JetFable’s Gamer Writer’s Block

Its long overdue for a new entry. I wrote most of this in my head when I was driving this morning, zigzagging through traffic, it’s insane how slow people drives, and it never ceases to amaze me, in any case, I am so busy that hopefully I can type this all up in 5 min. I discussed with my friend at length about what made anyone a tech moron, so he are my criterias. Before anyone read it, I am assuming you actually listen to an MP3 player instead of CD, you search Wikipiedia instead of Encylopedia Britanica, you never read the map and yellow pages because those information is already on the Internet. If you still do any of the above and are not above 50 years old, please fast forward to the line where it says you are a moron. Here we are, the things that you know/do to make you not a tech dummy, in order or importance.

1) You have some sort of Online storage for important data. A good place would be Yahoo Briefcase (or Flickr for photos). This reminds me of a conversation many years ago about when my house is burning down (now that Southern California is burning), what would I want to save (other than my own awesome arse) first, is it photos (memories) or is it important documents like passports. The importance of online storage is you never have to save anything. If you are a writer because don’t only have 1 copy of your manuscript in 1 computer, and viola, you know what happens. Yes, your life is stored online, it should be. One day we should be able to die in a car crash and download ourselves into a new body.

2) You use firefox instead of IE. I know, it doesnt come with your computer. But really it takes 2 secs to download and install it, and even grabs all your bookmarks from IE. Forget how much better firefox is than IE security wise, firefox has all sorts of interesting plug-ins that checks yahoo and gmail, FTP, google bookmarks that stores your links online, forget the days (what was it, 8 years ago?) when I was icq-ing myself links from my work to home computer. Better yet, if your computer crash, firefox remembers everything.

3) You use RSS feeds to view your articles from your favorite sites. RSS is very useful, and you can use that on your my.yahoo page (or yahoo mail) or google documents. Forget about checking a site every 5 minutes and hoping that someone won’t update it (I know, you got to do that here), it tells you when and where there is something new to read.

4) You have a media PC, and that means you have a computer connected directly to your TV, if not that you should have some streaming device to act as a in between (like Apple TV or xbox 360), but there is no reason for that, for it is very easy to stick your computer next to your TV and access it remotely from a laptop. Forget about paying for tivo, if you had cable, use your PC to record your shows, in fact forget about cable, forget about your DVD player, forget about going to blockbuster, download compressed video, which almost look just as good. My computer has been connected to my TV for almost 5 years? If you haven’t done so, you are 5 years late to the world of technology.

OK, if you haven’t done at least 3 things out of 4 things in the list, you are in fact a tech moron. But it is very easy to change that, you can learn how not to be one. One thing about asking whether you are a moron, is that by asking that question, you are showing some sort of remote intelligence that is lacking in the majority of human population. Enough said, on to the next thing.

Lets look at emerging technlogy in the Internet Space:

	Winner	Laggards
Search:	Google	Yahoo, Everything else
News:	Newser Beta	Yahoo News, and everything else
Finance:	Google Finance	Yahoo Finance
Mail:	Yahoo Beta	MSN Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook
IM:	MSN + live messenger plus	Yahoo Messenger, AOL / ICQ
Social:	Facebook	MySpace, Friendster, and everything else
Photo:	Flickr	Sony Imagestation, and All other photo sites
Shop:	Amazon Marketplace	Buy.com, yahoo auction, and all other sites
Map:	Google Map	MapQuest, Yahoo Map
Office:	Google Document	Microsoft Office

I am not going to talk about any of them, you just have to experience them on your own. I am still most impressed with Newser, proven to entrepreneurs that even when someone else is 10 years ahead of you, doing something differently, in a better way, wins…, and that is possible. Facebook is now valued at half of yahoo but has 30 times less revenue (is this a sign of bubble?), but I have many good things to say about Facebook, which I am not going to say it here, but the stickiness factor is there (read Tipping point), it makes us go back, not just that, it makes us want to develop applications on it. No doubt when Web 3.0 comes upon us, new leaders will once again emerge.

