Author: grenideer

Non Daylight Saving Time

We all know it – the clock shift is stupid. Days are longer in the summer so we can keep the mornings mostly the same and shift the extra sunlight to the evening. Whether or not you prefer daylight saving to standard time is your personal preference and I am not here to tell you which to like. But having a time system that requires a shift twice a year is retarded and it’s about time we did away with it.

What does shifting the clock actually accomplish? There are numerous studies and the short answer is either it saves electricity or it doesn’t. Seriously, that is about all we know about modern daylight saving time. Having more sunlight in the evening reduces the use of lights but very likely increases the use of air conditioning. But what do we need to deal with to keep it going? A giant pain in the ass, that’s what. Sunlight times are going to vary no matter what. Why not keep the change more gradual instead of throwing it in our faces in a single moment?

Reminding the country to change clocks once a year and then again to change them back sounds like an exercise in futility. It is like we are forever adjusting our perception to look for the perfect schedule but can’t quite pin it down. Listen, this is the deal. We can make time whatever we want it to be – there is nothing about the sun that says, “It is now 5:50 PM.” It’s all arbitrary since the rotation of the Earth causes days of different lengths that a fixed hour can’t deal with elegantly. Add the complexity of time zones and you could be in one place at 2:00 and 10 feet away it could be 3:00. Trust me, the sun looks to be in exactly the same position from both those vantages. Some countries, like China, don’t even have time zones and average it out so that most of the country is on an equal time.

But enough about the complexities of world time. The point is that we can declare time to be anything we choose. So whether we decide to roll GMT-8 or GMT-9 is of no consequence – what matters is that we keep it consistent to make it easier on, not only ourselves, but all the other countries who care to know what time it happens to be in the United States. I am a programmer by trade and one of my major beefs within my profession is when engineers try to be more clever than is needed. Usually the simplest solution works best. When you add underlying complexities to a system you are adding more points of failure- more moving parts means there is more to break down. There are scheduling, health, and economic repercussions to the change, and it is ironic that software engineers devote countless man hours to support the time changes because of their more dangerous cousins, social engineers.

Facebook Games

Do I want to join your mafia? Well, is it fun? Did I just find a lonely sheep? What can I do with that? For the last couple of years the newest phenomena in the game industry are ‘social games’. For those that don’t keep up with all the cute game category names, this just means ‘games you can play on Facebook’ (because certainly many other games are social).

These games have long held my contempt for many reasons. Here at Why I Hate Everything, what I find particularly egregious is when something less than ordinary is hailed as holier than thou. Do you remember the big push for mobile gaming years ago when cell phones first started being built with semi-decent processors? There was actually a Ratchet & Clank game that you could play on your Motorola as long as you didn’t mind 5 frames a second and only being able to push one button at a time. Next we had the great iPhone game boom and the industry was turned upside down because a few people early to market made some money. I personally know several developers who have tried to capitalize on the empty promises of the faux market known as the App Store. And now everybody is making a Facebook game. It is the new fad, and why should its fate be any better?

Unfortunately, people tend to be reactionary because it tends to be more exciting. When I attended the latest Game Developers Conference I was sickened to see how much emphasis was put on Facebook games and their poster-company Zynga was making ridiculous proclamations from on high. The idea presented was that social games are forever changing the industry landscape, that free-to-play is king, and that AAA console gaming as we know it is dying. This is right after a banner year when Modern Warfare 2 was crowned as having the most profitable entertainment product launch of all time. Seriously, I know you guys entered the market early, Zynga, and I know you’ve had unheard of success, but why feel the need to jaw about being better than everybody else? Ride the wave while you can, guys.

I played Mafia Wars for literally 25 seconds when it first came out. I concluded that it wasn’t a game and it certainly wasn’t fun. Of course, that didn’t stop it and Farmville from making bucketloads of cash. To me, a game like this is really more of a short-term scam. Its profit is driven from psychological tricks with money the ultimate goal that informs the design. Just google Zynga business practices and you will read a lot of unflattering stuff. It is self-admittedly less about fun and more about profit. The problem is, these ‘games’ are pretty much spam. People have already started to grow wary of the viral tactic of using invites to get more users. Facebook allows blocking notifications from apps because the majority of users already realize that it’s not fun to wade through advertisements to see status updates of their friends. Millions of users per month are being shed as developers like Zynga are scrambling to find more legitimate ways to harass people into playing their products.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not bad mouthing all games that can be played on Facebook. There are plenty of casual audiences that appreciate what is out there but there are also plenty of companies that care about nothing other than ‘motivating’ these players to part with their money to account for bad, in fact under-handed, game design. And there will be a smile on my face when the mighty fall. Now, I am not naive enough to believe that these games will go away forever. To me it is similar to being a telemarketer- people can make a living doing anything if they have no self-respect and some people will always look to money as their primary motivating factor. Just another way to make a quick buck. But the writing is on the wall. Game companies like EA, Activision, and Ubisoft have all made announcements of entering the social network arena. As better social games get created people will be less susceptible to the tactics of old. For now and for the short term people will still be paying money for non-fun experiences without realizing that anything better is out there but eventually competition will drive up the product quality and the cheap knock-offs will be left in the dust.

