an article about how Google’s current CEO avoided the AI topic at Stanford’s commencement speech as 200 students walked out. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened or how students are protesting major CEOs (or past CEOs like Eric Schmidt) in talking about the future with AI. Considering that the prospects for jobs with an inexperienced graduating class are pretty low, it’s not a surprise that one of the top companies in the world is getting slammed. I thought it was interesting how some signs in the article show students with signs displaying on how ICE used Google to perform their dirty work. Whether or not that’s actually true as well as to what extent is irrelevant since it’s the perception of these large companies in how they’ve evolved to only serve shareholders, the government, the 1%, etc. It’ll be interesting to see where many of these people eventually land or what they’ll do.

Another interesting article that popped up was this notion of “Shadow AI” in the enterprise. The gist is how unauthorized AI tools are being used in large companies, which can be a liability. I’ve tended to hate enterprise software and the idea of the CIO office just because it’s meant to control what employees can and cannot use. It really stinks if you’re a developer and you feel held down by this. However, a lot of people end up being handed some crappy tool to do their job most of the time that’s heavily controlled by the admin teams with locked down systems. If you’re truly unlucky at some of these spots, your internet is locked down and monitored so that you can barely do anything without raising suspicion or going nuts from some sort of network firewall. Worse still is how some of these tools might be legacy ones brought in because someone had a friend working in a company that sold them a bill of goods but you’re forced to use this pile of fuck since it’s IT policy.

Given that there’s this monstrous push by dumb ass CEOs who want to hop on the AI bandwagon without fully understanding what it does, it’s comes as no surprise how this “Shadow AI” concept has evolved. The problem though is that these mandates for the software/tools should not be coming from the office at the CIO but a ground up effort led by people familiar with the domain problem. Instead, someone who is working on the problem and figures out an optimized workflow or some method to reduce their work should be praised and work with the CIO office as well as gaining support from colleagues if it means getting things done more efficiently.

Entertainment/Movies/TV

Besides old kung fu movies, I’d been watching Tubi TV quite frequently. Since the new Masters of the Universe movie got released, I had an urge to finally re-watch the entire He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series from the 80s, having gone on an 80s cartoon kick in the past few months. What I like about the old He-Man cartoon is that it’s not antagonizing to me. Yes, Orko can be annoying but he’s not as bad as say Snarf from Thundercats nor Wheelie from the Transformers. Also, I came to realize that besides Evil-Lyn, my favorite character in the series is Cringer. Where Scooby Doo ended up being half way annoying (especially because the other Mystery Gang members could get on my nerves), Cringer is really cute to me. He’s this lazy, cowardly, self-aware grown cat that probably would make for a wonderful pillow outside while fishing next to a river. Also, I think he’s very relatable compared to Scooby Doo, who just gets himself and the others into trouble because he’s goofy. Cringer is much smarter but just cowardly and lazy. Plus, I always had a soft spot for the straggler tooth sticking out from his mouth.

As for the latest movie itself, while I have read good reviews, I’m not interested. Maybe the two characters I was anticipating the most was Evil-Lyn played by Alison Brie and the Sorceress played by Morena Baccarin. While I am a fan of both actresses, I really thought that they should’ve exchanged spots. Maybe the fact that Morena has played other villainous characters in the past and has dark hair make me believe she would come off more intimidating than the goofy Alison Brie. I think the only work of Alison Brie’s that I’m familiar with is Glow on Netflix. But she came across more as an actress trying to be an actress. I will say that Meg Foster’s Evil-Lyn is untouchable when it comes to a live action version of Evil-Lyn because of how Meg Foster has those cold eyes. Also, I preferred Meg Foster’s costume in the 1987 version of the movie; it’s more distinct. The Alison Brie version is more faithful to the cartoon but the whole movie comes off looking really fake and plastic to my eye. More than likely, I’ll wait until it comes out on some site like Tubi TV.

Hot Topics (Politics)

I’m slightly tempted to talk about these things but feel that it’s easy for me to go overboard. I generally dislike speaking on specific politicians or major problems in the world (e.g. the Russian – Ukraine war). My general take has been to avoid these subjects because I dislike giving attention to undeserving trolls. More importantly, politics aren’t really a topic I feel qualified to talk about on this blog without significant research. I feel for me to really blast someone, I’d need a better handling on the issues which would take far too long and there’s almost no gain. I might put something out at another time if I get red hot but I’m trying to avoid that circumstance.

What’s on Tap for Tonight

I ended up finishing the pizza for lunch which means I need to think about the next batch of groceries. I do have some chicken thighs in the fridge and a box of rice pilaf I can cook up but I’m missing out on a bunch of stuff. So I might take a break from writing/sitting on my couch, do my dishes then head next door to the market. I might even just freeze the chicken thighs and buy one of those already baked chickens near the deli section. But I don’t have much snacks and my drinks are pretty limited. Alternatively, I could just pick up something frozen to make for dinner. Either way, I’d have to go either today or tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I ended up staying up far too late yesterday and my sleep schedule is a little off. It’s been getting hotter by the day, which I’m not looking forward to as the summer is about to really hit SoCal. I’ve been running my AC during the day and at night but I’m afraid of seeing my upcoming bill. This is a major reason why I’d love to get out of SoCal. I have said in the past that I wouldn’t mind living in Henderson because of how relatively close it is to California as well as the living conditions which are similar to what you can find in say OC. The heat would be the one thing preventing me from moving (and current craziness in the states).

The other state I would consider is Oregon. I don’t think they get snow in areas like Portland (I could be wrong) but the climate might be better for me. My only concern is cost and the initial distance to move. If the job market were better in SoCal, I would be more inclined to stay. But truthfully, SoCal has been a depressing place that has degenerated over time and make me want to leave asap.

Besides food though, I’m not sure what the current plan is for later. I’ve not touched my programming gig for a while mostly because of burn out. I have some books I probably could read but don’t think they’d add much to me. But I do have that itch to write some sort of fiction. Of what, I have no concrete plans but there are ideas rummaging in my head. I could grind for a few hours on Wizardry 6 but I might be generally done because the end grind where I’m at generally is boring after a point. So maybe I just need to clean up, brush my teeth, take a walk, grab some groceries and see how things go for later.

The post Hodgepodge: Reactions/Responses for 6/15/2026 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

According to Cameron, part of the inspiration for The Terminator came from a dream of a metal torso holding knives and dragging itself away from an explosion. Then influenced by John Carpenter’s Halloween, Cameron decided to create The Terminator as a kind of slasher movie. While the filming started in March of 1984 (implying that the script had already been completed), I cannot help but think of certain parallels that would occur regarding infamous serial killers around that period like Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez (aka the Nightstalker). Richard Ramirez in particular started his road of treachery around this period with his first (known) killing in June 1984, whom, for myself as a young child living in Los Angeles, frightened me, although his infamy probably was at its peak in ’85. Nonetheless, it wasn’t uncommon to hear reports of similar incidents/people especially with the rise of slasher/horror film genre.

Re-watching the movie in 2026 though, you cannot help but see the age of the film not just in terms of the special effects but the overall atmosphere. Like Once Bitten, The Terminator has an 80s vibe pervading such as the apparel, the West Los Angeles shots and even the music. Much of the background soundtrack produced by Brad Fiedel has a dark synth tone with sharp explosive moments that one could hear in other synth pop bands like the bombastic Pet Shop Boys. In addition, there is another section by Tahnee Cain & Tryanglz, which can be heard in the Club Noir scene. The tracks there combine rock elements with a pseudo punk style that capture the mood of this movie. The Club Noir scene contains a similar atmosphere to Once Bitten’s own oddity club scene where the three friends encounter the lovely Lauren Hutton (or rather Jim Carrey’s character does). But in both cases, one could argue that there is a predatory sensation going on, at least in both those type of places.

When it comes to the Termintaor itself, the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed up in a punk kid’s outfit bearing assault weapons potentially could’ve given rise to the notion of cyberpunk itself. However, the intimidation factor he present as a street thug hanging out in dark alleys is probably more in line with what the producers wanted to project. The film heavily contrast the normal, quaint existence of Sarah Conner with this fearsome character to generate a terrorizing dread that stalks people mostly at night while under cover in a near normal appearing existence. Outside of the first victim, most of the killings were done in the evening, making the Terminator more like a predator.

The film partly embraces and negates the use of some familiar tropes in the slasher genre. For instance, Ginger and Matt’s demise occur after they have sex. However, Sarah and Kyle Reese’s time spent together is a necessity for the plot that does not celebrate Kyle’s death as a typical slasher casualty, but a future motivation device for Sarah to carry on her destiny in raising John and ensure that Earth has a future. When Sarah drives off into the distance in Mexico, we’re given an ominous warning by the child about an upcoming storm. While it’s intended to be the battle Sarah will prepare for, the underlying message was an indirect one about the constant threat of nuclear war.

I feel that most people who didn’t grow up during the 80s really have no context about what the Cold War entailed except as a historical footnote that they probably are studying in school. However, those who lived in the period were constantly reminded of our choices as a people as the USSR and USA prominently were at odds with one another as the primary two super nations with vastly differing ideologies. When Reese earlier describes the history leading up to John leading the human forces against the machines, Kyle states how humanity was on the brink of being snuffed out. While it’s directly connected to the robots, I think this was Cameron’s way of saying how close people were at the time of causing a nuclear disaster. The only difference is that under the hood, it was a thinking computer that made the decision for people.

Another thing I want to point out is that while robots are implicated as the thing that humanity fights against in the dystopian future of The Terminator, the term mostly used is the generic “machine.” I will say that there is some irony at the end of the movie where Reese and Sarah turn on the factory (which I read as possibly being Cyberdyne from some deleted scenes), the robotic Terminator gets confused by the heavy machinery. So Cameron here isn’t being a complete Luddite. I mention this being important because of how The Terminator frequently gets oversimplified into this AI revolution of taking over the world. I still would consider that a minor plot point compared to the other elements such as the serial killer part and the Cold War. Also, having the machines being the thing that saves Sarah in crushing the ominous Terminator demonstrates that Cameron didn’t believe necessarily that machines were necessarily a bad thing.

One thing that the movie doesn’t seem to shy away from is the idea of police being near useless in cases like these. While doing some research on the idea of serial killers in the 80s (mostly because I wanted to reference Richard Ramirez as it was one case that really stood out for me), I ran into this article that tries to analyze the notion of the seeming rise of serial killers in the 70s and maybe in the early 80s. Besides the psychological profiles and various environmental circumstances that may have influenced the apparent increase of these types within that period, one of the more interesting pieces was describing how there wasn’t enough data on these types of criminals back then. Both the technology and having a centralized information system that could be accessed by agents on criminals were a missing piece for the cops that may have prevented proper profiling, sharing information between areas and agencies as well as understanding the seriousness of the situation.

