via Buster Benson.
At our house we have a nightly ritual of listing three things we’re grateful for. We’ve had this ritual for a couple of years at least. Carissa instituted it, possibly as a countermeasure to a general negativity by the male members of the family. I’m pleased to learn it has been contributing to our happiness.
“Hi Ian,” writes one. “I’ve noticed that the Cowpocalypse has happened and users have to pay to see their cow. Do you have a goal or timeframe of when this will be set back to normal?”
“There’s no way to pay to see your cow,” replied the designer. “The cows got raptured.”
I’ve written about Ian Bogost before, and recently two excellent articles recapping the history of his Cow Clicker Facebook game crossed by desk (via Marco).
Bogost’s years of research and writing on how games could affect perspective and behavior prized design wisdom and a deep understanding of context and of other media. Yet suddenly there was an explosion of investment in gamification startups eager to tack game mechanics onto things like check-in apps. The intersection of games and real life was suddenly a very trendy thing, and a new legion of spokespeople emerged to simplify, systematize and mass-market it.
To some industry stalwarts, the gamification craze looks a lot like Cow Clicker—mindlessly deploying gaming’s most superficial and addictive features, such as leaderboards and badges, without providing the underlying experience that gives them meaning. Bogost himself made this argument at a gamification conference, during a talk called Gamification Is Bullshit, in which he suggested an alternate term, exploitationware. That, he said, represents the true mission of gamifiers: to use game mechanics to cynically ensnare their customers, much as Cow Clicker had unwittingly hooked its prey—including, as it turned out, Bogost himself.
…both are worth the time to read, especially if you’re even moderately interested in games and social software, or even just social psychology.
The only thing greater than the number of text/code editors in the world are the number of developer opinions about them. There is the classic Vim/Emacs debate. There are constant comments about the languishing of the popular Textmate (and pigs-have-flown exclamations at its recent 2.0 release). There are so many editors and development environments, in fact, that I must stop mentioning them now or risk a never ending paragraph burdened with commas.
At Extra Sauce we are not only platform agnostic (we pick the best stack on a project-by-project basis, although we have some tendencies) but we are tool agnostic. Within the development team we are split between Emacs, Sublime Text and Coda.
We are all happy with our different tools for various reasons. So I ask this almost entirely due to simple curiosity: which editor do you use? Leave your reply wherever…we’ll see it.
The Rapha Festive 500 is a worldwide challenge to ride 500km from the 23rd to the 31st of December. (Rapha makes very nice cycling garments as well as those cool videos I post all the time.) Last year it was the impetus for my return to regular cycling and the kickoff to a year filled with thousands of miles, new friends, lost pounds and a new appreciation for the further reaches of both my abilities and the town in which I reside. Last year I did not complete the 500km. This year I was determined to have a proper go of it despite the constraints of having a new baby in the house and the obvious schedule issues around the holidays.
As expected the rides were cold, often wet, mostly long (one must average about 40 miles per day) and as such engender an increased constitution and determination to ride regardless of conditions. This, as I see it, is really the biggest advantage of the challenge. Sure, for some, the distance is laughable and many participants complete it in much worse conditions; but for me it is the perfect distance at the perfect time.
I was struck with a strange emotion one dark morning. Here I was slogging away on my bicycle for no real reason except some number thrown down–by a brand, no less–while my new beautiful baby was at home. It wasn’t guilt, really, but a serious questioning. Why do we do this? Why do we throw leg over saddle day after day? I don’t race; sure, I’d like to lose a few more pounds; but really? This?
A mysterious love for the bike and its culture seemed at odds with the obvious and deeply powerful love for Lucy and my family. I started riding again for the sake of my sanity. Now was it leading me into a new kind of delusion?