It is why Zynga needs to start making better games. And it is why they are spending a lot of their cash buying small developers around the United States and the world. Because they do not know how to make good games. Because they’ve never yet tried.

Death of SP

With the advent of social games and more console connectivity there is a noticeable trend of packaging more games with cooperative and competitive multiplayer features. This is a great development in the game world because supporting a wider range of play styles can facilitate a larger audience. Friends can play with other friends who get excited and draw even more friends into the loop. Creating a community can extend the life of a product through expansion packs and micro-transactions and even simply keep fans around long enough to be excited for a sequel.

One thing that concerns me, however, is that there seems to be this line of thought that single player gaming is dying. There are people that believe that multiplayer is the future and everything else will fall by the wayside. This is simply not the case.

On speaking to current trends it is easy to see the success of World of Warcraft and Facebook as a platform. Let’s ignore the stagnation of the mobile and PC gaming markets for now. What we are left with are consoles- the core of the game platform business. There are clear examples of games receiving better critical and popular acclaim because of multiplayer modes. Grand Theft Auto 4 is a sprawling solo experience but you can play with and against friends in a cops and robbers mode. Almost all first-person shooters have cooperative play and various competitive modes, some even going so far as to focus on multiplayer and packaging a very weak solo campaign. These points all create a great case for why multiplayer gaming is here to stay but to swing wildly in the opposite direction and say single player is dying is being reactionary. A look at recent games awarded Game of the Year by popular outlets reveals Batman: Arkham Asylum, Oblivion, and even Bioshock, which is a first-person shooter that forwent a multiplayer mode altogether. Surely these types of game experiences are here to stay as well.

Aside from examining the current market we can think about why people play games to begin with. Entertainment has a long history of solitary and social applications. People can watch movies in groups and listen to music at parties but that doesn’t prevent doing these activities alone. Man is a social creature, to be sure. That is exactly the reason people turn to media when they are bored and alone. Curling up with a good book is a traditional experience- why should curling up with a good game be any different?

Mexican Chorizo

Mexican ChorizoMy girlfriend says she likes Mexicans because they’re funny. I’m not sure if that’s racist but I know one thing that isn’t funny – Mexican chorizo. It’s a pale imitation of the proper Spanish styled sausage and is more of a soft sausage mush with chorizo flavoring than the actual thing.

For a little background, chorizo is a sausage originating in Spain made from good cuts of chopped pork and pork fat. It is usually seasoned with salt, paprika, garlic, and some herbs and often has a smoky flavor. You can find small thin links of sausage or larger versions depending on the usage, but since it is cured it is usually sliced and eaten at room temperature- perfect for tapas with bread and cheese. When I was in Spain you could find chorizo in all manner of grocery stores and cafes. Growing up in Miami, I am accustomed to the many Cuban dishes that use the small sausage for its strong seasoning. I can make a mean picadillo using chorizo as the secret ingredient.

Proper Chorizo

So when I moved to Los Angeles I was delighted to see all the food trucks selling chorizo tacos or huevos con chorizo or papas. I had no idea that Mexican culture had embraced the sausage to such an extent but I was sorely disappointed when I tasted the local flavor. Mexican chorizo is heavily sauced and minced into unrecognizable portions then mixed in with other foods. This didn’t taste anything like what I was used to and for the last few years I would eat chorizo sparingly, blindly hoping that I would stumble upon something halfway authentic.

The answer came recently when I wanted to pick up some chorizo for a garbage plate party. Garbage plates are… well, maybe they warrant a separate post, this time on the positive side of the spectrum. But back to the point, standing in a Mexican grocery store because the Cuban market I took for granted had closed, I was surrounded by packages of large uncooked sausages labeled ‘chorizo’. I was bewildered at what I was looking at. I realize that you can probably buy authentic chorizo uncooked instead of cured but it was more than that. These sausages were phony. They started with the worst cuts of pork and tendons, which of course required the meat to be finely ground, had the salt and garlic but usually skipped the paprika, and tossed in some food coloring to compensate. Mexican chorizo is commonly made from cheaper ingredients and runs about a quarter of the price of even American made spanish styled sausages.

Mexican Chorizo

So now I need to begin the task of finding out where I can buy good chorizo again. I am seriously considering having it shipped from Spain. Maybe I can get my brother to bring a bunch with him when he moves from there back to the states. And next time I am at a taco truck considering between my options of carne asada, carnitas, al pastor, and chorizo, I will know better. And Mexicans should too.

