#Data Collection Practices

[realtybizblog]

Google’s Incognito Mode Update: Enhanced Disclaimer Amidst $5 Billion Lawsuit Settlement

While the current public version of Chrome may lack this explicit language, the recent update in Canary suggests a potential forthcoming change. As Google navigates the aftermath of the lawsuit, users may expect enhanced transparency regarding data collection practices in Incognito mode.

[051398]

Gay boys what matters more to you the cheeks or the hole be honest and think you may freely interact with this post.

[dreams-and-honor]

@moon-and-stars-selfship being into Alderge AND Szayel is so funny because they have the most hectic and messy fraccion and Espada dynamic with each other and now they're gonna throw a mutual partner into the mix.

Szayel being like "Wouldn't you rather spend time with someone who's not a complete degenerate?" <- also complete degenerate

Alderge being like "Spend some time with me, I promise I won't make you hang out in the morgue again."

decisions decisions

[memento-fugaces]

The article is from 2020 and mentions two lawsuits that i was able to track down - one successful and the other unsuccesful. There is some progress but not that much.

There's also a mention of calafornia expanding privacy laws which did pass, although i'm not sure how effective this has been.

The article is interesting - it's premise one of hope - but five years on, it cannot be the best information available. Another article mentions meta being fined in the eu but that seems to have been resolved by a privacy preserving subscription option: largely a dubious solution.

Laws have been passed to protect children in the eu. Still, this is hardly enough.

There is more research and discussion needed, but the idea of banning targeted advertising has potential.

Also I've said this before but advertising is an industry that should be considered as pointless and harmful as fossil fuels.

[farmerstrend]

The Evolution of Pomegranate Farming: From Secrecy to Collective Growth

Pomegranate farming has a rich history, deeply rooted in tradition and secrecy. For many years, it was a practice reserved for a select few who guarded their knowledge and techniques closely. This culture of secrecy had significant consequences, deterring new farmers from entering the field and leading to financial losses for those who dared to try. However, the past few years have seen a…

[globosetechnologysolution]

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[asinglebluefeline]

You know what I need more of in my life? Tim and Dick's coordinated combo moves. We got little bits of it here in a fight:

and passing things to each other without looking (these panels are from two different issues):

PLEASE I bet that back when they were Batman and Robin, when they were bored while waiting for the computer to finish some analysis or other (the Batcomputer wasn't as fast in the 90s as it is now) they would practice the most unnecessarily convoluted moves or coordinated trickshots for fun.

So imagine:

- discreetly passing objects between each other without looking, with various sleight of hand tricks? Saved a couple of missions, both in and out of costume, when they needed to smuggle some kind of dangerous artifact or data.

- a fighting move that's so unnecessarily complicated they're basically a living Rube Goldberg machine? So chaotic that it completely disorients the enemy, devastatingly effective.

They almost never get to use those super specific moves in the field – opportunities to use them are very rare. But when they do happen, Tim and Dick are both immediately on the same wavelength. And you just know that (while cool and collected on the outside) internally they're fistbumping and screaming at how cool it was.

[marketxcel]

How to Build a Strong B2B Market Research Plan

Learn how to create a robust B2B market research plan from scratch. Explore strategies, tools, and best practices to drive informed decisions and business growth.

[sbcdh]

"You saw it?"

"For a second. Yeah. I saw one."

"Start at the beginning."

"Hoo. Okay. Uhhh... It was 77. I think. I was air force. Or, hypnoengineering support staff contracted to help out around St. Louis."

"That's how you came into your supply of JVH-1"

"It was JVH-11 actually, and yeah, the fuckin, uh- the requisitions officer at Scott was an old buddy of mine. We used to fuck around in college before I, you know-"

"Yes I understand."

"I worked records for Sears-Roebuck, I had all the accounting expertise, as well as a ready supply of LSD."

"How did you start?"

