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Author: matt

Streamers turned Triple A Studio head

Streamers turned Triple A Studio head

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Dr Disrespect is a quick-witted, bombastic streaming persona created by Herschel Beahm IV. He is most famous for streaming games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and other battle royale games, but has worked at game companies as a level designer and other roles.

After a tumultuous time being banned by Twitch, streaming a men’s room during E3, marital issues, and other potholes, he has moved to Youtube and still has a powerful brand.

It appears so powerful that he’s paired up with some heavy hitters to start a AAA game studio: Midnight Society. He’s collected Call of Duty and Halo veteran Robert Bowling, Quinn DelHoyo (a developer who worked on Gears of War and Halo); Halo Infinite veterans Darren Bacon, art director; Greg Cox, 3D environment artist; Alex Fennell, Technical Director of Infrastructure; Rodney Gilyard, software engineer; and Howard Coulby, Technical Art Director.

It will be interesting to see if Midnight Society can make free-to-play battle royale game (code named Project Moon) take off – but they sure seem to be taking a good first stab at it by releasing early playable footage called DEADROP. They sure have a great bench and started off with a bang by almost immediately selling out their 10,000 Founders Access Passes along with patches and passes. These Founder’s Passes allow early access, voting rights on game behaviors, unique founder’s costumes, exclusive drops, etc.

Just this last month they release their first drop after only 6 months of development and they claim they’ll be doing new drops every 6 weeks.

But it doesn’t stop there, they spend a lot of ink talking about a desire to work with their community to build the game. All members that got in early start as “Claws” and must participate in a variety of tasks to be elevated to highest status of ‘Variant’. There will also be a second-tier group called “Eyes” that run the in-universe creation of weapons and cosmetics – and share in the future economy generated from the work of the guild. What tasks? Besides judging your participation in the forums, activity in the community, activity as a content or game creator, they also had to go through secret missions:

Over the course of the last two months, we’ve been running a secret mission, which began on New Year’s Eve and allowed the most locked-in Claws within our community to verify as Pre-Variants over the course of a five-week campaign. Deciphering clues, hacking into consoles, unlocking Sectors, and running missions. Many of these verified Pre-Variants, who showed initiative and teamwork to complete the secret CC.protocol training simulation will be awarded Founder’s Access for free, with the rest earning whitelist status and receiving the highest priority during the selection process.

They’re leaving no stones unturned. There is also likely going to be the choice of transferring earned equipment via NFT trading or more standard non-NFT trading.

To me, this feels like 2 different engines are running simultaneously. There’s definitely a game being built here, but there’s also an even bigger PR, community, and hype machine engine going. It’ll be interesting if the technical game can live up, or even keep up with the almost massive amounts of direction churn that will be generated by the hype machine. As a software engineer, I sure hope they have some solid change management plans.

If nothing else, Dr Disrespect does know how to monetize and capitalize his fame. It’s also a fascinating view into the most modern kinds of community management techniques. It will be interesting if they can actually put all that into an experience that works and is fun.

Reservations in Rome

Reservations in Rome

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Rome is a lovely town for visiting – but it’s always interesting to see how over-tourism has changed things over the years. I remember going to Rome and having pretty much free reign to walk around the whole Colosseum. It looks like now you need to reserve your slot far in advanced through a new CoopCulture website that lets you buy tickets in advance. In fact, it’s the ONLY way to get tickets for the Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, Colosseum, and several other key cultural sites. There is no longer on-site ticket sales.

It also appears that the much vaunted Scavi tours under St Peter’s also have online information now as well, but it appears they still prefer a phone call or fax.

Last Blockbuster is now an AirBnb

Last Blockbuster is now an AirBnb

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I have been to the Last Blockbuster in Bend Oregon. It’s a real treat and blast from the past. But now, you can have your own amazing movie night – by renting out the store!

Starting August 17 at 1 p.m. PST on Airbnb, Deschutes County residents can call dibs on (aka book) a totally rad, yet intimate slumber party at the world’s last BLOCKBUSTER store by requesting to book one of the three individual, one-night reservations that will take place on September 18, 19 and 20. While a movie rental will cost you $3.99, for just a penny more you can book one of these stays for $4 (plus taxes and fees) for an unlimited movie marathon.

Your own island off the coast of Maine

Your own island off the coast of Maine

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Want to own your own island? Here’s an opportunity: Ducks Island is a 1.5 acre plot a 10 minute boat ride off the Maine coast for a very reasonable $339,000. The house can sleep up to 4 and is far enough away from cities to give beautifully starry night views with the water’s edge only 20 feet from your front door.

