Schlock Mercenary

My friend Rodney is a business blogger who writes some pretty insightful pieces that draw parallels between business practices and everyday experiences. He interviewed me for his site, and I got the opportunity to answer some questions that nobody has thought to ask before:"Hiding From the Mariachi: An Interview with Howard Tayler"Enjoy!

I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Thursday night, and what do you mean you don't believe me? I totally okay no I didn't see it, but it would have been cool if I had, right?I'll be seeing it sometime next week, and honestly, nothing I say here is going to change anybody's decision about whether to see the film. This post is here to let you know that I'm going to hold off on an actual review for a while, because enough is being said by enough people in enough places that I really don't want to add to the likelihood that the film will get spoiled in some way for my readers.

Remember those Facebook hoax-posts in which people would decry Facebook's plan to charge its users a membership fee? There'd be some misdirected outrage, and then someone would clear things up by saying "no, Facebook is not planning to do that." I wish they HAD been planning to do that. Facebook's actual plans were far more problematic. At a high level, the plan was to monetize their user base as a product, rather than as customers. This meant selling the product to OTHER customers—advertisers and market research firms, for starters. I don't mind being advertised to, but in order for the monetization to work, Facebook had to step into our feeds and adjust the content we were seeing. Facebook became less useful to us, and this loss of utility was hidden much of the time. When we actually noticed it, it was status quo. Twitter is doing similar things to monetize their user base. The insertion of Promoted Tweets is the most immediately intrusive, but recently they've begun mucking with our timelines in order to adjust the content we see. Look, I get it. These companies are providing an exceptionally valuable communication service to hundreds of millions of users. They deserve to be paid for that. The question is, what's the best way to pay them? What will make them the most money, while keeping their users not just happy, but loyal? Twitter's 2014 revenue was $1.4B. They have over 900 million users, but most of those users do not tweet things. If we assume, conservatively, that there are only 100 million human beings actively using Twitter's service, they were worth $14 each during 2014. Much of that money was paid in by advertisers. $14 isn't much. It's less than $1.20 per month. I would cheerfully round up, and pay $20 for an annual Twitter membership without batting an eyelash. For that money I would obviously expect to NOT be monetized further. Don't market to me, don't promote Tweets, don't mess with my feeds. Maybe give me instead some cool tools that let me better manage this awesome communications tool. If those 100 million users were willing to pay $20/year for "Twitter Prime," Twitter's revenues would be $2B. It's not beyond the pale to further assume that their profit margins would be better, since all the overhead that goes into making a useful advertising engine could be dust-binned. Additionally, Twitter would become far more valuable to its users (who are now CUSTOMERS,) and they'd attract more paying users pretty quickly. In the grand scope of Big Business and All Things Internet, two billion dollars is chump change. That money would not turn Twitter into a financial powerhouse. Of course, neither will their current plans, so "displace Google" is a business goal that should be swept off the table. Ultimately, the social media business model needs to change. Consumers of social media should be able to become customers, not by purchasing "eyeballs," "likes," or "followers," but by purchasing better access to the actual social media services; services that would better serve those who use them. I cannot conceive this discussion NOT having taken place somewhere in Twitter's offices. What I don't understand is the business requirements that shut that discussion down, preventing them from selling me a decent service. (originally posted at howardtayler.com)

