Top 10 Free Kindle Books - "Politics & Social Science" section

A list without judgement:

• Preparing for the Coming Collapse of the U.S. Dollar 2nd Edition (Surviving in the New America)

• The Poor Man’s Prepping Guide: How to Prepare for Disaster on a Shoestring Budget (Stay Alive)

• The Art of War

• Delusions of Grandeur

• The United States Constitution

• The Bug Out Bag: What You Need to Stay Alive

• How To Survive: The End Of The World (How to Survive the Apocalypse)

• Bug Out: What to Do When It’s Time to Get Out of Dodge

• Death by China: Confronting the Dragon - A Global Call to Action

• Beyond Good and Evil

Roger Corman school of Game Development

After he finished filming The Raven, Roger Corman decided that since he already had the large, gothic sets built, he could re-use them (and sets leftover from other films) to quickly knock together another film, The Terror. He effectively got two films for (roughly) the price of one.

With another console cycle just around the corner, we can expect a tidal wave of news stories about the rising cost of game development. “Now that everything is in super-high-res 4K HD, creating art assets costs more than the GDP of some European nations” they’ll probably say.

This is why I love what Ubisoft have done with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Rather than just scrapping all the work they did on Far Cry 3, or even just knocking together some boring DLC for extra multiplayer maps, they’re re-using the assets in a completely new and interesting way. A way I’m really excited to play.

Frequency Illusion

Sophia Coppola and Kristen Sheridan have both got new movies out about a group of attractive young teenagers who break into the houses of rich people.

Dollhouse

The Bling Ring

Is there something to be read into this? Is this a subject that especially appeals to daughters of directors past their prime? Should we expect Jennifer Lynch to complete the trifecta? Or is this just one of those things, like A Bug’s Life and Antz landing at the same time? I don’t know. Do I care? No. I’m just killing time here.

Point - Counterpoint

Point

All future EA games to feature microtransactions

“The next and much bigger piece [of the business] is microtransactions within games,” he revealed. “We’re building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way, either to get to a higher level to buy a new character, to buy a truck, a gun, whatever it might be, and consumers are enjoying and embracing that way of the business.”

Counterpoint

‘Real Racing 3’ is ruined by in-app purchases

It’s a shame, because the game itself could be great. It features some of the most impressive mobile graphics we’ve ever seen, the list of cars and courses is endless, and the way it integrates your friends’ lap times into your races for a pseudo-multiplayer experience makes it all the more immersive. The problem is that it all just feels so cheapened by the business model; while it’s possible to play the game a little each day without forking out money … the constant nagging for cash grates.

Real Racing Review - 3/10

There’s a good game somewhere within Real Racing 3 - and there are plenty of free-to-play games that prove this model can work successfully while respecting the player. Firemonkeys, and perhaps more pertinently EA, have got that balance horribly, horribly wrong, to an extent where the business model becomes the game - with gut-wrenching results.

Idea: Peanut Gallery

Peanut Gallery: A script that takes a start time and an end time and generates a subtitle file for your twitter stream (or a given hash tag), so you can watch a show or other live event with (time-shifted) real-time twitter commentary.

I woke up this morning to a twitter stream full of amazing Oscar commentary. For example, from the ever-reliable Zodiac Motherfucker:

@ZODIAC_MF GET MRS POTATO HEAD THE FUCK OUT OF HERE

By itself, this is a hilarious sentence, but who is he talking about? Without context, I’m missing something. Actually, for most of my twitter stream last night, I don’t know what people are referring to. I’d say the same thing happened for anyone who wasn’t watching the Sony PlayStation announcement. For certain shows and events, a snarky running commentary makes that show infinitely more entertaining.

I’ll probably watch the Oscars tonight – time-shifting a live event – and I’d love to be able to time-shift my twitter stream as well. I think a subtitle track for my media file would be the best way of doing this.

Unfortunately, I think this is the kind of thing Anil Dash was referring to in his essay The Web We Lost: I don’t think Twitter’s API allows this kind of usage. Shame.

Football: The Meal

Remember Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar? The restaurant Pete Wells slated in the New York Times? Its domain name is guysamerican.com. Bryan Mytko bought the domain guysamericankitchenandbar.com and produced this. And it’s glorious. “35 oz of super-saddened, Cheez-gutted wolf meat” is one of the best lines I’ve read since the hey-day of Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home.

Far Cry 3

I’m finding it impossible to deal with Far Cry 3 in its own terms. It’s much easier for me to talk about it in terms of games it’s not.

It’s not Far Cry 2, for example. Oh my God, Far Cry 2 hates the player. Never mind the respawning enemies making sure that every square inch of that game’s sprawling African savannah was actively hostile towards the player. And this was the least of your worries. More than once when I was playing that game, I found myself in the middle of a firefight when my gun would suddenly just fall apart in my hands (weapons ‘wear out’ in Far Cry 2), I’d panic and run away to consider my next move and that’s when my character would suffer a malaria attack (your character is infected with malaria at the start of Far Cry 2 and spends the rest of the game dealing with this). And then I’d die.

Far Cry 3 is not this. It’s much more forgiving. More hand-holding. Almost to a fault. Straying too far off the prescribed path (even during the tutorial) will result in a ‘mission failed’ screen. It’s not messing around. It doesn’t want you actually exploring the huge, open island without making sure you fully understand the mechanics and the context. As helpful and friendly as this is, I can’t help but feel like this is a step back. It takes fewer risks. It’s less dangerous. Much as I disliked the random bullshit in the previous Far Cry game, it was at least remarkable.

