The Problem with Gamers

This really needs saying, and bravo to Matt Gemmell for saying it.

There are naturally many, many gamers who behave themselves, of course. That’s not in question. There are naturally many, many football (in the British sense) fans who behave themselves too. But their respective entertainments are notorious for appalling misbehaviour on the part of their most zealous proponents.

The existence of an unremarkable majority isn’t an excuse to wash our hands of the actual problem. The gaming industry owns it. The parents who sit downstairs while their teenager is upstairs playing online on his Xbox or PlayStation own it. Everyone else who’s playing owns it.

NYC Bans Styrofoam Cups, and E-Cigarettes

I don't agree with the vapouriser ban, but we should all be pushing for companies to follow their lead on food and drink packaging.

Foam coffee cups and takeout containers will be outlawed under the bill, which passed unanimously.

“Most foam ends up in landfills where it can sit for literally 500 years or longer,” Quinn said. “The only thing in the world that lives longer than cockroaches or Cher is styrofoam.”

At the urging of the foam industry, the Council agreed to delay the ban from taking effect for a year, during which time the industry will have a chance to prove that the substance can be recycled. Sanitation officials currently say it can’t be.

When Your Mother Says She's Fat

Not the kind of thing I normally link to, but Kasey Edwards just moved me to tears. 

The older we get, the more loved ones we lose to accidents and illness. Their passing is always tragic and far too soon. I sometimes think about what these friends — and the people who love them — wouldn’t give for more time in a body that was healthy. A body that would allow them to live just a little longer. The size of that body’s thighs or the lines on its face wouldn’t matter. It would be alive and therefore it would be perfect.

When Your Mother Says She's Fat

Not the kind of thing I normally link to, but Kasey Edwards just moved me to tears. 

The older we get, the more loved ones we lose to accidents and illness. Their passing is always tragic and far too soon. I sometimes think about what these friends — and the people who love them — wouldn’t give for more time in a body that was healthy. A body that would allow them to live just a little longer. The size of that body’s thighs or the lines on its face wouldn’t matter. It would be alive and therefore it would be perfect.

Touch, and the Post-Physical Shopper

Daring Fireball picked this up earlier in relation to the "touch beats click in shopping" angle, but another aspect jumped out at me too:

“They used to say nobody would ever buy a diamond online. Not true. People are even buying homes without seeing them [in person] online,” Cohen said. “We are entering a period where we’re using our imagination rather than touch, feel, or smell. We’re using our brain differently.” Some surveys of online shoppers have reported that people believe they can imagine the smell of a perfume while shopping for scents online, for example, Cohen said.

Interesting. Of course great advertising has always done this, creating a real sense of connection with the product through the communicative and evocative power of words and images. Nevertheless it's always seemed a giant leap to get people weaned on physical presence to take the leap of faith required to respond positively to online purchasing (especially, perhaps, for physical products).

I've written and spoken many times about the increasing degrees of physical connection introduced by first the laptop computer and later the handheld and tablet, and I wonder if engaging our sense of touch enables our memory to fill in the gaps for other senses. It might be considered akin to a smell triggering our memories of taste.

Perhaps wearable computing will amplify this effect, but only, I think, if it engages more than our vision. I don't anticipate heads-up-display-style devices to have the same direct sense of connection, but time will tell.

Writer Pro looks Gorgeous

I've used—and liked—iA Writer on and off over the last couple of years, and while it's never become my primary writing environment I'm very keen to try out the new Writer Pro environment. This looks like quite an achievement. No surprise to hear it was four years in the making.

Writer Pro’s simple workflow is built around how you work: Start with your ideas in Note, move to Write to flesh them out, progress to Edit for refining, then move to Read when you’re done. The different workflow states keep you focused on the task at hand, and each has a task-specific font and color.

 $19.99 for iOS, $19.99 for OS X. Strikes me as very fair—and I hope sustainable—pricing. I'll be downloading and testing the iOS version when it goes on sale tomorrow.

Gifting iBooks is Great (but let me keep the receipt)

You can now gift anything in Apple's App, iTunes, and iBooks stores to another user, as long as they're in the same geographical region (sadly the world of international licensing has a long way to go). 

If it’s digital books your family and friends love to read, Apple has a gift for them and for you. After long being the company’s sole online store without gifting options, the iBookstore now allows you to send ebooks to your friends and family.

It's a great and necessary convenience, but whenever I've given a digital download as a gift I've wondered whether the person I'm sending it to already owns that particular album, movie or app. While it would be great to get confirmation from Apple that they didn't have it (or that they'd added it to a wishlist)  I can only begin to imagine the privacy implications. A safer option would be for Apple to let me include the digital receipt, and to allow the recipient to exchange it for something else (prior or downloading).

Would that cause problems with the way way Apple recompenses publishers? Do they credit the sale when I buy the gift, or when it's downloaded?

The New Mac Pro goes on sale Tomorrow

It's no exaggeration to call this computer "long-awaited". 

CUPERTINO, California―December 18, 2013―Apple® today announced the all-new Mac Pro® will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory.

What's Wrong With Newspapers, c. 1965

Plus ça change.

“Many papers have had the same old-guard ownership and management for decades. These men are complacent, see no serious fault with their papers. They live in the past; in theory, they agree that to thrive a daily must present more and better local news but they hire no extra reporters. They still run columnists who are not even scanned by the present generation. And when questioned about their newspapers, they go off the record, as if publishing were the most sacred of cows.”

Explosion in Video Ad Viewing "manufactured"

Up 205% apparently, though few are seen by real human beings:

Perhaps surprisingly, Timothy doesn’t blame bad guys using bots for this surge in video views, although they play a part. Rather, he sees a huge spike in autoplay video running below the fold where people can’t see it. “This is a huge priority, and nobody knows what to do about it,” Timothy said, who also noted that the number of video ad networks has jumped from 50 in 2010 to 150 today, further muddling the supply chain. “We want to shine a light on it.”

