A Voice in the Dark

So Microsoft has this whole XNA initiative, and one of the things they’re unveiling for Holiday ‘08 is the Community Games portal where XNA Creators’ Club members ($99 annually, $49 for three months) can put their XNA games on XBox LIVE for anyone and everyone who has an XBox 360 to download.

Trouble is, you can’t put your game up there and charge nothing for it. You’re required to charge 200 points for a 50 MB game, and 400 for a 150 MB game. You may also opt to charge 400 points for a 50 MB game, or 800 points for a game of either size. The revenue split is 70% and paid quarterly; at the current rate of 1.25 cents per point, this means you can earn $1.75, $3.50, or $7.00 per copy sold, depending on your price point. Microsoft can also position and promote your game, for an additional 10% to 30% of revenue - reducing your cut to a minimum of $1.00 to $4.00 - under conditions that aren’t entirely clear.

Now, first off, this is a generous revenue split. Good luck getting anything even close to this from a normal publisher or distributor. One of the better avenues I’ve researched - Reflexive Games - gives you the same 40% Microsoft is offering at the bottom end of their scale, but never goes above that.

But what really chaps my arse is the sheer number of people who can’t stop whinging about the inability to offer their games on XBox LIVE for free.

I am so incredibly jazzed about XNA, I can’t stop gushing about it. I’ve constructed a pretty decent 2D Breakout-style game that’s actually fun to play. I don’t have to worry about the details of getting sprites on the screen and sorting them and rendering transparency; XNA handles all that for me. It took me just over a week to build a working game. Now here comes Microsoft to say that for under $100, I can publish that game on XBox LIVE before the end of the year and actually get paid for it. That rules. This has changed everything - I’ve had this dream of building an indie game studio for over a decade, and now here’s exactly the channel I need to make that dream a reality.

But the community is divided over the relatively minor point that you can’t give your game away for free over that same channel.

And that’s rather a shame.

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Microsoft, Programming, Software
No Comments

Russ Nelson deals with the question of cutting poverty in half. Relevant bit:

For relative poverty, it is impossible to get rid of poverty. As long as one person works harder than another person, they will have more.

Just to be clear, “relative poverty” is also what we call “income inequality”.

Filed under: Economics
No Comments

Scott Adams asks what constitutes a “fair” tax rate for the rich. It’s a fair question, at least.

The question that always comes to mind is what a person is going to do with their tax money if they don’t spend it on taxes. Imagine that everyone pays a flat 20% tax, just for simplicity. On the one hand, you have Joe Rich, who makes ten million a year and pays two million in taxes. On the other, you have Bill Poor, who makes twenty thousand a year and pays four thousand in taxes.

Contemplate the impact of dropping the tax rate to 15%. Now Bill Poor pays $3,000 in taxes, and gets to put $1,000 in his pocket. Joe Rich pays $1.5 million, and puts $500,000 in his pocket.

What will these two people do with the added income?

Bill Poor will probably use his $1,000 to buy a television set or a motorcycle. Nobody cares.

Joe Rich will probably invest his $500,000 in a business venture of some sort. This will create new jobs and probably result in new products and services; even if it only provides existing products and services, the additional competition will be good for consumers.

The alternative to leaving that $500,000 with Joe Rich is to give it to the government, who is not exactly sporting the best track record for using money wisely. It could be argued, however, that their track record is better than Bill Poor’s - and, indeed, that by pooling Bill Poor’s money with other people’s money, it could do more good.

The “highest and best use” answer would be to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, but somehow I don’t think the American public would go for that.

Filed under: Business, Economics
No Comments

The Supreme Court of Florida is a stone’s throw from permanently disbarring Jack Thompson, the anti-game attorney who keeps suing Rockstar over Grand Theft Auto. Referee’s opinion here. It’s pretty much a done deal, but it’s not written in stone quite yet.

Filed under: Notices
No Comments

I’ve been away a while.

Those of you who know me - if anyone who knows me actually reads this blog; for that matter, if anyone at all actually reads this blog - know that I am generally a pretty stalwart individual. I keep a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook pretty much all the time.

This is not always an accurate view of my mental state.

I have been so drastically and deeply damaged and distressed by the end of my association with RDA, that (alliteration aside) I am not sure I will ever be the same person again. It’s been made clear to me that working for anyone, anyone at all, is simply not a secure arrangement. In the span of two days, I went from being frustrated but optimistic… to being unemployed. I have not recovered. I may never recover.

I have seriously contemplated suicide.

The level of despair with which I have struggled after the events of April 15th cannot be described. I am simply unable to fathom the reasons behind that day. I don’t blame anyone; there’s no conspiracy, no coalition of people who were “out to get me”, no malfeasance or stupidity behind it. It was just not the right place or the right time, I suppose. I wish it had been. I love RDA. I loved working there. I loved all the people I met there.

