The Fair Game - Part 1 : why ?

Or why a Fair Game doctrine of game making is the sensible thing to embrace now.

With the seemingly irreversible onward march of online distribution, cloud gaming and DLC, and the probable end of brick and mortar retail, along with traditional console gaming business models, the incentives for small studios to throw themselves into soul'n'blood-sucking publishing deals are vanishingly reduced.

Those among the present set of big publishers that are swift enough to make the transition certainly won't die anytime soon, if ever, as they have plenty of wiggle room to cultivate walled gardens that should prove profitable for years to come, yet they are liable to lose huge segments of the market to the self-publishing studios pushing titles on comparatively 'open' platforms (Android, cloudgaming, possibly some desktop OSes), funded through crowdfunding and 'committed investors', and which manage their growth mom'n'pop style (profits reinvestment) as opposed to bubble'n'burst.

Although the shiny exposed bit of the crowdfunding iceberg right now is mostly outlier cases that raise millions in minutes, rather than slow and steady boutique studios doing solid work, and while some bubble economy useful idiots want to believe in neverending riches through yet-another gold rush, I believe the core model is here to persist after the dust has settled, as it is the most fertile environment for game production in the internet age.

In this context, the key factors for this new generation of self-publishing studios (SPS from now on) are to be differentiation and brand recognition, and customer acquisition and loyalty.

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As is obvious from the most casual tour of the — comparatively well-tended and variably walled — gardens of Apple, Google or Amazon app stores, sorting through the offerings isn't exactly straighforward. Even ignoring for a moment the toxic waste of mal/spy/adware ridden ripoffs of other games, repackaged with complimentary keyloggers, sifting through the chaff of cheap ports and gimmicky flash games is a daunting task.

A slightly deeper look at this market shows two things, though : companies that release consistently solid products gain recognition fast, and the need for triage is quickly filled by fan sites and "personal shopper" apps and services that feed from the player community to highlight the good bits.

Inevitably some-to-most of these helper services will go the way of the gaming press and quickly turn into for-hire mouthpieces for big name publishers, but the quickloop feedback provided by other channels like gamer forums and trusted fansites is already easing the metagame of telling which advisors customers should trust.

From the gamer perspective, the online distribution channels are thus fast becoming a much nicer and satisfying shopping space, and the only question is how good the actual videogame offerings might be in the mid-to-long run.

Except for a few occasional exclusives, owing to a walled garden owner also being their backer and publisher, it seems the cat is already out of the bag, and if the Android gaming dynamics are anything to go by, many titles may end up showing on more than one app store (at comparable pricepoints), with those acting essentially as retailer outlets.

Even Apple, although it likely won't open its gates anytime soon, might unwittingly be helping and soon find itself circumvented by cloud gaming service providers, wherever broadband wireless/cellular is becoming ubiquitous.

[ISPs and cellphone operators may actually have a strong card to play here, by bundling cloud gaming services with cellular data plans, cable TV style, but that's a topic in its own name, so I won't elaborate here.]

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If you're a gamedev, this should speak to you in more than one way.

As the pressure from a very real competition which doesn't spend more on advertising than production increases, making money from the umpteenth rehash of a tired franchise will prove increasingly difficult for big publishing houses, as the costs to market and promote big-budget games done the usual way will increase geometrically to achieve no better than linear revenue growth (which is the only metric that matters to a publicly traded publisher). This could mean a serious downtrend in budget sizes by big name studios, or a suicidal arms' race between major publishers if they fail to realize it's not their share, it's the pie that's shrinking. In any case, expect a lot of suddenly 'freed' talent to hit the gamebiz job market soon.

On the plus side, as the crud filter of community fansites and shopper helper services gets better at keeping the good wares flowing, SPSes that manage to build a good reputation* will have an increasingly easier time funding projects, recruiting talent, and making a pretty penny from their games, thanks to much lower overhead in customer acquisition and loyalty cultivation costs, and lesser interference from short-term revenue demands by their shareholders.

In time, as more of the videogaming action moves to on-tap model, existing entities that are well-established both as distributors, service and infrastructure providers, which includes notably Google, Amazon, Akamai and Microsoft (and likely more than a couple cellular network operators) will all find themselves in a very favorable position to claim a large stake of 'real' cloud gaming, by ignoring or circumventing net-neutrality hindrances and saving prime morsels for their own offerings both in bandwidth and computational access.
This once again may put comparatively "indie" shops at a disadvantage, but unless the hardware consumer market for general purpose / gaming devices crashes horribly, leaving nothing behind but dumb terminals streaming pre-rendered HD from the cloud, SPS should still keep enough of an agility and creative edge that they don't have to sell themselves into slavery, for a while.

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If I'm even half right in that bucketload of unsubstantiated prophesies, we're looking at a pretty good ten years for gamedevs interested in making high-quality genre games, and an equally unfriendly period for those who expect business to run as usual and still believe you can make big bucks by wrapping lowest common denominator turds in shiny eye candy.

Not to say braindead big splashy titles will stop hogging the limelight in gaming "press", on TV and walls of your cities, but odds are you'll see fewer of them, further apart, as — unless the aforementioned fratricide arms' race ensues — I expect the megapublishers to begin flirting with cartel-style practices anytime now, to protect their bottom line.

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In part 2, I'll ramble about what makes a Fair Game self-publishing studio, and some more on why that's what you should go for if you want to make interesting games for a living.

*[Good reputation is to be understood as producing good games, but also as being a good company,  because crowdfunders and committed investors are more likely to put a premium on company values, not just value]

The great crowdfunding scam (?)

Psychochild is slightly pissed off (which only means he's not dead, granted), and he's not alone, today.

Go read this and come back after the break, please : I'll wait here.

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Alright, I see where these guys are coming from, and respectfully, I think they're wrong on the parts that really matter, like does Molyneux acting like a bit of a greedy prick change anything for the worse, for you, and who is you ?

If you're a budding or career indie gamemaker, I don't reckon it seriously hurts your odds of getting crowdfunded, even if you happen to hunt on what could seem like Kickstarter "big name" reserved grounds. 

Molyneux' high profile and overpromising will, more likely than not, get a lot of people excited about the very possibility of more good god games, which some came to believe was something of a lost art, and thanks to the unrealistic expectations that come with overhype, this project is likely to disappoint people way before it hits beta and gets ready to under-deliver for realsies.

If you're in the same line of design, this could actually be good news for you, assuming a) your project doesn't suck, and b) you're aware of that dynamic being in play, and factor that in fundraising and project management.

There are good reasons why you have same-kind-wares-themed alleys in most commercial spaces : people who don't find the shoes they're looking for in a given shop are more likely to enter the shoe shop next door because, hey, they came here to buy some effin' shoes.

So think of the greedy big name opportunists on Kickstarter as your personal, pro bono, unwilling hecklers. There.