I don't blame the advertisers for getting worked up over this—they're paying for bogus ad impressions—but I think they're totally wrong in thinking that the answer lies in getting the ads into the visitor's line of sight. An auto-playing video ad is the quickest way to get me to leave a page and not come back, and I know I'm not alone. Fix the "below the fold" problem and watch your potential readers abandon your site completely.

Silicon Valley's Architectural Arms Race is On

How Apple's spaceship campus has sparked the tech community's desire to leave an architectural legacy: 

Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.

[…] Gehry’s Facebook building is intended in some ways to be the antithesis of Foster’s for Apple. It will be set lower into the ground and will be covered entirely by roof gardens: a building that will blend into the landscape rather than hover over it like an alien spacecraft. (From the minute the design became public, people have been calling the Apple building the “spaceship.”) But Facebook’s project is not exactly what you would call modest: underneath those gardens will be what might be the largest office in the world, a single room so gargantuan that it will accommodate up to 10,000 workers.

The Song that Helped Change the World

A fascinating tale. My own awareness of the evils of apartheid began in 1980 with Peter Gabriel's "Biko", but "Nelson Mandela" was transformative for a whole generation of young British people who found a political voice during the mid-eighties.

If any protest song can be said to have had a tangible effect on its subject matter, it is "Nelson Mandela" [released as "Free Nelson Mandela" in America]. It didn't exactly spring Mandela from jail single-handed, but it raised awareness of his plight like nothing else and helped to make apartheid one of the defining causes of the 1980s, something the man himself acknowledged after his release in 1990. And Dammers went further by founding the lobby group Artists Against Apartheid. In its broad outline it is an uplifting tale, but the full story is a turbulent affair, involving mental illness, creative paralysis, crippling debt, and a damaging musical row during which Dammers found himself on the opposing side to two black South African musicians who had been fighting apartheid decades before he paid that life-changing visit to Alexandra Palace: Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba.

The World's Best Street Foods

I ate Takoyaki balls in Hong Kong, and they might just be my favorite snack food ever. Their inclusion on this list makes me want to try the rest too. 

A ball of crisp, puffy wheat batter encases a sweet, tender chunk of octopus. The mixture is poured onto a specially designed hotplate with shallow indentations, like ping-pong balls hewn in half. A few spring onions might be thrown on top, then the whole thing cooks until golden. Once done, it’s dusted with aonori (green seaweed powder), sprinkled with katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or doused in mayonnaise or takoyaki sauce, similar to a thick Worcestershire sauce. The shell is firm and chewy, bursting open to reveal a scalding hot, creamy and not-quite-set mass of batter. The fat chunk of octopus is the final treat, something to chew on while you attack the next.

Books for Children (or anyone who ever was one)

Perhaps the best "best of" list I've seen this season. Some of these are new to me, and they're all beautiful. 

"It is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there's no such thing as writing "for children," intimating that books able to captivate children's imagination aren't "children's books" but simply really good books.

Beyoncé Broke the Music Business

Paul Cantor reminds us that, only a few years ago, we were told that paying for actual music was over:

Beyonce has completely turned that logic upside down. With this release, she has bypassed the gatekeepers, done away with the traditional promotional cycle and appealed directly to her fans. And by making it a more comprehensive experience, she’s made the album itself— not a concert, not an HBO documentary that she shot on her Macbook— the priority.

She’s saying that in a world where nobody wants to pay for music anymore, she wants you to buy this. Beyonce`is $15.99 on iTunes.

Siam Paragon Bangkok is the World's Most Instagrammed Place

It's an impressive mall, that's for sure, but there are far more beautiful spots to photograph in Bangkok if you ask me.

Over the past few years, shopping has propelled Bangkok, Thailand to being the top tourist destination in the world. And that fact is plain to see on social media: In 2013, more photos were posted on Instagram geotagged from inside a giant shopping mall in Bangkok than any other place in the world. (Last year, it came in second, behind Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.)

What Will Disney's Culture Empire Conquer Next?

Pixar, Muppets, Marvel, Star Wars, Indiana Jones. Whatever next?

It’s the latest gigantic pop culture acquisition for Disney, which has spent the last decade stockpiling many of the world’s most beloved franchises. First, Disney spent more than $100 million to purchase the Muppets in 2004. Two years later, the company shelled out $7.4 billion for Pixar, home of Toy Story, Monsters Inc., andCars. Marvel Entertainment came next (in 2009, for $4 billion) and then in October 2012, Disney snapped up George Lucas’ company Lucasfilm—and all rights to a little franchise called Star Wars—for $4.06 billion.

Through with Assigning Essays

Rebecca Schumann has had enough of grading essays, and with good reason:

Mom, friends, educators, students: We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

I'm particularly sympathetic to her call for more oral exams. Over on the Visual Communication course I teach we moved to student presentations for most things years ago and we've refined the process ever since. There's nothing like looking a student right in the eye and asking questions when it comes to working out what and how much they've learned.

Pencil and Paper

Very keen to try one of these out. In short, if you like the Paper app, you'll like Pencil. If not, then not so much.

Pencil uses Bluetooth to tell an iPad which tip is touching its screen. If neither the nib sensor or eraser sensor are sending a signal, Paper assumes input is coming from a user's finger and initiates a "blend" mode that simulates smudging colors together. When Pencil is powered on and connected, the app enables its palm rejection technology, which allows users to rest their hand on the screen while drawing.

Neat. 

British Library Releases 1 Million Images

A tremendous gift to the Commons, with more to come. Thanks @priddy for the heads-up on this.

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.