Interesting Links for 08-11-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Contraceptive pills might impair fear-regulating regions in women's brains

(tags:contraception fear hormones )

2. Maine's constitution has unprintable sections

(tags:Maine history )

3. Antidepressants or Tolkien? (I got 20 out of 24 right)

(tags:names Tolkien lotr quiz )

4. Edinburgh house prices are down 7.4% over the last year. Fingers crossed that they get even more affordable.

(tags:housing edinburgh )

5. The people who bought The Escapist a few months ago have driven their entire video team to quit, including Zero Punctuation (their main money maker)

(tags:videogames journalism reviews epicfail business )

Comments

[redbird]

Make that had unprintable sections: the ballot question to change that so the entire constitution is included in printed copies passed yesterday: https://www.pressherald.com/2023/11/07/voters-decide-on-changes-to-the-maine-constitution/

[andrewducker]

Woohoo!

[calimac]

2) So the one thing the fact sheet doesn't say is why these sections were removed from printed copies of the Constitution.

3) I got 23. Really, the only sure way to tell the difference is if you've heard of the items in one category or the other, and as I'm a Tolkienist and not a psychiatrist, it's obvious which category that is for me. Just one clue: if it's a lyrical and not a harsh name, and all of these are, if it has an X or a Z in it, it's probably a drug.

[andrewducker]

I'm not at all surprised you did better than me.

And I assume it's so that most people wouldn't know how well they were (or weren't) living up to their obligations.

3. Antidepressants or Tolkien? (I got 20 out of 24 right)

[anef]

19 here. I basically said that names I didn't recognise were anti-depressants. Were some of them not in LOTR itself?

Re: 3. Antidepressants or Tolkien? (I got 20 out of 24 right)

[calimac]

Several are from the appendices. One or two are from the Silmarillion.

[zz]

20/24, mostly from playing lotro, which speaks to how well they use the source material

[andrewducker]

A good sign!

[mountainkiss]

This is very much not my wheelhouse, but given that the ZP guy is described in the article as "very fast, very rude, quickfire opinions [...] featuring crude cartoon characters [...] politically incorrect scripting [...] airing controversial opinions to be edgy [...] no-holds-barred approach" then I am not sure that I am playing for your team here.

(If 'crude' means 'roughly drawn' then I retract that bit of the comment.)

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure what my team is here?

Supporting creators when the business people decide to treat them badly?

Not, in this case, that he was the one being treated badly. He was the one standing by the person being treated badly.

[mountainkiss]

I think the bad treatment wasn’t clear to me, previous quite possibly because this is not at all my domain. But it also seemed to me that if I ran his company and his activity is as I’m inferring (quite possibly inaccurately) then I don’t know that I’d want to keep him around even if he’s a rainmaker. In principle I play for your team on the above comment.

[andrewducker]

Ah, it's possible that the BBC didn't explain it very well.

They sacked the person who ran the team, and then everyone on the team (including Yahtzee, the reason why their site has any visitors) quit in sympathy, and they all went off to start their own site.

Which doesn't produce this things you'd like. But I assume that if what they wanted was a gaming review/news site that was aimed at producing content you'd enjoy then they wouldn't have bought The Escapist in the first place.

[mountainkiss]

Genuinely open q: why do we assume that sacking the person running the team is bad treatment? I can imagine circs in which this is so but also circs in which it isn’t. Is this more data that I just don’t know?

[andrewducker]

I totally agree that it's not always a bad thing, sometimes people do bad jobs and should be replaced.

But in this case, he'd taken a site where people came to see the output of one person and built multiple different sub brands on it that were all pulling in viewers, and were making a wider name for the site in producing interesting, insightful content of various kinds (and stuff that was just plain fun).

The guy clearly had a vision, a team that wanted to work together to make it happen, and an audience that were willing to pay money for it.

I assume, though, that it wasn't growing as fast as the owners wanted, or being as mass market as they would like, and he was fighting his corner over it (or at least it came across that way from little bits I picked up in the background).

Which is fine - they get to decide what their site should do. But if you're going to run any business it helps to understand who makes up that business and what their reactions are going to be to any changes you introduce. And, like many people who buy a business they seem to have done an incompetent job of that.

Which mirrors what I've seen elsewhere. Where new owners don't understand what makes a business work, think that the people who make it up are fungible, and cause massive damage to the business in their clumsiness.

