Expensive toys

Sometimes during December, I tripped over a weird but awesome Youtube channel. I should say two channels, but they are run by the same guy, so it's a matter of semantics really.

I'm not a car guy, I'm not into radio controls, but what this dude and his friends do is endlessly entertaining.

One the one hand there is Loading Kings, formerly known as Loading Wars until the Youtube algorithm decided it didn't like the word “war”... Frikkin' algorithm...

Anyway, they use the most amazing RC 18 wheelers, fork lifts, etc to compete in very exacting challenges against each other. It's super creative, really pretty exciting and so much fun. They have 3D printed crates, tiny shelves, and a zombie dock manager! It's so worth watching at least one match.

Then there is Youtube Gold, where they basically have a functioning gold mine run by RC trucks, excavators, front loaders etc. It's an amazing thing to see how they transport the pay dirt, sort it and filter it and finally actually get real gold!

It should be noted that they are not digging gold out of the guys backyard as such, it's dirt brought in from a riverbed that runs in gold territory. The channel owner, who's name escapes me, has a mining license and goes to a secret spot to dig out the dirt. The rest (besides a generator and a water pump) is all painstaking RC work. To date they have managed to get a surprising amount of shiny shiny gold out of the dirt. Enough to give Krazy Joe a gold tooth and more.

So if the weather is keeping you inside and there's nothing good on the old telly, why not watch some Canadians drink beer and dig for miniscule amounts of gold? Point of order, the firstr season is a bit slow, so skip ahead a bit if you feel it's too boring.

Until next time, have yourself a really great week!

Links:

Loading Kings: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZS4lGPG6JJs1NdtiHXsABw/videos

Youtube Gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y10yjvP2mSg&list=PLJrxZRfqxDn2OPE8vQz0D7CMe9-A697jX

It's all in your mind

Today we are looking at cognitive biases.

Cognitive being sensory input and bias being unfair favoritism. In other - less fancy - words how we skew how we experience the world around us.

When I decided to write this, I tripped over this list on Wikipedia and was really surprised at how many different biases there are.

From Ambiguity Effect: the tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown.

to

Zeigarnik Effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

There are so many odd things that we do in our brains with no one really thinking about it, it's staggering.

But today I want to look more specifically at The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It was named in 1995 on a message board after the left wing terrorist group, and is also known as Frequency Illusion.

This phenomenon is when you encounter something relatively obscure, and then fairly quickly encounter it again and again. Say you're watching a TV-show, and they mention Frederick the Great. Then the next day, you read a newspaper and see an article about Frederick the Great. Later, passing through a bookstore, you find a large display for a new book about Frederick the Great... You get it. You get a bit freaked out, don't you? Well, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Essentially, we are bombarded with input every day from thousands of places. Everything we read, hear, watch etc. We automatically ignore most of this input, but our brains love patterns, and every time you notice a pattern consciously or subconsciously, you get a small reward of feel good hormones from your brain. That's why we react so strongly to this phenomenon.

But there is a second part to this, namely Synchronicity. This is where, say you think of someone and then they call you or you run into them on the street. It is shocking and amazing, right?

But it's all coincidence, and it's the fact that it happens within a short period of time, that makes it seem more important.

If you combine the Frequency Illusion with Synchronicity, you get a strong feeling of meaning, maybe even destiny. Whether it is destiny or not is up to you, but it's most likely brain chemicals.

That's that. Until next time, have a great and maybe destiny filled week!

It is 2020!

Hello and welcome back to Eccentric Spheres in 2020!

Over the Holidays, I went and got a bit of flu, which I thought I had gotten rid of, but the damn thing has crept back on me, and it feels like I have more phlegm in my head than brains.

But you are here, and the show must go on!

In game news, things seem to not have changed all that much. The biggest news story at the end of 2019 was the hack/exploit in Fallout 76 that allowed the cheater to empty peoples inventories from a distance. So you'd be walking along, minding your own business and – POOF – you'd be walking in nothing but your underwear and all your stuff would be gone. If the hacker was really mean, he could also take your pipboy, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to access your inventory anymore, meaning you were stuck in your underwear forever.

Bethesda claims to have fixed it, but people in the know say that all they did was put a band-aid on the problem, and that it's only a matter of time until the next exploit comes along.