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Moving on, and killing a strawman at one fell swoop : it won't hurt Kickstarter good name's, and indirectly your odds of crowdfunding there, if/when Molyneux next big thing turns out to be a dud. Kickstarter is big enough by now that it has its own momentum, and too many smart and endearing projects find their way through it for the occasional trainwreck to discourage pledgers. It's a rule that anything visible enough will draw criticism, if only because that's a way to differentiate when tackling an obligatory topic — and Kickstarter deserves criticism a-plenty for some reasons, but that's not one of them.

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On the the really meaty part of the discussion : poor, deserving indies vs greedy fat cat exploiters of gamer naivete… yeah, that is bullshit, too.

The line is not drawn here, because many indie devs' life ambition is to make it big, while it is entirely conceivable for big name devs to make big games, with big teams, from the heart (it's just a freakishly daring endeavour and comes with a whole different problem set than that facing the budding indie dev).

If a line must be drawn to set apart what is ethically OK crowdfunding and what starts to look like a con job, or at least a tiny bit scammy, it should happen on the grounds of business ethics, and overall business model.

If your primary goal is to make games and incidentally a living out of it, because that's what you love and believe you can be good at, and certainly could commit more of your time and talent to it, didn't you have to keep a dayjob besides to pay the bills, then crowdfunding sounds fair : you're basically striving to make the sort of pro grade fan art kindred spirits might deem worth sponsoring and encouraging. This type of practice harks back to the time-honored subscription model, which has played a critical role in the development of many other art forms, and first among those, genre litterature (through magazines), and arguably some early pay-per-month MMORPGs.

If your main goal is to make a lot of dough by shearing a faceless herd of sheeples, the fact you happen to be a dishevelled nerd working from your three-jobs girlfriend's garage, or this week's flavour of rebellious trust fund hipster doesn't make you different from the most predatory corporate drones EA, Zinga or SONY has on staff.

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Banging the Gavel of Obviousness +5, once again : it's all about why you're in the game of making games, or art, or tablecloth, and how you go about it — it has nothing to do with how big or how small a dog you are, and everything to do with your personal politics, ethics, and aesthetic preferences.

Also I'm really not sure I like Kickstarter that much, as it is now, but I'll get back to that sometime.

*

On to some constructive thoughts, because it's sunday… tune in tomorrow to check episode 1 of my new The Fair Game series.

On the day after Obama's reelection,

…I started drafting a post meant to cheer up the non-batshit-insane portion of the losing camp, namely Classic Republicans.

The gist of my argument was : 

• If you hold free market and fiscal frugality as cardinal values, and also agree that not only is a general election a popularity contest-a-looza, but that the nature of political campaigning today has evolved to become so largely fact-agnostic and divorced from reality that it is now a self-contained, self-referential show business devoid of any real ideology and ethical concerns (but what the audience can go for), then you must agree to the following:

Whoever wins an election, by whatever means, however ethically, legally and constitutionally dubious is a priori deserving of having won, since the sole available gauge to judge the worth of a candidate is the proxy of his/her campaigning, and the only true  judgement of which campaign is best is the pass/fail test of winning or losing the election.

That was the free market at work part of my case, meant to do away with any after-the-game objections and debates about whether Obama's victory was legit, whether he should have won, whether results-affecting voter fraud had taken place, and so on. 

Surely, that kind of whining is only for people who concern themselves with "fairness" of elections, be it only when it suits them (wingnuts), or most of the time (bleeding heart liberals), and would be anathema to staunch free-market believers, for which democracy is truly the marketplace of ideas, and who trust its natural self-correcting abilities to (either/both) digest or negate electoral fraud, propaganda and manipulations so that all is right in the end, at least at the meta-level where it counts.

Thus, the best man-campaign won, and this should be the end of it as far as Classic Republicans are concerned : as soon as they get over their (entirely natural) disappointment of finding themselves on the losing team after the adrenaline has worn of, all will be peachy.

• Fiscal frugality then, was the clincher of my semisardonic attempt at comfort : by all verifiable accounts, Obama's campaign and its supporters made more conservative use of their war chest and won the election. 

Not only did the Obama camp arguably spend less (if you put together superpacs, greyish and official campaign funds) in grand total, but they more often than not got a better bang for their buck on individual expenditures, such as the price they paid for airtime, and generally how much they spent by vote they moved around.
In stark contrast, albeit consistent with the republican track record of republican presidential mandates, the Romney campaign was plagued with poor spending decisions, multi-layered leeching of resources by consultants and contractors, showing that CEO in the banking sector may sometimes not be a reliable indicator of one's financial acumen. Never was so much spent by so few with so little results.

…all of which I argued are good news for my Classic Republican friends, because the most fiscally frugal (ergo conservative) candidate won, which made this urban guy closer to their views than the wastebasket of a mormon-robot the ballot market rightfully corrected out of the picture. 

At the end of the day, if your major gripe with big governement is ill-advised, inefficient, bloated federal spending, BarryBamz is your guy, so you sorta half-won this one, cheers !

*

Yeah, I was quite happy with myself, and I managed to milk this spider-demon of a cow to spin my yarn for a page or three before I got kinda bored with the ridicule of it all… 

Plowing ahead my line of talking specifically to reasonable conservatives (as opposed to delusional bigots) I kept bumping on the same rock-like question : how could one be reasonable while self-defining as a conservative (Republican is after all just a brand and no longer an ideology, if it ever was) ?

Short answer: one shouldn't, and yet…

Just to get the obvious strawmen out of the way, I'm aware there are many conservatives who show every evidence of being reasonable people, just as I don't even need an effort of imagination to dream up church-going christians and mosq-going muslims who aren't god-crazy holybook-thumpers/burners — I personally know a few, which is enough to disprove a negative. Moreover, I'm (rather self-servingly) cool with quirky people being at large in the genpop, as long as they don't act entitled to do harm to others on the grounds of their feeling threatened by anyone who fails to share their views.

My point being, unoriginal as it is, that it's hard to reconcile being reasonable — as in amenable to reason and rationality — with the belief you can (and should wish to) stop anything from changing,  which is what conservatism boils down to.

Plainly, the level of commitment to magical thinking required to uphold conservative views as central to one's political identity (as different from conservative bias on set issues, which is a another matter) seems hard to reconcile with the minimal required intellectual balance to be called reasonable. And yes, that's where the "Reality has a liberal bias" zinger comes from, although liberals in general don't show any greater indication of their views being tied to objective reality, but that's, again, a different topic and not on today's rambling menu.

The contradiction between the last two paragraphs is only apparent, too : one can indeed behave reasonably whilst holding unreasonable views about big-picture issues like political ideology and the (non)existence of sky-fairies playing a part in our everyday life, much like one can be a well-read, seemingly level-headed rationalist and still end up cowardly pleading guilty to a crime of passion in front of a jury. It could be argued most interesting stories revolve around the contradictions between thoughts, feelings and actions. 

