meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)

she's schulzing on his charles til he peanuts, bro

i really don't know the future of social media. what can be expected to stay, gold or not? ought we all befriend each other on steam, safe in the knowledge that at least its huge marketshare and profitability means it'd be an enduring digital contact point of last resort? follow each other on youtube so we can be surprised in two-years-time by some video update? tumblr in particular doesn't seem more viable than cohost on the scale of "where will it be in five years", despite sixteen years of history, it's devolving into messy code that breaks, autoplaying video ads, serious moderation issues (yesterday while logged out i had thinspo served to me! front page, in 2024!), and a history of financial mismanagement. I love discord much more than the average user; I love the spaces that we have cultivated, the communities that are the right size to moderate themselves while still being open to growth. but assuming it will stick around in its current state til 2030 feels naïve to history. I love my internet; i love you — if only we knew a way to save the love so briefly shared

We're thinking back to the concept of gentrification and the ultimate limitation of many city building simulators as we really look into the San Francisco Housing Element. It's brought back my latent criticism for many of these games in how they fail to understand the humanity of the people who live and work in a city.

As Douglas wrote in the piece linked above, and later echoed by Kunzelman in Vice, as the concept of a city is reduced to a system, the ultimate goal becomes an exercise in making number go up. You want more people. You want more agents. You want more money. You want to push the simulation to become more complex within a finite box, which ultimately means you build upwards—and if you're building upwards, such projects assume that these complexes are better in some way than a base-level dwelling, and the ultimate goal is to build beyond basic developments because they enable you to collect the one definitive metric to the success of your mayoral mettle: more tax dollars.

So, of course you want neighborhoods to have schools, and of course you want neighborhoods to have public safety institutions such as police and health care. These are needs that any neighborhood should have, but they become a gateway to success for the video game denizens. High wealth residents pay more tax dollars and that money becomes the metric for judging how successful your city is run. Thus, in games such as Cities Skylines, the highest echelon of development presumes high wealth citizens.

François Schuiten (2010), reproduced in Les Cités Obscures: Intégrale - Livre 1 (2017).