Tag: Internet Finds

ArsTechnica on first-world-problems … ehm, Soylent

ArsTechnica has probably the best piece I’ve read covering the meta-problem with Soylent.

Nobody will live off of Soylent for extended periods of time. And even if there were people like that they would be considered  at least as weird or crazy as maybe vegans or people with similarly “limited” diets.

Soylent won’t destroy anything in our food culture that hasn’t been already destroyed. Why would anyone care if you drank Soylent instead of eating your drive-through fast-food alone. Chugging down a glass of Soylent instead of munching a chocolate bar between meetings. The cultural aspect of eating together is moot in those cases. At least Soylent would provide a “nutritiously balanced” choice here.

Yes, people must eat, but people don’t *need* to cook (themselves). And honestly many people don’t. I can’t really see the difference between eating out, just heating things up in a microwave or oven or drinking Soylent for that matter. The cultural aspect of preparing food is lost in those cases anyway. This may be partly because of the next aspect.

Cooking is not as easy as it may sound. It requires following “discrete series of steps guided by a mix of instruction, experience, and intuition” “surrounded with a complex support scaffolding” (I really advise you to read the 2nd page of that article). It is as easy and as necessary for a fairly normal everyday life as is compiling software. (I still believe that cooking is the analog equivalent of programming). I second the argument that as easy and essential it may look to some, it looks equally impenetrable and “magic” to others.

One interesting aspect I’ve not thought of previously was that Soylent may be a way to relieve people with eating disorders of guilt and anxiety when eating the “wrong food”. Since “for people struggling with food-related issues, it can be like a damaging drug that you can never quite quit cold turkey” it may provide an unambiguous food choice that is “satiating without being delicious.” It makes preparing and consuming food quantifiable which was the problem for the last two groups of people in the first place.

I don’t really care if it’s Soylent or something else. If find the possibilities intriguing. It’ll get a lot more interesting once anyone cared to study the long-term effects of consuming Soylent. But I’ll definitely try some once it gets available in Germany. 😉

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

Benjamin Mako Hill has followed up on an interesting thought: in a world where many people use Gmail, just how many of your daily emails also land on Google’s servers even if you aren’t using their services? … For him it turns out more than 50%. o.O

Double Positive = Negative

A linguistics professor was lecturing to her class one day. “In English,” she said, “A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah . . .right.”

Source: http://www.enginesofmischief.com/makers/evan/humor/doublenegative.html

KAZ: Pushing Product Placement

After reading on arstechnica about a new documentary called Kaz I was psyched to watch it. I’m no console player, but Gran Turismo is a household name by now. 😉 The documentary is about Kazunori Yamauchi the producer of this legendary game series. It promised insight into the thoughts and ambitions of a perfectionist mind funneled though the game making process to produce one of the most acclaimed racing car simulation games out there.

But what I went to see was utterly disappointing!

I expected insight into the process of capturing the “soul” of complex machines–that cars have undeniably become–and how they managed to produce a “piece of art” (in a visual and “feeling of realism” sense) so that they each car they put into the game feels and acts subtly, but recognizably different. I expected something along the lines of creator’s vision, technical process and production anecdotes (very much like the Oral History of Street Fighter 2).

How do you capture the very tactile nature of car racing and delivering it through a gaming console?

How do you deliver the sense of speed and deafening sound into the living room?

How do you make this livable so that people really think they have tasted a drip of the real experience?

Wouldn’t this be interesting to know?

There have been very different but good examples set by companies like Blizzard or id Software when it comes to this. (I’m only counting one-way communication here. so only videos, talks, interviews, etc.)
I loved the battle reports before StarCraft 2 came out or interviews with game director Dustin Browder talking about balance changes and giving insight into their weighing and thinking in the process.
On the other side you have people like John Carmack do after-the-fact (sometimes very technical) analyses of games his company produced on both very specific or very broad game development issues.

I have seen several documentaries that try to capture the fascination of gaming from the players side (e.g. The King of Kong) as well as some that try to show how certain very prominent games were made (e.g. Indie Game, Minecraft).

But this is nothing like any of them. It is a string of sterile interviews, shots in random (“industrial” looking) sceneries, with people (at best) vaguely related to the game, the industry, racing, the film or anything.

  • There are a bunch of random interviews with arists/crafts(wo)men neither of whom is involved in gaming or racing or anything todo with the movie.
  • Product placement
  • Interviews with a young racers and their families and trainers who have basically nothing to do with the game.
  • Pointless and empty phrases by car company representatives, etc. (e.g. Kevin Hunter makes me cringe)
  • Product placement
  • Endless adulation on how successful the GTAcademy is, without really going into how they actually recruit and train drivers
  • Irritating camera action (e.g. useless depth changes in interviews), superfluous shots and scenes just for product placement
  • And the list goes on …
  • Did I mention the product placement?

The only glimpse of how the game was actually made were in two short scenes: where they show how they digitize tracks and an interview with one of the games’ visual designers working on a track’s scenery.

The interviews with “Kaz” are interesting if it wasn’t for the over-the-top and totally artificial settings. There are also some rather bizarre outdoor shots with him in a forest and in a traditional around-the-corner restaurant. They seem like they were forcefully inserted to create the facade of a “happy” and “balanced” person … which seems odd … having a rough idea of the kind of mindset in both the (Japanese) corporate and the general gaming world.

It seems they were desperate to make one of the biggest game company’s largest and probably most expensive game productions look like a inspiring one-man handcrafted artsy garage project.

They basically failed really hard to portray it like an indie game (in spirit). The blatantly obvious and nonsensical product placements didn’t help either. So for a film trying to capture “feeling” it is a rather “over-engeneered” PR tool. Basically Sony achieved with KAZ what Morgan Spurlock couldn’t with The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

So thats why I’m angry … there is no feeling, no emotion, no insight in this film … it’s a piece coming out of a soulless marketing machine … sadly …