Monthly Archives: August 2019

Features of Failure

The Mummy from 2017 is today’s failure

Leave a comment

The Mummy (2017) is a reboot of a reboot of the Original Mummy franchise, started way back in 1932 with good old Boris Karloff as the titular mummy. For those who are unaware, the image that pops into your head when I write Frankenstein’s Monster, is Boris Karloff, that’s how old this is.

The Mummy Franchise was rebooted once before, back in 1999 as a Adventure-Action movie series, similar in nature and design to Indiana Jones, just without the hat and whip, the two first one were pretty solid action-adventure movies, with a fair amount of comedy and jokes, interspaced with perfectly decent action sequences, the third one was absolutely dreadful and killed off that franchise back in 2008.

BEHOLD! THE DOMINATOR!

However, Marvel’s Movie universe began taking off and somebody in the depth of horror that is Universal Studios marketing department went “hang on, we’ve got a whole mess of monsters, don’t we? Why not make a Universe out of them? A DARK UNIVERSE!”

They basically did a sort of alpha test of it with Dracula Unleashed, but it was frankly dreadfully boring, and even Universal realized that and downplayed the whole connection.

The big takeoff was supposed to be the 2017 rebooted “The Mummy”, starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella as the Mummy and Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Tom Cruise? He stars as fucking Tom Cruise, the overwhelming domination that only Tom Cruise can do to a movie.

Sure, Tom Cruise is weird and probably not human, but he’s not that bad an actor at all, but this movie was called “The Mummy”, the focus ought to have been at least a little more on the Mummy, instead it was all about how Tom Cruise got superpowers and became Seth or something?

This was supposed to be a big franchise were the Mummy would have been part of it and they trap the Mummy at the end of the movie, she should have just vanished away or be temporarily sealed for some else to release later.

But nope, just Crowe hurling exposition about old nonsense and secret societies and then Cruise riding though the desert.

It killed the Dark Universe dead, the movie made about 400 million US$, the budget was around 125-195 million US$.

That may look like a success, but it isn’t, those figures don’t count marketing, add that to the total: 345 million US$, which is not enough to risk the establishment of a full franchise.

So the Dark Universe died before it basically started, there are still two other “Shared Universes” other than Marvels running: DC’s, of which only Wonder Woman and Aquaman are worth anything, and the Giant Monster thing with Godzilla and King Kong.

The DC movies have all but died and the last Godzilla didn’t do to well, we’ll see how Godzilla Vs King Kong will do.

These universes require a massive amount of work to ever get to work, but every single movie have to be good too and that’s a problem that Marvel have somehow managed to avoid so far.

Features of Failure

The Twelve Battles of the Isonzo River is today’s staggeringly massive utterly wasteful failure.

Leave a comment

It’s the 23rd of June 1915, the glorious Kingdom of Italy have just joined the Entente in the war against the Central Powers, they were promised territory, they didn’t get as much as they wanted, this failure was one of the reasons why.

It’s the end of June, 225.000 Italian soldiers attacked the Austro-Hungarian army across the valley of the river Isonzo, today called by its Slovenian name Soča, thousands of poor young boys flooded across the valley, under the fire of artillery and towards entrenched enemies on the opposing side, fourteen thousand dead for the Italians, ten thousand for the Austro-Hungarians, the Italians actually outnumbered their enemy 1:2.

The result? Two hills captured by the Italians, tactical victory to the Austrians, thus the first Battle ends.

The second? The Italians actually had some successes, it helped when they’ve got a quarter of a million men and the enemy has 78.000, unfortunately, the Italians also had Luigi Cadorna, an incompetent idiot if ever you ran into one, the very personification of Italian military prowess, brave soldiers, awful officers and absolutely staggeringly, incomprehensible, reprehensible and stupefying idiotic Leaders.

Luigi Cadorna, incompetent twit

The battle ended when the RAN OUT OF BULLETS. Tactical victory to the Italians, the only lost 41.800 compared to 46.600, that’s a victory in World War One.

