I'll make this an effort post since I know you zoomies know nothing about the Internet or gaming before 2015.

Silicon Knights

Silicon Knights was a Canadian developer who made a few decent games, like Legacy of Kain and the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid. They're mainly remembered for the classic Gamecube horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, which is quite good for its time and is notable for being the only rated-M game ever published directly by Nintendo. They were lead by a guy named Dennis Dyack, a whiny manchild who doomed his company to fail.

To give you an idea of their management, here's an image of games in production, games that were cancelled or abandoned before release are marked in yellow. Note the staggering ratio of unreleased/released games:

Anyways, Dyack's passion project for decades had always been a game called Too Human, but every effort to make it had been abortive. After the successes of Eternal Darkness and MGS, Dyack decides the Wii doesn't have shiny enough graphics and makes the bold choice to unshackle his company from a lucrative position as a Nintendo third party so he can truly fulfill his vision on the superior XBawx Please Fix Me. Silicon Knights shacks up with Microsoft and Epic Games and produce an E3 demo (zoomers: people used to go to an annual convention for video game trailers) which is received overwhelmingly negatively.

Dyack is NOT HAPPY and goes on the IGN forums to whine about how the critics will regret their words and deeds:

Unedited clip from Too Human

NeoGAF

Once upon a time there was a gayming website called Gaming Age, with their forum called the Gaming Age Forum (or GAF). Eventually Gaming Age imploded, but the top two jannies (Evillore and Bishoptl) were able to move their community to a new forum, appropriately called NeoGAF. You wouldn't know it these days with GAF being a shambling corpse and its spinoff ResetERA being what it is, but pre-G*merGate GAF was chill and a place where industry figures would show up and sperg out while everyone laughed at them.

Dennis Dyack makes a bet

Once such figure was our hero, Dyack. With his new slop getting trashed by GAFfers, he makes a thread to bet on how it'll turn out:

Right now the man just appears confident in his project. But his next post is a bit more... unhinged, and seems to be setting the bar rather low by making alreay-forgotten games Lair and Haze the standard to beat:

He then goes for an interview on 1up (Zoomers: Now-defunct gaming journo site) and whined about how people saying mean things online is ruining America and how if the NeoGAF mods don't start respecting Denis Dyack and Too Human he's going to call the Internet Police and shut them down!

Also while it's not particularly dramatic he did an interview with DasG*mer where he talked about Too Human while in bed with two lingerie models. Alas I can't find the video anywhere, here's a thread about it. 2000s internet culture was something else.

Dyack then does another interview where he declares that not only is NeoGAF the worst forum in the world, but forums in general are evil and this is why the US military no longer uses writing:

Too Human comes out and scores lower than Haze. In classic GAF fashion the top janny punishes Dyack for losing the bet by writing lots of words and then perma-banning him. Dyack copes by saying g*mers are too stupid to understand his genius.

By this point the capital-G G*mers are pissed at Dyack in a way that prefigures G*merGate in a way. Seething articles are written speculating that angering the G*mers has resulted in him not just being banned from NeoGAF, but divorced from his wife, kicked out of the house, abandoned by his employees, his car towed, banned from every website ever, banned from the city of Niagara and tossed over the waterfall.

He messed with g*mers. G*mers.

The Saga Ends

Denis Dyack has brought Silicon Knights from one of the more respected devs in the industry to basically a joke. Following the failure of Too Human Dyack blamed the Unreal Engine and Epic Games and made the genius decision to sue them. This didn't go their way and by 2012 they owed Epic millions of dollars, had less than five employees, and were legally obligated to destroy all of their unsold games and source code.

In the meantime they had six more projects (including two sequels for Too Human) which were cancelled before they finally released another game, the absolutely awful X-Men Destiny, which turns out to be their last. In desperation, Dyack crawls back to Nintendo and pitches a sequel to their last hit, Eternal Darkness. NeoGAF insider reveals that Nintendo is agreeable until SK loses the lawsuit against Epic, and they decide they'd rather not fork over $10 million in legal fees so SK can survive, which Dyack denied. Former SK staff reveal that this was the case and part of the reason the X-Men game sucked was because Dyack was taking money given by Activision for that game and instead putting it toward Eternal Darkness II.

Years later Dyack attempts to kickstart his own Eternal Darkness successor and makes $300,000 out of the $700,000 target. He has yet to make another game. The end!

My favorite part is from 2:03-2:32

Favorite part from 0:59-1:27

Idk someone might appreciate it!

Some background that Politico won't tell you: New Caledonia is a French colony integral part of France in the South Pacific. The French never gave it up because it has the world's largest nickel mine it's an integral part of France. There has long been a policy of encouraging white people to move there to dilute the native population allow them to enjoy the climate as well. Recently France revised the island's colonial diktat constitution in a naked power grab attempt to be raceblind, allowing recent immigrants to vote in local elections. The native population is naturally outraged too barbaric to understand.

How in the heck does Azerbaijan fit into this? France has always been a supporter of Armenia. This must be because of righteous outrage about the Armenian genocide, right? Not really. Remember how the Sykes-Picot Agreement promised what is now Syria and Lebanon to the French after WW1? It also promised a huge chunk of southeastern Anatolia to them. The plan was that they would set up a puppet state here. In typical imperialist divide and rule fashion, the Armenians were supposed to be their enforcers.

They ran into a couple of problems though. First was the whole genocide thing. I wish it wasn't a winning strategy but sometimes it is. There weren't enough Armenians left to carry out the plan. Second, the French had the best army in the world in 1918 but it didn't mean they had a lot of guys who wanted to keep fighting for some distant colony. The few guys they did send out were defeated by the resurgent Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal. It's hard to win against a guy who's such a chad that he said to a subordinate at Gallipolli "I didn't order you to fight. I ordered you to die."

As a legacy of this there's a large and influential Armenian diaspora community in France. They're still kind of mad about the whole genocide thing. Mad at Turkey but also Azerbaijan because, if you'll allow me to grossly oversimplify things, Azerbaijan is basically half Turkish/half Iranian and they (and the Kurds) are accused of participating in the genocide. Did they? I dunno, researching genocides is pretty depressing so I usually avoid it.

So that's how the native indigenous Kanaks of New Caledonia have common cause with people living on inland mountains on the other side of the world.

let's tear down this wall and bring it in for a big rdrama family hug

https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1791921465492693154

Can I post here?

I'm not gay but I'm all too aware of how horrible LGBTQ people were treated not that long ago. Violence against them wasn't that uncommon.

One of the things that had the biggest effect on me was seeing circle marks on the pavement back in the early 90s in downtown Vancouver Canada. They were put there by gay rights groups to show where gay men were beaten by homophobes.

!leafs bring it back! @Eleganza You live in strag city you can be a spotter!