firehose

Happy 25th Birthday, Game Boy ⊟

What a great system you were. This artwork from Eliran Cohen reminds me so much of my experience with the Game Boy, absolutely immersed in whatever I was playing, no matter where I was.

If you haven’t read it yet, USgamer published a wonderful article celebrating the Game Boy, which JC and I contributed to. Here’s a scrap I wrote for it:

My memories playing Game Boy remain vivid, and remembering them now, you couldn’t have them with a home console. Backtracking around Metroid II during a long, turbulent flight over the Pacific. Having my mind blown when I first started Final Fantasy Adventure in the back of my aunt’s Monte Carlo, when your hero gets thrown off the cliff. Jumping through Elec Man’s stage in Dr. Wily’s Revenge, in between eating chicken nuggets at a Chinese food restaurant while my mom gossiped with her friends.

I still return to Link’s Awakening every few years, spending an afternoon by a window. I’m always trying to recapture the days I’d explore Koholint Island, hiding under the dinner table, hidden so no one could bother me and break the immersion but peeking out just enough so the sun could still warm my skin. If I could still fit in them, I’d probably try playing games in a laundry hamper again, too.

Feel free to share your Game Boy memories and birthday wishes!

SEE ALSO More handholding posts (our handheld gamer photo series)

In tribute to “4’33″,” the classic silent song by avant-garde composer John Cage, Brooklyn-based graphic designer Adam Lucas has created “Cage Does Cage,” four minutes and 33 seconds of silent mugging from National Treasure star Nicolas Cage. The 2012 video is built from clips culled from across Nicolas Cage’s career in which the actor doesn’t utter a single word.

via WFMU

Having already picked up Game Of Thrones for two more seasons, HBO today issued renewals to the series that have benefited from its lead-in, Veep and Silicon Valley, for a fourth and second season, respectively. In addition to being another sharp corporate satire from Mike Judge, as Deadline notes, Silicon Valley has already enjoyed HBO’s best debut for a half-hour comedy since Hung, as the network successfully gambled that Game Of Thrones viewers might enjoy watching a show about nerds. And while Veep has seen a slight dip in the ratings, creatively it’s coalesced into one of the best comedic ensembles on television. (And if that’s not enough to get your attention, Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently did this.) Their renewals ensure at least one more year of the comedy of people frantically gathering around computers.

Such takes. Much tie. Wow.

Let's be charitable, to the extent possible: some of what makes ESPN's Merril Hoge such a clownish figure is Merril Hoge, but a lot of it is Merril Hoge's job. There is even a sense in which Merril Hoge -- the barking anthropomorphized Slim Jim and former NFL fullback filling the role of Designated NFL Draft Heel at ESPN, and devoted anti-apostle of Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney -- is good at this terrible job.

We are edging out into some meta-performative territory, here, which is maybe not a good idea given that we're talking about a man with a perfectly rectangular head, a tie knot the size and thickness of a regulation volleyball, and some extremely overstated and contrarian opinions about various famous young football players. But if Merril Hoge is not necessarily good at assessing the qualities of NFL Draft prospects, or even appreciably more thoughtful about it than the doofs engaging in grump-o Scott Pioli Cosplay in various comment sections, we should at least consider the possibility that it is actually Merril Hoge's job to be wrong, in the most strident possible way.

And while Hoge is not quite as virtuosic at this dubiously necessary gig as Skip Bayless, the leatherette lava god of molten-hot takes, we might as well give credit where it's due. Dude is not just ready but eager to stake out unpopular positions, and then just continue to stake them out. The facts will shift, he will be exposed, but Hoge will still drive those stakes further and further down into the earth. Down and down he drives them, until Hoge is staring the devil himself in the face, squinting out something about how Johnny Manziel is definitely, definitely going to be a bust.

ESPN's Merril Hoge called Jadeveon Clowney's fundamentals "atrocious." "Not a very good football player .. Gets controlled & trucked a lot."

— Evan Silva (@evansilva) April 21, 2014

This is not all wrong! There are some things that Clowney does not yet do as well as he should, and which he will probably do better as he develops. Stephen White gave them a thoughtful going-over not very long ago. Hoge, who has been in and around football his entire life and so presumably knows something about it, is not making those points. Instead, he's just doing what he does: saying a thing, and then saying it louder and louder until the camera cuts away, at which point he may well continue saying it, but is at least and at last out of earshot.

