Note: if this drama looks familiar, it is because it's an expanded version of a write-up I did in a Hobby Scuffles thread when aspects of this drama were first breaking. Individual webcomics linked in this write-up were generally chosen for popularity and visibility, including being prominently featured on the front or explore pages of webcomic hosting sites.

Background Information

Webcomics are comics published on the internet, and they can come in an almost infinite variety of genres, styles, topics, and lengths. The people who create them also have a wide variety: webcartoonists range from young teens learning how to draw, to dedicated hobbyists making fan comics, to professional artists with publishing deals for print editions. The typical webcomic is serialized a page-at-a-time in formats either inspired by newspaper strips (example: Penny Arcade) or individual pages of print comic books (example: Gunnerkrigg Court). Recently on the English-speaking internet a new form first popularized by the Korean app WEBTOON has become common: mobile-friendly "vertical scroll" comics that update as "episodes" of panels readers scroll through rather than individual pages (example: Lore Olympus). [Yes, this boring minutiae about webcomic formats is a factor in the drama later]
Webcomic Hosting Sites are websites that allow users to publish their own webcomics, and give readers tools to discover, follow, and comment on webcomics hosted by the platform. While many webcomics are hosted on their own stand-alone websites, creators that choose webcomic hosting sites prefer them for their low barrier to entry, access to a existing community of potential readers, and because they're typically free to use. Because webcomic hosting sites are so easy to get started with, they can have a reputation for being places where newbie webcomic creators first start out before "graduating" to their own websites.
Smack Jeeves is a webcomic hosting site founded in 2005 by Admin. When Smack Jeeves was first founded, it gained a reputation for hosting video game humor comics, especially sprite comics made with assets ripped from video games. Later in the late 2000s and early 2010s Smack Jeeves went through a renaissance and became known as a good all-around webcomics platform. As a member of the webcomics community, I would describe peak-popularity (early 2010s) Smack Jeeves as the "DeviantArt of webcomics": it had a lot of users, you could find/post about anything there (but some things were way more popular than others, most infamously yaoi), the quality varied wildly from "amazing" to "are you trolling me?", and the userbase trended on the younger and more hobbyist/less professional side of webcomics. The archives of a tumblr active in this period called SmackJeeves Confessions can give you greater insight into all the dramas of the Smack Jeeves community.

The Twilight Years

Imagine it's 2018, and the landscape of webcomics has changed radically from when Smack Jeeves was first founded. Webcomics are no longer a world consisting of solely scrappy self-publishers and hobbyists; but are increasingly a way for artists to launch their careers, and for publishers and media corporations to find new IPs. Corporate-backed webcomic hosts like WEBTOON and Tapas have taken over the market with their mobile-friendly apps and monetization schemes that promise webcartoonists things like slices of ad revenue or opportunities to win webcomic publishing contracts. But Smack Jeeves persists long past its peak with a smaller-but-dedicated user base, and even is still commonly recommended to new comic creators looking for a webcomic hosting platform. What does Smack Jeeves, a website that looks and feels like an old internet relic, have that keeps it relevant against modern, mobile-friendly, monetization-ready hosts like WEBTOON and Tapas?
Customization Options: Smack Jeeves offers a pretty robust ability to customize your webcomic's appearance. You can choose from multiple premade layouts, customize them, insert your own code, and even make your own sub-pages for things like character bios and fanart galleries (examples: Beyond the Ordinary, Cafe Suada). This makes hosting your webcomic on Smack Jeeves more like having your own custom-made stand-alone website, compared to WEBTOON and Tapas which force all users into the same layout with limited customization opportunities outside of icons and blurbs (WEBTOON example, Tapas example).
Page Format: Unlike WEBTOON and Tapas which are primarily geared towards vertical scroll comics and consider each update its own "episode" with no organizational options beyond that, Smack Jeeves is designed for one-page-at-a-time updates and allows users to organize their pages into individual chapters, appealing to webcartoonists that prefer the classic "you're reading a print comic...but online!" format.
Community: As Smack Jeeves has been around since 2005, users have built up their own unique community across years of forum threads and comment sections, including readerships for their comics. Many users stay loyal to Smack Jeeves because of this long standing community.
Independence: Webcomics have always had a strong strain of independent, I'd-rather-self-publish-than-give-up-any-rights thinking inherited from the print indie comics community, meaning that the entrance of larger corporations into webcomics publishing was met with suspicion by some. These webcartoonists were concerned these corporate funded platforms would do things like insert clauses into their user agreements that take away intellectual property rights from unsuspecting creators, or use their algorithms and editorial departments to promote comics that fit their "corporate vision" at expense of others. These fears aren't entirely unfounded: in 2017 Tapas got into hot water by inserting a right-of-first-refusal clause into their user agreement that made them sound like an IP farm, and it only takes a quick look at WEBTOON's Originals page to see that there's some striking similarities to the comics WEBTOON chooses to offer publishing deals that could fuel these suspicions. On the other hand, Smack Jeeves is owned and operated by a single person (the aforementioned Admin), financially supported by ad revenue and paid accounts with special features rather than corporate cash. Admin, as a single person you could trust rather than a faceless corporation, is considered unlikely to do anything to jeopardize the independence of the webcomics hosted on Smack Jeeves by parts of the DIY-or-DIE crowd.

The Sale

In September of 2018, Admin posted on the Smack Jeeves forums to announce that Smack Jeeves had been acquired by NHN Global, the US branch of the Korean mobile entertainment company NHN that also owns a vertical scroll webcomics site operating in Asia called Comico. In the post Admin explains that the sale was motivated by both by his own difficulties single-handedly keeping Smack Jeeves running while dealing with chronic health issues, and the acknowledgement that Smack Jeeves couldn't truly compete with the new corporate-backed platforms due to a lack of funds. Admin is hopeful that NHN Global's investment will result in a brighter future for Smack Jeeves, with more employees creating more features while retaining what makes the platform special like full customization and creator independence. The forum replies are mixed but overall cautiously optimistic, with many hoping that Smack Jeeves' unique community and features will continue despite the sale. (spoilers: this will all seem deeply and bitterly ironic later)
From here, things are pretty quiet at Smack Jeeves for the rest of 2018 and most of 2019: job ads for new employees are posted, a new comic uploader is released in December 2019, and there's some chatter about site usability testing. Smack Jeeves' social media accounts stop getting updated during 2019 and I don't believe Admin made any more forum posts in 2019 either. So there's not much to show, good or bad, for NHN Global's acquisition of Smack Jeeves...until the Smack Jeeves Renewal Announcement is posted in November 2019.

The Redesign

The Renewal Announcement promises a redesigned look for Smack Jeeves launching on December 3rd 2019 and a new mobile app in January 2020. Some parts of the redesign's preview look good, like a better mobile site and the ability to choose between single page and vertical scroll format for your comic, but other parts of it look not so good...like the removal of custom layouts and the forums, the things that make Smack Jeeves unique. And no one from the community appears to have been consulted or given a heads-up about these changes, with the users that pay yearly subscriptions for special features not getting any kind of warning before those special features became defunct being the cherry on top of this sundae of userbase disrespect.
Already the community is in an uproar: forum posts appear with titles like "RIP Smack Jeeves" (sadly missing from the Wayback Machine) and plenty of Smack Jeeves users take to social media to complain. I can find very little evidence that anyone was actively hopeful/excited about the redesign rather than resignedly accepting of it, but I did find someone wondering about "what VC firm is going all in on borderline defunct webcomic hosting" which was pretty funny.
And then the redesigned Smack Jeeves was released, and even the most cynical of webcartoonists were not prepared for how truly awful it was.
The tl;dr is that the redesign was even worse and even more broken than the renewal announcement led anyone to expect. WebComicNetwork has a pretty comprehensive overview of all the changes made, features removed, and bugs introduced by the redesign; below I've featured some highlights.
Webcomic layouts: remember when I told you that one of Smack Jeeves's biggest selling points was the ability to create a custom layout for your comic? That feature is totally gone and with it all the users' custom coding and sub-pages, replaced with a half-rate WEBTOON/Tapas clone layout with little customization options. The old page organization systems are gone, and every page is now its own chapter, confusingly making Smack Jeeves comics look way longer than they actually are. Instead of getting to choose between single page and vertical scroll formats as promised by the Renewal Announcement, all comics are now vertical scroll. To meet new standardized page dimensions, old comic images are squashed and squished in awkward ways.
Monetization: one of the things Admin promised in the sale announcement was that monetization options for webcartoonists would be added to Smack Jeeves, and monetization sure did happen...but not in a way that benefits any Smack Jeeves creators. English/Spanish translations of Comico webcomics are now featured prominently as "Exclusives" which can be read through microtransactions. Unlike competing vertical scroll platforms there's no route for Smack Jeeves users to get their comics featured as "Exclusives" or way for them to gate anything behind microtransactions to earn income...but there's now a like button for each comic update labeled as "please support!" which confuses people because that language implies financial support on many platforms, a bunch of free "welcome gifts" consisting of chapters of "Exclusive" comics clogging up everyone's inbox, and the complete disappearance of the previous feature of Patreon integration.
Bugs: the new Smack Jeeves website is extremely buggy. All previous Smack Jeeves links are broken and redirect to the front page. Reports of whole comics randomly disappearing from the site surface on social media. Some people can't log into their accounts or navigate to their own comics. The search engine is totally broken and doesn't return useful results. Some pages and images don't even load. In short, it's a mess.
Once again only some of the many issues introduced with the redesign, with other issues including the closure of the forums, inability to create hyperlinks, reformatted comments sections, removal of RSS feeds, and the UX design itself drawing their own ire. And the coding of the new Smack Jeeves appears to be ripped straight from Comico's site, showing how little whoever implemented it cared about retaining Smack Jeeves' previous special features.
The community reaction to the redesign becomes even more negative after its release. Some webcartoonists snark the changes in twitter threads , and others write sad and frustrated blog posts about how the redesign essentially destroyed their webcomic's archives. Wether they're laughing about the absurdity of the situation or genuinely expressing sadness and anger at a unique website with years of community and art making behind it screwed up for this; all across the internet the webcomics community is united in truly hating the Smack Jeeves redesign and NHN Global for it.
The ultimate consequence of this botched redesign was an immediate mass exodus away from Smack Jeeves. Forum threads discussing the redesign and welcoming "Smack Jeeves Refugees" pop up on webcomics hosts Comic Fury and Tapas, the webcomics social media sphere fills up with announcements of Smack Jeeves comics relocating, and many then-active Smack Jeeves comics update for the last time to point readers to their new URL. My understanding is that anyone that stuck around after this saw significantly reduced traffic on their comics throughout 2020, meaning that the readers left in addition to the webcartoonists.

The Closure

As far as I can tell, after the redesign NHN Global made exactly two notable changes to Smack Jeeves: increased the pixel size of images you could upload in December 2019, and for some months of 2020 had the whole of the EU region locked out of Smack Jeeves so the site wouldn't have to comply with GDPR (yikes!!!). I do not believe any of the promised redesign features missing at launch or any of the bugs introduced to the website were ever addressed by NHN Global.
And then on November 1st 2020 a post vaguely labeled "Important Site Update" appeared buried at the bottom of the news section of Smack Jeeves announcing that the website was shutting down on December 31st 2020, barely more than a year after the redesign was released.
I would characterize the overall reaction from the webcomics community that I saw as "disappointed but not surprised". Many saw this coming as soon as the disastrous redesign caused the initial max exodus of users. As news spread of the impending closure, Smack Jeeves was eulogized by the webcomics community for both its place in webcomics history and the personal histories of many webcartoonists that once used the platform. Some came together to bitterly joke about what happened on that platform. And still others who hadn't already left Smack Jeeves scrambled to find new webcomic hosting solutions before time ran out.
But there's another wrinkle to this story...on the page announcing the closure you may have noticed the line telling creators interested in publishing their work on something called "Pocket Comics" to contact a NHN email address. You may also notice that the main Smack Jeeves page has a big banner advertising Pocket Comics, "our new app for exclusive titles", that when clicked on leads to comico.io...Comico being the other webcomics platform owned by NHN. What's going on here?
Well, it looks like NHN may have killed Smack Jeeves so they could re-launch their webcomics platform as Pocket Comics. Unfortunately the original tweet I saw that broke this down is deleted and unavailable on the Wayback Machine, but NHN appears to have a history of purchasing and then tanking online comic platforms and then re-branding them as a way to avoid previous negative impressions. This is something that Comico has already gone through, hence why the Comico website leads to Pocket Comics as well. According to the Webcomic Library, Pocket Comics only hosts former Comico comics and no Smack Jeeves comics, sad news for anyone hoping the Smack Jeeves archives would be preserved on Pocket Comics post-shutdown.
I have also seen other more conspiratorial-minded takes on why this happened to Smack Jeeves float around the webcomics community, including that Smack Jeeves was purposefully shut down to further cement the vertical scroll format as the standard by killing off a notable host of competing formats, or that NHN purposefully buys and tanks webcomics platforms to be a thorn in the side to Naver (the Korean owners of WEBTOON). The Duck Webcomics* assertion is, based on their own experience with NHN trying to purchase them, that NHN's intention was to use Smack Jeeves' user data for marketing purposes and to drive readers to their corporate-owned comics, with no regard for the pre-existing community and webcomics.
*(people reading webcomics in the early 2000s may remember this site as Drunk Duck)

The Final Days

At the time of writing this, at the end of December 2020, Smack Jeeves remains in a sad state: the half-broken website aggressively advertises Pocket Comics at you while almost every original Smack Jeeves comic on the front page has long since stopped updating, many ending with moving notices. Looking through recently updated comics gets you weird entries for things like dental practices and Chinese conveyor belt factories likely created by some malfunctioning bot rather than still-updating comics. Social media searches for Smack Jeeves turn up little but frustrated former users, readers begging webcartoonists to migrate their old webcomics to new hosts, and data hoarders. This website is truly going out with a whimper.
For anyone that once hosted a comic on Smack Jeeves, this is your last chance to save it for posterity by going to the comic management page and hitting download to get a zip of all your data (source) or by migrating it to another webcomics host (there's a helpful guide for doing this on Comic Fury).
For anyone that used to read comics on Smack Jeeves, there's still a few days left to revisit and re-read your old favorites before NHN global pulls the final plug on 15 years of webcomics history. Here's a moment of silence for every c. 2005 sprite comic made by bored middle schoolers in computer class, every c. 2012 yaoi comic abandoned halfway through by its creator, every shaky beginning webcartoonist that went on to become a professional, and the few poor souls that still actively upload their comics onto Smack Jeeves; blissfully unaware of the incoming shutdown because of how poorly it was communicated--soon to be gone but not forgotten.