With The Terminator, one could see a highly dismissive tone used in addressing Sarah’s concerns. Effectively, they turn her into a victim that cried wolf type rather than taking Sarah and Reese more seriously. The result though is the complete massacre of the precinct they keep Sarah and Reese at, which one might almost describe as a perverse poetic justice. I will say here that some things never change.

At any rate, I think examining The Terminator through a separate lens helps highlight a different interpretation to the casual AI/Skynet response most people might associate with the franchise. But at least at that point in time, AI and computers probably weren’t viewed as seriously as a threat compared to these days where it’s becoming more and more of a reality.

The post The Terminator (1984): Not Really the AI/Skynet Revolution You Think It Is appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, I want to talk about why this movie popped into my head today. Quite honestly, I haven’t seen this movie in quite a while and don’t have it readily available. However, back when I used to work in larger companies, I periodically would slip this classic into the DVD player (or maybe it was on a hard drive somewhere) and let myself escape in Peter Gibbons’ (the main character played by Ron Livingston) journey in trying to do nothing. As an office worker, I found the humor generally cathartic and could be cited in sardonic exchanges about management with other coworkers. The movie is infinitely quotable with classic lines such as “watch out for your cornhole,” or “I have people skills!” to “Someone has the case of the mun-days.”

Yet as I sit here on my couch doing my daily blog, the idea of being in another cubicle setting is so far distant compared to my current disposition that there really is no relevant reason why this movie should have manifested. I think part of the trigger though was being contacted by a friend/ex-colleague, who messaged me earlier this morning and told me he’d been wanting to contact me. However, probably because of a combination of work, having a new child and dealing with some political campaign stuff, he’s been inundated with life. My first instinct in hearing the business part was assuming he was overworked just because of how most tech companies really putting their foot to the gas pedal in squeezing every drop of blood from their workers while they can still do it in the current environment. Maybe that image made me think of Office Space and my personal PTSD of dealing with corporate environments.

Regardless, my mind went down this mental rabbit hole that led me to Office Space and the possibility of writing up a review, since lately I’ve been struggling to find something worth writing about. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I don’t currently have a copy readily available nor do I actually wish to watch the movie at this moment mostly because it invokes bad memories of the general work place. Instead, as I pondered the movie some more, I recalled a quote from a while back that I read about the movie: it really has no plot.

If you examine Office Space closely, you’ll realize that the characters really aren’t characters but types of people you might encounter in the work space. Also, the plot, if there is one at all, makes no sense. When you dig through a lot of the nonsense and try to come up with a one sentence summary of what happens in the movie, it boils down to some disillusioned white dude hates his life and decides he wants to do nothing. Once you see the movie in this manner, it changes a lot of the context of the movie.

First, let me talk about how there really aren’t people in this movie but character types. You have Peter Gibbons who, for some reason, hates his job and general life. We know almost nothing about this guy. Why does he want to do nothing and just go fishing? During the consultant interview process, Peter admits that he’s not lazy then talks about motivation. Everything he describes sounds reasonable and the person he’s projecting is very relatable. But as an individual, he still makes almost no sense to me.

Part of the character starts to fall apart just when his neighbor Lawrence shows up and tells Peter that anyone can do nothing, citing his own cousin, who is broke and “don’t do shit.” Then Joanna, played by Jennifer Aniston, critiques Peter’s lack of plans in asking how he intends to pay for bills or support himself. All he can reply with is, “I don’t think I’m going to do that either.” I mean, it’s funny, bold and idealistic as well as a way to charm Joanna, but the line is kinda thrown out there while there’s almost no consequence nor true follow up in how Peter will handle this. Instead, Peter’s life suddenly “improves” and things go his way magically.

Maybe that’s the comedy side of things but it does call into question this weird world that’s being constructed. It’s not completely outlandish like say Harold and Kumar riding a high tiger in trying to get to a White Castle. But for a movie that has more “realistic” elements, you have to acknowledge the semi-fantasy element portion of it as well as what the actual intent of such a statement is here. Like is Mike Judge actually suggesting that people stop paying their bills and do nothing?

I think this is where the movie gets really muddied because the plot and characters are somewhat socially subversive. Sticking with Peter, I have to question why and how this guy became like this. We know almost nothing about his background. The only tiny hint is derived from the profile that the two consultants pull out on him where it shows Peter has a decent degree. But it makes you wonder why he decided pursue this job in the first place if the environment makes him miserable.

Beyond that, Peter’s character loses a lot of sympathy from me because he basically comes from a privileged background. While I’m certain many computer worker types can relate to the big picture aspects of Peter’s misery, he comes off sounding really self-righteous at times such as when he mentions how humans weren’t designed to be jammed in small cubicles. I can understand the sentiment but as someone who worked in both cubicle farm-like office structures vs the open space place, I can say that I prefer the cubicle farm setting better for privacy. But we don’t understand why Peter is really miserable. We can only infer part of this because of the annoying environment he works in.

And this is where things get weirder. Like if he hates his company so much, why does he stay? Why does he continue to put up with things until the moment he gets therapy and witnesses the psychologist having a stroke? Even after the mystical epiphany, Peter continues to show up to work, even though he’s doing it under his terms. Later on after the company burns down because of Milton setting the building on fire, Peter does show up to a construction company. So he’s still working (and apparently he’s got a new boss that sounds exactly like Lumbergh, even though that part is only shown in the deleted scenes). But does it really change his life? He seems to have adjusted and mentally justified the new job but we don’t see more of him.

But as I deconstruct his character, Peter becomes really problematic because we never learn that much about him. Through a contemporary lens, he simply sounds lazy and entitled. I think if his character had some background like maybe what he originally wanted to do vs how he ended up trapped in this field, I would feel more empathetic towards him. But he comes off as shallow and almost a reflection of the white American upper middle class type.

Again, I emphasize the word “type”. Of all the characters in the story, Peter ought to have been far more fleshed out. But this is probably one of my general critiques of Mike Judge’s writing where the people in his work are generally those he can typecast for a cheap laugh. We laugh at these characters because we can see them too around us. Like Drew with the “O face” is someone you probably have encountered a few times at varying work spots. Or the annoying support woman. And Lumbergh certainly is your prototypical middle management, pointy haired boss figure that most workers demonize. Even if they’re recognizable, they don’t feel human as well rounded people.

That then leads me to talk about the problems with the plot. The plot itself is really shallow when you remove all these encounters. It really is about Peter’s quest/journey to do nothing. While Office Space itself was supposedly based on Mike Judge’s shorts about Milton, the movie mostly films around him as this oddball that gets interleaved around Peter’s situation. Peter is treated as the main character because the movie takes this type that was effectively based on Mike Judge’s transient period working in Silicon Valley and shows this sparse view of office culture. I suppose based on Mike Judge’s experience, his conclusion was to GTFO especially because he found more success and happiness in animation and film. But I get the impression that he privately isn’t a very satiated person in general.

But the plot is actually pretty stupid if you think about it. Here, you have this lazy, entitled, white worker that decides to effectively fuck off. He fails forward once he decides that apathy is the way to go and seems to be validated by the materialism shown by the procuring of the beautiful hapless waitress and his undeserved promotion. Then he decides to involve his colleagues, who might be considered work friends at best, into an illicit scheme to defraud his company of money. When he mishears that his girlfriend might’ve been with his manager, Peter goes ballistic because he’s an insecure prick that leads him to having a major fight with her. Once he understands that he’s really a delusional piece of shit and that he’ll probably go to jail for his fraudulent scheme, he works up a fake conscious to give back the money/letter to the company but immediately decides against it but inadvertently cannot get it back because the envelope had slipped under a door. It’s only by serendipity that Milton shows up to discover the money and burn the office down along with any evidence to implicate Peter, Michael Bolton and Samir. Despite this effort, Peter still ends up working but for a construction company, which doesn’t seem to truly placate his issues (which is his laziness), although he does still manage to get back with Joanna. So his only net positive in truth is dating Joanna.

We don’t really find out if Peter’s life improves though because Mike Judge admitted that he didn’t want to endure the problems he experienced in making this movie. I think Peter is just someone who is a miserable son-of-a-bitch, someone who is entitled and insecure but lacks actual self-awareness and is incapable of making significant change because he’s a mediocre person. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Peter is just a reflection of the vast majority of American office worker types, who wish nothing more than to be sitting on a boat casting their line and getting sun while sleeping.

Now, one might ask why am I getting so down on Peter? It’s not really Peter as much as how he’s written as well as the host of other characters in this show. I have to cross reference Peter with another character facing a similar plight in Yamada as Densha Otoko. I would argue Yamada and Peter are very similar in that they hold office jobs, are miserable and lack a sort of self awareness. Peter though had a beautiful girlfriend prior to Joanna but seemed miserable around her because she was a wretched person (more entitled white America for you). Yamada-san wasn’t as entitled but still to me is quite shallow as a person. We get a limited amount of knowledge about him as a person in terms of how he became an otaku except when he finally comes out to Saori. Even if we can identify with him thematically (the outcast geek type), lacking that historical aspect where we’ve seen his childhood and teenage development leading to his state makes his situation less relatable much like Peter. So in both cases we can identify with their circumstances but not as people.

I’m not saying Office Space isn’t a great movie in its own right. I love the de-glamorization of work culture. I have seen the various types of people Mike Judge gives us a brief glimpse of from the movie. Much of the movie quotes can be used as anti-corporate slogans. But I think the movie is an interesting case where if you can divorce yourself from the comedic aspects and dive deeper into the people and plot, you’ll see that it’s also severely flawed as well as not really providing a truly satisfying conclusion.

The post Office Space (1999): The Corporate Cult Favorite with An Odd Plot appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, there are a few guides on installing the patch utility. I wrote one up for dealing with the basic utility and there’s another write up that mostly focuses on the encumbrance bug. You might have to do additional stuff to get Wine working on the Mac as this is a dos program. But my write up includes another link that goes into more detail on dealing with things like WineTricks. However, that other guide is aimed more for BaneEdit.exe. I suggest checking the two links to see which fits your situation better.