The issue, here, is not that Hodge is ceaselessly, stridently wrong in his assessments of various NFL prospects. That wrongness is a problem for ESPN, maybe, at least among the people -- and we might as well assume they exist -- that persist in watching the network's endless and antic NFL Draft coverage as news, instead of as unwittingly vicious satire on the idea of a 24-hour sports network. But the wrongness is decidedly not a problem for Hoge, professionally, both because most everyone involved in the NFL player evaluation process is ceaselessly, stridently wrong and because Hoge's job is not to be un-wrong, but to produce piping-hot takes on demand, first and last and always.

There is something almost unseemly about how well suited Hoge is for this task. Relentless braying certitude and a simultaneous tendency to be hostile to young strangers are not especially sought-after personality traits, for obvious reasons. But they're necessities for those making a living in the business of NFL Draft kayfabe-ry, and they seem to come quite naturally to Hoge. He exists beyond right or wrong, beyond insight or introspection. ESPN pays him to be very specifically this way.

Life, for most of us, is a series of didactic humblings -- we are wrong, constantly, and we learn from it or don't; we learn to feel sorry and apologize or we don't. This tends to quiet us down, as time goes by, but it builds us up, too. When we learn to be quiet, to take a minute and think, to honor opinions other than ours and recognize that the world is larger than the part of near enough to hear us yelling about whatever we're yelling about, we are growing, and growing stronger. This is important for us, and good.

But it's not for Merril Hoge, because it is not what ESPN's coverage of the NFL Draft is about. This is a fantasy place -- a place where being wrong has no consequences, ruled by various rum-dummy-dum fatuities about martial virtue and Knowing How To Win, and where men talk loudly, all the time and without doubt.

The broadcasts beamed from that place are, accordingly, less about improving or illuminating than maintaining -- a consistent level of noise, a consistent churn of slides and surges and rises and falls and little micro-controversies to fill the time between now and the draft. Hoge's job, more than anything else, depends upon him staying exactly the same, and being wrong in exactly the same ways, every year about this time.

Merril Doge by James Dator.

What kind of company is Apple, anyway?

They certainly have great technology, but to call them a technology company doesn’t seem quite right. They have great marketing, but to call them a marketing company isn’t true either. They have an incredible retail chain, but to call them a retailer is clearly off base as well.

You could ask a similar question about Nike.

They started with shoes, but their product line has extended far beyond that. Certainly they are a marketing company, one of the best in the world, but they also make many genuinely innovative products. Over the last few years they’ve been expanding their push into software and wearables, yet no one thinks of them as a technology company. And, despite self-owned and franchised stores in almost every neighborhood in the world,¹ no one thinks of them as a retailer either.

Interestingly, both Apple and Nike have markedly similar business models: as various pundits never tire of telling us, Apple is selling a commodity and is doomed to inevitable margin pressure and/or massive loss of share in the face of good-enough cheap Android. For better or worse we in tech are stuck with these folks, because who knows what they would make of a company like Nike, selling pieces of leather and bits of fabric. Talk about a commodity! And yet, there is Nike, sporting a ~45% gross margin in an industry that averages 33%. Clearly they are more than just an apparel maker.

My wife just registered for the Nike Women’s Half Marathon here in Taipei; in order to register, you had to have logged at least 50km using the Nike+ Running App over the last month; immediately after registering you were presented with specially made products featuring the race logo. Typing that out sounds, well, rather annoying, but the reality was quite the opposite. My wife downloaded the app, clocked up the miles, counted down to the deadline, and joyfully bought a new pair of running pants (I was impressed at her restraint). It was fun.

What Nike is selling is the experience of being a runner (or a basketball player or a tennis player or a golfer, etc.) It’s not just the athletes in their advertisements, or the quality of their shoes, the sportiness of the clothes, or the sophistication of the apps. It’s the whole, and it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Nike is an experience company. They sell a commodity product, and make their profit off of the differentiation provided by the Nike experience. And they’re better at it than just about any company in the world, except maybe Apple.

