PatreonMooseGate the pitfalls of 2.0 indie marketing.

Today's story is about what happens when a genY musician-cum-entrepreneur gets his wires a bit crossed whilst earnestly trying to do good work, and how marginally bad things can come from smart, generally nice people acting without (much) malice.

First, let me get that out of the way : I'm a bit of a fan of Pomplamoose as an art act. I randomly stumbled upon Nataly Dawn singing her take on Louise Labé's Baise m'encor sometime in 2009, which led me to her Pomplamoose duo act along Jack Conte.

I dig their music and stagecraft/videos, I also like what Conte's trying to do with Patreon, and the pair of them is generally representative of the reasons why I'll try to give the benefit of the doubt even to hipster-looking types, as long as they're working at getting shit done.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I'll state for the record I have zero stake in the economic success of Pomplamoose, Patreon or any of the individuals and companies mentioned here, beyond personal well-wishing.]

Louise Labé is in da house, or something.

 
Now, in case you're coming at this without prior knowledge, here's the backstory :

• Pomplamoose debuted in '08 and has seen growing popularity online since, thanks to their music and visual work, with their very active online presence in the form of vlogs and side projects not to be discounted.  6 years is a long time, you come to realize, when you find Pomplamoose has a friggin myspace page !
   
• Then Patreon was launched last year by Jack Conte and partner Sam Yam.
  In a nutshell, Patreon is a subscription-style crowdfunding platform, which enables fans to act as patrons of the arts for their favorite bands, comic-book artists, podcasters, yni. People can either commit to a monthly fixed donation of their choice, staggered grant style, or pledge an amount of money towards any new work created / released by the artist(s) on a recurring basis (with a monthly cap). Patreon takes a reasonable (by today's standards) 5% cut on that.
   
• This fall, Pomplamoose went on a month-long US tour of 24 shows across 23 cities, which by standard metrics for an indie band tour qualified as a success : they sold a lot of tickets and merch, filled their venues, and the audience seemed to generally be happy with the shows.
   
• On Nov 24, Jack Conte went out and released some of the financial details of the whole operation in the context of a postmortem / expose about the difficulties of running a "mom and pop corner store" music act.
  …and the shit hit the fan.

• Bob Lefsetz, a much-listened to (and rambunctious) voice in the music biz published a scalding commentary on the lacking economics of the Pomplamoose tour in his Nov 26 Leftsetz Letter on Encore, annexing to it some comments from the many readers who apparently pushed Conte's postmortem his way.
   
• This prompted a number of other people in and around the biz to chime in with their own take on how Pomplamoose could fail to end in the black after a successful tour, but perhaps most critically, some saw the whole financial disclosure stunt as a manipulative marketing ploy by Jack Conte to drive business to Patreon, accusing him of hiding his personal stake as CEO and co-founder of Patreon when he explains how hard it is for a band to make a living by touring.
   
• Conte was not happy about that last part, and op-ed'ed his rebuttal to accusations of dishonesty the next day on the same platform he used to release his original post-mortem.

Here, you're all caught up. Follow the links above for the full material, I intentionally left out some that would have been repetitive.

Not just covers, either.

I find myself largely agreeing with Bob Lefsetz and others to question Jack Conte's conclusions about Pomplamoose's tour ending in the red, namely that it's proof it's too hard to make it as a middle-tier artist on the road : in a nutshell, this tour could, and presumably should have turned a healthy profit without the need for the band and crew to sleep in vans and survive on ramen, and the fact it reportedly lost 12 grand out of 136K income is simply evidence of poor business management, not impossibly challenging economics.

Having watched a number of their videos, and knowing how much care and work they put in their visuals, I would nitpick on some of the criticisms made about the unnecessary expenses on lighting equipment, but some videos are out that make clear the stagecraft on their tour wasn't anything your average live music club couldn't handle with in-house gear or would demand a special lighting setup.

True fact : some Pomplamoose songs are not in French !

 

I don't think Jack Conte tanked the finances of his Pomplamoose tour on purpose to make a point, or that he cooked the numbers to prove the only path to monetary salvation for struggling indie bands was to enroll in Patreon.

Nonetheless, accusations of Conte's dishonesty and supposed attempts to hide his personal take in Patreon are worth taking a minute to discuss.

