I am the Managing Director of the Balfour Institute of Internet Culture, and one of the world's foremost experts on the cultural phenomena of the Internet.
On the 13th
of May 1788, eleven great wooden ships departed from the south of England, two
of them were Royal Navy Escorts, the remainder carried supplies and convicts,
this was indeed the beginning of the story for Australia and for the literally
and liberally fucking rabbits that now plague it’s interior.
They brought the very
first rabbits with them to Australia, initially, this wasn’t much of a problem,
as they were all in cages and eaten with great relish.
However, this came
crashing down, as the local Australian predators were gleefully obliterated in
the name of sheep herding and general agricultural nonsense, turns out they had
kept the population of rabbits fairly stable, until evolution came along and
went “ha, HARDIER BREDS” and everything went straight into uncontrollable growth.
Apparently the entire
present horrible rabbit infestation can be traced back to twenty-four rabbits
released in 1859 by Thomas Austin, a moronic idiot who thought it was a great
idea to just randomly introduce English species of animal into a totally alien environment,
a true vanguard of the kind of ineptitude that to this day continues to thrive among
the Australian political class.
And now rabbits are everywhere
in Australia, causing havoc, rabbits aren’t picky eaters, basically devouring
every single plant, which has the consequence of erosion, in Europe our plants have
evolved alongside the rabbits, so they are much hardier breeds, much better suited
for the kind of grazers we have.
It does help we didn’t
manage to wipe out all our foxes and wolves, one wonders if the Dingo might be
slightly more helpful in keeping them down, in Australians didn’t consider them
a pest.
Oh well, the Australian government will just BIOLOGICAL WARFARE against the rabbits, having learned an important lesson from the Emu War, that they so comically lost.
Either that or just make massive fences everywhere, at least we have gained the enlightenment of how Trump got his idiotic wall from.
A Great Big Fence in the Country!
The lesson? Don’t
released animals, at all, you don’t do that, it’s bad. This is one of those
lessons that animal rights activists that have become radicalized don’t seem to
understand, releasing fur-producing animals into foreign environments are
REALLY fucking bad for it.
So, for those who are commiserable wretches with lacunae the size of the Pacific, Nauru is an island in the Pacific Ocean, it has some ten thousand really fat people living on it, it has basically two things going for it, fishing rights over its economic exclusivity zone and guano.
Thank you Atlas of Economic Complexity, for showing us just how bad it really is. (2017 Exports)
Guano? Right, bird shit, enormous staggering
quantities of solidified bird shit, accumulated over thousands of years by vast
flocks of marine birds, now turned into phosphate rock, which you can strip mine
with utter banality of ease.
The mining started in 1906 and terminated utterly in 2002, thousands of years of birds shitting obliterated utterly in less than a century, not a bad track record, not bad at all. The unbelievable environmental damage is a totally different story, the interior of Nauru was basically a nightmare of jagged limestone pillars, with absolutely zero agricultural value and frankly very ugly.
Note the slight drop in the early 2000’s
Remember the first thing they had going for
them? The fish? Yeah, the run off from the Phosphate mining basically wiped out
forty per cent of the marine lifeforms within reach of the island, and island
that doesn’t have a harbour due to ragged coral reefs surrounding then entire
island, the only way they got the damn phosphate off the rock was using a large
ram reaching above the reefs to pour the materials into the ships.
Now, Nauru did something very sensible,
they established a Sovereign Wealth Fund, just like the Norwegians and several
Arab nations have done, the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, which began
investing in various real estate projects around the globe, at it’s height, it
amount to almost a billion US dollars.
It included:
Fiji: The Grand Pacific Hotel
India: Paradeep Phosphate
New Zealand: Auckland Sheraton Hotel, Roturua Sheraton
Hotel
Philippines: Manila Pacific Star Hotel, Philippines
Phosphate & Fertilisers
Contiguous United States: Pacific House (Washington),
Singer Building Development (665 acres – Houston), Hillside Property (600 acres
– Oregon)
Hawaii: Nauru Tower, Hawaiki Tower
Guam: Pacific Star Hotel
United Kingdom: 3 Chesham Street (London)
Samoa: Properties at Vaitele and Sogi
Australia: Nauru House
Not bad right? Sure,
but overspending and relentlessly poor management of the wealth contained,
began to make itself known, they managed to burn off the cash reserves they had,
meaning loans, that they couldn’t pay.
How mismanaged? One of
the advisors to the fund, Duke Minks (A music producer, famously known for Unit 4 + 2, yeah I don’t know who that is either) recommended they
invest two million pounds sterling in a musical, which he wrote.
Leonardo the Musical:
A Portrait of Love, a giant of a musical, took four hours to perform, nobody
stayed to watch, ran for five weeks, lost all the money.
In the end, the fund
ran out of cash, it’s last attempt was a consolidation of their loans,
essentially taking a giant loan from General Electric to pay everything off, it
failed and GE seized what they could.
Yup, a railroad, it still counts!
The Phosphate was gone,
the money was gone, hell, most of the island was gone. Nauru now survives from
hosting a “processing center” for refugees arriving to Australia and not much else.
Add to that the
literally most obese people on Earth, due their diet being mainly processed
food, no cash, no tourism and no prospects.
But hey, at least they’ve got an airport and a railroad.
The lesson? That mineral
wealth is very much finite and don’t waste it if you’re a stupid little island
in the Pacific.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