Some coworkers just want to watch the board burn

Reflections on the 1992 Chuck E. Cheese Ball Pit Incident

1992, some nondescript suburban city in the mid-Atlantic region of the east coast.
I was sixteen years old at the time. I’d recently landed the esteemed job of “dish boy” at the local Chuck E. Cheese franchise. At the time, ball pits were still very much a thing.
They’re calling 2020 “The Year the Ball Pit Died.” Actually, that’s just what I’m calling it. But I don’t see a resurgence of ball pits taking place after the coronavirus clears up. I say good riddance for a couple of reasons. First, ball pits are fucking disgusting, if you didn’t know that already. Second –– well, let me give you a bit more background, then it will all make a lot more sense. Maybe with enough context, you’ll believe what happened to me.
Back to ‘92. As a sixteen-year-old Chuck E. Cheese dish boy, part of my job was to “clean the pit.” At the end of every month, we’d pull all the balls out, put them on massive tarps, spray them with disinfectant, then pile them back in. It took hours. You wouldn’t believe the type of shit we found at the bottom of the pit. Cheap toys kids had won in the arcade, beloved blankets belonging to little girls and boys, lost forever in the sea of plastic, and moldy slices of pizza that had been there for weeks, just to name a few treasures.
Because it took so much effort to take out the balls, we did preventative maintenance. After closing every night, I got sent into the danger zone with a bottle of OdoBan and a fresh roll of Bounty paper towels, with the express purpose of identifying “dirty balls” and “giving them a once over.” Despite the task sucking mightily, my fellow high school co-workers and I had some good laughs.
The manager of the franchise –– who also owned it –– reminded me a lot of Gustavo Fring from Breaking Bad. Not because he was Chilean (he wasn’t), nor because he owned a meth empire (he didn’t, at least not that I know of). But the manager had this crazy attention to detail and expectation for excellence. He would make his Chuck E. Cheese franchise the most successful of all time or die trying. He did die trying. Heart attack, ‘94. But that’s not the focus of this story, so let’s get back to it.
Ball pits, yeah. Disgusting and impossible to clean. Kids, faces smeared with grease and cheese, would dive into the fucker head first. I shit you not, one time I saw this kid standing on the edge of the pit and taking a piss right into the middle of the thing.
No bueno. Especially in 2020. Not a chance governors are signing off on that shit again.
You probably haven’t heard much about what I’m going to tell you. As I mentioned earlier, most people haven’t because it took place in ‘92 in a shithole, mid-Atlantic suburb. There was some brief press about what happened, a few urban legends about the dangers of letting your kids go near a ball pit (right alongside the ones about HIV-laced needles being put in the coin slot of public payphones), but eventually, the cops chalked what happened up to a standard abduction.
That was that. Kids started diving in headfirst all over again.
The kid who disappeared was named Miles Penrose. Eight years old. He was attending the birthday party of one of his friends. All their families were there, the moms chatting about their suburban existences, the dads pounding beer and talking about the glory days. The party started at around three o’clock, and they booked a roped off area until seven. Four hours of the kids going wild, slurping Coke, scarfing down pies as fast as the cooks could make them.
A little after four o’clock, Miles went missing. And his mom went ballistic. They shut down the restaurant, made sure everyone stayed inside, and the cops started taking statements. There were so many people there that the questioning went long past midnight. Miles’ mom continued melting down. His dad stared around angrily, accusing everyone in the restaurant with his eyes.
There’s a classic Hollywood plotline that you have 72 hours, three days, until your chances of finding whoever went missing winnow down to zilch. But Miles was long gone as soon as he went below the surface of the ball pit. And no one saw what happened but me.
I was busing tables when I saw a flash of movement, stopped, and looked through the ball pit area’s plastic windows. Miles had been standing alone in the pit, smiling. If he was actually friends with whoever’s birthday it was –– and not just a sympathy invite –– he sure as hell wasn’t one of the popular kids. Quiet looking type. Red hair. Goofy smile. Fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. But for the few seconds I saw him before he disappeared, I could tell he was a nice kid. Just gave off that vibe.
Suddenly, from all around Miles, pale arms reached up. Seven arms, exactly. The arms were so translucently pale that the veins stood out like dark blue extension cords. Miles’ expression changed to one of utter horror. Whatever was beneath the pit had grabbed onto him. I thought it was just other kids messing around at first. But the arms looked old, almost dead. Like they’d come from beyond the grave.
Miles started slipping below the surface of the pit. He was screaming. I could see his terrified expression through the plastic windows. But the other kids were screaming too, high on sugar and having the time of their lives. Nobody noticed when Miles went below completely. He was reaching out of the pit up toward some invisible life preserver that wasn’t there. Our eyes met for a second, then one of the hands reached up, covered his face, and yanked him violently beneath.
The only sign Miles had been there at all was a small disturbance in the pit, the balls trying to follow the source of whatever was pulling downward. Sort of like Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, grains of sand falling into a dark, gaping maw. But the pit was so stuffed with plastic balls that there was nowhere for them to go. They just rolled around on top of each other as Miles disappeared.
The kids carried on playing. I stumbled to the back of the restaurant with a plastic container full of dishes and started cleaning them, too terrified to tell anyone what actually happened.
Thirty minutes later, Miles’ mom noticed he was gone and went looking for him.
**\*
The cops questioned me, just like everyone else in the restaurant. I was the only one with a story worth considering.
“I saw him disappear into the ball pit.”
“Disappear?”
“Yeah, he disappeared.”
“What do you mean he disappeared?”
“There were seven hands, all around him. They reached from underneath, like they were coming up from a grave or something. Then they pulled him down.”
The cops looked at each other. I could tell they thought I was just some dumb kid being a pain in the ass.
“You watch a lot of horror movies, son?”
“Yeah, I do.”
It was the truth. I wasn’t going to lie to the cops. I’ve always loved horror movies.
“Horror movies about zombies, maybe? The living dead?”
“Why does it matter?”
“We’ll ask the questions, son.”
The managefranchise owner, the one who died two years later from a heart attack, came over.
“Is there a problem, officers?”
The cops shook their heads.
“No problem. Just taking statements from the young man here. But we’re finished.”
The franchise owner grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me aside.
“Get your ass back to the kitchen and clean the dishes.”
I hustled away, wanting to tell the cops more but knowing I’d missed my opportunity.
**\*
That was just the beginning of the night for me. The manager told me to call home and tell my parents I’d be helping empty the ball pit to look for signs of Miles. No one believed me that he’d disappeared into the pit, but the cops decided to empty the thing anyway.
Two hours later, after we got all of the balls out, I saw something strange. I’d never seen it before, even though I’d cleaned out that pit a half dozen times.
Built into the wood floor of the pit, past slices of rotten pizza and cheap plastic toys kids had won in the arcade, there was a trap door. Snagged on a rusty, protruding nail at the trap door’s edge, there was a coin purse. It was one of those fake kiddy wallets that moms give their sons and daughters on trips to places like Chuck E. Cheese so they don’t carry around a bunch of loose change in their pockets.
I looked closely at the coin purse to see that it was embroidered with a name:
Miles.
**\*
When I told the cops who were helping out about the trap door, they came over to take a look. The manager, huffing and puffing, shoved me out of the way. He looked ready to commit murder.
“What’s under the trap door?” one of the cops asked.
“Crawl space,” said the franchise owner. “No one goes down there anymore. We’ve long since tossed the stuff that had been stored under the floorboards, mostly trash and old tools. This building used to be a machine shop.”
The cops insisted on having a look. The unlucky guy who drew the short straw went underneath with a flashlight, but he didn’t find any sign of Miles. There was no exit point, either. The trap door led into the crawl space beneath the building, but nothing led out.
**\*
When all was said and done, they chalked Miles’ case up as a standard disappearance. Seventy-two hours passed. Then a week. Then a month. After six months, they stopped looking. Miles’ mom came to the restaurant every day, walking into the ball pit area and looking around for her lost son. On a couple of occasions, she pulled me aside, recognizing me as the one who’d said Miles had disappeared beneath the plastic balls.
After catching me talking to Miles’ mom for the third or fourth time, the manager told me to pack my shit and get out.
**\*
Twenty-eight years have passed since the day Miles Penrose disappeared at the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in the town I’ve long since left. I’m middle-aged now, forty-four. I’m twice divorced and have one kid I talk to, one who hates my guts. But let’s not get into that. The direction my life has gone is a bit of a sore subject.
Up until November of last year, 2019, I hadn’t thought about what happened to Miles for a decade or more. Life does that to you. Memory is weird. You only reserve mental space for the essential stuff. Looking back, it makes me sad that Miles’ memory wasn’t essential after a while, but that’s just the way things go.
So, November 2019. Right as the coronavirus was heating up, but not quite a state of emergency yet. Ball pits were still allowed, as was in-person dining. My friend, his wife, and I went to a fancy gala in the city. It was an art exhibit put on by this fancy pants auteur from Europe. $200 a ticket, but it was an all-you-can-eat lobster feed, so I was onboard.
Only when I walked in did I realize that the centerpiece of the exhibit was a giant ball pit. There were a bunch of white, plastic balls piled into a big above ground pool. Around the pool was a deck with the buffet and dining tables, everything built atop scaffolding covered in artificial turf, so it looked like a hillside.
Summer Vacation. That was the name of the exhibit. Funny timing, because it was winter, one of the coldest ones on record in the city I’d relocated to. Blizzards had been bombarding the city for weeks, and one was currently raging, covering the urban landscape in snow.
A lump rose in my throat when we got inside. I had avoided ball pits like the plague since what happened in ‘92. I insisted that we leave, but my friend and his wife reminded me that the tickets were nonrefundable. They had no idea about the trauma I’d experienced as a sixteen-year-old. It became the topic of conversation for the first part of dinner until we switched to talking about something else I can’t remember.
I watched, out of the corner of my eye, as person after person jumped into the pit. Moms and dads. Grandmas and grandpas. People were reliving their childhood, which I think was the point of the exhibit. There were kids there too, the sons and daughters of filthy rich patrons of the arts.
What happened next was almost exactly the same as what happened to Miles Penrose in ‘92. A little girl was standing in the pit by herself. Her name was Sarah Wallace. She was blonde-haired and rosy-cheeked, smiling in a state of complete and utter bliss as she watched people of all ages jump in.
Suddenly, from around her, pale arms protruded from the pit. Seven arms, exactly, streaked with veins so dark that they may as well have been black. Sarah screamed, but once again, no one heard her. People were too busy talking about art, screaming in jubilation, and chomping down all-you-can-eat lobster to notice.
I jumped up from my table and ran full speed, leaping into the pit where she’d gone under. I did my best to swim beneath the plastic balls, but they were too thick. I just slipped around, the mass of plastic preventing my progress.
I climbed out and noticed everyone who’d come to the gala was looking at me –– some with smiles, thinking I’d joined in on the fun, some with looks of terror that a 44-year-old man was flailing around like a crazy person. Sarah Wallace’s mom was scanning the area for her daughter. Our eyes met, she registered what had happened, and she began to scream.
**\*
The way it played out after that was eerily similar to the way it had happened in ‘92. Cops came. They questioned people. They questioned me thoroughly, given that I was the one who’d noticed Sarah was gone. They emptied the pit. But the difference between this time and ‘92 was that there was no trapdoor. The base of the pool was made of a solid piece of plastic.
**\*
The standard seventy-two hours passed, but I’d known the second Sarah disappeared into the pit that she was gone, just like Miles.
It was late on a Sunday. I was at my expensive downtown loft, alone. The loft is up on the third floor. There’s nothing outside –– no fire escape, no nothing. If you open the window and step out, you’re falling onto hard concrete forty feet below.
That night I’d been busy researching the history of ball pits, searching Google’s archives for news of disappearances at McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese, and Burger King restaurants throughout the 90s. But I was coming up short.
Then, all of a sudden, the power went out. I didn’t think much of it. The blizzard, raging for weeks, had caused the power to go out a bunch of times already.
The apartment cloaked in darkness, I walked to my bedroom thinking about Sarah Wallace. With the combination of heat blasting inside my apartment and cold air hitting the glass from the outside, there was thick condensation on all the windows. I got into bed despite knowing that sleep was a long way off. It had been hard to come by since what happened three days earlier at the art gala.
Something terrifying happened then. I noticed movement outside my bedroom window, obscured by the condensation. But it wasn’t physically possible. There was no fire escape. It was a straight drop, forty feet to the street below. Sure, window cleaners came once every six months, but it was almost midnight, and they’d already come the previous week.
I got up from my bed and walked to the window to investigate the movement. When I got to the window, there was a massive BANG, like a hand had slapped the other side. The glass rattled. I stumbled back into my bed, forced to take a seat on the edge.
I saw seven hands appear on the other side of the window. They began tracing something in the condensation. But that wasn’t possible either. They were on the wrong side of the glass. The condensation was on the inside.
Still, the tracing continued. My heart jackhammered in my chest. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, there was a message.
“I will stop sniffing around like a cheese-hungry rat.”
__ YES __ NO
The message about me being a cheese hungry rat –– the connection to the 1992 Chuck E. Cheese ball pit incident –– whatever this paranormal entity was, it was the same one from all those years ago. The same one that had taken Miles Penrose in ‘92 and Sarah Wallace, three days before. I got up, taking slow steps toward the window. The room had become freezing cold, but the message traced in the condensation remained.
Part of me wanted to keep searching for Miles and Sarah, to find the truth about what happened to them. I wanted to keep researching disappearances at other ball pits, if there had been any.
But being as terrified as I was –– and I hate myself for it now –– I traced a giant X next to “YES.”
Suddenly, seven ghostly hands reached up from the floor inside the apartment, planting themselves on the window with another BANG. They began rubbing the window in circles, the wet glass squeaking as they did.
I stumbled back into the bed again, forced to take another seat. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them a minute later, the message was gone. So too was the condensation. Outside, it was snowing as hard as it had been for weeks. There was nothing on the other side of the glass. No pale hands attached to vein-streaked arms were reaching up from the floor.
I was alone in the apartment –– just me, the memory of Miles and Sarah, and an overwhelming sense of guilt that I decided to give up on their memory.
**\*
If 2020 is truly “The Year the Ball Pit Died,” I’m grateful. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But I hope for the sake of kids everywhere that I’m right.
[WCD]

My list of gripes and suggestions after 60 hours

Just a big ranty list of notes I scribbled down after the first playthrough on PC. Edits will be ongoing. Apologies for the formatting being trash on mobile, I don't know what I'm doing.
Should also mention I like this thing enough to probably do at least another 60 hrs.
My Rig:

-AMD Ryzen 3900X -nVidia 3070, drivers are most recent -32GB RAM -2TB SSD, game is installed on it and it is the C:\

Performance:

-Performance with my med-high RTX settings hovers around 50-65 fps, assuming the fps bug isn't happening. -I would say CTD has been very rare. When CTD did occur I dialed back my 3070 overclock gradually and they seem to not happen at all now.