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Where was I going with this ? Not quite sure myself, at this point… mainly, it's about me growing tired of the BS, I guess, starting with mine, pretending I'm content playing smartass while the world is rotting on its feet.

I'll get back to that, I guess.

Meanwhile, merkins of all political creeds should rejoice and/or mourn in unisson : they have a new prez, same as the old prez, who's also a right-of-Reagan Democrat, so there's plenty to go around.

Also, the worse of the two ebils on the ballot has been avoided, for while Mitt Romney may be a non-quantity as an individual, and certainly not the devil, the people who paid for his excursion into big city politics, and to whom he'd had to answer had he been elected, most certainly don't have your best interests at heart (unless you're part of the 0.01%, and then you don't give a toss about who wins, seriously).

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King Kong Théorie

Je finis a l'instant King Kong Théorie de Virginie Despentes, et je n'ai pas perdu mon temps — c'est déjà mieux que souvent.

C'est court, certes: 145 pages à l'allure de la voix, soit une paire d'heures, quand beaucoup n'auraient pas entrepris un tel sujet sans lui accorder moins de 300 pages — serious biznesss, tout ça.

Pas Despentes, qui ne livre pas une thèse ou un essai, en tout cas pas dans le sens convenu, et — malgré le titre en clin d'oeil narquois — propose moins une théorie qu'elle n'expose le chantier en cours de sa réflexion.

Mais sur quoi, à la fin ?

D'après la 4è de couv', il faudrait y voir un "manifeste pour un nouveau féminisme", ce qui est bien normal : avec théorie en fronton, et quand on essaie de pousser du papier, l'hyperbole semble appropriée …même si ça n'a rien a voir avec le contenu.

Pour faire court, c'est l'histoire de comment Virginie Despentes a fini par  accepter plus ou moins qui elle est, du nombre de montagnes a escalader pour en arriver là et dont elle/chacune pourrait se dispenser si le monde n'était pas organisé pour nous rendre tous (et systématiquement) esclaves du diktat social.

Ça bat la campagne, et c'est normal: on est dans la discussion d'après déjeuner, du genre qui fait oublier de retourner au boulot, trop occupés à beaucoup s'écouter, s'interrompre, pas pouvoir se laisser dire des conneries pareilles, et même parfois avoir un déclic et reconsidérer les évidences d'hier d'un oeil frais.

Il n'y a rien de neuf, et c'est là ou on pourrait parler de tromperie sur l'emballage, peut-être, si n'étaient le ton et la forme.

On est a l'envers de l'essai à la française : il n'y a ni postulats bien assis, ni élégante démonstration, et pas plus de bibliographie. Les citations sont des tremplins pour un discours en roue libre qui ne sépare pas l'intuition du moment de la profession de foi, et qui se pose ou il peut, juste assez longtemps pour trouver de la traction et repartir dans une autre direction.

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Alors oui, il y a des connexions entre l'oppression classiste et sexiste, les bourreaux sont aussi/parfois/souvent des victimes qui se mentent, et le ressort profond de l'asservissement tient a l'internalisation par les soumis de leur "juste place" dans le système. Et oui, ça mérite surement d'être dit, pour le bénéfice de ceux qui ne se seraient jamais posé la question sous cet angle — c'est en partie le propos de l'auteur, qui souligne combien la France a choisi d'ignorer des pans entiers de la réflexion et de la littérature féministe mondiale postérieure aux années 70, et comment le sujet même du féminisme en France a été confisqué par les "bourgeoises blanches" qui se veulent 'féministes mais féminines' ou un truc de ce genre, et qui tiennent a se démarquer du courant 'vieilles gouines poilues des pattes'.

Ça la gonfle un peu, Virginie, que le débat sur le féminisme soit balisé comme ça, et on peut la comprendre ; elle le fait bien comprendre.

King King Théorie est moins un manifeste pour un nouveau féminisme qu'une leçon de choses : comment je me suis bien pris la tête avec la condition de femme qu'on veut me faire, et où j'en suis avec ça, perso.

On est dans l'inventaire et le carnet de notes, on raconte comment les idées se nourrissent de ressenti, n'existent que comme outil pour organiser le chaos des choses vécues — jamais tout a fait justes ou exactes, jamais tout à fait réductibles a la pensée sèche et nette qu'il est convenu d'attendre d'un essai, et pourtant c'est ce qu'elle fait, à la lettre: essayer.

Elle dit, elle montre, elle tire des fils entre les trucs, avec plus ou moins de réussite. Son argument pivot, sur comment découpler symboliquement puissance de virilité, et plus largement de la question du genre, avec un King Kong surpuissant et asexué, a sexualisé, qui incarne la menace d'une puissance qui ne serait pas asservie par l'ordre social viril est esthétiquement attrayant, rhétoriquement et théoriquement bancal, mais qu'importe: elle le pose en pleine vue, fais-en ce que tu pourras, lecteur.

De même quand elle choisit d'évoquer ses fantasmes de viol a quelques pages de son experience du viol, et de pointer l'évidente difficulté de la juxtaposition, l'intolérable difficulté faite spécifiquement a son sexe de la culpabilité d'être victime, intolérable au cube par l'obligation culturelle d'endosser le statut de victime à l'exclusion de tout autre.

Elle fait oeuvre utile, c'est sûr, au moins là, quand elle met la complexité et la confusion en évidence, pour tous ceux qui soupçonneraient vaguement que rien n'est si simple mais auraient peur de passer pour des crétins en affichant leurs doutes.

Et si elle cite en vrac Angela Davis et Freud, c'est probablement en partie un effet du style punk rock qu'elle revendique et assume, mais je crois qu'on se méprendrait en y voyant l'invocation de paroles d'autorité: Virginie Despentes n'a pas besoin de se cacher derrière les mots des autres pour avancer.

Elle prend quelques précautions oratoires, tout de même, pas négligeables ni inutiles, comme de reconnaître pour celles à qui autrement va bien le droit légitime de ne pas l'imiter. Elle a cet égard pour les autres qu'à elle on a très souvent dénié, de ne pas préjuger de ce qui convient et est convenable à et pour autrui.  Quand elle décrit comme lorsqu'elle cite, elle ne condamne ni n'endosse: ou bien quelqu'un a déjà assez bien dit ce qu'elle veut dire, ou bien elle plante un fanion, là où sa réflexion prend un tournant au contact de la parole d'un autre.

Intrigante aussi, l'unique question autour de laquelle elle tourne et que jamais elle ne confronte, alors que tout le reste est exercice de monstration : l'intuition qu'elle semble avoir de l'homosexualité comme seule réponse valide aux frustrations endogènes à la norme hétérosexuelle. 