One of the things Alan, Sandra, and I discussed building as part of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter was a Game Chief screen that would take drop-in sheets of paper, and which would be styled to look like a handbrain or display unit from the comic strip. We decided against doing this as part of the Kickstarter because we didn't have enough information, and committing to something like this would put the project at risk. When the project overfunded to $300k, we committed to an R&D budget for unspecified stuff. This screen was some of that stuff. We contracted with a designer to build a proper prototype for possible mass-production.The prototype arrived, and I love it.It's a high-res 3D print, so the plastic is translucent instead of opaque. It's designed to take half-sheets of US Letter sized paper, or full sheets of A5 paper. A full sheet of US Letter, printed with some game map stuff, is shown in the first image. After folding that sheet in half, it drops into the screen quite cleanly. The stand upon which the screen sits is angled so that the drop-in is visible whether you're standing or sitting, but it's not angled so steeply that players will be able to see what's printed on it, nor will they be able to see dice you roll against it. The third image provides a better look at the angle. For scale you can see a challenge coin, a couple of poker chips, some playing cards, and a pair of AMD CPU fans, stuck back-to-back because they look cooler that way (they were not cool enough when mounted in the PCs, and have been replaced with off-the-shelf liquid cooling rigs, making our game room much, much quieter, but I digress...) The half-sheet size makes this much easier to see over than conventional game screens. We don't want Game Chiefs unable to make eye contact with their players. NOTE: There is a Game Chief screen shipping with the game. That screen will be made of card stock, and will be printed on one side with ship art, and on the other with useful tables and rules reminders. It, too, will have a low-profile format. Game Chiefs do not get to hide behind fortresses of stats and artwork. Here it is from the back. The fiddly-bit sticking out of the corner is a yellow map pin from the local office supply place. Note that the final product will not be translucent enough for anything to be visible through the back. Obviously it needs to store flat, so the stand detaches quite nicely. As an added bonus, this means you can put a note, or other mission-specific information into it, and pass it to the players, just like the characters in the comic do with their their handbrains. Sliding things into and out of it is quite easy. If your game is anything like the ones I've played, this is a critical feature. These aren't for sale yet, and no, we're not going to Kickstart them. We still have to grind a bit on the prototype to make sure everything is just right. The eventual plan is to mass-produce these and sell them in sets of three.

I love dinosaurs as much as the next person, but I was concerned about the concept for this film. Admittedly, this is mostly because to my mind any alternate history that's missing the Chixulub impactor will also be missing any mammals larger than a rat, and certainly won't feature sapient hominids, but the concern is there nonetheless, even if it's just me.The movie did just fine for me in spite of this. It wasn't amazing, or even particularly surprising, and my son said that he felt like he'd seen this movie before, except in live action (a good indication that the formula is showing,) but I had a good time.Plot formula aside, the film was beautiful. The ultra-defined realism of the environment balanced the caricatured forms of the sophonts, and those caricatures were pretty brilliant. Especially the T-Rex, voiced by Sam Elliot. We've all seen a T-Rex run by now, but Pixar did it differently, and with delightful effect.The Good Dinosaur enters my 2015 list at #17, below the Threshold of Awesome, but still worth catching in 3D at the theaters. I wish I could get some screen-grabs of the environments to use as desktop wallpapers... so beautiful.

Monday Update: Well, that's it for Monkey Coins for 2015. We have sold out. We're running a brief sale on the very popular "Not my circus, not my monkeys" coins, which we usually just call "monkey coins."

I am a very thankful person.That's not the same thing as saying I'm fortunate, or blessed, or glad some of these crazy dreams of mine have panned out. I'm all of those things, too, but being those things isn't the same as being thankful.Thankful suggests that I'm a person who is ready to acknowledge the work of others in making my own life better. Thankful means drilling down on good fortune, blessings, and gladness, and looking for the specific places where my indebtedness can be enumerated.As a religious person, I'm always thanking God for things. But as a thankful person, I am mindful of the fact that God's hand in my life has been manifest through the hands of countless flesh-and-blood, Earth-walking folks; people who deserve better than to have their good works chalked up to a God in whom they may or may not believe.One of Sandra's "minions," a man who now carries the Hypernode Media Corps of Volunteers challenge coin ("running with scissors for no money since 2006,") built a computer for me earlier this year. When it began blue-screening, he came to my home and troubleshot the problem using tools and methods I understood, but never would have figured out on my own.The cascading levels of good fortune, gladness, and gratitude in this particular circumstance run for quite a while. I'm thankful that Chad helped me. Chad and I were both thankful that the problem was a single, easily-to-replace component, rather than the Mother of Boards. That was literally a "thank God" moment, but thousands of engineers, technicians, scientists, rare-earth-metal miners, and others stand in that chain and get credit for having built a Mother of Boards that did not fail.I'm thankful that thousands of Schlock Mercenary readers have spent money on books, challenge coins, and impending role-playing-games, allowing me to afford tools like the one Chad built, and repaired. I'm thankful that their support has been generous enough that when Chad said he did not want to be paid for his time, I was able to insist, telling him that at this moment, that small sum would probably work harder for him than it would for me.This in turn means that I'm thankful that my generous readers are gainfully employed, and have discretionary income. Without the people who pay them for the work they do, my own work couldn't continue.So... an 8gb PNY DDR3 memory stick fails, and now I'm feeling indebted to literally millions of people? A few phrases leap to mind as possible punch-lines:

