Category: the opiate of the masses
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minutes watched
Streaming sites evidently measure how much you like something by a metric called “minutes viewed” which really ought to be “cumulative minutes viewed” (if this was advanced stats for sports, it would be called CMV) because it is a measure of all the minutes that any client watched the show. Which is… weird, like, as…
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social myth
Philosophical mythology vs political sociology is the conflict between progress and regress, sophrosyne vs hubris, and thus the world of freedom and liberty vs the world of authority and control. “Do or do not, there is no try” is incompatible with corpo-capitalism because teaching mythological belief in the Force that you can find harmony with,…
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Middlemen
Thirty-four years ago today I got off a bus in the middle of the night and stood on yellow footprints at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot to begin boot camp. It was a different world. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had effectively surrendered (though it would take another year or so…
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Portability
Played Cyberpunk 2077 for five hours yesterday (because I’m an adult, 😛 ) and all I have to show for it is this: AAA video games that don’t let me save+clone+version+re-hydrate+share character state like skill trees, point allocations, and gear are starting to feel like a missed opportunity. We’re talking about the digital version of…
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why VR?
The “high-tech, low-life” aesthetic that makes cyberpunk cool is the only setting where VR/AR doesn’t seem out of place as “consumer tech”. The problem for Apple is that they are a luxury goods brand that is out of place in the aesthetic. It’s like if the child soldier in Africa was using a Louis Vuitton…
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Re-thinking Genre
Thinking that we’re at that place where franchises are each their own genre – MCU, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. are well-built worlds in which you can tell any story. And that’s what I want, stories that aren’t MCU stories but just regular stories told in-universe. Imagining stories and characters like Fargo, The Devil Wears…
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Mitigating gun violence versus controlling gun access
Gun control is decisive. Guns salve fear. Fear is increasingly pervasive, mostly because it is an effective tool for manipulating the market or the masses, occasionally because it is warranted. Fear-of-direct-bodily-harm-driven gun violence is most hazardous in places with higher population density. More people in smaller spaces increases the opportunity for both ad hoc violence,…
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Price premium for time sensitive video
Watching NFL games live on television incurs a 1912% price premium over the same game time-shifted from Sunday to Tuesday.
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On the Internet no one ever forgets…
This is completely wrong in so many ways, beginning with the utter falsehood in the first sentence (* see below for why I think so), which is why I discount this. Yes, time has passed and perhaps Kevin Smith has acquired something to temper his nerdgasmic reaction to all things Star Wars, but there is…
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The basics of a “slow demand” video service
Several years ago – call it 2004-ish – I spent a fleeting amount of time thinking about how to design a really good set top box that would facilitate a “slow demand” video service. This was around the time that I had permitted four things to enter my life – Netflix’s DVD by mail service,…