After all, Apple too is an experience company. They are not selling you a computer, or a phone, or a tablet; they are selling an experience that encapsulates everything from their ads to their stores to their packaging to the actual user experience of their devices. They sell a commodity product, and make their profit off of the differentiation provided by the Apple experience.

Serving on corporate boards is fairly common for C-level executives, but not at Apple under Steve Jobs. To my knowledge the only exception was Tim Cook, who joined Nike’s board in 2005.² A year later Nike and Apple released the Nike+iPod, a hugely successful collaboration that made an iPod Nano about as omnipresent as a water bottle for a great many runners, and a pair of Nikes the default choice for anyone with an iPod.

Since then the collaboration has continued, especially with the FuelBand, which has an app only for the iPhone, along with significant shelf space in Apple Retail stores. Of course the FuelBand also always seemed a potential stumbling block: would Tim Cook really release a competing product (the alleged iWatch) to the company on whose Board he sat?

Well, now that stumbling block is gone: CNET reported over the weekend that Nike fired a majority of the FuelBand team and will stop making wearable hardware:

The company informed members of the 70-person hardware team — part of its larger, technology-focused Digital Sport division comprised of about 200 people — of the job cuts Thursday. About 30 employees reside at Nike’s Hong Kong offices, with the remainder of the team at Nike’s Beaverton, Ore., headquarters.

Nike’s Digital Sport hardware team focused on areas like industrial design; manufacturing operations; electrical and mechanical hardware engineering; and software interface design. Products included not only the FuelBand but also the Nike+ sportwatch and other, more peripheral sport-specific initiatives.

First off, I highly doubt this was directly connected to Apple. By all accounts the FuelBand was a money pit and the Secret thread that first revealed the firings suggested the same. Secondly, the FuelBand was interesting in a product sense but didn’t make much business sense for Nike. It didn’t lead to the direct sale of any of their products, since it was meant for wearing around the home and office; relatedly, while there may have been some brand utility in people sporting a Nike+ wearable, a product meant to make you take the stairs doesn’t exactly remind you of an athletic lifestyle.

All that said, Nike can read the rumor sites just as well as we can, and do happen to have particularly special access to Tim Cook and a history of partnering with Apple. And Apple is certainly better at “industrial design; manufacturing operations; electrical and mechanical hardware engineering; and software interface design.” I would not at all be surprised if Nike were happy to cast aside the FuelBand in favor of recreating the Nike+iPod with the (alleged) iWatch.

The question, then, is were such a partnership to come about, what might Apple gain from Nike? Obviously we are well into the realm of speculation, but certainly the biggest question about a potential iWatch is what job it might do. And, perhaps, it really is there right in front of us.

Think about the iPhone: before it could make a call or go on the Internet, there was the iPod, which did nothing more than play music. But the foundation built by the iPod, iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store helped the iPhone tremendously, leading not only to software innovations like the App Store, but also hardware breakthroughs in miniaturization and battery life. You have to start somewhere.

So it is with a wearable. It’s not too difficult to imagine a future where your wrist is the center of your digital life, projecting a contextually appropriate user interface to the nearest dumb screen, but it’s even easier to see how that’s just not possible now – just like the iPhone wasn’t possible when the iPod launched in 2001. But you have to start somewhere.

So then, if you want a beachhead, is there a population that is already in the habit of wearing electronic accessories and loves measuring themselves? And, if you wanted the absolute best chance of winning that market, might you not want to partner with the company that sells the experience you want to provide?

Truthfully, the only reason to think Apple might not want to partner with Nike in this way is, well, because they’re Apple. But remember, Apple was quite pleased to launch the iPhone with Google services,³ and has cooperated with Microsoft for years; they’ve also long had by far the best and most comprehensive content deals. Apple’s business development acumen is one of its least appreciated competitive advantages, and their products are better when it is utilized. I bet that’s exactly the case with the iWatch.

The post Apple and Nike appeared first on stratechery by Ben Thompson.

Of the many horror stories we hear about GMOs, few are as heart-rending as the one about how nearly 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves over failed cotton crops. What's also horrible is that the story is a complete fabrication.

