Don’t We Already Have That?

I was reading this great article by Jason Tanz on Wired (via Marco Arment) about the Facebook game spoof Cow Clicker, and this paragraph stuck out to me:

Game theorist Jesse Schell took this idea to its Orwellian extreme in a presentation at yet another industry conference. He described a world in which a person’s every action—brushing their teeth, showing up to work on time, tattooing an advertisement for Pop-Tarts onto their forearm—earned points. Schell says he wanted to encourage people to think carefully about which kinds of games and experiences were appropriate to develop.

It seems to me that we already live in just such a world. The “points” are just called “money” and cheating is not only allowed, but seemingly encouraged by the rules.

read more

Disabled Comments

I’m going to take the route of John Gruber and Marco Arment, among others, and just keep comments globally disabled on this site. Why?

Well, mostly because I’m tired of fighting the spam. Allowing random people on the Internet to “contribute” to my site just opens me up to scripting attacks, and mostly it just enables spam bots to try to post crappy spam. Akismet is pretty good, but it doesn’t catch everything.

And, for everything else? I basically agree with everything that Marco Arment said. Comments are useful on some popular blogs (like Balloon Juice and asymco, for example), but I rarely get anything useful on mine.

If you want to contact me, or just shoot me a “thanks”, do it on twitter or via email.
If you want to respond to something I wrote, do it on your own blog, and link to me.

read more

Slow, But Not Never

So…. You might have noticed some changes around here.

I’ve been, as I indicated way back when, quite busy with the new addition to the family. Never did get around to making a real post about her, but what are you going to do. Some minor trouble with the website actually motivated me to get this thing running the way I wanted all along. I think it is looking much better now, but I’m not done quite yet.

Some notes about the switch: All of the images in my old posts are messed up, and there are some character encoding problems. I’ll get that all cleaned up in time. As it is, I’m quite happy with my new installation and look-and-feel. And I’m going to write again.

I’m also considering killing off comments altogether, but I haven’t quite decided. My site is, obviously, very low-traffic, so I don’t get many useful comments and battling the spam is a constant pain. But, I haven’t decided. When I do, I’ll tell you about it, dear reader.

read more

Promises, promises

I’ve been a little busy lately with a new addition to the family. I’ll get a story (and some pictures) posted here soon though. I know… Excuses, excuses. This one is small but mighty though.

read more

Jon Bon Jovi Blames the Steve

In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Jon Bon Jovi blamed Steve Jobs personally for the problems of the music industry (via @gruber, of course):

I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’ Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

Well, I hate to say I told you so, but… I told you so. Jon, if you really want to know who was responsible for “killing the music industry” look no further than the mirror and your “bosses” at the RIAA.

Let’s say it again: The digital music transition was coming no matter what. Even if Apple never opened the iTunes music store, someone else would have done it. The alternative was continuing to allow the P2P networks to be the primary distributors of digital music. Honestly, with most of the others who were likely to win that battle, the terms would have ended up worse for the RIAA, not better (just look at what Amazon paid publishers on the Kindle platform until Apple released iBooks, basically a 70/30 split the other way). At least the iTunes store gave them a closed environment for a while and a single monolithic entity with which to negotiate.

If you’re standing in the middle of the freeway and a semi is barreling at you at 70mph, your choices are to move or die. If you choose suicide and stand firm, you don’t blame the rescue workers who come to clean up the wreckage.

read more