And then the Third Battle of the Isonzo, now Cadorna have actually learned something, after using the blood, sweat and fucking tears of some sixty thousand Italian boys, artillery is really awesome and frontal attacks WILL CONTINUE!

Hey, a step forwards, artillery is important, he’s learning. Not enough, the Italians would keep attack on limited fronts and through terrains that negated their massive numerical advantage, even if this was the first battle were, they actually had helmets.

Another Sixty thousand plus casualties for the Italians, some forty for the Austrians, failure for the Italians, even if loses were proportionally roughly the same.

The fourth, to damn cold, more casualties for the Italians, in the end December and the winter brought everything to standstill, why anyone would fight this kind of war in the middle of the winter is beyond anyone sane, but sanity isn’t a requirement for Generals after all.

The fifth was even more pointless than usual, basically a bit of sabre-rattling from the Italians, mainly just to keep the French at bay. The Italians took a mountain, huzza.

The Sixth Battle? Was a Victory for the Italians, this time to actually managed to get an entire city, paid fifty thousand casualties for it, that’s what frontal assaults do to an army.

The Seventh Battle? Inconclusive as they say, basically everyone died in roughly the same amount, pure attrition warfare.

The Eight battle, much the same, just more dead, fifty-sixty thousand on the Italian side, 38.000 on the Austrian side, the biggest splash was the death of Antonio Sant’Elia, of the leading lights of Futurist architecture (One of the predecessors to the later Art Deco movement), the battles become shorter and shorter, the armies are getting tired at this point.

The Ninth, the Austro-Hungarians are starting to lose the War of Attrition at this point and the Italians manage to advance, slowly, but an advance is an advance.

The Tenth had a change of plans, most of the previous attempts were narrow breakthroughs, this one was a forty kilometre massed assault against the Austrians, the Italians had a 1:2 advantage again, 400k against 200k, the result? Little territory was really gained, 150,000 Italians casualties, 125,000 Austrian, the war of Attrition was taking its toll on everyone at this point.

The Eleventh? 200,000 plus casualties spread across both sides, the Italians managed to move forward a little, the Austro-Hungarian armies were actually at their breaking point at this stage, one more assault would have broken them, too bad the Italians couldn’t attack again even if they wanted to.

But hey, the Royal Bavarian Infantry Lifeguards Regiment got a march out of it, it isn’t all bad.

And now for the final one: The Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, which also have its very own name, the Battle of Caporetto, because guess what? The Germans have arrived, with all the cool tricks and clever tactics they’ve learned at the Western front and against the Russians, assault troopers, infiltration tactics and poison gas.

The Italians were absolutely fucking destroyed here, SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND casualties, the Second Army basically gone, the Italians had 800,000 soldiers against 350,000 Germans and Austro-Hungarians and they absolutely lost.

Unfortunately, the rest of the war being as it was, there really were no further opportunity or resources to carry on and knock the Italians out of the War, the Germans were starving at this point, literally.

Luigi Cardorna would later be promoted to Marshall of Italy by Mussolini, in a blatant attempt to pretend Italy won great Victories in the Great War and deserves much more. He’s son would actually do much better in World War Two, changing sides in the end and fighting against the Germans in Northern Italy.

This guy was made a Baron and a Marshall, the only Marshall the south Slavs had produced so far.

Svetozar Boroević, the primary commander for the Austro-Hungarians, would be promoted to Marshall and ennobled during the war, sadly, his fellow Croats and south Slavs weren’t very welcoming, he was buried in Austria. The result? Italy’s poor performance during the war, resulting in them not really getting anything good, which was one of the issues exploited by the Fascist as they took over.

Features of Failure, Uncategorized

The Goiânia accident is today’s failure

Leave a comment

What was the Goiânia accident you ask? Why it was a Five on the International Nuclear Event Scale, Chernobyl was a Seven, the scale only goes to seven.

The stage is set in the city of Goiânia, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, in the hallowed year of 1987, the Cold War is slowly grinding to a halt, Chernobyl is still fresh in everyone’s memories.

The backstory, a specialized radiotherapy clinic relocates to brand new buildings, the previous one’s being rented, they left behind a 1977 External beam radiotherapy machine behind, those things are usually quite large.

