Sharekoube Candies Secret Stash

I am not a New Englander in the typical sense, so it is fun and interesting to visit something customary to that when I attended Steve’s wedding.

It’s a classy affair. I think Bonnie and Scott’s pressure just went up! Anyway, congrats to the newlyweds.

Nice moves!

And damn it Charley why am I bagging groceries on my way home now… And what was it about my tie? The Boss2 semi-meetup was nice. It definitely has to happen more often. Scott and I make the effort, and at this point traveling 4 hours to and fro on a weekend is not a big deal for me (mostly in terms of cost). But LA is just so far away.

I wasn’t in Japan when the magnitude 9 quake struck its northeastern provinces. I was planning to, however, and if not for the disaster I might have been in Japan some point this year.

The consequences of that is most likely a delay on the house hunting, which not only means there’s a greater chance that I would have gotten an even lower interest rate (since I locked in, the interest rate has dropped by another 0.20-0.25% which is just :V) and more likely, not have purchased a house yet. I mean I was planning to spend some real money this trip. It would have put off the house thing if I went. And the place I bought would likely have slipped through simply because it’s a hot buy and would have gone off the market in a week.

This means I am kind of giving up on Japan this year. I also really need a vacation. These weekend-like trips just won’t do.

From a purely selfish perspective, it was a good idea to not go to Japan this summer, simply because it would have been hot, a lot of the electricity conservation effort meant still escalators and no AC. And Japan gets kind of hot and humid during summer. There’s a trip this winter that some people are going to, and it’s not yet too late to hop on that wagon. But in all likelihood I will be staying in and doing home improvement. I’d rather get a TV than an plane ticket at this point. And a better sound system than this Bose nonsense that I am left with.

So today looking at some news headline, the Syndicate reboot is news. A FPS you say? Yeah.

I find it entirely too tiresome to whine about it. I spent all my bile on the Fallout sequel (and while the game is relatively compelling, it just isn’t as fun–it was simply a different game). So instead I will whine about whining about it with a bit of applied knowledge from this weird book I read a few years ago.

Take one of the few TV channels I put on these days: The Food Network. Coming to America as an Asian immigrant, I find the entire dearth of food culture in American popular culture really pathetic and pitiful. Which is not a huge surprise considering what Americans eat, I suppose, but over the past 10-15 years it is very heartening and delightful to see the development of food culture in both urban and suburban settings, especially in the midwest and the south.

I suspect things like the Food Network helped in the slow growth of concepts of food culture in America, along side with “organic” or “green” or “free range” or “localvores” and what have you. I largely despise foodies, but I admit that it is those economic trends and fads that enabled more purveyer of, say, free range pultry, so that you can find such a food with some ease. Free ranged chicken makes the most delicious broth that middle-class Americans are deprived of but are plenty to lower-middle class Asians. And you can do a lot with chicken broth. Among other free range benefits.

Using fresh, quality ingredients is the very first step for a healthy and delicious meal.

Anyways, the Food Network was founded in 1993, and you can wiki its history. I mention this mainly to just correct myself: there were always and there will still be tons of people who love to cook, to eat, to study culinary cultures and sciences. That’s why we have culinary institutes that give out BA’s, that’s why moms cook delicious foods, and grown men crave that stuff. Food is necessary for life, after all. It is not poems for the soul but chicken soup. America is not really that different than any other country or culture in that regard.

So in this weird book I read, the idea is while culinary programming on TV is great stuff, it will not draw all your viewers. Say everyone loves to watch (I don’t know), the Simpsons. The logical thing for a TV content provider to compete with the Simpsons is to produce a similar program that appeals in the same way. Let’s say 150 million people watch TV on Sunday nights in America and there is only one TV station. If you have two similar programs for that 150 million people, odds are something like 75-75 will be split between the two shows. Let’s say only 10 million people will watch Iron Chef America instead of Simpsons at any given time. This means it makes a lot more commercial sense for a competing TV network to air Simpson-clone-family-comedy-#3 if it is the third channel competing for that 150m viewership, because now it would be split 50-50-50. And 50 is bigger than 10.

The logic goes, when cable and satellite TV became in rogue in the late 80s and early 90s, people start to get hundreds of TV channels. This means hundreds of TV programming channels are competing for that 150 million viewers. Which means like, 150 / 100 = 1.5, which is a number less than 10. Which means TV channel like the Food Network can now exist and prosper.

There are other issues to the hypothetical logic I’m running with there, but the mechanism between the increased diversity of television programming and the increase of channels is precisely this. Once the market for murder mystery TV dramas (or reality TV shows or day soaps or news programming or whatever) is saturated, you just have to look elsewhere.

How do this have to do with the Syndicate reboot?

I think it’s the same thing. FPS as a sales genre is rich. It moves millions. People crave that immersive  narrative doohicky that you can find in a latest Call-of-Duty game. That’s why we care about games like, say, Heavy Rain or some such. But what about other video game genres?

Turn-by-turn strategy game is now the food network kind of thing in the larger scope. It also doesn’t help that due to the evolution of video game tech, less-demanding categories of games are very much saturated today.

So in order to really stop people from reviving our favorite franchises into FPS and then throw it into the ground like used and overdosed prostituted, they just need to make more FPS games, sell more FPS games, and do it all within a shorter period of time.

There needs to be more commercial competition in the genre. The way to victory is through compete, utter defeat.

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The other take is simply that the game that was Syndicate (or Fallout or X-COM) were different. They were made for a different business model. It may be better stated that this kind of grandstanding game production that is characterized by the CoD games today is more like a movie adaptation. Viewed through that lens, it feels a little better justified comparing the differences between the old and the new. Hey guys, it’s a cross-media promotion-production!

