Fishin' in the stream of consciousness (all-purpose, no topic chat thread)

Just wanted to shout this into one of the most visited threads in the forum for sympathy and commiserating:

Guess who's coming to my bodunk mostly rural tiny ass town soon? That's right, it's Donald Trump! He's visiting the Louis Vuitton factory that dumps all it's waste in our lake with no remorse or repercussions, not only making it unswimmable but darn near Uninhabitable as well

 

Please go protest for those of us who can’t be there.

 

I'll try, but security is out the wazoo already and many people who live here aren't going to protest more jobs (that'll likely be paying less than minimum wage like everything else here) or a (corrupt) republican.

 

Slowly sorting out my twitch page. There's so much shit. Icons and banners and panels and sources. Making sure everything is linked up correctly, setting up a paypal, taking a new pic for my twitter where I'm actually smiling, changing my twitch name to something I actually like. I thought talking to myself for an extended period of time would be the hard part.

 

Gods I know right? Somehow actually getting all of that in order is muuuuuuuuuch more annoying than the part where I talk myself hoarse, turns out I can yammer on endlessly, but ~gRaPhIc dEsIgN Is mY PaSsIoN~ energy is strong and nearly impossible to banish

 

What is with the bullshit around untitled goose game?

 

That is so long that even though it was regularly making me burst out laughing I still got bored in the middle and stopped reading.

Nobody tell this person that golf is mostly walking, or that tennis requires practice, or that gardening basically amounts to digging around in the dirt like a peasant. I don’t think they understand that leisure isn’t the same thing as no rules or value. Presumably they enjoy spending their free time lying perfectly still in a ditch, face down so they won’t have to notice that there are many cities that have big problems with geese. (My Danish friend says Copenhagen doesn’t have geese, but that doesn’t count because it has swans, which are arguably worse.)

 

True, swans are just geese with a +1 to range.

 

I’m honestly shocked that this article managed to unseat the previous champion of bad goose critiques. Both feel very much like they are only about the goose game because it’s popular right now and thus the default excuse for a personal rant about something only vaguely related because it’s sort of about video games, kind of. But this one is so much worse. This one brought up Brexit and I’m still confused about how. I mean it when I say I couldn’t stop laughing. This take is not hot or cold. This take is suspicious that people claim to know about geese, and that is only a warning sign of what is about to transpire. This is a non-euclidian take and its temperature is not a number so much as a rebuke of thermometer worship and tangentially fleece.

As for why Untitled Goose Game, I think it’s not just because it’s a huge hit, but because it’s a fairly short game with an art style and design that’s deceptively simple. I think people look at it and think they could do that, they could totally make something called “untitled” like that, not realizing how much skill and effort is often necessary to make something seem effortless.

 

On a completely different topic, I’m suddenly glad that Pokemon Go stopped working on my phone years ago and I never bothered trying to fix it.

https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1838974714

 

[muffled screaming in Huizinga and Caillois]

Genuine question, why the 'suddenly'? I still play PokeGo and I installed the app when it launched in Germany 100% knowing it was essentially spyware with a cutesie filter. It's literally no different than Google Maps though which I also use, so I don't really care. Frankly nothing in that article is new or surprising information, and at least Niantic is honest about the fact that they collect data.

 

Yeah, Apple’s informed me a couple times that PokeGo is accessing my location. Given that the gift system sends photos of Notable Locations with a marker of the city and country they’re in to your friends, Niantic isn’t the only one learning where I’m going.

Which is still a security concern! But, well, it’s been about that way from the beginning?

 

Yeah, and like. Pokego aside, my sibling has had their phone randomly pipe up to tell them when their bus was leaving and the exact fare they would need. I'm not happy that Niantic knows where I live, where I work, what days I work, how I go there, where I buy my groceries, and where my family lives and when I visit them, but I resigned myself when I got a smartphone to the fact that owning a smartphone inherently meant our corporate overlords would know a creepy amount about my life and there wasn't going to be anything I could do about it.

 

Oh man, it weirded the hell out of me the first time Gmaps chimed up to tell me my route home would only take x minutes!

Buddy, I have never used you to find my route to school. That you know my schedule is bizarre. >:(

 

...the first thing i did upon recieving my phone was tell it to absolutely not access my location, and i've kept that with that unless I specifically want it to lead me somewhere.

