Quotulatiousness

December 30, 2022

Barnes & Noble used to be like an even more boring Indigo … but they’ve been turned around

Filed under: Books, Business, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back when my job required more travel, one of the things I used to look forward to was visiting US bookstores, as they always had a wider and more interesting stock than our staid Canadian equivalents. Over time, the interesting local bookstores got harder and harder to find as the big box stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble took over much of their customer base. Of the two, I much preferred going into a Borders store, as they had better stock than B&N and the staff seemed friendlier and (generally) more helpful to clueless foreigners like me. Borders went under around the same time my business travels to the US tapered off and it looked like it was only a matter of time for B&N to follow it into bankruptcy. Even if it struggled on, surely the pandemic killed off what Amazon left behind? Ted Gioia says not so fast:

“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

But Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again — and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.

Amazon seems invincible. So the idea that Barnes & Noble can succeed where its much larger competitor failed is hard to believe. But the turnaround at B&N is real. In many instances they have already re-opened in locations where they previously shut down.

Barnes & Noble tried exactly the same sort of “re-imagining” of their stores that Canada’s Indigo chain is currently floundering with: cutting back on the floorspace devoted to books in favour of throw cushions, candles, decorations, bath salts, scarfs and towels. It worked just as badly for B&N as it is working for Indigo: it chases out the primary customer base (book-buyers) in favour of bored people looking to waste away an hour or two just browsing tchotchkes. (And if you can find an Indigo staff member to ask about a particular book, they almost always assure you that you can find it on their website, which I’m sure helps bring more people into the store …) In desperation, B&N looked to expand into a very different market:

… in a bizarre strategic move, the company decided to launch freestanding restaurants under the name Barnes & Noble Kitchen — no books, just meals. But this was another disaster.

The company chairman Leonard Riggio eventually admitted, in September 2018, that running a restaurant is “a lot harder than you think it is … The bottom line is awful.”

Given the incredibly short and profitless life of most start-up restaurants, that really does qualify as a “No shit, Sherlock” moment. So how did Barnes & Noble turn things around?

It’s amazing how much difference a new boss can make.

I’ve seen that firsthand so many times. I now have a rule of thumb: “There is no substitute for good decisions at the top — and no remedy for stupid ones.”

It’s really that simple. When the CEO makes foolish blunders, all the wisdom and hard work of everyone else in the company is insufficient to compensate. You only fix these problems by starting at the top.

In the case of Barnes & Noble, the new boss was named James Daunt. And he had already turned around Waterstones, a struggling book retailing chain in Britain.

Bringing in fresh blood can be a life-saver for a business, but we also have that expression about deck chairs on the Titanic in common business parlance, so just being “new” isn’t enough … new leaders must also bring new approaches and fresh ideas:

But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.

This seemed stark raving mad. But Daunt had a reason. Publishers give you promotional money in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement — but once you take the cash, you’ve made your deal with the devil. You now must put stacks of the promoted books in the most visible parts of the store, and sell them like they’re the holy script of some new cure-all creed.

Those promoted books are the first things you see when you walk by the window. They welcome you when you step inside the front door. They wink at you again next to the checkout counter.

Leaked emails show ridiculous deals. Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies — even if the book sucks and demand is weak — and push them as aggressively as possible.

Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.

Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

“Staff are now in control of their own shops”, he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”

This crazy strategy proved so successful at Waterstones, that returns fell almost to zero — 97% of the books placed on the shelves were purchased by customers. That’s an amazing figure in the book business.

On the basis of this success, Daunt was put in charge of Barnes & Noble in August 2019. But could he really bring that dinosaur, on the brink of extinction, back to life?

December 9, 2022

Canada’s “historic” shift toward the Indo-Pacific is … more marketing than strategy

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day distills down all the airy phrases to see just what the Canadian government is actually going to do in the Indo-Pacific as opposed to merely talking about it:

“Red circle/oval roughly depicts the Indian Ocean region. Blue circle/oval covers the Pacific region. Green oval covers ASEAN. Yellow overlay covers the Indo Pacific.”
Map annotation by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.

