(2020)

I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

I feel like a lot of the hounding was more due to the fact that Cringely wouldn't admit the failure and instead chose to lie again and again, and less because of the money.

The thing that was / is a drag about Kickstarter was in the early days when some complete randos raised quite a bit more than the mine server project raised to make a “spiritual successor “ to a game I designed. Anyone who knew better knew they couldn’t, whatever they believed. Would have been nice to see that money go to a real game or a real developer.