Who Hunts the Whale by Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet

Author:Laura Kate Dale and Jane Aerith Magnet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789651591
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2023-01-09T16:37:36+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Heeren Today, Gone Tomorrow

5 JULY

After a long weekend, everyone’s back in the office (though I’m not sure how many of the dev team actually went home on Friday). Thanks to the positive reception the demo got at X3, as well as a little recognition here and there, the developers have been spurred on to greater productivity. Hopefully some of the code is transferable, or at least can be more easily put together now they’ve seen what the core gameplay loop actually looks like in practice.

That said, the sudden arrival, in a number of team calendars, of an ominous ‘major design meeting’, scheduled in the next few days, naturally has a few people concerned as to what direction is going to be coming out of that. I’ve seen Rick and Chad’s calendar, there’s no reason this couldn’t happen sooner, but I have a strong suspicion it’s just another power play, as the pair deliberately hang the Sword of Damocles for a while to generate some fear in the working class.

This is just like when someone sends an email that just says ‘We need to have a chat’ without any further context. It doesn’t matter if it’s a routine catch-up or a huge, life-shattering revelation, dread and tension spiral out of control all the same.

Unsurprisingly, come 00:00:00 on 1st July, all the company’s social media feeds removed any trace of a rainbow from our branding. Pride Month is over, time to pack the gay away until next year, when we’re considered financially viable again. At least they didn’t take the ‘support’ posts down, so that’s some semblance of a backbone.

All the Pride skins have gone from the current loot box rotation, leaving a few to rage they missed their chance to get them. What’s worse, they seemingly can’t be applied to characters anymore either, meaning they just sit in people’s inventories until they unlock again next year, at which point there will undoubtedly be a push to brand them inferior, and ‘so last year’ in the wake of whatever new releases they will definitely push out in an ill-thought-out hurry.

Other than that, reception to the Supremacy Software Pride season features was a mix of ‘it’s nothing but corporate pandering’, to ‘better than nothing, I suppose’. Of course the harshest critics are rightly pointing out that too much of the content boiled down to egregious stereotypes played out for cash. On top of that, the inclusion of straight Pride designs in an otherwise LGBTQIA+ Pride set rang alarm bells in certain circles. There was a vague apology for that, but the fact they included the line: ‘It wouldn’t be fair to exclude our straight players from our annual celebration of Pride’ somewhat weakened any semblance of sincerity.

Meeting minutes – 6 July

Drinks orders for the board:

Edwin – yellow power juice (Must. Not. Gloat.)

Rick and Chad – one twenty-two and one twenty-four-shot latte (suitably shuffled before I arrive)

For the time being, my plan to introduce plausible deniability into drink distribution is working well. Every meeting they ask for more shots, not knowing who truly has the greater amount of espresso.

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