Once you get the utility setup, configured and running, you will see a general interface like this:

The key piece in this interface is the section called “Patches.” From there, you see another popup/modal with the following:

Here, you will see the various patches that you can apply. Some are reversible, others are permanent. But this screen will show you which patches have been applied. I’m guessing that GoG, etc. might have already applied as few such as the “Affect All” patch, where spells like Nuclear Blast would fail to damage your enemies due to a bug. At any rate, some of these patches are considered bug fixes, so you might consider using them in case you were unaware of an issue (like the Poison debuff one).

The utility file itself comes with a patch notes section for both Wizardry 6 and 7. The most relevant patches I found were the following ones.

Attribute Bonus Generation

The original algorithm both for W6 & W7 is as follows:

Character gets 1d6+4 bonus points (5-10)
If what the character got is less than 9
(S)He gets 1d4+7 bonus points (8-11) 2/3
Otherwise
It is 1/20 that (s)he may gain additional +8 bonus points (13-18) 1/60
It is 1/20 that (s)he may gain additional +8 bonus points (21-26) 1/1200
End

The patched algorithm both for W6 & W7 is as follows:

Character gets 1d19+7 bonus points (8-26)
If what the character got is less than 9
(S)He gets 1d4+7 bonus points (8-11) 1/19
End

To me, this is the most valuable patch of the bunch because character creation in this game is really bad. Unless you really enjoy pain, suffering and endless wasting time in trying to create a character because you have some stupid, impractical notion of honor, be my guest and wither away in agony. However, I think a lot of sensible veterans would have to agree that creating a decent starting character should not take hours by itself. Also, if you want to try different things and take advantage of the game’s issues like Mana Regeneration problems, you practically need to do some level of editing and min/maxing.

In my case, I have applied the patch and I can still roll stinky amounts but it’s far rarer than seeing a 5 show up as my bonus roll compared to before. Since you can get up to 26 bonus points from the start, you can get more flexibility in your starting party. Because if with a utility like BaneEdit.exe that allows you to edit your attributes, BaneEdit.exe won’t work without a saved game and a starting party. So pick your poison here.

Removing Shoot and Throw Attack Restriction.

The problem with missile weapons in this game, especially Bows for me, is that they are mostly worthless. One of the neatest items in the game is the Elven Bow, but it already is plagued by issues like the class and race restrictions. However, you don’t get any bonuses from hiding in the shadows when you attack with a missile weapon, so you do far less damage. Even worse, you can’t multiple multiple swings (or shots) with a missile weapon. In turn, this makes the Ranger an absolutely abysmal class because their armor is bad and their general damage is bad. This patch tries to fix some of these issues by upgrading the number of shots someone can do, which should incentive using a Ranger. The key notes of this part of the patch reads as follows:

The base logic of the game concerning this matter is that when the attack type of the monster or
one of your characters is either ‘Throw’ or ‘Shoot’ type, than ‘Swings per attack’ is defaulting to 1.

The patch removes that restriction, so in that case the monster or one of your characters can ‘Shoot’
or ‘Throw’ more than once per attack (providing that (s)he has ‘Swings per attack’ > 1). Thus the patch
rejuvenates projectile and throwing weaponry.

But there are several flaws in this patch:

• Your character will lose only one missile from its inventory regardless of the number of shots made
  per attack (that is the cheating part – My response: who cares? Ammunition management sucks in general).
• Animation for the missile will be drawn once (does not really matters).
• Some monsters will become VERY powerful, notably ROBOTS. ROBOTS have powerful enough weapons such as
  LASER CANNON, PLASMA CANNON and SPECTRAL RAY which hurts badly the whole party. In the unpatched game
  they will only shoot that once per attack, in the patched version they may (and will) shoot it more than
  once. (My response – Does not apply in Wizardry 6 at least with regards to robots)

In general, this massively upgrades using a Bow and makes the Ranger class more appealing both as an intermediary class (midgame change) where you gain some stealth, can use a Bow and employ Alchemy and potentially as an end game class since the Elven Bow adds Critical Hit. Ranger’s armor mostly sucks but you will get the the Forest Cape, which has some nice resistances. Also, if you swap into the class from a class that has Kirijitsu, then you can nullify a good chunk of the defects in the class from the core game. With a solid Ranger armed with the Elven Bow being able to fire critically hitting arrows from the shadows multiple times per attack, you gain a specialized character that can potentially take down enemies in the rear, especially spell casters or highly resistant enemies that might lob special attacks at your group.

Another thing is that with these upgrades, a mid game Ranger becomes more feasible as you do not have to deal with armor issues still, have lower requirements than a Ninja (which progresses far slower), will gain a fair number of hit points per level and can function as a lockpicker as they have Skulduggery. Also, you would gain Alchemy without having to change into an Alchemist (which would feel pointless mid game) or a Ninja (where you won’t have their garb). So this patch does a lot to improve this class and it’s something that would make me reconsider how I can structure a party because of this new dynamic.

Encumbrance Bug

Another major problem with the original game was how Carrying Capacity/Encumbrance was determined at the start of the game. Strength dictates how much you could carry so regardless of the class you picked, you would always want a fair amount of strength to ensure you could hold anything. Even if you didn’t want to deal with the Mana Regeneration issue but still tried to create any pure spell caster type, if you knew about this bug, you would still need to allocate points into strength as opposed to your true main stats. So the patch corrects this issue by adjusting your CC as you level. I’m guessing that as you improve your strength, your CC should correctly adjust. I’m not sure if it goes down on changing classes but even if you’re a purist, you have to agree that your CC should increase if you get stronger at least. So this is another really good patch to install.

Other Patches

The remaining ones are either enhancements or a few key bug fixes like the Poison debuff one. These mostly are up to you. Some are labeled enhancements like one where a few classes are given an immunity. I’m not that big of a fan of that idea. I still want to keep the base game close to vanilla as possible. There is a patch for resting in the notes, but I can’t seem to find it in the actual list. However, it might be for Wizardry 7, despite how the description sounds fairly general for both games.

On the other hand, you can modify certain parts of the game like Mana Regeneration, which is silly to a degree. Or you can use the utility to even modify the maps, loot, etc. It’s a fairly robust editor that allows you to change a chunk of the game. I would only do this if I was supremely bored with the core game or wanted to give myself some small QoL (like adding a Lute or Ninja garb in the starting chests)

I think though with the above patches I suggested, I would like to give the Ranger another shot (pun partly intended). It’s one class that I think got badly shafted in this game. I read that they managed to fix the class up in later games. But I think having a dedicated ranged class in this game does add a small but interesting dynamic.

The post Wizardry 6: Patching the Game with Mad God’s Utility, Suggested Patches and Ranger Improvement appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The person from the post mentioned that they were a recent graduate in Astrophysics and was looking into jobs in the aerospace industry. In particular, El Segundo has a large number of well known aerospace/military contract companies like Raytheon, SpaceX, etc. According to this person though, the bulk of the jobs for entry level were for engineering roles. Although the non-engineering sciences like math, chemistry and physics might overlap in terms of skill set and/or analytical thinking for these types of jobs, the current job market makes it really tough for recent graduates to compete against more senior people or those who are top of their class while it has become an employers’ market (meaning the employers can choose from the cream of the crop as well as underpay).

Some people (including myself) mentioned that there were alternatives in the Long Beach area as well, not to mention how the area could be cheaper than certain spots in the South Bay like Torrance. However, I think the real issue for this person (and this is where a more general statement for other recent graduates can be made here) is that they have not landed a job. Eager, this person boasts that they can perform other areas of work like tutoring, etc. but I think she needs to focus on order of operations here. My advice to this person (and other graduates) is:

• Determine what you want to do first
• Figure out what fits you best
• Apply to as much as possible
• Don’t let the category of work be a deterrent
• Find a career oriented job before deciding on where to live
• Once you obtain the job, live close to that location. Don’t do it the other way around because you want to focus on doing a good job and stabilizing your income so you can begin building up your bank account.
• The commute gets in the way, no matter if you enjoy driving or not and sucks up valuable time that you cannot get back as well as the amount you must spend per month because of the high gas prices, your auto insurance (the further you drive from your home, the higher the risk of getting into an accident especially in a city like Los Angeles)
• Assume no one else will help you; meaning, don’t depend on hand outs from anyone
• Live frugally as much as you can until you can establish your career
• Focus on stability; it’s harder to plan when you can’t predict the future reliably
• Build up a nest egg where you can afford not working for at least 2 years in situations like our current economic times
• Grow a solid network of work associates/friends that can help you with finding jobs
• Don’t burn bridges as much as you can; this city is small and word travels around easily and fast
• Forget having a life until you can get the job and some sense of stability especially if you’re not a local and don’t have your own place already (meaning your parents live out of state or fairly far from where you’re planning to live)

With that part out of the way, I also had thought about the South Bay in particular because of how this person found it attractive. While I do enjoy the South Bay, the truth is that its best times are well behind it. I think the South Bay really achieved its peak back in the 80s while it was growing and as a support center for the working class people for the aerospace industry that was developing in El Segundo. Sometime in the mid 2000s or so, things massively changed where it became a kind of hip spot for young urban adults with successful careers. Then the coast of living started to really skyrocket. Even before it was still fairly pricey to live out here but now it’s practically a luxury.

Another issue with the South Bay is my personal joke: you’re within 45 minutes of everything but it takes about 45 minutes to get anywhere. If Los Angeles had a better interconnected public transit system that was readily accessible, then the suburbs of the South Bay would actually be a great place to live. However, you’ll be mostly relying on a car and getting to some of the best jobs in the city will require the worst commutes. For instance, if you wanted to be an actor in Hollywood, living in the South Bay would drive you nuts. Or if you have to commute to Santa Monica or even Downtown LA, it’s mostly exhausting. Yes, there are ways to do it but expect pain whether it’s the cost, inconvenience or potential danger.

I think a lot of people enjoy it because of the diversity in terms of the lifestyle as well as access to the beaches and parks. Growing up out here, those things were fine but if I was more career oriented as a recent college graduate those aspects would be much lower on my priority list. Since the dot com boom days, I think American jobs have been getting worse in terms of the long hour grind. So you won’t have as many chances as you think you would get to hit up the beaches if you’re doing a normal office job. However, if you get a job and you have the energy on the weekend, you can still drive out to the beaches or hit up a park. But you shouldn’t romance this idea.

Another major boon that I think gets overstated is the restaurants out here, especially the Asian ones. There are a lot of good spots but I think the pandemic caused many to close down (like Japanese ones). Also, the cost of going out to eat has become ridiculous. You’re much better off trying to learn how to cook and finding a spot near enough to a grocery store. If you’re lucky, that grocery store will be in walking distance so you can double your efficiency.

Along those lines, I would try to find a place to live after getting the job that hopefully is no more than 5 miles away at most and does not require the freeways. I would make sure the place was reasonably safe, had decent amenities (air condition for the terrible summers, no popcorn ceilings, indoor washer/dryer which can be rare in LA) and close enough to a market and stores like Target for supplies. You can use something like Amazon but I’ve found that Amazon’s quality on things have dipper especially with Amazon Fresh. Food delivery services are simply too costly and risky these days so it’s better to have a good kitchen with a refrigerator/freezer, proper oven and microwave. I would avoid living in a spot where there’s no indoor washer/dryer at all cost because then you’ll have to find a cleaning service, which sucks and eats up valuable time.

But why would I describe the South Bay as a trap? I think the problem is that once you’ve settled in here, it becomes very comfortable. At the same time, you’re kinda locked in because it gets hard to leave with all your stuff and the general tightness of the zone. I would only commit to living out here if I was planning on raising a family and ready for it as well as having a stable job that paid fairly well. Otherwise, you’re better off finding some place cheaper and closer to work. Also, it’s easier to be fluid where you have little to nothing for a while until you manage to secure enough to buy your own property. But I wouldn’t buy in the South Bay unless I had a significant amount of capital. I think there’s other places around the country that you could get more for less.

The post The Trap of the South Bay and Life/Career Advice appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Tier 1 Items

The Castle up until the Dwarf Mine should be considered in this category. The Castle itself has two vendors: L’Montes and Queequeg. L’Montes is unlocked through a small quest and can be found by locating his missing stuffed beagle while Queequeg is underneath the Castle in the basement. L’Montes doesn’t have much for sale while Queequeg probably will end up being your main spot for selling off gear. In the early part of the game, you probably should use Queequeg to upgrade lower grade armor and a few weapons if you either did a character transfer or if you have the money. Here are the best items I think worth buying from Queequeg:

• Halberd (for Valkyries)
• Katana/Wakizashi (if you did an early class change into a Samurai)
• Cure Poison (easy spot to restock on these)
• Cure Lt. Cnd
• Books of Direction, Knocks, Detection (don’t bother learning these during level ups unless you have nothing else to choose)
• Leather Boots (for most fighter types except Samurai. Also, Bards and Rangers)
• Buskins (Bishop and Samurai’s best footwear excluding Water Wings)
• Cuir Gauntlets (most fighters can use this)
• Buckler (bis Bards if you want more armor and don’t want to dual wield)
• Leather Leggings (for most fighter types and bards; but not Rangers oddly)
• Quilt Leggings (great for Bishops if you decide to take one early on)
• Suede Pants (good for Rangers but these are common enough to just find)
• Leather Cuirass (best entry level body armor for most fighters and the Bard)
• Quilt Tunic (great for Bishops)
• Suede Doublet (for Rangers)
• Feather Hat (for Rangers and Bards)
• Leather Helm (for Fighter types)
• Elm Arrows (worst for bows but cheap and plentiful until you can start farming Drow Elves)
• Quarter Staff (for Mages because a plain Staff just stinks)

The other major items in the castle are:

• Harmonium (in the basement jail)
• An Annointed Cloak (which should go to your Lord)
• An Stud-Cuir Bra +2 (which is decent as a starting body armor for a Valkyrie)
• Breastplate (found in the Captain’s Den in the backroom which is good for your front line non-Samurai fighter)
• Skull Dagger (good as an offhand for a Bard)
• Heraldic Shield (great for Lord or Fighter especially wielding the Sword of Striking)
• Chain Hauberk (good for Lord, Fighter or Valkyrie).

Unless you decided to swap to a Bard, your Bard’s starting Lute will be the best instrument he/she can use for a while. The Harmonium is okay for certain situations but incapacitating opponents and doing max damage is far more valuable in the early game. Otherwise, you’ll have to get lucky in picking one up in the Mines, which I heard has a very low drop rate.

Tier 2 Items

I would argue that the Mines are where some better items start coming into play. You can still survive on Tier 1 weapons like for your Samurai or if you’re still using the Sword of Striking from the box near the entrance of the castle. But I would suggest trying to get to Smithy, another vendor located on the first level of the Mines, as soon as you can. Hopefully by this point, you’ll have 18k worth of gold as he sells a top tier item (the Vulcan Hammer) which is great for a fighter type like a Lord or plain Fighter. Armor-wise, I don’t think he has much but the Mine itself and the Hazard Area have a few random treasures that probably will help upgrade most of your fighters’ armor. Samurai will continue to face armor issues for a while though. The rest of the party probably won’t be able to upgrade any armor in Tier 2. But your spell casters should focus on pushing the spell skills every time they level and cast when possible to increase their Oratory while your Bards (who should be in position #5) can use Hide in Shadows to avoid damage when not playing their instruments. But Smithy’s best items are:

• Vulcan Hammer (priced at 18k from last I checked; you will need to level up your Mace & Flail skill though but totally worth it)
• Lance (small hit penalty but better damage than a Halberd for your Valkyrie)
• Naginata (possibly your Samurai’s biggest weapon upgrade at this stage but you’ll have to swap to polearms)
• Monstrance (a Bishop or Priest’s best weapon here)
• No-Dachi (can’t recall if Smithy sells one here. If he does, then this is your Samurai’s best weapon despite dropping your offhand Wakizashi).

For Monks and Ninjas, your Hands & Feet are your best weapons so don’t bother picking up any weapons. Beyond Smithy, the Mines has a few random armor upgrades and a key instrument that will be great for your Bard:

• Steel Helm (great for any fighter)
• Angel’s Tongue (excellent for your Bard once Sleep stops being effective)
• Wizard’s Ring (quest item that also gives you a small AC bonus to mages; not sure if it goes away after using though)
• Wizard’s Cone (small AC boost and an upgrade to your Mage/Psionic/Alchemist from a Skullcap)
• Shadow Cloak (found in a chest in one of the darkness zones; Should give this to either your Ninja or Bard)

The Pyramid section, which I still consider part of the later mid-game, does pose tougher opponents but there’s not a lot of gear upgrades. However, the main vendor, Kuwali Kubona, has a lot of useful spell books. If you can avoid learning spells during the leveling process, you should pick up any stragglers from her. The only negative aspect is that anytime you travel here and want to speak with Kuwali Kubona, you must present an offering to the Amazulu Queen. Most people I’ve read simply dump their spare keys from the Castle but you should have at least one non-quest item that you’re prepared to ditch when you want to trade here.

Tier 3 Items

The River Styx is the start of the end game for me. Many difficult encounters pop up here and people suggest that this is where you will want to spend time grinding out a few levels to around 11-13 and changing to more elite classes. The most important NPC here (next to Charon) is Mai-Lai as she is a vendor who sells the next major set of upgrades.

• Cat’o Nine Tails (bizarre Mace & Flail categorized weapon that does high damage for a 1H weapon)
• Holy Basher (for your Bishop with a great Knockout effect to boot)
• Blade Cuisinart (great for fighters)
• Helm & Coif (great helmet upgrade for fighters)
• Full Plate U/L (really good armor upgrade for fighters)
• Studded Hauberk (good for Bard and Samurai body armor)
• Stud Chausses (legs for Samurai)
• Chamois Gloves (for Bards, Rangers and even Bishops apparently)
• Silver Gloves (for fighters)
• Silver Sollert (boots for fighters)
• Dragon Kite (best shield for your main tank)

You can just go back and forth if an item is not available from Mai-Lai. Other items you can find in this zone are:

• Water Wings (best footwear in the game; probably should give it to a Faerie and/or Bishop/spellcaster)
• Beastmaster (decent 1H sword found from Minos)
• Devil’s Pipe or Midnight Choice (found in the Hall of the Damn; your next useful Bard instruments)

Isle of the Dead/Hall of the Dead

This zone (the tomb part) is single-handledly the best the spot for gear in the game. There are a few other sections where you can still get upgrades, but this area presents some of the hardest fights in the game that provide your BiS gear. Because of how the area is structured and the general difficulty of the fights, you will want to rapidly dart back and forth to the healing fountains (which I believe are the strongest ones in the game and the last ones you’ll find) as you deal with each encounter and clean up the area. You still will be beset by hard encounters, some of which can wipe your party if you’re not careful.

Insane Skeleton

• Jazeraint Tunic (Best item for Bards)
• Jazeraint Skirt (Best item for Bards but only for females)

Robin Windmarne

• Elven Bow (BiS for elves, especially Rangers as it has critical hit bonus)
• Peacemaker (arrows)
• Chainmail Doublet (BiS body armor for Rangers)
• Chainmail Pants (BiS pants for Rangers)
• Forest Cape (Only Rangers can use this item)

The Black Knight

• Avenger (best sword in the game next to Excalibur which has an exceptionally low drop rate I’ve heard)
• Ebony Plate (U) (best body armor for fighters)
• Ebony Plate (L) (best pants for fighters)
• Ebony Heaume (best helmet for fighters)

Brigerd Woltan

• Maenad’s Lance (Valkyrie’s BiS weapon)
• Armet (decent helmet but doesn’t bet the Ebony Heaume)
• Mantis Gloves (best fighter gloves)
• Mantis Boots (best fighter boots)
• Horn of Promethius (best Bard instrument because you gain unlimited Fireballs)

Haiyato Daikuta

• Muramasa Blade (best Samurai main hand weapon; massive damage from this one!)
• Hi-Kane-Do (U) (best Samurai body armor)
• Hi-Kane-Do (L) (best Samurai pants)
• Kabuto (best Samurai helmet)
• Wakizashi+1 (best Samurai offhand)

Enchanted Forest

At this stage, you can choose to go in challenge Rebecca and the Bane King. If you do, I believe you no longer can return to the castle. But if you want to continue grinding levels and changing classes in preparation for the final stages of the end game, there is an alternative method. In the castle’s basement level, there is a strange set of stairs that leads to a gate that is closed. I think you can only open the gate by confronting Rebecca and the Bane King with a special key. However, this zone, although having just two tiles of movement, is still considered part of the Enchanted Forest and has those monsters as part of its encounter table. So you can effectively just stand next to the stairs and spin around and battle some of the top monsters in the game for plenty of experience. Besides the experience factor, these monsters (Liche, Wraith Lords in particular) can still drop highly valuable Ankhs, Rings and Amulets.