A conflict happened between the clinic and the rental company, the courts ordered the building sealed, BEFORE the Cesium source of radiation was removed.

To the credit of the clinic, they tried to remove it, the rental company prevented it, including calling the cops on them, they even warned the Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission repeatedly that there was a serious radiological hazard within the building.

Now, as long as the source was nice and sealed inside of the machine, inside a nice and sealed building, no worries.

There were no guards and on the 13th of September, a scavenger got in and stole a whole bunch of stuff, including the source, which he belived could be sold as scrap metal.

He pierced the seal of the containment unit, he SCOOPED OUT SOME OF THE MATERIAL, IT WAS GLOWING BLUE!

He then sold it to a scarp merchant, who then scattered the glowing blue dust on HIS FUCKING KITCHEN FLOOR!

Then his daughter ate a sandwich, smeared the dust on her body, in the sandwich, all of it radioactive as all mighty fuck.

It was noticed in the end, hundreds of houses had to be destroyed, topsoil removed, items burned.

  • Leide das Neves Ferreira, died, daughter of the scrap merchant, it took her a month to die, she was buried in a lead casket, she was six.
  • Gabriela Maria Ferreira, the mother of above, wife of the scrap merchant. Also a month.
  • Israel Baptista dos Santos, an employee, only lasted six days.
  • Admilson Alves de Souza, another employee, lasted about a month.

Devair Ferreira, the scrap merchant survived his exposure, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1994, you can probably guess why, he did accidentally caused the death of his daughter and wife.

The lesson? All radioactive material is horrendously dangerous, even stuff that’s used to save lives.

There was a massive Organizational failure here to, not in the aftermath, the Brazilian authorities were able to handle that, but in everything else too.

Features of Failure

Today’s Failure are ghost airports

Leave a comment

What’s a ghost airport? Airports that are either totally abandoned, doesn’t work or never really managed to get the customer numbers planned. This doesn’t count closed airports, they are a different perspective entirely, airports are usually closed due to being outdated or just not relevant anymore, they often carry on as either smaller operations handling charter flights and what have you, turn into racetracks or just vanish.

Ghost airports are the fuck ups, so join me, as we travel the amazing world of useless airports.

Let’s start with the shining ball of utter idiocy that are the Spanish Ghost Airports, the fact that this is a category should really clue you in.

White Elephant! Holy Grail!

Ciudad Real Central Airport is the biggest of the failures, building during the height of freewheeling spending before the Crisis, this Airport was obviously not built so serve any sort of real demand or at least they didn’t commit sufficiently.

There was a plan to built a station on a nearby highspeed trainline, enabling you to get to Madrid itself quickly, but guess what? Another failure, the walk bridge to the station was built, the station never was, and that’s a bonus Bridge to Nowhere for you all.

I do have to give the bridge some credit, at least it’s a covered bridge, this airport lies at an elevation of 636 meters, in the middle of Spain, that means cold winters and hot summers, so someone, somewhere at the very least looked at some climate data.

The damn thing is more than two hours away from Madrid by car, no wonder the last carrier left in 2011, the operating company went under a year later, now the airport stands empty and non-functional, the staggeringly incompetent local Spanish government thinks they can sell the silly thing for millions of EUROs, they’d be lucky to get any to take it off them.

The best offers they’ve gotten: 28 million from a unidentified British group, but it fell apart due to “complications”, the other one? Ten thousand Euros from a Chinese company.

They should have kept the original name of the airport: Don Quijote Airport.       

Splint your Lungs with Thunder! None ever walked here!

Let’s move on to Castellón–Costa Azahar Airport, was opened in 2011, then the fucking runway had to be modified, then dug up, then the Operating company, Aerocas, spent 26 million Euros, a sixth of the aiports total costs, on sponsorships of local teams, a statue of a literally corrupt politician was put up outside the airport, and I really mean literally, he got four years of prison for it.

It wasn’t until 2014, almost four years after the opening, that an actual plan used the airport and that was because the airport sponsored a local football team and they had fly somewhere.