Peut-être parce que celle-ci appellerait 400 pages à elle seule, ou parce qu'elle se confond pour l'auteur avec le problème — vieux comme le féminisme — du refus des codes 'féminins' qui plus souvent qu'à son tour résulte dans l'apparente imitation des codes 'masculins'.
Panier de serpents et boite de Pandore, sans doute, mais à effleurer dix fois le sujet sans le toucher quand tous les autres sont peints au pochoir, il en reste une image particulière et forte, même si et parce qu'en creux.

*

Moins théorie qu'exhibition, le bouquin est court. Moins un manifeste qu'une invitation au dialogue: "Regarde, moi je vois ça…" 

Le "…et toi ?" est implicite, et explique qu'on en sorte avec un gout de trop peu.

C'est un livre à trier les cons, du genre qui donne envie à certains d'aller boire un coup avec Virginie Despentes, et découragera les autres.

Policy change: not.

I just removed the "adult content" flag from this blog, because that was getting in the way of sharing on G+, which I kinda dig as it still only reaches out to people who are presumably willing and able to read my ramblings more or less as intended.

This is a technical issue, not an editorial one, and I'll keep posting under the assumption some minimal and arbitrary thresholds in literacy and mental balance are met by the reader, despite the removal of the safety label from the box.

Feedback is welcome and encouraged, via email over comments field.
Extensive contributions shall be posted as comments or submitted via email first, at your discretion and best judgement.
In any case, your right to free speech and other weird notions that you may or may not misconstrue from your local legal system or culture are largely irrelevant to this space: you have the rest of the internet for that.

I'll try to turn this into a cover page with autoload for non-reg users at some point, if and when I get around to it.
Meanwhile, if in doubt about what to expect here: RTFM.

Contact (it's all about) - part 1

There are plenty of reasons why we each, individually and collectively, do the things we do.

Aside the obvious and as-yet unhelpful "we're just moist robots, all we need is to revengineer our source to grok how we roll", we're left with models and theories of the mind that range from cargo-cult to bewilderingly naive deconstructions, with some interesting-if-broken leads that seem to work alright, some of the time.

One of my personal faves, because it is both flexible and reasonably self-consistent while turning out right more often than not (where applicable) I like to call the Historical Fiction Writer model — shortened as HFW, and rehydrated into "How ? Fuck, why ?" shape for handy use.

*

It goes roughly like this:* 

as individuals, we are the product of our history, both from the history of life perspective (which shaped our genome and innate abilities, passed along to their offspring — without much intent — by those who lived long enough to breed), to the societies and families that carried themes, beliefs, values, customs, knowledge and prejudices downstream to where we individually happen.

From there, we sail along when we can, we drown or take over if we can't.

…and we become, knowingly or not, HFWs, in the sense that we constantly copyedit, add, revise and rewrite our individual and collective history to build as close to comfortable a fiction about ourselves and others as we can manage.

What defines us, and 'why we do the things we do' then becomes a matter of reconciling the story we tell ourselves into a fleetingly coherent whole, despite possibly conflicting sources, such as Reality™ slapping us in the face, or others' delusions crossing paths with ours in disturbing fashion.

Like everything else, we drift towards a place of rest, and in the process contribute to the general agitation. 

At no point in this process is it really necessary for our consciousness to inform our actions: for all we know, we might just be watching our lives unroll like some foreign language film which we try to make sense of as we comment the show, until we start to believe we're actually running the story. 

Whether we decide anything consciously or simply pretend (to ourselves) after the fact that we did is up for discussion, but certainly we do act, and my hunch is the real influence of our conscious mind and higher cognitive functions is less in the decision-making process proper, and more in the way they tweak the filters of what we'll prioritize and pay attention to at a non-conscious level in the future.

Lest this starts sounding like a lot of baloney, let's get practical and consider why people embrace specific carreers, or why they get excited about any given activity, and we'll find it barely ever has much to do with the 'objective' qualities of the purported goal or object, and more about how it makes us 'feel'. 

…and then we try to figure a good enough story to explain why we should do what we're/we've already doing/done.

At least that's how I roll:

1/ I get excited (doesn't have to be a good feeling: solid frustration and burning anger work just fine, too). 

2/ I get depressed (almost never feels good, although it usually doesn't last long, and I sometimes welcome it with a relative sense of relief because it's part of my cycle, and getting excited gets taxing after a while). 

3/ I even out by thinking stuff through, but that's emphatically *after* I bounced from the down-bottom. 

4/ Rinse and repeat, with a slightly different set of parameters I'll respond to in step 1 and 2, according to what I came up with in 3.

I trust not everybody goes to through that kind of roller coaster on a daily basis, yet I reckon the core dynamic is a fairly common one: we learn from experience inasmuch as we process and internalize whatever story we tell ourselves about what did happen, but we really have little say about the what & why — while we're doing. 

*

This is a slight departure from the otherwise interesting theory that consciousness is essentially an artifact of malfunctioning brains, a useless parasitic commenter deluded about its contributing anything to a process that's entirely out of its control. 

My quick-bake HFW model instead posits our conscious self gets to debrief after the match, or at least stand in line and ask questions during the exit press conference, and may even sometimes influence upcoming games and inform the playbook — as any other outside voice can/would.

I'll get into the things that prong me/us in the next installment, but for now I have to saw some wood beams and lay some concrete.

***

*[Usual disclaimers apply, this is a work in progress — a polite way to say I'm making this up as I go, and I'm no more privy than you to we're I'm headed: journey > destination and all that.]

It is silly of you…

Judging by the bandwagoneering, Google+ has reached mainstream appeal.
To wit, this eager self-promoting entrepreneur who was brought to my attention by his deciding to circle me, presumably with the intent to boost his exposure.
Because I'm a peach, I'm happy to oblige, so I give you Bryant O.C. Wallace, a cautionary tale in e-marketing.

Here is me, having my proverbial morning coffee while checking email and g+ as a matter of course, to find I have a new e-friend.

Bryant Wallace added you on Google+ 

It is worth notice for me, as I'm barely public and not exactly a household name, plus I've only just joined the social networking dance with google+, where I'm not precisely doing my utmost to get crazy popular.
So, since I still can afford the time to be curious about people who decide to circle/follow me, and thanks to deeply-ingrained habits (because whose company I keep is usually company I choose to keep), my natural response upon noticing an unfamiliar name circling me is to look them up.

[/me clicky on profile]

InCircles: 278, HaveCircled: 11. 

Looks like the guy just arrived, is hungry and not very discriminate …that, or he's very quick on the uptake. I realize that sort of stuff is commonplace on Facebook, yet somehow, it feels wrong on google+.

A quick search lands me:

• a blogger.com user profile, registered December 2007, linking to an empty blog ; 
• a WordPress 'corporate' blog, barely unwrapped, yet with some content (most recent post dated Feb 18th), and linking to what looks like a one-man corp ; 
• and a motherlode of a facebook…

654 friends. Darn, that's some uncannily popular IT guy right there… clicky !

I'm a Success, capital S ! Oh wait.

