Jimkang

A few months ago, I stopped using Google for everything personal: I switched from Gmail to FastMail for mail and calendars, and that was the end of the era.

I remember how incredible Gmail was in the early days - I signed up when it was still ‘in testing’ around 2005 and you needed an invite code to get in. All of the previous systems had such low quotas that you’d constantly delete mail. The search functionality was so bad that you’d have to organize everything manually. And for a while, every new Google product was genre-defining: Google Calendar freed us from desktop software, Google Code was GitHub before GitHub, Google Docs changed the default mode of working.

But slowly, and without intention, I left it all behind: they shut down Google Reader, and I switched to Feedly. GitHub replaced Google Code. I switched from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. From Docs to Dropbox Paper, iA Writer, and Notion. From Picasa to Flickr and a simple folder of images. Google Analytics grew obtuse and unusable, so I switched to gaug.es, and then eventually removed analytics from all my sites. Google Groups, once a forum for discussion, has been overtaken by Discourse, Slack, and GitHub Issues.

Switching off of Google in 2018 is easy because you’ve probably abandoned most of their products anyway, and the ones you’re still using are stagnating.

Case in point is Gmail, the last thing on my list. The new paint job they released this week is the first in years, and still doesn’t answer the question of whether Gmail or Inbox is the future.

FastMail isn’t perfect - the spam filter is less accurate than Google’s, the mobile app a little less slick. And the transfer from Gmail was slow - but mostly because of Gmail’s unbelievably low rate limits. In all other ways, it’s an excellent - and better - product.

Which is the pattern: alternatives to Google services aren’t half-baked knock-offs, they tend to be superior. Google Reader was great, but Feedly is a more polished, better-maintained product. During their co-existence, there was just no comparison between Google Code and GitHub: GitHub was the better product.

I didn’t expect it to turn out that way: if Gmail had improved at the same pace from 2009 to 2018 as it had from 2004 to 2009, it would be unbeatable.

Not about security

When I’ve mentioned FastMail to folks, a lot of them are interested in the security implications. Email security is complex, and, frankly, it wasn’t one of my motivating factors. As FastMail has written themselves, they don’t support PGP, which is the only popular method of end-to-end email encryption. Which makes sense to me: PGP is renowned for terrible usability and hacked-together workflows.

FastMail has other, excellent security standards. They probably don’t take part in intelligence-gathering for nation-states, like Google did with PRISM. There are reasons to feel positive. But, practically, you’re going to write an email to your uncle with an AT&T account who undoubtedly uses a 5-character dictionary word password, and you’ll need to consider that message as a public artifact.

So – if you’re thinking about taking the leap, now’s a pretty good time to try out life without Google: the alternatives are strong and switching isn’t too painful. The Google Dashboard is arguably one of their best-maintained products, and it’s your ticket out - it’s the interface that lets you download and delete your data from Google.

As the current political situation unwinds there are things to watch for:

1. Now that the GOP mega-donors have their tax cut, do Republicans become more open to impeaching Trump? He is a huge liability for the 2018 mid-terms and impeachment might improve their odds as a way of distancing themselves from him.
2. As impeachment for Trump looks more and more likely, look for WikiLeaks to start dumping compromising information on Trump. If Putin can’t have a compromised politician in the White House then he can at least maximize the chaos. Also, WikiLeaks will point to such a dump of information and try to claim that they are unbiased.
3. Once impeachment proceedings start, look for Russia to make further inroads into Ukraine.

If you were dead, you’d be home by now.

Something I posted on Medium which I’m cross-posting here in case you don’t read Medium. 

They charged out of the trees, barking orders almost before they were close enough to be heard.

“Stop, boy. On your knees, boy. If you don’t follow our instructions, you’re dead, boy. You got friends? Where are your friends, boy?”

I only had two things of value on me, a morphine injector and some antibiotics. I knelt and injected myself, then began eating the antibiotics. Just so they couldn’t have them.

They shot me.

Ida! If she's not your hero, she should be. She's mine.

I gave an interview for the Appendix Journal, and cited her as a figure I'd like to make a comic about, but found it a hard thing, so that it never happened. The reason is easy - if you read about the things Ida Wells fought against, you won't laugh. You'll cry, I guarantee. And I thought, well I can't touch that woman with my dumb internet jokes, she's serious business. And she is.

But then, people use my comics as a launching device to learn history, and I would hope that part of what I do is to celebrate history, not just poke fun at the easy targets.