Now they don’t even respond to my emails. Would they be willing to provide a reference in my job search? Evidently not. I’ve been abandoned. Shunned. The only community with which I felt any real connection over those eight months has decided I’m no longer worth their time.

I’ve lived in Washington state for ten years. I have no real friends. America doesn’t provide much of a framework for adults to make new friends. You’re supposed to get them through your job. As a business owner, I was never a friend, but a boss. As a Microsoft contractor, I couldn’t be a friend, because I wasn’t really one of them. And as a former employee, the friendships I thought were forming simply evaporated once I left the fold.

I’m not one of them anymore. The friendship was not a real friendship; it was conditional. It was false.

There aren’t enough Jews in Washington state. I can’t find a good synagogue. My son needs to learn about his Jewish identity and what it means and how to be a Jew in the first place. He needs to meet other Jews. He needs to see that we are really out there, and it’s not just some weird thing his dad made up. He needs at least two or three Jewish friends. Eventually, he will need to have some Jewish female friends, so he’s only confronted with the choice of intermarriage - rather than being compelled to intermarry by circumstances.

I can’t support my family. I can’t educate my son. I can’t even find a friend.

I look back on my time in the Seattle area. I cast my eyes back ten years, and I find the white paper I wrote just before moving out here from Virginia. “I Am Not A Kook”, it’s titled. May 12th, 1998. Days before I left everything and came 3500 miles across the country to meet a woman I’d only ever known online - a woman with whom I have had two beautiful children, even if they don’t know what being a Jew is all about, and with whom I am still deeply and passionately in love. Even if we have an open marriage.

That “paper” (only ever posted online) ends quoting Marilyn Manson: “When I’m God, everyone dies.” Several months after posting it, someone mailed me a Chick pamphlet and admonished me in their handwritten note that “no man is God, ever”. I guess I hit a nerve.

I’m still the same person who wrote that white paper, fundamentally. I still like Marilyn Manson, although his latest album - “Eat Me, Drink Me” - was a little too self-important and pussified for my taste. “Golden Age of Grotesque” was okay; the “Doppelhertz” DVD with it was just plain fucked up, but I sort of expect that from him. I still read Nietzsche, and Kafka. Not as much… but here and there.

I still don’t know who I am or what I want or where I belong.

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

And that’s okay, in a sort of cosmic sense. Maybe I’m not really supposed to know. Maybe I just have to shut up and keep going and see what happens. I don’t know.

But there is something powerful and profound in realising that over the past ten years, you have really not changed all that much. There is some sort of cosmic validation there.

These wounds won’t heal, this is my sin.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy
2 Comments

Culturally, in America, you are what you do.

In a very real sense, that means when you’re unemployed, you’re nobody.

Even though I know, intellectually, this was just a circumstantial mismatch… there’s a part of me still trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Filed under: Business, Philosophy
No Comments

I woke up this morning at 2 AM to work on the stuff I’m doing for the EU protocol documentation effort. Around 7:30 I managed to get a big obstacle handled, so I could make real forward progress for the first time since the middle of last week.

And at 8 AM, I found out my employer - RDA Corporation - is terminating my employment.

It’s really one of those things that mystifies me. I came on board to do a specific job, and I was summarily pushed out of the project by a Microsoft FTE who didn’t like my methods. The projects since then had been a bad fit in oh, so many ways… fundamentally, I’m a shirt-and-tie go-to-the-office kind of person. RDA’s Redmond office is largely a virtual team environment, where your work day starts when you wake up and ends when you go to bed and in between you don’t really see anyone or collaborate in any real sense.

I don’t work well that way. I told them I don’t work well that way, from day one. And in my latest position, the state of the infrastructure was very, very immature… large swaths of support materials didn’t really exist, and “features” of the software I was using simply didn’t work. It looked like it would work, so I made estimates accordingly… and then I ended up past deadline because when it came down to the wire, the foundation was mud.

What surprises me is that this is precisely what I said at the beginning of the contract: that I was concerned about scope creep if the infrastructure wasn’t what we expected, and the language of the SOW was not specific enough for my taste.

They’re a great company. We didn’t fit well together, but honestly, I’d go back to them in a second given the right opportunity. It’s just that the right opportunity never quite materialised, and I guess they ran out of patience before I did.

I’m kind of lost now. Yesterday, on the way to work, my car just blew up. It’s unsalvageable. I spent four and a half hours on the side of the road with a dead cell phone. It really sucked. And things just keep getting worse.

Momentum being what it is, and since I’m a problem solver at heart, I’m going to finish up the stuff I was working on and send it to my PM anyway. I’ve spent four days trying to get over this hurdle, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop everything just because I don’t get paid for it. I’m not really in this field for the money, anyway.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy
No Comments

Every once in a while, I’m reminded that people get creeped out if someone can figure out where they were on a given date and time.

But why does that bother people? After all, if you go anywhere at all and encounter someone you know, that person knows where you were and can tell anyone he likes. Theoretically, you could tell this person not to tell anybody he saw you, but that would just make it worse. And if you didn’t see him, but he saw you, it’s every bit as bad.

