Diecast – Twenty Sided

I had a topic I meant to add to the show notes, but forgot. This week in my Paypal account I got a $500 invoice from GitHub. I spent a good while scratching my head and wondering what on earth would cause GitHub to think I owed them five Benjamins. Then I looked again and realized the name wasn’t actually Github. It just parsed that way, the way you might think that I’m talking about my podcast when I say “Diceast” or that “Batamn” is a famous superhero.

So… that’s a new scheme. I was really surprised to find that PayPal didn’t have a mechanism to say “I do not recognize this invoice as valid”. It did let me refuse to pay it, of course, but it didn’t give me a way to express concern or suspicion. A single report like this wouldn’t be a big deal, but if a new user sends out 1,000 invoices and 600 are ignored, 4 are paid, and 396 are marked as suspicious, then that might be really useful for detecting and combatting fraud.

I wonder if this is a one-off, or if this is going to be part of the meta going forward.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
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00:00 Social Media and Automated Caring

As part of a discussion on Reddit, my wife listed a couple of songs that she was into at the moment:

• Everything I Love Is Going to Die
• If You Ever Leave I’m Coming With You

The moderator bot saw that text and thought they were indicators of depression or risk of self-harm, so it sent her messages on how to get help. I leave it to you to decide if this is innovative and helpful, or Orwellian and creepy.

What interests me is coming up with other song titles to freak out the automated systems. Something like:

• Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
• Happiness Is A Warm Gun

I thought to use Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, but like a lot of songs the title isn’t what the lyrics would lead you to believe. The title of that track is just “bodies”, which is a far less interesting title. Imagine if “Sweet Child O Mine” was just “child” or “I Shot the Sheriff” was just “Sheriff”. If you’ve got a strong image in your lyrics, you should use it in your title. It’s not like radio stations charge you by the word.

Anyway, feel free to come up with pairs of well-known songs that would trigger moderation systems to attempt to help / ban you.

04:16 PyCharm

We talked about IDEs for almost half an hour, but it wasn’t until now that I’m writing up these show notes that I finally get it. The name PyCharm is a snake-charmer pun. It’s the tool you use to charm Python.

I’ve seen a ton of “haha our programming language is a snake” jokes on r/ProgrammerHumor. You’d think I would have caught on by now.

28:46 Book of Travels

This art is amazing.

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39:58 Mailbag: Sound Design & Soundtracks

Dear Diecast,

Listening to great video game scores got me wondering, What would Shamus and Paul think are the best games when it comes to their sound design, scores, and the alchemical result of their fusion with the visual design, gameplay, and/or game’s subject matter?

Halo’s weapons tend to be appropriately punchy and zappy for both verisimilitude of the world and player satisfaction, and the soundtrack usually hits the mark in enhancing the scale of the epic journey the Chief/player is on, as well as ramping up excitement at the right moments throughout the game. And the music for the first Mass Effect beautifully boosts the sense of awe and wonder at this fascinating new universe in front of the player’s eyes, in addition to heightening the more tense and action-oriented moments, without breaking from the general tone of the setting.

Any games that stand out as particularly impressive or bewilderingly incongruous to you in these areas?

All the best,
Andrew

48:25 Mailbag: Hardware Shortages

This one is a two-fer:

Dear Diecast,

With all of the hardware shortages and no end in sight, do you think the big studios will have to start reigning in their bloated game dev costs? How can they afford to keep making a HD++ games when nobody has the hardware to run them?

Sincerely,

Craptop user & late gen adopter

And the second one…

Dear Diecast,

between crypto mining and certain global crises the price of graphics hardware is currently rather high, and the same goes for RAM.

Between the high costs and the opaque naming schemes, I feel like building your own gaming hardware is not very accessible.

Do you think this will cause PC gaming to lose out in popularity compared to consoles?

Of course neither can hold a candle to mobile gaming, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Vale,

-Tim