I wanted to say something about a new artist that has me spinning a little bit with her talent.
So a girl named Esperanza Spalding defeated Justin Bieber for the Best New Artist Grammy Award this year. Naturally that turned more than a few heads, including mine, particularly when I noticed that Spalding was a jazz artist, the first of which to win Best New Artist. I was reminded of 2003 when Norah Jones beat Avril Lavigne and was comforted by, how as a friend said later, the Grammy panel hasn't completely lost it.
So how did an African-American jazz bassist beat Bieber, the modern-day equivalent of Elvis Presley? I don't have anything against Justin Bieber, he seems to be a fairly talented young kid. But plainly put, Esperanza Spalding is that good. After you have a listen (or two), you realize what a no-brainer this award really was.
I Know You Know
Precious
Espera
Winter Sun
Friday, March 11, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Dragon Age II
Dragon Age II came out on the 8th. I enjoyed the first Dragon Age very much. After years of playing games like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, and the Might and Magic series (I'm showing my age here), I was pretty disillusioned with the RPG genre. Dragon Age helped me enjoy the genre again, for a few reasons.
A lot of story-based role-playing games railroad you towards the ending that they have in mind for you. KOTOR was like this, despite not being a too terribly bad game. With Dragon Age Origins, however, your choices and the decisions you made when it came time to kingmaking or treating average people will affect the ending of the game. You're still going to have to fight the ultimate fight at the end, mind you. But the world that results is the one you make, not the one the game funneled you into.
The second thing I really liked about DA: Origins was the way they made you make ethical decisions. Many games are very black-and-white with decisions that they present you with, i.e., you can either help some beggar or kick him. It'd gotten to be almost the rule that you wanted to steer your character either towards being a really "good" guy or a really bad guy. With DA: O they REALLY introduced shades of grey into the decision making that you have to do. You might kill the demon that's ruling over an area, for example, in the name of good, but you have to consider that maybe letting it live will result in less people suffering. I think that is a really poignant ethical crisis in our time, particularly in the wake of the leadership crisis currently inflaming the Arab world. Real life isn't black-and-white very often. Are these tyrant dictators in the Middle East better for the region? They stifle democracy but often are cornerstones of peace and both political and economic stability. Anyways, that's a definite feather in DA:Origins' cap.
Dragon Age II so far is proving to be a little bit different from its predecessor. They've definitely moved it more towards action RPGing at the expense of strategic RPGing, something I'm not so excited about. The action in combat sequences is extremely fast, almost too fast to react to. The talent trees are a little confusing as well now. The talents are more wide-ranging and can be gotten at in different ways, but the user-interface for them is very poor and confusing, even for someone who logged many hours in Origins.
I hope DA II will become more fun as it goes on. I don't think I'll be playing it as much as I did Origins.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Initial Post - Facebook is history
Today I made the decision to permanently delete my Facebook account.
Facebook today decided that they would press forward with their plan to make the phone numbers and addresses of its users -- even privately guarded information -- open to access by third party developers. This was too much. I've always thought, "Dylan, don't think for a second that your information is seen only by your friends and the people you want to see it". I wasn't affected by this personally, since I don't share phone #s or addresses, but yet I know that people will be, because they do share that. They are encouraged by Facebook to share as many details as possible, and that is dangerous.
Facebook is not much different from McDonalds right now. They project very strongly to you that the more you use what they have to offer you, the better your life will be. They advertise everywhere that you should join and use their services, then when people start doing so, they show that jump in membership shows people want to use their service as deeply as possible. It doesn't really show that, all it shows is the success of their marketing arm.
Where do you think Facebook makes its billions? From the free services it provides to millions of people, or to the advertisers and other developers who are gaining increasing access to everyone's information.....? If Facebook really saw itself as a social network, where the priority was the sharing of information, they would tell those third-party developers to stick it in their ear and leave. But they need them. What they really are is a very successful business model set up to profit like madmen off of information trafficking from those "developers" (God knows who). There's not really a way I can justify being part of an online social network that exists to profit off of people more than they exist to provide real, legitimate privacy options.
I think sometimes that my generation is more apt to be too trusting with technology, particuarly the Internet. We've grown up with it, you know. Not as much as my sister Madison's generation, perhaps, but we're still integrated pretty deeply. I was 10 years old when Windows 95 came out and 15 during Y2K. The Information Age is all about the sharing and exchange of free-flowing information. Of course, over time, with that free flow of info comes both people who want to use it for good, and people who want to take advantage of it for their own purposes. In the late 90s when broadband became widely accessible -- that's when I think the Internet became something more than an afterthought to the average person. Frankly, before that, it sure was too tedious to sit in front of a dial-up connection for more than an hour, especially since you had to unplug your landline phone for that time!
