Saw this sign at the local fairgrounds this afternoon:
The big billboard for the fairgrounds called this event “CHILD CONSIGNMENT.”
Asides
Brian Crecente with a rather interesting interview piece with SOE’s John Smedley (among others):
EverQuest Next Landmark, free-to-play like all of Sony Online Entertainment’s games, hits this winter and uses the same building tools used by developers to create Next, but gamifies the process so players need to mine for material and craft, while building in the varied terrain.
That sounds familiar; not sure where I have heard about something like that before…
The solution is to create a game that uses multi-classing. There are no levels in Next, but there will be more than 40 distinct “professions” to choose from at launch. Each of those professions will have their own multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills to collect and master.
Yup. Definitely getting some déjà vu.
Players can sell their creations to one another for real money for use, if appropriate, in either or both games. Players can also sell particularly good creations to Sony Online Entertainment for an “appropriate” fee.
“If we get one million people playing Landmark,” Georgeson said, “and ten percent start making things, and ten percent of those finish and ten percent of that isn’t crap, that’s still a thousand people making cool stuff. And we don’t have 1,000 people on the development team.”
I’ve got it! At some point, maybe they should take a look at the balance sheets for Star Wars: Galaxies and see how that went.
A post on the Buffer blog by James Clear that’s really insightful:
If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it?
Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen.
And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
I am guilty of this a thousand times over. It’s why I have article after article read and don’t post about them to share. It’s why I haven’t lost more weight in months.
Give it a read and see if you recognize yourself in there as well.
I don’t know why, but I find this tweet/picture amusing:
Mr. Miyamoto meant it when he said he wanted In-N-Out! pic.twitter.com/6JR1PuCiXH
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 13, 2013
The cost of prom night rose 5% this year to an average $1,139 per attendee—a staggering sum that should spark frank spending discussions in every household with a teenager.
Yeah, like “you’re not going to prom.”
An announcement from the Chromium team:
WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium’s rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.
However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
Opera is also switching to Blink instead of WebKit. This is a curious move, and I’ll assume that it’s because someone wanted control over a project that they weren’t getting through WebKit’s gated commit process.
Regardless of what you think about the move (and I think I heard a noise like the sound of millions of designers rolling their eyes this afternoon), at least they are going about it the right way: forking on existing open source project and creating a new open source project of their own.
Who knows? Maybe this will spur some additional innovation with existing rendering engines to keep up with whatever improvements the Blink team makes.
And staying with open source means that if Google capriciously decides to change renderers again, it’s highly likely that Blink and Chromium won’t just die on the vine—though it appears that Chromium’s licensing is significantly more complex than WebKit’s.
Ben Kuchera was at the Battlefield 4 reveal, and posted a small report about the event (which was at GDC). What struck me the most about it was this:
The Battlefield 4 reveal has suffered leak after leak, and in fact many of us were watching a leaked version of the trailer in the theater before the actual reveal took place. This makes the flashlights EA representatives were shining in the eyes of the press to make sure there were no hidden video recorders in the audience even sillier than they would normally be. Any damage had already been done: People knew the game in question, and were dissecting some of the content that was supposed to be a surprise.
That AAA publishers continue to insist on revealing games using showy events shown only to a select few is yet another symptom that the games industry is dinosauring itself. Imagine the amount of money that could be saved across all aspects of an industry that is closing dev shops, bankrupting publishers, and missing completely ridiculous “sales targets” if these companies would just use their existing internet channels in smart ways to reach both the news sites and their customers at the same time.
This information gets out anyway. It’s yet another instance of games publishers being tone-deaf and oblivious to the realities that surround them.
I don’t always agree with Tom Bissell, but you should read his interview with Ken Levine about Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite on Grantland. A great quote:
I think it’s undeniable to say the forms in which people consume quality content change, the way they pay for it changes, and the places where they want to consume it change. Technology has been an amazingly creative and destructive force — it’s been a creatively destructive force. If you look at traditional TV shows, and people were worried about the end of the drama … remember that, a few years ago? I tend not to spend a lot of time being anxious about things. I tend to spend the time looking for opportunity. Because the Earth will turn. You can choose to try to stop it from turning, but it will turn. There are truths. The sun will go up and the sun will go down. And I think that you have to count on those truths. Quality matters. Focus on your craft.
If you’ve never played Bioshock, you really should. I’ll be digging into Infinite starting today and can figure that it won’t take my very long to get through it.
Some other things that found their way into Instapaper today while I was cataloguing Google Reader stuff after last night’s announcement and my blog post earlier today:
According to data from the BuzzFeed Network, a set of tracked partner sites that collectively have over 300 million users, Google Reader is still a significant source of traffic for news — and a much larger one than Google+.
Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.
By implementing a suitable syncing API for RSS, and implementing a reasonably useful web interface, Black Pixel could establish NetNewsWire Cloud as the de facto replacement for Google Reader. Charging a reasonable fee for this service would likely inoculate it from the risk of sudden termination, and it would doubly serve to provide the very service that NetNewsWire needs to thrive on the desktop and on iOS.
July 1 isn’t that far away, but there’s time to get it together. Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.
and again:
I wanted to say that it’s possible to use RSS without being dependent on Google Reader. And since GR is going away, that should probably be seen as good news, not bad.
Google announced today that they will be shutting down Google Reader. This is something we have been expecting for some time: We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.
A fascinating article on WSJ.com about “Wool,” which launches in print today after already having made the author a millionaire on digital sales alone:
Hugh Howey’s postapocalyptic thriller “Wool” has sold more than half a million copies and generated more than 5,260 Amazon reviews. Mr. Howey has raked in more than a million dollars in royalties and sold the film rights to “Alien” producer Ridley Scott.
And Simon & Schuster hasn’t even released the book yet.
In a highly unusual deal, Simon & Schuster acquired print publication rights to “Wool” while allowing Mr. Howey to keep the e-book rights himself. Mr. Howey self-published “Wool” as a serial novel in 2011, and took a rare stand by refusing to sell the digital rights. Last year, he turned down multiple seven-figure offers from publishers before reaching a mid-six-figure, print-only deal with Simon & Schuster.
The publishing industry is in danger of losing control of the digital market as more and more tools are being put in the hands of authors to allow them to make and sell their books directly to readers. This piece is fascinating in detailing how this author knew he had the publishers under his power and not vice versa.
He’s even able to set his own pricing, which ends up with the digital, Kindle version of the first five books retailing for $6Â and the paperback of the same retailing for $15, which resembles realistic and non-gougy pricing. Plus, when dealing with Amazon, he gets 70%, while with a traditional publisher he would get only 15% or less. The economy of this thing is a no-brainer.
Authors can now create their own books, package them, and sell them on globally-available marketplaces with minimal cost and with profit shares much larger than they can by going through the traditional publishers. They can also use blogs and social services to do all their own marketing nearly free of charge.
You can say how you wish things weren’t being controlled by DRM-laden marketplaces like the Kindle Store or iBooks, but the ease of access to the tools and methods or creation and distribution is eroding the traditional publishing market’s authority over the medium.