#professormeme

[thehobbutts]

I both appreciate your high posting and can almost always relate, god bless

ok this is such a compliment coming from you ahhhh thank you

[syllethx]

LMAOO at that “realistic edgy disney” photoset. how come every character has a sad tragedy life but tarzan is just ????? in a nice suit riding the subway???? like everybody else is dying/starving but ah jeez i guess rush hour traffic crowds are pretty bad too

fdfdjsgkdsjg FUCK UR RIGHT

[sassydrew]

who is penny milliken and why do you hate her? i know all the problems with HER right now, i've just never heard specific people mentioned yet

Hoo boy. Let me begin, and I will try my best to make this as factual as possible, even though I hate her.

Penny Milliken is HER Interactive’s current CEO, as of September 2014. This means that the only full game produced under her “leadership” was Sea of Darkness, which was likely in production before she took over.

Sea of Darkness was, by all accounts, a generally well-liked and well-enjoyed game. Especially favored by many of us here was the small but important inclusion that Dagny is a lesbian and had a wife, whom she separated with. This, of course, has nothing to do with Penny herself, because it was almost certainly not her idea. Katie Chironis, whose brief but impactful tenure as a lead writer for SEA and MID was widely praised by many fans, was likely the person responsible for the move towards inclusivity (correct me if I am wrong, as I have always been under the impression that story piece was Katie’s doing). And this is where our troubles began, because not long after SEA’s release (and the intense hype for MID, which seemed to deliver a dark, edgy, girl-focused story that we had been clamoring for) Katie left HER after only 9 months at the company. At first, we were very concerned that her departure was related specifically to the inclusion of a gay character, but the situation was murky at best. I think she left of her own accord, especially because of the huge amount of layoffs the company was undergoing.

Layoffs which wiped out nearly all of HER’s staff, it should be mentioned. Layoffs that came right on the heels of the successful release of a game. Their Glassdoor reviews (which I don’t have screenshots of, unfortunately; worth noting, too, that the company only has “1-50 employees” which is a pretty broad way of saying ten people work there, lol) cited how the company had shifted after Penny’s supposed ascension to the throne, and how the company was basically a revolving door of employees–benefits and security were very unstable and uncertain, causing a lot of long-time employees to leave (per my understanding). And the biggest blow, the one most baffling and most upsetting, was HER’s decision to fire Lani Minella very shortly after Penny took office. It bears repeating that Lani was fired–she did not leave of her own volition–and this decision was Penny’s (see Reddit thread comments where Lani cites the “HER admin” being behind the move). It became clear that HER was on their way towards a rebrand, but it was unclear exactly what that would be.

That rebrand turned out to be Codes and Clues, an app released to help girls learn how to code with Nancy Drew. Necessary and cool? Sure. But at a time when the company inexplicably delayed Midnight in Salem (see this thread for the timing of C&C) for reasons related to “developer issues”, it became unclear how a company could produce an entire app yet have no idea what was going on with Midnight in Salem. See my post here for why it is a shitty, money-grabbing move that will not make the impact Penny hopes it would (i.e. creating a lasting fanbase that will continue to purchase their products).

The other part of this rebranding was the shift to the Unity platform. I’ve played a couple of Unity platform games, most notably The Wolf Among Us and the Strong Bad games (lol) made through Telltale Games. And I guess I can see why the shift was “necessary” to Penny, as Unity is a commonly used platform, but to me, walk simulator games (similar to Unity platform games) are fun, but they make me super sick unless I can get finely detailed controls over how the camera moves and works. And frankly, I don’t need to be able to look up at the ceiling or turn in a full circle when I’m playing Nancy Drew. That’s not why I play. But in terms of keeping up with the market, the shift sort of makes sense.

But why, then, hand this huge developer-related shift to an outsourced group of developers, rather than the, I don’t know, former in-house developing staff? LJ’s post here sort of addresses this, saying that many aspects of past ND games have been outsourced. But there is a huge, huge difference between “outsourcing” voice acting (which is not the same; recording from different locations than where the developers/producers/etc are located is very common) and handing the literal creation of the game itself to a completely unrelated team. LJ makes reference to HER hiring their own animators and artists after ICE…so then why fire them if that type of in-house work is truly as uncommon as she claims? This thread here has a great discussion of the bizarreness of this move and how it seems uncharacteristically greedy and is a very hypocritical move to make. I want to stress, again, that Penny Milliken has been the person in charge while these sudden and abrupt changes occurred; there is really no other source to pinpoint.

What else has been weird? Well, HER used Katie Chironis’s unedited story pitch for MID (would appreciate if someone had links to Katie’s original tweets about this) as an actual descriptor of the game/way to market the game, rather than, y’know, the actual story that was written, without Katie’s knowledge or consent. Katie is bound by NDA to not say anything about MID, but the game seems to have disappeared into the ether, as far as former and current employees are concerned. 

I don’t have as many sources for this, but LJ has made repeated references to the fact that the team is basically doing nothing right now…..yet claims that they’re working on stuff at the same time. This thread is particularly illuminating.

