Giant Bombcast 540: Sailor Bruno Mars

I went to one once and the way Jeff described it, something like "When we were on the main floor it made me wonder what all the fuss was about," perfectly described my feeling there. I went with some coworkers who were more into anime than I was and were probably meeting friends or something, because after splitting up I didn't see them for hours and I walked back and forth through the stands 20 times. It was all just very junky or generic or you had to spend hours digging through stacks of posters.

@jadegl: Thank you for taking the time to write out these great and informative responses.

"Being told what to do as a game dev must be the most insane thing! It's like being told unplug and plug it back in!"

...later on in the podcast

"I like Fortnite because people will suggest them stuff on Reddit and they listen."

Well, I refreshed this page and it went from 1 comment to over 200. This can't be a healthy comment section.

I don't think anyone has been implying her job is customer service or that she had to be subservient to every query.

@sirpsychosexy: That's what makes their use of the word 'customer' wildly inappropriate.

@nietzschecookie: What...? No it doesn't. Just because you your job description doesn't involve you dealing directly with customers doesn't mean your employer will be cool with you attacking them on social media. The word customer here is super relevant to everything.

@nietzschecookie: one of the very first things I've been told at pretty much every job I've ever had whether it be customer service or not is that anything I do at work or in public off the clock can be seen as a reflection of the company. Just because she is not in the customer service department does not give her a pass to attack a prominent member of the community unprovoked. An no, wanting to spark a discussion on a public tweet is not provocation. Did she ever even apologize to the dude?

@sirpsychosexy: Suppose you live in a country where you work for Google and android has 100% of the smart phone market. Should you be unable to say anything mean to anyone you've ever met or ever will meet on social media, less you be fired? The word customer is not relevant in this context. Even if the latest android update enters into a heated discussion. Use fan, or community or discuss the nuance of social media engagement. Boiling this down to how a customer was treated loses sight of the fact that these were two human beings in a heated exchange first, and workers who have larger contexts and responsibilities second.

I'm hoping the 40 or so deleted posts were the ones that even tangentially supported anime as anything but baseless toss. Pure filth imo. *goes back to rewatching samurai champloo*

@mems1224: I see many posts in this thread that share a similar story to the effect of 'I've had a job, and this is the way things are or the way the world is'. Just because the world is one way, does not mean it ought be that way. Activism requires effort and imagination and time and energy that not everybody has, but chiming in to remind people that see a problem with the world that such a problem is ubiquitous will never sway me in the slightest from caring.

can we just get rid of twitter yet

@nietzschecookie: idk, i don't see a problem with an employer wanting their employees to have basic human decency. Not attacking a person who respectfully initiates a dialogue on a public forum is a pretty easy thing to do for a lot of people. There absolutely are many things that are worth fighting for. Jessica Price is not a hill worth dying on though.

@mems1224: I'll say this again, because it unfortunately keeps getting lost in all this, what about Fries?

I had to look up Fries deleted tweet because no one has mentioned the content yet:

“Here’s a bit of insight that I legitimately hope he reflects on: she never asked for his feedback,” he says. “These are our private social media accounts — imagine you’re an astronomer and you start sharing some things you’ve learned in the last few months since you began a research project observing Saturn, only to have observation techniques explained to you by a layman ... Jessica is great at her job and deserves to be treated with respect.”

Personally, seems a-okay to me. I can't even call it an error or uncivil tweet. Personally, i don't agree with the idea that Deroir was telling her how to write a story (his idea would have required a full overhaul of a game that's already in the retention phase and past the growth phase , which makes it infeasible to turn it into a more mass effect-ish / witcher-ish type of game. Simply telling someone to write 'different' or 'better' wouldn't magically turn it into such a game. ) But bear in mind that we have a blind spot for everything that happened in the office. Maybe Fries felt like resigning after feeling like ArenaNet made a bad call on firing Jessica Price. Maybe ArenaNet fired him for getting involved in this. Maybe he already felt like it was time for a new adventure and this was the event that made him take that step. We lack the information. We do know that this is how he responded afterwards. https://twitter.com/Peter_Fries/status/1015650777191231488

He is either very good at dealing with rough situations, or he is at peace with how it ended for him personally. I'm a human, not a mind reader, so i can be wrong about these assumptions though.

@nietzschecookie: wrong place, wrong time it seems. His firing is way more questionable but he also chose to defend his coworker who was clearly in the wrong. If ANet is setting a zero tolerance policy for their developers attacking their customers I don't really have a problem with that.

@mems1224:I appreciate you clarifying your view.

Its about as innocuous as a tweet can be, if you ask me.