===Gripes===
Graphics & Atmosphere

-Puddles: almost all puddles don't make noise, the only ones I've seen that do are the ones where you meet Stout. I'm guessing this is because those are permanent and the rest come from rain. Driving through the rain puddles, having a splash, and a short wet tire trail would be nice. -Water: no sound or splash when items, NPCs or vehicles hit water. This made the 'car off the cliff funeral' quest have a bit of a lackluster sad ending. Just a silent, distant, explosion poof that glitchily lasted half a second. -Cyberware: Only an animation for the first two. After that it's just in the menu and there are no satisfying crunching or cutting noises where there should be. -Parking: there are weirdly few parking spots, it wouldn't be that noticeable except that the AI doesn't know how to drive around your pulled over car so it just stacks up traffic behind it. -Eating: there are no sounds or animations for drinking or eating, not even a chomp or glug noise in the inventory screen. -Darkness: RTX makes it so dark inside some locations that it would be REALLY NICE to have a flashlight or night vision headwear or cyberware.

Character Customization

-Life paths are limited and it really feels like Streetkid is the only fleshed out one, and the Corpo and Nomad starts were just sort of glued on. Streetkid feels like the only story. -There is no way to customize your character after the creation screen other than hand/arm cyberware changes. -Character model customization is pretty limited currently. You are stuck with a choice of three 'heads' and can only change a few features to a few set options from there. -All the genital stuff was pointless marketing and they could just take it out to avoid the clipping bugs for all I care at this point. Unless they tie it in to a DLC or expansion it will never show up in anything so what's the point? -Cyberware and tattoos are extremely limited in choice and this is pretty surprising and disappointing. -Most hair options and beard options don't look great, some of this due to 'tall head' on the head options. -Almost all beards don't meet with the hair properly and the colors are different. this was a problem in the Sims 2 I believe.

Weapons

-Ammo are too plentiful, I've only ever run out on Very Hard and I never crafted any -Grenades are too plentiful, I had hundreds by midgame without crafting -If grenades were less plentiful, perhaps they should sell for more than 2 or 3 eddies? -Scopes have weird stats that don't seem to do anything, ADS time in fractions of a percent and Range in units unknown -I don't see any immediately obvious way to tell which module effects do not stack. I heard %crit does not stack. -The skill that lets you throw knives seems like garbage as a single throw destroys a knife worth hundreds. No Idea why I would take this anyways -unless- you don't need blade skill to boost it. If you do it would seem simpler to just use silenced pistols which can easily one-shot anyways. -Item cards show very little info on the gun. You don't know the following by looking at the card: -Auto or Semi? -Silenced by default or no? (some of the Grads seem to be?) -Magazine size -Accuracy & recoil -Range -ADS time (Should be related to weight in my opinion)

Armor & Clothing

-Characters end up looking like clowns unless you ignore stats HEAVILY, see suggestions below in Suggestions section -I'm not sure if armor does anything. Does anyone know? I noticed I was getting one-shotted a lot, made new armor stacked with Armadillo. No change. Maybe I'm receiving elemental damage that bypasses armor but I really don't know.

Other Items

-Why are so many Junk items $3 or $750??? It's just weird. -Would be nice if there were more misc items that actually did things, like the cat food apparently does

Crafting

-Upgrading is expensive and not too effective -Rarely need to craft anything because you collect so many drops and weapons aren't particularly unique

Crime & Wanted System

-Police only exist in clusters standing around crime scenes OR when they spawn on top of you after gaining 1 wanted level. They spawn so close you see them appear on the mini-map and at times I've seen them materialize right in front of me maybe 30 feet away. -No police cars in traffic at all -Crimes don't need to be 'witnessed' in any way. It is simply this: if you brandish too long at an NPC, or kill an NPC, NCPD teleports within 30 feet of you in about 10 seconds max. -No bounties from NCPD or gangs or corps -It feels especially weird that you have some many quests that should have corps sending assassins after you instantly but nothing happens -Wanted stars accumulate ridiculously fast.

Fighting

-Enemy AI could flank a touch more, but otherwise I think they're fine: Snipers hide and snipe, melee charge you, Netrunners hack and hide, the rest take cover and shoot/grenade you. -Incoming damage -I'm not sure if there is a way to see you are taking certain damage types quickly -It's hard to see if armor is doing anything for you -Healing: I never felt the need to use any healing item other than the lvl 1 maxdoc. 40% is too much for the starter healing item, and you get so many that again, I had hundreds by midgame without crafting -Stamina doesn't matter, generally, except when boxing -You have way too much stamina and/or running and dodging doesn't eat up enough of it. with Body 3 I can still run a long ways and never run out in a normal gunfight. This makes a whole bunch of foods and Chems pointless for all but melee characters. Maybe the heavy machine guns and sniper rifles should eat up a bit of stamina? Maybe if you run out of stamina you can't shoot them accurately while standing or something?

Stealth

-Disable camera & turret quickhacks -Currently, you can shut off almost any camera and turret from far away and never have to really deal with them and you barely lose any RAM for it and this is for ANY CHARACTER that has a cyberdeck, not just hacking specialists -Alert mode -Alert mode is way too passive. The AI just seems to stand in place or wander a few feet, not actively searching. This means that shooting enemies and cameras with a silenced weapon has basically no downside and you can just pick apart the whole base piecemeal. -Vision cones -The vision cones on the mini map don't reflect the enemy vision accurately. They seem to have a shorter range peripheral vision cone as well. This is really cool, but it makes the vision cones on the mini-map a bit of a lie. (See suggestions) -hiding bodies kills them? Why? I get if you stuff them in a freezer, but why does putting them in a trash bin kill them? I noticed this on one of the gigs that has an optional objective for no Militech deaths. Bug? Hard to tell because whether or not you kill anyone ONLY seems to matter for these few quests and whether or not you collect the extra bounty amount.

"Hacking"

-Mostly just composed of rare stat checks and the breach minigame -Terminals are generally only guarded by one NPC and let you do a few things: -Remote view through cameras (sometimes not all of them??) -Shut off attached cameras -Shut off attached turrets -read a few short emails, usually with the same few mixed in spam messages, usually the same emails repeat through the base. -View the same tiny text web pages -Access points seem to be glorified loot crates with the same breach puzzle repeated hundreds of times through the game. -on Access Points all three goal levels are all just the same loot, they don't do anything else or have any variety. -Occasionally you'll have to do the breach minigame on other things but it seems to be a one-off thing.

===Bugs and Shortcuts===
Texture and model loading

-Something big is wrong with how the game loads and tracks resources -It seems to make up NPCs on the fly rather than keeping any track of them like any other open world game. Sometimes if you look back and forth, entirely different NPCs and cars spawn. -Also when you look back and forth, even on a 3000 series card, you can see the texture level of detail ramping up very slowly. -Glitches on animated posters/billboards

FPS Bug

-Random times, could be a few minutes, could be hours, framerate will drop by a good 20 fps and stay that way until the game is restarted -Some say memory or CPU 'leak' issue, not sure. Can verify it's happening though on my AMD 3900X. -I 'feel' like maybe the FPS bug is something with DLSS running at a different setting than you told it to in the back end.

Keybinds & Controls

-There are way too many unbindable keys in the game keybind interface. something like half the actual controls that exist do not appear in there. You can access them in the Steam\steamapps\common\Cyberpunk 2077\r6\config folder .xml files. -There are also wholly missing controls like a single button to holsteempty hands (you can double tap alt by default) or a button modifier to walk at the NPC walk speed. -At least pre 1.05 you couldn't use Autohotkey for rebinds, haven't tested 1.05 -Double tap to dodge is not a great default to have when there is already a single button dodge modifier in the config files that you can enable with some effort. double tap on a PC just results in a lot of scooting forwards off of cliffs. -I really don't like the way the game seizes your controls during certain quest NPC interactions. You may notice you can't crouch or sprint, sometimes it cranks down your FOV. if you were already crouching when the interaction started you are stuck crouching until the first line of dialogue ends.

File size limit bug at 8mb

-Crafting too much bloats the file -Possibly other things not culling from the file properly, but really, there just shouldn't be such a low limit in a game that needs to keep track of so many things

AI shortcuts

-Other than enemies in combat, there seems to be basically zero AI other than the following -NPC standing around in place -NPC zombie wander for a short distance -NPC car drive on set short path that it cannot diverge from in any way -Enemy NPC patrol (bases only seems like) -Enemies and police don't seem to have 'pursuit' AI, if you run about 50 feet away, they more or less give up like an MMO mob

Other

-Loot Bags Floating: when you take a un-looted body to a container and hide it, the bag holding their equipment floats at head level. This doesn't happen if you do the move that kills and puts them directly in the container, then the bag is on the ground -Photo mode: taking a photo seems to mess with the brightness in the photo mode. Doesn't seem like it changes anything in the settings it just gets brighter or darker for some unknown reason and then stays that way for the rest of that photo mode session. -Mirrors: V is bald when you look in the mirror with headwear on. Should either show you without face and headgear or show you with them on. FPS also dies hard for some reason when using mirrors which is strange because nothing is really moving and the live action reflections with RTX seem fine. Would be nice if your character appeared in RTX reflections but it probably doesn't to hid the bizarre things the character model does like your body splitting when you aim. -Calling vehicle button makes your vehicle explode into existence, ignoring NPC vehicles. Frequently damages your vehicle -Vendors only spawn Legendary items the first time you talk to them and after that they're gone forever

===Suggestions/Changes===
Small
Weapons & Ammo

-There should be muzzle attachments other than suppressors, it looks like there used to be compensators, some are still in the game with the names missing and are worth 0 eddies. -Sniper scopes should have different zoom levels and there should be ones with adjustable zoom. I have a feeling this was disabled to hide 2d sprite cars and such. as it stands though, sniper rifles barely see farther than any other weapon. -There could be more ammo types for guns, would add incentive for crafting and you'd actually run out of them. Would make more sense than the weapons having these traits, which seems pretty 'Borderlands'. -Explosive, chemical rounds etc -Could be armor piercing but I can't even tell if they have armor TBH

Alert Mode

-Spawn extra enemies if alert is triggered -Enemy alert AI should have a few variants and some enemies should wander larger distances, searching -Alert mode could increase vision distances and/or reduce discovery time when they are spotting you

Mini Map

-Remove vision cones on the mini map, they aren't accurate anyways, replace enemies on mini map with just a facing direction arrow for each enemy. -equipment, scopes, or cyberware could add levels of accuracy to the enemies on the minimap: -only scanned enemies, just facing arrow -only scanned enemies, vision arc -only scanned enemies, vision arc and range -all enemies, vision arc and range

Cyberware

-More options for cyberware, there are far too few and once you have a full set it's like that system barely needs touched. Last half of the game the only thing I did was toggle whether or not I had the magic non-lethal eye mod turned on. -More cyberware should have visible differences on the character model -Negatives for installing a ton of cyberware -More stealth cyberware, perhaps one that gives you vision cones, on that populates unmarked enemies on the map and only show them? -Could be levelled too, example low level just shows the vision arc, high level shows the full coverage -Leg Mods for run speed, sprint speed, dodge distance, dodge stamina effect

Quickhacks

-Distract enemy, disable camera, and disable turret are too cheap and effective to be the built-ins you don't need a daemon for. I'm not sure why these and distract are built-in, they are the most powerful ones in the game for stealth. -Disabling with the default disable camera/turret quickhack should cause the same alert state that shooting a camera does. the camera went dark. At least then you'd have some reason not to do it and actually have to go to a terminal. -You could have a higher level, much more RAM costly one that does it without the alert (say it loops the feed or something) -lvl 1 ping and breach maybe should be the only slotless ones, unless more are added. -Maybe there could be a analyze one that gives you the weaknesses and such instead of that just coming free with the scan view?

Street Cred

-Street cred seems pointless; it's directly tied to things that give you normal experience and only seems to be used to gate off buying gear -Could affect discounts at vendors? -Other ideas?

Character Customization

-Color sliders instead of few set colors. don't give us the sims 4 excuse, this sets a color on a single character you almost never see.

Non-lethal

-Remove the nonlethal eye cyberware mod, it makes non-lethal missions trivial -Remove the nonlethal weapon mod, or at least make it Greatly reduce the weapon damage output (and maybe have an electric effect?) -If there were any kind of faction reputation, perhaps killing members should factor in to it?

Swimming

-Default oxygen gauge gives you way too much time and should be shorter. see no reason to have gear that boosts it.

Medium
Vehicle Damage

-Would be nice if the damage wasn't only cosmetic: blown tires, missing door causes more driver hits, etc -The need to take the car somewhere to repair it or at minimum, pay to repair in the summoning menu, as adding garages to the map might be not feasible

Weapon Mods

-Power Weapon scope mod that makes the 2nd and 3rd zoom level an "extrapolated" view from the point of first and second reflection, showing where our bouncing rounds will go. Could utilize the same blur effect as the BD edit mode. -Tech Weapon mods that reduce shake during charging, speeds up charging, increases penetration (currently seems to have infinite) -Magazine size mods, reload speed mods -Compensators / Muzzle brakes

Armor slot for hands

-Gloves, gauntlets, claws, those metal finger things Evelyn has, etc. Could be just cosmetic for all I care.

3D model viewer

-Similar to Fallout 4, let you just view the 3d model for items you are carrying -Could maybe have some animations to run through

Hacking

-Terminals should be either guarded more heavily, harder to break in to, or both -Terminals could have levels of access that lock out certain actions if you don't have the hack skill or didn't get a high enough pass on the breach game? -Terminals should let you do a larger variety of things in general -More locked doors -More systems to enable/disable -Ability to cancel alerts? -Access Points could provide an alternative way to access the system for the attached terminal

Big
Faction Reputation

-Fixer reputation -Higher level fixer gigs could be gated by fixer reputation -sidenote, would be nice if fixers had unique item rewards for you completing major gigs or their whole chain -Faction reputation -Could determine if you are attack on site or friendly for various corps,gangs, NCPD, etc. -would matter more if there were factions driving around on the streets rather than just hanging out in clusters

Body Customization in Character Creation

-Ability to adjust height, musculature, body fat, etc. -Make armor actually fit the model, no clipping or pokies -I've seen mention that Body stat is involved but I haven't seen it, though I do see the model sort of...growing weirdly sometimes when opening the inventory.