Anyway, I first saw a picture of Ida B. Wells at the Chicago History Museum. She was protesting the lack of African American representation at the Chicago World's Fair. And I am not sure what it was, but the image stuck with me. You could feel a power in the presence of the lady with the pamphlets. I found out later that she was also handing out information on the terrible truths of lynching in America, a crusade that she is best known for, and rightly so. Her writing on the topic is readily available on the internet, and if you read it, well you'll spend a good deal of time wondering at the terribleness of humanity, but you'll also note that she knew how to handle a volatile topic like that with an audience who didn't want to hear it. But, Ida fought against injustice wherever she saw it. You'll be happy to know, that at the 1913 Suffragist Parade in Washington, she was told to go to the back, but joined in the middle anyway.

I'll leave you with this, a review of Paula J. Giddings' Ida: A Sword Among Lions, from the Washington Post. Go forth, marvel at this woman, who was the best. Did I mention she was one of the first women in the country to keep her name when she married? A founding member of the NAACP? Ida! Just pioneer everything.

TED Talk: The Future of Sex Zoos

theatlantic:

There’s a Paranormal Activity Lab at University of Virginia

The market for stories of paranormal academe is a rich one. There’s Heidi Julavits’s widely acclaimed 2012 novel The Vanishers, which takes place at a New England college for aspiring Sylvia Brownes. And, of course, there’s Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters—Marvel’s take on Andover or Choate—where teachers read minds and students pass like ghosts through ivy-covered walls.

The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine is decidedly less fantastic than either Julavits’s or Marvel’s creations, but it’s nevertheless a fascinating place. Founded in 1967 by Dr. Ian Stevenson—originally as the Division of Personality Studies—its mission is “the scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relation to matter, may be incomplete.”

Read more. [Image: P.Morrissey/Flickr]

"The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge… or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Dr. Stevenson."

— A quote that Dr. Stevenson probably got very tired of.

Great Scowls of Cinema.

• I once sat in a meeting around 2002 where someone tried to talk UBISOFT out of putting Tom Clancy’s name on the games.
• I was once asked to leave the set of a Sugar Ray video.
• I once interviewed a guy for a job and he told me he had a “brilliant” idea and if I hired him he would tell me the idea. I still think about that one.
• I had a boss try to get me to register a domain name with a space in it. He was the sort of guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Well in a few years everyone will have spaces in their domain names.”

In the afterlife — you could be headed for the serious strife.

I don’t doubt that the overwhelming majority of you didn’t play one of the year’s best strategy games — through no fault of your own, of course. Turn-based strategy game Skulls of the Shogun was universally lauded by critics (including Strategy Core‘s Geoff Byers, who was kind enough to guest review it for us) but launched as a Windows 8 exclusive. Versions of Windows adhere strictly to the Star Trek feature film rule: only every other one is any good, and thus a great game went unplayed by most.

That changes today: Skulls of the Shogun is out right now in a surprise release for iOS. It’s a Universal app, and it’s five bucks.

17-Bit’s current project is the Playstation 4 arcade shooter Galak-Z. I spoke with Skulls producer Borut Pfiefer yesterday — he’s not working with 17-Bit at the moment, and he’s currently toiling away on ”a more serious cross-genre RPG, set during the election protests in Iran in 2009″. Can’t wait to hear more about that.

Skulls of the Shogun casts you as the shade of a Japanese general on a crusade through the underworld to become Shogun of the Dead, leading armies of ghost samurai in turn-based battles. The game is single-player primarily but there’s pass-and-play multiplayer on iOS. Watch the trailer below.

UPDATE: A couple of readers have written in to inform me that there’s online multiplayer that’s cross-platform with the PC edition of the game. Nice one, 17-Bit.

Our playlists our filled with One Hit Wonders like My Sharona, Tainted Love and Final Countdown. One Hit wonders are the non-nutritious food of the music world – they are Twinkie’s, the Ho Hos and the Yodels of our musical diet.  But what should we listen to when we want a full and nutritious musical meal?  We should look for music by artists that have deeper catalogs – artists where the fans spend substantial time listening to the non-hits. These are the Deep Artists, the opposite of the One Hit Wonders – the artists that you can spend months or years listening to and exploring their collection.