"Oh it was easy at first. Really just selling off phials of the new experimental stuff to finance guys. They'd go nuts for the stuff, pay top dollar for it too. Hell, I could get 100$ for a milliliter. Made it easy to keep my contacts bought in and re-invested. Honestly I don't think the req office would even know that we were skimming if they weren't in on it.

But, you know how it is with hypnoregulation. Transchronological market data is worth it's weight in diamond. It started with the odd photo of a 2q-week readout, then biometric data, then, uh- then. Well, we decided to try it ourselves."

"You attempted full sub-finantial emmanation?"

"No no god no, what're you nuts? No, see. We figured if one person can meld their brain with the market, we just had to get as close as we could to that guy, and mark the twain, hypnologically speaking."

"Mark the twain?"

"Yeah, see, okay. A plutophant in full emmanation isn't like us. We exist at a single point in time, an R1 rational market actor. But they exist in multiple points in time, back in 77, I think the government could hit R6 with that analogue tech. Most people can hit R2 with a single hit of JVH-1, with practice you can hit R3, but anything higher than R3 takes a pretty serious support team. But here's the thing, I had a whole cadre of co-implicated members of a military grade hypnoengineering support team. All we needed was the space."

"The warehouse. Schaeffer Marble and Tile was it?"

"Bingo. See here's the thing. You know why the government had to start building those special regulation temples? It's not just for security. Once you crack the R6 barrier, Plutophants start leaving what's called a wake. You know, like a fuckin, uh, like a boat. They're imperceptible to normal people, but if you have sensitive enough instruments or, say, a person in the edge of sub-market emmanation.

See the government didn't know at the time, but if you balanced the drugs just right, and kept someone right on the edge of R4, you could actually read the plutophant's interpretations by their wake rather than their direct neurofeedback. It's not nearly as precise, but if you have a good team and you know what to look for, you can get some really, really valuable market data that way."

"And your co-worker?"

"You mean Mills? Fuck. Yeah...Mills. Right."

"Take your time."

"No, no I'm good. It's... It's uh, It's dangerous. Brains aren't meant to take that much JVH-11 all at once. We could stay on R4, but what we didn't have was a recovery team, or a medical team, or recon team. It was me, Mills, Israel, Connaught, and Marsh. The five of us were the only ones in the soup. Bruso was running the machines and Lasker was monitoring the readout."

"Can you tell us what happened?"

"Yeah. Yeah. It was a normal intrusion. Hypnogrid emmanation is pretty simple with our tech and support. Sedation was all green, hypnoinduction was green. Smooth as silk. Landed about 40 minutes from our work location. We had the codes from the IRSAW people that morning, all we had to do was maintain hypnoinduction for 40 minutes while traversing the colon and we'd be able to-"

"I'm sorry, colon?"

"Oh come on. Colon. Collective Unconscious. Col-Un. Colon."

"I- of course. Continue."

"Hey, have you ever been on a dive before?"

"Can we focus on your statement?"

"It's important. I need to know if this next bit is gonna make sense to you or not."

"I've undergone basic anti-intrusion training standard for IRS investigation task force officers."

"So you've done safe dives. White room? Castle training? Putting up the wall? All that jazz?"

"That's correct."

"Did they ever tell you why it's dangerous to perform off-site hypnoincursion in meta-unstsble hypnospace?"

"They did."

"Well they're lying...don't look at me like that. I'm not bullshitting you. They're lying...there's...there's shit out there okay? There's things out there."

"Mills?"

"Yeah. Mills. Uh..."

"Take your time."

"Yeah yeah. Quit interruptin me. Mills... Uh, yeah so we were T-Plus 30 into the dive. Bruso gives us a heads up that some hypnoflora is headed our way, but can't get a read on mass. Says we should steer clear, but we are so close. Israel had handled some hypnoflora before, so we weren't worried. But it was... I dunno. I can't explain."

"Do your best."