Additionally, HER makes really shitty marketing decisions on Facebook, such as running sales on games that fans already own. As far as I know, this content isn’t really being promoted to anyone who DOESN’T own the games. It’s silly to run sales on something that people….already own? If Steam ran a sale on Life is Strange, it wouldn’t tell me because I already own the game. Why would I buy it again? it’s a pretty obvious “clear our inventory because we are desperate for money” sale, which is very sad. I could go into a whole diatribe about the horrible marketing itself, but that’s more of a “PR is really bad at their job” thing than a “Penny Milliken is like Satan” thing. That being said, the fact that their marketing is this bad and Penny is fine with it (or is encouraging it) is really embarrassing.

And then we come to the comments on these posts. First of all, HER took down an advert they put up today that SEA was “the best adventure game of 2017.” I feel like I’m living under a (second) fascist regime, because that is such a blatant and deliberate manipulation of facts presented not only as truth, but as a way to “make money” (??? even though who would buy the game in the fanbase that DOESN’T own it). The reviews calling it that don’t exist. No one is saying that it’s a great game of 2017, because it was released two years ago. It’s like the “Bowling Greene Massacre”–a fake event is used to create hype for something supposedly coming in the future (although to very different ends for HI, obviously). Comments on the post calling this out were deleted, and then the post itself was deleted. It just seems absurdly, absurdly stupid to make such obvious and glaring lies the focal point of a marketing scheme to a fanbase devoted to solving mysteries.

Why does this matter, and what does this have to do with Penny? Well, many of us who have been involved with the HER fandom for years can tell you honestly that HER has always come across as a very open and accessible company that produced something near and dear to our childhood. I may never get to meet JK Rowling and thank her for Harry Potter, but up until Penny’s tenure as CEO, HER Interactive was very kind and engaging to fans who loved and supported their games so much. And it is remarkable that this game series has existed for nearly twenty years and still has the exact same people playing it! Emailing HER with questions about unanswered game plots and interviewing staff members (the interview of Kevin Manthei by thegoldengardenia I think, for example) was easy and fun. It was a mutual relationship that all parties benefited from–by having such clear, transparent access to the company that literally produced our childhoods, HER Interactive was able to maintain a steady, devoted fanbase in an otherwise dwindling market.

But now that Penny has taken the reins, all that has changed. Deleting Facebook comments, bizarre marketing moves like the “Odyssey” thing (explained here), and the seemingly intractable gulf that is information about MID (information about which is always contradictory; “we’re still working on it but we have no idea what’s happening on it” basically???) has led to an era of confusion and shunting a loyal fanbase. I would wait for MID for however many years it takes to make it if they had made it transparent and clear why it was the game had to be delayed, like many Kickstarter game startups have done in the past. I would donate money, too, if that was the problem. But by shutting fans out (especially by making an app clearly designed to shut most of the fanbase out through its intended demographic), HER has lost loyal fans, many of whom are my friends who I met through the games–friends I never thought would stop playing. Penny has single-handedly driven loyalty, respect, and trust in the company to the ground. It will be nothing short of a miracle if MID even recoups whatever it cost to make it, considering the only real market for the games (long-time fans, let’s just be real with ourselves here) has already been lost.

Anyway. I hate her, because she ruined something I respected that produced things important to me. She changed it in a way that was clearly not for the better, and she makes decisions that hurt good people–at a larger company this would be expected, but not for this tiny, tiny company. Nancy Drew has been an important part of my life for literally more than half of my life, and to see this company so clearly being run into the ground while fans’ protests are shut down is so painful. It hurts to watch something you love get ruined while you can do nothing about it, really.

So I hope that all was clear and useful! If you want to read more, I suggest this article!

[castroneves]

show us your wrapped: 8, 28, 68 ✨🌙

thank you :’) <3

8. sutux - 7 jaws

28. save me, san francisco - train

68. waiting room - fugazi

send me a number 1-100 and i’ll give u the corresponding song from my spontify wrapped ✨

[indycar-series]

night light and cosmos!

night light: who or what makes you feel safe?

a warm cup of coffee, a dark room, the night, and a fire.

cosmos: whats one thing you wish to say to someone you are no longer friends with?

(i kinda already did this tbh) "i want nothing to do with you, so fuck off and leave me alone."

[castroneves]

36: How long does it take you to get ready in the morning? 37: How late do you usually stay up at night?

36. when i have to work i give myself about 35 minutes to get ready and most of that is spent hating my life and having an existential crisis on the toilet, so... i can prob get ready in 15-20 mins but i wont look cute.

37. when i have to go to work early i try to be in bed by 11. when i have free reign the next day i’ll stay up till like 1:30 at the latest tbh im getting OLD

[castroneves]

professormeme replied to your post: me: i’m bored haha time to do some buzzfeed...

ok but which character did you choose to have a threesome with

pardon?????

[castroneves]

professormeme replied to your post: ���� if you would? :)

wait what. do you guys have an octagon flag down there or something?

jfgisubdofgisdhofhg no that’d be cool tho

here she is