In 2015 Ryanair swopped in and began flights, the EU is now investigation the whole thing, because the local Spanish government probably subsidizes the whole thing, which is illegal.

SPLIT YOUR AIRPORT WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER!

Then there’s Beja Airport over in Portugal, now, to be fair, this one wasn’t a massively expensive boondoggle, mostly because it’s actually an old West German military airport, this was an attempt to turns a military airport into a dual usage airport, they built a civilian terminal and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, the region is thinly inhabited, the city of Beja has some 35.000 inhabitants, so it’s really only used for charter flights at this point, and frankly, five thousand travelers in 2018 is just all kinds of sad.

This one is a much smaller failure to be fair, compared to its Spanish cousins, this thing will probably convert into cargo only and it is used for various support activities, essentially being a large parking area for airplanes.

So not a total failure, only a partial, typical Portuguese, just can’t commit to total failure like their Spanish cousins.

Let’s go to Canada for this last one: Montréal–Mirabel International Airport.

Break the backs of the Civil airlines men! If you wish to prevail!

This was the largest planned airport in the world when it open back in 1975, fortunately, only Phase 1 opened, not the rest of this abomination.

There were several factors that caused this failure, oil prices dropping (Subsidies had kept local prices artificially lowered), the fact that most continental traffic would stay at the previous airport and just plain better planes.

This Ivory Tower propels me! To Thrust into the heart of Darkness!

Now? Well, Bombardier has their plants at the site, there’s plenty of cargo coming in, there’s a racecourse and a whole bunch of other industrial activity, but this was still a huge waste of money.

There’s also Berlin Brandenburg, but that one’s such a failure it deserves its own special feature.

Features of Failure

The Alaska Syndicate is today’s failure

Leave a comment

“What the fuck is the Alaska Syndicate?” I hear at least four of you think, in the future, because I am special. And no, this isn’t some strange meth drug ring based in Alaska you’ve never heard of, most Meth distribution in the US is done by Mexican cartels and freaks in basements, so don’t worry about that.

The Alaska Syndicate was a conspiracy in 1906 between J.P. Morgan (The actual person, not the Bank, mind you, American banks count as persons these thanks to the US Supreme Court being corrupt as fuck) and the Guggenheim family. That’s right, and actual conspiracy, not a theory, a fact.

J.P. Morgan, the person, not the Bank

And what was the Grand Goal for the dastardly manipulation of the United States of America? Why, to prevent Alaska from getting statehood.

And that’s a Guggenheim, that’s one hell of a nose, eh?

Why? You may ask, I shall regale you with a fairly simple story, by keeping Alaska as a territory, the Syndicate only really had to manipulate the Secretary of the Interior and whatever Senators happened to handle whatever subcommittee in charge of US territorial Oversight.

If Alaska got statehood, they’d have to deal with local politicians, depending on a native electorate, rather than various Apparatchiks in Washington.

The Syndicate managed to get the Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger to favour them fairly heavily, unfortunately, they got to greedy, and when the Secretary transferred large chunks of a National Forrest to the Syndicate, including land he owned himself, the gig was essentially up.

Well, kinda, the Syndicate’s ownership of various mines would continue until the Great Depression broke the prices of Copper and pretty much everything else.

This was one of their mines, it is now a tourist attraction.

The Syndicate liquidated their mines and vanished back into the pages of history, Alaska got statehood in 1959, so the Syndicate failed in their secondary purpose of keeping Alaska out in the cold.

They didn’t fail in their primary purpose though, they made an absolutely staggering amount of money, one mine giving up some two hundred million US dollars, in the 1920s.

Not bad at all really. The lesson? Give Puerto Rico Statehood already you racist motherfuckers.

Features of Failure

Bridges to Nowhere are today’s many Failures

Leave a comment

Bridges to Nowhere comes in many different configurations and permutations, some of them are basically excusable, for instance bridges that have been partially destroyed in a war, some were built as a form of future proofing with vague plans of roads and other infrastructure coming later on, other’s are just stupid prestige projects.

Putin just added me to his list of low priority targets, I probably shouldn’t ever to Russia now.