The Peanuts Movie is weird, and I'm conflicted about it. I'll lead with this: it enters my list at #16, just a hair shy of the Threshold of Awesome. I doubt very many of you will feel the same way I do. I was ready to walk out of the film 20 minutes in. We were getting perfectly executed Peanuts jokes in 3D, and I found that so incredibly boring it was almost physically painful. But I stuck around, and at the 40-ish minute mark something different happened, and I was interested again. By the end of the film I was quite happy with it. I've never had that happen before. I've never gone from "I may walk out" to "I am SO GLAD I STAYED." Let's get technical for a bit. I love Charles Schultz's work ethic, and his economy of line. I can stare at his line work for hours studying the way a nonsense squiggle becomes, in context, the delivery mechanism for a content-rich payload. I was very concerned that this film would lose that. I was happy to be wrong. The animators used the computer graphics to provide the context (heads, shoulders, doghouses, kites) and then used what I swear are digitized versions of actual Schultz-squiggles as mouths, eyebrows, and worry-lines. It was a brilliant melding of line-art and computer animation. I was mesmerized. Most people won't be. Lines aren't really all that interesting unless they're at the beating heart of your career. Charlie Brown's try-fail cycle is always kind of depressing. His best efforts are either wrong for the problem, or will be rendered irrelevant by something outside his control. The best kite-flyer in the world cannot compete with a kite-eating tree. Hours of practice kicking footballs mean nothing if the person holding the ball plans to betray you. A story in which the protagonist continues to try in spite of this has power, and is worth telling. But Charlie Brown is always the punchline. Even his successes are ironic, and outside his control. I can only take so much of this. It's depressing. Well, The Peanuts Movie gives us an Act II Twist in which Charlie Brown gets the success he always wanted. This was surprising, and fresh, and even though I knew it couldn't last, I was interested to see how a triumphant ending could be delivered. Most folks don't watch movies this way, deconstructing them on the fly. Again, this was something I really enjoyed doing, but that experience might not be there for you. Especially not now that I've told you it's there. Umm... spoiler alert? Sorry. The Peanuts Movie is a film for children under the age of ten, and it seeks to keep adults happy with nostalgia. Based on the reactions of the young children in the audience, it worked just fine. I heard a tiny voice exclaim in dismay "OH NO CHARLIE BROWN," and you know what? That was kind of awesome. (cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

I'm trying to put my finger on why Spectre didn't work for me. The salient point is that I spent much of the film being bored, so obviously there was a problem.In Casino Royale we were shown a young James Bond who was unmade and remade by betrayal. In Quantum of Solace we were shown that the brilliance of Casino Royale may have been accidental. In Skyfall, we were given a deconstruction and un-making of Bond as a nice capstone for a trilogy of Daniel Craig installments in the series. It was the perfect book-end opposite Casino Royale. The two films deserved better stuff between them.And now Spectre comes along and undercuts Skyfall. It is set shortly thereafter, and it tells us that these other Bond adventures were all connected to a single underlying conspiracy, a massive confederacy of hitherto undetected mega-miscreants whose nefarious plans and dastardly schemes are finally coming to fruition.That's a hard sell, and they tried to close the deal by giving us something just shy of a clip show.It didn't work for me.Most Bond films are a series of Green-Eggs-And-Ham set-pieces. "Would you, could you, on a boat? Would you, could you, in the throat? Would you could you on a train? Would you hey we're now in Spain." And so on. The best Bond films mask this by tying everything together with a multi-layered mystery, with reveal after reveal drawing us into the new locations. The worst ones find us coming to our senses in the middle of an action scene and asking ourselves why we're in Austria.On to the good stuff: