Issue : Games : Coruscate

Secret Neighbor is a game about intruders.

 Here are a few things you will no longer find in Oakland:

1. Menthol Cigarettes.
2. Black people.
3. Sports teams.
4. The Oakland you heard about.

Everyone wants me to produce a hot take on how it feels to lose the Golden State Warriors. First of all, im from Stockton, so why? Sure, I work in the Town, but live there?! You fucking kidding?

Do I look like I am made of money? Nobody in their right mind "lives" there, cept "Sillicons" and "Dot-Earthers." Everybody from Seminary to the North Pole knows they are just squatting till the rent wave hits and they gotta move in with their auntie in Tracy.

Second, The Golden State Warriors were never the Oakland Warriors. The players, yes. The team, no. The Oakland Raiders at least had the balls to claim the Town and look how that went. My Thesis. If you are from California and aren't used to things turning on you when the wind changes, well, you got lucky.

Everybody talks about city pride and im from here and there. It's such a bunch of horseshit. Bangers going on about, "This my block on Gawd, Four loc duce five generations deep." It's Berkshire Hathaway's block, Silly Billy.

Sportspeople are the fucking worst. I left San Diego the day the Chargers left. It was the first time I saw a whole town go through an awkward breakup. "Man, it's not the Chargers fault, It's these damn politicians that couldn't decide on a stadium. I wish em the best in LA." No, you don't.

I drive past Oracle on the 880 every day, looks like the same San Leandro trash heap it always did. I will probably never see the Chase center. Bet it's nice. Like, 15,000 dollar seats, like, a beer garden and shit. It doesn't smell like a layer of OG Kush, I bet.

I'm happy for the San Fransisco Warriors. Anyone that can afford to leave Oakland should, before the rest of the people that can afford to live in Oakland move in. Not even no good rolled taco or dim sum places there no more. It's all "Artisinal Flatbread" or some such shit.

Anyway, shouts to info, rip tb rip tc rip tall-t. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do the damn thing. We believe in you. Also Jobz.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Aerie

Issue : Games : Spoonerism

Moons of Madness is a game about licence.

YouTube got pretty big, didn't it? 400 hours of content a minute uploaded to 1.8 billion users who spend about a billion hours a day watching. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, the company that owns YouTube, Google, is the first. That must be nice.

The best part, it's all free. No lie, just log on and go crazy! Upload videos, share or comment on other peoples videos, subscribe to your favorite YouTuber's channels or make money by monetizing your own videos. No cost at all.

How does a company make money while providing a free service? Well, Senator, they run ads.

Mark made it sound simple to that dumb old man, cause to that dumb old man, advertisements are simple. They are the thirty-second interruptions in between his Law and Order Reruns. Ah, the halcyon days where you couldn't harass an end-user during the program.

These days, every self-respecting web hustler has gotta have their SERP up. SERP (Serch engine results pages) is when an advertiser pays YouTube to run an ad, and the advertiser pays youtube based on the number of views the ad gets or how many times it gets clicked on, which is PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

If that didn't net enough fish then you gotta move on to embedded advertisements. Those are the ads that play before a video begins, during the video, or after the video ends.

Like when you click on a video trailer of a movie you wanna watch and an ad with the trailer of the movie plays before the video trailer of the movie plays. But also just to be sure a banner advertisement neds to run in between the pre-video ad, intermission video ad, and link-box ad at the end.

Oh, and be sure to make the way to close the banner ad hella small, that way the end-user is either too frustrated to close it, or missed the checkbox and is sent to the advertisers' page, easy money.

And that is just dermatology digital marketing, surface level. It goes way deeper. But I mean, that's cool because it all makes the service free.

How do content creators make money from YouTube? Well, YouTube shares the revenue it generates from advertisers with its community of content creators hahahahaha nah im just fucking with you, they run ads.

So there you go, that is how when you click on a video you get served a pre-advertisement for a Google Pixel, a banner advertisement for some MLM, content containing an advertisement for Squarespace (It's always Squarespace), an intermission advertisement for a local couch store, and a link at the end for some dealers choice situation.

I don't blame the content creators. It's the scariest thing in the world to put yourself out there like that. To have people engaging with you must feel amazing. To be validated by your community, family, friends, must be edifying.

Then to have some flannel shirt invite you to the YouTube compound for a "lunch"! To have some other flannel shirts send you a super formal looking email saying they want to "partner" with you as the voice of [Insert community here].

All you have to do is...

Look, the product YouTube and Google sell are their users. But you already know that. Content creators are users, too. Just... Just be careful with all that, don't sell the act before you finished refining your act. Ok?

Oh, and nobody told me Moons of Madness is like, really, really, on that Lovecraftian shit, I noped the fuck out real fast. Not me, sir, you looking for that other one with that horseshit. Not that I'm scared, I just don't feel like playing it right now. It's dope tho.

Shout's to info. rip Tb rip Tc rip Tall-T. love is wise, hatred is foolish, get out there and do great things. We believe in you. also jobs.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Noachian

Issue : Games : Knackered

Disco Elysium is a game about pathing.

It's weird to hear people talk about surveillance states like they ain't into it. "Facial recognition and the internet tracking me, I can't take this!"

Alright.

They say a person's home is their castle. Which makes the land around it their kingdom, I suppose. So it's funny that the same people that don't want monolith industries like the guv'ment or an internet company tracking them are perfectly fine installing tracking devices that record anyone coming near their domain.

Home security cameras have finally entered the point where the price has gone down and production has gone up. Everybody has some version of one now. Ring, Nest, SimpliSafe, ADT. You can get them at Cosco. Well, you can get anything at Cosco. Also, shouts to Cosco Polish dogs, I don't care how the rest of the world is going, I fully cosign Cosco Pizza and Polish dogs, they are doing gods work.

Anyway, people can watch their dogs ripping up the blankets on their cell phone while at work. People can sit inside the home while the delivery guy is outside delivering the pack of granola bars they were too lazy to put on pants for. And maybe, just maybe, people can catch a criminal in the act and release that video to a social network where it will go viral.

Here is the thing. I don't have anything against installing a home security camera where you lay your head at, where your kids be, or any of that. This world is bare dangerous, take steps. But the idea that the government or a private company wouldn't be on the same shit is laughable. That imaginary bad guy you are worried about, also known as the neighbor that you think stole your dog, to the government and business, that is you.

Cameras and guns are basically the same things. Weapons of intention. You can grab a camera in hopes to prevent, you can grab a gun with the best of intentions, but as most people who have held a gun will tell you, it only got one use.

The one thing a gun has on a camera at the moment is that a gun can't be hacked as easily. As in, a third party couldn't just bypass the owner and use a gun in that person's hand. A home security camera jacked into the internet tho?

Elanor Everet said, "For safety is not a gadget but a state of mind." She right, for sure, but it also sounds like she ain't live in the hood. Security is currency when safety is threatened. An the bill don't come till late. Such is life.

What was I talking about before? Oh, Disco Elysium!! Best cRPG I have played in a long time, no cap. I am legit having fun with this one, it's different. You should check it out if you are into boring games like me.   

Also shouts to info, rip Tb rip TC rip Tall-T. Love is wise hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things, we believe in you. Also Jobs.

The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Exhaust