A formal public-policy statement from the Government of Canada is a rare thing. It is even rarer when it is not just a speech but a published written document. The rarest of these is undoubtedly when such a document focuses on foreign policy. When Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly recently pitched her “once-in-a-generation shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, much was made of why Canada was doing it and what it would achieve. No fewer than four cabinet ministers took part in the announcement. Canada will, they announced, step up naval patrols of the region, continue to expand trade with China while also tightening our protections of intellectual property and ownership rules for strategic industries, and use “Team Canada” trade missions to boost commercial links with other growing regional economic powers, including India. We seek also to expand our intelligence and cybersecurity links with allies and partners in the region. 

Now that the dust on the rhetoric has settled, closer examination reveals that this might simply be an exercise of branding separate activities into a marketing-friendly bundle, as opposed to a coherent plan focused on achieving specific outcomes. 

In examining the document two approaches are equally useful in assessing value: whether the content has some substance and whether the policy framework is sufficiently robust to hang various activities and plans on its body.

Three hints are provided as to why the new plan might not be the cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy that it portends to be. Firstly, operating in the “National Interest”, a phrase used six separate times over the 26 pages, is given neither form nor function and lacks any definition. It is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat talking to Alice asking her “where do you want to get to”. When Alice replies that “I don’t much care …” the Cheshire Cat wisely suggests that “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” With no definition of national interests pretty much anything can be hand waved as to being necessary and required, or not, for its achievement. 

This leads in turn to the second hint that the plan might be more posturing than substance. Lacking the single aimpoint of operating in the national interest, the “objectives” supposedly fill that gap by providing a set of specific achievements which in combination would be a sufficiently clear aimpoint. But normally objectives can, and should, be thought of as something specific and measurable, allowing plans to be developed to achieve them. “Save 100 dollars this month” or perhaps, in more relevant terms, “Increase our trade in the Indo-Pacific region by 100 per cent over the five years of this policy enactment.” Plans can then be developed to achieve those objectives. But reviewing those objectives reveals that they are themselves actions, not end-states. It appears that the policy is based on “doing, not achieving”. I am reminded of my sons many years ago. When asked if their rooms were clean, they would reply, “I’m cleaning it.” The process was enduring but we most certainly disagreed on the value of the activity as opposed to achieving a measurable result. Under this construct the government can claim that as long as Canada is doing stuff the policy should be considered a success. 

December 5, 2022

“… when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from this weekend’s dispatch from The Line:

A typical haul of weapons confiscated by Toronto Police Services in 2012. Most of these guns are in the “restricted” or “prohibited” category of Canadian firearms and would not be available for legal purchase by anyone who had not gone through a rigorous RCMP background check and passed multiple training courses. Almost certainly none of them came from a legal owner.

We hate this as much as you do, but we must discuss guns with you again. We think the Liberals have screwed up, and we aren’t sure yet they realize it. (But they’re probably clueing in.)

You know why we’re suspicious? The Liberals are extremely good at marketing. A depressing amount of the time, it’s all they’ve got. They can take the smallest morsel of accomplishment and make it the centrepiece of a coordinated nation-wide grassroots mobilization campaign and fundraising drive. They have memes and other social shareables ready to go. Cabinet ministers release cringe videos captured by staffers who probably realize, in the very moment of their filming, that they’ve wasted their God-given potential on … this. 

Outcomes? The hell with those. Let’s talk about those inputs, baby! In both official languages. 

But this time? When the Liberals have actually embarked on what would be the most significant overhaul of our firearms laws in a generation? Not only have they not said boo. They’re going out of their way to deny that they’ve done anything. Or, when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing.

So either they don’t know what they’re doing (very possible), regret what they’ve done (also very possible) or it’s a confused mix of both (our working theory).

But let us explain. And forgive us, but things will get a bit technical. (We’ll keep it as simple as possible, but guns are complicated.) 