Could you be so clueless as to try and egohype by photoshopping yourself into the cover of some obscure self-improvement magazine ? …for surely that would gain you loads of trust with potential customers and you'll never-ever get called out on it ?

Well, yes, of course, and sure, apparently —but it gets better.

…for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

A quick check on the website of success.com magazine (What Achievers Read) shows that Usher is who presumably ought to appear on this cover (Oct. 2010), instead of the nice whiteout where Wallace's dashing FB profile pic is inserted.
Weird thing though, is how clean-yet-unsophisticated the photoshopping looks, so I check the FB Cover Photo itself, and sure enough, the 'zine title is rendered in neat red-on-white, something that would take quite a bit of digging and fontwork to recreate at home.

+

=

???

Certainly, anyone driven enough to bother with a fake vanity cover wouldn't botch the final insert so badly ; and why would they settle for this rag when they could just as easily usurp Time magazine or Wired, instead ?

Then the dime drops.
Google images yields a link to the resource used by my new googlefriend to get famous,
… and one to an article on the aforementioned self-improvement 'zine's blog, which invites its readers to "Be on the cover of Success", for serious !

The ultimate hipster gift. 

Two words come to mind: neat, and sad.
Neat, because this is a cute trick to pull on a cover photo, and they've made it so easy it's nearly mom-friendly.
Sad, well, because it's a depressing case of truth in advertising: the only people who would ever want to be on a fake cover for a self-improvement magazine boorish enough to call itself "Success, What Achievers Read" (sic) and not clue in on how sorry it looks …are exactly the target audience for said publication.
It's like ordering one's own Best Book Award plaque from a vanity press — irony doesn't begin to cover it.

*

So kudos to success magazine, you're well on your way to become a cult mag, which I believe is exactly what you aspire to.

As for you, Bryant O.C. Wallace, I urge you to please reconsider your self-promotion strategy: you position yourself as a Strategic IT Service Provider for local businesses, and looking like a quack is the last thing an IT professional lacking a well-established brand can afford.

I fear your lazy, un-ironic attempt at faking recognition may prove detrimental to your business.
And no, I haven't circled you.

Unique browsing experience.

…that's what the blurb says, at least.

Yeah, it's all black on white now, as opposed to the opposite: I'm toying with the new Dynamic Views templates on blogger, which are neat, if still kinda gimped by the lack of a 2-sidebars option and easily selectable trog-mode switch (or at least a light-on-dark scheme that doesn't require CSS voodoo).
Also some gadgets don't show in this template, but for the price I pay, it's hard to argue…

So, expect it to change again in the near future, I can't promise anything except it will remain free of blink, bling, longhand fonts and adverts if I can help it.
In the meantime, you can play with the corny display modes, just under the masthead.

***

Of DRM, cheap media and convenience.

[Prompted by this article from the always-worth-reading Sanya Weathers, but too long to be politely posted in her comments thread.]

I've been a gamer for the past three decades, an avid reader for five years more, and a father for the last 5 years. Nobody in my household is exactly averse to music, either. 

The total surface area of exposed books, CDs  and DVD (and the odd VHS/Beta/DAT shell) spines on my bookshelves could probably host a decent game of volleyball and yet: most of it has been amounting to not much more than wall insulation ever since HDD storage became cheaper (per gigabyte) than CD/DVD as a backup medium — so, circa 2002…

As for games, even before then, I'd become used to he practice of getting a crack or 'liberated' copy for any game that would expect me to keep a plastic pancake whirring and grinding at all times in my computer optical reader, and to do away with the CD/DVD entirely whenever HDD capacity allowed to dump the entire game on disk, thus saving on inconvenience: swapping disks, loading times, ear and media tear.

Once some game publishers got into the habit of dumping multi-gigabyte game data on HDD as a matter of installation, yet still kept demanding I re-heat waffles in my laptop for as long as I play, I stopped feeling clever for optimizing loading times and battery life, and started getting seriously puzzled at their rationale…

All moot now, as hinted above: every game, movie or music I buy on plastic media these days gets ripped to HDD before its inaugural run on my screen. I tote 1TB of kid animation and movies (roughly a thousand feature-length's worth) in my backpack at all times, neatly  arranged in a 2.5", under-a-pound, quick-loading package that can plug'n'play into anything, from my coffee-table laptop, to my son's old 12" G4 iBook, my wife's 10.1" tablet, the home projector, or the grandparent's big-screen TV (thus avoiding low-interest 'kids' TV programs — seriously, how often can you luck upon Ghibli/Pixar stuff on network TV ?). Obviously there's a second 2.5" drive packing goods for the grownups. 

…all of which weighs about the same as a 'compact' DVD album, and is half as bulky.

And yes, VLC ftw: watching a movie on an otherwise excellent 17" laptop is an experience soon ruined by the background hum'n'whirr of a DVD reader, not to mention the ridiculous cost in battery life. 

And then you have the FBI/RIAA/MPAA warnings, which are silly in the extreme and exemplary of what's wrong with the entire model.

Listen, Hollywood: if my copy is pirated, I obviously have little regards for the MPAA's hurt feelings, and if not, you're getting in the way of me enjoying the product I've paid for, while not adding any appreciable value to my experience: you're not helping your cause (or my being sympathetic to it) either way.

*

Books are a slightly different animal: I understand some people don't like reading book-length text on-screen, and would rather use the paper version. I don't mind it either way personally, but still was on the fence on the matter of convenience of use… until good tablets showed up. 

Especially if you enjoy behemoth-sized books, which are common in the SFF, history and science departments, adding a eleven-hundred pages brick you're already two-thirds through to your handbag can give you pause, hence going the ebook way has become something of a no-brainer for me in the past year or so.

But anyone who's been paying even marginal attention to the matter of ebooks knows publishing them isn't as simple as "Print to: pdf": it takes skilled work to convert a book layout and font work to read comfortably on a 10", not to mention 7" touchscreen, and things aren't entirely quirk-free on that front just yet, so I'm not sure buying a paperback should automatically entitle one to a complimentary ebook voucher.

Maybe dead-tree editions could include a coupon for a discount on the ebook, just like the ebook could include a similar-value coupon for paper or electronic copies you subsequently buy as presents (maybe it's just in my circles, but the people I know don't just give away or loan their own books, they also tend to buy several copies for the explicit purpose of  offering them to friends).

None of the current marketing/DRM schemes in the ebook business properly account for the cross-pollinisation between readerships of various genres/authors/supports, and the Babel-like format confusion doesn't help either. 

Whether a unified format (jQuery ftw ?) for ebooks will address the formats issue remains to be seen, but asking people to use a different set of proprietary reading glasses for every other book sure isn't helping sales, nor is it a smart allocation of resources and expenses on the production/publishing end of things.