Conte's argument (in his rebuttal) that he didn't do anything to hide his involvement as not-just-a-user of Patreon kinda works for me : it's there for everyone to see on his personal public profiles, he's done promotion for Patreon and given plenty of interviews about it – Andy Cush was either lazy or disingenuous in his failure to do the homework for his Gawker piece (he since sorta acknowledged the fact in an article update) and that's plain bad journalism.

I also don't see malice in Conte not adding a full disclosure about his co-founder role in Patreon in the post-mortem : the financials tour breakdown was written from the perspective of Pomplamoose-the-band, not Jack Conte the Patreon co-founder, who had no investment in the tour's profitability (or lack thereof).

Either he overlooked pointing his interest in Patreon as self-evident (the intended readership of his postmortem presumably being reasonably educated about who Conte is), or he considered it, then figured bringing it up may muddy the waters when he's been going out of his way to keep the two separate – as pointed in his rebuttal, when he indicates taking zero salary from Patreon and instead being intent on making a living on his artist income alone (at this stage).

With that said, I don't think Conte is beyond criticism, here. My guess is he tried to make the best of a bad situation and it went somewhat poorly.

Do that on stage, nobody will gripe about the extra lights…

 

Finding his operation down 12 grand after a month of successful touring, with the main financial salvation for his band coming from his other venture (Patreon) may simply have reinforced Conte's  belief that Patreon is a great idea (which it is) and is the only credible way for an indie band to make a buck besides iTunes sales and YouTube ads, since touring is doomed to be done at a net loss (which it doesn't have to be).

Coming to a wrong conclusion because it saves oneself self-criticism (Jack sucks at finance) and reinforces established prejudices (Patreon is the way to go) is not exactly unheard of, especially when you throw in the cookie of making a case for something you strongly hope to see succeed (people should see that Patreon is the way to go).

On a personal note, his rebuttal rubbed me the wrong way by not linking to the source of the Bob Lefsetz piece he was responding to (on Encore), and phrasing it in such a way as to imply Lefsetz endorsed the accusations of cooking the numbers in the service of a marketing ploy (which he didn't). It's hard to read that as anything but a kneejerk attempt at damning-by-association the valid criticisms made by Leftsetz (among others).

So yeah, possibly, Conte spun his yarn in a way that portrayed touring as financially more grim than he would have if he didn't have an alternative on hand, and certainly he does a disservice to aspiring live artists by failing to take away the proper lesson from his experience : a band can't make a buck from shows without being a bit careful with budget.

He also should have put a full disclosure about Patreon in his piece, and it would not even have been out of place to plug it in there if he had.

If anything, his biggest mistake may have been to post this way too early after the tour, as that's the sort of stuff one should take notes on while it's hot, then let cool down before the actual writeup.

That he failed to address any of the substantial critique about money management in his rebuttal is telling of Conte's state of mind at the time : while he clearly took offense at the attacks on his moral integrity, he didn't seem to take issue with the challenges raised against his tour management acumen, which were much more damning to the substance of his original thesis.

It may be a hint that the truth about this is dawning on him.

~

Symaptico w/ the debil

Call me a contrarian, but the more public discourse seems to break down into a collection of loosely connected, self-referential reality-distorting echo chambers where people congregate based on shared prejudices and unexamined beliefs, the more I find myself going in the opposing direction, reaching out and paying attention to people I intuitively disagree with.

*

I remember my marveling, in the early days of the interwebs (circa 94), at how it was suddenly so easy to assemble and exchange according to shared interests and self-selection criteria, rather than by imposition of external factors such as locale, class, age, creed and other opportunity-limiting parameters. [all subject to the usual caveats about future's uneven distribution, etc.]
It was a nice change of pace.

The net created a privileged space where (a subset of the many) voices that couldn't be heard before could speak up and reach like-minded individuals, of the sort previously doomed to the solitude that comes from worshiping at no(t the right) altars, or failing to embrace the local unquestioned consensus — wherever one happened to have been born.

This new information age seemed to open the doors on a much richer, diverse future, and really, so it did.
 