I thought of this today because I turned on my Zune to squirt somebody a copy of Black Tide’s single “Black Abyss”, and there on my “Social” tab I saw a gamer tag I knew from XBox Live. Given the range of the Zune’s wireless receiver, that means I know this person (or at least, his Zune) was in building 34 on the Microsoft Redmond campus at 2:30 this afternoon, while he knows absolutely nothing of this.

My personal opinion is that if you’re not up to anything illicit, you shouldn’t care who knows where you were and when. So I should be able to walk up to him and say “hey, I saw you were in building 34 earlier” and he should say “yeah, I was”. But what really happens in these cases is that people act suspicious and say “who told you that, then?” while furtively glancing about. They want to know who told me they were there - because that will tell them who they can’t trust. If I say I saw the Zune listed as nearby, he’ll probably just turn off his Zune’s wireless and then I won’t see him next time.

I get really tired of people being so antisocial. I like to go out and see people I know. I like to run into them days later and say “hey, saw you at the concert last week”. And it really annoys me when they get cagey and say things like “what concert, I didn’t see any concert” and then you realise they blew off their SO to go see it. It’s like everybody I know is lying to the rest of the world about who they are and what they like and where they go. God forbid I see someone coming out of a gay bar.

“What? The uh, the Madison’s uh, a gay bar? Why, I uh, never knew.”

Well, gee, it sure looked like the guy hanging all over you knew. But I won’t say that, because I know what you really mean: “nobody knows I’m gay”. Everybody sort of grasps the idea that appearance is reality, but nobody wants to alter the reality to match their desired appearance. If you don’t want to be caught going out to gay bars - don’t go! Then you can’t be caught. If you want to go out to gay bars, then accept up front that you will be caught, and when you get caught… just draw yourself up and say “why, yes, I was out looking for hot young college dick last weekend; and I found it, too”.

Privacy is a polite fiction we maintain by mutual consensus. That’s all it is. It’s not a right. Expect that people will always know the truth if they care enough to look for it, and it just makes your life so much easier. You don’t have to hide or lie or make stuff up. Just tell the truth. Isn’t that easy?

Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy, Security
No Comments

McDonald’s has done an interesting thing with the $1 value menu, in that they’ve completely hosed the value proposition of more = cheaper. Here are the three sizes of chicken nuggets on the regular menu.

Six chicken nuggets: $2.49, or 41.5 cents each.

Ten chicken nuggets: $3.89, or 38.9 cents each.

Twenty chicken nuggets: $6.29, or 31.45 cents each.

Turning to the value menu, we find four chicken nuggets for $1. That’s 25 cents each.

To maintain the pattern, it should be TWO chicken nuggets for $1. Trouble is, nobody will pay $1 for just two chicken nuggets. So what you end up with is luxury pricing: prices which inherently assume you will order what you want without regard to the price, while simultaneously ignoring discounted options.

The notion that McDonald’s practices luxury pricing is rather counterintuitive, isn’t it?

 

Filed under: Business, Economics
No Comments

This band rocks.

I saw them at El Corazon in Seattle last night, and this is one hell of a band. What strikes me more than anything is the modesty of the lead singer, Gabriel Garcia; the spotlight was on Zach, the bass player, most of the night. But then, Zach flubbed the audience participation at the beginning of the concert by asking how we were doing… Portland.

Unlike other bands I’ve seen, he was completely nonchalant about it when Gabriel whispered in his ear that they were in Seattle. He simply said “Oh, this is Seattle? Sorry.” Smooth as can be. Then he proceeded to say Portland was a great audience, and we’d really have to be something if we wanted to top them. Great recovery. Not self conscious at all.

Some random chick band was the opening act, followed by local boys Neon Knights. Both were pretty “meh”. Neon Knights not as much as the chick band… which seemed to be trading exclusively on “we have tits” rather than “we can play”.

Black Tide, however, stayed true to the modern aesthetic by opening with “Black Abyss” - the hit song off the CD which a lesser band would have saved for the close. During the show, I managed to drop the t-shirts I bought before the show, so I had to buy more after the show. Somebody got free t-shirts. Enjoy them, whoever you are; I have certainly picked up my share of free t-shirts at concerts over the years, so I’m not going to piss and moan about being on the other side of that experience now.

After the show, I managed to get Gabriel and Zach to sign my CD, although Steve and Alex weren’t about. Not that it matters, since Gabriel and Zach are the important members… but it would have been nice to get all four. I was standing around with them for about twenty minutes trying not to be a douche. There’s always that moron who hangs out after the show and acts like the band are his friends, you know? I didn’t want to be that guy.

Badass band, badass show. If they’re in your neighborhood, go see them. They’re on their first tour for their first album, and mark my words, years down the line you’ll be able to say “I saw them when they were just getting started” - and it will mean something. This band is definitely going somewhere.

 

Filed under: Music
No Comments