One good example of the stupid prestige project is the Russky Bridge in Vladivostok in, you guessed it, Russia. Build to connect Vladivostok with, again perfectly obvious, Russky Island.

It cost roughly a billion US$ or so, with a rough capacity of some fifty thousand cars per day, the problem? Oh right, Russky island have like five thousand people living on it.

Reason for failure: I suppose it didn’t fail for the companies that built the overprice useless bridge nor the politician that could point to a big shiny monstrosity. It did fail the people of Russia, as it was utterly and totally useless, built really just to impress foreign dignitaries at some conference no one remembers anymore.

Nowhere? No, Bridge to Lighthouse! PURPOSE!

Another example of a prestige project is the Saint Elmo’s Bridge in Valletta, Malta, played as a restoration project of a bridge destroyed by the Italians during World War Two, it just goes to a breakwater and a lighthouse, utterly pointless beyond the tourist value and the deck keeps getting damaged, so closure happens with tiresome regularity.

Whole project cost 2,8 million €, seems kinda pricey, but hey, URBAN RENEWAL, URBAN RENEWAL! ARGHH!

This one was built as part of a conspiracy by J.P. Morgan (Not the bank, the man the bank is named after) and the fucking Guggenheims to keep Alaska from gaining statehood.

Yeah, the Miles Glacier Bridge was originally a railroad bridge, constructed for the purpose of transporting copper from a mine inland to the Alaskan coast, after the depression the copper prices crashed and rendered the line to expensive to maintain.

The railroad fell apart, the bridge was actually re-purposed as a road bridge, however, the road on the far-side basically didn’t exist and a flood damaged one of the truss sections, so now it is a Bridge to Nowhere, however again, it did actually pay itself off, it cost 1.4 million US$ to built back in 1910 and around 200 million US$ worth of copper was extracted before it all went to shit.

So it wasn’t a total waste.

Then we have bridges that were blown up during World War Two and never rebuilt.

The Yalu River Broken Bridge was blown up in World War Two and the North Koreans dismantled their side of the Bridge, probably because the it was right next to the bridge you can see in the background of the above picture.

The Chinese turned their side into a historical landmark.

Then the Chinese built this actually very lovely Bridge.

In a valiant attempt to actually do something good for the poor sods in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of China built a very pretty bridge with all the infrastructure and shiny shit needed.

On their side, the Koreans built a small gravel path linking the bridge to: NOWHERE.

Sure, Xi Jinping has promised that his government will now pay for the infrastructure on the Korean side too, because he basically has to do everything for the utterly broken North Korean economy.

There’s been bridges in both Norway and New Zealand with the same story, built to serve areas that didn’t get populated at all and now simply remain as curiosities for random people out for a nice walk in the countryside.

Germany had a motorway bridge that was built in 1966 but wasn’t actually connected until 1994, frankly, that was a bit to much planning, the maintenance cost of keeping that around for that long probably wasn’t worth it.

Bridges to Nowhere are delightful little stories, often failure, sometimes grand conspiracies and sometimes cute.

Features of Failure

Today’s Failure is Enron and their Blockbuster deal

Leave a comment

That’s right, it’s an oldie but Goldie, Enron, granddaddy of corporate failure and seeing as Blockbuster now belongs to the pages of pointless history, I’d call it a nice and comprehensible failure.

Enron’s idea was to capitalize on the dot-com bubble by building massive fiberoptic backbones, hoping to rent it out for various IT uses, hoping to essentially “corner” the market for bandwidth.

“But that’s not how it works Philip?”, yes, I am well aware that isn’t how any of this total nonsense work, but Enron was Enron, they thought everything could be turned into a commodity, just like they’d done with gas and electricity.

As part of this massive gamble, Enron made a deal with Blockbuster for something very novel, a streaming service, in 2000, nineteen years ago, Blockbuster would provide their content through their contacts with the movie industry and Enron would provide the technological knowhow and bandwidth to deliver the content.

Fairly straightforward right? No.

