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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.

    I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.




  • Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.

    Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.

    Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.

    Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.

    I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.


  • I’m actually excited to see this one. Kamala is a fun character and Iman Vellani captured her essence really well. They have not done a good job of making Captain Marvel or Monica Rambeau as characters we care about, but through the Kamala lens we might during the movie. But a lot of folks skipped on Ms. Marvel thinking she was for kids.

    However, I wouldn’t even call this dip in presales Marvel fatigue. I’m a Marvel fanboy. I watched She Hulk and enjoyed it. Yet, Marvel have done nothing to actually invest me into the current phase. It’s not a Marvel fatigue but more a multiverse/plot fatigue. I haven’t watched Secret Invasion or Loki 2 because… Why?

    I find Kang to be such a damp squib of a character. They ruined most of his mystique at the end of Quantumania to the extent he is no longer a real threat. Thanos worked because he was a difficult but not impossible threat. You felt like even the Guardians had a chance against him as slim a chance as that might be.

    Kang is an impossible threat. A multi-versal threat that has no limits. He’s boring because he can’t be overcome.

    I’ve said it before when we were all on Reddit, this Phase would be made significantly more interesting if you use this as the opportunity to introduce Doctor Doom. Have him crush Kang as a threat setting up a more complex, potentially beatable, villain and establishing a power order in one sweep.

    Once he’s established, bring in the X-Men and FF fighting off incursions, lead up to X-Men Vs MCU as your Summer Blockbuster, have a handful of arthouse y Last Days Of style movies. Go into Battleworld, have some really fun remixes of our established characters, reset the multiverse to a single world with more mundane threats and recast any character who wants out of the franchise.

    Instead, this movie becomes a ‘eh. I’ll see it on Disney+ eventually’.



  • The multiverse could have been so cool, but they went about it ass backwards. They introduce Kaang in a ‘quiet’ part of the overall story, where no one really has any stakes and we have little investment in anyone’s stories. Everyone is kinda doing their own things, mainly dealing with the aftermath of Endgame. Even Spider-Man, who we should be feeling protective of, decides to have a reset. We didn’t care about Kaang because we no long had an investment in any character.

    Then we’re supposed to feel scared of Kaang? And then in >!Quantumania they straight up just strip him of all mystique to the point the end shot of that movie is just comical with the arena full of Kaang’s making the character have 0 remaining intrigue. !< Even had the stuff with Masters not happened they’d lost their chances to make it interesting. Paired with Skrull just not really resonating with the audience at all, it has been misstep after misstep.

    !imo the only way you fix it now is have Doom come in the the F4, outright murder Kaang as the actual universal badass and then switch back to the personal less connected stories to tell a series of Invasion stories as the universe crumbles. Lead up to Fox-verse Vs MCU showdown. Then have a battleworld at the end of it and just reset the whole thing.!<

    Basically, in trying to make a mainstream product they’ve ended up with something no one really cares about.


  • In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.

    I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…

    Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.