So . . . anybody want some coffee? Here's the thing - all my industry friends are jumping to Rockstar's defense over this whole GTA thing. And I'm here to say - this is the line, and that's them crossing it. Rockstar screwed the pooch, and the ESRB slapped them for it, and rightfully so. Let's deconstruct a bit. For many years now, I've met Muggles and said I work in video games. The response is almost always the same - asking about whatever latest controversy was afoot. Almost all the time it was Rockstar, and most of the time it was one GTA or another. I always fought the good fight. I'd say that y'know - they rated it 'M' - same as a 'R' rated movie. The retailers shouldn't sell that to kids. I even had a little rap about how Rockstar had always shown restraint with the ads - no ads during primetime, etc. They really had not ever marketed GTA to kids. Well. Here we are. Rockstar snuck content past the ESRB, past Sony, past Microsoft. Teehee. Except while they were did it the took the high ground I was standing on and let it fall into the ocean. Let's go over a few of the defenses I've seen on the net in the last day or so. 1) "Oh so violence is OK, but sex isn't? What's wrong with this country?" - Don't go here. The people upset about Hot Coffee want to ban the whole damn game. They don't like the violence either - the sex is just the cherry on the damn cake. This won't work as a defense. 2) "It could have been one rogue guy." No. This isn't a a texturemap with a coworker or some guy's girlfriend. This is custom code, special animations, building interior art, etc. Here's an exercise - imagine you have GTA: San Andrea as shipped and you're a department lead in a meeting. Somebody pitches Hot Coffee to you and asks how long it would take to implement. How many coder hours, how many art resources, how long design would take to tune the "gameplay". Face it - this feature was built on purpose before somebody chickened out. And they slapped the exterior shot wallpaper over it. C'mon now - anybody who's ever been a lead can look at the game and see that they built the sex mini-games and added the coverup later. 3) "It requires a 3rd party mod to activate". Really? You know this? You've studied the codebase and can tell me there's no cheat to unlock this? None at all? No special save file? No special code that can be entered? Rockstar never thought about releasing this to the public? Nobody really knows do they? 4) "Rockstar couldn't remove the content cleanly and make their ship dates." So? Because Rockstar has so many cashflow problems. And we all know that a GTA wouldn't sell if it didn't make the Christmas prime season. Bullshit. They knew it was there, and they should have pulled it from the game. Can you honestly tell me that you think if the game had been a month late it would impact sales at all? After all, aren't we all claiming the game should be sold to adults, not as Christmas presents? Don't we all claim that the top titles will sell reqardless of when they ship? For crying out loud - if there's a poster child for "This franchise will sell millions regardless of when it ships" it should be GTA. I can think of other top tier games but no other 'M' one. If the market is no longer driven by kids then let's prove it. Face it. Rockstar lied to the ESRB, they lied to Sony, they lied to Microsoft. Hell, they lied to everyone when they claimed the content was hacked in. What else could the ESRB do? For years they have been our bulwark - when attacked we could point at the ESRB and say "We're self-regulating!" Even freakin' Liebermann had backed off and all of a sudden we have Frankenstein's Bride (nee Senator Clinton) breathing down the industry's neck. And why? Because Rockstar tried to pull a fast one and lied to everyone. The ESRB rightfully said "This content was not shown to us, and doesn't deserve an 'M' rating." Now you can go on all you want about how the 'M' rating and the 'AO' rating are poorly defined but that's just smoke and mirrors. Ask yourselves one question - did Rockstar conceal what they were shipping? If you can answer "Yes", then you can't defend them anymore. I won't - and not just because I'm out of games, professionally speaking. I thought we were fellow soldiers in a cause we all believed in - it turns out Rockstar was just using us all as chumps. Don't let them use you this time - call 'em on it. If they want to sell a 'AO' game then fine. I'd support their right to do so. I'd buy it, even if I had to buy it on PC because the console manufacturers lack the balls. Even if I had to mailorder it because the local retailers lack the balls. That's free speech. Lying to a regulatory body to hoodwink your partners (the licensors - the first parties) isn't free speech, it's craven shitty behavior. Don't tell me that they lied and that doesn't matter. Because it does. They tried to trick everyone and they have their hand caught in the cookie jar. They should pay for it.