• Ring of Speed (+1 speed on usage)
• Ring of Deftness (+1 dexterity)
• Tora Maedate (+1 vitality for Samurai)
• Ring of Minds (+1 intelligence)
• Ankh of Might (+1 strength)
• Ankh of Youth (+1 vitality)
• Ankh of Arnie (+6 max HP permanently)
• Ankh of Purity (+1 karma)
• Ankh of Sanctity (+1 Piety)
• Ankh of Wonder (mana regeneration I believe)

There are other items too but the motivation for getting these items is to increase your base attribute score beyond 18. I think there’s a limited number of times you can boost your attributes though, so you might want to save your game each time you try. Last time I played, I recall that the Ankh of Wonder additionally gave mana regeneration, which is hard to find in the game. So I included it here as a must have for spell casters, even above resistance or bonus armor since by this point it will take a long time to get your spell pools back up to maximum. I believe the highest level I’ve been able to elevate my attributes was up to 20. That said, I recommend only using these items once you determine your final classes going into the end game to avoid dealing with the attribute reset for a class change.

Another comment I have is that you can still find some other gear like for Samurai’s, Ninjas, etc. as you’ll encounter like opponents. For instance, the Tora Maedate is an extremely rare item that I’ve found off of a Lord Daimyo I believe. And by avoiding the central room in the Tomb of the Dead, you will still have access to Queequeg around the corner to sell off any excess gear. Also, if you have a monk and started the end game, there’s a Jade Figurine with some decent bonuses for your Monk.

Temple of Ramm

By this point, you should have the vast majority of your end game gear. There are still a few limited upgrades.

• Robe of Enchant U/L (for your Monk or Bishop; your Monk should have really good natural armor by this stage so your spell caster should use these)

The other guaranteed items can still be found in the Enchanted Forest encounters.

Other Items

If you have a clue book, you might see additional items that are labeled “not in the game”. That just means they won’t drop so you can edit them in. Or there might be items with an exceptionally low drop rate. The only way to get those is by grinding the highest level items. The Diamond Ring, I’ve read, is given to you by one of the end game bosses but may not appear until Wizardry 7. You can still edit one in if you choose.

The post Wizardry 6: Gear Progression appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The main point with the NWO split was to finish up with Hogan and Sting, which to me was probably the best thing WCW had ever produced business-wise. From there, he wanted to use the situation to move forward towards another major conflict between two wrestlers (possibly Sting or Hogan and someone else) or two groups. Ignoring the unremarkable title run and match Sting had (both times with Hogan), it’s obvious that the direction would eventually point to Bill Goldberg and Hogan. I think Sting wasn’t the same guy we saw back in ’89 – ’92 where he was energetic, exciting, loud and could rally the fans. However, Goldberg was and he had the explosiveness that could’ve carried WCW for a few more years if the stupid shock stick incident never happened.

As for the split, Bischoff apparently did not want the separate NWO faction to happen originally. I think most people who were watching could agree that at a certain point the NWO got flooded by lesser talent that diluted the group’s star power. And once the Red & Black NWO faction formed, the group had played its course much like a series digging for anything to keep relevant but continuing to use the brand because it sold well. For myself, I think I lost a lot of interest around that point in the American products until The Radicalz jumped ship to the WWF and WCW tanked but part of the issue was the repetitiveness of WCW. This was even before Vince Russo got the book so it wasn’t just his issue.

The next part is where things get muddy but is quite interesting in terms of the politics inside of the company and the upcoming AOL-Time Warner merger:

Somewhere along the line, I got a phone call from Harvey Schiller, who said he’d just gotten off the phone with Ted Turner, and Ted wanted Thursday night TBS to have its own show, just like TNT did. So I was told I had to come up with another two-hour program in prime time at the same level as Nitro. At the time, it’s like, what do I do? Oh, I know — I’ll give the NWO the Nitro show, I’ll give WCW the Thursday-night show, and we’ll have our own intercompany rivalries, no different than Raw and SmackDown. It’s the brand-extension idea, really. The crossover, the drafts, all that nonsense makes a little internet chatter, but there’s no real money in it. That was the original plan, which was partially the reason the NWO started to get bigger without it making a ton of sense, because we were building up to whenever Thunder debuted — it must have been ’98 somewhere in there — partially so we could eventually do the split.

My first instinct about hearing this talk between Harvey Schiller and Ted Turner is that possibly Harvey was not acting in the best interest of WCW here and could have been lying. It just stinks of someone trying to manipulate someone else then later getting credit if their idea takes off. Obviously, I wasn’t there and I don’t know Harvey but I think Eric should’ve gone directly to Ted Turner to affirm this part himself because it’s a pretty big deal to come up with a totally new show and I don’t know if he was prepared. If that isn’t the case, then I’d have to think Eric was lying and trying to blame Harvey for the show. Either way, this isn’t something trivial one just pulls out of a hat.

That said, I never understood why Thunder needed to exist. WCW already had at least three other shows, three of which were on Saturdays with one on TBS. Why couldn’t they have just improve WCW Saturday Night or moved the time slot rather than add another show with less emphasis (i.e. the B-Team show)? I think having yet another show simply spread themselves out even more.

As for the NWO increasing in size “without it making a ton of sense,” too much of the situation seemed ill planned or not planned at all. A few key moments that happened that were poorly conceived to me were:

• Roddy Piper revealing Eric Bischoff as the “insider” – I know Bischoff admits that he mostly did this move to get off announcing duties. But the biggest hole in the logic here was that Kevin Nash and Scott Hall bullied him up until The Great American Bash ’96 incident where it culminated in Nash powerbombing Eric Bischoff through a table. Why would anyone take a powerbomb through a table from their “enemy” then suddenly side with them? Why would Eric Bischoff turn heel and become this insider? I think if they spent some time explaining how he actually was a weasel and had been trying to kill off the dead weight of the NWA by getting the WWF’s tossed out talent, then this entire plan would make a lot of sense. But you needed that part to connect the two moments together in giving Eric Bischoff a motivation for any of this. Not to mention, how would Roddy Piper have known Bischoff’s actual intentions? Just too much missing logic.
• The NWO Nitro TV Takeover Incident – One of the worst moments in pro-wrestling TV because the NWO had finally done what they said they were going to do: take over WCW (well their TV at least). However, whoever came up with this idea of a live re-construction of a set probably never understood how it would be executed and appear on live TV. Watching the audience just sit around bored was just as painful for being at home while this abysmal mistake went on. Then they had these “matches” where it was just the NWO messing around with some jobbers or talent that they could ridicule to sound cool. Who wants to see that? I think this situation was “encouraged” to happen because of the positive response whenever Nash and Hall showed up to do commentary as well as leading up to the original Souled Out PPV, which was supposed to be for the NWO. But this single night was so bad I think they had to re-think everything while the first Souled Out ’97 was mostly a disaster except for that Syxx vs Eddie Guerrero which was decent.
• The NWO “We’re taking over!” slogan. Take over what? I never understood the need for the NWO taking over. This is where pro-wrestling logic needs to exist because once you start going into a fictitious realm where almost anything can happen that no longer resembles a sport, the facade dies horribly and why you see what we’re watching today. When Scott Hall and Kevin Nash initially appeared, it was very exciting because fans believed that the WWF was going to have a real invasion, an idea Bischoff admits he stole from stuff in Japan (e.g. NJPW vs the UWF). The problem is that the WWF was never going to let him get away with this and a lawsuit pretty much killed the kayfabe identities of Hall/Nash (as Razor/Diesel). So they pivoted. Luckily, in getting Hogan to agree to turn heel, which was something many fans who hated Hogan in WCW wanted, the situation worked. There were two particular Nitros that got major ratings because of a full force NWO attack that was exciting and made for great TV.

  The problem in the “We’re taking over” idea is that it’s still just pro-wrestling at some point. You have a match, try to settle differences, move up the ranks and win titles. Once you move beyond those boundaries too radically, it becomes impossible to take the idea of pro-wrestling seriously. So if the NWO successfully had taken over (which they did at one point), what can they do? You have a main title and you need to compete for that. You need to fill up an arena so you have to put on compelling matches that entice people to watch. But if you take over and it’s just your people in endless squash matches for no good reason, then you get WWF weekend TV that had been mostly bland since the 80s (except for the promos and occasional angle) Why would anyone want to watch that crap? If you’re taking over because you’re airing your grievances for being pushed aside or considered too old so that you can challenge for the top titles and get the top matches, then it makes more sense because you then can demand things in a more explicit, on-air type of creative control contract agreement that adds more logic to this.

• NWO Souled Out ’97 – Before I bash this PPV, let me say that the ’98 PPV was miles better and even did a decent buyrate from what I can recall. But Souled Out ’97 was a new PPV that had a different concept where the NWO were going to call the shots. The NWO were trying to have the star power and get most of Hogan’s buddies into the faction. Maybe Syxx was the best worker at that time in the entire faction, which is why he won the cruiserweight belt from Dean Malenko. But the matches here made it obvious that the NWO faction did not have the actual talent depth, especially as the cruiserweight division was kicking it up a notch and driving the more modern style up while the WCW main event scene had been faltering with Hogan and other older people maintaining their spots but not delivering on great matches.

  The other major issue here was that having a PPV like this made no sense still because people on the NWO side lost. It sounds odd but if you’re booking your own PPV and you want some sort of logic, why would you have any credible opponents? Why not fill out the PPV with job people?  Again, this is where the whole “we’re taking over” statement makes zero sense in the scheme of things. Again, I have to emphasize that a PPV could only work if the motivation of the NWO was to ensure that the people involved would be constantly given top talent and the most money. Otherwise, why take over a company in the first place? Why not just grab the titles and hold them hostage?

But as you can see just some simple ideas here with logic added demonstrates the fallacy for the NWO, regardless of their popularity.

The last key part of the interview has Eric Bischoff talking about what went wrong:

Things started getting ugly during the merger. Ted says, ‘Eric, go do this.’ I say, ‘We don’t have it in the budget.’ My boss says, ‘Doesn’t matter, find a way.’ Okay, that’s my job, go find a way. I found a way to produce the show, but the biggest challenge was that I had to bring in new talent — I had to bring in Bret Hart — otherwise I’d be looting my talent pool, filling four hours of prime-time wrestling with the same basically eight guys who drive things. So I started hiring more talent at the same time Turner corporate was slashing my budgets — pre-approved budgets, budgets that had been approved a year in advance — even though I was creating more revenue than I was projected to. They kept cutting production budgets, travel budgets, advertising, marketing — all being crushed because they were trying to manage their EBITDA, their earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization, which was a big formula during the merger for executives who owned stock options to cash out big. So my company was being gutted while I was being asked to produce a new prime-time show with the same level of production as TNT. It was a crossroads of bad traffic.