It is clear that the strong-arm negotiating style of Amazon and Apple aren't helping authors and editors, while most book publishers are fighting the same kind of rear-guard battle the RIAA is, trying to milk an extra gallon or three from this very dead cow before the stench becomes unbearable, but that's too big a topic for this present post. [Go there to read smarter people than I on the issue]

The takeaway is people will read books, and if the industry doesn't provide convenient, sensibly priced and unobtrusive means to get and read them, it will simply be passed by. Whether that is conducive to more good books or less/worse ones being released in the future is anyone's guess.

*

Generally speaking, the same question applies to the distribution of books, movies, games, and music: either do away with DRM, or make it sensible, transparent and beneficial to the customer, all of which is entirely possible, at least in those parts where you take people access to the net for granted — most of the time.

You can't beat your customers away from piracy and expect to win, all you can do is lure customers away from piracy by offering them better value and/or superior convenience.

Ideally, create an industry-wide virtual-assets account management system, that would give people convenient access to the entire catalog of their owned products, regardless of publisher. Allow the client-side software to act as a local server while offline (html5-style), and possibly enable sharing/trading on a LAN even while cut off the internet (caching events and changes to be synched up next time inet is available).

More importantly, if your products come with online verification attached, give people reasons to like it: offer coupons, rebates, special offers (director's cut early-releases, or extras) to returning customers, and do not stop people from playing their copy when they can't access the net, provided their copy has been validated once.

Similarly, do not attempt to stop people from transferring or giving away the stuff they bought from you (second-hand sales may be another issue, though, better tackled by embracing the rent/PPV model), and instead incentivize buying an extra copy (for cheaper) to give away instead, and extend and facilitate affiliate-like programs where customers gets points/vouchers for recommending products to their friends, etc.

A massive cross-publisher catalog could enable customers to build their own 'collections', mixed-tape style: buy "Marge Perkins' The 10 cookbooks to have and their matching soundtracks" and save 25$ !

*

Alternate funding and revenue models have emerged over the past couple years, mostly in book and music publishing so far, although indie games and movies are showing how even comparatively heavy-iron media don't necessarily have to depend on mega-corporations for their funding, marketing and revenue.

The apparent progress in emancipating creators from the often abusive relationship with ebil corporate publishers should however not hide the fact liberation is typically only gained through creators becoming their own publishers/marketeers/sales-and-business people, with the possible drawback that business acumen (as separate from artistic value) may weigh excessively in the selective process of who gets to make a living of their craft. The corollary being: while you're (more or less competently) updating your facebook page, handling accounting and planning for promo events, you're not doing whatever it is you're supposed to be good at — and paid for…

***

Can I see some ID, please ?

…besides your member card ?

[This post was prompted by one of the many trains of thought that left the station upon reading this at Peter Watts' blog, which I followed to where the fire started …and then spread.

There's a lot of food for thought in this jungle of internet rage, and a lot of noise, as should be expected, and I don't intend to cover every angle, although I will probably return to some of the issues raised in the future.

I commented on Peter's post, but in the process I started plowing a tangent furrow, and I'm not a fan of derailing threads so I had to stick it somewhere else, which is below.]

I 'get' feminism like I get black power, or gay pride, or self-diagnosed @spies wearing their quirks like badges of honor.

Not in the sociological sense, I don't, because I haven't gone all embedded journo in each and every one of those groups, but insofar as I can recognize the drive, it feels like I can relate.

It's frustrating when people think they know who you are, solely based on their preconceptions of what you are, say a gay black non-neurotypical female, and worse even when they tell you about your experience and your place in the world — as if they knew.

And yes, there's comfort in familiarity, support in recognition, and that's good enough reason to seek out kindred spirits, fellow members of an ingroup who've (had) to deal with the same crap, and won't try and mold you into their particular brand of 'normal'… at first.

Because that's the problem with self-identification in identity politics of any kind: you join in driven by a crave to be acknowledged for who you are, as a person, which includes what you are as a demographic, but it only starts there, and you end up peer-pressured into conforming to the group's idea of how and who you ought to be.  

*

Ingroups are attractive because they free one from the Sisyphean push back against prejudice, they promise (and deliver) a safe ecosystem within which one can exist and grow as a person, safe from the pressure to constantly defend and justify oneself which dominates outside the group.

Anyone who ever felt like an outcast, or felt they weren't accepted for who they are can somewhat relate to that urge, and that's about everyone who lived long enough to reach their teens in any society that regards individualism as something not entirely like a brain disease.

How it can go wrong is obvious, though, and trading one ill-fitting uniform for another can even be for the worse after rationalizations kick in: at least going against the consensus and 'normal' of a society that is imposed on you can be intuitive and almost self-evident, but it's much more difficult to justify any challenge to the groupthink of a club you self-selected into, without your own identity coming into question.

Am I saying one should pretend prejudices are a fiction, or worse, that race, gender, sexual orientation or any other 'deviation from the standard' don't really matter ? No.

I'm not about to deny anyone the option to weigh the defining elements of their identity by their own scales, yet I'll point that if you're about finding out who you are, and intrinsically define yourself (as opposed to merely satisfy a need to belong), then seeking validation by whomever is most likely to do it based on one or two traits you share with them isn't just the 'quick and easy way': it also carries the risk of the group defining your self for you.

Now, I'm a proverbial reasonably affluent middle-aged white man, and in the world of identity politics, that makes me statutorily incapable to even dream of relating to the ordeals of the oppressed of any kind.

Because I'm that sort of asshat, I also take extra care not to wear my possible deviations-from-standard on my sleeve, for fear of the variably well-meaning who could be tempted to coopt me in their gang, make excuses for me, or blame my skewed views on the parts of me that don't operate on specs.  

On the plus side, my assumed privilege and inability to empathize also afford me the luxury to treat people as equals, if and when I feel like it (or so goes the song).

The upside of that blatant iniquity is I can do something the self-identified oppressed can't possibly do, which is tell you about how it feels from the haughty heights I call home: pretty good, identity speaking.

*

My experience of privilege in this regard is: there's plenty of room between the cliffs of definition-of-self-by-group-affiliation and circumstances-denialism, and it's in those feisty-yet-naviguable waters where maybe not the nicest or comfortable, but the most constructive conversations tend to catch wind in their sails.

And while I'm not meaning to throw my privilege in your face, or tell you or anyone to 'get over it, already', because I know that's neither here nor there… I'm just asking: is that what you expect the ultimate spoils of victory for identity politics to be ?

Is the ability to converse on equal footing without the need (assumed or imposed) to constantly justify, excuse or defend oneself the holy grail of every minority ? …and if so, how and when can you tell any one set of "us vs then" rethorics (will) have jumped the shark and outlived their usefulness ?

Or is the issue one of payback, meaning no oppressed group can be vindicated and satisfied until they've in turn got the opportunity to stomp their former oppressor(s)… and then, what's the pecking order among the formerly-oppressed — can they share the driver's seat on the steamroller of justice, or are we going Round Robin about righteous fury ?  

