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My personal thoughts on life, the universe, and the meaning of everything. Ok, maybe not everything.
Brack Friday Bunduru
I am one of those crazy people who was in line at midnight on Black Friday to buy an Xbox One. Was it because of a hot launch title? No. Am I a Microsoft fanboy? Hardly. I bought an Xbox One to be one of the first to play Project Spark. Depending on whom you ask Spark is either Microsoft’s secret weapon in the battle with Sony or just another Second Life knockoff going nowhere. Once I got my hands on the beta version of the game, here’s what I found out.
Note: My original version of this post included complaints about Windows 8.1 and the setup process – along with slightly more vitriol. For a snark-free version written by a fan who echos many of my points, see Mike Kelly’s excellent beta review.
Kodu was Microsoft’s first attempt at simplifying game programming.
A Tiny Bit of Background
Project Spark is Microsoft’s game-creation tool aimed at new developers and non-programmers. It’s a outgrowth of Kodu, a free downloadable game for Xbox 360 which I enjoyed tremendously and which created my enthusiasm for Spark. The project’s main goals are to make game development accessible to non-developers, to teach coding skills through a non-intimidating user interface, and to expand upon the idea of open roaming games by allowing users to remix and extend each others’ content. Sadly, I think they’ve failed at all three.
Spark’s opening screen offers what might be the most unhelpful programming advice ever: “Koding the line WHEN: DO [turn][10] in an object might or might not turn it into an exotic sports car.”
Microsoft: Where new bad interfaces are born every day. For starters, What the hell is going on in the bottom right corner with transparent text overlaying other text?
10. UI Basics
New game development, like music or movies, must be led by young people. I question whether anyone under 30 was involved in the creation of Project Spark’s user interface, which seems like a throwback to the CD games of the early 1990s. There’s nothing inviting or modern about its both circuitous and counter-intuitive design. For a tool whose primary purpose is editing and playing one’s creations, it’s remarkably clumsy to move between edit and play modes.
The “me too” buttons that litter the interface do nothing to convey where one is in the game-making process, leaving player-creators to hunt for the button that seems to do what they want. Is it “test?” Is it “remix?” Is it “edit from here?” Microsoft uses all these words for the same concept – editing the game! If editing and playing are tedious, potential developers will tire of the environment before they get anything playable accomplished. And this tedium is really the underlying problem that connects all the others and will, I think, be the death of Project Spark.
Do not adjust your TV… This is the actual typography used throughout Project Spark. Notice horrible fuzzies on diagonal lines like in the “M” and “v.”
9. Fonts
Fonts in a video game would have to be pretty bad to warrant a position on the Top 10 Worst list. The fonts in Project Spark are so hideous – so uninspired in design and horribly pixelated in execution that they’re a real turn-off. I was at a Dave & Buster’s last week and saw a Daytona USA arcade machine from 1993 with higher resolution fonts than Project Spark. On the same visit, I played a beautifully-executed Lord of the Rings slot machine at a Miami casino which was chock-full of stunning custom typography and graphics – not only on the game screens but on the cabinet itself – that drew players into the characters’ world. The fonts in Project Spark were… well, forgotten.
Spark’s graphics don’t live up to the hype. On the left, a widely-publicized image of the game’s village scene. On the right, the actual village rendered by Crossroads has far less detail.
8. Graphics
Crimes against beauty are bad enough when they’re confined to the user interface, but in Project Spark they’ve made it into the game, too. Even in Microsoft’s best sample worlds the graphics don’t approach the quality of Morrowind, a watershed title released back in 2002 for Xbox. Is it all about the graphics? No. Minecraft is almost anti-graphical, but Microsoft’s goal here was not to make another niche title. The goal was to revolutionize the way games are programmed in order to attract new devs. No one will be excited about making a game with these graphics.
Unlike Forza’s lovingly-crafted car models, Project Spark’s previews of Marketplace content are entirely sexless. Where is this supposed to be? A parking lot?
More worrisome on a personal level is the fact it gave me a headache every time I played. Something awful is going on with Project Spark’s graphics, and I think its the unhappy marriage of these UI and graphics issues.
Second Life makes 3D movement easy. Just grab a colored ring.
7. 3D Controls
A defining aspect of any 3D content-creation tool is how it addresses the problem of rotating and moving objects using only a 2-dimensional screen and mouse. I’m concerned that “Not Invented Here” syndrome has kept Microsoft from studying the best examples of the art, and what they did come up with in-house feels untested. 3D object placement is not only vastly inferior to Second Life or Disney Infinity, it’ riddled with problems that will frustrate and eventually alienate new users.
Players will sometimes wonder why their object “flies off” into space, never to be retrieved, because they pushed or pulled the wrong 3D handle. Other times they’ll be completely unable to rotate in one dimension because Spark has covered up the necessary handle with UI cruft. In a game about creating and placing things in 3D space, 3D controls must be a top priority. These appear to have been designed by an intern.
Sparks’ push-pull 3D arrows are not clear in their meanings. And where is the red arrow for the 3rd dimension? It’s occluded by other UI junk and unclickable.
A brief tour of Second Life’s featured community content will show the amazing complexity of the objects that can be created and combined in 3D space using SL’s (admittedly first-generation) tools. Trying to assemble anything even the slightest bit complex in Project Spark’s 3D space is a fast way to get a headache a not much else. The proof is in the pudding… few of the uploaded community games contain any complex assemblies at all. The objects we do see were simply dropped-in and slid-around in 2D space, not built or moved in 3D.
The UGC (user-generated content or community game) A Cotton Tale opens with a compelling cinematic, but the landscape is nearly devoid of 3D objects. Could it be because they’re so difficult to place?
6. Free to Play
We all know that “free to play” means you pay for games, you just pay for them in pieces. But Microsoft has taken putting the screws to the player to a whole new level. Crossroads is Spark’s game-starter tool that leads players through a restricted series of choices, helps them place objects, and writes code to create a playable game level, but too many of the options at every juncture required paid content from the in-app Marketplace.
Many of the choices in Crossroads will cost you real money in the Marketplace. If you buy them, will your game be fun? Maybe.
Guess what, Microsoft? It’s not very much fun to make your own adventure if there are few stories and settings to choose from! What part of that would be “my” adventure, exactly? MS seems hellbent on taking as much profit from Spark as possible, even if it means no one plays. I spent nearly $50 to buy enough credits just to unlock all the options available to the beginner and purchase a month of Spark Time in order to be able to play other people’s games. That’s as much as an entire traditional game on disc, and we’re only looking at (extremely limited) launch content.