The biggest red flag to me from this quote is where Eric Bischoff talks about bringing in “new talent” like Bret Hart. He goes on to justify these additions because of how he would otherwise “be looting” his own talent pool and filling in four hours of prime-time wrestling.  Before I talk about the budget aspect, the big problem I have here is that Bischoff had a HUGE pool of talent at WCW’s height. Even if the main event people weren’t at the level of say HBK or Steve Austin in comparison, many were huge names like Luger, Sting, Flair, etc. And they still had a few people that were coming up the ranks like DDP and Bill Goldberg. From what I recall, I heard that at some point WCW might’ve had 200+ people on their roster. How can you say you didn’t have enough talent?

The problem to me was lacking focus and relying on certain people. Outside of DDP and Bill Goldberg, WCW really hadn’t created any new stars in the mid to late 90s. The cruiserweight division as a whole managed to get over and guys like Chris Jericho, Benoit, Mysterio and Eddie Guerrero were on their way up, but they had a ceiling (which is partly why they went to the WWF) Then there was a reasonable middle card that could do well like Jeff Jarrett, Curt Hennig, Steve Regal, Raven, etc. that weren’t cruiserweights but could have been built up towards main event status. If there was one major complaint about WCW in general under Bischoff at that time, it was that there were almost no new stars and he used Turner’s deep pockets to poach the WWF’s big talent rather than developing programs that could get their internal people over.

The last point Bischoff makes is a red herring to me about why things failed under him. He mostly blames the Time Warner-AOL Merger with their budget slashing as the key failure. If that were the case, why not cut a huge chunk of that 200 person or so roster? It was common knowledge back then that certain people were making huge money but not really pulling their weight. Worse yet others had special contracts, allowing them to sit home and collect a massive paycheck. You can’t tell me that you needed to go out and find talent when you already had existing talent that could’ve been used for another 2 hour show.

Also, even if WCW didn’t have great booking nor storylines outside of the NWO, they could’ve easily filled up part of the time slots with longer matches. Like it or not, that’s the WWE’s current strategy where they focus on a few talent having longer matches to minimize injuries while their main event people handle lengthy promos. If Thunder didn’t use the NWO at all and became a pure WCW talent spot, they still would’ve had great top end people like Ric Flair, DDP, Arn Anderson, etc. to handle the promo/star duty while the undercard could be filled in. I don’t see what the real complaint was here.

At any rate, obviously I wasn’t working at WCW at the time and can only see things as an outsider (not The Outsiders) so I don’t understand the complexities of the internal politics at WCW and AOL-Time Warner at the time. However, it is frustrating to see how things evolved in retrospective. I do think most people watching around that time shared similar viewpoints at least in terms of the sheer depth of the talent roster, the lack of usage of many people and the excessive expenditure of money on numerous wrestlers for no gain. And I think many people who were fans at the time, probably could’ve booked a reasonable show and would’ve advised against some of these bad moves pulled with the NWO.

The post Eric Bischoff Reveals Original Plan for Splitting NWO from WCW and My Response appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Patching the Game

First, let me say that I finally got around to installing the Mad God’s Cosmic Forge editing utility. If you have BaneEdit.exe running, then getting Mad God’s Cosmic Forge editing utility isn’t that much more difficult. In my case, I use a Mac so there’s a few prerequisites such as installing Wine. However, as I discovered, there were a few additional things required, which is why I made a small guide for getting BaneEdit.exe and Wine working on a Mac.

Once you get Wine installed and manage to get BaneEdit.exe working, you can use CosmicForgeU.exe which is located on a Google Drive. Then you just unrar the file and run it with:

bash-3.2$ wine CosmicForgeU.exe

You will see a setup menu where it will ask you for the game installation. Since the editor is made for Dos, you won’t see the typical BSD/Unix style directories. Instead, you’ll see stuff like C:\ or Z:\ drive. Your game installation ought to be under the Z:\ drive. My full path was:

/Applications/Wizardry 6.app/Contents/Resources/game

That is the only thing you will need to configure. If you use the wrong path, the editor won’t load properly and probably quit out on you, forcing you to go through the steps again. In essence though, the editor is searching for the main game files so that it can patch them properly. You might want to create a backup somewhere as well as have backups of your saved games just in case.

Once you get the editor running, the main thing you will want to do is apply some patches. The most important of these is for Attribute Bonus Generation. This one is reversible and mostly ditches all the low end rolls during the character creation process. I highly suggest this patch even though it’s labeled as a “cheat” unless you enjoy suffering through hours of getting bad rolls. But if you really want to create an ideal power fantasy type of party, this is your best option.

Mechanics

To really get a long term party you have to understand a few critical mechanics about the game, some bugs and aspects like how mana regeneration operates. I had discussed a few of these ideas in the past but want to summarize them here as a review.

• Strength and Carrying Capacity (CC) – The game has a “bug” where your Carrying Capacity is determined by your strength only at character creation time. If you don’t use the patch (labeled “Encumbrance” in the patch section of the utility), you will be stuck with that amount for the remainder of the game. If you have say a female Faerie character, you will then end up not being able to carry anything. And since Faeries have numerous gear restrictions, you might consider using a Faerie as a kind of mule character especially for things like quest items or potions as they might have extra bag space. However, Faeries also are penalized by an additional 1/3 CC penalty. So I suggest applying this patch to avoid dealing with this problem.
• Faeries, Vitality and Mana Regeneration – Mana Regeneration also is fixed in this game is determined by the class you start off with. That makes Priests and Mages by far the best classes that allow for pure Mana Regeneration. For most classes, you will only receive 1 point of mana regeneration as a basis. Lizardmen are the worst because they have a -1 mana regeneration penalty, which makes them effectively a race you want to avoid. On the other hand, Faeries receive a +1 mana regeneration bonus so combining one with a Mage, for instance, seems like a natural choice for the best regeneration. Likewise, Vitality (rather than Intelligence and Piety for some reason) also determines your Mana Regeneration. This means you will want your character to have as much Vitality at the start as possible. I believe you need at minimum 16 points of Vitality to receive this bonus. Faeries though have a very low starting Vitality at 6, which means you will need at least 10 dedicated points to get the best bonus possible. Note that you can modify the starting mana regeneration values through the utility but do so at your discretion.
• Best Class Mana Regeneration – As far as I can tell, the best classes for Mana Regeneration are Alchemists, Mages and Priests. Alchemist though will lack Magic regeneration, which will be important at later stages in the game for healing and dealing with Undead and Demons. Of course, Psionics have the best Mental regeneration but only have 2 points in the other spell schools. Bishops only get 3 points for Mental and Magic regeneration while the rest are at 1 point. So one idea in creating an ideal party is to start off with only Alchemists, Mages and/or Priests to get the best Mana Regeneration possible. This does pose a problem if you want to take a Bard, which almost is mandatory to survive the initial half of the game.
• Bards and the Lute – Bards are almost universally praised as a must-have as part of a starting line up. Unfortunately, the Bard like other non-pure magic classes, only receives 1 point of Mana Regeneration. You can offset some of this by taking a Faerie and attempting to have at least 16 points of Vitality. However, my major issue with the Faerie as a starting Bard is that their equipment limitation prevents them from using a lot of armor. Most likely, you’ll position this character in the back possibly in the 5th slot. However, enemies can still strike out at them, making them vulnerable especially with their low hit starting hit points.
  Also, if you choose to swap from say a Mage to a Bard at level 1, you will be missing the all important Lute. As far as I know, the Lute is a random drop that won’t appear until you encounter Miner or Major Dwarves, which comes roughly at the midpoint of the game and have a very low chance to drop this invaluable item. So other guides propose you will want to start with the Bard just to have this item. If you insist on having the most mana regeneration possible along with doing an immediate class change at the start, you will have to cheat and use a utility like BaneEdit.exe to give yourself this item. But this issue becomes a question of ethics than feasibility.
• Class Change to Ninja – Like the Bard, Ninjas have some very rare starting equipment that you won’t find until towards the start of the end game when you begin encountering Ninjas themselves. So unlike a Monk, who will most likely just use common Robes (U/L) and Sandals for armor, which are readily available and sold by Queequeg, the Ninja will be lacking in -3 points of armor which is pretty huge at the start. On the bright side, if you can survive a few levels, your armor will improve naturally where the main other penalty is the higher experience requirements. In that sense, you might consider a Faerie because of their natural -2 to armor at the start as well as having a natural base speed of 14, which can influence armor too. You won’t be able to use most equipment for a while though, not even robes nor sandals.
• Class Change to Samurai – Unlike the Bard and Ninja, the Samurai’s starting equipment can be purchased at Queequeg’s shop (namely the Katana and Wakizashi). Also, the Samurai only start with Robes (U/L) and Sandals, which makes them a lot easier and a good choice to swap early on from say a Mage.
• Dracons and their Breath Weapon – Dracons have an interesting small AoE ability that is like a black dragon’s acid breath. For a starting party, it might be tempting to pick one of these races up (like for a Ninja). However, this ability does not scale into the end game and you won’t be using it for long. So I think this race is a bit of a red herring to start.
• Psionic and the Shadow Cloak – Perhaps, the one remarkable thing about using a Psionic is that they have a Shadow Cloak that they cannot use. Only thieves, ninjas and bards can use this item oddly. In addition, there’s only one other known Shadow Cloak in the game that appears in the later stage of the early game. Because this item only supplies a -1 to armor, I don’t think it’s worth using nor having a Psionic taking a spare spot in the party.
• Automated Core Skill Leveling – As you level up, you will get a certain amount of skill points. I believe that a portion of this pool is automatically pre-allocated to the main skills for your class as long as that skill is under 50 points. For instance, a Ranger will automatically have points placed into Scouting. If you want to level specific skills, you should ensure that the class does not have a core skill that interferes in taking precedence for receiving points, especially useless skills like Scouting.
• Class Changes, Attributes and Hit Points – When you change classes, your attributes drop the minimum need for the new class, your race’s starting points while your hit point gains will only increase by 1 until you exceed your previous level. If you have a wide gap between classes in terms of levels, it may take sometime before seeing any significant gain in your life. This situation makes swapping to simple classes like a Fighter or Mage pointless. It’s better to swap from a simple class into an elite or mid-tier class rather than the other way around since your race will determine the other attributes. On the other hand, you will level quickly so besides the starting part of the game, you should be judicious in choosing when to swap classes. Altering several classes at the same time might feel exciting but you probably will want to reload to ensure that you can maximize the number of attributes, hit points and skill points you receive for the new level. If you do this at the same time as other classes, there’s a high likelihood that the other class may get the shaft and you’ll have to reload and get lucky.