Thanks to being fearful, bunchy apes, with sectarian reflexes drilled into us by history as the winning strategy for survival, this explosion in complexity and variety soon led to us seeking safety in exclusionary self-selected cliques. This mindset eventually leaked into meatspace and most venues of public debate as our daily lives got more networked and net-entangled, turbo-charging trends that had started with the advent of the TV age, and trampling whatever semblance of shared normalcy we'd painfully imposed upon ourselves through centuries of self-inflicted mass punishment.

Flash forward to now, where simply getting people to agree on basic facts gets problematic, since it's become so easy to tune all inputs, and receive only those feeds that confirm and reinforce one's expectations (good and bad), to engage only with people who share one's worldview.

If the takeaway lesson from the 20th century was to be wary of the ideological and military continent-scaled monstrosities enabled by mechanization, modern media and commerce acting as force multipliers for simplistic cure-all utopias, we certainly overdid the formula when we leveraged the wondrous potential of a networked world to create the epidemic of self-assembling cults that now seem to be tearing to bits every attempt at building any sort of social and political consensus.

*

Mobs freak me out today more than ever, as they've never been so well-insulated against any call to reason or practicality, now that self-delusions have been promoted to the 'new normals'… 

Strangely enough, this proliferation of self-contained insanity bubbles also makes me hopeful in the potential of education and shared intelligence in our technological age.

If we managed to shred the social fabric(s) that had gone essentially unchallenged for the previous eight thousand years in just a few decades (not to mention ecosystems and climate dynamics), then it could be a hint about our potential to collectively grow out of this phase, too, possibly in no more than a generation or three, and maybe even of us getting a clue before we self-exterminate, as cultures, and as species.

Hence me no longer seeking out like-minded types — it's good enough for me to know there are, a plenty — and instead looking in the most unlikely spaces I can parse for the sort of intelligence that differs from mine.
I'm not saying UFOs (you silly), although if you have some actual (or alleged) space aliens willing to sit down for a drink and a chat, I'm down with that, too.

*

So what do I mean by that ? 

Since I've always been driven by curiosity, I must now assume I can't rely on my sense of wonder and adventure alone to take me where I've been a dozen times already, and see better this time around.
Instead, I go where I normally wouldn't. 

If something or someone rubs me the wrong way, with that familiar "this is beyond dumb" feel, I go against my so-called best judgement and ask myself two things :

• Why exactly does it trigger my scorn, disgust or mere irritation (when some hold it so dear and / or true) ?
  
• What would it take for me to relate ?

I suggest you try it, it's interesting, and often fun.

***

Diversity in AAA titles

Hello reader : it's been a while.

Backstory : E3 is upon us, and the count of severed heads still beats that of female characters (because that's a metric now, apparently). Many are irked by this, and thanks to fumbling a PR saving throw, Ubisoft has made itself a sausage-shaped lightning rod in this storm of diversity denial, or something.
Assassin's Creed Unity coop mode will not have female avatars, which certainly is not as good as having them, but the real problem is Alex Amancio (creative director @ Ubisoft) inadvertently turned a missing bullet point into a scandal when he said the game sorta-kinda-almost did, yet doesn't, because it was "too much work", which some immediately translated into "not worth the trouble", to be taken as proof positive that female characters (hence players, too) are discriminated against.

If that wasn't enough to fuel the fury, the Far Cry team (also Ubisoft) then offered a free refill.

Diversity in videogames is a hot-button issue and the discussion is now reaching into the usual proclamations about WEIRD being the scourge of the universe (which should be the new Godwin, btw). The people is Kony2012-levels of angry and I kinda grok the outrage, yet I'm not totally on board, either, hence the poast. 

Let me mansplain why Assassin's Creed is the wrong kind of game to pick for affirmative action.

As a pale-skinned, blue-eyed, penis-having, reasonably affluent and educated cis-gendered straight-ish bastard, I still get frustrated by the lack of diversity in blockbuster RPG/adventure games, not just over avatars, but also plot, characterization, etc.
On the other hand, when I pick up a title that centers on ninja-ing through (admittedly gorgeous) scenery with not much more story to it than 'go there, kill that, don't get caught', I don't set my expectations higher than what reads on the tin – if that — and I don't care to identify with the avatar : it's a vehicle with about as much humanity to it as my keyboard.