"Like. Okay. Meta-unstsble dives are fucked. They're acid trips. The St. Louis hypnoscape already doesn't look normal, but Scott Base looked like some kinda bastard lovechild of a medieval castle and a seashell, all twisting up into itself. The streets were a chessboard, and all the streetlights we're these tall kinda mannequin lookin' things holding a tiny sun in their hand. Everything is fucked, it's all topsy turvy. But it's okay, because it's meta-unstable hypnospace, its not SUPPOSED to be normal. And then there was a Red Sock."

"Like for the feet?"

"No. Like. In the middle of this fucked up dreamscape, there's suddenly a batter for the Boston Red Sox. He's standing there, maybe 50 feet away. He's got a bat in one hand and a mitt in the other, and he's just kinda walking towards us. Nobody really knew what to do. It didn't look dangerous, but something wasn't right. It didn't fit. We just kinda stood there, looking at the thing. Israel starts talking to Bruso, asking him what to do. Suddenly, Bruso is screaming at us, telling us to book it. He's screaming into the com, telling us to prepare for de-emmanation. Nobody knows what's happening. Israel is suddenly standing between Mills and the Red Sock, and..."

"Any information you can recall could be of use."

"It's...it's mostly feeling at this point. You ever been having a normal dream? Like, a good, normal dream? And suddenly you realize that something is really, really wrong? There's signs. For me? It's that the lights go out. Suddenly day turns to night, and something about this batter just makes me want to curl up and hide. Suddenly, moving through the world is like trying to swim through molasses. I try to run, but nothing moves, and everything is dark. The world is shifting. There's shadows under the bathroom door that can't be happening. A man who looks like Jesus. An old and terrible house and an old man with no name whose face I can't remember. The batter swings at Mills and she just...vanishes. Shes gone. Bruso pulls us out a second later."

"So this, batter killed Ms. Mills?"

"No."

"No?"

"No. We get out, she's comatose. Whatever that thing did to her, she was still in hypnospace. I gave her a hot shot of barbiturates. Her brain activity slowed to R0 after about 90 seconds."

[scondigital2022]

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powerbi #microsoft #businessintelligence #excel #dataanalytics #datascience

[reasonsforhope]

"In a degraded and semi-arid farming area in India, simple science-driven changes to the landscape have colored the horizon, and a village’s fortunes, with green.

In the Latur district in the central western state of Maharashtra, 40 years of erratic rainfall, groundwater depletion, soil erosion, and crop failures have impoverished the local people.

In the village of Matephal, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) launched a project in 2023 that aimed at addressing these challenges through integrated landscape management and climate-smart farming practices. [Note: Meaning they've achieved this much in just two years!]

Multiple forms of data collection allowed ICRISAT to target precise strategies for each challenge facing the 2,000 or so people in Matephal.

Key interventions focused on three critical areas: water conservation, land enhancement with crop diversification, and soil health improvement. Rainwater harvesting structures recharged groundwater around 1,200 acres, raising water tables by 12 feet and securing reliable irrigation. Farm ponds provided supplemental irrigation, while embanking across 320 acres reduced soil erosion.

Farmers diversified their crops, converting 120 or so acres of previously fallow land into productive farmland with legumes, millets, and vegetables. Horticulture-linked markets for fruits and flowers improved income stability.

Weather monitoring equipment was also installed that actively informed sustainable irrigation practices.

“It is a prime example of how data-driven approaches can address complex agricultural challenges, ensuring interventions are precise and impactful. Matephal village is a model for other semi-arid regions in India and beyond,” said Dr. Stanford Blade, Director General-Interim at ICRISAT.

Farmers actively participated in planning and decision-making, fostering long-term commitment.

“This ICRISAT project improved yields, diversified crops, and boosted incomes. It also spared women from walking over a kilometer for drinking water, now available in the village for people and animals,” said Mr. Govind Hinge of Matephal village.

Looking ahead, ICRISAT writes it wants to use Matephal as a case study to scale these methods across India’s vast and drier average. As Matephal’s fields flourish, the village is a testament to the power of collaboration and science in transforming lives and landscapes."