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(Data from International Social Survey Programme; tabulation by Larry Bartels)

The United States does less to redistribute income than virtually any other economically “advanced” democracy. So why does class conflict loom so much larger in U.S. public opinion about government spending than in other affluent democracies? The answer may have something to do with our peculiar system of taxation.

The claim that America is riven by class conflict may come as a surprise to people who like to think that “There are no classes in America,” as Rick Santorum put it during his 2012 presidential campaign. But the fact is that rich and poor Americans disagree about government spending to an extent virtually unmatched elsewhere in the world.

In 2006, just before the onset of the Great Recession, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) asked people in 33 countries about “some things the government might do for the economy.” In the United States, 63 percent of the respondents favored (or strongly favored) “cuts in government spending” to boost the economy, while only 13 percent opposed (or strongly opposed) such cuts. But that was not so unusual; in 15 other affluent democracies, an average of 57 percent of the respondents favored cuts in government spending.

What is much more remarkable about the pattern of opinion in the United States is the extent to which it was polarized along class lines. In the other affluent democracies, net support for spending cuts was virtually constant across income groups, from the very poor to the very affluent. In the United States , however, poor people were only slightly more likely to favor than to oppose spending cuts, while affluent people were vastly more likely to favor spending cuts. No other rich country even came close to matching this level of class polarization in budget-cutting preferences. Among the poorer countries included in the ISSP survey, only one displayed a larger division of opinion between rich and poor — South Africa.

What accounts for the remarkable enthusiasm for government budget-cutting among affluent Americans? Presumably not the sheer magnitude of redistribution in the United States, which is modest by world standards. And presumably not a traditional aversion to government in American political culture, since less affluent Americans are exposed to the same political culture as those who are more prosperous. A more likely suspect is the entanglement of class and race in America, which magnifies aversion to redistribution among many affluent white Americans. Another is the “hidden” nature of the American welfare state, which funnels subsidies to affluent people indirectly through tax breaks on mortgages and health insurance rather than providing them with public housing and free clinics.

The U.S. tax system is also quite different from most affluent countries’ in its heavy reliance on progressive income taxes. The political implications of this difference are magnified by the remarkable salience of income taxes in Americans’ thinking about taxes and government. Matthew Yglesias chides the Heritage Foundation for harping on the steep progressivity of federal income taxes while ignoring payroll taxes and state and local taxes, which make the overall U.S. tax system much less progressive. But it’s not just the Heritage Foundation.

Income taxes seem to dominate public discussion of taxes and tax policy. For example, years of dramatic political confrontation culminated in a grudging agreement to shave a few percentage points off the Bush tax cuts for incomes over $400,000 per year; meanwhile, a major reduction in the payroll taxes paid by millions of ordinary working Americans expired with barely a whimper. Thinking about the cost of government solely in terms of federal income taxes makes it tempting for affluent Americans to see politics as a battle between “makers” and “takers” — between them and Mitt Romney’s famous “47 percent … who are dependent on government.”

Some readers of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s bombshell research on economic elite domination have questioned whether the outsized political influence of affluent people really matters, since they agree with ordinary Americans on most political issues anyway. Most issues, but by no means all—as Gilens’s previous work handsomely demonstrates. The remarkable enthusiasm of affluent Americans for government budget-cutting is a prime example of what is at stake in economic elite domination of the U.S. political system.

(The affluent democracies included in my comparison were those with GDP per capita in excess of $25,000 in 2006 — Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The other countries in the 2006 ISSP study included Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The levels of net support for government spending cuts shown in the figures are calibrated to range from −100 for strong opposition to +100 for strong support; thus, the positive values indicate net support for spending cuts all across the income spectrum in the U.S. and elsewhere. The levels of net unmet demand for social welfare spending are calibrated to range from −100 for respondents who want to spend much less on each program to +100 for those who want to spend much more; so positive values indicate net support for spending increases.)

Cat videos are okay, rolling raccoon is better.

