Face Value or Sub-Text?
After finishing the Mass Effect Trilogy and filling my head with the Indoctrination Theory, I kept thinking about the idea of the face up value vs sub-text. A lot of games that are available today are simple games, what you see is what you get. Monsters are overrunning the Earth and you need to kill the Devil, ok no problem. Seems pretty simple. And you can find some games whose stories takes a few twists and some things are not as they first seem, for example… [SPOILERS AHEAD! If you see the name of a game you don’t want spoiled, skip it! But there is another section after this.] Portal 2 – One of the more obvious examples when you start out fighting your previous villain only to discover you’ve helped a worse villain. Star Control 2 – You start out thinking you’re fighting to stop this evil race only to find out that they are doing what they are doing because they were burned pretty badly in the past, burned so bad that galaxy wide domination or annihilation is the only choice. Borderlands – At the beginning, the vault is this huge treasure trove but at the end you realise it was a prison. Knights of the Old Republic – You go hunting for a malevolent Sith Lord only to discover that you were the villain that lost his memory. One Must Fall 2097 – You fight through all the tournaments to face the big boss and he’s not piloting his robot, he is his Continue Reading →
Posted in Gaming, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Imagine if there were no pirates…
NetFlix will have to write their own subtitles… Ubisoft will have to disable their annoying copy protection on their own… They will also need to convert their own audio files… Artists will have to be sought out for their music… It will be a tragedy. On the other hand: Music sales will go up… People everywhere will pay to watch TV shows… Authors will be much more well known for their work… And every form of media we wish to consume will be readily and easily available… It will be a utopia. (Hint: No, it won’t).
Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 3 comments.
Kids and Strangers
I’ve been reading the Free Range Kids blog for a little while now. This blog came out of a book, written by the blogger Lenore, about the idea that kids are not unsafe if you leave them alone and when you give them responsibility, whether they are 16 years old, 11 years old or even 6-7 years old, you’re not endangering them but empowering them. And on top of that, the fact that current society sees all of these activities as dangerous to kids is borderline psychotic. It has been interesting so far, but the first post I would really like to talk about is this one. The story actually starts in this post (linked inside the new one as well) about the Virgin-Air Airline who forced a man to move from his seat just because he was seated next to two boys, 8 and 10 years old. The 33-year-old firefighter was immediately suspected as a secret pedophile just because he was male. This is a great blow to this man’s honor and to human decency in general. After that story was posted, Lenore posted two letters she got in response. One stating how right Virgin Air is of their action because 99% of pedophiles are male (so, by obvious “logic”, 99% of males are pedophiles, right?) and another one, which I linked to first, that tells an interesting story by a reader who says that when she was 4, she, her mother and her 1-year-old sister where going cross Continue Reading →
Posted in Humanity, Practice, Thinking Out Loud, Weird by Eran with comments disabled.
And here is my entire “Company Loyalty” point in a nutshell
Google fucked up too, I’m not saying they didn’t. But somehow, their fuck ups seem diminutive compared to other fuck ups. When they introduced Buzz, they had privacy issues which they solved by putting a “Turn off Buzz” button. When they rolled out Events, people were flooded but there worst case was an annoyed Robert Scoble who had to delete events from his calendar one by one. Their worst fuck up I can think of right now is collecting wifi traffic data and not being transparent about it but even that was mostly a moral issue of privacy. Here, in one of Facebook’s fuck ups, they practically erased user data! If I had anything on Facebook besides my name and birthday, I would be seriously pissed right now and on my way out the door. If you’re not, may I please know why? (And I’m sorry, the “Everyone is on Facebook” argument just isn’t good enough anymore).
Posted in IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
פיראטיות תלת ממדית
In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, pretty much every household had their own molecular assembler which they could use to make just about anything, paying only for the raw material the device required. The precursors of that, the 3D printers, are already becoming something that a single person could buy for their home. They are still quite complex, small and expensive but the day in which you could just get one from the store the same way you get a microwave or a toaster oven is not far away. Seeing this coming, the people behind The Pirate Bay have offered a new category which they call Physibles. That is, 3D design files to be fed into a 3D printer to print… well, anything you can design. I just looked at it now and people are offering anything from Mark Zuckerberg’s head through a nerf gun and up to a Warhammer 40K Space Marine. I think this is insanely cool and I hope two things: One, that I would be able to print my own… anything in the near future. And two, that Old Manufacturing (paraphrasing Old Media) companies won’t go bananas with copyright and try to stop the revolution but instead try to follow it and work with it.
Posted in Geekdom, High-Tech, IT, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 1 comment.
