TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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Offlyin’
Okay, it’s been 48 hours, I’m calling it: I’m back online. I’ve been off for six weeks, during which I started eating breakfast, and showering every day. Most of that was because Be (my new ISP) were telling me it must be a problem with my phone line, and British Telecom were telling me that it wasn’t, and if I wanted them to send out an engineer to check if it was, he’d charge me a minimum of £110 and refuse to fix it.
I solved it by lying: I just told Be that BT had checked my phone line and found that it was fine. Satisfied that I had performed the requisite dance, they just flicked the big switch they evidently have labeled “Work”, and now it does.
I had another card to play if that didn’t pan out: I can accurately call myself a technology journalist, we genuinely are considering an article on the abysmal state of internet sevice providers in this incompetent country, and as an absolute last resort, when companies are being utter fucking pricks about something, I’m not above role-playing a self-important twat to get it resolved.
But this story has a cathartic ending: on the day I get reconnected, I hear the BBC’s iPlayer, which lets you download a good quality copy of anything from the last week’s telly, is causing ISPs such chronic bandwidth problems that they’re trying to force the BBC to pay for overhead. “According to figures from regulator Ofcom it will cost ISPs in the region of £830m to pay for the extra capacity needed to allow for services like the iPlayer.”
At this, I laugh; bitterly and at length.
I guess you could summarise my position as in your fat, sweat-wet fucking faces, you unctuous fucking stoats. ISPs have survived thus far by lying exuberantly to their customers, selling them transfer rates they cannot possibly hope to provide, and relying on the vast majority of their customers wasting money by paying for a level of connectivity they never fully use. Now they’re fully using it. Now grandma has found BitTorrent, assholes, and she’s going to destroy you with it.