The owner stipulates that interested parties must spend a night on the island before he’ll consider an offer. There’s also the fact it can get pretty dicey in New England winter storms from October to May when it’s ‘Not fit for man nor beast’ with storms, ice, and potential flooding. A friend only managed to stay there 3 days before coming back in the winter. There is also no running water, showers, nor heat. Bathroom facilities are an outhouse. Still, it’s a rare find because the structure could never be built with today’s new zoning laws.

Visiting Tokyo on the regular

Visiting Tokyo on the regular

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I’ve been to Japan twice and loved each time I went. With the age of the internet, live streamers, and travel streamers – you can visit anywhere in the world at any time without leaving the comfort of your own home.

Over my 20 years of international travel, one thing I’ve learned is that you can never visit the same place twice. Time marches on in every country, every city, and even every life. Places you visited one year are gone and replaced the next. Cultural trends you loved in one place have been replaced with the latest new thing. Nothing stays the same.

That’s why I love checking up on the places I liked visiting using Twitch, Youtube, and other streams. Thankfully, we’re moving beyond the era of screaming, idiotic streamers into something more refined. I prefer streams from people that live in the countries and travel like locals and not tourists and Instagram influencers. The latter often rarely have any real curiosity or respect for a culture. They do culturally rude/insensitive things, forcing their way through a place with money and brashness. They pressure the goodness of kind locals just to get the shot they want and then go on to culturally pillage some other location for likes. They rarely leave a place or people the encounter better – or actually learn anything about the cultures that produced what they’re traveling through.

Here’s a few of those better channels. Do you have some?

An example of some good quality content. Bonus points for the fact I remember this guy when I was in Akihabara.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

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Two of the the greatest intellectual achievements of modern times might surprise you. Both were developed by Austrian mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel in 1931. They are called simply Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and apply to all of mathematics, formal logic, and even philosophy (epistemology in particular). The implications turned out to be deeply profound and have thrown all of mathematics, logic, and even philosophy into disarray ever since. Despite almost a century of attempts, no one has been able to disprove them. In fact, almost all attempts end up supporting, and even reinforcing and expanding them. They now are accepted as almost certainly true.

The theorems sound simple enough at first blush. The first incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent formal system (mathematics, logic, physics, etc) in which a certain amount of arithmetic can be carried out, there are statements of the language of which can neither be proved nor disproved in that language. According to the second incompleteness theorem, such a formal system cannot prove that the system itself is consistent (assuming it is indeed consistent).

What is so shocking about these two simple theorem? They prove something devastating: that mathematics and logic is not complete. There will always be truths in reality that the system cannot prove. It means that some problems can NEVER be solved in some kinds of mathematics or logic. You can even try making new systems of math/logic (Algebra, Calculus, etc) but they ALL will have things they cannot prove. It meant that you might work on a mathematical, physics, or logic problem your whole life, and none of the systems we know about might be able to solve it – even though it might have a solution. There might even be some problems that if we make infinite numbers of logical or mathematical systems, we might STILL not be able to find a solution.

Veritasium did an absolutely fabulous video on the topic that’s worth a listen.

It blew my mind when I learned about Godel’s incompleteness theorems in college. Knowing that our tools are limited is frightening at first. It completely unseats our certainty that known mathematics or science as we have today is sufficient. In fact, we know it is NOT sufficient. In fact, we know that we’ll almost certainly have to make more logical systems for the rest of eternity. We can never have a grand unified theory of everything. There is no ‘bottom’ to reach.

Yet this opens the reality that there will ALWAYS be something new to learn and know. There will be countless other models that might work for problem we have but we haven’t found yet – even though each one will be flawed and incomplete in their own way.

Many purists find this knowledge to be disastrous. It rips the rug out from anyone that asserts we can know everything. Others were excited by the fact there will always be new developments. Others are left in awe that even our very universe/reality itself lacks the limits we have. Still others have taken this as proof of the infinite. I know at least one mathematician that believed it gave us proof of God.

I do believe in God – without question. Many people forget that the vast majority of modern science was developed by believers in God that saw no conflict with discovery of properties of the physical world. The idea that faith and science are incompatible is a very modern and absolutely incorrect train of thought.

Instead, I see this reality as much like ourselves. None of us are perfect, yet each of us has a uniqueness that might just express a great truth no one else in history has seen or could see. This is why life is so infinitely precious and a tragedy to all when even one life is lost. This is why it is a crime to all humanity when we decide suffering is reason to end a life or that a disadvantage life is a life not worth living when we have such contrary examples and saw exactly where that idea led too in the early 20th century during WW 2.