Jessica Lyin' Whines, Lies

Jessica Lyin' makes another lie-filled rant on her blog attacking readers while whining about nasty comments made on said blog.  The deceptions are numerous, but here are the ones that are, in my humble opinion, the most laughable.

I have never taken the liberty of speaking my own personal opinion on this blog as it is not a place for personal opinions. It is a place for political correctness, fairness and unbiased, unemotional facts. However, today I’ve decided to make an exception because I feel some opinion is called for at this point in time.

This is a flat out lie right in the very first paragraph.

Here's an example of her "speaking" her own personal opinion:

Not only is this a major update with loads of new features, as well as performance and stability improvements, but it is also a necessary upgrade for you if you want to be able to render avatars correctly when Linden Lab throws the switch for Server Side Baking (appearance). Because all Firestorm users will need to upgrade to this release, we have put it through unprecedented development and testing with no fewer than three levels of Quality Assurance: internal testing, Beta testing and our new Preview Group testing. We truly hope and expect this to be the best release we have ever issued. Grab the downloads from our Downloads page and enjoy!

It is highly questionable as to whether the "new features" are actually improvements, just as it is mere opinion that there are stability and performance improvements.  Given the sheer number of complaints about reduced stability and lower performance that has always plagued Firestorm, Lyon's remarks are nothing more than her own dishonest opinion.

It is also a flat out lie that Linden Lab will somehow throw some mythical switch and block access to "old" viewers.  It is true that viewers that are no longer maintained will experience an increasing number of bugs as Linden Lab introduces new code that the discontinued viewers aren't programmed to handle, leading eventually to viewers that will no longer be usable, but it is simply an outright falsehood to claim that Linden Lab will deliberately block people from logging in on "old" viewers.  The only significant instance I can recall when this actually happened was when the Lab shut down Emerald Viewer, and that really only because the head programmer inserted malicious code into it which he then used to launch a denial of service attack.

It is, again, a matter of opinion that Firestorm users "need" to get the latest viewer.  They may want to, but considering all the alternative viewers available, "need" is a pretty strong word to use.  Next:

Anyone reading the comments on our blog posts since the release of 4.4.0 would almost be lead to believe we were actually trying to ruin SL by releasing a viewer with bugs. They might even be lead to believe we intentionally put the bugs there.

Okay, this isn't a lie per se, but it is a serious grammatical error.  The past tense spelling of 'lead', as in to lead a horse to water, is 'led'.  By using the present tense spelling, it confuses the reader as to what the hell she's blathering about.  If nothing else, it exposes her poor communication skills.  One might think that Lyon and Co. are out to ruin SL for their user base, but I've never seen anyone make that accusation.  Ruining SL for the Firestorm user base is almost certainly an unintended consequence, but it is hardly the driving motivation behind Firestorm and as far as I am aware, no one has actually made any such accusations to the contrary.  Jessica Lyin' makes up more bullshit.

To those of you who have non-constructively complained just for the sake of complaining, flamed us, trolled us, attacked us, and criticized us publicly as if we were trying to release a broken viewer to ruin everyone’s SL experience…. Kindly walk away from your keyboard. Thanks. Your negativity does not help anyone and only makes it harder for us to remain motivated in spending countless hours of our spare time trying to improve your user experience.

This is both dishonest and arrogant in the extreme.  It's bad enough to falsely claim that people are making assumptions about Lyon's motivations that they haven't actually made.  It's a whole other level of batshit crazy to arrogantly order people not to use their computers at all just because their complaints about the instability and poor performance of Firestorm hurt her feelings.  Well, Jessica, maybe if you and your elitist clique of chronic bullshitters focused less on attacking any and all user complaints and actually devoted time to fixing the issues, you'd not get nearly as many complaints.  You'd also get a lot less grief if you pull the bug out of your ass and leave it out.  You and your team of amateurs aren't ha;f as clever or talented as you think you are.  THAT is the reason you keep getting so many complaints.  Your dismissive replies and arrogant commands to the very people whose SL experience you claim you want to improve are what attracts all the negativity you despise.  In short, hypocrite, a lot less negativitity from you will yield a lot less negativity from others.

Here's another bit that had me chuckling:

There are proper channels for support requests and blog comments is absolutely not one of them.

I'd like to know why people don't feel that they can use the "proper channels".  is it possible — indeed likely — that using the "proper channels" doesn't work because when people do use them their issues are ignored or dismissed?  The primary responses to any and all issues had by Firestorm users are to "get a better computer", and "we don't have any problems, so it must be your computer that's the problem", and similar condescending dismissals.  With that kind of response to legitimate issues of stability and performance, it's no wonder people feel they can't get any other response from Lyon or her lackeys except to post in the blog.