An unnamed person who reads this blog asked in another forum for any opinions or comments on Getting Things Done. I mentioned it somewhat in this post, but I thought I'd go into more detail. But I don't like making long posts at the other place (and I'm being slightly vague on purpose) so I decided to write a post about here. So I first heard about GTD from 43 Folders which is really just a productivity tips & tricks site - albeit one with a Mac-centric focus. But there's a fair amount of GTD conversation as well and I eventually picked up the book - right before I quit at Crystal and had a small period of chaos in my life :-) Ultimately Karin read it before I did, and she started using some of it and liking it. So I eventually got around to checking out the book, and I really recommend taking a look at it. One funny thing is that there appears to be a bit of a "cult" around it on the web, but in many ways it's the least cult-like organization system I've ever seen. There's a lot of emphasis on simplicity and "whatever works for you". Compare to Franklin Day-Planners where you need to go to the seminar, buy the book, buy the Day-Planner, buy the pages for the Day-Planner, etc. etc. You can use your spiffy Palm PDA but you'll need the special Franklin software for it and so forth. GTD only really makes you buy a few things - probably some office/desk stuff. I bought a labeler, three stacking inboxes, a little basket for my "tickler file" (more on that in a minute), and a rack that sits on my night-stand and holds magazines. That's it really. 95% of my whole GTD "system" is just a single text file on my Mac and my iCal files that I already had. There are two central tenets to GTD really. The first is that you are most productive if you flow quickly and easily to your next action. If you always know what your best next move is then you're in pretty good shape. The second is that it is impossible to keep everything in your head - and people waste a lot of psychic RAM on trying, and a lot of angst over worrying what they forgot. So if you have a system you trust to track things you can "dump" everything in it. No using RAM on remembering to call Aunt Bertha next Tuesday, no worrying over whether your forgetting something. As long as you have a system, your system works, and you TRUST your system then your system won't let you forget something. The rest of the book is really just good tips and tricks for building such a system and keeping it ticking over smoothly. There's a lot of focus on Inboxes - both physical and email. The book is adamant about not keeping emails in your Inbox - I'll admit I personally still do that. This is all about capturing all your "stuff". If a bill comes in - it goes in the Inbox. If you remember something you need to do in four months - jot a quick note and throw it in your Inbox. If your system works then it's off your mind - you know it will be handled ultimately. Now you have a bunch of things in your Inbox. Now what? Now you organize. Everything in your Inbox can't stay there - you pick up each thing (possibly metaphorically) and move it somewhere else. This is where the "Two Minute Rule" comes into play. You pick up a Foo. Can you resolve whatever you need to do with Foo in two minutes or less? If so, do it. Right now. Trying to keep track of Foo for later handling is more trouble than it's worth. That sounds stupidly simple, but man is it effective. Many things just need to be filed somewhere - it's a "one day I'll need this", or it's a receipt you need at tax time or whatever. (This is what the labeler is for BTW - you also are supposed to buy a file cabinet but I already had one.) Many things just need to be held until a particular date - these will go into the "tickler file". The rest of these things all need you to do something, and it's going to take more than two minutes or it needs something you don't have right now (net access, a Philips screwdriver, whatever). For these you determine what the "next action" is for that item and you write it down. You create a big list of next actions. Now do them. But you can do them with full concentration - you know you haven't forgotten anything because it all went in your Inbox and got processed. I've mentioned the Tickler a few times - time to explain that. The tickler file has 43 folders in it - 31 folders with a date and 12 monthly folder. If you need to do something at some point in the future it goes in your calendar. If you need a physical bit that goes with it you put the bit in your tickler file instead. Let me give you a few practical examples. I went to my dentist in April and scheduled my next appointment for October. There's no paper for that - I just put the appointment on my calendar - no tickler involved. But back in February I got two pieces of mail - one was for some property tax that is due on July 31st and the other was Karin's car registration which we didn't need to pay until July 22nd. Historically I had to just push these sorts of things around my desk and hope I didn't lose them for six months. And I told some neuron in the back of my head "remember to find this in July" and probably told a few dozen neurons to worry about whether the first one was on the job. These are the things that ultimately keep me from sleeping at night. Instead they went in the tickler. I jotted a note on a Post-It saying "Pay this on 7/15" and threw the whole thing in the July folder. When July 1st rolled by I opened up the July folder, and moved them into the proper date folders. Each day I open that day's folder, take at whatever is in it and handle them. When the 15th came by I pulled them out and paid them. But I knew they were taken care of - I knew I had a system that would automatically remind me when I needed to pay them - and it kept the piece of paper I'd need (the bill and the envelope) right where I'd need them. You can go from the important to the trivial with this. I have concert tickets in my tickler, and I have a piece of paper that says "Take Trash to the curb". Every Wednesday I pull that out of the tickler and say "Oh yeah - gotta do that today." Once I've done it I stick it in next Wednesday's folder. It's stupid - but it means I don't have some mental subroutine saying "Is it Wednesday? Don't forget to take the trash out on Wednesday." My E3 pass went in my tickler file. I had it for a month and I just wanted it to do two things - 1) don't get lost and 2) be present when I needed to go to E3. So I threw it in the folder for the day when I would be packing. Brilliant. Mine takes a 4"x12" footprint on my desk and it's got bills, tax forms, concert tickets, whatever in it. It's got notes set a week before birthdays reminding me to buy presents. Anyway - this entry is way too long so I'll sign off for now. I recommend the book. I don't do everything in the book, but it's well worth the cost and the time to read and consider.