Turns out that Blockbuster had been pissing off most of Hollywood for years, forcing them to give out increasingly large concessions, by way of their dominant market position when it came to video rentals, so the content they provided to this “Video-On-Demand” service was mostly softcore erotica and Z-list movies.

Combine that with the fact that even today, there are many areas in the US with absolutely rotten internet, you can imagine how small the customer base was.

The answer is to small, the deal collapsed, and Enron hid away the massive loses in yet another accounting boondoggle, that inevitably killed of the company later.

As part of the preparatory work on this deal and the attempt to sell bandwidth as a commodity, Enron build a massive datacenter in Las Vegas, costing millions, it was later sold for: 930000 US$.

The lesson learned: Nothing, Venture capitalists are fucking morons frankly.

Electronic Entertainment, Features of Failure

Yogventures is today’s failure

Leave a comment

It’s Wednesday boys, girls, toasters, assault helicopters and other, time for another failed crowdfunded nonsense product and/or service. And today’s utter failure is Yogventure, a masterstroke of failure, as it never actually released into anything resembling the promised product.

I ought to know, I funded the stupid kickstarter and I regret it to this day.

The concept originated from a Youtube group know as the Yogscast, who made their fame from a series of Minecraft adventures, mostly scripted with various storylines about wizard and cookies and what not, high production values, decent fun for the time.

The idea behind Yogventure was essentially a Minecraft clone, with a heavy focus on multiplayer and modding, i.e. creating maps and gameplay elements tailormade for whatever purposes your specific players needed.

They managed to get over half a million US dollars out of it, with 13,647 backers essentially preordering the game, they even had a prototype to show off.

Let’s list the promises:

  • Just like Minecraft
  • Not blocks though
  • Multiplayer-focus
  • Has characters from our Award-winning YouTube series.
  • Crafting
  • Easy to mod

There we go. Fortunately, there are no real stretch-goals, thank fuck for that at least.

So, what happened? Well, they outsourced the entire development to some other studio, rather than making it themselves, which turned out to be brave. As in the whole thing just vanished into bankruptcy and wasted money.

Apparently the developer they’d basically outsourced the actual work to, hired an artist to do assets, without a contractual obligation to actual do it and paid the artist in advance? Which sounds utterly bonkers to me, you’d have to be completely fucking stupid to anything like that.

Although there’s been at least seven other kickstarters that have failed due to contractual shenanigans, so perhaps it wasn’t that odd.

The single potentially fraudulent thing the Yogscast crew really did, was that to claim that they had a prototype during the kickstarter, turns out if was a Unity engine hackjob put together just for the crowdfunding campaign, probably not fraud, definitely unethical as fuck.

The lesson? Don’t trust anyone.

Features of Failure

The Promissory sections of the Danish Constitution is today’s failure

Leave a comment

Yup, this one’s probably so niche that if it get’s anymore niche, I’d have to start a subreddit and sell tickets to my personal discord to freaky constitutional law fetishists. But enough about that, let’s party like it’s 1849.

Which, for those sadly unenlightened individual to the vast and utterly bonkers glory that is European history, in 1849 Europe was gripped by the “Spring of Nations“, a series of revolutions, revolts and general discord against the established monarchies and oligarchies of Europe.

It generally didn’t result in serious political change outside a few nations, it did however have other permanent effects: The end of serfdom in several countries, re-introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands, Bismarck and the Danish Constitution of 1849.

So fancy.

Now, here’s the ting, that document was made by a Constitutional Assembly, and it had a strict deadline, a sensible thing to in any serious project, without deadlines things will rapidly get out of control.

Here’s the first failure, they ran out of time and whatever things they couldn’t agree on before the deadline, they simple basically add as “We’ll fix this in post” section of the constitution.