Complaining about the lack of depth or diversity of what is essentially an over-polished hack'n'slash game seems as misguided to me as faulting a Monster Trucks show for falling short on character development and long story arcs.

 

I swear, I'd be all over that if it had playable female characters…

With that said, the default-to-white-straight-male thing gets on my nerves, too, and I wish there were more titles where the protagonist was anything else.

Don't count me as one of yours just yet, though, because I really mean that…

I do wish there were more games where we get to play really diverse characters, like a goblin or a spider, whose mission is to kill invading 'heroes' in order to protect our family and grow our stash of gold, or fill the boots of the cleanup crew who's to rebuild NYC every time the Avengers fuck up the city real good with their overkill tactics. I wish there were more games where you had to juggle accountability to your peers, or boss, or kids, while fighting the ebil du jour, and so on.

In short, I hate that most AAA games are unimaginative clichés crapfests, and I feel sorry that so many among the riled-up defenders of minorities rights seem to merely aspire for opportunities to better identify with the seriously lacking protagonists of seriously stupid games - it's like complaining that nobody makes truck nuts for girls.

… anymore.

As things stand now, it seems to me engaging the females-in-games issue in their established product lines is, if not a lost cause, at least an uphill battle for game studios : whatever ridiculously overblown female archetype they pick for a main character, they'll take flak (often deserved) for sexism, when they can safely dial the muscular grizzled warrior to eleven without a peep of complaint from their regular  audience.

The solution is to build deeper, less braindead games, and yes, I'd advocate being proactive in bringing more diversity in the teams that make games to make more diverse games, but I'm not of the opinion that merely slapping female textures and voicework* on the avatar in 13 year old male fantasy-fulfilling games will magically make them female-friendly.

…and if GearBox decides to build embarrassing stereotypical female-fantasy AAA titles, more power to them : I'll despise those with the same level of scorn I have for Duke Nukem Forevah.

Now, give me a good story, with engaging characters, and then I'll get seriously pissy if it all revolves around yet-another white male fantasy.

~

*[It's actually much more work than that, too, as Amancio apparently failed to get across. Adding a credible protagonist of different gender to a 3D full motion game is about as much work as adding another humanoid alien species.]

I demand hord-ahr !

We all know of way more important things going on re: sexism, harassment and broader expressions of dorkery in the gaming industry and culture, but I'm gonna natter lexicon instead, because it won't drive me to a lengthy, foamy rant (can't be arsed, today) :

When did 'chauvinism' (without the 'male' qualifier) become the default and preferred synonym for 'phallocracy', as opposed to its proper meaning of 'exacerbated patriotism/jingoism' ?

I get how anything with an -ism attached instantly sounds prejudiced and therefore becomes more suitable to dissing purposes, but 

1.  it's confusing two distinct (if often coincident) prejudices, 
2.  how could you pass on the opportunity to use 'phallocracy' instead, when it literally translates to 'rule of dick(s)' ? 

Right ?

Pic found via Ernest Adams, the beautiful beardy feminazi…

…all that, assuming it's acceptable to call someone a dick when he/she/it's being an ass, and there isn't a minority rights group somewhere to object to the misrepresentation of 'dicks' as anything but superiorly endowed in the cognitive department — I wouldn't want to hurt anyone's in their tender bits, of course.

There's a problem with your Google+ profile.

…is what I found out yesterday, thanks to a nice robotic email from the "Google+ Team".

C'mon, you asked for it…

In fairness, I knew this could happen, ever since google decided to enact their RealName™ policy, and I can see where the company is coming from on this issue, even though the case they make for why they need realworld ID is such thinly-veiled BS it's both comical and mildly insulting.

There are a lot of moving parts in that single event, and I'm not going to write about those, mostly because tl;dr. Just to get that out of the way : pseudonymity, freedom of speech, trolling, antisocial behavior, dog on the internets, right of privacy, ax-crazy exes, sessual predators, oppressive governments and abusive corporate monsters, bullies, etc, none of which is the main course on today's menu.

