Think Critical

Thoughts on Apple, gaming, and technology, from one interested individual to another.~Nate Barham

[markrosewater]

I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell. Captain Sisay's race was never the focus of her character and she was a complete badass! And I fear if you did it over again Gerrard would be trans, black and disabled just because. It also cheapens the stories of world devastation when characters worry more about their gender than Bolas destroying everything.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Thanks for reading.

[natebarham]

Apple Software is like Windows Hardware

I’ve recently been on a committee at work to select a Windows touchscreen laptop. We’ve tested a number of machines, and it’s only served to reinforce what I already knew to be true: most mainstream Windows hardware is trash. No. That’s a bit too harsh. Overall, Windows hardware can be ok, but it never feels cohesive. There’s always something that feels janky at best and downright awful more often than not. Why? Any piece of Windows hardware comes from multiple vendors (as does Apple’s, but there’s a different level of quality control happening there): the trackpad feels disconnected from the UI or has flimsy buttons or strange scrolling behavior or unreliable tap and drag functionality or sketchy multi-finger gestures. And, even if the rest of the computer works and feels like a nice machine, the trackpad feels like a car that’s had the matching rims stolen and replaced with bicycle tires. The same can be said for touchscreen materials and behaviors, keyboards (including key layouts!), fingerprint readers, charging solutions, hinges, speakers, and so on. On every machine, there’s at least one (usually a couple) that come from a subcontractor and more importantly *feel* like they do. The truth is that these machines are a hodgepodge of commodity components slapped together into a box cheap enough that customers will buy it based on one of its better qualities. Alright, enough bashing of Windows machines. Let’s get to the point. In recent years Apple software seems to have the reputation of being in decline. I’m not here to say one way or another, but I have noticed that Apple software has become increasingly like the Windows hardware described above—a hodgepodge of components that against all odds seems to work most of the time (less and less often as time goes by). I understand that software in general is a clever illusion built atop a cacophony of Rube Goldberg machines. In Apple’s case the poster child for this theory is Siri. Each of its features, while intriguing and even impressive in some cases when they work, don’t function as a coherent whole. Context works, sometimes. But not when referring to certain topics. Trivia works, in a few particular domains. Apps can use Siri, but only specific types, and even then with bizarre results and incoherent behaviors. Thing is, it’s not only Siri. MacOS has slowly been working its way toward the same state: tags, tabs, back to the Mac visuals and their removal, iOS influenced app designs, apps that live mostly in the Menu Bar, Save As, and so on. WatchOS for sure has the problem, with its first gen apps versus newer versions versus companies discontinuing their WatchOS apps altogether, the honeycomb launcher, differing notification types, and a somewhat confused mixed interaction model (touch, force-press, crown). Even iOS has come to this with different behaviors on different phone models (and iPad models) and legacy apps that haven’t been updated for recent hardware like the iPhone X. Meanwhile Apple’s hardware has none of these problems. Oh, it has problems of course (I’m looking at you, ever worsening butterfly key switch situation) but even when it does, the user never gets the sense that it is because the components aren’t from the same company. At least on hardware, users get the sense that it’s all from Apple, and any issue is due to a mistake in the design rather than assuming that the keyboard sucks because they cheaped out and bought a component from a lesser subcontractor. Unfortunately with software it increasingly feels as if there are at best multiple Apple software companies that all do things a little differently from one another, and at worst that even under the umbrella of one product, the components of that software are made by entirely different companies with different priorities, and severely differing quality levels. When this is the case, the whole product suffers and likely gives the user a lackluster experience when things go right, and a broken, miserable experience when they don’t.

[natebarham]

Alora’s Tear, Volume III

Over on my publishing site, BarhamInk.com, I've just posted the release date and gorgeous cover art for the next book in my fanstasy series Alora's Tear. It's called The Voice like Water and will be available on August 9th, 2016.

Head over and check out the new cover!

As always, thanks for helping to support my writing.

[natebarham]

Equilibrium

It’s 1997 and I’ve just researched and configured the best PC I can imagine for what was then a reasonable price. The beast, an ominous black tower in a world of boring beige, has a CPU ten times faster than the Packard Bell it’s replacing. It runs a new technology called AGP, which the sales person assures me is not only as good as the popular PCI solution but better.

Long story short, that guy was either a liar or an idiot. The lie plagued my perception of that PC from the very start and fueled an imbalance that may only now be coming to rest.

You see, from that point forward there was always something incredible right around the corner. At first, it was a new PC that would be powerful enough to run the games I wanted to play at the time (AGP wasn’t upgradable, and the built-in card was starved for video memory, a critically important spec back then).

