No no, he’ll just change it so that all posts must be 14 words. Much less obvious.

As someone who’s had the misfortune of having to use Salesforce professionally, this might actually improve the quality of their slop.

Mine? Mine? Mine? Mine mine mine mine.

The biggest thing I’ve started not doing (stopped doing? whatever) that’s helped me is spending any time using search engines to find things.

If I’m looking for something I try to find some sort of forum, or irc channel, or discord group, usenet group, or message echo or whatever and just ask what’s (probably) still an actual person.

Maybe google would be faster but holy crap has my quality of shit-i’ve-found online gone way the hell up once I stopped asking a computer to send me to something obscure or old or odd, because every search engine has basically decided to go all slop, all the time now.

The only drawback is if I’m asking someone a question about OS/2 on an echo, it might take me a couple of days until some greybeard comes back with an answer, but so far it’s been 100% accurate shit, rather than either nothing useful, or incorrect slop.

It also fixes that weird thing where the internet feels like nothing but bots and AI slop generators, because you’re in a situation where you can almost 100% be certain the person you’re talking to is still actually a human and it also leads to lovely conversations about other shit, and really brings back the feel of the “old” internet before it got infested with big tech who capitalism-ed it into a pile of garbage.

A generative AI company ripping everyone off? Say it ain’t so!

AI slop? On my website full of mostly garbage articles? Well I never.

“As you can see, the computer clearly indicates I’m the winner of this discussion. Once you’ve talked to the AI and understand your failures, we can talk.”

Sounds like he’s a lot of fun.

The crossovers are mostly meh,

Good news! They announced today that fully half the printed cards going forward are going to be crossovers! This has been met with uh, less than overwhelming enthusiasm and support.

Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

Not really.

If the card is stupidly powerful it gets banned not too long after it’s printed, because, well, that’s when someone figures out how to break it. So, ultimately, you don’t end up with a lot of old cards being banned because if they’re not broken as fuck when new, they’re probably not going to suddenly* become broken as fuck in 10 years.

*Something new could be printed that makes them broken, but that’s not especially common.

The issue is that this is a boiled frog situation: things have slowly gotten worse, and people have grumbled the whole way down, but it’s at the point where WotC is adding the garnish and seasoning to the soup and everyone is suddenly realizing that they’re also the boiled frog, not just people who play insert-format-they-don’t-play-here.

Modern players rolled their eyes as standard got shittified to the point it’s essentially a dead format in paper, and then commander players rolled their eyes as WotC printed super powerful cards into modern and it also shittified to the point that it’s also mostly dead in paper format.

Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.

As someone who’s been playing this stupid game since 1993, I’m a little sad because it’s both obviously clear that it’s time to sell all my cards, and never think about MTG again because there’s absolutely no way back to what the game was since Hasbro has to milk this cow until dust is coming out the udders because they literally have nothing else of value left to squeeze.