Canadian firearms policy has generally tried to classify firearms by their technical specifications. Three broad categories were created by the major reforms of the 1990s. “Prohibited” firearms essentially were machine guns, automatic assault rifles of the kind used by modern militaries, and easily concealed short-barrelled handguns; prohibited licences were issued in the 1990s to a relatively small number of individuals who already owned such firearms and their immediate descendants (to cover family heirlooms), but prohibited firearms otherwise are not available to the public. “Non-restricted” firearms were the very common rifles and shotguns suited (and frequently used) for hunting or target shooting sports, and require the least onerous level of licensing (but still, you do need a licence that involves background checks and vetting). In the middle we had “restricted” firearms — mostly handguns — that require a special licence beyond the normal licence, requiring extra training and conditions. 

These broad categories do not always reflect the reality of how the laws actually shaped up. The prohibited and restricted categories were often stretched by meddling politicians to apply more broadly than they ought to have, so that politicians (mainly Liberals) could claim to be “tough on guns” in particular instances. But these three categories have been generally stable for a generation, and functioned well, more or less. Perfectly? No. But our gun-control laws worked for the public at large, which is why violent gun crime by licensed individuals is rare despite a relatively high rate of firearms ownership in Canada.

You wouldn’t think it given all the political controversy, but Canadian gun control has been a fundamentally successful public-policy program, for decades. The very real problem we have with gun violence in this country is overwhelmingly committed with illegal guns smuggled in from the United States, and fall outside the scope of our gun-control system, which works well doing what it is supposed to do: licensing lawful gun owners, regulating the legal uses of guns and regulating, as well, the lawful hunting and shooting sports industry. 

For all its success as public policy, though, the system didn’t work for the Liberals politically. So they decided to get cute. And that’s where their problems began.

December 2, 2022

The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explores the oddity of musical tastes on TikTok:

When I was a child, a band called Alvin and the Chipmunks enjoyed a brief taste of fame. Hot bands come and go, but this one had a bizarre back story.

First of all, it didn’t really exist. The band consisted of cartoon chipmunks. In this regard, Alvin and his rodent colleagues get credit for anticipating the anime pop stars of the current day.

Second, these singing chipmunks were more a brand than a band. Because these animals were make-believe, they couldn’t go on tour — but they could sell boatloads of merchandise, from lunch boxes to comic books. This, too, anticipated much of our current music industry — where the side deals often make more money than concerts and records.

But even stranger, this group aimed to imitate the sound of singing chipmunks by speeding up recordings of human vocalists. The end result was arguably the most annoying sound in 20th century music (a rare distinction, that). I can’t stand listening to these tracks, but they somehow won five Grammy Awards. Alvin and the Chipmunks actually enjoyed two number-one singles.

That’s two more than Bob Dylan can claim.

In all fairness, these same tracks sound even worse when slowed down. So maybe there’s something to be said for getting to the end of the song as fast as possible.

But here’s the most surprising part of the story. This sped-up sound also anticipated the contemporary music of our own time — it’s actually one of the hottest trends on TikTok.

The whole music culture, it seems, is now under the sway of a chipmunk aesthetic. This, to my way of thinking, is even more foreboding than all those people who want us to eat bugs and compost our deceased loved ones.

I’m starting to think that Alvin and the Chipmunks belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe I can’t stand listening to the stuff, but these cartoon critters clearly pointed the way to the future. A dark dystopian future, perhaps, but I guess that’s what happens when you treat rodents as role models.

November 17, 2022

“The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented – and he had a few, that bloke – is Thanatos, or the ‘death instinct'”

Filed under: Books, Business, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the apparent death wish of the academic publishing industry:

The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented — and he had a few, that bloke — is Thanatos, or the “death instinct”. This is an alleged drive among living organisms to destroy themselves.

Many have disputed that such a thing exists. Instincts preserve life — that’s their evolutionary purpose. The idea of a death instinct is impossible, so the critics claim. It’s like that Peacekeeper Missile or soft rock or marijuana initiative or any of those other two-word combinations of things that don’t belong together.

I’ve often criticized Freud, but I’ve come to accept this Thanatos notion, at least as a sociocultural concept. It explains so many otherwise inexplicable happenings in our society.

Take, for example, academic publishers. They are clearly imbued with a death instinct, no? How else can you explain their self-destructive behavior?