@hollitz: I wore a zip up hoodie on mine and now I’m married!

Call me old I don’t really care but seriously why even bother with social media at all in today’s climate? I used to have a Twitter account years and years ago. I rarely tweeted but I used to enjoy to read what people had to say.. until about 2014 when it got unbearable. I deactivated my account and have not used any form of social media since (never had a Facebook account ever). I honestly do not see any benefit to any of it at all. Sure you can get news faster but why the fuck would you want that now?

I feel bad for both people who got fired, losing a job sucks and it’s even more stressful today and than exponentially worse in a game development field. Should Arena Net gone in a different direction? Sure, but I’m not gonna pretend to know what happened day to day there.

I will not pass judgement on anyone in this because it’s fruitless. This is an all around shitty situation where nobody feels good. I just hope that everyone can learn from this going forward whatever that may be.

Ashley dies every time. There isn't even a consideration. She.Is.The.Worst.

Ah another user of high anime taste! *pours another glass of Mushishi!*

>taking the corporate line

more like taking the CUSTOMER LINE

justified firing

I've never been to a con myself, but as someone who follows a multitude of people who do go to those things, it does indeed seem that one of the big draws for stuff like AX is to meet up with your online friends while also maybe being a few pieces of merch or art. Yeah, it would probably be more efficient to just meet up outside of a con like Jeff described, but it's an easy way for people to get together and also be surrounded by the hobby.

Her response wasn't acceptable and the company handled it poorly, should of just got a writen up or verbal warning. end of story.

There seriously needs more laws and such when it comes to social media and streaming. I bet almost everyone will have some sort of mental disorders in a few years becouse of how it is at the moment.

Came to the comments to find a picture of that Sonic Hoodie. Stayed for the toxic comments justifying "customer is always right" BS.

Ya'll are all about this Arenanet debacle am I the only one that noticed Jeff talking shit bout Elon Musk for trying to help these kids trapped in the cave? What the fuck is that all about?

The thing about the Sonic hoodie is that, much like Rick & Morty or pro wrestling, there are a lot of preconceived notions about the fandom. And maybe that's unfair. But that's reality.

So it's less about being yourself, and more about revealing "It's okay, I'm a decent person...NOW check out this Sonic hoodie."

@bongchilla: I've never used facebook. I only use twitter and only to follow accounts that let me know if a cool project from someone I like is coming up or if they are going to stream. I mostly only follow accounts that are entertaining.

I spent most of 2016 through 2018 being miserable every time I checked my twitter feed but I started purging it this year. My feed looked like I only followed political commentators despite only following one. I've since unfollowed everyone that tweeted about politics on a daily basis and I am mentally the better for it.

@rsawyer757: Because Musk clearly wasn't interested in helping the kids. He was interested in publicity. No one wanted his sub, which was called impractical for this rescue operation. So he took the sub to Thailand anyways and just left it there. If he wanted to really help, why didn't he start working on the sub before rescue operations were already underway?

Every billionaire on this planet should be constantly dunked on and mocked.

Pretty sure I've seen emails between Musk and Dick Stanton where Stanton was asking him to continue working on it as it may prove useful.

@wesleywyndam: It may. In this case it wasn't, but he left the sub there anyway, because he has a ridiculous ego.

How else are we gonna get that one-man sub from the opening of Metal Gear Solid?

C'mon, really? This is so obviously slanted and not representative of the truth I almost don't even want to respond. You're really twisting the facts here.

1. He was not "clearly" in it as a publicity stunt. If you want to believe so that's your prerogative but it is certainly not obvious and I have to disagree with your judgement.

2. He took the sub to Thailand (July 9) before they told him it would be impractical (July 10). The quote literally said "The technology he gave us..." Gave being past tense. And he didn't just leave it there, he delivered it to the guy who asked for it while the operation was still under way. The quote that they didn't use it came the next day and he was already gone.

3. Clearly someone wanted his sub as Richard Stanton, a cave diver specializing in rescues and co-lead of the rescue team, asked him to build it. You make it sound like they told him "nah dude we don't want your help" and he went anyway.

4. As to why he didn't get involved earlier, who could possibly say? It could have been the length of the process that made him think to get involved. It could have been someone on his team that came to him and said "maybe we can do something." It could have been that he didn't have any ideas yet. Who knows. It could have been tons of reasons and I can't think of a single one that plays into your false narrative here.

Regardless of all that, talking shit about a guy for trying to help some kids escape from a cave is a shitty thing to do.

@rsawyer757: Thank you for clarifying the timeline. Multiple articles I saw did not make that part of it clear.

