(I'll replace it with a real review, I promise.)

I'm sorry. steamcommunity.com/id/dphrygian...

Since then, I've always made sure to pay anyone who works on anything I did, with two minor exceptions:
- One person who disappeared for a while; I paid them like 8 years later when I found them again
- One person who asked to work for free, but I still feel bad about that one (cough it's Xalavier)

If anyone wants to buy me a Christmas gift, there's also this Johnny Marr signature Jaguar. www.fender.com/products/lim...

(Translators being paid fairly (or at all) is a whole other thing that I'm not going to get into tonight, but... back in 2013 when I released Eldritch, it was sort of normal to ask for fan translations. I did that, and it worked, but I feel queasy about it now. Translation is hard work. Pay people.)

I've used aws translate to generate some strings so I could prove my loc pipeline, and I feel gross about that because I'm pretty sure it's AI. (When and if Eldritch 2 is translated to other languages, I will make sure it is translated by real people who know the material. And are paid fairly.)

And one other thing: we’re being told that AI is the only way to make games cheaper and faster, to pull us from this precipice of production nightmares the industry has found itself in. That it’s necessary.

We put out roughly 3 motherfucking games a year, not touching the stuff.
Skill issue.

I meticulously comment my code and it's *still* sometimes hard to fix bugs in things I wrote just 6 months ago. Imagine trying to fix something written by an AI years prior. No one you can ask about it, because no one knows how it works. What are you gonna do, ask the AI to fix it? It CAUSED this.

I'm old enough to remember in 1998-1999 when COBOL programmers were suddenly needed to fix up a lot of Y2K bugs in old software. And they did, because smart people are smart!

I'm scared of the "we fucked up and we need some real programmers to fix the code we asked some AI to write" era.

That's what software engineering is! You learn a concept, you construct a digital model of it in your head, you write the code to express that model, you test it, you refine it, you ship it. If you're asking an AI to skip those steps, you're not learning anything! You're not contributing anything!

I honestly can't even comprehend asking an AI to write code for me. Like, sure, I'll look up algorithms on Stack Overflow or whatever, but then I'll *learn* them, understand them, and write the code myself. Then I know what it does! I can debug it! I can explain it to other people!

I wrote a bit about those tools here:
www.dphrygian.com/wordpress/?p...
www.dphrygian.com/wordpress/?p...

I learned so much about so many different things making these tools, and they're *mine*, made for me, to do the things I want in my games. That's neat.

In case anyone ever asks, I *have* written a material generator and a music generator for Eldritch 2, but that's not AI. That's me taking all the things I personally know about those things, and writing my own tools to make the process a little faster and easier for myself. It's still 100% me, baby.

This show desperately needs a human villain to ground the fear. A Henry Bowers-type bully for the kids, a villain in the military hierarchy, some real teeth to the racism angle, or SOMETHING. It's surprisingly flat and kind to all its characters so far.

Those circa 2000s Disney CGI ghosts, straight out of The Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean. That's not IT.

Best intro to a TV show I've seen since LOST, and I have faith in Gilligan and co. that it's going somewhere.