Universities have been publishing books for almost 500 years — dating back to 1534 A.D. when King Henry VIII allowed Cambridge University to set up a printing press. Running one of these publishing outfits is almost a requirement if a college wants to rise in the rankings, but I wonder how much longer this can last. After all, how can you succeed as a publisher if you put so little energy into selling books?

I know one academic publisher that previously sent out two hundred or more review copies of each new book — because they obviously wanted publicity for these titles. Those days are gone. Nowadays their preferred strategy is to send out zero physical copies to reviewers. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve heard it straight from their mouths: their goal is to distribute absolutely no hard copies to media outlets and book critics.

    College students are spending 26% less on textbooks this year. That’s a bloodbath for the publishers. But this is the inevitable result whenever you assume the customer has no choice — because, sooner or later, they actually do.

Okay, I don’t blame the publishers entirely — just consider how rarely the New York Times reviews books from academic presses. You might think the cultural elites in New York would give some support to their fellow travelers in idea-mongering, but no dice. They treat those academic books like they’re toxic.

(By the way, I’m grateful to the Times Literary Supplement over in London, which still takes time to tell me about important scholarly works, most of them ignored in US media. But even that last holdout in Britain feels precarious — I fear they’ve been too contaminated by Yankee values.)

Yankee values? That’s up there with the Peacekeeper Missile.

But the lack of review copies is just one symptom among many. Let’s look at a few others.

Just consider the flurry of rebranding efforts in academic publishing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, successful organizations rarely redesign their logos or “refresh” their brands. They don’t have time for such nonsense. But even more to the point, when you’re thriving, your logo is part of that success — it’s a sign of your strength, and you just don’t mess with it.

But that’s clearly not the case in academia nowadays.

I could give you countless examples from college campuses — where “rebranding” is more popular than a hot high school football prospect on a recruiting visit. But I’ll settle for two instances:

My only disappointment is that these brand redesigns didn’t come packaged with a new slogan. May I suggest something along the lines of: Information Solutions for a Changing World.

Or maybe, if we can be a bit more boastful: The Ultimate in Handheld Data Storage.

Does anybody still believe in this rebranding malarkey? Surely any reasonable person can see it’s all smoke and mirrors? But that hardly matters, because the brand redesign has tremendous symbolic value.

That’s why they do it.

The road to hell was once paved with good intentions — but nowadays we settle for symbolic gestures. They’re much cheaper than good intentions. And there’s no shortage of symbolic gestures nowadays — more than enough to pave that whole damned highway to hell.

It’s a shame that symbolism doesn’t pay the bills. Or fix problems. And it certainly won’t sell books.

November 10, 2022

Contemplating the end of brand franchises like Star Wars

Filed under: Business, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia is wondering how Star Wars ends:

Original Stormtrooper Hero Helmet from Shepperton Design Studios + originalstormtrooper.com

Lately, I’ve been wondering how Star Wars ends.

Let me be clear, I’m not worried about how the story resolves, or what happens to the characters. I have zero interest in all that. Darth Vader can win the Nobel Peace Prize, for all I care.

I’m more concerned with how a powerful brand franchise loses its stranglehold on the culture. And it’s not just Star Wars, it’s all those other stories that never achieve closure. I’m talking about Batman and Indiana Jones and James Bond and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or MCU, for short), and the rest of them.

They all die, sooner or later. But how?

Heroes in capes and colorful costumes seem invincible now, if only because these fictional flâneurs are bigger than anything else in commercial culture. If Spiderman and Batman were real people, they would boast higher incomes and net worth than any flesh-and-blood entertainer in the world. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, which Disney acquired back in 2009, must be worth ten or twenty times the $4 billion they spent back then — total revenues from Marvel brands since then are somewhere around the one trillion dollar mark.

No pop star in history has ever possessed that kind of earning power.

Can these franchises just go on forever? The management team at Disney certainly must hope so, judging by their never-ending slate of Star Wars, Marvel, and other brand extension offerings. No Time to Die isn’t just the name of the 25th James Bond movie, but a promise for the future — why not another 25 films in the series? Or 50 or 100?

