Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?

I saw one of the dumber attempts at deceptive advertising today by Comcast. Really, the sort of thing that makes you wonder where that “most hated company in America” title came from. In looking at internet options for the area of the house we’re looking at buying, their site gives the breakouts; you get 5Mbps for this much, 25 for this much, 75 for this much, 150 for this much…and 2000Mbps.

Wait, what? 2Gbps service? I mean, as a professional nerd, I don’t even have to look at the terms and conditions to know something stupid is being presented. For non-nerds, nothing in your house has the capability to go past 1Gbps for download. So what Comcast is doing here is listing the 1Gbps down, the 1Gbps up, and adding them up to get 2Gbps to make them look twice as good as Google Fiber, even though it’s the exact same service. This is the only one in their lineup that they present in such a manner. The others are only your download speed, and this one is download + upload.

The thing is, it’s $300 a month. It’s gigabit internet. Who are you trying to deceive, Comcast? The one demographic that immediately sees through your shady bait-and-switch, nerds that want gigabit speeds and are only going with Comcast because Google Fiber isn’t in their market yet. I’m one of those! And I’m not impressed or amused.

I played a fair bit of Cities: Skylines yesterday for the first time in a few months. The last few cities I built made use of the Unlimited Money/All Buildings Unlocked mods that come stock with the game (and a big thanks to Colossal Order for that and the Steam Workshop integration). Going back to a standard playthrough, it was rather liberating because you’re dirt poor in the early game, you can’t build out a perfect cookie cutter city with beautiful interchanges and traffic circles. You build a little bit, make do, wait for some more demand, make some more, wait for some more demand, and so on. It’s what gives your cities their character (as well as their traffic problems). Not having the choice but to just jump right in changes the whole complexion of the game, for the first few in-game years anyway.

I made a rich-person district high on a gently sloping cliff with a great view of the city and the bay. The bay’s half full of shitty water because we weren’t fancy enough for a sewage treatment facility for a while, but it’s improving. It was pretty fun switching from the perfect gridlines that makes your places look like any other sprawling suburbia hell, to the freeform tool along a hillside. It looks like a community for the super-rich, which was exactly the point. Just gotta get the poor people out of there, now. I added tax hikes for the district and all, maybe they’ll take a hint.