There will need to be 100x the amount of Marketplace content available before Spark will be interesting, but at these kind of prices and with next-to-nothing included free, who will bother to try?
Spark’s Crossroads feature is like those old Make Your Own Adventure books. But come prepared with plenty of (real) coin if you want more than a limited set of choices.
To make matters worse, Project Spark requires a separate subscription called Spark Power which must be paid by the day or month in order to play more than 30 minutes of other people’s games (called Spark Time) if they contain any Marketplace stuff you don’t have. Which, of course, it will. A single rock or tree in someone else’s game that you don’t own will cause playing that game (even checking it out) to go against your Spark Time – or require the subscription.
The upshot is that you will need Spark Time or a subscription to play most people’s (admittedly unprofessional) games – and on top of that you must purchase any content in their game in order to be able remix any part of the game or even view its source. If a game has something cool on Level 1 and you want to remix it, you must own the content on all the levels. Spark Time won’t help you. That’s not what free to play was supposed to be about. If they wanted that model, they should just sell the entire game up-front or sell a content subscription for DLC. This combo-model is confusing, expensive, and poorly thought-out.
Many Marketplace items are locked until you reach preset game levels, akin to Lego giving a test before you can buy a set. All Mindstorms builders would be forced to start at Duplo!
5. Achievements
The promo videos from the Project Spark development team talk at great length about how the game offers achievements, challenges, and community involvement to help players level-up and unlock content. They even propose that you could level up instead of buying tokens in the Marketplace. But the amount of grinding required to buy even simple items makes these rewards feel like beatings.
Spark’s daily challenges are a bit extreme. Play 15 minutes of community content a day, every day? No, thanks.
The tutorial is broken and won’t even let you one quarter of the way through, but finishing it is an achievement, so you must! Spark’s daily goals (yes, daily!) were an odd choice, since most folks don’t have time to play this every day. Instead, MS should be helping people learn to use this tool (or a better tool, really), through working example games and more sustained goals, tailored to the player, that don’t treat every day like Groundhog Day.
Both are for Xbox One, but the game engine Microsoft used in Spark can’t compete with the output of Cryengine for RYSE: Son of Rome.
4. Fun
The one hands-on review I did read was from a staff member at Gamespot who got 30 minutes with the Xbox One version. Even without being saddled by a Windows 8.1 machine, his summary of the game might be its coup de grâce. “Will Project Spark be an amazing creation tool for making games that aren’t fun to play?”
Watch Dogs looks fun and also promises to break new ground in the open-roaming genre. Gameplay involves hacking an entire city and finding novel ways to exploit its infrastructure.
I wanted Project Spark to be fun, and it is much more fun to create or remix a game with it than it is to play anything made with it. But making games which aren’t fun to play is like bad cooking. Who wants to learn that? Some have complained that the Make Your Own Game genre is doomed because most people just aren’t creative. But I happen to be creative and millions of others are, too.
The problem will Project Spark is not a lack of talent. Hell, Mozart had a freakin’ harpsichord to work with. The problem is that the tool impinges upon the talent that’s out there, leaving it feeling unsatisfied and disinterested. Unlike the harpsichord which didn’t get in the way, Project Spark gets in the way. It kills the fun. It kills the creative impulse. Witness the remarkably bland “games” offered up from it so far and the complete lack of demo games from MS.
One ring to rule them all… Every bit of Spark’s Kode language must be entered through this wheel device.
3. Kode
You would think that I could have ended with #4, ‘cause its all about the fun, right? But I’m fascinated by any attempt to improve coding, to bring more talent into the field, and to get any help we can from anywhere to make software better for users. I believe we must start with improving tools for developers. What better way than teaching coding through non-traditional means, like game development?
I saved Microsoft’s coding language for Project Spark, called Kode, for last because is truly both the greatest hope and biggest disappointment in the entire thing. To see why, we must look at the barriers to successfully writing code and see how Project Spark attempts to remove them. Unfortunately, I think it adds new ones.
The search function gives no indication of how to find these brain commands again, nor what parameters they might require.
Discovery
The first aspect of software development must be discovery – finding out what parts are available and what they do so that we can begin to plan our castle in the sky. This is akin to dumping out the entire box of Legos on the floor so we can see what we have to work with. We build more interesting buildings this way. Enabled by discovery, our minds leap to new heights. What if I put this… on this!?
Microsoft has forgotten that we all dumped Legos on the floor. Instead, they make us use a wheel which only shows a few toys at a time to narrow down our selections. But I don’t want to narrow my selections. I want to expand them!
“Get brain” is real Kode, but clicking Help pushes my code off the screen. Without visual correlation, it will be difficult to learn from help text presented this way (even once the text is here).
By trying to “help” programmers and creative types, they’ve instead set a choke-hold on creativity. It’s as if you asked Van Gogh, “Would you like to paint a Man or a Crow or a Wheat Field?” Shit, man! I want to see all my colors and all my tools and then I can figure it out, thank you. If you’d like to help, that’s great. But don’t restrict my choices. I’m sure MS will answer this by saying that they have search. And you know what? The search tool doesn’t even tell you where it found the toy you want!
Failing to aide users in discovery is a terrible crime in teaching. In fact, you cannot teach if you cannot help students discover and assimilate information. A wheel is a very poor choice for this job.
Spark only lets you see a few lines of code on the screen at once, making it impossible to build up or break down larger programs – a crucial technique in learning non-trivial programming.
2. Coding Tools
Once a programmer surveys the landscape, he immediately begins to think of the “wiring,” the connections between parts that will make the game or app do something useful. Without access to tools, these confections remain in our heads. All of the work which has gone into better ways to teach coding, such as those outlined in Bret Victor’s excellent Learnable Programming, seem wasted on Microsoft’s team. They’re determined to stick with the wheel. If your own ideas happen to be more advanced than that wheel can represent, you’re out of luck.
Inform 7 is a fascinating experiment in English-language programming. The tool can create standalone text games or be used to scaffold 2D and 3D games, including automatically creating game maps like the one shown here.
Spark offers no way to edit code in a traditional editor. Microsoft would say that’s an impediment to game development, but is reading and writing English in something resembling a normal font an impediment to communicating in this language? Quite the contrary. It’s a necessity. In this regard, a free tool like Inform 7 is far ahead in helping new devs structure a game and learn programming. By eschewing the fundamental aspect of programming (giving instructions to a computer through written text), Project Spark prevents new developers from ever rising above preschool level.