While it’s not quite the Northwest Passage early explorers were looking for, the United States actually does have a continuous line of water dividing the country…

Tucked high in the mountains of the Teton Wilderness Area in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, the Parting of the Waters is a hydrological oddity. Straddling the appropriately-named Two Ocean Pass on the Continental Divide, North Two Ocean Creek flows south along the divide before splitting into Atlantic Creek to the east and Pacific Creek to the west…

Anyone up for a hike to the Parting of the Waters can actually visit the site and walk across it, or throw sticks in the stream and guess whose stick will float to which ocean…

(via Reddit, M. Mark Miller, Dan & Anna’s Adventures)

Interestingly, the Parting of the Waters isn’t the only place where this unusual occurrence exists. A nearby example is Yellowstone National Park’s Isa Lake, which sits on the Continental Divide and is believed to be the world’s only natural lake to drain backwards into two different oceans.

10 Commandments of Typography

Fox 13:

A 2-year-old boy injured when his older sister reportedly shot him by accident Friday died of his injuries while in a hospital, and officials are urging people to review the way they store their guns and ammunition. Police officials stated Saturday morning that crews responded Friday at 6:40 p.m. to 3616 W. 2200 South in Young Ward, an unincorporated area of Cache County southwest of Logan, where the victim had been shot in the stomach with a .22 rifle.

A press release from the Cache County Sheriff’s Office states investigators believe the rifle had been used earlier in the day by the children’s father and left in the living room area of the house. The release stated the gun was “in an unloaded state but did have live rounds in the magazine. We believe the 3 year old had to manipulate the action enough to chamber a live round prior to the incident occurring.”

You know what might prompt idiots to think about "the way they store" their stupid fucking guns? The arrest, prosecution, and—if they're found guilty—imprisonment of other gun owning idiots whose improperly stored guns result in the deaths of their own children. That isn't going to happen, of course, not in America, where guns are cherished and children are expendable: authorities in Utah say they're “comfortable referring to this case as an accidental shooting" and they would like the community to view this child's extremely painful death not as a crime but as "a stark reminder of the importance of keeping all kinds of weapons out of the reach of children."

We get "stark reminders" just like this one several times a week. Maybe we need starker reminders? But could there be a starker reminder?

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Los Angeles musician and composer Andy Rehfeldt created a fantastic video, in which the heavy metal band Dio appears to perform a sexy jazz version of their 1983 hit song Holy Diver. All music was mixed by audio engineer Grant Cornish, with arrangement, performance, and recording by Andy. We’ve previously written about Andy’s smooth jazz version of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica and a death metal version of “What A Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong.

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Photographer Douglas Sonders has put together a beautiful campaign seeking to educate the public in hopes of changing opionions preconceived notions about pit bulls and other “bully breeds” with his photo series aptly named “Not A Bully“.

The term ‘bully breed’ covers 14 popular dog breeds including French Bulldogs and Boston Terriers. Two of the most popular domestic dog breeds in the country, Boxers and Rottweilers, are both designated bully breeds. Despite their popularity, many people still believe these dogs are inherently mean, aggressive, or even violent. Dispelling these rumors is the focus of Not a Bully….Many communities treat all bully breed dogs with extreme prejudice regardless of their temperament or personality. Shelters are crowded with loving bully breed dogs, cruelly limited in their chances of finding forever homes. Through beautiful portraits and inspiring rescue stories, Not a Bully hopes to eradicate the negativity towards these deserving pets and give them a fighting chance at a forever home!

The campaign was recently featured on the National Geographic‘ Cesar Millan: Love My Pit Bull, featuring dog trainer Cesar Millan who loaned his pit bulls Emma and Junior to the cause. Other donations can be made through various bully breed charities.

images by Douglas Sonders

via F-stoppers, PetaPixel

nevver:

Toothpaste for dinner

Kanzi the bonobo gathers wood, lights a match and builds himself a fire to roast the marshmallows that he so clearly enjoys in this lovely video by BBC One Monkey Planet.

via The Mirror

Rocco, a skittish springer spaniel, screeches at a squirrel he can’t get to because he’s stuck in the the car in this 2013 video posted by his human Meaghan Griffin.

via Nothing to Do With Arbroath

App Camp For Girls is coming to Seattle. Cool news for my town.

Supermaterial graphene is among the world's strongest, thinnest, and most flexible substances, and, according to a newly published scientific paper, it can now be made using a standard kitchen blender.

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