I rented Destroy All Humans! from Gamefly (the Xbox version). I liked it but it's incredibily short (and I don't usually knock games for shortness). Put it this way - I received it Wednesday (and Karin and I went out Wednesday night so I only got to play it about an hour), and sent it back on Saturday, after finishing this story mode. It's fun, and some of the dialog is great, but I'm hard pressed to put a ringing endorsement on a game that only had about 7-8 hours of play. I'd certainly be upset if I paid $40 or $50 for it. It's worth renting, but I'd have to recommend a pass on buying until it hits $20 or so. And that's even with only playing about an hour on Friday - as I spent most of Friday rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in preparation for the release of the new one. I like the new Harry Potter a great deal - more than Order of the Phoenix. Without getting into spoiler territory Harry is still a teenager but he's moved past the whining and complaining and general snottiness that dominated a lot of volume 5. I read #6 entirely yesterday which I did not mean to do but it is a real page-turner. I'm not sure if I think it's as good as the first or second books - the tone of the series has developed and changed so much that they are sort of apples and oranges. It's much darker and grimmer - which is good for most fiction but has this weird feeling of . . . meanness when applied to what was once seen as a children's story. I'm not sure that's the right word but a lot has happened and people have changed quite a bit from a Harry that couldn't quite believe that magic was real and was excited by Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavor Beans. It does make me impatient for volume seven, but I imagine that's a way off. I should have a book on the shelves before seven hits. :-)

The Guardian is running a fabulous contest. The gist is that it's known that some major character dies in the new Harry Potter book and the popular favorite is Dumbledore. So they are having a contest for people writing Dumbledore's death scene in the style of various authors. I'm partial to the Scooby Doo, Douglas Adams, and Stephen Fry/Terry Prachett entries, myself. (I found it from Making Light.)

So everybody knew all along that transitioning to all digital TV in 2006 was crazy talk. But now it looks like the broadcasters are buying into 2009, with some caveats and restrictions. So the sticky widget is this - 15% of American households apparently use antennas to receive programming (as opposed to satellite or cable). In some of these households it would be an issue to buy a $50 box to convert the digital signal to analog so old sets could keep receiving programming. There's an aside about some households having cable or satellite and having a set somewhere in the house that still has a pair of rabbit ears on it. In the meantime the broadcasters have more spectrum than they should because they have both an analog AND a digital frequency. The disturbing side of this is that emergency services need new spectrum and the likely source is the analog freqs. So here's the part I don't get. Broadcast TV is advertiser supported (OK - PBS is a slight exception, but moving on.) So the concern here is broadcasting wanting to reach a set where the consumer is either unable or unwilling (and apparently part of the debate in Congress is whether to subsidize both categories or just the unable) to spend $50. Why do the advertisers even care about reaching this consumer? What's the disposable income of this market segment anyway? I mean OK if you produce a family that is so poor that they can't afford the $50 for their one TV and will lose all access to programming . . . I'll concede that is a very sad case. But don't they have bigger problems than whether or not they can continue to watch American Idol? I mean - even if you're going to give them $50 is it reasonable to spend that money on television? I just don't see why the advertisers care, and thus why the broadcasters care. Of course, I don't think advertising has ever adapted to HD. Back when I first got HD it was common for the commercial breaks to just show a network logo - they simply could not get enough commercials to fill the time. Even now - Karin and I just finished watching Battlestar Galactica in HD (on the Universal HD channel) and each episode was several minutes short because the commercial breaks were noticeably shorter. Now by all I understand the HD consumer is self-selected to be a desirable consumer demographic, right? I mean back in 2000 you could say that everyone who could receive HD programming had spent at least $500 on that capability. (That's what I paid for my first HD receiver and it was notable for being the cheapest HD receiver available then.) If you incorporate the TV set costs it's even higher - although that's trickier. I bought my current set for watching DVD's and playing videogames on. The fact that we watch TV on it is fairly incidental to me. But it's always mystified me why people ignore the fact there is particular HD advertising space available.