My uncle compares it to TV, how shows like I Love Lucy gave way over time to shows like Jerry Springer. Do you think that's a good comparison? As it became more accessible, the Internet sure did become more treacherous. It wasn't so harsh when we first encountered it in the 90s, I remember what America Online was first like. People (actual people) discussed actual issues of substance in these things called chat rooms, and some of them scoffed or smiled when a certain 10-year old made an attempt to participate.
Since I got Facebook in 2005, I've thought it was a great tool. And it has been for years. It's been the way to keep track of lost friends, organize events and share media. But it's no longer about getting people together with long-lost friends. Advertising agencies, government or terrorist groups, heck even any group that would want a multitude of information on millions of people world wide should be licking their chops regarding what type of databases and information they could glean from Facebook. Did you know if Facebook was a real nation, it would now be the third largest in the world? How desirable even a cursory amount of knowledge on that many people would be...
I'm really, really worried about what kinds of people might get their clutches in people's private information now that Facebook has agreed to make the private phone numbers and addresses releasable to third party "developers". I know that many people (but not all) would never make the foolish decision to share that information. That doesn't seem to matter to the Facebook brass, though. They seem to think the more information shared, the better. (And why is that? Because they profit off of the amount of information shared!) Maybe that mindset would work in the Internet of the 80s and 90s. It sure seems prohibitively dangerous for today.
So goodbye, Facebook. And don't hurt the ones I love.
Facebook today decided that they would press forward with their plan to make the phone numbers and addresses of its users -- even privately guarded information -- open to access by third party developers. This was too much. I've always thought, "Dylan, don't think for a second that your information is seen only by your friends and the people you want to see it". I wasn't affected by this personally, since I don't share phone #s or addresses, but yet I know that people will be, because they do share that. They are encouraged by Facebook to share as many details as possible, and that is dangerous.
Facebook is not much different from McDonalds right now. They project very strongly to you that the more you use what they have to offer you, the better your life will be. They advertise everywhere that you should join and use their services, then when people start doing so, they show that jump in membership shows people want to use their service as deeply as possible. It doesn't really show that, all it shows is the success of their marketing arm.
Where do you think Facebook makes its billions? From the free services it provides to millions of people, or to the advertisers and other developers who are gaining increasing access to everyone's information.....? If Facebook really saw itself as a social network, where the priority was the sharing of information, they would tell those third-party developers to stick it in their ear and leave. But they need them. What they really are is a very successful business model set up to profit like madmen off of information trafficking from those "developers" (God knows who). There's not really a way I can justify being part of an online social network that exists to profit off of people more than they exist to provide real, legitimate privacy options.
I think sometimes that my generation is more apt to be too trusting with technology, particuarly the Internet. We've grown up with it, you know. Not as much as my sister Madison's generation, perhaps, but we're still integrated pretty deeply. I was 10 years old when Windows 95 came out and 15 during Y2K. The Information Age is all about the sharing and exchange of free-flowing information. Of course, over time, with that free flow of info comes both people who want to use it for good, and people who want to take advantage of it for their own purposes. In the late 90s when broadband became widely accessible -- that's when I think the Internet became something more than an afterthought to the average person. Frankly, before that, it sure was too tedious to sit in front of a dial-up connection for more than an hour, especially since you had to unplug your landline phone for that time!
My uncle compares it to TV, how shows like I Love Lucy gave way over time to shows like Jerry Springer. Do you think that's a good comparison? As it became more accessible, the Internet sure did become more treacherous. It wasn't so harsh when we first encountered it in the 90s, I remember what America Online was first like. People (actual people) discussed actual issues of substance in these things called chat rooms, and some of them scoffed or smiled when a certain 10-year old made an attempt to participate.
Since I got Facebook in 2005, I've thought it was a great tool. And it has been for years. It's been the way to keep track of lost friends, organize events and share media. But it's no longer about getting people together with long-lost friends. Advertising agencies, government or terrorist groups, heck even any group that would want a multitude of information on millions of people world wide should be licking their chops regarding what type of databases and information they could glean from Facebook. Did you know if Facebook was a real nation, it would now be the third largest in the world? How desirable even a cursory amount of knowledge on that many people would be...
I'm really, really worried about what kinds of people might get their clutches in people's private information now that Facebook has agreed to make the private phone numbers and addresses releasable to third party "developers". I know that many people (but not all) would never make the foolish decision to share that information. That doesn't seem to matter to the Facebook brass, though. They seem to think the more information shared, the better. (And why is that? Because they profit off of the amount of information shared!) Maybe that mindset would work in the Internet of the 80s and 90s. It sure seems prohibitively dangerous for today.
So goodbye, Facebook. And don't hurt the ones I love.
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