From someone else’s recommendation, I revisted this AOL music page, and I realized I was part of a team that helped develop early versions of this when I was a consultant there, but I never really used it (I always wonder why AOL still exists, among other things). It is actually a good way to listen to the top songs. And I became wasted on this song after listening to it 1000 times — Carrie Underwood’s Wasted. I love the song. Hay she is not bad looking too. Kelly Clarkson’s songs are terrible lately (and have you seen her recent pictures? Implosion: Trust me, you do not want to see her up close)

	Winner	Laggard
Somewhat cute chick American Idol turn Pop Star:	Carrie Underwood	Kelly Clarkson

While talking about technology, I will touch upon investment, I saw Google yesterday at exactly 666.66 when I came into the office, thought that was somewhat sarcastic. While their motto is to do no evil, Google is the only corporation in the position of power to take over everything that is humanity, whoever controls the flow of information, controls everything. No doubt in 20 or 30 years, Google will become so pwerful that it can track anyone and predict anyone’s move based on their browsing habbit, it can change human history on the fly, it will become, well the mother brain, and one day someone will deploy a EMP bomb to take it down, and take us into the dark ages, and a band of adventurers will challenge the mother brain… RPG style, I have gone off topic. On to investment, market is see-sawing, I now think the tech leaders (GOOG, RIMM. AMZN, AAPL) are over extended, no doubt they are still good for long-term hold (probably beat putting it in the bank, or under your grandma’s bed), new leaders are ascending, as per my last post a few weeks ago, my recommendations are still making new highs, FSLR and VMW (I keep saying VMW will get you a BMW, earnings out today!) are the new leaders, and contenders are SPWR (no dent today in the horrible market) and STP, speculative guesses: STV and IGE. My long time bottom recommendation NYX has finally reversed its course (from pathetic to rising steadily). One trading advice I have is, don’t gamble and always have cash reserves. If you don’t want to take a chance when earnings come out, sell half of your positions (Cramer teaches trading around your core position). I did that with Google (which turns out to be a bad move), that way either way the stock moves it goes in your benefit. If it goes down you can accumulate, if it goes up drastically, you can forget about it and move on to other things. Its good when you flip a coin and either side there’s something to your benefit. Buying an reverse index fund for short term seems to work quite well as hedging your positions (QID is the reverse of QQQQ and hedge against GOOG), so do that instead of ever shorting anything. If you did that right before goog earning, it becomes a win-win situation, the next day Nasdaq falls drastically but google is still up, your reverse index fund would make about 5%. Anyway, enough with the boring stuff.

If you could only read 3 nonfiction books in your life for leisure purposes, the Tipping Point is one of them, the other two being Freakonomics and Blink. The Tipping Point is not as fun as the other two books I recommended, but essentially helpful for entrepreneurs, or in other words, people who wants to start something (not necessarily a business). If I had to describe the Tipping Point in one sentence, it is that the book tries to identify how an epidemic is started, not a malady kind of epidemic, but when a trend crosses a threshold and spread like a disease. To draw a real life example that’s not from the book, there’s a very tiny japanese ramen restaurant close to where I live, they make excellent ramen, one of their flavors, a white soup based pork ramen, is probably the best of its kind, best I’ve ever had. This restaurant is in the middle of nowhere, in a small alley surrounded by residentials. Eight years ago I was introduced to this restaurant, and I began going about once a month, it was never crowded, but only seemed to be sustaining itself by loyal customers. Some time between that number of years, a change happened, everyone started going to that restaurant. The wait around dinner time is more than an hour, and if I went there at 9:15 pm (it closes at 9:30), there’s still a 10-minute wait. Since the restaurant did not have any geographic advantage, you can pretty much rule out people who stumble upon it, so how did it become the Ramen place to go to in that district, that threshold is the tipping point. I wouldn’t quote the book too much, but word-of-mouth empidemic needs Connectors and Mavens, Connectors are people who are connected to a lot of people, and Mavens are people who are authorities of the subject. It matters less if suddenly 30 people stumbled upon the restaurant, than 1 connector/maven who went to the restaurant, and loved it.

