Today, Penny-Arcade had a very interesting comic about second hand games.

And it’s the usual controversy about the second-hand market you have come to expect. Developers and Publishers hate second hand games, they don’t see any money from it. While end users love it because they can obtain titles for sometimes half of what you’d have to pay typically for a brand new title. Now, I do understand where developers are coming from as a content creator. I get it. You want to make as much money as you can with what you have. It makes sense.

But, as with every other industry that sells information or an experience: they forgot about the needs of their clientele. This move does absolutely nothing but showcase how out-of touch they are with their audience. They often think that $80 dollars for a game isn’t expensive, but it is. It is so out-of-line that it’s kind of staggering on how little developers and publishers seem to think about the wallets or bank accounts of their “customers” unless it’s how much they can drain from them. They continually hammer you over the head about YOU should care about THEIR fragile little careers (I live in Vancouver, there’s a few developers here. They don’t have to worry about rent or bills, I can tell you that.) while they openly and shamelessly treat you, the “customer” like nothing more than a walking sack of money that’s waiting to be cut open and drained. That’s if they don’t openly imply you a thief for trying to make ends meet and still play their game.

I’ve brought this up before, but the fact bears reiteration: Gaming is more expensive than developers realize and they are at a point where they don’t even really remember how much it costs. lets take a look at the breakdown of it:

• Firstly you need a gaming platform. For the sake of argument we are going to go with the cheaper option: consoles. So an Xbox 360 will set you back $200.00 at the cheapest option.
• Secondly, you need an entertainment rig, or at the very least just a Television. Tube sets are essentially obsolete, so lets take a look at an affordable flat screen that isn’t a pile of un-viewable junk. $600.00. (and were leaving a stereo out of the equation, just to play Devil’s Advocate)
• Microsoft and Valve would really like you to have an Xbox Live account to play with friends, purchase DLC as well as a low-cost way of generating income. They give you the option to try it out, but it’s $19.99 for a few months to get started.

So now we’re coming up on a thousand dollars and we haven’t even bought one damn game yet. And if you’re playing on a PC? you can easily tack on an extra $1000.00 – $2000.00 depending on how nice you want your rig to be. What other kind of pass-time requires a minimum of $1000 in investments as a starting point before you can even go out and get going? I can tell you right now, my guitar is a decent make and, in comparison, is looking mighty attractive right now considering it cost about 1/3 of my gaming setup and is usually more rewarding to spend time with.

Developers: your games are only ONE option of many for a person like me to spend their time with. You have to remember that you are competing with all manner of other pass-times & hobbies for my limited amount of dollars to be spent on and I’m choosing to buy your games instead of pirating them outright because I think it’s a just cause to pay for good content, but I am not made of money, and it’s ridiculous to think that I am. You have to remember that my choice is simply that: a choice. If you make it any more difficult to play your games, I’m going to just walk away to any one of the other forms of entertainment that I enjoy.

My DVD collection won’t stop me from watching my movies because I didn’t buy a band new copy, nor will Gibson stop my guitar from making music if I had bought it from my dad.

I like your games. And I’m willing to pay money for them. But right now, the bottom line is that you’re looking at me pulling cash out of my wallet and parting with money to play your games and you’re telling me that I can’t do that. I will walk away from your business unless you change your attitude.

I am really fascinated by electronic music again, lately. Mostly strange, obscure spin-off genres that showcase odd tempos and radical ways to even think of how you’d play a synthesizer or a drum machine. And it’s pretty fun, exploring like this. I might try something of it.

I shoulda did this upgrade a long time ago…. Though, the G5 is still crunching away as a media center host. It does that VERY well.

A post of Copyright Bill C-61 has been floating around the web for some time now and to be honest, I’m not too sure if I find it useful to anybody. If  we look at what Jim Prentice had to say about it, the Industry Minister has stated you get this:

“Our government has committed to ensuring Canada’s copyright law is up-to-date, and today we are delivering by introducing this ‘made-in-Canada’ bill that balances the interests of Canadians who use digital technology and those who create content”

And, so… basically we can copy legally acquired music, television shows, ebooks, photographs and movies to digital devices like iPods and the like. Call me crazy, but that’s what I thought people were already doing for years, now. I know I have. Although, I have to admit that the “timeshifting” term is a bit silly. I mean, the whole idea is that you’re temporarily saving a recording of a program that you can view at a time that fits your schedule better. Jesus, we’ve been doing this exact same thing since the personal videocassette recorder and VHS tapes were introduced the public. Why is this even an issue now? just because it’s being saved sooner and to a hard drive instead of a spool of tape?