I’m absolutely in favor of using new and improved user interfaces to introduce programming concepts and even syntax – but to try and take the text out by cramming it into a puzzle piece shaped designed for little kids isn’t helping. It’s hurting.
Information density is a key concept in programming, but Spark takes up huge amounts of space for small, 5-letter words. Every line consumes ¼ of the display screen – for a total viewable program consisting of 4 lines. How much programming could you teach someone (or accomplish yourself!) if you were only allowed to see 4 lines at a time?
You might think those sliders on the left were slideable, but Crossroads offers only limited, non-editable characters. World Wizard, in a different area of Spark, offers a primitive editor for visual objects, but character attributes like strength or magic must be created in code.
1. Remixing
Documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson says everything is a remix. And it is. All great culture is the assimilation and expansion of previous culture, and so must it be with video games. Microsoft gives great lip service to remixing in its numerous video presentations about Spark. But in practice, the game is actually anti-remix. First is the ridiculous requirement that you either own everything in the other person’s game to remix it, or license it through a subscription to play more than 30 minutes total (of all others’ games which contain content you don’t own. Whew! Even the explanation is tiring.) When was the last time you had to buy a license for a tree to run behind that tree in a video game? This is very anti-remix as it gives me limited free-to-play and almost no free-to-remix content without buying or renting it all myself. As the amount of content in the Marketplace grows, the problem will become worse. New games will contain new Marketplace content that other players don’t own, forcing those players to buy that content if they want to peek inside the game’s code or objects – even just for learning or idea generation, aka remixing.
Microsoft should have separated the ability to play others’ content from the ability to publish that content yourself, and frankly they should have offered both by a simple subscription if it’s recurring revenue they’re after. As it stands, I have to dig deeply in my pockets to dip even a bit into content creation via remixing. And only Microsoft stands to benefit from the game’s economy. Content creators are paid nothing.
This is a real 3D multiplatform video game, made on a PC. This is Unity.
Spark Out
The lack of any real code editing environment, integrated documentation, or the ability to cut-and-paste working modules into a real app is the death knell for Project Spark. It flies in the face of everything that’s happening in software development today, where frameworks, first-order modularity, and the expectation that new projects will be easy to skeleton with working code are the norm. Any young gamer looking at Kode for the first time and thinking this is how game development works is more likely to be clinically depressed than motivated.
Here’s the game I scaffolded in Inform, now coming to life as a 2D game in Unity. The runnable game is at the top left with the animation controller for Clive below it. A series of Adobe-style panels on the right allow object editing – even custom ones you define in code. Unity offers 3 programming language choices and a built-in text editor, or bring your own.
The Cure
Fortunately, someone has done game development right. It’s a tool that makes no attempt to redefine how programming is done. In fact, it uses Javascript which is the de facto way that programming is done today. Unity is the best way for new game developers to get into this space. With a rich environment of playable, remixable content that’s free (and an asset store, too, of course), tons of online tutorials and examples, modular code with standard languages and editing tools, and huge community support, anyone interested in gaming can start with Unity for free and turn their creation into a game that’s playable (and fun) on just about any device you can name. How do we know it works? Many of the top-grossing mobile games today were written with it. So what are you waiting for? Go make something great with Unity. You’ll never miss this Spark that won’t become a flame.
– D
[Full Disclosure: I’ve been a professional software developer for 25 years and a gamer since Pong.]
The ongoing disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill falls right on the heels of Obama’s new law that opens up coastlines to more drilling – the kind of offshore drilling that has been banned for the last 20 years. Even if you don’t believe in the concept of peak oil, when you see the satellite image of crude oil pouring out of an open hole in the ocean, you have to be curious about the options. So what are they, really?
First of all, let’s get a couple of popular red herrings out of the way.
Nuclear Power Isn’t Green
I’ve mentioned this before, but I think the worldwide commission on cleaning up Chernobyl really puts in it perspective. According to them, we’ve got a 40% chance of another Design Basis Accident (that’s nuke-speak for meltdown) in the next 40 years. Would you like one in your backyard? The Chernobyl nuclear plant (still not safely contained, btw) caused “untold suffering for millions of people.” Should we just go ahead with something that has this potential?
Even if your neighborhood nuke never goes critical, there is the small matter of waste disposal. Most people know that nuclear waste is the most toxic material ever created by man. Even kids know it takes thousands of years before the danger goes away. So what do we do with the nuclear waste we create from power plants and military projects? We put it in swimming pools. Yep, that’s pretty much it. We keep spent nuclear fuel rods in a swimming pool, usually nearby because, in all seriousness, who wants to transport the stuff?
Even the Federal Government shuttered their own Yucca Mountain storage facility. Not only could the facility never be made safe, getting the waste there would put hundreds of millions of Americans in front of potential nuclear waste accidents every day as trains and trucks carrying it crossed the country. Oops!
Ethanol Isn’t Green
Ethanol might be what the corn industry wants to sell us after we quit eating corn syrup, but it isn’t a great fuel source. Even if every acre of our fields were given over to ethanol, we could only make about 12% of our automobile fuel.
Because it’s hydroscopic, ethanol can’t be run in the nation’s petroleum pipelines and distribution system. Drivers and boaters already know what an ethanol mix does to their fuel lines. It would cost billions to convert our oil infrastructure to one that could run on ethanol, billions that could only come from huge tax credits and development projects funded with public money.
Ethanol production is inefficient. When the complete product lifecycle is taken into account, ethanol may produce more carbon emissions than it saves. It may even take more energy to produce than it creates. That’s not green! Besides, using a food source to power our cars hardly makes sense, especially given the present problems with the food supply in this country.
Hydrogen Isn’t (Necessarily) Green
I love hydrogen as much as the next guy. (Well, hydrogen vehicles sure look cool.) And with zero emissions, what’s not to like? Although hydrogen is everywhere, it must be separated and compressed into a tank to be used as fuel. That takes energy. If we make the hydrogen using dirty power, we haven’t saved the planet one bit. We’re just making a Jetson’s version of another consumptive energy system, one that depends on digging something up and burning it for power. A hydrogen infrastructure and a hydrogen economy are steps backward, not forward.
Getting Away From Consumption
Anything that makes us consume something cannot be green energy because we will never get out of the cycle of obtaining that something (at any cost) so we can burn more of it up. The economics of infrastructure-building are such that, once you build an entire society based on an energy source, it’s very difficult to change. Since we have to change soon, we should move to something non-consumptive at this juncture.