-Article via Good News Network, March 3, 2025. Video via International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), February 26, 2025

[valeriapryanikova]

ominous

(itsy-bitsy fanfic concept/idea/? under the cut)

[A page ripped out of a journal; the owner’s handwriting is messy and barely legible.] 

february, 29th

i'm surprised i'm not dead now.

yesterday, in the late evening, as i was painting, it started storming. suddenly and hard. one second the dark sky is clear from any clouds, and the next moment the droplets are pelting me with a surprising force. i rapidly abandoned my easel and canvas (not like there would be anything lost—the piece was dull and not working out the way i desired) in favor of seeking cover.

i was still near the village, on its outskirts, but just a bit too far from my house to reach it quickly before my whole being was drenched through and through. so i ducked into one of the huts, all of which stand empty, desolate… or so i thought, at least.

only once inside did i spot the dim, ominous, red glow of the overhead lamp; the sound of a muted conversation; the overwhelming sense of “wrong”, like i was not meant to be here. abruptly silence fell and two sets of bright eyes stared me down.

terror froze my body. i felt like a prey caught in between two predators, i could practically feel their jaws snapping around my neck.

the dredger slowly smirked at me, barring her sharp, sharp teeth. (since when are they sharp? i may not have crossed path with her often, but i swear i would’ve noticed if she had shark teeth before.) i did not stay to see if the fisherman would further react to my presence too. the control of my body returned, allowing me to let out a panicked apology for interruption and bolt out of the hut, running home at full speed.

it’s been hours since then. i couldn’t fall asleep. i’ve been up the whole night, haunted by fear. the scene of those two beasts in the darkness, ready to snap me like a twig for overhearing something (i don’t remember what exactly, all the horror of the situation evaporated all my thoughts), got stuck in my mind’s eyes. so i’ve been doing what i know how to do best—painting.

[Attached to the diary entry is a typewritten note.] 

That painter fellow is an impressionable and imaginative type. Needless to say, the actual interaction with the two fish merchants was likely a lot less… Dramatic.

The painter was reluctant to show me the painting mentioned in the last paragraph, but after some convincing I did manage to take a quick look on their recollection of the witnessed scene: it seems mostly useless for my research, but I noted down some details that might be of use in the future (refer to “AudioLog#143” transcript for more information).

Collecting data on “The Fisherman” continues to prove itself annoying. The subject is allusive: there’s not many sources mentioning him, and folk around here rarely witness him out and about. Currently the only lead I have is finding that one old newspaper article about the docks that, if I recall correctly, mentions him in an interview with workers. Perhaps, when I have time, I’ll try asking the collector from the other side of the river if he has a copy of that newspaper issue.

However, for now, I’m significantly more interested in “The Dredger” subject. There’s more than plenty info about her—I would actually say there’s too much info about her, all inconveniently inconsistent. In an attempt to get more reliable data I’m getting in contact with Mined since they have done scientific observation of this area and the people of interest. My request for access to their data has gone unanswered so far and, if shoving my anthropology degree in the faces of those bumbling idiots won’t work, I’m sure that that city nearby has enough hackers willing to do some dirty work for a pretty diamond.

I will get the data I want, one way or another.

[dontbesoweirdkira]

There's just so much potential for platonic !yan Tim Drake that isn't really explored. This post may flop but I like to imagine that yan! Tim Drake is actually the worse out of all his brothers...

Masterlist

Requests: always open

Look...you and i both know that Tim is canonically unhinged. But Batsis!reader doesn't. It's so easy for you to forget that your brother Tim is so dangerous. I mean he doesn't really seem all that different from any other nerdy 19 year old. His body doesn't loom over you like the more bulky of your brothers, and his presence is rather...calming? I mean there's still a bit of uneasiness there but it's so subtle that you can brush it off

He's normal when he interacts with you. He doesn't bug you to spend time with him or uncomfortably touch you like Dick does. He is sweet and gentle...He knows how you prefer to be engaged with and respects what you don't like.