***

[For a different perspective, an interesting and feminism-centric take on the issue can be found here.]

Mitigating ebils.

[Version courte pour les non-anglophones: l'est temps de se tirer de fessebouc, 

qui est sur le point de publier des photos de ta grand'mere en culotte au 20 heures, 

avec son adresse en prime.]

I've never been a huge fan of FB. I find it messy, noisy, and phishy in the ways it tricks ingenuous users (meaning most normal humans) into exposing more of themselves than they'd care to (if only they realized) to anyone willing to lurk.

The latest development, however, is seriously shifting gears, and kicking unsuspecting people right into Stalker Central, which itches me the wrong way, so I'm out.

Facebook acting rather callously about user privacy is nothing new, obviously, and it only worsened over time, yet Timeline is something else, and the way FB is going about deployment isn't pretty either — it's so creepy, the ever-upbeat WIRED can't wholly manage to spin it in a favorable light.

*

Is Google better, really ? Well, in a sense, yes they are.

For one, they're more about co-opting the internets and less about attempting to pull and AOL (which FB clearly is, and it stinks to high heavens), and also because the nature of each company is subtly different.

Mark Zuckerberg fancies himself the new Steve Jobs, and runs FB as a one-man-cult. As proven over time, it's often a very potent strategy to get stuff moving, and to deliver a daring product, as the vision suffers no interference but that of what is feasible. 

On the other hand, it only takes one guy losing his marbles to drive the whole train over the cliff, and when it comes to protecting your privacy, an overcompensating narcissist nerd shan't be thy first pick, imo.

Despite their motto of "Don't be evil", the other Church of Nerdery over at Mountain View is not staffed entirely with EFF angels, obviously, but the sheer scope of google's reach, and their 'try every path' approach to product development and marketing means they attract a lot of very bright, naive, hybrid-limo-libs, which are allowed and encouraged to somewhat think for themselves (within reason, ofc) and are more likely than not to either actively oppose, possibly blow the whistle, or at least passive sabotage stuff that stinks too heavily.

Without being a democracy, google sports some of the built-in sanity checks that come with a large headcount of educated and relatively free-willed denizens. That's a plus in their column.

*

The erosion of privacy in general terms probably files under regrettable inevitability, yet google has some incentive to protect the semblance of intimacy that comes from perceived protection of privacy, because they're not in the business of antagonizing their followers (which compound users and employees), when Zuckerberg has nobody to keep FB in check but his own sense of decency (and some would say The Law, but let's be serious here).

The skinny of Google-over-FB being: more than a fraction of people at google are likely to care and feel guilt if/when BadThings™ happen to innocent, relatable human beings (kids, females, nice elderly/underage white males) as a result of google being lazy or callous about enabling users to protect themselves from stalkers and crazies. As a result they will be both proactive and reactive about mitigating such adverse side-effects inasmuch as they can — something that's obvious from the very design of G+ Circles.

*

On a more personal level, I can't be arsed to actively maintain a presence on more than one social network, so I'm going to grab my stuff and take a hike. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to stick to G+ and this bloggy thing here for the most part, and rely on some gadgets to leave crumbs behind on FB and Twitter.

…and no, I'm not moving to Diaspora just yet — don't ask.

*

You're in the ACME now !

Because telling stories is sometimes so much better than showing them.

Mitchell Zuckoff & Jon Stewart discuss the former's book: Lost in Shangri-La.

Seriously ?

OBL is dead, and obviously the world is a better place for it, right ?

That's what they say, at least:

"World stocks rise after death of Osama bin Laden"

Now, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but a few things seem off with this:

• The end of OBL (if verified) isn't the end of the jihad/terror/civilization agit-prop/yni: 

He was a bogeyman of our own doing in more than one way, and notably because he wasn't as lionized anywhere as he was in the 'western world'.
Bin Laden was seen by many in the middle east as nothing more than a philanthropist of sorts, funding the worthy cause of ousting american imperialism and fighting the perceived judeo-christian hegemony, yet not so much as a warlord of strategic leader (which he indeed wasn't). OBL was just a rich heir with a grudge, and was first tolerated only because of the dough he brought to the table, but not taken seriously besides, and he eventually turned into a real propaganda asset after we made him the bugaboo.

At the end of the day, one of the post-facto leads in the cast of the 9/11 soap opera just got written out. That's not exactly a franchise-ender, though.

• Why would you summarily execute a PR golden goose ?

According to the official news, it seems OBL took a headshot during a close range engagement, which doesn't look like an accident.

Obviously there are many reasons why him dead is possibly better than him alive, starting with the fact he can't say anything embarrassing to the U.S of A anymore, can't be rescued nor escape, etc. Still, you'd think after all the effort put into hyping him, the U.S and Obama would want to milk this PR win for all it's worth, and that's better done if you can drag a defeated OBL in front of cameras — whenever convenient — for the weeks and months to come, while making a righteous circus of his trial in front of both U.S and international courts.

Is it only for fear of likely "release OBL or else" terrorist threats that terminating him was determined to be the best course of action, or was it really just one of the acceptable outcomes of an arrest attempt that didn't go as smoothly as it coulda/shoulda/woulda… I don't know, and probably never will for sure, but it still feels like a weak and anticlimactic end for the biggest PR game of this past decade.

• Why dispose of the body thusly ?

Killing the guy on the spot to take control of the narrative and avoid subsequent unintended developments, I get (even though I feel it's sub-optimal), but the whole 'Sorry, we already tossed the corpse at sea from a helo' charade is just ludicrous.

This is creating the impression of a fake hit, the kind of cheap, cookie-cutter twist you expect from a made-for-TV thriller: "Oh, he wasn't dead after all, he faked his own death to instigate a turf war among his rivals", or somesuch. 

Plainly put, if you kill a notable enemy with no witnesses, and hastily dispose of the body while still claiming the credit for the hit, it does look fake, and you'll be called out on it.

• So is OBL really dead ?

I wouldn't put money on it either way.

Occam razor dictates he most likely is, or at least the U.S intelligence is confident enough that he is to not expect he'll show up live on TV sometime later today to point and laugh at them.

My best bet: he died a few days/weeks ago of unrelated causes, and the U.S figured they'd better hurry to make it look like they did it before the word got out.

Hence no arrest, no fresh corpse to display, and what we're witnessing now is the best CIA and special forces could make of a bad situation on short notice and a ticking clock.

And ttfn: back to your regular programming.

Busy-ish.

Just for those keeping tabs on this place: I'm not quite dead yet, just busy woodworking and thinking about issues.

Think About It - Flight Of The Conchords

Some stuff literally hurts on sight.

Between Twilight and Harry Potter, it's a tough call which is working harder on grooming kids to Olympic levels of brat-ness.

On a related note, I saw New Moon about 4h ago, and my brain still aches… I fear permanent scarring.

Distraction.