The energy business would prefer that we not move away from consumptive models. If nothing is consumed, there’s nothing to sell. Someone would need to sell power-making devices of course, but King Gilette would tell you all the money is in the refills. No matter how green their talk, today’s energy companies just want to replace one consumed energy source with another and they’ll do everything in their power to obfuscate that fact.
Are There Non-Consumptive Sources?
Yes! Of course. We have overlooked them on purpose. Let’s take the most obvious first.
It’s Hot Up There!
The sun produces in one hour all the energy we use on earth in one year. New solar fields are producing massive amounts of energy – enough to power cities and nations, just as we do now with oil. A successful solar field in Spain, for example, will expand next year to provide service to 600,000 people.
Solar power for city-wide electric service is a Very Big Deal and certainly seems completely obvious for the sparsely populated and sundrenched Florida Keys. Who would guess our local power plant on Stock Island burns fuel oil, brought in by ship? Yuck! New solar cell technologies make solar practical and economical in more places than ever.
The Ocean’s Version of Geothermal
Water is the other power source that’s all around us and doesn’t need to be consumed to be used. Oceanic Thermal Conversion is a revolutionary power concept that consumes nothing and produces green electricity along with free air conditioning and pure drinking water. Fortunately, it works best in warm coastal locations where those three things are very much in demand.
And speaking of geothermal, a new low temperature version makes that technology viable in more places than ever. Temperatures that exist near the earth’s surface almost everywhere are high enough to power turbines – if we build the plants to do it.
Back to the Buoy
Wave power is an age-old dream that could become reality. A promising new technique for making power from waves uses a simple array of buoys. It probably won’t be funded because it costs less than a war and won’t be made by Halliburton. Naw, I’m just being cynical.
What You Can Do?
If you’ve read this far, you’ve done the first part. Get informed and don’t buy the bullshit that energy companies are selling you. Talk about non-consumptive energy sources and steer your friends (and politicians) towards those solutions.
Since most of us aren’t involved in building power plants, we can only green our own homes. If you are involved in public energy policy, by all means, please do more than that!
The bottom line: Demand, don’t suggest, that we create green energy solutions today. After all, it’s your planet, too.
Namaste,
– D
This being Veteran’s Day, several of my friends on Facebook have already taken the opportunity to tell everyone how thankful they are for veterans. But you know what? I’m not thankful for veterans. Regretful might be a better word.
From our earliest school days, Americans are taught that veterans “fought for you,” filling a child’s mind with the vague connection that others should be subjected to war and violence as a necessary and important part of the American way of life. We start out early with the idea that our lifestyle cannot be maintained without guns and death and bombing and warships and so forth. Sadly, it’s the truth… but not for the reason we’re told.
A War-Based Economy
War is absolutely necessary to sustain the American way of life at the moment because it is the basis of our economy. War is is the primary product of the American economic engine. Think about that for a second. With all the resources we have available in this country: human, natural, and financial – the best thing we can come up with to produce for the world is war? We want to devote maximal effort and energy (and money) to war above all else? Is this really the kind of country that we’ve chosen to live in? We’re not the leader in science, or the environment, or technology, or medicine, or education, or quality of life by any quantitative measure. Instead, we’re the leader in war.
When we glorify war for children (which is where ideas get started), we’re preparing them to live in a world with a war-based economy, dominated by the US, of course. All around us are patriotic symbols. Posters, films, and TV provide ample opportunities for hero worship, where men engaging in the war business are shown as saviors, doing right by the people. In reality, this is pure propaganda that ensures the war business will continue to have lots of boosters when it comes time to cheer the latest military action (or expenditure).
Who Wins in War?
Is it so hard to accept that a few wealthy individuals in interconnected industries largely determine the conditions of the masses? At some level, we all know that everything is owned by someone… even corporations are just groups of people who hide behind shares of stock to prevent too-close examination of what they own. But underneath all that, a relatively small group of people own quite a few businesses which are related to war.
Is it farfetched to think that the war industries might be the largest and most profitable businesses in the country? It shouldn’t really surprise anyone. America’s wealthiest individuals make their money in the war business and the many related industries propped up by it, like the petroleum, infrastructure-building, aviation, shipping, arms, energy, chemical, vehicle and vessel construction, prison, security, and police businesses.
So this is the real meaning of “veterans fought for you.” Veterans fought (and continue fighting) so that indirectly you may “benefit” by living in this society that’s constructed on a war-based economy. This is quite different from the kindergarten story of some bad guy across the sea trying to take away your freedom and the need to “fight for it.” There is no bad guy trying to take anything away from you, except perhaps a rich person who is trying to take more of your money… a topic which is not unrelated to this question of veterans and the war economy.
What Are We Fighting For?
Children are told (and adults still believe) that we put our boys on the front lines to keep the baddies away so that Americans can enjoy the good stuff over here. Often when I post anti-war comments, people will reply by telling me that a veteran fought so that I could have the right to disagree. Not quite. My rights are innate and don’t require fighting, thank you. Sadly, we send our men and women away not to fight the bad guys but to keep the war business alive. This is the main focus of America now, although in the recent administration the finance industry is getting a large share of the pie, too.
When we get excited about veterans, we are cheering the deaths of millions of people and the waste of untold amounts of money and immeasurable human efforts that are destroyed by war. It’s never just the smiling soldier in the poster or on TV. War is a brutal game that brings death and destruction wherever it’s played. Just ask anyone who has been on the receiving end of American imperialism. Is this really necessary so that Americans can have a cheeseburger and watch TV (or even have a veggie wrap and read a book)? No.
What Veterans Do Today
As technology advances, the war business can do its dirty work with fewer hands. Today, soldiers push buttons in a bunker in Vegas which kill people and wipe out infrastructure in other countries. Then American companies can go in and rebuild it, power it, fuel it, police it, put a fence around it, and connect a new water supply. Do this enough and the country is so weakened that we can install a new government, one that’s amenable to putting in our electric company, oil company, telecommunications, schools, food supply, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals.
See how it works? This is the job of veterans. Kill people and destroy things so that a few companies and their owners can get richer by providing the means of destruction (the material of war) and the contractors to rebuild it. Still thankful?
What Did We Buy With Our Money?
All this death and destruction is very expensive. Until fractional credit schemes were invented, the war business was the most lucrative one on the planet because you simply charged a lot for something then blew it up. Voila! You need another one. Since American taxpayers fund all of this and they don’t get to examine the bills, it’s the ultimate gravy train. As new threats are invented or imagined, the war business will suddenly have new “needs” which can only be filled by massive expenditures in petroleum, infrastructure-building, aviation, shipping, arms, energy, chemicals, etc. Easy!