Document Writing, Calendar and Sattelite TV
Three thoughts I’ve just had. Well, one is about a week old but still. I’m writing this from the waiting room of our garage in Haifa, waiting for Bessie to get her check up and polish. There’s a TV here showing a movie on Yes1 and it jumps and struggles and jitters a whole heck of a lot more than my two year old computer playing a 1080p movie. And people wonder why we don’t have a television connection, just a monitor for movies and games. Right now, when classes are finally over and I am moving into exam season, my calendar is freeing up and for the first time in several months I can see into next Monday. That’s kinda cool. I know this is always presumptous to say but _I am_ writing a book. For those of you who know it, it’s the one I started here and took down for a serious rewrite – Nathanel’s story, which I think could really work as a full length novel. The point is, I had it on Google Docs because I thought it was comfortable to keep it there where it allows me to write from anywhere. But a while back, with Google Drive and the, to my opinion, quite horrific terms of use, I decided to move it to Dropbox. I know Dropbox isn’t completely secure and I should probably encrypt it but I can access it, with full WSIWYG editing, through my Office application here on my phone. Continue Reading →
Posted in From the Writing Desk, High-Tech, Practice, School, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Sustainability Model
After watching a specific TED talk, I got myself thinking. I wasn’t thinking about rebuilding the health infrastructure, thought that is admirable, I was thinking about The Model. Whenever people talk about starting up, about building a company, they talk about their business model. And when they don’t, I’m always interested. But I find that I don’t care about how they make money. I care about how they sustain their vision. Because I don’t believe in aiming for a lot of money. Me… I’m thinking about making enough money to stop worrying about it. But mostly, I want to make enough money to sustain myself, my family and my vision. So I think that it shouldn’t be called a Business Model. We should redesign this idea to be a Sustainability Model: Not how to make as much money as possible and whatever or whoever’s expense but to make money to finance the ability to support this vision and more to come.
Posted in Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.
Syndicate Reboot Didn’t Work
That’s the quote from a release made a while ago by an “EA Boss”. No, you idiot EA boss, I’ll tell you the nature of resurrecting old IP. You need to make the same game but with newer tech and a new story; Not to completely change the fundamental aspects of what made the previous game awesome. You just can’t take a tactical cyberpunk game and make it into a 3D shooting gallery. As was previously said: Those who aren’t familiar with Syndicate will stay away from it, afraid they won’t get it. And those that are will be extremely disappointed with the new game because it’s not the old one. So you can just admit you already had the game and were afraid to venture on a new IP so you took the Syndicate name and a few gimmicks and called it a game. Gibeau further explained that EA has “numerous brands” that he finds worthy of making a comeback. He did not say what any of these properties were, but said it’s possible these franchises could be reborn on next-generation platforms. Translation: As one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet, we own a lot of your childhood memories and will feel free to rummage through them in search of names that will trigger your insatiable nostalgia and then we will make a 3D shooting gallery out of them just to spite you. And they aren’t the only ones committing this sin. But you know what the worst Continue Reading →
Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 2 comments.
DOTA 2 will be free to play
After conducting the Torchlight vs Diablo discussion for a bit and after reading this, I have to say that Valve, despite being insanely tardy and negligent on the side of their Half-Life property, still know how to release a game. In summary, it goes like this: “Here is a game, it is of one of the most popular yet least populated (by major releases) genres today. This game is completely free to play. As soon as it launches, you can just go play it. There is an in-game store where you can pay real money for stuff that will make you cooler than others. But if you don’t want to spend money, you don’t have to. The items for sale are just cosmetic, they don’t affect the core gameplay. And you have a creation tool in there where you can extend the game by yourself. We will make your extension official and you will get paid for it if it is good enough.” And they also have a matchmaking multiplayer system, an AI mechanic in case your opponent accidentally disconnects, and tutorial line ups where masters can teach the newbies. I think the only thing missing from this release is a big fluffy bunny you can put on your lap and pet for the enhanced experience.
Posted in Gaming, Less Interesting News, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 3 comments.
How to Prevent Unfounded Assumptions?
My brother answers people very literally. I tend to do that to. It’s a sort of defense mechanism against assumptions. People tend to make a lot of assumptions in conversation. They assume you’re a friend who’s willing to help, they assume you are in the same group, they might assumee you’re stupid, but the biggest is the assumption you know what they are talking about, you know what they are thinking. And that tends to be very annoying, especially when I have no idea what they want. When I do, I try a reply that will demonstrate their assumption is incorrect. Example: I’m sitting in a class after the lesson ended wrapping up some things. A guy walks in. He asks: “Isn’t there a lesson today?” His wrong assumption: I’m in the class where his lesson should be and thus I know about it. This is a logical fallacy. He should have asked specifically about his lesson and if I knew anything about it and I would have truthfully responded I have no clue. But to that question I could only come up with “There are lots of lessons today!” but I chose the more subtle “I don’t know about you but I had lessons today.” But, for some reason… I think this isn’t working. Is there a better system or should I just go wilder with my responses?
Posted in No Category, Practice, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with 10 comments.