*

Google is in the business of knowing people to better market stuff to them, and enabling convenient communication channels and collaborative tools is just means to that end. At face value, the tradeoff for users is one of convenience vs privacy, not quality, as the quality of Google services may often be improved in direct proportion to how much privacy is sacrificed : you get less disruptive (maybe even useful) targeted ads instead of random boner pills on your webpages, while integrated services algorithmically smoothen the ride by learning and sometimes anticipating your needs. Letting Google know more about you often betters your experience, as long as it doesn't go terribly wrong for you, the individual.

Long story short, I think google is behaving like large corporations do, and is doing what it thinks best according to the business plan. It is certainly not moral, nor respectful of users, but whoever expects morals from a global for-profit operation just because it favors LEGO color schemes and exudes Stepford positivity is just begging for a personality test.

The slightly twisted part here is Google made no effort to clarify this early on, and indeed seemingly did nothing to raise awareness about the possible pitfalls of using your existing gmail handle as your Google+ name, especially during early stages, when the Google+ experience and userbase flowed rather naturally from the (now-defunct) Buzz service (where Google showed they can be trusted to act responsibly with their users data and privacy). 

To take the case at hand, and as far as I can tell, some asshat took exception to my snarking at the jeebus conservative crowd (something I do quite often, all the while trying to keep things in good humor, and tentatively constructive), and did the honorable thing, reporting my obviously non-christian googlename as illegal, which is what our Vord & Sailor would do, or something. I'm not going to cry over dirty metagaming tactics, this being the internet and all, but certainly it was a bit pissant (as She intendeth, presumably) and it wasted a few hours of my time.

Coincidentally, it also goes to show how exposing your RealID publicly on social networks may not be all that wise, but that's for another day.

As instructed, under penalty of losing access to my profile, I provided proper name and surname, and moved to have Armchair Designer set as my nickname instead, while I was setting up a g+ Page by the same moniker.

On my freshly renamed Profile, I then added a pointer towards the Page thingie, and inverted the colors palette on my original Profile picture to draw my regular readers/contacts' attention to the changes.

While I was fiddling with that, a second message from our friendly robotic overlords dropped into my lap: 

I know there's probably prØn somewhere involving armchairs and designers, but really ?

Cute. Now I have a name on my formerly-main Google+ profile that's entirely alien to the majority of people who have me in their Circles. Glad we cleared that up.

Understood that — like it or not — Google can insist on users of Google+ (but really all google services) presenting their official ID to the world, the real question is whether it's the best business move Google can make.

The short answer is : yes, but.

Google's thoughts on the matter are no mystery, and the company's position has been made as clear as one can hope from an opportunistic colonial organism. In de-BS'ed terms, it boils down to the following :

Google intends to be a central ID provider, starting in its home turf of 'merka, a country where there is no national ID card, the mere mention thereof being cause for riots. Google+ and associated services is Google's private census tool and ID registry initiative, reliant on the users willingness to provide the hivemind with the most minute details of their life so they can be profiled, packaged and properly marketed (to).

From google's perspective, keeping out the small fraction of users who don't feel comfortable sharing their meatspace ID with the entire googlesphere is not a bug, it's a feature. Presumably, the damage pseudonymousers' lack of faith in the panopticon utopia could do to the plussers community morale is not worth the trouble, relative to the value of said minority's business to Google.

See ? all good.

*

So why then, considering I'm obviously one of the shy types about my meatspace ID going full-frontal on the internet, do I even use Google+ ?

The short answer is I'm a mammal, hence lazy, and also I probably was happy to delude myself in the belief that Google somehow cared about retaining some of its vanishing geek-cool streetcred. In retrospect, that was serious wishful-thinking on my part, something Google track record should have discouraged, was I not an idiot.

As for my weak mammal argument, Google apps are rather fantastic tools, and at least until recently they had no competition to speak of (Sheets is still unrivaled, as far as I know). Gmail is fast and extremely convenient, and Google+ in my experience has been vastly superior to Facebook in terms of s/n ratio, ergonomics, spamlessness, plus it doesn't make my eyes bleed from the clutter on screen, and that's without considering Circles, which are its major selling point.

There is no reason not to use Google stuff if you have the use for it and you're cool with their policies, and it's clearly a take it or leave it deal.