  • § 72. En Lov ordner nærmere Forfølgningsmaaden.
  • § 74. Den dømmende Magts Udøvelse kan kun ordnes ved Lov.
  • § 75. Den med visse Eiendomme forbundne dømmende Myndighed skal ophæves ved Lov. 
  • § 76. Retspleien bliver at adskille fra Forvaltningen efter de Regler, der fastsættes ved Lov. 
  • § 79. Offentlighed og Mundtlighed skal saa snart og saa vidt som muligt gjennemføres ved hele Retspleien. I Misgjerningssager og i Sager, der reise sig af politiske Lovovertrædelser, skulle Nævninger indføres. 
  • § 80. Folkekirkens Forfatning ordnes ved Lov. 
  • § 83. De fra Folkekirken afvigende Troessamfunds Forhold ordnes nærmere ved Lov. 
  • § 88. Alle Indskrænkninger i den frie og lige Adgang til Erhverv, som ikke ere begrundede i det almene Vel, skulle hæves ved Lov. 
  • § 96. Communernes Ret til, under Statens Tilsyn, selvstændig at styre deres Anliggender vil blive ordnet ved Lov.
  • § 98. Intet Lehn, Stamhuus eller Fideicommisgods kan for Fremtiden oprettes; det skal ved Lov nærmere ordnes, hvorledes de nu bestaaende kunne overgaae til fri Eiendom. 

Now, I have translated those into English, the translations range from pretty much spot on to rougher than hooligans after the World Cup:

  • §72 A law concerning the method of prosecuting minsters will be addressed later.
  • §74 The Judicial Power’s execution can only be handled by law.
  • §75: The Judicial authority commanded by certain properties must be disestablished by law.
  • §76 The Judicial System must be separated from the Executive, following those rules, as made by law.
  • §79: I’m not translating this mess, it’s basically stuff about getting Juries into the court system.
  • §80 The Constitution of the Danish State Church is to be arranged by law.
  • §83 Those religions organizations, that deviate from the State Church, are to have their conditions handled by law.
  • 88§ All limitations on the free and equal access to employments, which aren’t based on the common good, must be removed by law.
  • §96: The municipalities right to, under Central scrutiny, independently manage their affairs will be arranged by law.
  • §98 No noble estates or similar can be established in the future, those who presently exists are to be converted to free property, by later law.

Looks like fun right? Well, most of those were resolved, some fairly faster, other much less so.

72 was resolved in 1852, which is why Denmark has a Ministerial Court, that only handles cases against ministers of the Government, that is elected among the parties of the parliament. They rarely do anything, having only really handed out a single lone conditional prison sentence, ever.

74, 75,76 and 79, were a fair bit slower, as in over half a century, a law actually fixing this mess wasn’t passed until 1916 and didn’t come into force until 1919.

88 was fairly fast for the time, 1857, it basically abolished whatever was left of the old Guild Systems and gradually abolished the specially privileged cities around the country (1920 was the last gasp of that old system).

98 is special, very special, it to wasn’t passed until 1919, the reason being that the conservatives that had been in power for the decade prior, oddly didn’t seem to be in such a massive rush to get this dealt with. One wonders why a political movement that relied utterly on the nobles didn’t care to fix it. Hell, Jacob Brønnum Scavenius Estrup ruled as a dictator from 1885-1894, ignoring parliament utterly.

Here’s the best part, in the 1866 Constitution? We did it again, keep the above mentioned sections that hadn’t been dealt with in and adding TWO more.

One about what happened if the monarch is indisposed/sick or insane, which was made into a proper law in 1871, so not that bad.

The second one was about how the monarch wasn’t repsonsible for the action of the government, that responsibility lied in the hands of the ministers. This one took 98 year to actually get fixed.

And hey, in the 1953 Constitution? The latest one Denmark did? There’s just one, concerning the Ombudsman, and it was fulfilled the next year, with the first Ombudsman being elected in 1955. So that wasn’t that bad. There was an option for a diarchy here tough, which I think is a shame we didn’t go for.

Now comes to the true Failure:

  • §80 The Constitution of the Danish State Church is to be arranged by law.
  • §83 Those religions organizations, that deviate from the State Church, are to have their conditions handled by law.

Those two? Are still there. We never got any proper laws done about any of these things, everything is basically done based on customs and smaller laws. Nothing comprehensive, so they are still in the constitution and are still waiting laws.

Only 171 years delayed, nothing to worry about really.

The reason being that nobody really wants to mess around with the second on, the fact Denmark has a State Church is enough of a bother really.