Because the most important matrix to measure its success is on how it is faithful to the original. I think Fallout 3 scored maybe a 6 out of 10 on those grounds, but from what I can tell of X-COM or Syndicate, those are not likely going to be the case.

With buying a house, the word is right that it means significant investment beyond the real estate (and associated closing procs). And let’s ignore the obvious targets: dryer, washer, dish washer, fridge, range, hood, or vinny’s fave: toilets. Bidets are kind of neat!

Obviously I’m talking home entertainment. So I figured a list is nice.

The house comes with 2 TVs. One is like, 32″ and the other looks like 42″. They don’t look too old, but they probably had a few years behind them. I think one of them is plasma. Anyways, neither looks like centerpiece material so let’s ignore that the options are there to do nothing.

The house has speakers wired throughout, including the deck. So it’s already wired up for some kind of central media system. It’s something to being doing research on, since I’m pretty nub in that area.

For TV, 47-55″ candidates are basically what’s going on. I’ll wait for this holiday season to fill that order.

And strangely I’m not very eager to shop for a receiver. I’ll probably just camel a couple candidates. Mainly because I guess I should be shopping for a 5.1 or 7.1 set, so I have a lot of options (some of those are great bargains).

I do need to pick up some kind of Verizon LTE device for the new commute. AT&T just doesn’t cut it on the NE corridor like this. Either a hot spot, a tablet, or wait until I transfer my account out from AT&T. Verizon has crap for data plans because of the new caps, so that’s $50/mo for the tablet and hot spot routes. If I just stick to a phone, I probably stand to save some money. And I could even look into Sprint?

Somehow I have this huge urge of wanting to buy a Sony NEX-C3 or NEX-5N. They’re probably the best on the market for “entry level” interchangeable lens camera kits. “Entry level” in quotes because it’s more like a hybrid between a point and shoot and a mid-range kit. That translate to potentially better PQ than a low-end DSLR like the Nikon and Canon kits many of my friends have. At least for now. I really like the form factor–I’d probably buy it with the kit prime lens or buy it with the zoom lens, and get a prime lens on the side.

Mo money mo problems!

Take a look. Something written like this deserves the link and hits. Not that my linking helps its goog score at all.

Here’s the thing.

The new Razor laptop is pretty wonderful hardware. It’s really expensive, but it delivers the goods (except the lack of SSD). Price-value valuation is not part of this post, but I just want to highlight things:

1. The article talks about Apple. Articles about PC gaming and Apple in the same sentence is rarely worth reading because it’s a non-starter. So it talks about general computing. This is the SEO/eyeball grabbing part.

2. Mentioning Apple in this context is a little contentious, only because everybody who does PC gaming knows Macs are not first-choices in PC gaming. This is the troll part. Because the platform is non-starter for not only games, but hardware manufacturers too. I mean, does Apple even sell any hardware with user-upgradable video cards? Do people buy them? When’s the last time this guy looked at the benchmark on a Macbook Pro?

3. And it riffs off a new announcement and highlights that are a bit of an outlier. Curiosity makes news.

I’ve been shopping for a gaming laptop that is more suited for mobile lifestyle for a long time now. About a year, in fact. And there is no silver bullet. All I have are half-baked solutions, with the new Sony Z doing its best impression of a Tony Romo fumble holding the potentially winning field goal kick in 2007. Any Cowboys fans remember that? Where did it fail? The video card is now a dock. What the hell?

The Razor Blade is a nice try, but it is no cigar. Gaming on a 17″ 1080 screen is great. Making it weight less than 8 pounds is a good start but it is a showstopper. My Lenovo T510 weights less, and it’s already a drag trying to walk 15 minutes (at a brisk Manhattan pace) with it, on top of all my other things. Being only 0.88″ thick is wonderful, as that is the Achilles’s heel for Alienware. I can tell you if the M11x was not over an inch thick and also not ugly as sin I would have had one already. nVidia 555 is great, because it is now into high end proc territory; if you’re going to squeeze in a dedicated board you ought to go all the way as much as you can. The same applies to the i7 (although the gain in gaming between i7 and i5 is not worth the $200 price difference most of the time). And again, no SSD is a major problem only if you consider the price tag. The swichblade thing is neat but not going to make sales; on the other hand the keyboard layout is tops, so is the construction and design in general.

If Sony’s new Z had its Radeon proc inside the laptop, this Razor Blade would have been a non-starter. Instead now it’s going to not make the sales that it would have all because of it.

Back to the Gizmodo article. It makes a good point about platforms and PC gaming, but it also misses the point entirely about hardware. Again, no serious PC gamer uses a Mac for that purpose. Or a laptop for that matter. Does lack of platform (as per Carmack) take away some performance? Yeah, but not exaggerated like this. Windows and DirectX IS the platform. Intel and AMD serve the consumer segment just fine; not everyone wants a Porche for their car, so some of us are quite happy with our $450 APU-based laptops, because it does everything your iPad does and much more.

And the thing is, that is not where PC gamer is at. That’s where the general public is at. The PC is already dead and niche; no laptop form factors will save it. The hardware is not just a CPU/fps kind of game, but a user experience kind of game. By nature what distinguishes tablets from laptops is precisely the user experience. Good luck working at Gizmodo only with tablets. It’s not going to work not because of hardware restraints, but user workflow problems. Just like how people with mouse+keyboard still whip butts versus people using game pads at FPS games. That’s not going to change when the tablet meet in the middle with cheap laptops.