But brand franchises do die, or become so tired that few people care anymore. Universal Studios made so much money from Ma and Pa Kettle films that these corny comedies allegedly saved it from bankruptcy in the 1940s, but by 1960 audiences had lost interest in the predictable formulas of the series.

The Carry On films were the most dependable audience draw in British comedy, but after 31 movies the franchise could carry on no longer. A final resuscitation attempt after 14 years not only failed at the box office but was voted the worst British film ever made.

Some franchises not only die, but become genuinely toxic as attitudes evolve — killing, for example, the Charlie Chan franchise, and making it unlikely that Tarzan or the Lone Ranger or many other once lucrative brands will ever enjoy another meaningful payday.

None of this should surprise us, because narratives and protagonists go in and out of fashion like anything else. A story that charmed your grandparents is unlikely to interest your grandchildren.

May 11, 2022

QotD: The TV treadmill

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At Best Buy we looked at TVs, something that always makes you rue whatever TV you had. The clerk was a smart fellow who steered us away from the 8Ks, said it’s nonsense unless you have 8K eyeballs, and besides, everything you’re getting streamed is 1080.

“All this beautiful stuff we’re seeing is shot in the highest definition known to mankind, right?”

“Right. Nothing else looks like this. But it sells TVs. What you really want, is …” and he led us over to some other TVs that looked just as good. I wondered aloud whether the entire 8K product line existed just to make us more likely to heed the wisdom of the salesman and lay out some money for the 4K.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2022-02-07.

April 21, 2022

QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market

Filed under: Britain, Business, India, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Self-promotion is not new, but never before has it been what theology was in the Middle Ages, the queen of the sciences.

A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.

It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.

Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.

November 27, 2021

QotD: The zombie that used to be Abercrombie & Fitch

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back when Abercrombie & Fitch was the NYC outfiter for affluent sportsmen, it carried high end guns and fishing tackle and outdoor equipment. Its Madison Avenue store had a shooting range and a casting pool on the roof. Griffin & Howe custom rifles, London best shotguns, and Payne fly rods were waiting there for sale. Alas! the real Abercrombie & Fitch died in the mid-1970s.

The name changed hands repeatedly and was revived in the late 1990s as a completely different kind of entity. The new revival markets sissy fashions to metrosexuals. It’s rather as if after Papa Hemingway shot himself, his name was sold repeatedly, and revived decades later as “Ernestine Hemingway”, an authoress of Gay Romance Novels.

David Zincavage, “From the Good Old Days: Abercrombie & Fitch, Change Sucks”, Never Yet Melted, 2021-08-24.

October 31, 2021

Meta?

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line Matt Gurney wonders what Zuckerberg is up to with the corporate re-naming:

My favourite reaction to Facebook rebranding as “Meta”.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, chairman and CEO, has unveiled the newly rebranded company’s plans for the “Metaverse” — a combination of online environments that can be experienced in augmented and virtual reality. (The company’s new name, Meta Inc., reflects the new focus, but the major brands the company owns, including Facebook itself, will retain their current names under the now-renamed parent company.)

We can’t ignore the fact that Facebook is rolling out its bold plan at a moment when the company is on the receiving end of much negative attention over its business practices and corporate values, if any. Facebook is as much a global supervillain as a company, or at least the overall coverage would suggest as much. No, we definitely can’t ignore that, and we won’t — look for a specific analysis of that part of the whole puzzle in this week’s full version of the The Line‘s dispatch feature later today.

But for this column, just for now, let’s briefly set aside Facebook’s major political and cultural problems, and actually try to assess Metaverse on its own merits. What the hell is the company trying to do here, and will anyone go for it?

The what of Metaverse is intriguing. Zuckerberg announced the concept in a promotional video, but that’s mostly marketing. The Guardian tried to concisely sum up what is being proposed, and I probably won’t do better, so let’s just crib their summary:

    The metaverse is where the physical and digital worlds come together. It is a space where digital representations of people – avatars – interact at work and play, meeting in their office, going to concerts and even trying on clothes.