Then it was a laptop that felt like a real computer and not a hamstrung hack attempting the future before its time. I used some laptops (IBM, Compaq, HP) but didn’t pursue buying. I found that dream laptop (excuse me, notebook) in a Titanium PowerBook G4, ever after referred to affectionately as the TiBook. It had a trackpad that worked as advertised, a widescreen display, an operating system that looked modern, even futuristic without looking like a neon sign in Vegas, and that beautifully designed case.

Battery life was good for the time, but not great in practical use. It was powerful, but buying or building a desktop with visibly more power was still easy and relatively cheap. And so the balance favored the future again, and I waited.

The answer to my notebook-that-feels-like-a-desktop came with a Penryn Macbook Pro. It even played PC games of the time at respectable frame rates using Boot Camp. That machine, to this day is probably my favorite computer. I wrote my first novel on it, played countless hours of World of Warcraft, edited the first videos of my daughter.

But the imbalance came again. Despite its power, mobility grew more important. Lighter, thinner, better battery life, the list that lay just around the corner. A Macbook Air came next, and now a Macbook, tiny and light, powerful enough to do all that I want these days on my work computer, and the most beautifully designed notebook I’ve ever seen (good luck topping this one, Jonny).

But I’d traded performance for portability, so I built a gaming PC between the time of the stalwart Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air: my for-fun computer. It is fast and powerful, even today, and with a reasonable upgrade to the GPU, runs current games at another of those ever-retreating corners I’ve been waiting so long to turn, 1080p 60fps. Consoles haven’t truly done it yet, and look to be making the jump to 4k before they get the chance. As for me, I look at the 4k televisions in stores and see very little real world difference between them and my 1080p plasma, unlike with Retina where the difference achieved another past-fantasy tech milestone.

And that gets us to my point. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium in tech. Light, powerful, beautiful notebook, check (then do the same for TV display, set-top box, sound system, gaming PC, tablet, phone, even a smartwatch). With all of this amazing hardware, and the always evolving (usually improving) software, there are so few real world corners left to turn.

There’s always a new iPhone on the horizon, of course, a new everything. For the first time, however, none of it feels particularly pressing. Nothing feels like “Oh, if I only had a machine that would…” at this point. The last two items on my list were 1080p 60fps and an instantly responding Apple Watch (which, though I don’t have it yet, seems to be the real deal with WatchOS 3). It’s a somewhat peaceful and somewhat empty feeling, as if a part of me dissolved without my permission.

Out there, some will shout “VR!” and “Self-driving cars!” and whatever else. I’ve tried VR, and it’s an interesting curiosity. I’m intrigued by a self-driving car, but the corner to turn for that one seems years away, maybe a decade, and that’s not considering the fact that a teacher’s salary is extremely unlikely to pay for one in the first—or second—phase (even the 30k Tesla Model 3 is priced beyond that, and that’s with virtually no autonomous features, or at least not the impressive, world changing ones).

So for now, and possibly the first time since I was 13 or 14, the world of technology seems good enough. Can it get better? Always, and I fully expect it to. Will I want some new shiny thing come September, probably, but if Apple released nothing, just went totally dark, I’d be fine, and not in the sense that I’d survive, but in the sense that I wouldn’t feel compelled to ask for anything more. This 6S performs brilliantly in every measure I can think of. Ditto for all my other current devices.

I suppose the most difficult part of balance is maintaining it. Perhaps that’s the new question. Is that next reveal enough to tip the scales? Is there something out there that’s coming up next that completes an imagined technological picture you have for yourself?

For me, for now—for once—the answer is “No.”

[natebarham]

The Puck (or why I support Bernie Sanders)

Before I begin: If you support Bernie by harassing women or other public figures, attacking Hillary Clinton with sexist language and the tactics of the vile Gamergate or other foul misogynist hate groups, I am not your friend. I am not your ally, nor are you mine. You are a scourge that needs silencing and a pestilence in need of a cure. Stop this nonsense immediately and stand with the rest of us—for something—not against something in a thinly veiled attempt to justify your hate.

The following thoughts arose from a number of conservative family members asking why I support Bernie Sanders. For some time I've wanted to write a post encapsulating my decision and continued position. This is my response 

As a clear-thinking, educated person, I understand where the money for a progressive agenda would have to come from. I understand that I would pay more to the system in hopes of saving money elsewhere and to help those who need it most. These values are not foolish, ill conceived, or even unrealistic. I am not some hoodwinked, moony-eyed youth, dazzled by the allure of free.

I do not make these decisions lightly but with the most concerted of efforts to fully understand my own position foremost, and those of others so as to not be blind to the faults of my own choice (and there are several) or the virtues of others’.