ArmoClothing system changes

1.Transmog system like FF14, where you can apply stats of an item to the model of another 2.Remove stats from most of the current slots and add other slots so you can have armor under or over clothing -I'd almost prefer this because having an armor bonus from glasses and BD headsets is goofy -Buttons to hide head and face gear would be nice to have in either case -More items for the "Clothing Sets" slot please. So far I only remember seeing the one for the Heist and the Arasaka Hazmat suit which doesn't seem to do anything like a Chemical Resist buff. The hazmat suit actually nicely covered all my armor in a way where looked like it was still there.

Apartments

-Ability to buy at least a couple other Apartments -Garages in the nicer ones to store cars, so they don't just existing in that one car summoning menu.

Game world

-Arcade machines, pachinko machines, more Yakuza series type stuff -fewer fake vendors that just tell you to go away -NCPD, Gangs, Corps in traffic -WHERE IS TRAUMA TEAM??? There are several ways they could interact in the game but all they seem to be is a couple setpiece groups standing around and the one story section.

Hidden collectables

-Similar quality to the cigarette cards in RDR2 -Maybe displayable in apartments -Actually hidden, not on the map

Vehicle customization

-Garages -Paint color, cosmetic mods -Performance mods (not really important currently as cars don't really affect gameplay at all with no unscripted chases)

The Future That Never Was: KITTY KITTY - #2 THE TWISTED HEIST

RR link
Previous chapter (RETRO COSMOS)
#2 - THE TWISTED HEIST
A star had just gone out in the distance, sending its entire system, planets and moons, into oblivion. So, what was a simple life compared to a sun? Did the human existence that earthlings highly cherished in the past deserve so much fuss?
I would say no, of course, because I’m a cat. Our condition to us felines will never have to pale in front of a shiny astronomical object. Mine specifically, don’t you think?
Oswald Avery was merely a Homo sapiens. A retired buccaneer, fermenting his adulterated wine on the carcass of a drifting supercargo; all under the remodeled features of a former Galactic Trade Company’s pilot. Alas, regardless of the genetic disguise, the FID rarely lied. It hadn’t fooled us and the masks had fallen off. Just like him.
I’m such a poet.
Anyway… Avery had had a long life of crimes and adventures. He was full of energy in his youth. And as in the universe, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed, this energy was reincarnated in a nice amount in our bank account once the old picaroon flatlined.
“We finally got it! And it was a traditional Martian contract. Payable remotely, on condition that the FID is validated. How about that?”
“God… Lee … you’re talking to yourself and it’s only 8 a.m.,” Ali grunted behind me.
My couch potato of an associate had her head still stuck in the cereal box she was nibbling before falling asleep binge-watching Captain Caveman on ABC.
“To begin with, it’s 8 p.m., Martian Time. And we do have a positive balance in our bank account for the first time in months! Do you know what that means, partner?”
“Shopping, bitches!” she shouted as she hurled herself into the void, gliding to the bathroom in the weightlessness.
With the cardboard box on the top of her head, this sugar bishop was swimming after the remnant cereals that floated on her path like Ms. Pac-Man.
“Hell! Have I just opened Pandora’s box?”
The liner Danaë and its forty-eight post-nuclear Baltimore-XVIII heavy reactors made its annual cruise from Lunapolis to the suburbs of Ceres, in the belt. Its figurehead with the effigy of the Greek princess was a two hundred meters long, green ceramic statue. The size of the ship exceeded some inhabited asteroids’ diameter so it possessed its own substantial gravitational field.
“It’s quite a symbol of the decline of humanity,” I said to Ali, pointing with my chin at this unique work of art.
“Why?” my partner asked without caring whatsoever. “Spill the beans, Plato.”
The Kitty had obtained permission to dock and began its approach. I concluded then:
“Humanity no longer erects great and beautiful things without turning them into a shopping mall.”
The gold and ivory Danaë was one of the most luxurious epicenters of human decadence in the system; comprising hotels, casinos, megastores and amusement parks spread over a dozen centrifugal rings. There was something for everyone’s wallet, ready to be emptied, whether one was welcomed at the port or had joined during the crossing.
And to my great regret, the cape of the Danaë was just passing by us that week.
“I believe we should keep our savings for the maintenance of the Swallow. The dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree. Some parts need to be changed…”
“You’re such a bore with your adult talks,” my partner said as she left the fitting room of a luxury chain overlooking the main deck. “What do you think of that? Sexy as fuck, right?”
Her camisole didn’t hide a single inch square of flesh and I subtly pointed it out to her:
“It’s a bit of a back-alley Sally.”
I took a blow on the nose which, this time, was amply justified.
“There’s nothing chicer than Borderline. You don’t know anything about fashion. It’s crazy!”
She was furious. It was entertaining. But she was right. The human female fads were way over my head and I wasn’t a good adviser. Mostly because I didn’t care. At all.
Fortunately, the upscale shopping mall where we were staying had provided us with a free assistant who was even more servile than a decerebrate canine. As usual, the robot carrier that accompanied us did the job by flattering her with its unbearable honeyed tone:
“I find you charming, Madame. Here we have the latest fashionable lingerie on Mars. It’s an ephemeral collection that appears to have been specially made to mold your discreet curves, which seem to have been sculpted by the seraphim.”
Ali gave me a satisfied look that I pretended to ignore. Then she backtracked into the fitting room to put her black suit and pink jacket back on.
I took the opportunity to climb on the shoulders of this silly robot, servant of our servants and last link in this hierarchy whose origins go back to Ancient Egypt.
“One more move like this and I’ll turn you into a gum dispenser.”
The automaton apologized before my partner’s head emerged from behind the silk curtains which were far too fragrant for my taste.
“I just checked; it’s too expensive anyway. I ain’t buying it,” she announced. “Can you order a taxicab to take us to the hotels’ ring? You’d be a sweetheart.”
Happy to leave this irascible human with her robotic slave, I proceeded to the nearest service terminal. By the time I requested a vehicle, a flying cigarette dispenser could light me a Lucky.
“It’s forbidden to smoke in our store, Monsieur.”
The customer attaché, in his blue silk suit with elephant legs, had appeared out of nowhere. Yet, with such a shiny tie, this punk should have dazzled me from the Kuiper belt.
“Please be kind and get me a Pepper Coke instead of ruining my eyesight…” I grumbled in response.
I was in an awful mood. I definitely hated shopping. And people. Yet the pedestrian avenues of the Danaë had a very exceptional population density. Perms were making a strong comeback, as were neon tattoos and overly open flowered shirts. Under the false UVA/B sun, it was a true dance of flesh, steel and plastic bodies with assumed nudity. Implants and surgery erased the hazards of the genetic lottery for better or worse. It was so superficial. So futile. So human.
“Hello, handsome!” Ali cried out, a large smile across her face. “Lee? You didn’t tell me you knew Christophe Lambert! You know I'm a huge Highlander fan!”
My partner had just joined me, arms loaded with bags massive enough to live in it, start a family and park my chromic Pontiac Firebird. All were filled with C$400 t-shirts and sneakers that she didn’t need and would only put on once.
“No smell. Hologram,” I conclude by throwing my cigarette butt through the smiling ghost.
“Shame!” Ali sighed.
She then looked at her terminal, and continued:
“Do you think I have time to grab a watch module? There are sales in the Japanese aisle! I saw some GD-8 that would go well with my new Game Pocket! This boat is fucking rad!”
Ali could not stop humming Who wants to live forever. I had to rub my temples to avoid a migraine before the arrival of our taxicab five minutes later.
These were miniature limousines with double fake leather benches, facing each other at the back. There was a minibar with expensive multicolored drinks and sugar-soaked snacks, the sapiens’ primary source of calories and high Gs space travel drug. For the sensitive, the smart-fridge provided diet sodas with aspartame, but no one took it. Finally, there were free Gauloise cigarettes next to the ashtray on the armrest. And even Tylenol!
“What a time to be alive!”
Right after leaving the fashion district, a soft voice of a young woman, who appeared to us through the armored porthole separating her from her customers, finally emerged from the cockpit:
“Good evening! I’m Miss Meera. At your service. Hotel de Saint-Malo, correct?”
I nodded. She smiled at us. She was beautiful with her incredibly dark night metal skin that contrasted strongly with her silvery-white hair. She also had charming ivory eyes with absolutely no reflection. They were a mesmerizing void of light.
In fact, it was so rare to deal with a real person, and not an AI, that we engaged rapidly in a lovely and honest discussion with Meera. We were mostly talking about life on the Danaë. As she stated, the rules on board were very strict, even military. All was done to make sure that the customer had the most pleasant time at the expense of everything else. Finally, according to her, her condition wasn’t the most to be pitied in the cosmos. And she was fully satisfied with this precarious semi-nomadic existence.
“And what about you? Are you here on vacation or in transit for work?” she eventually asked. “What do you do for a living?”
Should we have told her that we were executing infamous people so Ali would collect expensive t-shirts and I could fulfill my nicotine addiction?
“Don’t get me wrong but I saw that you had a gun. Are you in the police… or are you pirates?”
It wasn’t the first time someone asked us this question. Although weapons were allowed on most ships and stations, it wasn’t wise to display them unless you were looking for trouble. Unfortunately, hiding such a large caliber under such a tight vest was a Herculean task.
“You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone”, simply quoted Ali, her forehead against the window covered with scented stickers.
Meera laughed before continuing:
“Very well, Al Capone. I understand that you’re not the type to let yourself be taken advantage of.”
The taxicab entered the central expressway after the water park then suddenly swerved violently to the left.
“What is going on?” I gasped.
After crushing the safety railing, we fell from one rotating bridge to the other in a frantic cavalcade. Judging by Meera’s swear words, this ride wasn’t part of the show.
Avoiding the stalls of an art market and a group of children coming out of an arcade, the driver finally managed to recover in extremis. It was about time, because within seconds we were passing through the transparent protective wall of the hotels’ deck.
“A thousand apologies! Another one of those mor… clients from the Middle System who doesn’t know how to use a rental car,” she shouted through the window. “Are you guys hurt?”
“No, thanks to you,” I replied, my tail spiked over my head, taped to Ali’s neck now decorated with bloody scratches.
Although my human forehead now had a bump on it the size of a golf ball, it was true that Meera had just saved our lives. This young girl had unsuspected driving talents despite taxicabs’ lack of handling. She didn’t belong here, playing the steward in a yellow circus uniform. This woman should have been a fighter pilot; or a NASCAR driver on Canyon Creek.
“In any case, here you’re almost in front of your hotel,” she replied. “You don’t have to pay anything, and I apologize again for the scare.”
From the outside, the taxicab now looked like a can of nutrigel after going through a crusher. Yet, it still worked. May God Darwin bless Venusian steel.
After thanking her, we wished Meera a good day. But the cockpit window suddenly went down on the passenger side. The smile of the driver had faded. She had tears at the corner of her white eyes.
“Wait!” she asked. “This weapon… do you really know how to use it?”
So, life on the Danaë wasn’t so sweet. As Meera explained to us in a secluded alleyway, a trio of criminals had come to threaten her a few days earlier, after finding she was a bodacious driver. They were preparing a heist in one of the flying city’s fifty casinos. The young woman was now ready to pay the price to settle the case.
“What is your opinion about this whole situation?” I asked Ali, once in our room, a small yet cozy suite whose glass walls overlooked the vacuum of space.
My human had applied a brownish ointment on her hump, which disappeared soon after, leaving only a slight pinkish hematoma.
“Meera said she would provide us with more details tomorrow. However, if she ponies up the cash, I don’t see why we would refuse. We ain’t mercs but these three guys must have a bounty on their heads. Let’s do our job, right?
“Indeed…”
All we had to do was wait for more instructions. Fortunately, it had been months since we had been able to take days off except on miserable gas stations full of drug addicts, implants scavengers and prostitutes.
After another morning of shopping, Ali went to the thalassotherapy center of the neighboring hotel. Her main occupation? Overeating sushi made by 3D nutrigel printing while getting massages.
Alas, I didn’t have the time to bask under the false sun of the lakeside resort and get my belly stroked. As a good captain, I had to go to the maintenance to fix the numerous damages of the Kitty. As always, the bill would be higher than expected.
Everything was orchestrated so that we would never hold a positive balance in this corrupted system. We had to chain contract after contract.
But Meera’s gig didn’t sound right. There was something I didn’t like and I couldn’t catch it yet. All my cat sensors were in the red. Unfortunately, the bounty hunter’s ones only saw the green of the bills.
Don’t judge me.
The young taxicab driver had finally contacted Ali again by holoconference in the early afternoon, shortly before I joined her at the exit of the tanning booths. Or as I called them: human toasters.
“Have you finished roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey?” I asked her as she plunged into the icy water of the adjacent basin, under the lustful gaze of a group of cadets from the Marine Academy.