    At the centre of this universe will be virtual reality, a digital world that you can already enter via Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets. It will also include augmented reality, a sort of step back from VR where elements of the digital world are layered on top of reality – think Pokémon Go or Facebook’s recent smart glasses tie-up with Ray-Ban.

Virtual reality isn’t a new technology — I first tinkered around with a VR headset as a child probably 25 or 30 years ago at a downtown Toronto convention centre. It was incredibly rudimentary, but the core concept has basically stayed the same: a user puts on a virtual reality headset that puts a screen (or two separate ones) before their eyes, and those screens provide visual stimuli that, when combined with audio through a headset or earbuds, can create a very convincing simulation of … basically anything. There are a series of virtual reality video gaming systems on the market today; I own one of the lower-capability versions, a PlayStation VR, running off a Playstation 4 console. Though one of the less powerful modern VR systems, it’s still surprisingly capable of completely tricking your brain. My wife and I once spent an amusing evening doing a virtual rollercoaster ride, and even sitting in a chair in my basement, you’d swear you could feel the motion of the car going up and down the tracks.

All the bafflegab about a “metaverse”? Wes Fenlon believes it’s all bullshit:

We have Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to thank for popularizing avatars as our digital personas, from early internet message boards to full-body VRChat. We also have Snow Crash to blame for the absolute hell we find ourselves in today, as every tech billionaire on the planet slobber all over themselves as they declare the metaverse — the next phase of human culture!! — is within reach. Games, NFTs, crypto, VR, AR, the blockchain, they’re all wrapped up in this idea of a virtually-integrated society in which our Fortnite costumes will carry over to our Onlyfans accounts and we will never, ever have to log off.

The absurdity of it makes me want to scream, or maybe die, or maybe just spoon out the part of my brain that knows what an NFT is. But there’s one thing that keeps me going:

The absolute gleeful, cackling, deep-in-my-bones certainty that it’s all complete bullshit.

If you also know deep in your heart that the metaverse is a big fat steaming load of billionaire nerd pabulum, I hope reading these words provides you with a wave of vindicating comfort. You’re not crazy. I know it can feel like that when the people peddling these things seem so convinced that they’re the future, like they know something you don’t. Don’t fall for it. Watching people spend $69 million in fake money to buy a JPEG should make you feel like you’re living in an age of unparalleled nonsense.

That feeling isn’t going to go away. For the next decade we’ll all be asking ourselves if the whole world’s gone mad at least once a week. But the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry’s very expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a schadenfreude generator the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

We will all become the living embodiments of the one true expression of being online in the 21st century:

The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it’s called the internet

When Epic’s Tim Sweeney and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg talk about the metaverse, they’re primarily drawing from the foundational visions of cyberspace created by science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Their books in the ’80s and early ’90s looked at what computers were capable of at the time and imagined them decades in the future, just abstract enough to let our imaginations run.

Here’s Gibson’s description of cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984):

    A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

And here’s a snippet of Stephenson’s description of the metaverse in Snow Crash (1992):

    Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.

Both novels were prescient and profoundly influential. Alongside movies like Tron, they shaped ’80s and ’90s depictions of what it would look like to be inside a computer, from rudimentary early VR to movies like The Matrix. In 2012, Michael Abrash — who has worked at Microsoft, id Software, Valve, and Oculus — wrote that his game development career “all started with Snow Crash.”

September 23, 2021

QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I’m baffled by this idea — seemingly everywhere in modern marketing — that they can somehow annoy you into buying their products. Music streaming services like Spotify are all but unlistenable because of it — not only do you get four ads every three songs, but three of the four ads ask “Want a break from the ads? Join premium!!” Or … you know … I could just go back to listening to tunes the old fashioned way. Humanity’s Greatest Genius, when he lays off that shtick for a minute, actually has some good riffs on this. We all must learn to deprogram ourselves from the Cult of Free. If they’re giving away the product, then you are the product. Much like a college degree, “free” tech is actually negative equity — you’re actually worse off for doing it.

It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.

Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.

Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.

