Hello.
I laid bare my heart for the world to see.
But stuff still happened.
So what's up?
There's too much science.
There's too- there's too much of it.
So research.
You want to do a good research?
You want to do a good science?
It takes a bit of time.
You got to do some experiments,
control groups and stuff.
God, this is going to be a good episode.
Anyway, it's supposed to take time and energy to do science and publish papers about science,
but according to a recent research paper,
there's too many research papers.
Like a suspiciously high number of them.
There's been a shocking increase in the number of scientific papers being put out by individual scientists
over a single year.
Some people across the world, especially in certain countries,
have suddenly and inexplicably gotten way more productive at their science.
Essentially, how are they cranking out so many papers?
My first thought was chat GPT, but apparently that's not it.
Or at least that's not the prevailing theory.
The prevailing theory has to do more with financial incentives by paper published count,
as well as countries working really hard to make it look like their higher education system is really good.
For example, Thailand had one person in 2019 who was producing papers at the alarmingly fast rate.
And now they have 19.
I can barely get a newsletter out a couple times a week.
I don't know how they're doing this,
but the author of the paper believes that they're doing this by compromising research integrity
and being shady about it.
Probably.
Anyway, subscribe to my newsletter or podcast.
Cool.
Hasbro, I am sorry you did not pass your Constitution saving throw.
Hasbro, who owns Wizards of the Coast who make Dungeons and Dragons,
are laying off 20% of their workforce.
They just announced that right before Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
You don't have a job.
The layoff will affect about 1,100 people.
It's going to take place over the course of several months.
So it's not like all these people are suddenly out of a job,
but they're suddenly out of a job.
This is not the first time in the past couple years that Hasbro has actually already had a layoff.
This is just a much bigger one.
We didn't previously have a whole lot of insight as to who was affected at the Dungeons and Dragons level and whatnot,
but it doesn't look great.
People laid off from Wizards of the Coast include artists, writers, game designers,
people who have been working on Dungeons and Dragons for years,
people who helped make it what it is today.
It's giving Bungie.
So despite the recent rampant success of the D&D movie and the Barbie movie
and also just the ongoing phenomenon that is D&D,
Hasbro says they've been having headwinds that have not gone away.
And so now they got to get rid of 20% of their staff.
They say it is a lever they must pull.
That lever being 1,100 people's livelihood.
Anyway, don't mind me just out here getting myself blacklisted from future Dungeons and Dragons content.
Great.
Pour one out for E3.
E3 is dead.
It's dead and gone and buried forever.
It wasn't before.
It actually is now.
E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo.
It used to be the biggest event in gaming.
It's where consoles were announced.
It's where the biggest titles of the year were previewed.
It's where My Body is Ready came from.
But over the years, companies started to pull out of the show
and then the show was postponed and then it was tabled
and then it was untabled, but then it was retabled because there was a COVID.
But as of now, E3 is officially dead.
You go to their website.
It's just a goodbye.
They're not going to do it anymore.
It's over for realsies this time.
Ripperino.
This isn't going to have a huge impact on the industry, honestly.
Like, E3 has been dwindling and waning for years now.
This is not really surprising.
It's just kind of sad that it went this way.
But more and more companies are following after Nintendo's design
of doing like Nintendo Direct stuff where they just stream their updates
as opposed to spending like millions of dollars on set pieces and shit.
And we've already seen other venues kind of picking up that slack.
In fact, the Game Awards that just happened
where Baldur's Gate 3 won Game of the Year,
they're being criticized for basically being just an industry showcase
as opposed to an award show.
And so while yes, E3 is dead and gone,
we will hopefully for many years to come
continue to have extraordinarily cringey presentations from game companies.
And let me tell you, here and now,
my body is ready.
Hey, can you just give me a break on this next headline?
Alright.
Epic win.
Christ.
I had to.
Epic Games, the people who make Fortnite,
they sued Google and won.
In fact, they sued Google and Super won.
A jury unanimously found that Google was engaging
in monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior,
specifically around the Android app store
and the billing systems that are available to developers
to take money from customers.
If you want to sell, for example, a subscription on Android or iOS,
you pretty much have to go through Apple or Google's billing system
and they take like a 30% cut.
This is why you sometimes see that subscriptions are more expensive
on iOS or Android as opposed to purchasing them on desktop.
The developers are trying to offset that 30% cut
that Apple and Google get of everything.
Epic has been famously beefing with Apple for a long time about this
and also beefing with Google.
They lost against Apple, but they won against Google.
That's a big deal.
And even more so, during the court case,
it came out that Google has been basically paying people
to prevent having third-party app stores on their phones.
As in, they've been working with the companies that make phones
to not include third-party app stores
and in some cases reaching out to people who are making third-party app stores
or direct-to-consumer stuff and they're like,
hey, maybe don't do that.
Maybe don't get in the way of us forcing people
to give us a 30% cut.
It'd be a shame if you lost access to the ability to publish your application.
Anyway, Google wants to appeal the case and we'll see.
Also very notably, we don't actually know what Google is going to have to do yet.
The judge hasn't really determined what they need to change.
So, unclear.
On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers made their first attempt
at flying their Wright Flyer machine.
The flight attempt went about a hundred feet
before it crashed and sustained a little bit of damage,
but they fixed it up and a few days later,
they made several successful test flights
until eventually a gust of wind flipped the plane over and destroyed it.
And now we have baggage fees.
Lightning round.
The developers of MMO game The Day Before
shut down the day after they launched their game.
According to them, the company has failed financially
and so they launched the game and immediately closed.
No one really knows what's going to happen now.
It turns out the LAPD spends 50 million dollars a year
maintaining their helicopter fleet alone.
That is worth at least a few loaves of bread.
After launching his own chatbot AI,
Elon Musk is upset that it's too progressive
and he wants to make it more right-wing.
Or rather, he wants to make it more, quote, politically neutral.
Coming from the guy who just reinstated Alex Jones on Twitter,
told people to follow Alex Jones
and had a conversation with Alex Jones,
Vivek Ramaswamy and Andrew Tate.
That man is definitely a good judge of what is politically neutral.
Also, political neutrality isn't a thing.
Fucking stop.
Anyone.
Protesters in the UK are trying to stop their government
from building a car tunnel that's going to go like right next to Stonehenge.
Literally like, hey, what if we dug a big underground tunnel
next to this massively well-known historic site?
The UK's own investigation said that it would cause irreparable harm to the site
and they gave it the go-ahead anyway.
Like it's fucking Stonehenge.
It's Stonehenge.
Netflix has released a big old spreadsheet
with all the stats of everything that everybody watched over the past year.
You can go check it out and do some data analytics on your own.
How sexy.
And finally for today, the US has decided to not re-up
a nearly billion dollar subsidy for SpaceX's Starlink internet service provider.
They wanted the subsidy in return for providing rural internet
and the government was like,
we don't actually trust that you're going to be able to do that with this money.
Poor Elon having a harder time using government subsidies to build his companies
than turning around and claiming that he's a genius.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Stuff Keeps Happening.
Have the Stuff Keeps Happening.online for sources, bonus content,
and the internet, the entirety of it, the whole thing.
It's just that one website.
My name is Endeavorance.
I'll be back on Monday.
Take care and be well.