But, that's what makes him so dangerous. He knows you. Every. Last. Detail. He's gotten so good at being a nasty little fly on the wall that sometimes you forget he's even in the room. He's always around you, observing and collecting data. He's got you wrapped around his fingers and you don't realize it.

But it's not your fault. It's hard to even imagine that someone as mellow as Tim could ever share the same traits as his brothers.

Yan! Tim fully picked up just how intuitive you are and how you can spot red flags easily. He's so calculated and careful with every interaction. It's amazing how natural he makes these conversations flow. Well, they better. He's spent hours analyzing and practicing how to speak to you. His heart is pounding with anticipation, as every shred of information you give him is going right into his files on you.

Oh! The files he has on you? When Jason and Dick asked him about how many he had, he said only 4. Which is true. but those 4 files have much more information and pictures of you than they could comprehend. ...and he wasn't accounting for the hard drives and physical stacks of papers he stole. I believe Tim knows more about you than you do. When was the last time you've seen your medical records? Passports? Birth certificate? Is your ID even in your wallet? Don't worry, your brother Tim is keeping them safe for you.

Yan! Tim is a little stalker who may or may not have put a tracking/listening devices in your bag so he can keep tabs on you. <33 That's why he's always wearing headphones so he cab listen in. A small piece of missed information could cost him so much. Don't be mad, batsis! He cannot risk making you suspicious of him by asking you invasive questions so this is the only way.

I Like to think you automatically sit by him. whether it be during breakfast, watching a movie or in the car. You feel safer with him and it's a better option in your head than being with Dick who will be overbearing. Tim always acts cool, even a little annoyed by you at times but inside he's screaming. Your scent, your small smiles at him and nudge his shoulders when he makes a funny remark all send him into overdrive.

But i must say, it's exhausting for him to hold back his obsession all of the time. Sometimes he envies his siblings and how shameless they are in their obsessions. Tim Drake thinks about how great it would to be to just be hugged by you or for you to want to fall asleep on him like you do with Jason.

Sometimes, our creepy detective will slip up. He will say or do something that is odd to you

"I cannot remember the name of that song i used to listen to...what was it.."

"It's this one by that local band, sis."

"oh, yeah! wait...how did you-"

"I know you better than i know myself..."

"...what?"

*an incident happened where dick basically forced you to say i love you back. Tim was there and he was so so jealous*

"You love me the most though, right?"

You laughed, thinking it was a joke\

"Sure, Tim. You are my favorite Robin."

*Tim is very visibly becoming feral. Almost in the same way as Dick and you are slightly alarmed*

"...I'm your favorite Robin? So you do love me more than them."

"0-o"

He repeats it over and over again in his mind. If he was recording it like he does with many of your interaction, it will be on instant replay every morning as an affirmation.

That one time you were chilling in the study with Tim. His head was ducked, low into the computer. It was super late by this time and you didn't really want to bother him so you ended up leaving without saying anything, and headed to your room. Tim was beyond hurt that you were breaking his version of bonding time and you had the audacity to not even announce your exit. He's so swift that it startled you when he grabbed your wrist from behind. His grip was....strong.... to say the least..... and he questioned why you were leaving him.

speaking of his strength, Tim is so skinny that you forget he is well trained with a nice bit of muscle. Maybe not as strong as his brothers or Bruce but he can easily subdue you.

He's definitely broken a lock or two, to get into your room at the dead of night and watch you sleep. This is the only time when he can be as fucked up as he wants to. The unhinged look in his eyes while going through your things and taking what's interesting..The adrenaline that you might catch him, excites him. He can't help but to sickly smile as he makes his way over to you and observes. A gentle hand caresses the sides of your face. You're so perfect. He whispers on and on things he wishes he could tell you while you were awake and wouldn't think it was weird....

Maybe even once he's crawled into bed with you, wrapping his arms around you. So happy to be able to finally be able to cuddle like this.

And if you happened to wake up, and realize your dear brother, Tim was there...he has a plan for that. He knows how to play mind games on you and makes you seem like the crazy one. No one would believe you anyways. The locks are all fixed by the morning.

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.