 

yeah it's not inevitable. there's a lot you can do to keep your data out of companies' hands. of course there's definite convenience trade-offs, and that's a choice that's probably going to come down to individual needs and, like, personal philosophies. (and yeah, it means you don't get to play pokemon go.) but just because you have a smartphone doesn't mean you automatically have to be a data mine for a big company.

 

considering that my phone refuses to run poke go anyways, I'm not feeling particularly inconvenienced tbh

 

It’s the sheer scale of what it’s collecting, how often even when the app isn’t active, and claiming it was a mistake when confronted. I don’t like their behavior.

 

I'm really looking forward to roosterteeth's extra life stream this year! Is anyone else going to be watching?

 

To answer more specifically, I was never under the impression that they weren’t able to access information about my location, especially when I specifically gave the app permission to access that. It’s hard to run a geolocation game without location data. That much is definitely expected.

Personally, I was surprised by some of the information in the article, though. I very much did not get the impression they were interested in being honest so much as the reporter was asking them questions, getting non-answer denials, then pressing them with information they were forced to release under law into admitting that maybe they did do the thing but it was totally an accident. And they may have filed all those patents but they’re totally not planning to do anything with them, cross their heart. Maybe they really aren’t planning to do anything with any particular patent, and maybe their software really did have some extremely convenient bugs. But I do not have an impression of them that could be called honest.

Having access to data doesn’t mean you now have to store it and mine it. Niantic already has upfront revenue from microtransactions, which normally would mean I had fewer questions about how much money they needed to squeeze from user data, but instead it seems like they’ve decided to go above and beyond. I think they’re benefiting from unclear disclaimers. Like when you agree that a particular content service has permission to redistribute your work and can use your image, because what they actually mean is that they can serve your content to your subscribers and advertise it in places where they might already do spots about their content for your mutual benefit. They’re not going to cut you out of your own book deal, or build an advertising campaign for their service with your face on it without asking. But the same legal language might technically allow them to claim they could. I feel kinda like Niantic is not on the book deal end, but it’s probably significantly closer than another game company using the same basic game model and legal language might be.

(Sometimes I look at a company and I want to brush my hair in front of my face and crawl through a convenient screen near them to rasp, “Bro, do you even Information Lifecycle Management? It could save you from so much liability. I have chaaaaaaarts!” Because they do choose to store and keep this information, they are legally and ethically responsible for it. They have a duty to keep it safe and private, and to release it when compelled by law. If their story about the bug was true, they suck at information management. They’re apparently not even able to tell if they’re collecting what they wanted. Or they forgot to tell their spin doctor about this eensie little hiccup before the date with the nice reporter.)

Regardless, I do think we can all make decisions about whether it’s worth it to play Pokemon Go. And for a little while, for me, it really was. I had an amazing summer when it came out and met so many wonderful people. I wouldn’t take that back. The app stopped working shortly after I stopped being interested in using it anymore, which is why I’m glad it broke when it did. The reason why this is sudden is because I hadn’t even thought of it for so long that it wasn’t on my mind anymore. Of course I had settings about it not being able to access things, but I frequently accidentally open an app I didn’t intend to and leave it running until the phone restarts itself, or forget to turn off its access when I’m not using it. It basically removed itself from my life and phone of its own accord before I was ready to admit I was over it, and if it hadn’t, I can only hope that I really would have definitely remembered for sure to turn off its access as I lost interest. I’ll accept that it collects data when I’m using it, even if it’s collecting more than I would have thought. It technically warned me. But if it had been on my phone all that time not drawing attention to itself, it could potentially have been collecting so much information without me realizing it. Years of information. I don’t think it’s evil and no one should have fun, just that I’m glad my indecisiveness and general desire to leave well enough alone was not left in charge of my life in this instance.

The thing about it that honestly creeps me out the most is not that you or I, both adults as far as I know, might choose to use this app even knowing it may be intrusively collecting information about us. It’s that the reason the article came out now was because of Niantic’s new Harry Potter game. Between that and Pokemon, the most obvious demographic they’re targeting is very young. They’re aligning themselves with super popular children’s media properties. There’s obviously a ton of interest from people of all ages, but I think it would be very difficult to argue that they are not largely targeting children and young teens for massive data collection projects. That’s what makes me recoil from this so fucking hard.