INTERNET — For people who like antiques, Pawn Stars and American Pickers are the hottest television shows out there. Items roll by faster than Antiques Roadshow while middle-aged men flirt with each other. Most of the meaning of each item is also reduced to cash value, and once per episode an expert will get a sentence or two in about one interesting item. Already, antique stores across the nation are faced with an army of idiots who won’t buy anything without trying to haggle the price down. Customers believe they are antiques experts because they’ve watched every episode of Pawn Stars and American Pickers. As a result, antique prices have plummeted severely in the last year.
But Shopdogsam is not that kind of entertainment.
Shopdogsam has posted hundreds of videos, documenting and explaining methods he uses to restore very old engines. He is practitioner of many lost engine shop arts, but more importantly, he is an authentic and entertaining character. The meaning of every intricate detail of antique engines is served up with a charming Arkansas accent, and Sam’s long white beard and easygoing demeanor may convince you he’s Kris Kringle, maintaining engines which could only power a toy shop manned by tiny elves.
The thing that sets Shopdogsam apart from television, and even apart from the majority of self-made celebrities on YouTube, is that he doesn’t seem driven by the need for hits. He’s not jiggling female cleavage in his videos, shoving food down his throat, or doing silly stunts in video games. Shopdogsam is opening an honest window into his engine shop to continue to spread the tradition of maintaining and repairing engines from a long lost age of innocence.
Joseph Kony is now dead, but assassins sent by the Internet say killing him “felt wrong.”
INTERNET — Joseph Kony, famed general of genocidal child armies and Internet super villain, was hunted down and killed by a team of assassins who funded their mission with crowd-sourcing after an anti-Kony video went viral last year. However, the team of killers have expressed mixed feelings and even regret at carrying out the Internet’s mission of ruthless vengeance.
After the anti-Kony video, Kony 2012, became the most viral video ever, many concerns were raised about its accuracy. Skeptics quickly debunked the claim that Kony was still roving Africa with murderous child armies. Now, some are questioning the one dimensional and inhuman portrait of Kony which stands in stark contrast with reports of assassins who spoke with the aging and defenseless Kony before acting out the Internet’s lucrative vengeance. One assassin, who wished to remain Anonymous, said the kill team found Kony living in quiet retirement, and said, “His exile was mostly self-imposed. He could have continued his raping and pillaging, but he was repentant. We found him living the life of a religious ascetic, and he gladly allowed us to kill him, fully understanding his death would not atone for the great atrocities of his life. He fixed us dinner, and we had thoughts of sparing him, but we all knew that the Internet would send a kill team for us, if word were to get out that we spared Kony.”
On the fifth night of my prison’s existence, during the third riot in 24 hours, one exceptionally frustrated prisoner used a knife he smuggled in to stab an already-unconscious guard. He stabbed him to death. The prisoner then got hold of that guard’s keys and, with two fellow prisoners – one maximum security prisoner and another on normal security (both of whom were already known to cause damage and harm to my guards) – bypassed the main riot and walked straight to the Psychologist’s office. The Psychologist who, all along, has been profiling the increasingly unsanitary mob – cataloging their needs, displaying to me how hungry they are, how unhappy – how apt to violence they have quickly become. They walked into his office and stabbed him like it was nothing out of the ordinary, but also like it was something they’d been planning for a long time.
So far mine is a small enough prison to where no riots have yet reached Attica status, but I’m man enough to admit my prison is totally broken. Daily income can’t keep up with the constant repairs needed by rioting prisoners. Guards can’t stay alive long enough to keep a paycheck and I couldn’t afford to pay them if they did. My prison, filename good.prison, once had rigid regime. It followed a daily routine! It had working showers! That was yesterday. Today, good.prison has degenerated into fenced pandemonium. I think I wasn’t feeding them enough. But I guess I still don’t really know exactly what went wrong. After all, nobody was willing to go into the showers after the first “incident.” Shower time came. Nobody went. I’ll never know why. I don’t even want to know. Watching the quiet, peaceful family visit of a guy named Pennock – who got sent to solitary for shanking a guard – just felt perverse. You rapidly grow desensitized to prison violence to the point where you’d rather watch one of your contractors install electrical cable than take the time to witness a series of shower-stabbings out of Oz. Or maybe you wouldn’t. This game gives you that choice.
The winner of a knife fight lies unconscious in the floor, dying.
The only direct control you have over your guards is to click on a prisoner and have him searched, so I probably should have searched all my prisoners for contraband upon arrival. However, just like authentic American prisons, the intake rate is so high in Prison Architect that you can only give each individual so much attention while tending to the whole horrendously overcrowded system at one time. But after enough armed convicts break the line, surrounding inmates gain confidence and join the fight. Before you know it, 18 inmates are tearing down every gate you thought was secure, and then going straight for the psychologist whose job is to warp their minds and break their psyche down into the well behaved license plate stampers God wants them to be.
While Prison Architect is a well-polished Alpha, there are still a few game-breaking bugs; namely, what’s done with all the dead people lying around. After the mayhem of the game-finishing Third Riot, I noticed four hearses lined up outside my prison. My morgue was packed full of dead bodies, all of them guards, and so were the infirmary beds. Because the AI does not dispose of the dead yet, gamers complain on forums about their sprawling, growing morgues. Dead guards, prisoners and staff now litter the main drag of my prison as a reminder of the terrible situation all around them, permanent monuments to chaos.
But don’t take my word for it. Witness these horrors for yourself. The earlier you register this game, the cheaper it will be. That said, $30 is still pretty high for a broken game only in Alpha. On that note, Prison Architect has surpassed the $4 million mark. That’s how much Mojang made with Minecraft prior to MineCon in 2011, which celebrated the official release of the game.
The Prison Architect development team, Introversion Software, has crowd-sourced prisoner diversity by allowing their premium player base to write in the names and biographies of at least one prisoner per player. They suggested players use their own names but I created a fictitious prisoner named Frank “The Free” Mason, named after The Internet Chronicle‘s shittiest dead writer. Approving the massive swarm of incoming biographies sounds like a difficult task but the developers say just about anything goes and, considering how much money they’re making from the Alpha release alone, it’s safe to assume they will hire an editorial team to clean everything up closer to Beta.
Try not to let anyone die until the next Alpha update (current version is a-11).