I understand why a live-service game is so attractive to the money-suits, but making one and keeping it running at a level that keeps the masses playing is really hard. You can't just take any old thing and make it live-service. That won't do.

Also from last year: Star Wars The Fallen Order seems to be an honestly good game, with none of EA's usual nonsense. Just a good single player game and that is it.

Moving into 2020, the first big piece of game news concerns the famously bad WWE 2K20. As the name suggests it's WWE wrestling, by 2K games. It looked worse than the previous titles in the series, and was so full of bugs it could intimidate an anthill. Well, as soon as the clock ticked over to 2020 the game stopped working. Indeed, you read that right, the game was so sloppily programmed that it refused to play in the year it's supposed to be for!

Speaking of sports games, I read an article the other day that lamented the fact that “all” sports games are held by either EA Sports or 2K games. Both companies are more interested in milking money from whales than making good games, which is of course an awful thing, but it got me thinking. EA and 2K have the official licenses for the big sport franchises, not the sports themselves. So yeah, no one else can make NFL, NBA or FIFA games, but perhaps the time is right for someone else to step in and just make a good game without the franchises.

Take city builders as an example. Back in the day, the big dog was SimCity. No one could touch them and they ruled the roost. Until SimCity 4 came out and failed super hard. In a nutshell, the game was lousy to begin with and had to be played online at all times, even though it was basically single player. On day 1, the login servers broke and no one could play the game at all! Que furious fans and an apologetic Maxis and EA claiming there was nothing they could do. The game had to be played online, period. Until a fan wrote a patch in less than an hour that made the game run with no internet needed.

That was the death of SimCity, but it left the door open for Cities: Skylines, an indie city builder that has become a huge success because it is a good game. I don't see why this couldn't work for sports. Sure, a FIFA fan wants to play the official stuff, but when it's so bad... there has to be space for indie games as long as they are good.

Well that's what I can wring out of my snotty brain. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and until then, have a great week!

Sometimes newer is better.

Well, here we are, the last Eccentric Sphere for 2019.

I started this blog way back in 2012, October 16^th to be exact and now I'm looking forward to taking it into 2020.

In order to go forward it is sometimes necessary to look back at what came before. Today I want to look a bit at video game art. Cover art to be precise.

Within some franchises the art is both predictable and boring. Take the Call of Duty games. Usually it's a silhouetted soldier with a gray or green tint. The Battlefield games have pretty much the same but with a blue or orange tint. Dull, but serviceable. Do a Google image search if you're curious.

It's a natural fact that the cover art has to be illustrative of what the game is about. A sports game has to show the relevant sport, Minecraft shows off the blocky nature of the game, etc. If the game has a cover theme or very recognizable icon, that goes on the cover. The Fallout games has a dude in power armor on the covers, which lets you recognize that it's Fallout from far away.

But what happens when this methodology goes wrong? Well, see below for the answer. A video from the Norwich Games Festival holds some examples, going all the way back to the early text only games. But, fair warning, you may well see this and tear at your hair in confusion and horror at the baffling “art”.

Anyway, please enjoy and I'll see you next week, next year and next decade. Until then, have a great time! See you in 2020!

A bit of holiday entertainment

Seasons greetings to you all!

As the holidays are upon us I thought some fun entertainment might be in order, so I have some more SNL sketches to amuse you and hopefully de-stress you a bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjlDTeOtq-c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGYDWO5Fhtg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc7slln9qNU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2dXFzXQ-Bs



If you're not in the mood for comedy I also have a show called The Scariest Places on Earth. Now, I haven't watched this myself, but I hope it's amusing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lknJ_g2iHf4&list=PL8tn07U2vMYCMPe8PJ6X5iGAEAJv-B5IA


So that's some entertainment for you, and with that I want to wish you all Happy Holidays and until next time, have a great week!

History of the entire world

The last couple of weeks have been a bit heavy, content wise. CIA... The Mafia... so today we're doing to entire history of the world in under 20 minutes.

Now, this video is hectic, so make sure you wake up before you click play. So enjoy and maybe you'll learn something, I know I did.

Join me again next Monday and until then, have a great week!

Direct link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

Gangsters

Last week I posted an interview with former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mandez.

This week I have John Alite, former hitman for the Gotti Family. It's a bit longer, and pretty grim at times, so be aware.

That's that, join me again next time for more eccentric spheres and until then, have a great week!

Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBvKTO-VyK4