Issue : Games : Wave offs

This week has either been a really bad one or good one for quality assurance, mostly depending on where a person is sitting. Somewhere in Blizzard headquarters I am guessing there is a smug little jerk of a web tester smiling and humming while completing their latest test plan, the echo of "I told you so" reverberating down the halls since the beta shut down.

Every once in a while he/she returns to that red light launch report or cycles through those handful of waived net bugs in the database and plays the mini game of matching them to the specific complaints of customers located in video game website forums and player bug databases. Then later a little Wolfenstien as a chaser.

And on the other side of the world at SpaceX there is probably a former Nasa employee contracted to do an advanced version of the same job backtracking through logs and logs of rocket engine data, then tracking forward again, then back again, over and over, as they are wont to do through ocd, even though they know it's the problem they brought up in the meeting a while back. The major difference being that in the case of this employee many lives were saved by reporting an issue, not to mention the future of privatized space travel.

Nobody outside of the companies will ever see how these particular sausages got packaged and shipped or dated and recalled, but that is how it probably should be. Instead they become office lore and the new fantasy, and the names on the bugs become the new legends talked about in hushed tones around bottom floor Keurig machines and parking lot smoking areas, "I heard [X] wrote that up two months ago and it got nabbed, lolz." Serf nerds run on that type of local immortality, it gives us a way to impress our friends and keeps everybody showing up to work.

The Protoculture Mixtape V.80 Issue : Games : Toonami

Issue : People : The Other Side

Chuck Brown was a guitarist, funk expeditionary, high flier, big baller, and D. C. landmark that walked around looking like a damn Kansas City pimp, which isn't really fair to Kansas City, because being compared to Chuck Brown carries with it a base swagger requirement that doesn't exist in this day and age.

In the 70's Parliament Funkadelic delivered the funk to the masses in a spaceship while wearing glitter armor and a diaper, which is undeniably awesome, but Chuck just rubbed some funk off his face with a towel, walked up, threw that shit at your head, que'd the baseline, and suggested you dance out of politeness, while knowing you didn't have a choice. It would be a little gross at first, and people would say to the person next to them, "Did this nigga just throw a funky towel at my head and tell me to dance?" But you would dance though, and it was cool.

And funk operators managed to do all this while disco was in play, a musical situation that most 70's youth survivors still deny happened. It's bittersweet that Donna Summer and Chuck Brown passed around the same time, but it's all good cause they did their jobs well on separate sides of the street. They got the kids of the time where they needed to go, took a bow, then went to sleep.

It's almost romantic that American innovators have been quietly passing since Jell Roll Morton without much pomp or circumstance, but the styles they created can be heard in every cord and break in musicians performances after them. Call and response, jazzy bridges, funky breaks, it's all there in every hip hop, R&B, and rock track if you listen to them in sections.

I mean, it's romantic for the fans, but still must suck for the artists estate, all that music in life only adding up to a spam obit in the midweek news cycle and debt your kids have to deal with. Meh, music is a tough gig, and not one you can measure accurately in money. But if you do it well enough you change the world for the better, so there is that.

The Protoculture Mixtape : V.79 Issue : Games : Last Dance    

Issue : People : Telekinesis

Diablo 3 is a point and click adventure/operant conditioning chamber/current video game hype recipient/thing you are probably doing right now, that has been a long time in coming but now is here. It's also a game in the elite club of having all those things be true about it but if you play it then those things cease to matter by the time you reach the skeleton king.

It's also a game that people play as an event even though not many people know why it is an event in the first place. The idea of a "main," as in a game that a person plays constantly over the course of years doesn't seem to have much traction anymore, and Diablo was a series in the league of Street Fighter, Starcraft, WoW, and a handful of fps's where saying you have been playing them for the last ten years to another "hardcore video game peep" will get you vertical head nods of respect, but saying it to a "softcore video game peep" will get you horizontal head shakes of secondhand shame.

It's still confuses me, kinda like back in school when a person would say something like "Yeah I decided to major in geography and I am in grad school for it," And another person would respond by saying, "Well that's a silly major and a waste of money, and also, there is a graduate school for that major? Why?"

Or a dude would choose to play a female character in a fighting game and human dudes would give him shit for it as if the video game avatar wasn't just palette skin 3, and the choices you made in selecting it had super important bearings on everyday life and not on the statistics and abilities of the toon.

And yes I am saying all this because everybody is giving me shit for rolling a witch doctor, and yes maybe I only did it because the witch doctor is black and not because he plays like a WoW warlock, and yes maybe I do like watermelon an chicken a little more than I should, and...  Can I do me? Can I?!

The Protoculture Mixtape V.78 Issue : Games : Hell Rell