But since you and I are paying for this, don’t we have the right to ask if it’s what we really want to buy with our money? I think we can lay clear any concern that America is under threat of losing our way of life because of some foreign invaders. We’re much more at risk from continuing our war-based economy here at home than from anything any other country is doing, and here’s why: Money spent on the war business isn’t available for anything else. It’s really just that simple.
There are websites with scary counters showing just how much we spend on war… and others with alarming comparisons of what could be bought with one day’s expenditures on war – how much food, how much education, how many homes for foreclosed people, etc. If you need convincing, look them up. But you don’t have to be an economist to realize that everything we want and need to improve society can be purchased with money, and that the money is available but it’s being spent on war.
We Have a Choice
So ask yourself… Do I want to fund the war business more than I want to fund healthcare, or housing, or education, or the environment? Do I want to give my tax money to the war industry more than I want to give it to green energy, a safe food supply, or better conditions for working people? If people realized they have a choice, somehow I don’t think most people would choose to keep funding the war business at such an extreme level – to the clear detriment of the rest of society. We are a nation where many are suffering, yet we pour most of our money into the war business so a few people can keep getting richer.
I don’t like to say it, but veterans are a part of this problem. I’m not thankful for them. You can see why I rather regret that we’ve ever had veterans. I feel sorry that any person was ever lied to and manipulated into believing that fighting was a good idea, or that going to war meant he was somehow helping the people in his own country. By now it should be obvious that war is only robbing the public trust so that a handful of people can remain fabulously wealthy and in control. War is the fastest way of emptying the coffers of your money and my money – emptying it into the hands of people in the war business. If you celebrate war and war boosterism, you are helping their cause.
Many veterans have seen for themselves that the system is bogus and they’ll tell you what I’m saying is true. If people do not celebrate veterans, do not agree to be veterans, and do not speak in exuberant, loving terms about war and death and destruction – then we might bring some peace and sanity to the future of our country. That is my hope today.
Peace,
– D
Advocate for the Audience
Some folks think that what a host does is have a conversation with someone on the air. If you do that, your show will fail. Other people’s conversations are just not that interesting. The host’s primary job is to advocate for the audience, to be ever-vigilant every minute of the live show to the needs of the audience and whether or not they are being met. Is the current discussion of interest to the listener? (Not to you but to the listener, an important distinction.) Are we answering the questions that the listener needs answered? Are we approaching things systematically and in an organized fashion so that the audience can follow along? Are all the relevant details being called out and broken down so that the listener can follow them? If not, it’s the host’s job to immediately detect the out-of-whack condition and correct it.
Like the captain of a ship, a radio host must act swifty and without reservation to avoid winding up stranded with boring material or worse, dead air. A courageous host advocates for the audience in every aspect of the show – even to the apparent detriment of his guest or a pre-arranged script. Your guest may want to give a facile answer or dismiss something that’s of deep interest to the audience. Make him discuss it! Your guest may gloss over a subject, assuming that you and she both know what she’s talking about. Don’t do it! Your audience has no idea what you’re talking about. Break down everything and always ruthlessly advocate for the audience with every question and every statement. This is the host’s job.
Always Go Deep
Most conversations are at the surface level. While this is fine for the post office, it makes terrible radio. To create programming that’s worth the audience’s time, you must always go deep, in every topic, every time. No exceptions. It’s very easy to remain at the surface. We’re there so much we hardly recognize it. Here’s how to tell if you’re at the surface: You’re discussing anything that your audience might be able to find out on their own. Just make it a hard-and-fast rule. If the audience can find out the information through normal means, don’t discuss it.
Here’s how this works in practice. Let’s say you are interviewing a filmmaker. He will want to keep the conversation very basic and only talk about things that people can find out in a thousand other places. Boring! Make him talk about something that cannot be found anywhere else. Anyone can find out the title of his movie or the name of the director, but no one other than the guest can tell the most valuable thing he learned from working with that director… or how how she changed as an artist by being a part of this film.
Only your guest can connect her childhood experiences growing up in the favelas with her current status as a darling of the Cannes film festival. This is the secret of great radio. Don’t talk about the parts of the movie that everyone can see. Boring! Talk about the parts that your audience will never find out unless they hear your show. Use this technique everywhere. Take your listener inside the guest’s world by asking deep questions that go beyond what the listener could find outside your show.
Everyone needs shameless plugs and of course it’s important to state the basic facts in a clear and understandable way for the benefit of the audience. One way to handle both needs at once is to open your show with a 30-second introduction of your guest which sweeps away all of the common knowledge information that can be gleaned about your subject. The name of their book, their company, their charity, their blah-blah-blah. Just get this out of the way early on. This is only peripheral information anyway. The listener wants to relate to your guest as a complete person with life experiences, challenges, dreams, and realities. The magic here is not in the details; its in sharing genuine emotion and real experiences that are universal to all human beings.
You Are a Key Ingredient
Many new hosts make the mistake of giving over too much air time and too much control to their guest. Don’t forget that the audience is expecting you to contribute to the show just as much as your guest. I would say 50/50 is a good ratio to start with. Be sure you are adding your own observations, experiences, opinions, questions, ideas, thoughts, doubts, etc. The listeners expect your personality to be a key ingredient. There’s a reason the show has your name on it! If your guest is exceptional and really knows how to carry a subject, consider a 70/30 balance. But always be prepared to add yourself into the mix, and not just as seasoning but as a main dish.
Let’s say you’re talking to your guest and he brings up his time in France in college. You could fawn over him and say, “Oh, that’s lovely, tell us something else.” And then watch the boring meter shoot off the chart because, in actuality, it’s not lovely nor interesting to anyone but the two of you. The best answer is to add your own observations… perhaps you were in Spain in high school, or perhaps you didn’t get to go to college! Either way, you can add something to the mix that wasn’t there from just your guest’s statement. Then go deep.
Building on what you and your guest have said, ask an open-ended question, such as “How does it affect your life today that you lived in a foreign country in college?,” or “After living overseas, what would you say is the most important step we could make toward getting along better as nations?” Obviously, your show and your guest will have different aims and topics, but do not fail to both add yourself as an ingredient and then go deep, as these techniques make great radio no matter what the subject.
