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Too much listening to podcasts.

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts over the past few days. i had to catch up with all those I haden’t taken the time to listen to over the last few months.

It’s amusing. in “96 I began working on my website, in 2007 I uploaded it and since then I’ve been following everything that’s happened. I’ve seen as some new things became old and old things became new again with time.

How many people remember Geocities, Angelfire and other projects? I remember them. I remember when I started trying to get people to contribute to my website because I didn’t have time to produce the content. It didn’t work. That was web 2.0 several years before the time.

I remember 6 degrees.com, a website that attempted to do something which is becoming more standard as new social networking websites come of age. Look at myspace, look at youtube and Flickr. Each one concentrates on your interest, whether music, video, or video. Everything the youth enjoy. Rupert Murdoch is attempting to join the fun.

It bothers me that people are putting so much content on myspace without attempting to put that content onto their own domain names and websites. Why should I create content only to have a billionaire make a little extra money when the content is mine.

The challenge for me is to find how to create content, host it myself, and then make money through other people showing interest. Over time it should improve.

A site I like at the moment is Facebook because of how much information is available. The user interface is good, the add ons are interesting. If I create a post in a blog on my own website it’ll automatically be synchronized with Facebook for people to come to and read.

It’s also where people I haven’t seen for over a decade re-appear and I can see how things have evolved since last time. We’ve grown up.

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Pay-to-win Futility.

Byrichard

Several years ago a friend told me about Clash of Clans and I began to play the game. The game is an enjoyable distraction for when you have a minute or two three. You perform a few actions and then you get on with your other tasks. When you play for free patience is an asset. You have to wait to get enough gold, elixir or gems before you can complete certain actions. The game is designed in such a way that you can play for years and still progress.

I like to joke that the Pay  to Win model is both encouraging and training people to bribe their way through life. If you’re impatient you pay a little supplement and you complete the action. Instead of taking a week for an action to be completed it takes seconds. Supercell has made millions this way as individuals spend more than a thousand euros. Those who are willing to pay get to the top of the leaderboard.

Two factors that discourage Paying To Win.

The first reason is that I come from the early days of computer games when you paid for a game once and you could play for as long as you had free time. It was a time when Civilization 3, Gunship 2000, Doom and other games were around. With games like Clash of Clans, you spend more than you would spend on a good meal and you only progress a little.

The second is that accounts are or at least, were, platform specific. I started playing Clash of Clans when I had an iPhone. When I switched to Android I lost my progress and had to start again. It has taken more than a year to get back to the same level. If you pay on ios your progress is not reflected on Android and vice versa. It’s nice to have two level50+ games but imagine if I had paid to get the game on both platforms to be at the same level.

Clash Royale

Recently they came up with Clash Royale. This is another Pay to Win game and as you can see from the screengrab above it is currently the top grossing app on the play store, at least in Switzerland.

They released the game to a restricted number of countries at first. Some players were at an advantage. They could play and progress in the game. We were easier to beat as we arrived later.  Now we find it easier to beat the newcomers, as we have learned strategies to be victorious more often.

People who are less patient, less humble have obviously paid a lot of money to progress. I prefer to wait and progress for free.

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We are living through the media’s golden age.

Byrichard

When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved.

The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.

The media have progressed. I am in constant contact with everyone by mobile phone for over a decade. I have had minidisk players, i’ve had phones and I’ve had a television in my room.

Now the mobile phone I have replaces all these devices if I so wish. The ipod replaces the radio and the television, the phone replaces the laptop, the minitel and the fax machine.

I have access to the world’s media within two clicks of a mouse, which is no more than a trackpad on an ibook.

Video editing is far simpler. When I wanted to learn to edit I remember that you’d need to get two player/recorders and a third device to control the two machines. We bought Adobe Premiere and the Miro dc30+ and there it was. I spent a weekend learning to edit with pictures of the Mer des Glaces, a glacier in the French Alpes.