We’ve been accused of not caring and/or not trying to deliver to you a good product. This team works damn hard to make every new version of Firestorm better than the last.

You don't care, and obviously you're not trying hard enough because each new version carries with it more bugs than a roach motel.  Like I said, you're not half as clever or talented as you think you are.  Here's a suggestion you'll dismiss condescendingly: grow the hell up and go get some help from people who know how to program, like Henri Beauchamp and Siana Gearz.  At this point, having alienated so many truly talented programmers, I doubt they'll do it, but you never know unless you swallow your pride and try.  Then again, you could simply fork their code and insert it into Firestorm, like you did Henri's mesh code for Phoenix Viewer, but you don't have the programming know-how to make it work as well has he can.  Time to bite the bullet and start facing some unpleasant truths, bitch.

We’ve been accused of not testing enough prior to release.

This might be true — the making of the accusation, that is.  And the accusation is probably accurate.  It's pretty obvious that not enough testing went into the new releases because they were rolled out riddled with bugs ranging from black screens to constant crashes on startup to ridiculously low frame rates.  If you spent more time testing and less time patting yourselves on the back, and devoted more time to working out all the bugs before release instead of insulting your user base every time they point out the bugs in Firestorm, you'd have a lot less stress to deal with.

While the development of 4.4.0 was somewhat rushed on account that we had to get the LL Server Side Baking code out into a release, we were also extra diligent in testing everything to the best of our ability. knowing that everyone would need to be on this release when LL flips the switch for SSB, IT HAD TO BE GOOD. So I even created an additional level of testing with our preview group, re-purposing it as a third tier of QA with roughly 1700 users to run the release builds prior to officially releasing it. And they tested it… and it took several different release builds before we felt we had it right… before the consensus among our internal development and support tests, our beta testers and preview group testers said “This is ready for release”. Well perhaps it wasn’t ready, and as the leader of this project that blame should lie squarely on my shoulders not those of our developers, support personnel or quality assurance testers.

Again, it is a lie that Linden Lab is "flipping a switch" on anything.  Linden lab is at this very moment slowly implementing Server Side Baking throughout the grid.  This is done by writing new code into its default viewer and making changes to the code underlying Second Life itself, doing test servers to make sure it's ready before any gridwide release.  The whole reason it took mesh so long to be released was because the Lab needed to be sure it worked on enough servers before they could roll it out to the rest of the grid.  There has been no date set in stone for when Server Side Baking will make its official debut.

Obviously Lyin' Lyon has no idea how SL or computer programming actually works, and just makes shit up to tell people so she can look like she knows what she's saying, or she does know and is deliberately deceiving people for whatever reason.  I'm gonna go with the former hypothesis on this one.  She's not smart enough to engage in a deliberate campaign of deception, and there's no reason to do so anyway.  So chances are she's just dense and is pulling stuff out of her ass so people don't think she's an even bigger idiot than she's exposed herself to be.

It is nice, though, to see her take some responsibility for rushing a release out before it was ready.  Now, here's where she exposes her earlier lie about having done thorough testing:

For those of you disappointed with 4.4.0, so am I. Even though it seems the vast majority had few problems we did release with some significant bugs. None of which I might add, showed up significantly in our testing. Inventory not loading, Textures not rezzing, Black rectangles in snapshots, Prims not showing up, low performance are some of the problems that either did not show up in our testing or was missed but which did end up existing in the release.

First you said you went through all this testing to make sure there were as few bugs as possible.  But right here you're acknowledging a slew of serious bugs that have a big effect on the majority of users (at least the ones who have been brave enough to complain).  If you had actually done as much testing as you claim, then why did so many bugs get past your team?  You admittedly rushed out a viewer you knew wasn't ready, but now you claim you did thorough testing before releasing the viewer you acknowledged wasn't ready for prime time.  Make up your mind, liar.  You can't have it both ways.

Suggestions for Moffat

I was reading a blog entry by someone who had some ideas about how best to keep Doctor Who going for years to come.  It's a really good read, grammatical errors aside, and you can do that by clicking here.

The blog guest writer, George Edgington, posits that the show must be willing to tell good stories consistently.  He points out how some episodes of the post-2005 show are written basically as what-ifs, with the head writer (in this case, Stephen Moffat), tossing out an idea and the episode writer following through.  The problem is that this often results in stories that really probably shouldn't have been told, or rather, should have been told much better, such as in "The Rings of Akhaten".

Okay, that's a fair point.  Another one is that too often in the show's current form, monsters are created for no other reason than the writers thought they needed them in there somewhere, and that not only leads to poor storytelling but wastes time and money inserting a monster that will likely only be used once and then be forgotten.