Speaking of exploring, Far Cry 3 is not Proteus or Misasmata. It’s not even Dear Esther. These are all island-based games that are very much about exploration. Proteus and Dear Esther are nothing but exploration. You get from it what you get. Miasmata has a story and a history for you to peel back, layer after layer. Your exploration is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the narrative. It’s like the designers took a look at Lost and thought “there’s a game there.”

Far Cry 3 is not that either. The game is set on a couple of huge, open islands with a long, varied history, but there’s actually very little to explore. Every hut on the island is the same. Every cave is the same. There are WWII-era gun emplacements. There are downed aircrafts. There are beached tankers. But these are all just eye-candy, not actually things that affect your game in any way. They don’t reveal anything about the story of Far Cry 3 or the history of the Rook Islands. I found one cabin with a body in a noose, but without any context for who this guy was or why he hung himself, it’s just a meaningless non-sequitur.

And this is the problem with Far Cry 3 - it’s an enjoyable romp, but it doesn’t have any aspirations to be anything new or original or even different. The entire plot is built on a series of tired Alice in Wonderland parallels (with a healthy dose of references to The Beach thrown in for good measure). And it could easily have been so much more. As well as his arsenal of heavy weapons, your character is also armed with a camera – a tool for exploration, for documenting things – and this could have been used in interesting ways; integrated into the gameplay somehow, but instead it’s only ever used to identify enemies before you kill them.

As much as I’m enjoying Far Cry 3, I can’t help thinking of it in terms of games it’s not because it’s just a very bland game done very well. And it could have been so much more, if it tried.

Going digital-only

Over Christmas, we moved again. This time, into the house we bought¹. One of the more useful things that falls out of the process of moving is that it gives you an opportunity to take account of your possessions. There’s nothing like packing everything you own into boxes and carting them off to another place to make you realise how much shit you own.

Well, somewhere around the 30th box or so, I had an epiphany. I have too much stuff.

“Duh, asshole. This isn’t news.”

No, you’re not listening to what I’m saying. I’m saying that my internal understanding – my mental self-image – suddenly went from “I have a lot of stuff” to “I have too much stuff”. As in, I could easily offload three-quarters of my DVD collection and not really feel the loss. Which is why I’m sort of glad that HMV is gone. As a nerd who loves movies and games, its disappearance leaves me with fewer places to buy these things in Dublin, fewer avenues of temptation. This is a perfect opening for me to re-evaluate my relationship with these things and how they come into my life. A lot has already changed.

Books: Kindle My kindle has completely transformed my relationship with books. I also count this as the thing that completely turned me onto the idea of digital, rather than physical ownership of media. I realised that I had been fetishizing the form, not the content.

Comics: ComiXology I haven’t bought a physical comic in at least a year now. Sorry, Forbidden Planet! Maybe if you weren’t missing volume 1 of every series I’d like to check out, y’know?

Games: Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, Wii U e-shop I feel like, of everything listed here, games are the best represented in the digital market. Each platform has its own storefront (Steam isn’t official, but it is the de-facto standard on PC) and it’s only getting easier and cheaper to buy digital versions of things.

Movies: ?

And this takes me to the point of this post. Yesterday, Philips announced that they were exiting the consumer electronics market. This line jumped out for me:

“Since we have online entertainment, people do not buy Blu-ray and DVD players anymore,” Mr. Van Houten said.

I think this ties in with what I’m saying - there’s very little need to own physical copies of digital media. Consumers are realising this and HMV, having built the core of its market around selling DVDs and Blu-Rays, couldn’t adapt.

But I have a question about all this. People aren’t buying Blu-rays or DVDs any more. So what are they actually buying? Is the lack of a standard for downloaded video harming adoption/uptake, just like we saw when HD-DVD and Blu-ray were competing to see which would be the dominant format? Also, until there is a standard, should we expect the price of digital-only movie purchases to remain high?²

In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh -- Vulture

I was watching one of those iconoclast shows on the Sundance Channel. Jamie Oliver said Paul Smith had told him something he hadn’t understood until very recently: “I’d rather be No. 2 forever than No. 1 for a while.” Just make stuff and don’t agonize over it. Stop worrying about being No. 1. I see a lot of people getting paralyzed by the response to their work, the imagined result. It’s like playing a Jedi mind trick on yourself, and Smith is right. That’s the way I’ve always approached films, the way I approach everything. Just make ’em.

A while ago, over the course of a couple of days, I came across two slogans that have stuck with me and have had a profound impact on my approach to my creative projects. First is from Facebook’s Analog Research Lab’s who have a poster saying “Done is Better Than Perfect”. The other is Brendan Dawes’ “Talk - Action = Shit”. Now, rather than being paralysed by the fear of the blank page and the fear of releasing anything that is less than perfect, I’m churning stuff out. There’s a lot of misses in there, but there are a few hits too.

Fear of failure

This weekend, I’m doing something foolish. I’m taking part in the Hell and Back. It’s a 10k race up and down the Little Sugarloaf, with a few obstacles thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot to be scared of. Never mind the cold, I’ve also got to haul my fat ass over a 7 foot wall, and deliberately subject myself to an electric shock. And then there’s the very real possibility that I will injure myself, badly.

But the thing that’s really got me scared – the thing that’s actually keeping me up at night – is the fear of failure. Of not finishing the course at all. Or worse, coming dead last. This is scaring me more than serious bodily harm. I can handle physical pain. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t handle emotional pain.

Ze Frank has some comforting things to say about this. Especially this line:

Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail or disappoint me… I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.

If my wife did anything like this, if she even signed up for something like this, I would be so proud of her. If she came dead last – if it took her eight hours to finish the course and everyone else had gone home – I’d still be at the finish line, cheering for her like she’d just out-run Usain Bolt. Can I do the same for myself?

On second thought, maybe I should be watching clips from Rocky instead. Much less likely to make me cry.