Actually, I imagine that it’s because you could rip these saved videos and throw them up on all sorts of legally questionable websites.

This bill does have an air of positivity and a lot of it is spun in such a way to make us feel that we’re gaining all manners of new freedoms that haven’t been addressed before, but at the end of the day, the gist I can derive out of the bill is to allow Canadians the ability to copy and save and store digital media in their own libraries at home and to move them to portable digital devices and players with enough freedom to match what would be the equivalent to a creative commons licence…  unless it has had some form of DRM on it when you bought it. And giving content producers and providers enough of a heads-up to put DRM on anything and everything.

This doesn’t give balance to anyone. It is turning this whole situation into the same stupid cat & mouse game we’ve already had to deal with, just with a newer rulebook. And none of the major rules had changed.

So, I’ve had my hands on an iPad for about two and a half weeks now. It may not sound like the biggest deal in the world, but I live in Canada and the iPad isn’t bound for release up here for a few more weeks. (no I didn’t run to the states to pick it up.)

My first impressions were that it’s a very fancy web surfing machine that is, actually, quite nice to bum around the web on. You get a very “Minority Report” vibe from some of the ways you can interact with it. The size is actually kind of…  sort of, halfway large once you get it in your hands and start using it. I use a 13-inch screen laptop 75% of the time and I somehow feel I get the same amount of screen real-estate in some strange way. But, that’s all about the usability of the device, itself. It’s a device designed by Jonathan Ive, it was always going to look amazing and be nice to use and none of that was ever really in question. To doubt Ive’s design capacity would be like saying that Valve Software is working on an A-list gaming title and it is somehow suspect to flopping.

The big thing that has kept me using it every spare few minutes I have is the alternate, more subversive implied use for this device that I think is going to really open up a whole side of modern day digitization. It’s the way you can view and subscribe to content that was normally only available in print or awkward websites. I’m talking about Magazines, Newspapers, Journals and the like. This thing could very well be the digital answer that print has been looking for. Because, lets face it: print is dying. Publishing a Newspaper or Magazine this day in age is a very, very, difficult space to be in right now and you even hint that there is some kind of reliable future in that space is just laughable.

A lot of the tech-aware Mags and Papers have made a serious effort to move online and have at least a digital end with a website or a mobile app or, in some rare cases, a desktop client or email newsletter on the extremely lazy end. But, the younger publications that have emerged from this new digital era of shared media have pretty much embraced the web and digital distribution out of the necessity or constraints of the internet. These publications are just now breaking the threshold of being respectable sources of information and often can operate and compete on a platform with traditional print media and can how stand shoulder to shoulder with old printed companies and say with complete confidence: “This is a digital age. Our industry is about to erupt into a large digital model and we should have, nay, NEED to have a proper, full featured device to experience our content on. It’s worked for video and especially for music. We need to get our act together.”

I’ve played with a Kindle and I’ve seen many reviews of Sony’s ereader and they all seem to have the shortcomings of the mobile market pre-iphone. All they do is read books. Like, novels, not mags or papers. And I honestly think that novels are going to stay fairly comfortable in the physical medium. Novels are a bit of a niche market to begin with and almost every last customer in that space loves their books. They love the feel, the smell, the weight and the way the form walls in a collection. I don’t think that has any shot of changing any time soon, or at least in the next ten years until some radical new way to READ a book is presented.

But magazines? I have a box of mags in my brother’s closet that him and I will never touch again. I do not regret spending money on them and on many issues of Keyboard Player, Computer Music and Electronic Musician I am really glad I parted with the ten dollars to explore the information put in there by the writers and editors of that title. But once you read an issue, the paper becomes a waste of space. It always has and would continue to be if it weren’t for the recent efforts to build a device to carry this kind of content. In full colour with dynamic, imbedded media and contextual linkage on a device small enough to put into a backpack or carry bag, but big enough to hold on your lap and read like a modest sized magazine.

The iPad is going to be the little black & silver rectangle that will sit on your coffee table that you will pick up like you would the newspaper or a magazine and flip through stories and articles like you would do normally, but there’s nothing to waste or throw away while the same content providers you enjoyed in print would continue to thrive and deliver you the same quality content you have come to enjoy. Or, at least they will, if they’re smart.

I know this because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing with this thing for two and a half weeks. I go to my desk during lunch, throw down my sandwich, take a sip of my coffe and then flick on the iPad and launch the Digg App and read magazine articles.  (and also read comics from Marvel’s comic reader app, that, I cannot say enough good things about. it is a JOY to use. I could write a whole post just about that little piece of software. If you haven’t given it a go, I suggest that you do.)

Oh yeah, and this thing does all the other stuff the iPhone does, too. And that’s turned out to be a bit of a half-way successful feature-set.