I ended up finishing the 500km with a day to spare–entirely thanks to meeting Matt Christensen on the trail that day. He rode 877km total in some kind of godlike rush of determination and a true appreciation for the joy of riding a bike. The day I met him he rode a century–his second of the week. I joined him for a portion of that century–enough to cross the 500km mark with a few kilometers to spare. (23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30)
The afternoon after completing the 500 Carissa and I were on the way to the doctor when we witnessed a most horrific thing. A girl, who couldn’t have been older than 15, stepped into the street and was struck by a car. I must presume she died instantly. I was one of the first people on the scene and I could tell almost immediately. The images burned into my brain that day are going to haunt me for a long time.
So many emotions, so many lives forever changed, so much grief and hurting to be experienced, my own understanding of all that still–always–too close.
And fear. Cars are our constant enemy when we ride our bikes. Their speed, their mass, the careless way their drivers move them around the city. Today was my first ride on the road since then, and every intersection, every passing car evoked those images, that fear.
Penn has taken a recent and enthusiastic renewed interest in cycling. I’m not sure if the 500 had anything to do with it, but yesterday he begged and begged to go on a ride with me, and it was nice, having completed the challenge, to not worry about how long a ride would be. Little did I know we would end up riding a complete loop of White Rock Lake, no small feat for an eight year old–not to mention the number of pedal strokes required by the gear ratio on his small single speed bike! As we rode slowly along the trail, he chatting away, me constantly instructing him if only to assuage my own concerns, a peace eventually came to visit. The weather was perfect. I was spending time with my stepson doing something I enjoy, and he shared unadulteratedly in that joy. I had a beautiful family.
The loop around White Rock is about 15km from our house and back, but I didn’t count those kilometers. At least not with a cyclometer.
In keeping with an older tradition of this blog–a seasonally appropriate mix tape! I tried to favor local musicians and stuff I hope you maybe haven’t heard before. Enjoy!
Announcing the arrival of Lucy Pearl Miller, born December 7th, 2011; weighing 8 pounds 10 ounces (Carissa is 4’11”). In her first week in our family she has beguiled all of us with her sweetness and the power of The Cute.
Those who know us well know that Lucy’s birth has even more meaning than usual, and we appreciate your heartfelt expressions of joy at our blessing.
I’ve never experienced so much healing so quickly.
Hi. I’m Daniel. I’ve run a blog of some sort or another since 2001. I was originally on Blogger, then Moveable Type, then a little piece of software I wrote myself called SWIM. Then I ran away from what I considered “normal” blogging and was hiding away on LiveJournal for a while.
Last year I started a blog using Jekyll.
Now I’m trying to move everything to Jekyll, which means every post will be an old fashioned HTML file here on my very own server. No database. No server side scripts to be hacked.
Eventually this will happen. In the meantime I’m just trying to get one post to show up!
Update: I ended up getting half of my archive imported and (somewhat) cleaned up. This includes everything I blogged on LiveJournal from 2005-2010 and everything I blogged on my design blog nonlinear on Blogger from 2001-2011. I have yet to import my personal blog from 2001-2005. Or really go through the archive to see what else might be broken. I did cursory testing/fixing as I found problems.
Update Dec 2nd: Importing the rest. Boy is it a pain. Also apologies to RSS readers out there. The whole feed appeared as new posts.
Update Dec 3rd: Got the rest of the posts imported. My blog is now a little big for Jekyll, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it now. 2,980 posts. The archive page is long. I need a spider that will identify all the broken links and images on the site, because there are surely a ton. I’m going to slowly work on removing/fixing broken links/images as well as deleting posts that just don’t matter or don’t belong on here anyway…
Update Dec 19th: I broke out the archives into two different chunks for the sake of my blog engine and sanity. Now the need to sift through them and clean them up a bit, as well as set them up on their own subdomains, means it will be a little bit longer before they are again up on the site.
Ian Bogost makes a scathing critique of social games:
Several years ago, Chaim Gingold gave us the useful concept of the Magic Crayon. A magic crayon is a tool that facilitates creativity in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. A magic crayon lets its users breathe life into things.
Some would like to think that all crayons are magic ones. That just any old thing can conjure. But that’s not true. The magic crayon has a shadow side.