While thinking hard about fiscal justice in a globalized-yet-uneven economical landscape…

Legal dress code.

After a couple trial runs at city level, Belgium is about to pass a law forbidding the public display of full-head veil in public spaces, and Frogland is next in line — according to the local ruling clique.

What strikes me as fairly dumb in both cases is the pretense under which such laws are pushed through, namely under the guise of protecting women and their humane dignity from oppressive traditions, when it's plain as day the real target here is militant Islam, perceived by some in both countries as a mounting peril for the local culture, and that rubs me the wrong way, as a matter of principle.

See, I'm a sucker for consistency, in game design or in public affairs, and despite my personal understanding of religion as a mental disorder, I can live with the fact constitutionally secular countries such as France or Belgium recognize freedom of faith, and even their endorsing religions to an extent, as long as it's under a principle of equal treatment.

And that's where I see some issues with the dress code laws…

• Not all Muslim women routinely wear a face-covering veil, but almost all women who wear those (and insist on not removing it in public places) happen to be Muslim. As such, these laws  effectively target and punish people on the basis of their religious affiliation, which both in Belgium and France should be impossible under their respective constitutions.
  
  
• The second argument is public safety, as in wearing a face-covering dress allows one to conceal his or her identity in public and therefore could be instrumental in the perpetration of criminal offenses, encouraged by the increased odds of getting away with it. This may have held at least shallow water, if not for the fact campaigning for those laws clearly revolved around the Muslim veil as topical item, so it's a serious case of 'too little, too late'.
   
• The third point, the one the French supporters of this bill plan to hammer on to get it passed into law is the preservation of 'humane dignity' on behalf of the poor, oppressed burqa-girls (although what you mostly — and seldom — see in France is simple niqāb), and this angle qualifies as Broken, For Real™.  This last one warrants a bit of elaborating…

The 'humanist' argument hinges on the assumption women don't choose to wear a niqāb and are — explicitely or implicitly — coerced in doing so by mysoginistic and machist traditions imposed upon them by men in their families and communities. Furthermore, it posits forbidding the cloth will liberate these women and allow them to connect in a 'normal' way with society and with their inner feminist self, thus sapping the foothold Islamic bigots have gained in our precious secular democracies.

Right. This is going to end well, I'm sure.

• If niqāb-wearing women are indeed victimized by their community and can't stand up to the pressure they're under to dress as told, they aren't guilty of anything and shouldn't be punished for it. Good luck finding a way to establish causality and fine the husband because of the wife's dress code — although this would probably be more effective and could be good fun. Fail.
  
  
• Regardless, helpless-by-definition women (in this context) won't grow a pair because the law says so, so they'll simply stay at home or pay the fines (less likely), with a direct result of alienating them further for lack of opportunity to connect with 'normal' society (which seems to be the purported end goal here). Re-fail.
   
• Conversely, if they actually are making a choice in how they dress and express their religious beliefs, then they aren't victimized, and thus there's no legal basis to oppose their behavior, (insofar as it doesn't cause explicit harm to others) unless one purposefully intents on persecuting Muslims, which — as pointed earlier — should prove unconstitutional in either France or Belgium. Triple fail.

Either the 'human rights' proponents of the niqāb ban are right, and these women really are hapless victims, or they're wrong, and the burqa is a matter of personal choice and religious expression… in any case the proposed bill is a non-sequitur.

My 2 eurocents ? Handle religions for what they are: a mental condition ranging from a harmless quirk of personality to a serious psychosis, depending on the severity of the delusional state, and treat it as such. 

Get the patients professional help, don't feed their neurosis by encouraging it, and when necessary, take the usual steps to protect them and society — starting with screening out overcompensating midgets lacking a super-ego *before* they get into presidential office.

For a different take, here's what the hive-mind has to say on the issue. 

My euro-tip: for consistency's sake, if we must harass and fine women to protect them from humiliating themselves as a result of peer pressure, can we outlaw boob enhancements first ? At least there is evidence of bodily harm, there.

*** 

Food for thought.

It just occurred to me that in the matter of credit attribution as to where we — as a species — are today, too much is given to our fabled neo-cortex, while way too little recognition goes to our palate and digestive tract's prowess.

So here it is: our gut smarts are underrated.

To clarify, I'm not about to go all redneck on you, and argue the case that guts know better than brains as a rule (even though it may happen sometimes), and I'll leave truthiness to whom it belongs: comedians, teabaggers and choking-on-pretzels ex-POTUS. 

Instead, I'll go out on a limb, as per standard protocol here, and tentatively argue: our guts play an under-appreciated yet decisive part in the historical making of our brains, both as a facilitating agent and enabling device.

*

Consider this: we humans come omnivores as a standard issue, and tend to embrace it unless constrained to a less diverse diet imposed by circumstances or personal/cultural biases. At face value, our gut would deserve praise if only for its ability to use almost anything we stumble upon for fuel — on the omnivore's radar, anything that is or was alive once could be dinner.
We partly owe to our guts to have survived and thrived in a variety of environments that non omnivorous species can only dream of, but I'd wage that's only half of it…

Opposable thumbs are cool, for sure, but they're of limited relevance if all you do is twiddle them: how and to what end you put those to work is what's key.
Our brains are a spectacular learning machine, a difference and inference engine that can find patterns in a chaotic wealth of information, derive meaning and build narratives or concepts to organize the universe, with us as its focal point. 

As it seems obvious a direct relation exists, between the diversity of experiences and stimuli we're exposed to and the opportunities we get to make new and smarter inferences, anything that helps us survive and explore new horizons is increasing our odds to have a eureka! moment, or its intuitive, less conceptual equivalent.

And just like our opposable thumbs, our guts enable us to explore and experience more, not only by keeping us fueled and clanking beyond the point where the Duracell rabbit would finally stop, but by providing us with the means to experience more. Non-omnivorous animals don't get the chance to try much of the gastronomical aspects of pleasure and discomfort, simply eat whatever limited selection of food they trust to process without falling sick, and won't even think about ordering off the menu, even when it sucks — ask any panda how they feel about their last meal(s) for a very fucked up perspective on this.

*

Long story short, being able to process diverse foods extends our biotopical reach and our ability to move around, yet also broadens our mental horizons and sense of aesthetics. Diversity of tastes, textures, shapes and colors all give our brain those little jolts that once in a while may spark a new and interesting connection, even though we may not always realize it at the time, and the same goes for those different landscapes, climates and environments we would never have dreamed of, had our omnivorous bowels not kept us alive through there.

Thus, I suggest you make today (which is whenever you happen to read these lines) your personal Gut Recognition Day and celebrate GRD by thinking hard about how much we owe our intestines for coping with our whims as they do, be thankful for that, and vow never to deny your guts their rightful part by ensuring you don't eat the same grub every day from now on, if you can afford it.

Your neo-corticoïdal bowels thank you in advance.

***