I'll expand on this point by referring you back to the Whisper Men in "The Name of the Doctor", those minions of the Great Intelligence who were there simply to add an element of fright to an otherwise good story.  Did we really need them there, especially since Moffat went through the trouble to concoct The Silents and have them be on a quest to prevent the Doctor from ever traveling to Trenzalore?  No, we didn't.  Better it would have been to devote an entire episode to them, because the Whisper Men did have potential, but that potential was wasted.

Another episode in which a monster was created simply to have one inserted was "The Crimson Horror", which proved not at all horrific and indeed, came off as downright silly, as the episode was obviously a light-hearted one.

Moffat needs to stop with this, because frankly the quality of Doctor Who has gone steadily downhill since he took over as head writer.  With Matt Smith leaving after the Christmas episode, we'll have another opportunity to start anew, with a different actor stepping into the main role and a new set of opportunities for great storytelling.  But those opportunities can only be fully realized if there's real storytelling going on, and under Moffat that just hasn't been happening.

Review: The Name of the Doctor

Talk about titles that mislead, but don't!  The episode isn't about "the name of the Doctor".  It's about the Name of the Doctor: The Doctor, the title, the name he's chosen for himself, and the secret the revalation of which has ramifications throughout the Whoniverse.

Stephen Moffat left us with a cliffhanger ending that introduced (SPOILER ALERT) John Hurt as a future (?) incarnation of the Doctor.  Why the FUCK has he been holding out on us, letting mediocre stories get produced for the second half of Series 7, when he could have made them all awesomely epic and well written?  I don't know and I no longer care.  Moffat really ought to be sacked and replaced with someone who can write well and do it consistently.

Okay, now that I've gone off on my usual tangent, there was actually a lot to like about this episode and a lot not to like, but nothing I could really stay angry about.  Madame Vastra visits a prison, where a deranged convicted murderer waiting to be hanged offers information about the Doctor and Trenzalore in return for his life being spared.  The information turns out to be the location of Trenzalore, where the Doctor's future corpse is buried.  This sets off the story's action, and things get really bad really quickly.

There were a lot of things I didn't like, chief among them being the complete lack of the Silence, the group led by the Edward Munch-looking aliens, which has been trying to prevent the Doctor from ever going to Trenzalore for fear of what the revelation of his greatest secret will do to them.  Well, it seems that, going by what cryptic information this episode gave us, Trenzalore may in fact be the Silents' homeworld, or at least, their primary base of operations, or maybe just the place of their final defeat at the Doctor's hands.  We don't know, because nothing was revealed along those lines.  Instead, we got the Great Intelligence making another appearance, apparently trying to uncover the Doctor's Big Secret as a means of gaining its final revenge on the Time Lord, in an apparently completely unrelated plot.

Granted, the Doctor faked his death to get the Silence off his back, but still, for all the trouble they cause throughout Series 5 with blowing up the TARDIS and destroying all of Creation, and throughout Series 6 with their ploy to turn Amy Pond's and Rory Williams' daughter into a weapon with which to kill the Doctor, you'd think Moffat would have brought them back.  But no, instead we get the Great Intelligence, with no hint as to any previous involvement in any of this, on his own quest to kill the Doctor.  That just annoys the hell out of me.  Moffat, you botched it again in that department!  A pox upon your house!

On the other hand, we finally get the explanation for Clara and how and why she has existed in time and space before.  No, she's not Bad Wolf II like I initially thought.  Just watch the episode and you'll see.  I did like all the appearances of the Doctor's past selves, which included William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and (only as a stuntman dressed in costume) Christopher Eccleston.  We didn't get to see Paul McGann or David Tennant, either through footage or stunt doubles, as with the others.  That was odd, but we should really see all the Doctors in some way in November for the 50th Anniversary episode.  Anything less would be a huge letdown.

Now, as I wrote above, the cliffhanger ending was fantastic and introduced us to a (possibly) future incarnation of the Doctor — perhaps the Final Doctor — played by legendary actor John Hurt.  Only Hurt could portray a guilt-wracked Time Lord the way the future and Final Doctor must ultimately be played.  Brilliant casting decision there.  Oh, and if you're wondering how River Song could be in this episode after her doomed trip to the Library, well, it's Moffat's typically throwaway non-explanation.  I'll just say that even with that monumental cheat, the chemistry between Matt Smith and Alex Kingston was superb and undoubtedly caused quite the number of tears for many audience members.

So, I give "The Name of the Doctor" a B+ or A-.  Moffat still gets a big fat F- from me, but we'll see how the 50th Anniversary goes.

For an alternate take, go here.