Be Prepared, But Not Too Much
I find that about 1 hour of preparation is sufficient for a 1-hour radio show, evenly divided into two parts. The first part is finding out about your guest and her background so that you can think about your own experiences and how these compare and contrast. In this phase, you read the guest’s website and bio, their Facebook pages, and read the Wikipedia articles about their industry or charity or subject area. Start to think about how your listeners will relate to this information. What will they care about among all this stuff?
The second half of your preparation is a brainstorming session that you do together with your guest. I like to have some ideas of what to talk about before I call my guest, but I only want to have 5 ideas for for the entire hour going in. Most professional guests want to over-prepare. It doesn’t make very interesting radio. Instead, tell the guest that together you will come up with 5 broad topics that might be discussed during the show. (Emphasis on might because you want the show to flow like a river. There are no hard-and-fast rules.) Write down the five… some before you call the guest and some during your call. Don’t spend more than 15 minutes on the phone with your guest before the show. And whatever you do, don’t tell them any questions you’re going to ask. That spoils a show and makes it dull.
During this 15-minute brainstorm call, write down some subtopics for each of the 5 areas so that you have some mental reminders of where you might go when the show is rolling live. If you have a filmmaker as your guest, only one topic is the film, not all 5. You better come up with 4 other things to talk about. Let’s say your filmmaker is Cuban, involved in charity for dolphins, and has a kid at Stanford. These might be your 5 bullet points:
Under the main topic, write a few memory-jogger subtopics. If the film is a documentary about Cuban immigrants filmed in Florida that won a student prize and is his first film, your subtopics might be:
This is all you share with the guest, your main topics and a few subtopics. Just a few words about each, enough to serve as a memory-jogger.
During the live show, you can use these notes in two ways. First, you can ask questions built around the topics. Take a freeform approach, rather than writing the questions in advance. We know that at sometime during the show, the film, the kid, the charity, etc. all need to be discussed. We don’t really know what order it’s going to take or what specific questions and answers will be derived, but that’s ok. The show will be better if it’s more organic.
Use your notes as a topic wheel to make sure you cover the ground you intended before the hour is up. This is not to say that if one topic becomes particularly riveting it should not be allowed to consume the entire show. By all means! Whatever has drive and energy and interest (especially any caller or audience participation) should be pursued at the total disregard of what’s in the notes. The notes are there to get you into this flow state rather than yank you out of it. If you’re in, you’re in!
The second way to use your notes is as a hook. When you hear your guest mention one of the subtopics in your notes, take it as a natural segue to make your own observation, then ask an opened-ended question based on the new topic which the guest has opened up for you. It helps to check-off subtopics and topics on your notes as you notice the energy drains from the conversation and you seem to have exhausted the subject. You will soon get a feel for how much territory you are covering and how much time each topic really merits in the listener’s mind.
Go Beyond Your Friends
Most new radio hosts make the mistake of limiting their guests to friends and people they know well. But keep in mind that your friends are only interesting to you. Unless you have some really fascinating friends, they’re probably not the best radio guests. Instead, look for people who can mutually benefit from an on-air relationship with your audience, which just happens to be what you offer! You are not asking anyone to be a guest. You are offering an opportunity for them to connect with your audience in way which should raise up all of you. If it doesn’t, don’t do the show!
With a little effort, you can find people in the subject areas and interests that fit your show. Do some research online. Don’t be afraid to call and ask or email and ask someone to be on your show. Have a clearly defined reason to bring them on, one that benefits them as well as your audience.
Make it easy for your guest by explaining the technical aspects of how the show will work. Most guest fears revolve around technical issues and preparation concerns. If you present an image of confidence and professionalism and follow-through by delivering quality shows, you can get agreement from caliber guests in any field, whether you know them or not.
Just One Thing…
Let me just say one thing, Software development sucks. It’s really too bad and sort of ironic, because here we are as programmers working in the most advanced technology available on the planet, performing some of the most important work that supports every aspect of our economy and our lives – but we are straddled with tools that barely work, software that’s full of promises (and short on deliveries), missing and wrong documentation, and vendors who continue to write new versions of broken stuff rather than fixing the software we already paid for.
As an IBM mainframe software veteran, a professional developer for the last 24 years, and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, I often console myself with the knowledge that ours is a young industry. “Web software has only been around since the 1990’s,” I tell people when trying to explain why the software they paid for simply doesn’t work. “Television is more than 50 years old and telephones are more than 100.” But you know what, it’s pretty much bullshit.
Where We Started
When I was trained by IBM as a mainframe developer, the company sang a big song about something they called RAS, Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. There was an emphasis first on making sure the software and hardware worked correctly, then on finding and fixing problems where they occurred. This was a corporate culture baked-in from the highest levels and directly inherited from T.J. Watson, the company’s founder.
Of course, there was a lot of money in mainframes at that time and IBM could afford luxuriant salaries and highly trained professionals who worked on fixing the already-sold software as a separate task from writing the new (and undoubtedly somewhat broken) stuff. The last IBM product I worked on, VS COBOL II, had license fees as high as $3.2M per month. That’s some serious gravy and IBM could afford to share the love on people and facilities which actually provided software service. (Who’s even heard of that anymore?)
Folks who grew up in the PC era will find this amazing, but IBM tracked every piece of mainframe software that its clients installed, including which pieces were compatible with others and which were later found to have problems. A massive database called RETAIN was established to track, and most importantly address every single reported issue in every product without exception. Problems that were compounded (or corrected) by applying other fixes, or by interaction with other IBM (and even other vendor’s products) were also tracked and corrected.
Fixes Got Fixed
Most amazingly, when IBM came up with a code fix (that was my job for the VS COBOL II modules over which I had responsibility), the company prepared and shipped individual tapes to every single customer who was running the broken code, whether or not they had the bug. And these were no ordinary tapes. Another piece of IBM software called SMP/E made sure that any tapes were installed in the correct order and that all prerequisites and post-installation requirements were met. The tapes did this on a customized basis for every single IBM customer individually. And if the setup was not right for the fix, it simply didn’t go on. IBM did not send its customers tapes which would take down their running systems. That’s RAS.
It was definitely the heyday of software development and I am eternally grateful that I was steeped in that era. Thomas Watson’s principles evolved into the core values of my own company, and that’s something I’m very proud of because it’s truly at the foundation of our success (and survival in hard times). But I fear Trellis might be one of the few software companies left that’s really singing this song. Even IBM started shipping knowingly broken code toward the end of my tenure there because of pressure from above to get out a new release worth hundreds of millions in extra licensing fees.