The Party Composition

With some of the main mechanics established above, I would like to dive into the party creation.

• Male Rawulf Priest
• Male Felpurr Mage
• Male Faerie Alchemist
• Female Dwarf Priest
• Female Elf Mage
• Male Mook Mage

This initial party seems fairly easy to create. However, the only character that will retain his class for a while is the Mook Mage. But this group will be able to have some of the highest spell regeneration in the game. Compared to my previous “optimized” party, I ended up changing the Faerie from a Mage to an Alchemist with the intention of converting him into a Ninja. In turn, I swapped the Felpurr from the Alchemist role to a Mage with the intention of turning him into a Samurai. Note that I chose a Female Elf Mage but have no Bard. I will admit that this character will be swapping to a Bard at level one where I will give her a Lute (and maybe some Skulduggery since locking picking and trap disarmament sucks in this game). Otherwise, her max Mana Regeneration will not exceed 2 points for the rest of the game. If you’re more of a purist and don’t want any edits (outside of the patch parts), you can go with the Bard from the start and have slightly less Mana Regeneration.

The early class transition will look like this:

• Male Rawulf Priest -> Lord (lvl 1/2)
• Male Felpurr Mage -> Samurai (lvl 1/2)
• Faerie Male Alchemist -> Ninja (lvl 2)
• Female Dwarf Priest -> Valkyrie (lvl 1)
• Female Elf Mage -> Bard (lvl 1)
• Male Mook Mage (no change)

The only two that are pretty much a must-have in terms of the class change after the start of the game are the Bard and Valkyrie. I would suggest giving a few starting fights a shot before making the class switch to see how your survival is. Part of that will depend on your starting hit points. Before going into a deeper look into the timing of the class transition, I want to first examine the minimum attribute requirements for the classes to be able to make this switch possible.

Male Rawulf Priest -> Lord Requirements

The male Rawulf’s starting attributes are:

• Str: 8
• Int: 6
• Pie: 12
• Vit: 10
• Dex: 8
• Spd: 8
• Per: 10

The Lord class has one of the highest starting attribute requirements in the game. The Lord’s minimum attribute requirements are:

• Str: 12
• Int: 9
• Pie: 12
• Vit: 12
• Dex: 9
• Spd: 9
• Per: 14

The Rawulf is one of the better racial candidates to handle this early transition. But to move from Priest to Lord, you will need the following additions:

• +4 str
• +3 int
• +2 vit
• +1 dex
• +1 spd
• +4 per

+15 min points total.

With the utility, achieving this minimum is much easier. In my case, I had previously rolled a Rawulf Priest without the utility and scored 23 bonus starting points. It is possible but extremely rare. Also, it’s worth noting that you do not need to adjust anything for the Priest side of the class. While creating the Priest class, you should dump everything into Theology and pick up Bless and either Heal or Make Wounds. Since I suggest that the Female Dwarf Priest be the one to immediately change to Valkyrie, you might consider placing this character in the back either for healing, utility or minor offense depending on your starting hit points. Generally though, I think a basic Priest can perform decently especially with the attributes required for a Lord.

Male Felpurr Mage -> Samurai Requirements

A male Felpurr’s starting attributes are:

• Str: 7
• Int: 10
• Pie: 7
• Vit: 7
• Dex: 10
• Spd: 12
• Per: 10

The Samurai class also has fairly high requirements but has a reasonable match with a Felpurr’s base:

• Str: 12
• Int: 11
• Vit: 9
• Dex: 12
• Spd: 14
• Per: 8

The Mage class itself requires a 12 in Int, which is only a single point off from the Samurai. This puts the starting schema as:

• +5 for str
• +2 for int (mage)
• +2 for vit
• +2 for dex
• +2 for spd

+13 min points total

13 points isn’t impossible to achieve even with the base game. Since you would want as much mana regeneration as possible and more hit points, I suggest dump as many points into Vitality and the leftover points into Strength (mostly to deal with the CC bug if you don’t intend to patch the game). Also, I suggest dumping every skill point on creation into Thaumaturgy. In that manner, you’ll continue to accumulate some points as you level in your initial chosen spell schools. For that, I would suggest grabbing Energy Blast and Chilling Touch. You want to be able to cast Fireball and Iceball once they become available as well as have plenty of points to maximize your casts. Gear-wise, you’ll only be missing the starting Katana and Wakizashi. You probably can make a fast run to Queequeg and try to buy those weapons when you decide to swap classes. You will not be able to use the Sword of Striking found in the starting chest though.

One idea here is to rush to Queequeg’s before you swap classes and save near the door (or inside). Then reload/go back and forth outside until you can obtain the Katana and Wakizashi. If you can get those, then do the class swap. Otherwise, consider reaching level 2 before the class swap. You might even be able to obtain Magic Missile and start your Magic Pool development. But you might be careful in deciding whether to swap your Lord first or your Samurai. In this situation, I would probably go for the Lord because of how he can make use of the Sword of Striking immediately (unless you give it to the Valkyrie, which I honestly don’t recommend since she will already have a Quarterstaff, which functions equally well as the Spear except for 1 less point of damage)

Male Faerie Alchemist -> Ninja Requirements

A male Faerie’s starting attributes are:

• Str: 5
• Int: 11
• Pie: 6
• Vit: 6
• Dex: 10
• Spd: 14
• Per: 12

Becoming an Alchemist for a Faerie is quite easy as the Alchemist requirements are:

• Int: 13
• Dex: 13

The Ninja is perhaps one of the hardest starting classes to role as well as being a class that is spread somewhat thin as a starting character. But the minimal requirements are:

• Str: 12
• Int: 10
• Pie: 10
• Vit: 12
• Dex: 12
• Spd: 12

Surprisingly, this disparity actually makes the conversion from a starting male Faerie Alchemist into a Ninja difficult:

• +7 Str
• +2 Int (for alchemist)
• +4 Pie
• +6 Vit
• +3 Dex (for alchemist)

+22 min points total

With such high requirements, one might ask why? In my previous iteration of the party, I did a Felpurr Alchemist into a Ninja. So why the alteration especially with the various gear restrictions and penalties for a Faerie as well as a Ninja? The ultimate goal for this character is to go from a Ninja and move him into the role of a Bishop for the end game. In the previous game, my Faerie Mage ended up as a Ninja, which is still quite strong. But the idea of using a Faerie for a Ninja early on is practical: you have a natural starting bonus of -2 armor. Since you’re giving up your Ninja garb (without saved game modifications), you effectively are naked.

However, a Faerie’s exceptionally high base speed along with the starting armor bonus mitigate some of these issues. Once you start casting spells again, you’ll have excellent mana regeneration. Also, I mentioned that you might consider swapping into a Ninja at level 2. Since the Alchemist experience table is quite low, the idea here is that getting one early level before switching to a Ninja would help by racing your Alchemy skill and hopefully acquiring a level 2 spell like Blinding Flash or increasing your Earth pool with Itching Skin. That will get you a small head start since most of your points early on as a Ninja will automatically be placed into Ninjutsu (which can take a fair amount of time to level). If you want to push things, you might even consider getting to level 3 as an Alchemist and seeing if you can get some higher level spells like Stink Bomb by pushing your Alchemy. Because the attribute requirements are pretty high for this transition, you might be off a few to make the change. So this will be at your discretion and situation.

Female Dwarf Priest -> Valkyrie Requirements

A female dwarf’s starting attributes are:

• Str: 9
• Int: 6
• Pie: 10
• Vit: 12
• Dex: 7
• Spd: 7
• Per: 8

The Priest only requires a Piety of 12, which makes it easy to obtain for a Dwarf. Swapping from a Priest to Valkyrie is actually quite natural when you look at what’s needed here for a Valkyrie:

• Str: 10
• Pie: 11
• Vit: 11
• Dex: 10
• Spd: 11
• Per: 8

Thus, you will need:

• +1 Str
• +2 Pie
• +3 Dex
• +4 Spd

+10 min points total

With only that many points needed, you can dump everything else into Vitality then Strength to really maximize your spell regeneration, hit points and carrying capacity. Priests start with Robes (U/L), Sandals, a Quarterstaff and 3 Lt. Heal potions. Valkyries have more armor but still only have a Spear and Sandals. But the Quarterstaff itself only does one additional point of damage over the starting Spear and still allows the wielder to attack from the 4th slot on. So the transition won’t be as bad compared to a Samurai, which is why you can swap from level 1 here.

Also, because the Valkyrie’s core skill is the Pole & Staff, you’ll be leveling this up as you go. In turn, when you start off as a Priest, you will want to dump all your skill points into Theology and pick up Heal and Bless. Once your Rawulf switches to a Lord and becomes the main tank of the group, your Valkyrie’s secondary job will function as a healer and utility person firing off Bless spells in tougher fights. But you will also have a head start to work on Theology because of the early focus. The only rough spot will be Oratory initially, which is why you probably want to cast Bless periodically to keep Oratory from failing.

Each time you level, you should dump your remaining points into Theology. I think Valkyrie’s can access their magic from level 3 or 4. By that point, you should still be able to increase your base Magic and Mental pools as well as use some healing. Then you probably will want to pick up spells like Cure Lessor Cnd, Divine Trap and Dispel Undead as quickly as possible. Cure Poison to me is the holy grail for Priest spells, but that will take some time.

Gear-wise, I think Queequeg sells a Halberd, which will be your best weapon until you meet Smithy. Also, in having a Valkyrie, you can wait until you find the Stud-Cuir Bra +2 on the second floor if you want to save some gold. There are a few other key spots containing low level gear in the basement. You will be sharing some gear with your Lord character.

Female Elf Mage -> Bard Requirements

A female Elf’s starting attributes are:

• Str: 5
• Int: 10
• Pie: 10
• Vit: 7
• Dex: 9
• Spd: 9
• Per: 9

A Mage only needs an Int of 12. For a Bard though, you need:

• Int: 10
• Dex: 12
• Spd: 8
• Per: 12

With the following adjustments:

• +2 Int (for mage)
• +3 Per

5 min points total (or just 3 for a plain bard)

This makes a female Elf a natural choice for a Bard or a Mage transitioning into a Bard. I provide two options here to point out what is needed if you don’t mind manually adding the Lute to the Mage with BaneEdit.exe or if you’d prefer to remain pure. The other major downside about the swap is that you will lose all your initiative advantages because your speed will only be 9. Of everyone in the party, you want your Bard to dish out those Sleep spells as fast as possible. So it might be worth keeping the Bard class regardless (unless you decide to modify her even more).