July 17, 2021

QotD: “Magic” bullets

Filed under: Business, Humour, Quotations, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As I write this, another wave of ballistic hyperbole is sweeping across the Internet. There’s a new bullet out! It sets the paradigm on its ear! Gun owners are drooling for this, the last bullet you’ll ever need! Blah, blah, blah, yakkity-shmakkity.

Stick around long enough and you’ll notice this phenomenon happen every few years. You’re sitting there, minding your own business, and the next thing you know, friends from work or church or the book club who know you as “The Gun Expert” are coming up to you and asking about this bullet that’s being hyped in the mainstream media as either the surest felon-stopper since Wyatt Earp or the biggest menace to society since John Dillinger.

It’s rare for something as esoteric as a projectile design to come to the attention of the non-gun press. Generally, for that to happen, it takes one of two things: either a mainstream manufacturer made an unusually poor PR choice in the bullet naming *cough*BlackTalon*cough*, or someone has launched a buzzword-laden press release with all the discrimination of a desert island dweller putting notes in bottles.

[…]

When a new Magic Bullet is launched and makes media waves, I always apply two filters as to whether it’s worth chasing down. The first filter is “Are the police using this?” This is not necessarily because I think that the police are all-that-and-a bag-of-chips in the gear-selection department, but they’ve generally been okay with bullets for the last 15 or 20 years and, should I ever have to justify my choice of rounds in a courtroom, it would be nice to be able to say “You, alright! I learned it by watching you!” like the kid in the commercial.

The second filter? The second filter is “Is this cartridge sold in six-round blister packs with pictures of explosions and rappelling ninjas on them?” Because if it is, well, I’m just not Operator enough.

Tamara Keel, “No Magic Bullet”, GunsAmerica Digest, 2018-11-27.

July 6, 2021

GALAXY QUEST – WTF Happened To This Movie?

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

JoBlo Videos
Published 7 Feb 2020

Hollywood has had its fair share of historically troubled productions. Whether it was casting changes, actor deaths, fired directors, in-production rewrites, constant delays, budget cuts or studio edits, these films had every intention to be a blockbuster, but were beset with unforeseen disasters. Sometimes huge hits, sometimes box office bombs.

In our latest episode we explore the 1999 surprise hit GALAXY QUEST, which had a long road to making it to the big screen. Starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, Enrico Colantoni, Justin Long and Missi Pyle, this riff on Star Trek, directed by Dean Parisot, eventually got over its hurdles and made a galactic splash at the box office. Now, if we could just get that sequel …

For more MOVIE NEWS, visit: http://www.joblo.com

#GalaxyQuest #TimAllen #WTFHappenedToThisMovie

May 7, 2021

The Nazi Invasion of Canada?! – WW2 – On the Homefront 009

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 May 2021

What would happen if Nazi Germany invaded Canada? You don’t need to imagine. In 1942, the government of Mackenzie King launched a propaganda effort that simulates Canada falling under Hitler’s yoke. Why? For the war economy of course!

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Fiona Rachel Fischer and Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel Fischer
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Miki Cackowski and Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory​)

Colorizations by:
Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…​
Daniel Weiss

Sources:
IWM Art.IWM PST 18495, CH 27, CH 3231, CH 6831, HU 88386, HU 104482
nationaal archief
Photo Album of F.V. Light (1923-2000)

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “Prescient”
Max Anson – “Ancient Saga”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “Sailing for Gold”
Philip Ayers – “Please Hear Me Out”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle Of Complexity”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
1 day ago
As you can see in the video, the efforts to raise money to pay for the war were extremely high. But when we read about the stuff that was going on in Winnipeg on “If-Day”, we were really surprised — talk about “playing” war! Of course, this top-notch high-effort propaganda had quite the impact on the citizens of Winnipeg, because — let´s be honest — who wouldn´t be frightened by any kind of Nazi invasion? And they did not spare any effort to get the details right, too. What is your impression of If-Day? Have you heard of it before? Please let us know in the comments!