Unfortunately, there’s no master list of Deep Artists – but I have lots of music listener data, so I figured I could build one.  Here’s what I did. First I restricted my results to somewhat familiar artists with at least 100 songs in their catalog. I then scored each artist by the percentage of song plays that occur in the deep catalog versus the total plays for the artist – where deep catalog means a song that is not in the top ten for that artist.  This gives each artist a Deepness Score that I could then use to sort artists to give us a list of the Deepest Artists.  Here are the top ten:

Click for the full list

Not surprising to see Johann Sebastian Bach at number two. Bach has no real ‘hits’ – and indeed has an incredibly deep catalog. 90% of all Bach plays occur in Bach’s non-top 10.  The number one deep artist is Vitamin String Quartet – they have 3500 covers of songs with no clear hits among them.

Looking at the full list we see jam bands like Phish and Grateful Dead, AOR staples like Pink Floyd and David Bowie.

I’ve built a list of a little over 500 of the Deepest Artists. These are artists that have a deepness score of 50% or greater – meaning that at least 50% of all listens for the artist is in the deeper cuts.  This Thanksgiving if you are looking for some more nutritious music, stay away from Alice’s Restaurant and other One Hit Wonders and listen to music by artists on this Deep Artists list.

Update: Glenn looked at these results and felt that a nutritious music meal shouldn’t include Vitamin String Quartet (it’s the ‘artificially-fortified sugar-coated cereal of music’ according to Glenn), so Glenn took a different approach with different results. Glenn calls his results boring, but I think they are quite interesting. Read his post: Good  Boring results

Pictured: Not Lone Wolf

Another week, another gamebook to review.

Unlike Sorcery! I am not at all familiar with the Lone Wolf series. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of the series until news of this app surfaced about 3 months ago. So, going in, I was expecting more of the same: read text, make a choice, read text, fight something, read text, etc. This was the standard model started by the original gamebooks, and recaptured so well by Tin Man Games. Sorcery! changed things up a bit by removing the “book” and leaving you with a lot of “game”. Instead of making page number choices, you moved a pawn on a map. Instead of rolling dice, you played a rope-a-dope minigame with paper dolls.

Lone Wolf is something completely different. Sure, there’s a lot of text to read and choices to be made. It’s all the stuff you can do outside those gamebook tropes that makes Lone Wolf more a fully-fledged RPG than merely a gamebook.

In fact, if it weren’t for a few major issues, Lone Wolf wouldn’t just be the best gamebook on my iPad, it would be one of the greatest games on my iPad, period.

Without a doubt, Lone Wolf is the best looking gamebook I’ve ever seen. Hell, it’s one of the prettiest apps, period. The entire book is like the Marauder’s Map, with text appearing to flow onto the page and full-page illustrations seemingly coming to life. Transitioning to combat is like Dorothy opening her door for the first time: sepia toned pages are pulled back to reveal a vibrant, color-filled world. Lone Wolf can stand proudly amongst the Infinity Blades and Real Racings in the pantheon of eye-candy apps.

It’s not shown on the character sheet, but Lone Wolf has an 18 Charisma

Graphics, however, do not make a game worth playing, and when it comes to gameplay, Lone Wolf, again, differentiates itself from other gamebooks. They start you as a predefined character with the only differences between playthroughs being how healthy or strong you are. Lone Wolf, on the other hand, gives you an Elder Scrolls-like questionnaire at the beginning of the book, allowing you to create a unique character with unique powers. It’s a cool system, and one that encourages replayability, just so you can try it with some other disciplines.

Unlike other gamebooks, that treat your inventory in the same way an adventure game would, Lone Wolf has an inventory system more akin to Baldur’s Gate or Diablo. You have a backpack with a limited number of slots, and can find bags to increase how much you can carry. Inventory management becomes an issue due to the amount of random loot you find after every encounter. Things like weapons, potions and reagents will fill your bags almost too quickly, as you won’t find a merchant until rather far into the story. At the merchant,  you can buy, sell, and craft items or even use the stash to save items you don’t want to carry. Yes, I said craft items. You can upgrade your items at the merchant using reagents you have found on your journey. It’s another feature that you wouldn’t expect in a gamebook, and one that reinforces that RPG feeling.

You want more RPG goodness? Lone Wolf levels up after every chapter, gaining new stat points and boosting your combat prowess. There is also a skill-based leveling system, where your skills get stronger and will level up the more you use them. Chests and doors can be opened with a lockpicking mini-game that is straight out of Elder Scrolls Oblivion, and can be frustrating as hell. It happens so infrequently, however, that I found myself actually looking forward to the lockpicking game whenever it appeared. I wish the same could be said for the combat.

Get used to this image. You’ll see it a lot.