This is Frederik VII, the Danish King who gave up on Absolutism.

I’m going to leave you with an anecdote: It was rainy evening in late 1848, a delegation of esteemed gentlemen was making their way to the Royal Palace, Amalienborg, this deputation carried a request for a Constitution to his Majesty the King, they were all granted access to the King’s office, his wife was sitting in the room too, these grand gentlemen politely presented their request to the King, expecting that they’d have to somehow either bargain or threaten him into giving up absolute power.

The king simply said: “Certainly, as long as all is done proper We have to Objections”.

The deputation profusely thanked his Majesty and bowed and scrapped and left. Just before the door closed, the legend goes that his Majesty turned to the queen and said: “Perhaps now I can sleep until noon every day”.

Some countries have constitutions born in blood, sweat and guillotines, some are born out of wars of freedom, some are negotiated into being by compromises and Denmark? They got one because the King was a big fat lazy son of a motherfucker.

Sources:

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B8fteparagraf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Denmark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

Electronic Entertainment, Games

Apex Legends Developers are today’s failure

Leave a comment
Holy shit, now that’s a meltdown

Now, for those who wonder what Apex Legends is, it is a so called “Battle Royale” video game, basically just a big open map with a whole bunch of player, either solo or in teams, with the objective being delightfully simple.

Last player/team standing, everyone else must die, there’s various mechanics to ensure the whole game doesn’t end up with one player hiding in a corner, there’s a slowly decreasing play area, anyone caught outside get’s melted by video game magic or lasers or what have you.

Ever since Player Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG) released a buggy game, this has been the big thing the AAA publishers have been trying to get into, with various degrees of failure, Epic’s Fortnite is the present number one on the market, but everyone’s trying this. It’s MOBAs and MMOs all over again.

Now EA had Respawn Entertainment slam Apex Legends together to make a quick buck using existing assets from Titanfall 2, using existing assets to make games isn’t by any means a bad idea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was assembled out of re-skinned assets from Far Cry 3, so if you need something fast, this was the correct way to do it.

Nobody planned for Apex Legends to make gargantuan amounts of cash, just a nice little share of the market, however, with people being fatigued from playing PUBG or unwilling to handle the art style and player-base of Fortnite, Apex Legends was a solid contender with decent enough gameplay.

Until this happened:

And the reddit didn’t behave properly, not the usual echo chamber, when we are all with amazing alacrity, shown just what the business strategy is for Apex Legends monetization: Massive Whaling.

Whales being a video game term for big spenders, the gambling equivalent of a high roller, gamers who lack the self-control and spent small and sometimes LARGE fortunes on silly digital items and such nonsense.

Well, nice to see what they think about everyone, except the whales of course

Yeah, this isn’t the best way to communicate with your audience, on the other hand, it’s honest, the fucking hate everyone who doesn’t burn though 100+ US$ for a silly video game.

Wow, what the fuck?
There’s a whole bunch of these.

So? Why is all this going on? Simple, Apex Legends made about 150 million US$ in revenue for EA in their most recent quarter, that’s about 10% of the company’s total revenue, from one source, that definitely wasn’t planned to be this massively successful.

So what happened? Well, EA now have an interest in really getting the revenue up as far as possible, squeezing every single penny and cent out of the players as the possibly can, which is what they always do.

But not only that, when Respawn was bought by EA back in 2017, EA paid 151 million US$ in cash, that isn’t the noteworthy part, the second part of the price is: ” Up to $164 million in long-term equity in the form of restricted stock units for Respawn”

Obviously, we don’t have a clue how this equity would work, we have no clue what the restrictions are, however, what I can tell you with absolutely certainty: The Leadership of Respawn Entertainment has a really big stake in the company’s profitability, for it’s a fairly safe assumption, to presume that a significant element of the restrictions are based on earnings.

So of course the developer goes nuts, why wouldn’t he/she/it/they? That person might have a lot of money at stake, a lot of stress, a lot of greed.

Not it matters, nothing will come of this, everyone will forget it within a week or two.

And that is today’s failure.