Some barriers are benign, but others are insidious…
Inspirations like that are not magic crayons, but shit crayons…
Even if creativity comes from constraint, there’s constraint and there’s incarceration. A despot in a sorcerer’s hat does not deserve praise for inciting desperate resilience.
The other day I wrote:
“What we do is make software. And software is best made by humans who understand each other (and by extension understand the people who use their software). Unless they’re miraculously made up of such humans, organizations make shitty software.”
And I just had some more thoughts about that:
I don’t want to make or work on software that sucks anymore. Life is too short to work on something that is shit to begin with. Just because a piece of software improves your process or workflow over the paper version you used in the 80’s does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software is better than its competition in X, Y and Z ways does not mean that it is not shitty software. Just because a piece of software just like its competition except in that one way you need it to be different does not mean it’s not shitty software.
If we are to take our craft seriously, to consider ourselves worthy of our work, to join in a lineage of artisans and, most importantly, enjoy ourselves while we work and work in a way worthy of the life we have been given, then we must make software that is a delight to use, that makes our customer’s lives not just seem to be easier, but actually brings them joy in their lives.
It’s not good enough to add the features they want or fix the bug they are complaining about or improve the workflow that is still–despite your wonderful technology–a total mess and waste of their precious time.
The problem is most of our “users”…and what a terrible word for these people, these people we have a (for the most part) unseeing yet terribly intimate relationship with…but “customer” is also a horrible word! A customer is someone you exchange money for goods with, not someone who interacts with your product every day and alternatively praises and curses you in abstentia, who scours the internet for advice on how to use your product, who navigates some joyless “customer service” experience in order to better use your shitty product. Usually, the only way the term “user” applies to those who use our software is in its similarity to “drug user”–they have no choice but to use our product, despite a more abundant life calling out to them from outside the boundaries of this myopic experience.
…The problem is most of The People Using Our Software are within an even larger set of boundaries: rules, expectations, norms, mores, groupthink, culture, ignorance…part of the reason we make shitty software is because we live in a frequently shitty world.
The other day I was riding in a group ride on the service road along I-30 in east Dallas and I was looking at all the shit along the road there and I thought of this video:
I don’t want this to be a Jerry Maguire mission statement, I don’t want this to be a Fight Club deconstruction of society. I don’t want to make any more movie references. I just want to make great software and I want to be empowered to do so.
I’m not even going to proof this post. I’m just going to put it out there as it is, incomplete and probably more than a little incoherent…but I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, too.
Maciej Ceglowski is one of the proprietors of Pinboard and also an amazing writer. His recent post describing technical aspects of the great exodus from Delicious (to Pinboard) has too many gems to capture them all, but here are a couple in case you need convincing when it comes to reading technical blog posts:
Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. We were a niche site and in the course of eighteen months had siphoned off about six thousand users from our massive competitor, a pace I was was very happy with and hoped to sustain through 2011. But now the Senior Vice President for Bad Decisions at Yahoo had decided to give us a little help.
…
We had always prided ourself on being a minimalist website. But the experience for new users now verged on Zen-like. After paying the signup fee, a new user would upload her delicious bookmarks, see a message that the upload was pending, and… that was it. It was possible to add bookmarks by hand, but there was no tag cloud, no tag auto-completion, no suggested tags for URLs, the aggregate bookmark counts on the profile page were all wrong, and there was no way to search bookmarks less than a day old. This was a lot to ask of people who were already skittish about online bookmarking. A lot of my time was spent reassuring new users that their data was safe and that their money was not winging its way to the Cayman Islands.
That post led me back to idlewords.com to which I was already subscribed, it turns out, but I clicked a random link and read Dabblers and Blowhards a brilliant critique of a book I have actually read:
It’s surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar. The closest he comes to a clear thesis statement is at the beginning “Hackers and Painters”:
“[O]f all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike. What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers.”
To which I’d add, what hackers and painters don’t have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.
Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.
Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.
…it goes on in similar fashion, you should go read it, especially if you’ve read Hackers & Painters.