Combat is really what brings Lone Wolf back from the precipice of greatness. Combat is turn-based…kind of. You have a timer in which you can try to get as much done as possible: drink potions, perform different attacks, cast spells, etc. When the timer ends, the Giaks (think orcs or goblins) get to go and you have to stand there and take it. Attacks are all done via quick time events.

For example, when you throw knives there are circles on the screen. At a certain point, you need to tap all three circles or you miss with the knives. Likewise for weapon attacks, you have to swipe or tap at a certain time, or miss. It’s not quite as limiting as Infinity Blade’s combat. Lone Wolf gives you more choices to make, and it’s not as frantic.

I hated combat at first, but once I figured out how everything worked, it wasn’t too bad. The problem is the frequency and repetitiveness of combat. You fight a lot. Seriously, there is a ton of combat. That would be cool if they weren’t all exactly the same. Exactly the same. You will fight the same monsters (the Giaks) throughout the entire game. A couple of times they throw something called a Drakkar (think bigger orc or goblin) at you, but it’s just a Giak with a different skin and more hit points (and he’s accompanied by more Giaks). Tactically, I never had to deviate from my combat routine, other than focus on the Drakkar first.  Combat became rote, boring and way too long. It became a detriment, rather than a boon. After a time, I absolutely dreaded it.

It was here that Lone Wolf gave a rousing rendition of Bring Him Home.

The lack of variation in enemies makes perfect sense from a story standpoint. You’re investigating a small town that has been attacked by an army of Giaks, after all. This raises the other problem I had with Lone Wolf, however. It is very well written, especially in comparison to other gamebooks, but the story is bland. At the beginning you find a village has been attacked. The entire story deals with…nothing else, really. You walk around and kill Giaks. Occasionally you’ll find a survivor. That’s it. Eventually you’ll find an NPC who tasks you with finding parts for a machine in the village, but due to the books linearity, I’m not sure there’s any way to not find the parts. It’s just a matter of following the map to the next location, fighting, and getting a part. Once you find the parts, the book ends. There’s no boss battle, no conclusion, nothing. You find the pieces and escape. If you take the combat out of the equation, the book is incredibly short. I’m sure I could have finished it in an hour if it wasn’t for all the combat.

The entire book reminded me of Sorcery! Part 1, in that it didn’t have a strong plot on its own, and I hope it gets better with parts 2-4. Sorcrey! Part 1 is definitely a better book now that Sorcery! Part 2 is out. I would imagine the same to be true for Lone Wolf.

So, do I recommend Lone Wolf? Yes, definitely. I did have a great time with it, for a bit. The RPG elements are amazing, and the presentation is wonderful. If the next volumes in the series can add plot and variety to the combat, this would be one of the greatest games ever made for iPad. As it stands, however, it’s merely one of the better gamebooks for iPad.

Pocket Tactics Rating: 4/5

We live in San Francisco, but not the “Full House”, “Charmed”, “Vertigo” San Francisco. Our neighborhood is as close to San Francisco gets to working class without being frightening. Just diverse folks, non-chain coffee shops, lots of dim sum, skeezy pot clubs and one decent sushi place with about 15 seats.

A few years ago, on a day that will live in infamy, we went down to our local sushi joint and within a few minutes of ordering, a guy comes in, takes the table in the middle of the small restaurant and starts talking - very loudly - on his phone. He simply pointed to what he was getting on the menu as to not disturb his conversation. Except his conversation seemed to be entirely about his plans for the day.

He didn’t do much listening, just talking, and then suddenly he made another phone call, having almost the verbatim conversation about his plans - his three very specific goals - for the day.

And then he did it again. And again. And again. Not even pausing to listen, change topics or even really chew.

The order of events, phrasing and rhythm became an unnatural thing - almost a lonely man’s haiku. It seemed strange. I almost suspected some sort of weird “Candid Camera”/”Punk’d” thing or, given it is the Bay Area, some PR stunt by a start up.

I was nearly convinced he was simply the world’s worst “brand buzz agent” for the movie VANTAGE POINT, until…

It was clear instead that this brief flirtation with mediocre sushi and Supercuts might be the only moments in the day this 20-something guy spent away from his mother - and the only non-mother topics he might have to talk about.

So if you ask us what we want to do in a day - or make a reference to sushi that isn’t the classic REPO MAN line - know that we’re not quoting a movie, a show, a play or even a bad SNL sketch.

And we will certainly never actually watch VANTAGE POINT.

Someone decided to solve a concurrency issue at work by generating a random number between 1 and 1000 and appending it to a resource name. More than one person agreed that this was good.

This is a guy, BTW, that was concerned about duplicate GUIDs being generated.