So we could pretend that it just isn’t possible for software to be better, but that’s a crock. I was there and I know better. We could also argue that Microsoft couldn’t be expected to write such great software and offer phenomenal support for something that cost you 200 bucks. I’ve made the case to friends many times. But today I tell you it’s a hollow cry. And besides, the tool I’m complaining about costs $10,000. They could afford to fix it.
Development Tools Are Crap
I sit here day-after-day, attempting to write a product which represents an important advance in computational science and user interface technology. I am using Microsoft’s most advanced, enterprise class development environment. I am targeting their latest platform and using the interface methods that they recommend for the next “digital decade,” whatever that means. These are the best tools that the world’s most successful software company can muster. With $30B in the checking account, this is as good as it gets. And you know what? It sux. It doesn’t even remotely work. Not even close.
Now developers reading this will say, “of course there are problems, it’s a beta.” Spare me. Gmail is a beta, too. How often is it broken? And we aren’t talking about occasional or insignificant problems here. We’re talking about total showstoppers, what IBM would call a Severity 1 error. That means the system is down hard and nobody is getting any work done.
If a Sev 1 error isn’t fixed immediately, people get sent home from work. Those are the kind of problems that Microsoft routinely creates (and gleefully ships) in their development tools and their consumer-facing applications. Even though developers run bleeding edge software and expect to have more problems than regular folks, anyone who uses Microsoft software at any level will know that shocking amounts of brokenness are the order of the day. They’re not surprising anymore.
Just Virtualize Me
A few years ago, desktop processors got fast enough to perform a trick known as virtualization. Their mainframe ancestors have been doing this since the 1960’s. IBM’s Virtual Machine (VM) operating system set the standard by creating a fully-insulated machine where you could install stuff, create drives and printers, and generally use and abuse the thing without any concern that you might be hurting the real mainframe. In my office, the real machine cost around $30 million and IBM wasn’t about to let some punk programmers run code against it that might bring it to a screeching halt, especially since they’d just taught us to how to write that kind of code in their own bootcamps.
The VM virtual machine environment is so complete that the user need not even know where his physical machine is located or what kinds of resources it has. If he needs a disk, he simply tells the system to add one of whatever size he wants. Where this disc resides, how data gets on-and-off it – those are not his concerns. In the blink of an eye, the disk is ready. Whole machines with software installed can be started, stopped, saved on tape, shipped to other real locations, and run on different real machines unchanged. They can be endlessly and instantly duplicated and spawned into various flavors and incarnations. This is not a new technology but one that was already robustly implemented on a vast commercial scale when I was there in the 1980’s.
It’s My Party & You’ll Cry If I Want You To
Microsoft was late to the virtualization party (their worst problem is Not Invented Here syndrome) and they had to buy another company in order to rush a VM product to market – rush being the operative word. Nonetheless, a techie might have surmised by now that MS could make up a virtual machine at their office with everything that you need to write their software and simply let another person on another machine click to start running the already-working VM. In other words, it would reduce the cost of installation and setup to zero, allowing programmers to get back to doing what we are highly paid to do. (It might surprise you to learn that programmers earn, on average, the second highest salaries in America, after lawyers and before doctors.)
I point out the real cost of development not to wag my tail, but to bring home the fact that we are all paying a big financial price for shitty, unsupported software. There is enormous human waste in having to deal with perpetually broken programs, only to have to frustratingly fight their dragons again and again with keycode installs, upgrades, and fixes that just break new things.
Somebody’s Gonna Fix This
As much money as MS pays out in programmer salaries, they pocket a hell of a lot more than that. Would it surprise you to learn that Microsoft does not appear to have a single employee whose job it is to look around the net for errors that people are reporting and get them fixed? I’ve spent half my life developing for MS (I was at Borland first, an early software company that thought of MS as a no-big-deal competitor back in the day. Looks like they were wrong.), and I can’t find any evidence of any bug patrol at MS. In fact, the forums are swarming with problem reports and complaints about the fact the no one from MS reads or responds to any of these problem reports and complaints! Aaaaaaaaaargh!
I think Microsoft has spent far too much time trying to figure out how to dominate the software industry and far too little time trying to figure out how to improve it. The potentials of processors and programs today are exponentially greater than what we had running at IBM twenty years ago, yet MS can’t even seem to get their quality up that old skool level. It isn’t rocket science. It’s a gross disdain for the customer and an intentional disregard for his welfare, amidst a heavy fleecing of annual “upgrades” which only offer more of the same.
It’s time to stop the all-you-can-eat buffet of bad software from Microsoft, because bad ideas begin and end at the top. If MS creates a culture of quality, they might survive the forthcoming nuclear attack from Google. If they don’t, I’ll be the first one to move my company and our resources to another platform. It pains me to say this because, even with all my criticisms, Microsoft still makes the best PC development environment on the planet. I wouldn’t use it for 10 minutes longer if they didn’t. But I’m ready to get behind the team that can either fix Microsoft – or push it aside. Whichever happens first…
– D
A word cloud made from my latest post. Make your own from anything you like using Wordle.
Tonight I was invited to record a radio show for SRN at a community meeting here in Key West. (You can listen to the entire meeting online.) The event was billed as a chance for citizens to record their messages to Congress about green energy. Sounds great, right?
When I got there, the meeting turned out to be organized by something called Repower America. They had slick brochures (printed on non-recycled paper) with stock photos and platitudes like “We need green energy and American jobs.” I was worried right off the bat.
In the interest of getting a good show, I asked the organizer, whom we’ll call Miss V, if folks were going to come up to the podium to present their statements or how would the meeting work? No, she said, there would only be a flip-chart presentation and then everyone would be expected to call a phone number and record a “message to Congress” in favor of a very specific bill, HR 2454, which is also known as the Clean Energy & Security Act (why security?). I was even more worried. How did a community meeting turn into a forum to promote a specific piece of legislation? And who was behind this bill and who stood to profit from it?
Miss V didn’t have the correct number for the bill nor any copies or summaries. The Repower America website was also strangely silent on the subject. What’s in this bill? The site was pretty insistent that I do something to help this bill go through, but they didn’t want me find out what they were pushing. Why all the emphasis on getting everyone to lobby, not on getting anyone to understand? Now I was really worried. And I’m super serial about this.
Using my trusty iPhone, I looked up the official summary of HR 2454 while Miss V threatened that the sea would rise 42 inches into my Key West living room if I didn’t vote for this bill. She said without this bill, “we will have nothing to take to Kyoto.” Knowing that we are the largest per-capita carbon emitting country in the world and the only one that refuses to agree to the Kyoto Protocol, I figure we are now completely in Fantasyland and I really want to read this bill for myself.