“Meera will pick us up with a new taxicab in the hotel parking lot,” she whispered once back to me. “Alongside her, we will meet two of the criminals at the burglary location, shortly before midnight.”
“Go on.”
“We take care of these guys and we catch up with the last one: the band leader, in the storage cavities of the hangar reserved for the ship’s logistics. Below the last rotating ring.”
In Eve’s costume, Ali came out of the basin, not without deliberately drenching me. The water had a nasty chemical taste from being filtered day after day.
“Do you have any intelligence on these jokers?” I insisted while lighting a cigarette.
“The Broadway Gang. Three brothers. C$45,000 for the trio. We will also be able to recover at least C$10,000 of Techno-federal tax on their ship depending on its condition. Easy cash with the dollar credits that Meera promises us…”
Now sitting on the ledge, my partner splashed her feet to demonstrate her eagerness to head back swimming.
“Excellent! This will pay for the maintenance and allow us to save some money on our way to the belt.”
“Can I go now?” she asked, sliding back into the water.
“You may,” I had concluded before seeing her leave for her absurd wanderings that would fill her afternoon.
I myself was very busy making eyes at the wealthy guests of the hotel restaurant to glean a few pieces of Peking duck or juicy crabs. They were real farm animals from Mars. Not nutrigel. It was worth abandoning a little dignity aside.
With a full belly, I finally joined Ali in the middle of the evening. Arriving in the corridor of our suite, I crossed the group of cadets noticed near the swimming pool. They seemed tired but blissfully smiling as they just discovered the nirvana. And I knew why…
“Ali? Are you ready?” I said as I walked through the half-open bedroom door.
Her dressing gown had been thrown on the floor. Her gun and badge were resting on the bedside table against a giant bottle of Koala Springs soda and a pyramid of little Yoyo Mints.
To be honest, I expected a bigger mess.
“Gimme five minutes,” she replied while in the shower.
An hour later, we met Meera in the staff parking lot behind the recycling stations. Without further discussion, we joined the expressway in the taxicab. Between two noisy info-ads, the radio played Sweet Transvestite then the rest of the mythical Rocky Horror soundtrack.
“I wonder what Tim Curry’s up to these days,” asked Ali while browsing the intraweb on her implant.
“Being legendary as usual,” I answered.
Afterwards, the casino was in sight. But once on the forecourt illuminated by the gold and silver bulbs, we heard gunshots and screams. My partner and I quickly realized that this was a violent robbery rather than a modest heist.
“What the fuck, Meera?” Ali asked, turning to the porthole that separated us from the cockpit.
There was a hint of irritation in her voice.
Meera remained mute, her hands on the wheel and her gaze forward. In the rear-view mirror the young woman looked panicked.
The right door of the vehicle suddenly opened and two men sat down in front of us. They were wearing theater masks: the first was Melpomene, the sad grimace of tragedy; the second, Thalia, the twisted smile of comedy. Each brigand carried a huge metal block under his arm; drawers that were sure to be full of cash. On the other hand, they held their still smoking ZeG-4 machine guns even more firmly.
When they saw us, they both gasped, in unison:
“What the fuck, Meera?”
One… two. One… two.
Four holes in their faded tuxedo. Four bullets as big as a cat’s eye that silenced them forever, before slowly repainting the bench in red.
“What the fuck was that? You killed them!” Meera shouted this time, as she started the electric engine. “You had tasers at your disposal, you psychos!”
She had finally turned around. Her voice was quivering. She was no longer panicked, but angry.
The tasers must have slipped between the seats because I hadn’t seen them. My partner raised her eyebrows and it made me realize that their use had never been in mind.
“We’re bounty hunters, not 9 to 5 social workers!” continued Ali. “Now, you gotta motor, otherwise the cops will shoot our ass on the spot before we could even meet the third dude!”
Meera put her foot on the pedal and one could almost hear the noise of the thrusters melting the white asphalt.
“I can perceive the sirens, Ali,” I concluded before Meera entered the ring's external road reserved for logistic transport.
We then had the shortest car chase we had taken part in. The Danaë security forces may not have had the best elements in the system, but Meera’s talents didn’t give them a chance. We had crossed half a dozen rotative bridges to the rhythm of Take on Me, zigzagging between expressways and maintenance tunnels to arrive before the song ended at the deserted logistics hangar.
It was similar to a huge supermarket with honeycombed shelves. Each of these garages, dimly illuminated by red LEDs, housed a delivery or transport vessel. There was the most impressive fleet I had ever seen.
In one of the first level’s cells stood, between a set of clamps, a Swift-0 scout, from Peugeot Corp, with wings spread. The Swifts were small and very high-end single-seaters. They could be modified to integrate weapons systems, but their primary characteristics were velocity and evasion.
Leaning on the flank of the mono-turbine, the last of the three criminals, a tall blond man with a “Chevy Chase” prominent chin was looking down on the approaching taxicab.
“Were they planning to escape on that ship? The three of them?” I remarked when the vehicle stopped a few meters from the small vessel.
But Meera ignored me.
“Hand me the money, I’m going out. That was the agreement.”
The porthole opened at its base, allowing us to pass the steel cash drawers. Once the taxicab’s ignition was turned off, only their holographic numbers glowed in the dark.
“It’s all over if his cronies don’t stick their noses out of the car,” Ali replied, finally giving the second drawer away. “He’s going to figure out that it went south. He will kill you!”
Outside, the man was getting impatient. Blinded by the taxicab’s headlights, he came closer before exclaiming:
“Zéphyr, are you there? Where are my brothers? Security is closing all the departure modules. We will be stuck here, for fuck’s sake!”
He now had a gun in his hand. A machine gun identical to those of his companions currently bathed in their blood, nailed to the seats.
“Zéphyr? Wait… I know that name!” I meowed to myself.
The doors and portholes of the taxicab were locked. Ali and I were now stuck in the back with the two flatlined and most wanted criminals on the ship.
“Sorry guys, but I’ll handle the rest.”
Miss Meera, alias Zéphyr, smiled at us through the armored glass just before leaving the cockpit by the driver’s door.
“What a fucking piece of shit… Lee? Do you have a plan? I think the windows are bulletproof. I don’t feel like testing. Especially if it’s bouncing around with us inside, we will be turned into ground beef!”
“Did you forget who I am, my dear?”
I was already crawling under the seat, between a pair of Méduse shoes and half nibbled fried rat wings. It was time to demonstrate all my infiltration skills learned from Ninja Gaiden. Unfortunately, both the crab and the duck slowed me down and my belly remained for a few seconds stuck under the driver’s seat with my head on the brake pedal. How outrageous!
From the porthole, I saw Ali watching what was happening in front of us, near the ship. Our eyes met for a brief moment and I could read on her lips: “diet kibble”.
“Better off dead!” I shouted.
My paw reached the bottom of the dashboard, activating the mechanical opening of doors and windows. And, accidentally, the loudest horn in this dimension.
“My bad!”
My sapiens immediately jumped outside, pointing her gun to Zéphyr. Surprised by the thunderous din, her target pivoted towards us, uncovered, turning her back to the human with the magnificent chin and his ZeG-4 who yelled:
“What in the whole universe is that? Wait! I know her! Did you bring us bounty hunters? You were clearly planning to double-cross us!”
The man shouted and his gun produced a rain of bullets. It first hit the windshield of the taxicab, passing through the conductor compartment where I was. The rounds bent the windscreen, but it held. This wasn’t, however, the case for the hood, protecting the engine and the reservoir full of coolant, which ended up covering the seat and my face.
Fortunately, the sticky alcohol allowed me to escape from this trap and jump out of the vehicle through the window I had previously opened. But, once again, a fire ring enveloped the ZeG-4’s cannon.
“This is how I die…” I meowed, eyes closed.
I was violently tackled and hit the ground. Zéphyr had saved me at the last moment, just before bullets obliterated the front of the taxicab.
Other projectiles ricocheted off the metal money drawers on the floor and got lost in the ceiling, activating the fire sprinklers. This incident triggered a silent light alarm throughout the hangar while the mobster prepared a new salvo.
“Don’t hurt my pilot, you narbo!” roared my partner.
Ali, this time taken as a target, retaliated. She fired a single shot towards the rascal with a formidable precision. No one knew how to handle such a heavy gun as she did. She was my human. She was the best in her field: murder.
And I taught her everything. Almost.
The leader of the robbers tried to reload the magazine of his weapon, unaware that his heart had been punctured a few seconds before. Adrenaline was doing its job. But the blood loss caused by the explosion of the aorta at its base, near the ventricles, gradually stopped him in his gesture. His pressure dropped and the bloodstream no longer reached the brain sufficiently. He was already in a coma when his shoulders touched the ground. He was luckier than the average Joe and died a few seconds later.
“Is everything all right?”
My voice was trembling, still in shock from this disaster. I was wet and frozen.
Zéphyr got up with difficulty. Next to us, one of the metal drawers was opened, revealing a bunch of green bills and a much stranger booty: an eight-inch gold diskette with suspicious Chinese symbols.
Well… I couldn’t read them but Chinese symbols on stuff are always suspect, aren’t they?
But there were more important matters. Because my partner, on the other hand, stayed on the ground. Blood was dripping from her black suit and mixed with the clear firefighting fluid that was falling like an endless rain.
I tried to talk to her again but my voice was lost in a groan.
“Why are you whining, you big baby? It’s just blood.”
With her nose in a puddle, my sapiens smiled at me. Her left hand was compressing her abdomen. The bullet had passed through the external oblique muscle, far from the stomach.
It wasn’t that bad after all but she had scared me. And that deserved a scratch on the wrist that made her scream:
“What the fuck?”
“And the medical expenses? Have you thought about medical expenses? We don’t have insurance!”
“God, Uncle Scrooge! I hate you!”
“We won’t be able to fix the Kitty with your heroic outbursts!” I fulminated to mask my joy of seeing her in one piece.
“I will kill you, Muppet! I almost died! I don’t give a fuck about your rusty trash can which flies like a brick!”
It was true that we hadn’t had a fight for a long time.
“Guys…” intervened Zéphyr.
“What?”
Ali and I had spoken together.
“These three ruffians had planned to steal the diskette drive from me once I got back. I needed a hand, so… thank you… I guess.”
“You’re welcome,” my human answered dryly while sitting.
Although Zéphyr saved me, I didn’t share the same kindness:
“Wait, we’re not letting him go! Do you know who he is?”
Zéphyr. Prince of thieves. And yes, he wasn’t much of a princess either. Just an androgynous cyborg. A breakout king wanted throughout the entire system for his affiliation with the Data Brokers’ Guild. With an incredible bounty of C$800,000, she or he… whatever… was the knight of the brokers’ chessboard.
“I think we’ve had enough for today,” Ali said. “Unless you hope to go after him with these big fat guts of yours.”
“By the 79 moons of Jupiter, you shall pay for this, woman!” I meowed, angry.
My ears were backwards and my hairs were spiky. But soaking wet, it just made Ali and Zéphyr laugh.
Disgrace!
“He’s so cute when he’s furious,” he joked.
Now on his knees, the night-skinned androgynous was blotting Ali’s wound with a torn piece of fabric from his driver’s uniform.
“But more seriously, I need to go. With the bounty, you’ll be able to repair your vessel. As for the hospital fees, I will contact a good friend who will take care of you for free. She’s the ship’s chief medical officer.”
“Thank you,” I simply replied as he helped my partner get back on her feet.
“It’s the least I can do. I wasn’t interested in money. More important information is contained in this,” he said as he was picking up the floppy disk.
This golden diskette must have been worth a lot of cash for Zéphyr to play a taxicab driver to ensure coverage. I had perceived that something was fishy!
Then, halfway to his Swift-0, Zéphyr stopped. I witnessed his hesitation.
“There was nothing personal, you know. We’re all just trying to make our way. The best we can…”
And he ultimately left before adding:
“Maybe we’ll see each other again! You seem like fun.”
Before fleeing away, Zéphyr abandoned one of the boxes near the criminal’s corpse. Thus, he validated the theory of a robbery that had gone wrong. When the security arrived a few minutes later, we were the heroes of the day. And with a little bribe, nobody cared about Zéphyr’s missing ship.
This whole story surely left us a bitter taste. A feeling of defeat and humiliation that the swimming pool under the synthetic sun couldn’t make disappear even a week after.
“He undoubtedly played us as we were rookies, with his little face of a young innocent girl in distress,” I said to Ali right after the end of the daily Brett Maverick.
This old show was dispensed on a couple of giant screens suspended by drones.
Until now, Ali had remained silent on her deckchair; with a brick of sour juice stuck between her breasts and a pair of straws between her teeth. Only inaudible grunts emanated from her mouth since the departure of the sexually unclassifiable mugger.
“I wonder what information this fucking cyber-Tootsie could have been looking for in that casino,” my human mumbled as she squeaked her rainbow flip-flops.
“Admit that it’s not really that question that puts you in such a state…” I answered, now well installed on my motorized buoy that I had gotten as a gift in a diet kibbles package.
“You bet! I will have a nasty tan mark on my stomach with these bandages!” she exploded, spitting out her plastic straws with infinite curls.
My float slipped towards the ledge as a robot came to bring us our next glucose overdose.
Ali finally added:
“I swear that if we run into him again, I’ll smack his fucking angel face.”
Back to business!