Review: Nightmare In Silver

I loved the new design for the Cybermen.  The story was so-so, and had rather obvious flaws.  The chief of these is that the Mondas-originated Cybermen at some point merged with the Cybus Cybermen, according to episode writer Neil Gaiman (who wrote the Series 6 episode "The Doctor's Wife"), but we never actually got to see this, nor was any mention of it made in the episode itself.  So we end up with the Doctor managing to delay the Cyber-Planner's invasion of his mind with a gold ticket, a weakness the Cybus Cybermen never had, and no explanation as to why they have it.

The episode was saved somewhat by the incredible acting talents of Matt Smith and guest star Warwick Davis (of Star Wars, Willow, and Leprachaun fame), but neither of these two fine actors was given much to work with.  Smith, by the way, has confirmed that he will be returning for Series 8.

I don't know why Moffat is letting such poor writing permeate the second half of Series 7, but the next episode, "The Name of the Doctor", is supposed to be freakin' epic and from all we've been given so far, it's going to be yet another monumental letdown.  I don't know if Moffat is trying to get himself fired from the show, but if he is, a simple resignation would have sufficed.

Review: The Crimson Horror

This episode was kind of "meh".  Mark Gatiss, who wrote the teleplay, went for comic effect setting the story in 1893 Yorkshire, a year after the second Clara died.  People are turning up dead, petrified, and stained crimson, their faces twisted in expressions of horror, hence the title of the episode.  The impossible reflection of the Doctor's face in the eyes of the latest victim leads Madame Vastra, her wife and assistant Jenny, and Sontaran manservant Straxx to investigate an organization preaching doomsday and offering the chosen survivors a utopian vision of the future.

As was the case with every episode of Series 7's second half except Cold War, I just wasn't feeling blown away, and I blame that on the diminishing quality of the writing.  Head writer and show runner Stephen Moffat keeps promising us big things but always fails to deliver, and that is getting seriously irritating.  Neil Gaiman returns to pen the next episode, which features newly revamped Cybermen.  I'll let you know how that one goes.

Review: Journey to the Center of the TARDIS

I've got mixed feelings about this episode.  On the one hand, it was enjoyable seeing areas of the new TARDIS, which included a glimpse at the swimming pool, the library, an observatory, and even the Doctor's store room of cherished mementos.  On the other hand, the story was mediocre, which is to be expected from a show run by Stephen Moffat, and the ending was another "it never happened" cheat that abused time travel as a storytelling aspect.

Yes, I just gave you a major spoiler.  Considering how awful it was, you're not missing anything by knowing how the episode ends.

Okay, the plot revolves around the Doctor, Clara, and a trio of space salvage brothers as they try to save themselves from hideous burnt-mummy-clay-things.  At the same time the Doctor sets the TARDIS controls to a level Clara is able to handle, in an effort to bring her and the ancient time ship closer together, the salvagers lock a powerful tractor beam on the exterior, which happens to be materialized in space, heavily damaging the TARDIS.  Upon waking up from under the junk pile where the salvage team's spaceship dropped the exterior, the Doctor then proceeds to threaten them to help him locate Clara, who is lost somewhere inside the TARDIS, by activating a self destruct sequence.  And as is quickly evident, the five are not alone, and soon five become four.

There were a few nice touches, such as when one salvager removes a console panel only to hear the echoes of voices from the past, bringing us another reminder of the classic series, and another when Clara discovers the library and, irritated and impressed at the same time, reacts with the line, "now you're just showing off."  Also, while there, Clara makes an interesting if predictable discovery that, really, shouldn't have been included -- at least not the way it was in this episode.

So we have yet another contrived ending that once again leaves us feeling robbed of what should have been an epic moment in the development of Clara's and the Doctor's relationship.  I give "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS" a C- for poor writing.  I give Stephen Moffat a big fat F for his atrocious handling of Series 5-7.

LOLing All Over the Place

Remember how in my last post on the topic of craptacular Firestorm Viewer, I reported that development team head Jessica Lyin' claimed that even though they have a workable release, her team wasn't going to release it until after Linden Lab officially rolls out Server Side Baking?  Well, it looks like she got tired of fielding complaints about having to wait an indeterminate time for the next release because she went ahead and released it anyway...and no surprises, the new release is as full of bugs as ever.

Users are reporting the usual crashing-on-startup, voice not working, and now the entire viewer screen going black with no way of resolving the problem.  After replying to a few complaints with links to her never-responsive JIRA, Lyin' finally gave up on answering questions about the bugs and told everyone to just file a JIRA instead of posting their problems in the blog.

Now, this comes after Jessica Lyin' claimed the testing went through no fewer than three phases before release.  Somehow I doubt all that much testing was done.

Rubbing salt in the wound: lying and saying they've worked hard to make Firestorm look like Phoenix as much as possible, when they obviously haven't, and telling people to go use some other third party viewer.