I should point out something to Jeff. Just like anime nerds, video gamers stink. You're just used to the smell.

That sub was never going to work as a rescue device and I’ll bet everything that it will never be put to any important use whatsoever. I mean Christ, Elon was discussing installing iPods or whatever in it on Twitter. He’s a self indulgent little prick.

@bladeofcreation: No problem. Many publications (or maybe individual journalists idk) seem to have an issue with Musk. They like to paint him and his companies in a negative light and unfortunately for a lot of people that's all they know. I'm no Musk expert by any means but I've seen enough of the guy to have a generally favorable opinion of him.

@rsawyer757: Oh don't me wrong, just because the timeline is slightly off doesn't turn him into a savior or anything. The dude is still ridiculous.

@boonsong: The great tragedy of the wannabe space-explorer billionaires is not that they'll leave us behind when they go to Mars. By the time Mars travel is feasible, they'll all be too old to take the trip. No, the great tragedy of the Mars billionaires is that we'll be stuck here on Earth with them forever.

@bladeofcreation: Truly Hell on Earth.

@bladeofcreation: I'm curious. Why do you dislike Musk? What makes him ridiculous?

@boonsong: He was asked to build the sub by the co-lead of the rescue operation. I think his opinion of whether it was ever going to work is more valuable than yours. I'm am curious though as to why you think he is self-indulgent?

I'm generally curious as to what lead you guys to form such negative opinions of the Musk. Is it information that I'm ignorant to? Are we both reading oppositely biased sources? I've never seen anything that would lead me to the conclusions that you guys have so I'm curious where it comes from.

@rsawyer757: From my understanding Elon decided to build it, then he sent an email to Richard asking if he should continue with it and he basically responded ”yeah sure, it might be useful”. It’s not like they came to him and asked him to build it, unless I’m missing something.

@rsawyer757: I want to say reports of poor working conditions in Tesla factories such as that this one is what started the bulk of negative Elon Musk sentiments for the public at large.

What pisses me off about Elon Musk is his attempt at painting himself as a goodwill humanitarian. He’s really not. He’s a rich businessman who talks a lot about doing good, does it at times to further pump up his brand and become more obscenely wealthy, then spends the rest of his time shooting cars into space, making flamethrowers and being an idiot on twitter.

@rsawyer757: Conditions in Tesla factories. He's actually terrible with money. He thinks he came up with the idea of bus stops. The way he treated his ex-wife.

But really, the weirdest thing is all these people who think they need to go to bat for a billionaire. The way his fans act is strange.

@turambar: @boonsong: @bladeofcreation: Thanks guys for the info. I've never heard of most of this stuff so it's been interesting looking it up.

Sure, that's how these things usually work. Organizations, or usually someone at the top like an owner or CEO, offers to help when an individual or group of individuals is in need. I see this kind of thing on my local news all the time. PR certainly plays a part but that doesn't mean that there isn't a genuine desire to help also. If you actually look at the email trail that Musk posted you can see that what Richard said doesn't equate with "yeah sure, it might be useful." Musk asked him multiple times if it was worth working on and in each case Richard answered in the affirmative. "It is absolutely worth continuing in the development of this system in as timely a manner as feasible. If the rain holds out it may well be used." His last email was "We're worried about the smallest lad please keep working on the capsule details."

Thanks. That was a good read and doesn't paint a pretty picture. As usual the truth is probably somewhere in the middle but in this case, the middle is likely not a great place to be either. On the positive it does seem they recognize the issue and have improved conditions greatly.

I appreciate the response. This mostly seems to be your perception of the man rather than anything objective that I can research.

Thanks. I've looked these up but I don't see anything about him mistreating either of his ex-wives. Do you have any links? The bus stop thing seems to be nonsense. This isn't a bench on the side of the street and while yes, it is literally a place that a bus will stop it is very different than existing bus stops. Sure, he could have made the comparison. Who can say why he didn't. Saying that he claims to have invent the bus stop though is, to put it as mildly as possible, ridiculous. The money thing seems pretty broad so I'm not sure how to look that up.

Just to be clear, I'm not a Musk fan. I have a cursory knowledge of him and his companies though from a distance I do appreciate his areas of focus and the competition that they are helping to create. I do however like to inject facts in where they are clearly needed. For instance @bladeofcreation your initial comment on the subject was filled with untruths and so you had a skewed perception of events. I don't necessarily seek to change anyone's mind, that's impossible, but I at least want to help make sure that people are not basing their opinions on bullshit if at all possible. That includes me, so I appreciate your feedback and helping me see the other side of the coin.