Some updates about my games!*
iOS 5.1 came out last month, and to my dismay, all of my games were crashing on launch. Obviously, this was a problem. As you may recall, I started a full-time job in November; as it turns out, finances at this company were a problem, and after a round of funding fell through, so did my job. Though unfortunate, it was kind of perfect timing, since I now had the freedom to get on top of a few things, like these app fixes.
Sadly the belief that it’s about willpower and calisthenics is what fuels childhood obesity. Kids are the same as they always were. The world is different. Trying to treat this problem by suggesting kids, little kids, should be able to will themselves into healthier habits, and to dance dance revolution their way down is addressing a symptom, where the cause is the world. You can’t cure a disease by treating its symptoms.
— Yoni Freedhoff on Weighty Matters (via talenstraining)
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
— Banksy, from Cut It Out (via zaschell)
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad […] and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. […] And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us […] that’s the way it’s supposed to be! We all know things are bad—worse than bad—-they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms […] and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”
Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad!
I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. […] All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!” So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
— Network (1976), slightly edited to be more presently relevant.
There is only one real concern, specifically, which needs to be addressed in order to make “piracy” 100% viable (at which point the label of piracy no longer really applied; we’re just talking about content, provided free to all consumers): how do the content creators make money? Follow me down the rabbit hole, if you will, to see a couple ideas I’ve come up with to solve the piracy problem.
I think to be an activist you have to believe on the one hand that things will get worse if we don’t do something, and on the other hand, that if we do something things can get better.
— Cory Doctorow on Technology and Anarchy
And this is why I won’t shut up about internet regulation, censorship, IP and copyright legislation, the possible death of file sharing, the risk to future techs like 3D printing, and a better future as I see it.
Response to my last post was overwhelmingly negative, and mostly it went unshared. That’s fine; I tend to be an extremist and have largely differing opinions on the way the world works and how things are going to happen in the future. But the issue is complicated, so let me offer some clarifications…
Note: I am going to say a lot of things that may sound unlikely, implausible, or even outright silly. I encourage you, in reading this, to keep an open mind and identify the roots of my speculation as real and truly destructive. Though it is likely things will not play out as my post below specifically implies, the danger of similarly damaging events is very real. Please, make your own conclusions and if you too identify troubles, share this post with any addendum on further insights I may have missed.
I believe that serious turbulence is coming to America.
Better the government shut down than Wikipedia go on strike. That would be like part of my mind going on strike. Just give them [Wikipedia] whatever they want — we don’t even need to hear what it is.
I’ve never been good at making resolutions, for a variety of reasons. More often than not, when you decide you need to make a change, you fail to realize that the reason you aren’t doing that already is because it’s hard, uncomfortable, or not in line with your lifestyle. This isn’t to say that changes can’t be made; rather, the practice of choosing an arbitrary date (such as a new year celebration) to make sweeping changes to your life probably won’t work out. A common resolution is to “get fit” or “be healthy”, but the middle of winter probably isn’t the best time to do that, so why try then? Rather, springtime might be appropriate, since you can start running outside—it matches up to the planned change, and so it’s more likely to work out.
So as I’ve mentioned a few times here on this blog, and many times on Twitter, I recently dived pretty wholeheartedly into strength training, weight lifting, and fitness (which I intend to continue to be passionate about well into the future). This has a tendency to bleed into other aspects of life, like trying to get friends and family into it, changing what I read about and pay attention to, and even my social networking. As such, I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while, to share what I’ve learned (which is hopefully accurate) and maybe, if I’m lucky, share some of the goodness.
(As with my barely-explored idea for a blog series “On Break From Games”, since I’m now actually playing some games again I’d like to do some talking about them. And thus a new blog series is born. “This Is Not A Review” will be my horribly biased and subjective opinions on the games that I’m playing. I used to try to be objective and fair when writing on games, but this will be the opposite, so strap in. I will start with the new Legend of Zelda game. There may be minor spoilers.)
Let me preface this with a little factoid about myself: I hate the Wii, and the movement towards motion gaming. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but having grown up with a controller in my hand, I am both comfortable and content with traditional gaming, so much so that I am stubbornly avoiding stuff like the Wii, Kinect, PSMove, etc. But I’ve also been playing the Legend of Zelda series since its inception, my entire life. Hell, I used to be part of a play-by-post D&D-styled RPG on a forum in the Zelda universe. It’s a part of me, and I knew that eventually I’d be playing something on the Wii because of this. Twilight Princess came out for both GameCube and Wii, so I played it on GameCube (which is a system and controller that I really love, actually, making the Wii all the more unappealing), but Skyward Sword forced me to take the plunge.
Another iteration of the Humble Indie Bundle hit the shelves of the internet today, which sparked a bit of conversation amongst my Twitter feed this afternoon. Those of you unfamiliar with the bundle: it is a collection of indie games from various indie developers, packaged (or bundled, if you will) together, at a pay-what-you-want price point, and in general has been hugely successful and more importantly, profitable.
