general musings: / the App store

Thanks to the App Store, attention spans are extremely short - a game has to have serious sticking power to keep in the user's mind for over the course of even weeks. Somehow this is a problem with only iPhone games ... small-console games like DS or PSP don't have this problem, because you have to go out and buy these games, physically: they are more of an investment, it takes more effort, so you buy something you feel lasts a long time. An iPhone game takes next to no effort to get; likely the user is likely to jump to the next game without nary a forethought. It's the investment of monogamy versus the free-for-all promiscuity of the App store.  

Felicia Day

Let's talk about the whole Felicia Day thing. There is an aura this woman puts out, that is just extraordinary.

Cars 2

It's weird to see the characters in this setting. Are we too old, to want to see our characters endeared to a certain style, of environment? Kids eat this up. They have no qualms seeing Mater, Lightning, etc. as superheroes. Their minds are very flexible. Ours are not.

Cars 2

The Cars 2 game is doing it right ... ads in-game *look* like the game, just like I predicted they should during playing Malestrom.

Eguchi Aimi

http://gizmodo.com/5814813/can-you-fall-in-love-with-this-beautiful-girl

Until I can get this to Jesus Diaz himself:

"And while the Eguchi Aimi phenomenon may be just anecdotical, the fact that a synthetic creation has been able to make their fans to have crushes and feelings without them never realizing she was a figment of someone's imagination, a digital mutant mix, is not a simple anecdote. That's very real."

Really, this has been going on with actors, and other personalities and celebs, from behind the screen, or magazine photo, or TV, for a 100 years. From the viewer's point of view, they are falling in love with someone fabricated / manufactured / acted / created, and there's nothing tangible there.

From the viewer's perspective there is no difference. It's all warped media. Whether it's digital or analog, the warping effect is the same.

Digital is just a delivery system. The end effect has been happening countless times for a 100 years.

Aural sunglasses = earplugs (I actually use wadded up cotton or tissue)

At night, take them off so you have heightened hearing to adjust for the darkness

Brittany

Chinese woman at

Breakfast cereals of the past 100 years

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112856/breakfast-cereals-declining-popularity-247

"Increasingly, people are eating less cold cereal, which has been part of breakfast for more than 100 years."

Breakfast cereals were the "fast food" of their day; the primetime tv; they were the "experience", much as fast food was less about the food as it was the "experience" of going there, seeing the place, experiencing the living brand; (much like a theme park). Primetime tv was less about the actual content as it was the experience of sitting down, as in a theater, and gorging on your "favorite shows". These all were about the meta-experience.

Breakfast cereals were less about the actual sustenance as they were about the experience, of the flashy packaging / branding, the "experience" you had while eating, the visuals in your head as you ate.

It's no surprise that these have taken a back seat to other forms of entertainment that have now dominated people as the predominant experience. In older times, we had no such stimulation: the flashy breakfast cereals were it. They were our morning entertainment.

GetGlue: if you truly want to be meta, you'll include "sites I'm surfing" along with 'what I'm listening to' and etc. 

Youll be the Google of the new Internet. 

I really like this game. Reminds me of the paper games I used to play and design as a kid. Something about the paper, takes you out of the immersive element of the iPhone and makes it feel more like a real game. The human finger during the tutorial is a bit creepy, though.

Hangman

Looks beautiful. Fun, simple, plays well.

Cars 2: The Fast and the Furious

I'm a little disturbed by trailers for the new Pixar flick. It looks a little dark to me.

City Friends

Why is the library so massive? That drives me nuts.

I found it interesting that I naturally partitioned suburbia and urban/inner-city/metropolitan-downtown from each other on opposite sides of the street, and that I am totally neglecting suburbia and giving urban/downtown all of my attention.

Hey Jayne Mansfield Superstar!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hey-Jayne-Mansfield-Superstar-by-Sigue-Sigue-Sputnik/58646911566

Someone created a Hey Jayne Mansfield Superstar! page, following in the footsteps of my "Rhythm Heritage Theme from S.W.A.T." page and "Shep Pettibone remix of 'Something About You" page. What is it they say about there are no truly new ideas? Or that for any idea you have, someone on the opposite end of the planet is coming up with the same idea?

And they have 297 followers! I'm jealous.

Commercial with dollhouse using smartphone as widescreen TV - that was just adorable

I had this great red Chinese dish on white rice with Albert at Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas

http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/?nc&vid=25570923

"Ready to rumble? Police cars are deploying new sirens with heavy bass that you can actually feel coming even if you can't hear them, helping cops respond to the 240 million emergency calls every year."

Actually, this has been going on in San Francisco for quite a while. And the bass is meant to augment the siren, making you pay more attention.

While playing Metalstorm

Ads in games should have the same look, the same stylesheet as the look and feel of the game. For an ad to look like an ad is disjarring. An ad should look like the game.

On the wildfires

Why do people in New Mexico fantasize about the "end times" and the "apocalypse"? I took one look at the ash-covered sky and thought "Mars" ... guess my sensibilities are different. Alternate realities, life on other planets .. setting foot on other planets - this is what I saw. Why do New Mexicans fantasize about the world coming to an end? It's bizarre and I don't understand it.

DJ Baby Anne page

Someone is posting weird comments on my DJ Baby Anne page : grief-stricken comments, to a girl he loves. I've been there. The need to post grief, messages to a girl you love, that you lost, that you cannot do face-to-face ... Ive been there.

In a strange way, I have inadverdently done someone a public service - I put up this page and it allowed them a venue to vent their feelings. The image of the beautiful girl, was a type of psychology, a type of therapist's couch .. he got to talk to her, through this page.

I guess DJ B Anne, the image he sees on the page, is a symbol for the girl he lost. Just a guess. Men pine for women just as much as, if not in different ways, but just as much as women do for men. Men feel the pain also. Men hurt just as much.

General technology rant

Technology should do what you want. It should be doing as much as possible behind the scenes to do simply what you want on the surface.