The fact that it's gone so badly seems to me to be proof that it was a bad idea. Or, at least, a bad idea to do it the way they did it.

[mountainkiss]

It’s because I work for one such organisation that I found myself reading the article very carefully, knowing that my emotions would take me in the same direction.

[melchar]

Jumping in this a couple days late - mainly since I only check Dreamwidth about once a week. Essentially - I am a gamer gal & followed the Zero Punctuation website for a couple years specifically because I like Yahtzee Croshaw's reviews of games. Do to this, I also watched & am fond of many of the other reviewers on the site.

Is Yahtzee crude? Oh yeah, but hilarious. He PLAYS, then condenses & summarizes a review for a multiple hours-long game - good, bad or indifferent - into a short, humorous 5 to 10 minute review that NEVER is demeaning or insulting TO the game creator, while at the same time pointing out highlights & shortfalls of what the game has to offer players. This is an AMAZING talent. His language is direct & can be crude, while managing to also be riotously funny.

Yahtzee has done this for more than 15 years.

I hadn't paid attention to the business side of the website before last week, but the last 5-ish years saw the website grow and expand. Nick added new reviewers & creative folk who produced other styles of game reviews & this attracted a LOT more viewers. This growth & QUALITY was accomplished by Nick Calandran, the fellow that the 'business' fired - with NO warning, after telling him he failed in some metric they never told him they were looking for.

Restating - without notice they fired the guy who improved the website/expanded it/interfaced with the creators/attracted more than a million new viewers. The creative folks learned about Nick's sudden firing & they ALL quit the next day.

I checked the ZP site daily, since there was always something new & fun there, so I heard about what happened pretty much as it occurred. I followed about 500 other folk over to Nick's discord server & learned in real time what happened as they try to figure out what to do next. That discord server is called 'Second Wind'. There were some livestreams made to explain what they've been doing.

Less than a week later, the discord server has about 30,000 members. Nick & Yahtzee & the other have a new YouTube channel called 'Second Wind', and a Patreon. They hope to put all of the creative folk, mainly writers, back to producing regularly as soon as they are able - AND I learned, because Nick spilled the beans - that Yahtzee is FUNDING this all, personally, so his friends can afford to do this.

To quote [what I just double-checked] = Fully Ramblomatic, the brand new review show from yahtzeecroshaw! Premieres on Second Wind on Wednesday, November 15th at Noon ET

[mountainkiss]

There’s my answer then, thank you!

[melchar]

LOL - glad my ... wordy response found favor. I am admittedly a bit fanatical about gaming, seeing it has been my favorite hobby since I was age 15 [in 1973, when I discovered D&D] - ... & I just turned 66 2 weeks ago. So I will go on at length, sometimes. ^_^

[mountainkiss]

Very grateful thank you!

[mountainkiss]

(It’s not so much what I’d like. I aten’t a gamer. But the words used about him didn’t seem (quite possibly wrongly) to add up to your values, from my perspective.)

[andrewducker]

Ah, gotcha.

He's definitely crude. But he doesn't come across (to me) as hateful, bigoted, etc.

Some of his older stuff is definitely more that way, insofar as nobody had pointed out to him that some words might be punching down, but I've certainly not found him to be that way in the last few years.

I can see the BBC getting its petticoats in a twist over the use of the word "fuck" and generally over the top profanity (neither of which I'm morally against).

[mountainkiss]

Makes lots of sense. Isn’t the inference I drew from the article, but per previous I am basically talking here about a topic about which I know nothing at all.

[elwinfortuna]

I got 24 out of 24 on Antidepressants or Tolkien; the only one which threw me even for a second was Nardil.

[calimac]

That's the one that got me.

3

[channelpenguin]

Ok, since Tolkien was a language nerd, I'm super curious as to WHY this is tricky. Just 2 sets of words unfamiliar to most people? Or something deeper in the resemblance?

Re: 3

[andrewducker]

Similarity in sound, I'd say.

Narsil is a sword in LOTR, Nardil is a drug.

I assume that drug manufacturers have a good reason for having their products sound elvish.

[anna_wing]

23 out of 24, and Nardil was the one that got me. It actually does have a meaning in Quenya.

[andrewducker]

Very close!