Idea for " Prestigious Moonshiner " role.

Slavery is a lot more complex than authors realize (Star Wars, Fallout New Vegas, Oregon Series)

Slavery is usually used as an easy way to designate a group as ‘evil’ because, well, it is. So, I’m not going to touch that here. What I’m going to do is a deep dive into why that treatment is incomplete and often counterproductive. The issue is that slavery is a system of labor, rather than just being a moral choice, and, consequently, can be analyzed as such. When an author creates a system that depends on slave labor to function, there are certain implicit arguments they are making for that system to be successful, or else it flat out reduces production.
Examples
In Star Wars, slavery is fairly common on the Outer Rim, with Anakin Skywalker being the most notable example. At the same time, there are inexpensive droids that function at a near human level, and can operate for extended periods without running low on power.
In Fallout New Vegas, Caesar’s Legion uses slaves extensively, both for medical treatment, as brute laborers, and for agriculture. This is common to the point that Caesar requests to buy a character named Arcade Gannon as his personal doctor from the Courier.
Clive Clussler’s Dark Watch is about a group of mercenaries trying to back track a slavery ring that is moving vast numbers of Chinese would-be illegal immigrants to a desolate coast in Northern Russia in order to force them to mine gold.
Background
In economics, there’s an idea that boils down to “humans are not horses.”¹ There is economic value to a human beyond the ability to pull a heavy load, and humans are pretty much endlessly adaptable. We participate in the economy, we make decisions, we can learn and be trained to do things that robots and computers can’t (and probably won’t for the near to medium term. And if they can, then human slavery becomes even more pointless). What this means is that by making someone a slave, you’re taking an individual who can produce, on average, in the US, $50,000 worth of output, and making them into a manual laborer that can produce a fraction of the amount a $5000 engine can. This is reflected in the jobs where slavery is an issue. We don’t see it in commercial copper mines, we see it in service based jobs that have negative connotations or illegal services (like massage parlors), in some farm jobs where machinery can’t easily handle the plant in question, in places that need a minimum level of skill or ability, but the risk of disaster isn’t that high and productive output is limited beyond simply the physical work. Because physical work is done much better by machines.
The risk of disaster is a major point, because ordering someone to do something or die tends to breed some negative feelings towards the boss. For example, Nazi Germany suffered from a huge number of dud shells as their slave labor force intentionally risked death to weaken their war effort.² You can’t treat a slave as a slave when they’re in a job that is technically demanding, intellectually difficult, or requires skilled labor, because it takes someone else who is equally technical, intellectual, or skilled to check the work and ensure that there isn’t a timebomb waiting to go off. A slave in that position needs to be trusted, like any worker in a similar position, to at least not actively sabotage their job.
Which is where the use of slaves tends to break down.
The primary issue is that slavery basically depends on humans, or other sapient beings, being most valuable as a source of work, in the physics definition of the term. Basically, given the choice between an internal combustion engine, and a human, a slaver must explicitly choose the human. And give up many times their economic contribution as a slave in production.
Given that slavery is usually used, in media, in war-like societies that are trying to maximize production by working people to death, this is a very interesting decision. Is the 50 year old accountant going to be able to haul much iron ore? Probably not. Can they work through the numbers and find a military commander embezzling funds? Absolutely. Or, if foreigners aren’t trusted to do that, can you leverage a company to retool and produce consumer widgets, opening your own trusted factories to retool towards the military, co-opting your enemy’s strength? Definitely.
Anyone who views a larger labor force as a liability in war completely misunderstands the value of a human life and the output of the human mind and hand.
Problems
Fallout New Vegas allows the player character to sell Arcade Gannon into slavery as Caesar’s personal doctor. But Arcade Gannon is morally and ideologically opposed to Caesar, which makes that choice frankly insane.
There were well educated slaves in Rome, which this is probably a reference to, but slavery in that form was somewhat limited compared to how we view slavery today. Learned Greeks were extremely prized, to the point that they would sell themselves into slavery for the money and for the chance to become a Roman citizen once freed, and were given what were effectively wages for their work. The implicit protections on a well educated slave, and the cost of an educated slave, made them valuable and difficult to waste.³ The way that Arcade Gannon is sold to Caesar is much more in line with, well, slavery, or at least what we would consider slavery.
Forced labor at the hand of another without any real expectation of freedom or citizenry at the end. Moreover, due to his ideological commitments, Caesar was giving someone with ample reason to hate him the means to kill him. Caesar’s implicitly hoping to god that Arcade doesn’t know a slow poison or the existence of lead and a delivery mechanism, since the slow deterioration would make it hard to point to Arcade, as you’d need a medical expert on his level to be able to prove it was intentional. Which Caesar explicitly doesn’t have.
More generally, the slaves generally shown are used as pack mules, which makes sense from a resource perspective, if actual pack mules are that rare, but the attempt to expand the slavery system to cover doctors and other experts is unrealistic and would be extremely damaging to Caesar’s war effort. Attempting to use slaves in line with how they’re referenced in classical works isn’t feasible except when it’s voluntary. Which doesn’t really meet the modern definition and image of slavery.
Similarly, slavery only makes sense when human physical work output is the main limitation on production. This can be seen in Clive Clussler’s Gold Coast, where Chinese would-be illegal immigrants are forced to mine gold under slave labor conditions. Now, mining is one of the more common uses of slave labor in developing regions.⁴ The works is difficult, dirty, dangerous, and doesn’t always pay well, so slavery can be the only way to get people to work the mines. The issue is that those mines are small, poorly run, and their output is comparatively minuscule. Modern commercial mines produce massively more, due to the sheer quantity of rock they can move through machinery, even with environmental protections and regulations. Gold Coast attempts to combine the two, slave labor input with commercial mining output. Multiple small cruise ships are used to house the slaves, there are standing pools of mercury left over from the intentionally unsafe separation plants, and the slaves are worked to death to move the rock and run the separation plant. The problem is that human labor is slow, weak, and fragile, especially compared to today’s industrial scales. Even if the slave driver has thousands of slaves, a large dump truck will easily beat them on rock moved.
The value of human labor is in operating the machines, which Gold Coast touches on, by pointing to the on-site separation plants being the most expensive part of the operation, but the issue there is, once again, the misuse of slaves. Operating an industrial scale separation plant is involved, complex, difficult, and wouldn’t be left to an uneducated slave, which means that some training and trust is necessary. And the slave has every reason to try to destroy it, especially if they’re being forced to work with mercury on a continuous basis. They’re knowingly dead men walking, and threatening to kill someone if they don’t work is not as effective against someone condemned to die. The entire process is designed with an eye towards being as awful as possible, rather than being efficient, which tends to be the most common thread in depicting modern slavery, rather than accuracy.
This type of approach becomes even less reasonable as society becomes more advanced. Star Wars is somewhat notable here, since they explicitly have droids and robots that can work on a human level. They may be portrayed as relatively bumbling, but they’re able to make decisions and act independently, with a long lasting power source, and ownership is explicit and common. Why have slavery at all, when those exist? And slavery isn’t just for domestic servants, or for the Hutt or similar to show off how rich and powerful they are. A random junk trader can own two of them, despite any value derived being entirely dependent on a relatively high level of education. It takes months or years of training, trust that the slave will obey and not undermine their master, and there are much stronger, faster, better alternatives. Why even have slaves in that instance? Other than because of social norms that require living slaves, similar to the mid 19th century definition of middle class requiring human servants⁵ , slavery in the Star Wars universe is unnecessary to say the least.
Solutions
So, which universes actually do slavery logically?
I think the most reasonable use is in the Codex Alera series, which has three major facets in favor.

Low technology level, meaning that human muscle power is all that can really be used.
Humans are massively boosted in that world, with significant strength gain from the in universe magic. They can be stronger, ignore pain, heal faster, and a multitude of things that render them effectively superhuman, though few have access to all of that.
Effective, but not absolute, mind control. The Codex Aleria series has Discipline Collars, which cause their wearer to feel euphoria when serving their master, and extreme pain when they resist. Consequently, initiative and intelligence can be retained, when the master so wishes, while guaranteeing absolute loyalty.

Historically, slavery has been useful when muscle power was all that people had access to, which is pretty much everything prior to the industrial revolution, ignoring water and wind power. Be it in the fields or the mines, slavery has been at least as effective as the peasantry or serfs, though the three were relatively similar in most regards. However, by making humans more powerful, Jim Butcher made slavery more attractive. Why use a horse when a human can run as fast, further, pulling more?
The local maxima of utility was with human slaves, especially with the discipline collars, which forced loyalty and allowed trust. From an efficiency and productivity perspective, it could have worked well.
Of course, slavery being easily beyond the moral event horizon, and stealing free will even further, the antagonist who most played into this system was an evil egomaniac who wanted to conquer the world. And said antagonist, despite leading an army of enslaved supersoldiers, regarded slaves as nothing more than somewhat intelligent cattle, explicitly going out of his way to crush intelligent behavior and initiative.
Which reduces the utility of a slave in much the same way taking an accountant and forcing him to be a laborer would. He had a solution to the question of how to enforce loyalty and attain maximum production, and wasted it because of his ego and belief that his class was inherently superior. Which it sort of was, due to the magic system, but not so much that he couldn’t have benefited from allowing a little more initiative in his subordinates, especially when he used hostages and other hostile forms of control against people he couldn’t collar.
Moreover, continuing the theme of self-satisfaction and ignoring the populace, his nation suffered from ongoing exploitation and generational looting, as befits a ruler who views his subjects as nothing more than an inherently rebellious resource, even when their free will is crushed.
The way slavery is used in the Codex Alera series hits both on how effective it could have been, as the antagonist was able to threaten the entire rest of the kingdom through a total war economy, as well as why it is surprisingly ineffective in maintaining that war economy, due to the absolute crushing of initiative.
The result was a lopsided, ineffective nation, one that couldn’t react well to outside pressures, and lacked the internal stability to function once the head was removed. Even ignoring the antagonist’s dead man’s switch tied to a volcano.
Through the lens of “The issue is that slavery is a system of labor, rather than just being a moral choice, and, consequently, can be analyzed as such” slavery in the Codex Aleria world makes more sense than most, and could have worked relatively well, acting as a decentralized hivemind where everyone works for the greater glory of the head aristocrat, had said aristocrat not been cartoonishly evil.
So what?
With regards to doing slavery in a historically accurate manner, the issue is that slavery is inherently a loss to society. The world is taking a productive being and forcing them to work at vastly below their potential. Especially since concentration of wealth doesn’t usually produce self-driving wealth growth. It’s accumulation of wealth and resources for the few, rather than a system that encourages broad productivity growth, which is necessary for a state to fund a technologically superior military, and maintain the production necessary to engage in a long term war.⁶
That said, if someone wants to write about a nation that uses slavery realistically, there’s two options here.

The limitation on production needs to be the amount of mechanical work that can be done. Rather than needing more workers to manage and run machines, the world needs to be at a low enough technological level that humans are the best option.
The person running the slave society places an inordinate emphasis on slaves, for social or other inefficient (from a productivity perspective) reasons.

The former is largely seen in the modern world, in places like African conflict diamond mines, as well as jobs where robots cannot be used, such as certain agricultural positions. North Korea’s export of workers whose salaries go to the government can also be framed in this way. The cost of those slaves is less than the cost of the proper mechanical equipment so, even if production is limited and slow in comparison to a more mechanized system, it’s profitable enough for people to still want to use it.
That said, while it can work on a limited basis, attempting to use slavery as the underlying system to power a wartime economy is largely infeasible. Nazi Germany demonstrates that issue, with massive quality control problems and papering over cracks with free labor. Rather than slavery being a method of forcing maximum production, the Nazi war machine saw slavery encourage inefficiencies and reduce the long term production potential of their empire, by reducing the number of workers, and by allowing companies that should have failed due to poor management to survive by leaching off of the lives of slaves.
The latter can be seen in the Antebellum South, where a landowner’s wealth and power wasn’t measured in money, but in the number of slaves and size of his fields. The latter should imply the former, but that wasn’t necessarily true, and the latter was much more impressive to visitors, which meant that it was emphasized over the long term. Even if the actual value of the slaves dropped, social forces meant that slaves were still valued beyond their potential material gain.
The issue with that latter focus is that it detracts from actual utility to the system. Yeah, there’s some very rich people, but the overall society is relatively impoverished, as the true cost in both labor and opportunity is hidden in a population that society ignores.⁷
In short, if you want to create a story about an evil empire that enslaves everyone it meets, go right ahead, but it’s damn near impossible to make a good argument that those workers are being used to their maximum utility, and a hell of a lot of economists agree with that viewpoint.^8,9
References

https://www.reddit.com/Economics/wiki/faq_automation
https://books.google.com/books/about/Resistance.html?id=BqH8wyTLcFgC&source=kp_book_description I apologize for not having a more focused discussion, but this is one of those things where there are plenty of references towards the topic, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find exactly what I’m trying to talk about.
https://www.reddit.com/AskHistorians/comments/w1l99/how_was_the_literacy_in_roman_empire/
https://www.cnn.com/2011/12/05/world/africa/conflict-diamonds-explaineindex.html
And of course the Victorian British would define their society in such a way that at least half the nation is inherently poor. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19544309

Employing a servant was a sign of respectability, but for the lower middle class, where money was tighter, they could only afford one servant - the maid of all work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers This is the fundamental argument of the book, and honestly offers a very good lens for comparing military power and potential.
https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/247221/original/Economics+of+Human+Trafficking.pdf
https://fee.org/articles/slavery-was-never-economically-efficient/
http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=129502

Was BFV at launch too hardcore?

[Table] I am Dave Plummer, author of Windows Task Manager, Zip Folders, and worked on Space Cadet Pinball, Media Center, Windows Shell, MS-DOS, OLE32, WPA, and more. (pt 1/2)

Source
Note: Based on observing question-taker's profile, he is still taking answers, so two parts may or may not completely summarize the AMA.