Since then I upgraded through the years and my laptop can do all this seamlessly.

We discussed video on demand years ago and that idea was novel, was something which would be hard to implement. Today video on demand is so easy it’s syndicated via RSS feeds. I get my televisual experience via downloaded streams on a daily basis. Radio on demand is certainly here and doing well.

In this week in media one of the presenters said that in the near future media content would become more valuable than oil. It’s an interesting idea.

Are media studies a mickey mouse course when you’ve got free newspapers, you can watch television whilst commuting to and from work? When you share your pictures with friends around the world and computing is no longer the realm of the computer geek I think we’re in the Golden age of media studies and that it may have been one of the most interesting topics to study with the exponential growth of media outlets.

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Embouteillage pour cause de sapin sur l’autoroute a1 en direction de Lausanne Blecherette

Byrichard

I went snowboarding at it was great fun. At some moments the snow was great fun so it felt really good. I love the feeling of snowboarding at a fast rate down ski slopes and keeping up with skiers who don’t mind waiting too much.

All the snow canons were active because there’s a lack of natural precipitation. Some resorts are worried about what to do but as long as it’s cool then fake snow can be created to make a base on which for skiers to have fun. It’s tomorrow the resorts open properly, when all the tourists arrive.

On the way home on the radio I heard there was a traffic jam on the way to lausanne due to a christmas tree being on the road and I burst out laughing. only in Switzerland would you hear such a traffic jam warning.

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Hat Parties and the Events Therein

Byrichard

Last night I went to a hat party and I enjoyed it. I found it amusing to look at all the hats, from pink cowboy to chimney sweep, snowboarding and even motorcycle helmets. The more excentric the hat the more amusing the person.

House parties are interesting because it’s a familiar event. We already know everyone that’s there so there’s no time wasted in trying to meet everyone for the first time. A simple hello will suffice in some cases and in others great conversations will fly off like water drops descending from Angel falls into a fine spray. That spray is the culmination of a hundred conversation.

As it hits the plunge pool all of them merge into the pile of consumed conversations. Some wash up on a stone and will come back into our conscience but most will vanish.

Photographs of parties are great. If you’re in a bad mood, feel tired or are down then it shows and you’re dissapointed. When you’re smiling, relaxed and enjoying yourself though they’re great. Some of these are “stolen”, taken by a photographer who prefers spontaneity to the posed image. Occasionaly posed images are good too.

Two weekends, two very different events, one in a London nightclub, the other a few minutes walk from home. Both will leave enjoyable memories.

Tonight I shall rest, content with the way Friday night progressed.

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A Larger Readership Than The Student Newspaper

Byrichard

A few days ago I was with a friend discussing the student media within my university. I’m not speaking about the content created by those in the various courses but rather about the student newspaper and television channel. It’s gone downhill over the past year.

In my first year at uni although people poked fun at the student magazine they used to get it in order to get all the events listing. It meant that you knew a month in advance what was going on what night and so university spirit was stronger. At the same time, some second-year students of the time decided to create a student television program in which they got up and running external to the student union. In so doing they guaranteed success. Last year the student magazine coasted along and the first discussions about it becoming a newspaper happened.

Since then it’s been downhill. We’ve gone from having a glossy magazine coming out once a month with all events listed to having recycled paper as a newspaper. Rather than having people fighting to get their articles published an apathy seems to have formed around the project. There is no features editor, no listings editor, no main editor, and no layout person. This is a uni with 23,000+ students of which 10,000 full time. You’d be led to believe that they could produce some content without too much difficulty.

The one thing that’s doing relatively well is the student radio but it’s not independent of the Student Union, therefore, it seems to run better. If they had kept podcasting as they were doing last year then I’d still be downloading and listening to those programs as I walk around London.

I’m ready to leave university and get on with other more interesting projects. I’m ready to get back to the world of work. I only have about three weeks left of work.

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