Have you heard of Craiglist, heres an interview of the creators with Freaknomics. Craiglist only has 25 employees and it is one of the top 10 traffic sites in the US. Yes, and it looks like shit (thus it loads quite fast), and well its domain name is not that great either. Recently there is an indy documentary film about the lives of people who use Craiglist in San Francisco. Have you wondered how you could possibly heard of Craiglist? Like the restaurant I mentioned above, Craiglist does not have any advertising, and its purely from word-of-mouth. I wonder what its tipping point was. Tipping point is necessary for success.

Talking about Craiglist reminds me of Baidu, it is now the 3rd most-used search engine globally. It owns 5% of the queries as opposed to 60% from google. It is amazing because only people from china (who reads simplified chinese) uses Baidu, sure China has 1/6 of the world’s population, but what is the % of people who are online and regularly searches. Imagine Baidu expanding globally, into other asian languages, even traditional chinese, the possibility is endless. Baidu stocks skyrocketed, everyone wished they bought it before (including me). Ever since the subprime fiasco, stocks are moving agaist the economy, some people say we are again in a bubble. I dont think we are. We are only in a bubble when everyone’s grandma and their cats are talking about buying stocks, most people nowadays, they are still weary of what happened in the past. Trading is always a game of not being the last guy to get to the party, and certainly not the last guy to reach the exit in case of a fire. I still predict a recession 9 months after the first interest rate cut, and that puts us right in election time. Yes, a democratic president always have to pick up the pieces. So between now and then is probably a good time to invest, get the hell out, and buy a house. I continue to recommend solar energy stocks and techs. If you don’t already have GOOG, RIMM, AAPL, BIDU, it may already be too late. The correct thing is probably to identify the next GOOG, and right now my speculative google contenders are VMW and FSLR. More speuclative risky stuff I recommend would be STV (digital TV in china!) and YGE. One long term investment advice I really have is, don’t buy too much of  your own company’s stock for your 401K no matter how much a discount you get, well unless you worked for Google. Just look at Enron, when shit happens, you lose not only your job, but your retirement funds. Have you watched Damages, the show I kept recommending, and recommending. If you haven’t watched it, you get two slaps from me. Do you sympathize with Ted Danson’s role as the crooked CEO on trial for screwing his employees. It takes a crook to become a CEO, all CEOs should screw his employees in the first sign of troubles, just because they can (yes, if you are a CEO reading my blog, please screw your employees to your heart’s delight, but chances are, you already have). They become CEOs for power and success, and to screw their secretaries (a different kind of screwing than the above), if you are screwed in light of your employer’s accounting trouble, its really your own fault, enough said.

Talking about buying a house (and don’t ask me if housing in the US has bottomed yet), a friend asked me how much money I would spend on stuff I want to buy, as opposed to tying myself down with a morgage and saving every penny I can. My answer is this: whatever you want to buy is always worth it (no matter how much it is) if it brings you happiness. My advice is live every moment as if it is the last day of your life (who knows you may die in a car accdient tomorrow), and also keep in mind that you may live forever (and in case of that, prepare a little), and the correct way to live is to have a balance in between of that two thoughts. Balance is the key to everything.