Questions	Answers
Space Cadet Pinball, how does it feel to be the most played "bring your child to work day" game? I remember it fondly.	The best part is that I used to "teach" computer lab when my kids were in K through 6th grades, back when Pinball was still included and well known. The kids could care less about anything technically hard or interesting that I'd worked on, of course, but Pinball gave me instant street cred with them.
	Especially cool was being able to walk over and enter a secret code that only I knew that would turn on all the cheats, like infinite lives. They thought I was a wizard at that age!
	The code, by the way, is "hidden test" without the quotes! Then various keys do different things, you can click and drag the ball around, and so on. Google it for the gory details!
	I always like to point out that I was working with a full set of original IP from Maxis, so I had nothing to do with the design of the game, or it's art, etc... that was all done! My contribution was volunteering to port it, including a partial rewrite from asm to C, to work on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, ARM, and so on, which was actually a lot of work. But I got it into the Windows box, which is how and why everyone knows it today. But all credit for the gameplay and so on goes to Maxis, all I did was not screw it up in that case!
^{the below is a reply to the above}
To add a bit of detail re Space Cadet Pinball: we built Space Cadet originally at my company Cinematronics and did a deal with Microsoft to ship it with the Plus Pack that accompanied Win 95 and Win 98. While it technically didn't ship w/ Windows, the Plus Pack had something like a 25% attach rate and pinball wound up on most systems anyway. Microsoft actually had an option in our original contract from 1994 to ship it with the OS itself or the Plus Pack. Maxis was our publisher for the subsequent retail version, and later bought my company. More germane to this thread: I believe Dave's port entered the picture a few years later, after Win 98, and was likely critical to pinball continuing to ship on later iterations of the Windows OS (i.e. 32-bit). I definitely appreciate the time he put in to give the game extra years of life on the Windows platform. Kevin Gliner, game designer and producer for 3D Pinball, and co-founder of Cinematronics.	Pleased to FINALLY put a name to the game design! You should update the Wikipedia article for the game, as I think it lists Matt Ridgway, who might have been sound? I've been crediting Maxis for years, not knowing the role of Cinematronics who was who. One thing that confused me: wasn't there a company that did video games in the 80s called Cinematronics? Any relation? Star Castle, Armor Attack, etc...
	As for timing, this likely between the Win95 and Win98 Plus! packs. It was very early on at least, and shipped at least in NT4, and perhaps earlier in "SUR" release that ran atop NT 3.51, but I don't have access to any source files to check dates!
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I keep meaning to fix that wikipedia article, there's a significant number of people that worked on the game and for some reason only Matt (an independent sound guy who did some excellent part-time contract work for us) is listed. There's also a lot of confusion about the timing of various releases and the companies involved, and who owns it now (EA). I actually have all the original source, although no rights to any of it anymore. Hard to say on the timing of the port. I was working in Redmond in '99 when I got word someone had done an NT4 and Win2000 port (I'm assuming that was you), so that was the first time the port showed up on my radar. I have a more confident memory (and contracts, email, etc) of all the events related to how pinball came about and the first couple years after it was released. I like to think pinball was the very first Win95 game (it was fun to watch Gates and Leno pretend to play it on stage at the Win95 launch event), but of course there were other games that shipped with the launch too. You're correct, there was an 80s arcade game company called Cinematronics that went out of business long before we started in 1994, and someone had let the trademark lapse. How we came to be called Cinematronics is a long story for another time...	NT shipped in 96, so the version I did for it would have been done in 95. I remember working on it about the time Win9X was shipping or in late beta. I could be wrong on that part, but Nov 95 would be my guess.
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Damn dude, porting assembly? You are a legend!	Thanks - we actually did all of our debugging in assembler. We didn't have any source-level or line-level debugging at all (except as noted below). So you'd connect to a machine through an ssh-like tool and then, if the symbols were right, you could get a callstack and inspect memory, disassemble functions, and so on. But since we spent much of our day staring at assembly, I became reasonably adept at it.
	I say "reasonably" as I was lazy enough that I would compile the components of interest to me with Visual Studio PDB symbols so that, if I could repro on my own machine, I could then source-level debug it. That made me fast at some stuff that others were slow at, but I likely never got as proficient at asm debugging as someone who never had an alternative. I had a developer friend named Bob whom was an ntsd (our debugger) superstar, and he'd write expressions inside of breakpoints to fire conditionally, that kind of thing. So I did learn that trick, but I'm sure there were dozens I just never knew.
	That all said, we rarely if ever coded in assembly. All coding was in C/C++.
	In the Pinball case, parts of the original were written in hand-coded in asm by Maxis, like the sound engine, and wouldn't have had a hope of working on anything but an x86. Rather than be lame and not have sound on the RISC platforms, I opted to rewrite that stuff in C so that it was portable.
	The RISC platforms also bring their own set of problems like 32-bit alignment for data. And being on Windows NT (now just "Windows") meant being Unicode, but fortunately there isn't a TON of text in a pinball game!
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boytekka: damn, the only time that I did assembly language is when we tried moving a small machine through the printer port.. I miss those days LordApocalyptica: Only time I did assembly was when I wanted to make a game on my TI-84, and decided that I didn't want to. I miss those days too.	First game I wrote in assembly I did in a machine language monitor on my C64. You can't (easily) relocate 6502 so to add code you'd have to jump out, do stuff, and jump back... Crazy!
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If I can ask a question, how does it feels to go from coding with basically zero help to working with modern IDE and code editors that give you a lot of infos, tips, error notifications and so on? I've started programming like a year ago from zero, and I don't think I could be able to program like y'all did 20 years ago or more. Thanks for doing this AMA anyways!	You're very welcome! The progression in tools has been amazing, really. I remember HESMON and my first machine language monitors for the PET and C64, then really nice ROM dev environments, and CygnusEd for the Amiga... all the way up to PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code.
	My most recent "WOW" moment was adding a line to my lib_deps line in platformio, which magically included the library being developed at the URL on github. So you can link to online projects... cool.
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Just wanted to say thanks for the Alpha port!	Alpha AXP was by far the hardest to debug! "Branch later, maybe"
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I just want to thank you for my first experience with pinball. I am now a top 100 competitive pinball player and own 16 pinball machines.	That's cool, which do you collect primarily? I was always a fan of Williams, and am FB friends with a couple of their older devs like Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, and Eugene Jarvis (but I should be careful, Bill Gates warned me never to name drop :-) )
	I have a Black Knight 2000 as my own machine right now!
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I have a wide range. Some modern Sterns like Metallica, Jurassic Park, Tron and Iron Maiden. Older Bally’s like Frontier and Fathom. 2 classic Bally/Williams Dr Who and Attack From Mars. Plus a few EMs. I like them all! Attack From Mars was the game that got me into the physical world of pinball. Collecting has been more of a recent pandemic thing since I can’t go out and play. I miss traveling around the country playing in big tournaments. Oh yeah and Steve Ritchie is quite the character. You must meet him some day. I’ve met him a few times and each time has earned a place in my pinball stories I talk about with friends.	Congrats on the collection, that's a nice set! I've never met Steve - I did meet Larry DeMar in vegas. I was playing at a slot machine and he was next to me, and had a name tag, and I was like... "Excuse me sir, but does the word Robotron mean anything?" and it turned out to be him!
Asking as someone pretty new in software development, did you experience impostor syndrome? If so, how did you deal with it?	My first couple of years were very productive, so I wasn't insecure about my output, but even so I definitely experienced imposter syndrome. I think most people who achieve aspirational roles do... I have a friend who was in the NFL who describes the same feeling.
	Being as productive as your peers is sort of the pre-requisite, and if that's true, then remind yourself that when you were in fifth grade, the eighth graders on the playground seemed so old and mature! It's odd in that I started in 1993, but to me anyone who started in the 80s was a "true" Old Timer and remains so in my head to this day. And similarly I'm no doubt the grizzled veteran to people I hired a few years later.
	I know when I started I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, and by the end I felt like the smartest guy in the room, and I don't think I'd gotten any smarter along the way. So it's all relative and perception. Well, that and the stock caused some serious attrition of the "really smart"!
	I remember visiting Google a couple of years ago in the bathrooms they had posters that read "YOU ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER", and info about seminars and so on about it, so it's very common! I wish I had a concrete strategy for you, but I don't other than "It's commonplace, and I bet there are a ton of resources on the Web. Don't be surprised you're experiencing it!"
What would you encourage someone to start learning today related to your field?	I'm learning React at the moment. Let's face it, the web development experience is utter nonsense. So I kept hoping for something that would make it clean, and easy to make components, and to work with REST apis. So I went looking for a solution. Then I read about Angular, and it seemed like "too much" to learn for the sake of making a SPA.
	But React seems understandable enough and solves a ton of problems with web development, not the least of which is being able to intermingle HTML and Javascript (via JSX).
	As for languages, I'd probably start with Python. I prototyped a complicated LED system a couple of years ago and it was admirable what it could accomplish for an interpreted language. And you probably have to know modern Javascript as well.
Now, would you be rather interested in working for windows, macos or linux ?	I work in all three. For my own projects I write to the ASP.NET Core 3.1, and that's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I originally wrote my LED server to it under MacOS, then moved it to Windows with about 5 minutes of changes (related to the consoles being somewhat different). Then I moved it to Linux, where I made it work and then containerized it with Docker. I got it up and running on my Raspberry Pi and in a Windows HyperV and under WSL using Ubuntu. To me that kind of stuff is super cool.
	Once I had it working in a Docker container I deployed it to my Synology NAS, which is some variant of Linux. So my NAS runs my Christmas lights!
	I love stuff like that when it works!
	My main workstation is a Dell monitor that has an internal KVM. I have a 2013 Mac Pro connected to it, which is maxed out and then has an eGPU and eRAID setup via Thunderbolt. And then I have a 3970X Windows PC connected as well, and I can jump back and forth with a button.
	I spend most of my day in Windows now, unless it's video related, in which case I use Final Cut Pro.
Hi Dave, thanks for the AmA! In regards to task manager - often times I have to click the 'end task' button more than once to get the frozen program to actually close. Why is this? Thanks again.	Remember that, at least in my day, End Task is different than End Process. The former sends a "Please close yourself" message to the app, and if it's hung, it should then detect it and so on, but doesn't always. Imagine the app is in a weird state where it's still pumping messages, it's not hung, but it's broken. End Task likely won't work.
	That's when you need End Process, which tears everything down for you. The substantive difference is that the program gets no choice in the matter and no notification. End Task can be graceful. End Process is brutal.
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What about when the task manager stops responding? We need a task manager manager to manage the task manager. Lol	I've never seen that happen, ever, unless the system itself or the window manager is bunged in some way. Your puny Task Manager cannot save you now.
	Then again, nothing can, save a reboot.
What cool new tech are you excited about?	Right now I'm actually trying to productize something of my own, a system for doing hidden, permanently-installed LED holiday lighting. It receives the effect entirely over WiFi, or it can fall back to built-in effects and so on. Quick demo from 4th of July here:
	https://youtu.be/7QNtj2hZtaQ
	I'm done the software on the ESP32 and on the desktop, and working on the phone app now. So the next step is to find someone to manufacture the actual addressable LED strip fixtures. They'd be like under-counter LED strips that snap together end to end, but weatherproof, and with WS2813 LEDs internally.
	In terms of stuff that I'm just benefitting from, the latest CPUs from AMD are amazing. I have the 32-core 3970X and the raw computing power is hard to comprehend. That you can buy a 32-core chip for $2K (or 64-core for $4K) amazes me! Now I need to learn AI or something to make use of all of that hardware...
After the rise of WinRAR, did you continue to use the trial or did you pay?	From: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
	Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:14 PM
	To: Dave
	Subject: Your BuyRAR.com Order #: 122229610 License Key