Kevin Rose posted on his website over yonder, a quaint little list of products that he thinks that he couldn’t go without, or it’s absence would adversely affect his life, as of right now, in 2010. And it really got me thinking to what kind of things would I say the same thing about. So I made my own.

Apple Computers / OS X

Logic Studio

Microsoft’s Xbox

Gmail

Gibson Guitars

Marshall Amplifiers

Clearvision Contact Lenses

Korg Legacy Collection

Korg Kontrol49

Translink’s Skytrain

Shaw Canada Broadband

iPhone 3G

Twitter

Foursquare

The bit I really liked about this idea was to compare and see how many of these products or services were digital or virtual in comparison. It’s probably more than you expected.

LISTEN TO ME

I wiggle my mouse, letting a laser sensor detect movement and send small electrical impulses down a copper cable via the universal serial bus into the front of my Apple PowerMac G5 where two IBM built PowerPC 970MP processors detect that movement and jolt to life together in unison, propelling my desktop computer to 2.0GHz per processor as it cycles through billions of calculations a second to frantically run the UNIX foundation that supports Mac OS X as a platform that flexes it’s muscles and hosts Core Audio that can detect my M-Audio audio interface over the universal serial bus and supply the electricity needed to not only power that input/output interface, but supply the extra 45 volts down it’s cable to my Nova where it powers the electronics and diaphragm of the microphone so it can receive and interpret sound pressure levels emitted by my Marshall Valvestate S80 amplifier who listens for the signals made by my Gibson SG guitar.

Where my hand and pic grazes the strings of it that vibrate at different frequencies depending on where I restrain those strings on various points along the guitar’s fretboard. the dual, plated humbucker pickups below the strings sense those strings vibrations with electromagnets wrapped in copper coil that generate small electrical signals that are routed inside the guitar, being coloured by the density of the wood and the coil of the strings as they pass through volume and tone filters that I could control with my hands with knobs on the face of the instrument and zaps on out through a 1/4 inch cable into my solid-state amplifier where those signals are sent through semiconductor circuits that use a combination of valve and solid-state technologies that create a unique overdriven sound and route it out to a pair of 12 inch speakers in a cabinet that continue to shape the sound before it expels outward as waves of particles and energy through the air and collides with my Nova microphone where it is then converted once more into electrical energy and is blasted down, through my I/O’s analog to digital converters that change electrical signals to digital information so my Macintosh’s Core Audio engine can read those packets of information and allow Logic Studio to route and record that information to my hard drives that are spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute.

All of this happens behind a graphical interface that allows me to modify, warp, change those recordings into a coherent “mix” where the guitars are spread out over a wide stereo spectrum and it’s harmonic content controlled with multi-band equalization so that the drum kit, who is a interface and algorithm with over 20,000 different samples of a given drum kit that interprets how I play my midi controller into different drum recordings, in real-time, to arrange different percussion patterns can eventually get mixed and summed with the recordings of my guitars in a mathematical algorithm where it is then converted, compressed and saved as an individual MPEG-Layer-3 coded file that I then upload over the TC/IP network that spans the entire fucking globe to a website that I own and run for a small-as-shit fee, so that anyone on the infinitely accessible internet can decide if they have the time to listen to what I had just spent the time creating or read what I had just self-published. for free.

EVERYONE.

everyone takes everything for granted, all the time.

and as much as I find the possibilities of what can be done with our technology inspiring and truly amazing.. I find it sad and very disheartening that nobody knows that it’s there. or what it actually does. or the effort it took to get it to where it is. or that they can do these kinds of things if they took the time to look into it.

It’s taken me about a month of looking (not really that hard, though. Damn, b-movies.) but I finally got that tone and mic placement redisovered from back before I moved. Man, that was a bit of a task.

Always remember: document everything. Even when you think it’s more fun to get another beer and continue to rock out. You just may regret forgetting how you came across a sound or setting you just created.

Play Me!

the great scourge of the information age. I’ve tried many times to express why I feel piracy is so important, and I think I may have hit a nerve:

Piracy, right now, is important because it makes it difficult to make money in media. and that’s important. because by making it harder to cut a living in multimedia, it forcefully weeds out the entities that have no interest the medium as art, but as a source of income.

think of it like a human body in the grips of a fever: it is forcefully making it’s own body uninhabitable so it can drive out malicious agents.

that’s essentially my personal take on priacy and how it should be seen as a natural reaction to the *LACK* of a competitive marketplace since the 1970’s.

and it’s my opinion that this is only really at a start and has a lot farther to go and a lot more damage to do before things even begin to solidify.