1980s Robots

I’m not talking about fake robots. I’m not talking about toys. I’m talking about actual ‘high end’ ‘robots’ that were sold to consumers in the 80s. Of course these products weren’t very advanced but they were meant to modernize convenience. What menial task was so horrible that it should be delegated to a robot servant? A waiter, of course! This is what the pinnacle of thinking in the decade of decadence came up with.

In 80s movies, whenever there is a rich guy who lives in excess you will often see a short scene of a stumpy robot rolling two feet and stopping holding a tray of Coca-Cola. In Rocky IV (1985), the boxer has a lot of money and apparently buys a present for Paulie.

Even Wall Street did it. Seriously. Gordon Gekko is at a house party hosted by a rich guy and this little R2-D2 looking thing haphazardly rolls up.

How retarded is the concept that it would actually be easier to deal with this half-working drone simply to very slowly give you refreshments? It’s a good thing these big houses don’t have any stairs or furniture in the way to trip up the robots- there’s a good reason why these movies never actually show them doing anything.

And even if they worked, I’d like to be the rich guy whose biggest problem is figuring out how to get Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator.

How To Destroy Angels

It’s about time I talk about the new Trent Reznor side project with his wife. Teased on Pitchfork a couple months before its June 1st release, How To Destroy Angels promised to have a more melodic, trip hoppy sound. With the multitude of releases by Nine Inch Nails in the recent years, how does this one stand out?

The first song, The Space in Between, comes with a macabre video showing Trent and his wife laying dead after some horrific murder, eventually catching on fire. In other words, it is really cool. Mariqueen Maandig’s drugged out vocals work perfectly with the slow rhythmic song. A very promising start.

Parasite has some dirty guitar reminiscent of Broken. Not bad, but it is immediately noticeable that the trip hop vibe is suddenly gone. Fur Lined sounds like a With Teeth B side- a decent song, but more NIN sounding than I expected from this album. BBB, or Big Black Boots, is a lackluster song that sounds very Year Zeroish, aside from having a subject that might have been cool 20 years ago but feels forced now. The Believers likewise has a distinctly NIN sound, this time a pretty good semi-instrumental with its roots in The Fragile.

Listening to the entire album I can only think about two things. I love Nine Inch Nails, but if I listen to a side project I really want it to stand on its own and have a different feel. Also, Mariqueen is truthfully not the best vocalist. She does the down tempo thing well but lacks the depth to stray much further. The resulting product is pretty good – I listen to the album often- but it is nowhere near reaching its full potential.

A perfect example of what could have been is the last song, A Drowning. Finally, another slow, constant beat with Trent masterfully playing the piano. Without a doubt this is the best song on the album and what How To Destroy Angels should have been all along. It’s hard to argue with the price – you can pick up the album for free at howtodestroyangels.com. It’s a good listen- just don’t expect a legendary new sound. I have no doubt that for HTDA to be relevant in the future they will stay in their sweet spot and give us a modern twist on trip hop.

Freakonomics

FreakonomicsFreakonomics is a very interesting read on the economics of random topics. Describing it as disparate is not an exaggeration- the book jumps around from sumo wrestlers to drug dealers to cheating school teachers and breaks down trends with compiled statistics. It is not simply data analysis though- it actually makes analyzing that data fun. Before you think this book is all about numbers, its other author has his foundation in journalism and adds color and a stream-of-consciousness style to the writing that makes it sound conversational. And there are a good deal of funny jokes as well.

Economics in general is an interesting subject that caught my attention in college and even had me considering it as a major. But it isn’t necessarily the study of money that fascinated me, but the analysis of trends, what they mean, and how to read and control these factors to achieve a desired result. Freakonomics, likewise, abstains from discussing the conventional and instead focuses on social, financial, and moral incentives and how society has responded to them.

One of the earlier focuses of the book is how the internet has brought power to the people. Experts have long hoarded and used information to get the better end of transactions with the uninformed. Now, with information readily available online, it is easy for the layman to get facts or price comparisons and make a more well-informed choice. It goes into great detail and breaks down numbers to show why, for example, it is in a real estate agent’s best interest to sell their customer’s houses below cost than to spend the extra time and money to get a better deal. Personally, this is something I’ve long suspected since I sold a house years ago and felt like I was rushed through a bad deal as if just getting it over with was the primary goal.

Of course there are times when I found the facts to be lacking. A section of the book explains how a record of racism could be gleaned from looking at the statistics of who was voted off The Weakest Link. The authors claim that the optimal strategy is to vote weak players off in the beginning and strong players off in the end, so any behavior that fell outside this rigid guideline was defined as anomalous. With this study I would be much more lenient and accept that different players may have different strategies or just not be smart enough or have the wherewithal at the time to conform to what someone else deems is in their best interests. Still, even these *loose* sections, while they are not as factually accurate, are still intellectually stimulating. While I usually find myself hating topics with shaky foundations being forced down my throat, I at least found entertainment with these.