Cheers, Fiona

P.S. If you want to watch the short film starring Donald Duck which Anna mentions in the video, click right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNMrMFuk-bo&ab_channel=8thManDVD.com%E2%84%A2CartoonChannel

March 15, 2021

Loaded For War — The Santa Fe Railroad In World War II

Filed under: History, Military, Railways, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 24 May 2020

Want to support this channel and help us preserve old films? Visit https://www.patreon.com/PeriscopeFilm
Visit our website www.PeriscopeFilm.com

Santa Fe presents, Loaded for War. This WWII era color film presents the power of the Santa Fe railroad. While speaking of the mighty effort the trains and its myriad workers achieved during wartime, the footage is all modern and in color. The film does a great job of showing how integral our railroad system has been to the growth of these United States. “With grateful appreciation to the Office of Defense Transportation, the Army, Navy, Maritime Commission, and the shipping and traveling public, for the cooperation and genuine understanding which has made the service record here presented possible …” The film opens with a steam locomotive bearing down on the camera 1:03. The narrator speaks as the train crosses a trestle 1:10. News headlines of December 7, 1941 11:25. Steam and diesel locomotives are transformed into machines of war 1:40. Smoke fills a train yard as trains enter and are washed 2:08. A train signal shows a green light 2:25. Workers are seen in the factory 2:36. Civilians exit trains volunteering for service 2:45. A telegram is shown stating that the trainmen should, “move all available equipment to military stations without delay” 2:54. Four locomotives are shown 3:03. Crews are assigned and men work double shifts 3:45. Rail equipment is loaded by military personnel, ready to move 4:13. Flatcars are loaded with tanks and military trucks 4:52. Divisions of fighting men aboard the trains 5:09. The tanks roll down the tracks on flatcars 5:35. The wheels of war are rolling 6:14. The day by day mass movement of freight is shown at the train yard 6:48. Trains crossing country on railroad tracks 7:40. Trains service the shipyards as men work building military ships 8:00. A ship is launched 8:15. Cattle and pigs are delivered throughout the 48 states 8:37. Potatoes are tilled in the field with heavy equipment 9:00. Oranges are picked and packed in southern states 9:13. Military bombers soar through the air 9:23. Heavy machinery workers in the factories 9:48. Factories and men building artillery shells 9:55. Tanks roll off the product line and onto the railroad tracks 10:10. Locomotive struggles up a hill 10:25. Miners and their lamp hats head down the tunnels by rail 10:38. Oil fields are shown 11:15. Oil is loaded onto railway tankers 11:38. Machines digging the copper mines 12:08. The big diggers pick up 8 cubic yards of copper at a time 12:18. The railroad moves the copper to the smelters 12:31. Sulfur mines using forced steam 12:50. Sulfur is moved by train to the gunpowder makers 13:25. Logging industry is served with the railroads 14:00. Cotton and scrap metal industries are also served by rail 14:18. Old cars are being called back into use for the war effort 15:30. Locomotive number 3723 comes out of retirement by the trainmen 15:48. Various train parts are marked and taken away for repair or replacement 16:07. Men work in factories with fine-tuned machines to retool and refine old parts for new use 16:26. Old firebrick is removed and replaced 16:43. Acetylene torches are used inside the huge boilers 16:49. Huge wheels are cleaned and dipped and sprayed ready for use 17:08. Heat is used to expand the metals 17:18. Locomotive number 3723 is fully refurbished and ready for the tracks 18:05. All types of equipment need to be refurbished for the war effort 18:46. The men use heat and molten metal to reshape old parts for new use 19:00. Gears are ground with precision 19:13. The railroads motto, “let’s keep ‘em rolling” 19:24. The men work on building new track 19:35. Men using hammers to straighten out tracks 19:53. The towermen, bridge crews, conductors, station men, ticket men, dispatchers, signalmen and to the other thousands of men – give the railroad men their due 20:44. Women are also an integral part of the success of the railroad 21:07. The women work in offices but also in factories with heavy machinery and molten metal 21:21. Two women wash down a train 21:30. The wheels of war are rolling 21:40. Military men march in unison 21:47. Train caboose pulls away from the camera 22:52. A flag with 8057 turns into the American flag and waves in the breeze 23:06. The End. Santa Fe.

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com

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