If you decide to start with the Bard, you probably will want to boost her Vitality to 16, which means, you need 12 points minimum. Then you’ll probably want to give her as much Speed to start. For her starting skills, I would dump all spare points into Skulduggery. You will be leveling your Music skill all the time by using it exclusively until you get more confidence in the others in your party. While you can level Skulduggery through usage, you simply do not find enough opportunities in the game. And early on many doors and chests have tough traps and locks, so you’ll need all the help you can get. As a Bard, your starting weapon is a Sling, which sucks because you have limited ammo. Don’t bother putting any points into that because it’s a very weak weapon and you’re better off using a round to Hide in Shadows to build up your Ninjutsu when you have a chance. Instead, you’ll want to pick up a Buckler for a little extra defense and a Cutless or Rapier. Heck, go with both if you want to try your hand at dual wielding. But your primary focus for a long time will be Sleeping your foes.

If you choose to start her as a Mage, you should pick up Energy Blast and Chilling Touch to begin building up her Fire and Water spell pools. Also, you’ll want to dump everything into Thaumaturgy. You will level fairly quickly as a Bard but your Music skill might not exceed the 50 point amount to allow you to spread your leveling points more heavily into spells. Also, even if you decide to have a Ninja, you’ll probably want to make your Bard your primary lock picker. As you level early on, you’ll have to make some key choices in terms of dividing your skill points between Thaumaturgy and Skulduggery. I personally suggest just giving her 100 in Skulduggery because of how lame the lock picking system is in the game and be over it. Only do something different if you really want to experience a super hardcore grindfest.

In addition, the idea of taking a female Elf is that the long game will gradually transition her into a Valkyrie for the end game. I think if there were extra character slots (which I wish there was), I could try to shoehorn a second Elf into this party just because I like the idea of having a Ranger that can make use of the Elven Bow. Yes, this character can use the Elven Bow too but it seems redundant compared to the Maenad’s Lance, which is one of the best end game weapons.

Lastly, whether you want to start with a Mage or Bard really depends on how much QoL you want to give yourself vs the true grindfest you can suffer. The thing I’ve noticed in taking a Bard is that I didn’t switch classes again for sometime. The majority of the time, I either was using my Instruments (especially the Lute) and building up her Music skill or trying to Hide in Shadows to avoid damage. Spell regeneration didn’t seem to make as huge of an impact by the time my Bard was starting to cast more spells. Also, once you hit near the end game with the Forest, you’ll be resting multiple times consecutively because the spell drain will get very high while number of foes you encounter pile up. The only real mitigation in any of this is simply to build your spell pools into a ridiculous amount to have enough points and a variety of spells at your disposal. So it really depends on how you want to carve your experience here.

Male Mook Mage Requirements

A Male Mook starts with:

• Str: 10
• Int: 10
• Pie: 6
• Vit: 10
• Dex: 7
• Spd: 7
• Per: 9

While a Mage only needs an Int of 12 making your minimal requirements points a whopping 2. I don’t have another class to change into here because I think it’s better to keep at least one Mage pure until the mid game (level 13 or so). By that point, you should have more options and ideas of how this character can compliment your party. Compared to my previous party, the Male Mook Mage there was used to swap into the Samurai whereas the Faerie had been the Mage.

Using a Mook Mage though, you have better overall Vitality and Strength so you don’t have to put as many points into those attributes. On the other hand, you are much slower than a Faerie and more vulnerable due to not having the natural -2 AC bonus. You will have slightly more access to gear overall in the short term but nothing that is a real game changer. Theoretically, you could still take a Faerie Mage but I dislike the redundancy of having two Faeries in a single party. I think with my previous group, I had swapped the Faerie Mage into a Bishop and raced to push his Theology then eventually swapped to a Ninja for the end game. Since you won’t have a great dedicated healer until mid game possibly, you could plan to swap this character into a Bishop and much later into a Monk. You just won’t have as much regeneration nor AC until you become a Monk. If you go the Bishop route as the follow up class to the Mage, then the final class should either be a Ninja or Monk to avoid redundancy with a Samurai or Lord’s spells as well as gaining access to the prized Ninjutsu skill.

The Game Begins

Once you’re in the starter dungeon, you should race to grab the treasure from the two starter chests. The most important item will be the Sword of Striking. While it’s not the best weapon in the game, the +2 bonus to hit is a major upgrade over a Longsword or the Lord’s starting Broadsword. So this makes me believe that you should change your Rawulf Priest into a Lord immediately to take advantage of this starting weapon. The other major item to acquire is the Amulet of Life found in the opposite treasure chest. Most guides recommend selling this off because it’s only use is to revive dead characters (Resurrection). However, it sells for a lot of gold which means if you can get to Queequeg unscathed, you probably can buy most of your missing starter gear (minus the Lute if you decided to take a Mage rather than a starting Bard). I would try to beef up your Lord and Valkyrie immediately with armor. If you have spare gold, get the Halberd for the Valkyrie. But make sure you can purchase the Katana and Wakizashi for your Felpurr, regardless of swapping to a Samurai.

Your Mage won’t require much additional gear at this stage. You probably will want your Bard in the 5th slot so armor isn’t critical at this stage. There are a few items the Bard can use found in the towers so you’ll want to explore those and hopefully be able to disarm their traps to obtain those items. But don’t hit up the towers until you have some basic gear from Queequeg.

I would handle my first class changes immediately. So at minimal, I would do the Valkyrie, the Lord and possibly the Bard (if I decided to fudge things a little). Having the Lord and Valkyrie immediately means you can have two front line tanks, even though I would use the term “tank” very loosely since neither are well equipped at this stage. Thus, you can rush for Queequeg and try to obtain gear after selling off the Amulet of Life and any irrelevant starting gear from the Priest side. Once you have a few pieces of better armor, you should go back to the main castle level and stay near the curative fountains. There’s a better fountain on the upper level that heals and provides stamina. But at this stage, healing shouldn’t be a problem because of the low health pool. Instead, Stamina will be a bigger issue. Similarly, since you used more “pure” spellcasting classes at the start, your mana regeneration should be fairly quick. You might want to avoid resting for a while too.

Here, I would save the game and simply spin around to start getting random encounters. I would try a few out to test if my party can survive. Most enemies at this level won’t do too much damage but I would be wary of Rogues. Use your Bard’s Lute every single round on the largest group of enemies or the deadliest. When enemies are sleeping, you gain a huge hit and damage advantage. Also, you’ll be building up your Music skill.

My main concern are for those that have lower hit points, which is why you probably will want the Valkyrie temporarily in the 2nd or 3rd slot. Both Mages should cast as frequently as they can to build up their Oratory. You might be a little judicious about spending mana though and should monitor your regenerative abilities here. I would suggest if you see the Felpurr getting hammered hard, then it might be worth class swapping to a Samurai and helping out the melee. Your Faerie Alchemist probably would be the better choice to swap classes between the two early on but I would hold off until level 2 or 3 just to continue building up his Alchemy skill. But changing to a Ninja does mean your Faerie can serve as a potential tank because of his slightly higher natural armor. But Hiding in Shadows will be difficult to do reliably for a while. So in a large fight, focus on melee with the Ninja and Hide in Shadows when you know the others can finish off the remaining opponents.

Another recommendation I’ve read is to avoid the Basement level until level 5 or so. I think it’s because some of the foes are a lot tougher and come in bigger groups. The ones to watch out for are Brigands, Rogue Leaders, Tricksters and some Slimes. I think what I tend to do is grind the area near the starting fountain until about level 3 then make my way into the basement or upper castle floor. The upper floor might get frustrating because of all the locked doors. You can find keys to deal with some of them. I believe some keys can be found off random dead bodies of monsters like from Rogues. Others are relegated to quest items. However, you might want to keep a few to give to the Amazon vendor as a sacrifice later on to avoid problems. But they will take up some space.

Regarding early leveling or any leveling in this game: SAVE ALL THE TIME. I made it a habit to save after each successful combat. It’s not terribly difficult to do on these later versions since you don’t have to deal with a floppy disk. But you will want to save and keep a close eye on your experience points as you near gaining a level. The early stages are probably the worst because of how easy it is to get murdered by the wrong encounter. Also, you will want to save frequently to reload so that you can get more ideal stats as you level.

This will become even more important because of the class change and attribute reset. I would suggest that the minimum number of upgraded attributes per level, at least early on, should be between 3-4. Prioritize speed and vitality since you gain more AC, initiative and hit points. Dexterity helps in this regard too but I would put that attribute under your main stat like Strength, Intelligence or Piety.

Along the way, you should try to acquire any spellbooks from Queequeg and pick up potions once in a while like Cure Posion, Cure Lt Cnd and Healing. It will take sometime before you can do your own Cure Poison so just be careful of that situation. Obviously, you want to prioritize your armor and weapons over healing items (unless you are poisoned but at an early stage you should just reload). But I would continuously stock up on healing items and keep them in my swag section.

The hardest encounters early on are the secret Brigand tavern (Captain Matey), the killer boss rat (Fat Rat) and the Zombie in the tower. Some of those might have extra mobs (especially if you decide to put the game on a harder difficulty). So it might take you a few attempts to down those encounters. Along the way, you can use the Belfry rope spot to get mobs of bats to assault you for early easy XP. I think some people use that area to grind until level 5 or 6 because the encounters are reliable.

Lastly, I did read how some people might even change around level 5 just because it’s very easy to get through the first 5 levels, especially if you use the Belfry trick. The main thing is that if you plan on something like this, once you’ve settled into what your real starting build is, you should not swap simultaneously (outside of the initial entry into the game). Being able to level up separately for each character makes the fine tuning of attribute upgrades much easier. If you save a character or two for a later stage class swap, I would suggest waiting until you’re in the Dwarf Mine so you can grind next to the fountains. For instance, you might consider using that point in time to swap your Mage to Bishop. I would evaluate my situation based on how much healing I’d need at that stage. If my Valkyrie is doing fine in the 4th spot, then I would wait a little longer to do the class swap, possibly switching around level 13 so you can race to get the more powerful spells like Nuclear Blast or Astral Gate, which comes in really handy once you arrive at the River Styx. Just know that once you lose your main Mage, you’ll be limited on the spell level you can cast your spells at. So by then you should make sure your Bard can handle secondary AoE/group attack responsibilities.

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