Freakonomics is a surprisingly short read. I found myself actually wishing for more random topics by the time I was finished, especially since the last few chapters of the book are unfortunately the worst. The Revised and Expanded Edition luckily includes a lot of web articles written after the book’s release, providing me with a fix for a short while longer. If you are in the mood to read about social science that will make you think, Freakonomics won’t do you wrong.

Kinect

Xbox 360 SlimIt is time for another year of the Electronic Entertainment Expo and what better way to start than having Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony duke it out with their pre-E3 press conferences. For the uninformed, these are hour long hype machines hosted by the biggest corporate tools you have ever seen in your life. Today was Microsoft’s turn and as expected it was time for them to unveil their motion controller.

While the press conference did start out with glimpses of Gears of War and Halo, nothing was notably wow-worthy, perhaps with the exception of the Metal Gear game. A new Xbox Slim is pretty cool but the announcement of built-in wifi (welcome to 4 years ago) doesn’t deter me from noticing that there was no price drop. This is because the majority of the show was meant to focus on the “next era of entertainment” which is the “evolution of motion control”- the Microsoft Kinect. This is a camera system that plugs into your Xbox and tracks your skeletal movement to allow you to control games without a physical controller at all.

Microsoft Kinect

At face value this sounds cool. The thought of navigating menus with your hands a la Minority Report is tasty. The facial recognition and voice command input are logical followups. Saying, “Xbox Pause” to put a movie on hold is actually kinda cool. So how does the Kinect break down?

The good

I have to admit that Microsoft is making a run at the casual market very strategically. There is a dance game that beats anything DDR can do. I don’t need to make a creative leap to imagine junior high kids learning classic dance move and performing on screen to a Guitar Hero like system. The pet sim for little kids, while very limited, may sucker enough parents into noticing the Kinect. There is a fitness program that doesn’t require a pad and can track any motions your body is doing and make sure you are correctly matching a personal trainer onscreen. I’m genuinely curious to see what this technology can inspire in a couple years.

The bad

There are a couple big problems with what Microsoft is selling. The first is that something is automatically easier and more natural to use without a controller, an obvious slam at Sony’s Move motion controller. But this isn’t necessarily true. Easier? Imagine if you walked into a building and wanted to turn on the light and there was no switch anywhere. No problem, just say the right voice command, or make the correct hand gesture, and presto, you’re done! Well, what is the correct thing to do here? The lack of a physical switch isn’t by nature more intuitive. What about more natural? Well, if I am playing a golf game I can hold my hands in front of me and pretend I am holding a club, or I can grip a physical controller with the same form I would use in real life. It is certainly more natural to actually feel a baseball bat, steering wheel, or guitar in your hands.

Another potential issue is the accuracy of the system. While there’s no denying that Sony’s physical controller will more accurately reflect movement, the question is whether or not people will care. If Microsoft is truly going after the casual market then this most likely is not an actual problem. But there were some games being shown that may be approaching the ‘hardcore’ spectrum. The racing game, for example, allowed you to pretend to hold a steering wheel but had no discernible method of controlling the gas. Games that require multiple controls, however simple, will suffer. And any games that require immediate reaction will just not play as well as their controller-driven counterparts.

The funny

A great thing about these press conferences is that, without fail, there is always a new internet meme born. Whether it’s Cliffy B acting like he’s on MTV 15 years ago (“What’s up bitches?”) or a preview of a game billed as having realistic historical battles right before a giant 3 story scorpion boss fight starts, there will always be something Tosh.0 worthy. This time this guy rolled out to present a few games.

Lorenzo Lamas

Now I don’t know who he is really or why he was wearing sunglasses inside during the day but it was a pretty weird scene. At one point he introduced some people who were gonna play a game and one of them said “Thank you Lorenzo Lamas.” It was a completely unscripted joke as the dude was walking off the stage and he turned around semi-laughing, semi in shock and said, “What the … fuck?” before his mic was cut off.

The end

So it’s hard to say if the Microsoft Kinect will succeed or not. It mostly depends on if it captures the imagination of the populace. And that is the question, since they are shamelessly targeting the Nintendo Wii audience. Not only did they copy their avatars and then actually claim to invent the concept of avatars at last year’s press conference, but they are shoveling advanced versions of Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Nintendogs. In no uncertain terms, Microsoft is trying to outwii the Wii. The question is, does this casual market really want to buy another console that they will use for a little while before stuffing into their closet? I’m not saying the answer is no because there will be hella marketing backing this thing for sure, but a large part of the Wii’s success was the low price point and that is not something that the Kinect bundle will likely have. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft finds themselves going in another direction with this technology as it matures.