I got a 40 page hit for 1 day on this very blog. Yes, that’s a breakthrough for me, since I don’t quite advertise this blog and most people I know don’t even know about it. Okay, I confess, I clicked on it about 5 times, so I still have the guy who refreshed it 35 times in hope of me not updating my blog to thank for, but he’s out of luck. I guess the next day Blog.com decided to screw with my formatting, so I was forced to adopt to a new look and feel. The picture of the above room I chose, to reflect my (archaic? Messy? Artsy?) state of mind. But in general, I am happy that more people are reading my blog, and let’s just hope everyone who reads my blog will also buy my next great American novel (when is it out when is it out? Sorry I am still waiting for the cover — I hope the guy who’s drawing it doesn’t decide to spend all his time on Halo 3).

I’m going to talk about Adventure games. Read this article titled Information Complexity and the Downfall of the Adventure Game. Let me just say, here is another claimed-to-be-a-writer person who has no idea what he is talking about, and if he had twice the sense of the person who wrote The Secret, he still should do the rest of the world a favor and hang himself. Read the article if you are interested in absurdity, but not in so many words, he said that the overload of onscreen information causes adventure games to loose out of popularity. That is simply not true.

As I have commented, the downfall of adventure games is a eventual paradigm shift in the industry. People demanded more “action” in their gaming titles, therefore you get games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, which are adventure games with heavy action elements. You get dumb kids that want to just shoot things and chop things up instead of just solving puzzles and not having any action, the industry demanded action. You can see the evidence of this in King’s Quest 8: Mask of Eternity, where the game shifted toward action game play. Yes, call it King’s Quest 8: Tomb Raider.

As for having too much info on the screen, this was all solved by the excellent adventure Grim Fandango, which adopted the Resident Evil / Alone in the Dark movement system and the character looks at the object of interest when he travels so you instantly know where you would pick up an object. There are many adventure games that highlight objects of interest instead of requiring players to hunt hidden hot-spot on the screen. At the end, it’s more of a design issue than the problem of the entire genre.

Also as longevity of games becoming more important, like role-playing games claiming 60 hours of game play, people want more for what they pay for. With the advent of the Internet, you can find solutions to adventure games right away, and most of them won’t even last more than 2 hours if you followed a walkthru. You needed the action to breakup the adventure and stoy-telling part of the game play.

And paradigm shifts happen all the time. We are again facing another shift of the casual gaming industry blooming, and with that, also the return of adventure games with the episodic download of Sam and Max. And at the end, graphics complexity has nothing to do with downfall of adventure games, it has only let authors tell more immerse stories.

Recently I have discovered many communities with self-made adventure games, and when I say self-made, I really mean these are professional people who just are not paid for their work, since they work is nothing less of a professional quality. Check the award winning section of Adventure Game Studio (a platform that enable you to design point-and-click adventures), and of notable download (which I tried and can vouch for excellent quality) is the remake of King’s Quest 1-3 VGA version (by Tierra and Infamous Adventures, remake of Trial by Fire and Space Quest 2 in the works), original series Apprentice by Herculean Effort Productions, Ben Jordan series by Francisco Gonzalez, classical 5 Days a Stranger, and the masterfully crafted A Tale of Two Kingdoms. Some of them even have excellent voice acting. If you are an adventure fan you owe it to yourself to try it. There is of course also a community of text adventures, but I am personally not a fan of text-only games. I read enough as it is I rather read a real book.

ScummVm is also an excellent way to relive old adventures on modern operating systems. Most of the LucasArts classics are compatible with the ScummVm engine. I especially recommend Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tantacle, Fate of Atlantis, Loom, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. The writings and humor (if applicable) and puzzle design on these games are simply unbeatable.

Speaking of classics, Jane Jensen is still active in the gaming world. If you don’t know her she’s the creator of Gabriel Knight mystery series, and before Dan Brown wrote Da Vinci Code, Jensen had already long went through a similar plot in Gabriel Knight 3, but of course she did not get the exposure she well deserved, hay, afterall, who treats games seriously right? Here’s her recent interview with Escapist. She said she was simply incapable of writing un-complex plots. I can really quote her on that, when people ask me why my novels have 600+ pages and why my blog entry is so long (among other things). Her next game is called Gray Matter.