It’s not pretty. First off, the bill doesn’t limit carbon output. Instead, it say electric companies must produce 6% of their power using renewable methods beginning in 2012 and rising to a maximum of 20% renewable electricity by 2020. Pardon me for saying so, but that doesn’t sound very green. If we are still going to be making 80% of our electricity from oil, gas, and coal in 2020, which is what the authors of this bill seem to be hoping, then this is not the answer.
But it’s a good start, right? We should support anything that helps, shouldn’t we? Perhaps. The next section of the bill talks about how energy companies can get around all of this. They just build nuclear plants! This is where I stop to remind you that nuclear waste is the most toxic substance ever created and no safe handling or storage procedures have ever been devised.That’s when things go perfectly. When they don’t, nuclear power plants scorch the earth, leaving it uninhabitable for hundreds of miles around and hundreds of generations into the future. Major minus green points there.
The next issue HR 2454 focuses on is carbon sequestration. For those you not up on contemporary fiction, this is the idea that we should go right ahead burning all the oil and coal we want and we’ll just stick it somewhere. We’ll bottle-up all that nasty carbon dioxide gas so we just forget we ever made it. We’ll put it under the bed! No, under a rock! Under the ocean! There isn’t actually any such thing as carbon sequestration, so we might as well put it on the moon. Studies suggest the entire idea is an impossible joke, foisted on us by the coal industry in order to allow them to continue in their present line of business. Burning carbon fuels isn’t green energy, folks! But there’s plenny money in this bill to hand over to some crony company so they can say they are “studying” it or they are “trying.”
The last dirty secret of the Clean Energy & Security (why security?) Bill is that it creates a carbon economy through the use of “allowances.” These are basically a way of saying “You, kind sir, don’t have to be green.” Miss V’s explanation was that this is a helpful way for greener companies to make money by selling their credits. She neglected to explain that the other side of the equation is the big, fat polluter who gets to keep ruining the planet for the rest of us because he had enough money to buy someone else’s credits. Get it?
Before I started making a ruckus at this meeting (you knew this part was coming), another member of the 60-person audience asked if there is money in the bill for things like retrofitting your house with solar, since its such an obvious green move for us in the Keys. Miss V’s answer was that there was money for research. Well, at least she’s honest.
To you sir, in the audience, that means, “No.” She did add that if we felt the bill needed more money for solar (before we got it passed this very night) we could mention it in our “voicemail message to Congress” and the organization would have people listen to all of these phone messages and edit them (so that people like me don’t make the cut), then mail them to congresspeople on a CD. Um, one pill makes you larger and the other one makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all.
So let’s back up a step. What’s the real story here? First off, peak oil is a term you need to learn tonight. It’s much more important than anything brought up in the meeting… or anything else I’m going to write about in this silly blog. So just lookup peak oil and tell your friends to do the same. My work here is done.
Still with me? Ok, so you know we can’t stay on this road. You already understand that we have the ability to make green energy right now but the dirty kind is too lucrative so our government mostly helps that along and prevents the other. I pray that I’m preaching to the choir.
There are lots of ways to go green, but supporting another pork-filled bill isn’t one of them. In other words, taking your tax dollars and giving them to Exxon and the coal companies, as this bill does with its numerous tax credits and allowances, is an example of what Voltaire meant when he said, “The purpose of government is to transfer wealth from one class to the other.” You, being the taxed, are the from in the aforementioned sentence. Large corporations that don’t want to stop polluting (the ones behind the bill) are the other class, the one that is having your wealth transferred to them.
Suffice it to say that my contributions were not welcomed by the lobbying organization behind this meeting. Miss V seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would counter her arguments. I’m sure she’s a lovely person and we have a lifelong friend in common. I know her efforts are well intentioned, but I must say that to come to our island and offer a community meeting about green power (something we desperately want here), only to sell us a bill on Capitol Hill constitutes something of a hornswoggle. For there cannot be “only one answer” to anything and to tell people that we must pick up our phones and dial right now or the oceans will sweep us away is irresponsible and insulting to the democratic process. In fact, it’s how demagogues get started. Let’s all support the new laws made by the great leader! (This bill is 1,500 pages.)
If any of us wants to be successful in greening the planet, we must start at home and help others to do the same. When you buy green products (and fewer of them), recycle, drive a Prius (or better yet, an all-electric Leaf), reduce your air travel, reduce your use of chemicals, start eating green (and healthy), etc. and start talking to your friends about what you’re doing, you are making a difference.
Only through real education and individual action is anything accomplished, not through bills, tax credits, or economic games. Haven’t we learned from the war industry scandals and massive banking fraud that these laws aren’t protecting us? No, we haven’t learned that. And that’s the education part this meeting missed out on.
Some of my friends were also not happy that I rather forcibly added my comments to a meeting that was supposed to follow Roberts Rules of Order, or something like that. Well, dear friends, the world needs shit-disturbers and I’m just about old enough for the job. Seriously, if someone tried to shovel this kind of bill in front of your community and then told them to just get on their phones and dial like sheep, I hope you’d interrupt the insanity and say something too. I hope you’d stand up and talk about the real issues. Because that’s democracy, the old fashioned kind.
Ustream and YouTube are examples of the make-your-own-media era, in which the neighbor kids might be producing a national TV show, even if you don’t live in Hollywood. Even the Old Media guys are on Ustream. Why? This is where TV is headed because it offers viewers both immediacy and relevance. No one watching YouTube is sitting there saying, “Oh, I think I’ll go watch another show that’s highly produced and has better lighting.” South Park is one of the highest grossing TV productions ever and it was based on a paper cutout aesthetic. SP was only picked up by Comedy Central after the homemade pilot went viral on the internet. Today, the shows made by you and your friends can be offered on the same platform that CBS and NBC are using. And you have access to the same audience.
A few nights ago, I watched Ashton Kucher walk around at his film premiere with a netbook and its built-in webcam, transmitting live video on Ustream. This is very much one aspect of the future of television. Production values? A tiny window, a crappy webcam lens handheld under horrible street lighting, and an unedited view from Ashton’s waist. Not exactly riveting, but people watch because they are interested in him or his film. In my case, I was interested in the technology. I found out about the stream on Twitter. You may not care about Ashton. Neither do I, although I heard he’s naked in the new movie. Now that’s worth watching.
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