It's the same reason why I did not appeal or fight the name change : per Google's rather fluid EULA, I was in breach, and that they didn't act on it until somebody pointed my way changes nothing. Although I reckon it's a stupid policy, and one that could be largely addressed by allowing people to present themselves under their chosen nickname alone (even with Google requiring people fill optionally public-facing Name and Surname fields in profile), Google's reasoning is what it is and, unless applicable laws say otherwise, is their privilege.

The comedy lies obviously in how easy it is to fake a "true" ID good enough to fool Google's superficial controls (for now), meaning anybody who really means to be a nuisance is a copy-paste away from a brand new Google account, while serious trolls will go the extra mile and prep pre-aged accounts to replace those that fall. Google or not, the only workable ways to adress anti-social behavior in large online groups depend heavily on actionable personal reputation, something Google has nothing to enforce or leverage at this writing.

Episode X : A New Pope ?

I'm not quite ready to ragequit on Google+, because all the stuff I like about it is still true, but a few things radically changed in my perception of the social platform over this relatively minor event, and that will certainly affect how, and how much, I use it.

I've been burned, and there's no coming back from that. Google+ will no longer feel homey to me : it's about as personal as LinkedIn or twitter now, which is really not that much. As a result, I'm less likely to use it, push content to it, and help Google know more about those among the supposed 99% of users who are fine with using the name that's on their passport in g+, whenever they interact with me or my content.

By no stretch of the imagination am I famous, nor even internet-famous, so I guess I'm no big loss to Google, yet I'm left wondering : how many among the outliers to the general blissful population of g+ happen to also be significant outliers, from a data-collection standpoint ?

Google is running a mall/farm sort of operation, and I can see how they see as their best interest to maintain public order. A combo of relative segregation among populations (thanks to Circles) and of catering to the least-controversial denominator (thanks to forced exposure and peer pressure) seems like the way to go, and yet…
If my intuition about outliers is correct (big if, indeed), there is a potential downside to Google xanaxed ideal of an aseptic community, and that's a (proportional) drought of exciting things happening in their over-homogenized ecosystem.

Life is messy, and Google's electronic equivalent of a white picket fence cul-de-sac may prove a little bit boring, in the long run.

~

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.

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.

*

Best of luck.

Believe it or not…

…these two are soon getting married.

***

[Here be the photo gallery, and go there for a nice behind-the-scene look at Big Daddy's inception.]

Oldie but goodie.

I know it's old, I know if you read this, odds are you're familiar with this stuff, but just in case you somehow missed it, as one of my good friends had until it popped up in the course of a conversation today, here's a link to a seminal paper by Nicole Lazzaro, of XEODesign, which is most definitely worth your time.

You'll thank me later.

Goofram — tastes twice as funny.

Sure, you love its guidance in navigating the intarwebs, but the Church of Gloogloo is a bit bland at times… ever wished you could shpritz a dash of ebil genius to top your ad-browsing experience with something a bit edgier ?
Say no more, friend, for I have jumped on the bandwagon of Goofram, a Firefox plug-in (and standalone search webpage) and so should you, if you enjoy computer-generated deadpan comedy.

Of course, Wolfram Alpha won't know how to make love, and neither will it be able to make head or tails of most of your typical search queries, but there is some nice zen to how it fails — sometimes a much welcome perspective.

Me luv Charlie.

Charles Stross is one of the most endearing SciFi writers of the past decade, and I mean that in a good way.
He mans a very stimulating online diary, which he recently moved into a previously deserted domain of his: accelerando.org.
While announcing the relocation, he mentioned his Singularity ! A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds, which is not only funny as hell but also happens to be TiddlyWiki-powered.

Mom, I think I'm in love, I hope you'll understand.

PS: those stranded in Baltimore over this coming weekend (I know at least one who is) may find comfort knowing it's also where Charlie is (lolcat and stuff).

On the way to Slate,

we paid a visit to Tokyo Toys (their catalog is pretty nice, but the B'n'M shop doesn't measure up) in Trocadero mall, which hosts other amenities, including an arcade, a bowling, and this very cute cybercafe-cum-gallery where strange robots live.

[click the pic for more]

13, Coventry Street: first floor, better accessed by the ramp next to the Passaje del terror attraction (no kidding).

Frogs had Boris Vian...

...the anglo world still has Tom Lehrer.

Lucky bastids.

[More where that came from]