	Attachments: rarkey.rar
	My WinRAR order number, from about 15 years ago, is above. And my WinZip license is much older than that. As someone who (a) made their real living in shareware and (b) worked on Product Activation, I'm the kind of guy who always licenses everything! You'll notice in my PlatformIO/"Arduino" video I even walk people through how to contribute to show how easy it is. I love good, cheap software.
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Would you download a car?	My wife's Tesla downloads update all the time. I'm sure they're just as complex as the mechanical components of the car, so in a sense, we already do!
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But... why did you keep the email?	I have a folder on my OneDrive called Registrations where I keep copies of license keys and registrations. So it was handy. Looks like Telix is my oldest registration from 1989 or so.
Also what was Microsoft really like back in the 90s? As a user of MS-Dos 3.30 forward till now. I’m assuming there has just been a whole tide of changes. Was double space really as funny on the dev side as it was on the user side with the slowness and the pufferfish as a logo :)	I worked on Doublespace in that I wrote a thunking layer that could live in low memory and then moved the rest of the code into the HMA. I didn't work on the compression, but odds are the guy who did is reading along right now, I bet!
	I don't really know if it was faster or slower than its contemporaries like Stacker. I wrote one for the Amiga, though didn't get it quite finished before starting at MS, and it's an interesting and hard problem to do well. At least on the AmigaDOS it was, FAT would be a tad easier.
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I mean for its time it was great. But back then floppy disks and 10M RLL-MFM drives were more the norm. It was actually awesome to have it included IN the OS instead of having to buy stacker. I think this is why I get so much of a kick out of every phishing AD that says download this to double your RAM. It just takes me back.	RAM Doublers are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Raymond Chen, in his blog "The Old New Thing", covers them well. If I understand it correctly, in the most famous case the code to do the actual memory compression was disabled, so it literally did nothing, but did it with overhead.
	On the other hand, I note that current Windows, the HyperV, and even my Synology NAS offer "Memory Compression" now so perhaps there's a time and a place on modern cpus and systems.
I'm an Engineer and regularly use MS Office to produce reports and calculations. Subscript and Superscript are something I use all the time. For at least the last 15 years, in MS Word I can hit "Ctrl +" & "Ctrl Shift +" to make the highlighted text Subscript or Superscript. But MS Word sucks for calculations, so I use MS Excel. But MS Excel it's about 8 clicks to make something super or subscript, and the hotkey technology hasn't made it in. So my question is, why was MS Office 2003 the best version of office that was ever produced?	I retired in 2003. Coincidence? I'll leave that one up to the scholars.
If you could go back and change anything about Windows without consequences or worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?	Format! I wrote that and since I was used to using the Visual Studio Resource Editor for dialogs, but couldn't in this case, I just laid out a stack of buttons and labels, content in the knowledge that a Program Manager or Designer would come up with a proper design for it that I would then code up. But somehow, no one did, and no one has for 25 years! So it's a big tall stack of buttons like a prairie grain elevator.
Ever met Bill Gates or have an interesting personal experience with him or another higher up you can share?	Yes, even when I was a new college hire he had the 30 of us or so over for beer and a burger in his back yard. It was a nice touch and quite informal. Obviously, at some scale, it wasn't 30 people anymore and they couldn't continue it!
	Ever play the video game Star Castle? It was like that. Concentric circles of people standing around BillG each armed with what they hope is a question or comment so clever they'll stand out in some way!
If every software you need would be available for both systems. Would you use a Linux distribution or Windows 10?	Right now I'd use Windows 10 because, if the same client software is available, I'd do it on Windows simply because I have a new 3970X w/ 128G of RAM and triple RAID0 SSDs plus an Optane stick. All for about 1/10th the price of a Mac Pro. Since the hardware is so cheap and powerful, it's really hard to resist.
	Even if all the client software were magically available, or Parallels for Linux were a thing, I'd stick with Windows because I haven't seen a Linux UI that I really like. I know everyone has a favorite... if there's an actually good and attractive one that works out of the box, let me know what distro, and maybe link a screenshot!
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Give Mint 20 with Cinnamon a fair shot! I have struggled for years trying to like a Linux distro but never found one that felt and looked right which I think had been the reason Linux hasn't been adopted mainstream but Mint20 with Cinnamon is possibly it..if not its very very close.. Has awesome multi-desltop winodws feature and you can make it basically just like Win10.. Would love to know what you think of it! 20.1 BETA just dropped and has a super interesting feature called Web Apps that needs to be checked out asap! Heres a link to the 20 long term support version.. some people do not like the Minto Logos/Backgrounds out of the box..keep in mind there are a ton of nice ones included and many more you can get quickly if that's something you don't like..what is really neat is that you can make Mint20 look like any OS.. there are themes that make it exactly like MacOS I just have not personally tried those out yet. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3928	Thanks, I'll check out Mint!
I am looking at my copy of Douglas Coupland's "microserfs". Although it's fiction, do you think it resembles the Microsoft Culture of the time?	Lord no, that book bugged me. On the one hand, they're a bunch of pretentious and precocious, annoying kids. I worked on a team (NT) where the tone was set by Dave Cutler and the guys he brought over from Digital, so it was rather different. On the other hand, it's such a big company that odds are those four main people DID exist somewhere in the company. Just not around me!
Why was (is) a monolithic registry preferred over distributing the settings in a number of files like Unix? Why did windows remain single-user focused for so long when Unix was multi-user since the 70s? In my understanding, if there is just one user, that user has to be admin which opened Windows up to security issues. (I don't even recall any sudo-like privilege escalation in pre-XP Windows.)	Windows NT was multiluser from birth. And there's nothing about the Windows architecture that requires users to be admin; the reality, I think, is that most apps started out in Win95 land and just didn't work if they were run as non-admin, so people ran as admin because the apps required it.
	We couldn't just break all those apps and say "Oh well, get better apps" so what you got was a convention of people running as admin. But again, there's no need to. Same as Unix.
	The one exception is that under Unix it's easy to sudo and so admin work briefly. I wish Windows had (or exposed) a simpler mechanism for letting me run as a non-admin credential and escalate when needed. I know UAC does the same thing, more or less, if used cautiously.
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Yeah NT did eventually get around to fixing it. My question was really about the earlier systems, because I think you said you worked on MS-DOS? Since there were existing systems with multi-user and privilege escalation even before the first Windows, somebody must have made a conscious decision to not include that functionality.	MS-DOS was only the second or third OS I can think of for a Microprocessor (CPM, SCP, then MS-DOS). What existed for mainframes and minis didn't matter much in the memory limits available on the desktop.
What was the inspiration for Space Cadet Pinball and what is your high score?	I don't know, I wasn't the designer, the inspiration part happened separate, I provided the perspiration part! I was actually pretty good at the game, since I was literally paid to play and test it... but I don't know the score, sorry! I do have the world high score on Tempest, though! But not Pinball :-)
1. What's something super useful within Task Manager you think even seasoned Windows users don't know they can do? 2. What do you think a future version of Task Manager should be able to do?	I think CTRL_SHIFT_ESC is a surprise to a lot of people!
	I think Task Manager needs Dark Mode, and a way to show who has locked what file or device so you can kill the offender when needed.
Why is it that I can still find dialogs in Windows 10 that were clearly built using 16 bit Visual Studio 97 version?	This should explain it. When you achieve perfection, you leave it alone:
	https://youtu.be/l75a8CvIHBQ
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Please for the love of God, use your Microsoft contacts to stop the snipping tool from going away. It's literally perfect but they keep trying to discontinue it.	One Compound Word: SnagIt. It's what you need to make your life complete.
	After my time, but I heard the new snipping and history that's being built in to replace it is pretty good. It better be if they kill snipping tool!
Thanks for task manager! I use it for so many things. How do you feel about newer versions of Windows de-emphasizing the control panel in favor of their new settings app?	I'm all for it if they made sure they had 100% coverage of all settings. It's sort of weird that in this day and age, with an R&D budget in the billions, we still have a mix of new control panel and old property pages. But I like the new stuff if it covered all cases!
Hello Dave! Why does Windows have such a rough time transferring a lot of small files? Is it a limitation of NTFS?	It's not Windows, it's all operating systems. Part of it is filesystem related:
	Imagine copying a file takes 200ms of overhead plus 10ms per MB. Coping 100M of large files will take 200ms + 1000ms = 1.2 seconds.
	Now imagine you have 100M of 1M files. Now you have 100*200ms + 1000ms = 20000ms or 20 seconds. 20 times as long for the same amount of data.
Did you ever get a chance to work in/on OS/2? I stuck with OS/2 until 2005/2006, before moving onto Linux, and would love to hear any opinions and stories you might have.	I didn't! I used OS/2 a bit but never had a chance to work on it. Many of the people I worked with did, though... but if OS/2 were Kevin Bacon, I'm one degree removed.
I had waited more than 20 years to ask this... What the fuck is Trumpet Winsock?	That's what you need to use TCP/IP on Windows before it was included in Windows. You're welcome.
What was the idea behind having "generic" activation keys starting in Windows XP that would activate any version, it was said they were for [educational purposes], did Microsoft provide them to 501c3/non-profit schools, or was there a different reasoning?	I'm not sure what you mean by "generic". I remember retail and oem, but what was a generic key?
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There was a set of keys that became public knowledge partway through XP life that appeared to activate unlimited machines as valid, though added a banner "For Educational Purposes Only". I remember trying it back in the day and always wondered what the intention was that was important enough the key activations were never blocked. [I did have multiple legal keys, but curiosity killed the cat and I had to swap one to the "educational" key to see for myself, lol]	I don't actually know! But I can surmise that if it was displaying a banner down in the bottom right corner of the screen, it knew it was not licensed and was likely limited or time-limited in some way. Unless you could actually ACTIVATE them with that key, which would surprise me.
How does OLE still work? I can't think of anything else that complex and old that still runs. We've got a legacy piece in our application that uses it and I can build against it using .net 4.0, in an Azure pipeline and deploy to windows 10 hosts and a piece of 90s technology still works perfectly. How and why?	It was complex, but pretty well written and very well tested. That's not to say there aren't a lot of bugs outside the common case codepaths, but I bet if Office used it, it's pretty solid, and will be forever.
Other than your personal phone number, did any Easter eggs make it to general availability?	There was one in the Win9X shell, but I think we removed it for Windows XP and later. So not that I'm aware of!
Have you ever wanted to make a "sequel" to Space Cadet?	There are actually two other tables available in the original Maxis game that should work, in theory, but I think Space Cadet was the best of the 3, so...
Were there ever any 3rd party edit/change to shell that made you think, "Why didn't we think of that?"	Not offhand, but "Stacks" on MacOS where it tries to rescue your mess by grouping things by filetype (Images, Docs, etc) is pretty clever. So that's something I wish we'd though of!
Have you worked at all with Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich?? Also, what was your initial response to Process Explorer /the Sysinternals stuff??	No, but the SysInternal guys are geniuses of the highest order, so far as I'm concerned (and I say that based on their products, no knowing them). They know their stuff.
What are your best/oddest purchases you were able to justify as a work expense (for example, were you able to get MS to buy pinball machines as an R&D cost)?	I had DirecTv in my office! I was working on the Media Center prototype and we couldn't get cable on campus, so I got the dish installed on the roof, etc....
	I had a Tempest machine in my Office but at my own expense. I started right around the days of the "shrimp vs weenies" memo, so they were pretty cost conscious.
Is it true that you and Dave Cutler got into a knife fight over a hand of poker gone bad?	A broken bottle is not a knife.
Was DoubleSpace stolen from Stacker?	No. As I understand it, DoubleSpace was licensed from an Israeli developer. Then I heard that Stacker had somehow been awarded a patent on using a hash table in compression, which sounds pretty ludicrous if true. There was a trial, and even though it revolved around hash tables and math and compression engines, and no one on the jury had been to college, as I heard it. So the big guy lost. That's the story I heard, your mileage may vary. I'm not a spokesman, etc.
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MS-DOS 6.21, the most useless version. I remember writing an extra "2" on my 6.2 OEM disks when the update came out (no point wasting disks).	You say "useless", I say "canonical".
	I think I actually worked on 6.22, not sure. It was 6.2 something. In terms of usefulness, the features I added to it personally were:
	- Moving Doublespace to HMA to free up a lot of low mem, as noted
	- Giving Diskcopy ability to do it in a single pass with no swaps
	- I wrote a new version of Smartdrv that added CD-ROM support
	- I wrote a special version of Setup that worked via deltas and put everything on a single floppy (no point wasting disks).
	Mind you, I was just a summer intern when I did that, and it took me about 3 months.
What are your favorite DOS command-line tricks that still work in Windows 10?	doskey!
What actually happens if someone deletes Win32?	Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Do not attempt.
Did Bill ever swing by your cubicle and tell you'd he'd take your assignment home and finish it in a weekend if you didn't hurry up?	Cubicle? It was the 90s at Microsoft! I had a corner office with a table, chairs, a Tempest machine, and a sofabed.
What is the best project you worked on or had friends work on that was canceled, that you would revive if you had the resources?	Windows Media Center, I'd say! And I wish they'd done a great AutoPC that the OEMs could have licensed and made common to most cars.
There has been a lot of hate on Windows / Microsoft from the Unix / Linux advocates. What are some narratives that you disagree / don't think are true?	I used to love the Amiga, so I know what it's like to feel a sense of advocacy for a platform that you feel is superior but overlooked in the marketplace.
	I think the most untrue narrative I've heard about them is that they all have neckbeards. I think it's only "most", not all.
How do you introduce yourself at parties?	"Does anyone here know how to update my Groove subscription on my Zune?"
What OS are you using now? What's your favorite OS of all time? What's the worst OS of all time? What's the worst Microsoft OS (if different)?	The best OS of all time was Windows NT 4.0 with the Shell Update Release.
	The worst OS of all time was the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 DOS that didn't have the keyboard debounce code in ROM yet so you couldn't even type on the thing.
[deleted]	No, I never put a true easter egg in anything. Especially in an operating system, I don't believe in them. You have to be able to trust the OS, and I think it goes against that.
How did you get started in this specific field?	I first wandered into a Radio Shack store in about 1979 when I was 11, where I saw my very first computer. It was not connected yet, as the staff had not figured out how to set it up yet. Being somewhat precocious, I asked if I might play with it if I could manage to set it up. On a lark they said, “Sure kid, have a shot”, and ten minutes or so later I had it up and running. This endeared me to the manager, Brian, enough that every Thursday night and Saturday morning I would ride my bike down to the store: I’d type in my crude BASIC programs and they were kind enough to indulge my incessant free tinkering on their expensive computer. So that's pretty much how I started!
Do you ever have moments where you’re like “they have it so easy nowadays” or do you think that because of the groundwork put in place 30 years ago that systems have become exponentially more complex?	Only when someone spools up an entire docker instance to pipe something to it on the command line... then it's like "Really? You're basically booting a virtual computer as a command?"
What's the best C++ expert tip you can share for fellow programmers?	If you make anything in your class virtual, make the destructor virtual, particularly if there's any chance that anyone might delete an instance of your derived class through a base class pointer. Otherwise, the behavior is undefined, I think, but even if it works, it's not what you want!
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Wow this is eerie. I literally fixed a bug a couple weeks ago that was this specific case.	They can be weird bugs to track down, too!
Tabs or spaces?	Spaces on an indent of 4, tabs set to 8.
How can I open an MS Binder file?	Push down on the metal tabs at the top and bottom of the central spine of the binder. That will release the 3-hole punch claws, and then you can remove your printed file.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" Why was this splash removed?	I think most current BIOSes can do it on their own by now!
Do you have any insight as to why MS decided to build Windows 95 from the ground up instead of building off of an existing *nix system the way Apple did with OSX? Was it just for backwards compatibility or were there other reasons? Also, had you gone this way, how do you think Windows, and the industry in general, might be different? I'm asking as someone who thinks that WSL is the best thing to happen to Windows in years.	Windows 95 was not built from the ground up, but NT was. The most succinct reason (and just a guess, I'm not a spokesman) is that even though MS had Xenix on hand, there were fundamental problems in the way Unix handled SMP multiprocessor locks and so on at the time. I presume these have long since been solved in Linux, etc, but not without significant work.
	WSL is one of my favorite things too, but for the library of tools and software, it makes available to me, not because of some fundamental architectural superiority, I don't think!
What are your feelings about "Microsoft Bob"?	https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
What did source control look like in the 90's? How did MS keep its code from leaking out to the public? How did you handle versioning and different developers working on the same feature?	We used a tool called SLM, or Source Library Manager. It was sort of available briefly as a product under the name Microsoft Delta.
	It was OK for smaller teams but did not support branching, so just before I left we moved to Source Depot.
Why was Ctrl + Alt + Delete changed to Ctrl + Shift + Escape?	It wasn't! Ctrl-Alt-Delete raises the "Secure Alert Sequence" which triggers the OS to switch to the secure desktop, where you have the ability to click a button which will start task manager upon return to your regular desktop.
	Ctrl-Shift-Esc is a feature built into Winlogon that launches a TaskManager on the current desktop without switching to the secure desktop.
	There are theoretically hacks and exploits that can only be caught by switching to the secure desktop, so if you're ever in doubt, ctrl-alt-del is the more secure way to go.
How did DOS ever get away with just pulling device names like "COM1" out of thin air when it came to output redirection etc..?	That's for compatibility with MS-DOS.
What are you currently working on?	Mostly on LED and Microcontroller projects that I detail on my YouTube channel, and the channel itself takes a fair bit of my time! If you're curious, you can check out my current successes and failure adventures at http://youtube.com/d/davesgarage
Did you work with Kris Hatleid on Super Hacker and the game Evolution?	I worked with Kris on an unreleased title called "Commander Video". That's largely where I learned assembly language, since he did the bulk of the coding, I watched and did level design, etc. 1982 or so I believe!
Got any dev back door mainframe access codes for pinball?	hidden test
Dave, how did you manage to do all that without being able to google everything?	That's one of the craziest things... I got a degree in computer science before you could even look anything up!
	The hardest part was OLE2. Coming form a different platform (the Amiga) it was a monster to wrap my head around, and the book (Inside OLE2) was not the best for introducing devs to OLE. It scared me, and I sure could have used a YouTube tutorial or two!
Hi Dave! So here's a bit of an odd one. I loved your Space Cadet Pinball! I must have spent countless hours on it as a kid, and even now I still occasionally try to find ways to boot it up. A legitimate classic. But lately, the version windows offers just... don't feel the same. They aren't as nice. Is there a game you can name that you would say feels like a worthy successor to Space Cadet Pinball? Or even any more general pinball games you would recommend?	I have a real Black Knight 2000 machine here in the house that I fully restored, so I'm a fan of physcial pinball as well!
	I think the two best video games are (a) arcade Tempest, and (b) XBox Geometry Wars 3.
	GW3 is a classic, or should be!
Woah woah woah, University of Regina?!? Are you from here? Cool to see a UofR grad had such a major impact!	Yup! Check out the regina sub for a recent article
When working on MS-DOS what did you think of alternatives such as 4DOS, NDOS or DR-DOS, were they source of inspiration for new features or not at all ?	No in general, but Norton had NCD. It was a change folder command that could jump around the disk, so if you typed "NCD drivers" from the root, it could go down to "C:\windows\system32\drives". Super handy.
	So I tried to write one for NT, but it meant changing the working directory of the PARENT process (cmd.exe) and I could never figure out a clean and elegant way to do it without modifying CMD itself!
Which is the best version of Windows? (Figuratively speaking).	Windows NT 4.0

why are arcade machines so expensive video

It's because the parts are expensive when you add them up. The CRT monitors, for example, cost hundreds of dollars. Add in the cost of the word working, doing the art for the side, and wiring the whole thing, and the software licenses (assuming this is a legit machine and not a pirated box.) So getting an arcade stick that will be compatible with future consoles, unlike gaming pads is definitely worth it! Something else you’ll need to consider is the price. Arcade sticks can become quite expensive relatively quickly, depending on the specific model and design you choose. Okay , when I move into my first house which I want to be cheap , I want to turn a small room into a game room. I want that game room to have a Huge screen t.v ( not too huge ) which with that I want to buy the game systems that are out now , some arcade games ( only about 3 ) one of those 6 in one table top game things , a pool table and a small slot machine ( just for me. ). I know its A LOT ... So I was wondering why arcade games are so expensive and if there is a way to get one cheaper; stripped down or something. I'm not much of a gamer anymore, but yeah. 4.) working machines with no parts that need to be replaced are RARE. Usually when someone is selling an arcade machine, it comes with a list of things that need to be replaced or fixed. A good one is hard to find and it goes to the highest bidder. So one theory of why games were popular, arcade games specifically, is the whole easy to learn and hard to master aspect. Approachability. While there are exceptions, for the most part a lot of the classics are very quick to understand. Pinball arcade on steam/Everywhere else is an excellent simulator of real machines. I'm sad that you cannot buy Addam's Family for it anyomore. I got it on Steam so I have it forever, but still... that, T2 and Star Trek: TNG are my fav tables. _____ Arcade cabinets vary in cost based on the experience provided and newness of the game. The big fighting games will likely demand two or more tokens (or even regular coin) because they are all the rage and will take the biggest beating by gamers ea... Pinball machines are costly because there are not many enduring machine makers because of the game declining in fame and the precarious costs associated with the structure, innovation, creation and permitting of the machines. More seasoned pinball machines are costly because of their irregularity and gather capacity. upgrade arcade1up So it's a fair question to ask why some of these semi-to-entirely-obscure games are now among the costliest to obtain. It seems to me that the question is not "why are arcade games so expensive" but rather "why are so many mediocre-at-best games that were unloved back in the day so expensive?"

Why Are Upgrade Arcade1up Machines so Expensive?

why are arcade machines so expensive

why are arcade machines so expensive - win

Why are old arcade game machines so expensive, when they are a cheap box and the games that are played do not require modern technology to run?

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