And so, a few principles.

Our government should help those who need help, and all people should have a truly equal chance. The US healthcare system is a blight that needs to be eradicated, replaced with an alternative reflecting the modern world and not a profit machine fueled by illness and misfortune. I respect those who fight for a noble cause, even when it is not popular. Only the people should be able to affect elections, not large corporate donations and backdoor deals. Our voting system—the key component to the greatness of our country—is broken, designed to punish the powerless and reward the powerful when it should simply count each person and their singular vote.

I do not support dividing everyone’s income to the point at which we are all paid the same. That scenario would be communist. Some have earned an easier life by sacrifice, and some have earned a harder one. If socialism means balancing the scales so that the American dream—that pursuit of a better life through hard work can result in success for any person willing to do said work—can be real again, then I am indeed for socialism. But I have always (even when I voted for Bush in 2000) insisted that our government exists to work for us, and that we pay into it for the services it can provide, be it roads and bridges, education, a military to protect us (though only as a last resort), or with clean, efficient energy, and a healthcare system that helps everyone.

I watched as a corrupt insurance industry and profit-driven medical industry depleted my Grandparents' savings while my Grandfather struggled with the horror of dementia and my Grandmother struggled as her partner of five decades fought against that horror. And it only got worse as his condition got worse. It turns my stomach to think of it.

When I look into my son’s bleeding face (he fell and bumped his chin on the bed) I am ashamed that even one of my first thoughts is given to the bill and not to his pain or fear. Every thought should go to him. This too turns my stomach.

Why do we generate all of this prosperity if we must live in fear that it will be swept away by random chance?

Some events are unavoidable. But if our government is going to pay for something with the taxes they extract from us, let it be this. And the most embarrassing part for our nation is that other countries have already solved this problem. The systems vary, and none are perfect, but they are all more effective and far less expensive than ours. This is the issue for which I feel the most passionate, partial measures will not do.

In high school I read Wayne Gretzky’s biography, and one quote stood out (a quote I also appreciated much later when Steve Jobs reiterated it). He said, “I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.” I began then to apply this philosophy to my political views.

In a hundred years, a thousand, will the greatest country on Earth help its people when they are sick, or will it watch them suffer as their life savings is instantly consumed and they worry about money when they should be focusing on those for whom they care most? After examining all of my politics under this lens, I saw what I would someday want in a politician.

Then, about a years ago, I read about Bernie Sanders. Nearly all of his policies pass my self-imposed test. In a hundred, a thousand years will we: restrict people based on their gender, race, or sexual orientation? Listen to them instead of saying that the problem is already solved? Power our industry and personal lives cleanly and efficiently or in whatever way is most profitable?

Will we be at war with a world full of enemies, or will we have found solutions to render those enemies ineffectual and irrelevant—or even have managed to make them into allies? Will we pride ourselves in the education of our people—so much so that we would pay to make certain that they are all educated? Will we, the people, decide what steps our government takes, making sure that it acts in our interests and not in the interests of others?

Or, will we still remain at the whims of capitalist industry, which though it has served us well, has clear flaws that concentrate wealth and power at the top, while continuously forcing those at the bottom further and further down? Will we shout insults, build walls, and shoot first, asking questions later like fearful cavemen (or women) cowering in the dark, paranoid of everyone and everything that is not like us?

Or, will we apathetically accept that the world cannot be changed, that our lives, and the lives of those whose are the hardest, cannot be improved? Will we reach for half-loves and smile when given our quarter portion? Will we deal and barter with swindlers who already have more than they and a dozen generations of their descendants could ever use?

So many of our major victories as a people came from skating to where the puck was going, to where the world was going. The pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic did. The revolutionaries did. Lincoln did with the emancipation. When we awoke to Hitler and the Japanese, when women won the right to vote, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, we skated to where the world was going.

But we know this only in hindsight. Now, today, we must choose to the best of our abilities where we think the puck will go. Bernie Sanders aims for where I think the puck will be. I support him because I want all of us to be there, too.

[natebarham]

The Social Pressures of Being "Right"

Do you like Apple’s Retina MacBook? Do you still enjoy wearing an Apple Watch every day? Maybe you like the look of Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 or use your iPad Pro as a full-fledged computer.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but you’re wrong. Wrong for liking things that others don’t, wrong for attempting to understand where these designs and products are coming from rather than critiquing the obvious compromises they’ve made or the places where they’ve actually chosen to diverge from the herd, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Well, maybe wrong, as long as the future plays out a certain way and those spouting constant criticism turn out to be right (even a broken clock…). And what is right? Is it vindication in finding a MacBook five years from now that’s much faster and has much better battery life? If so, the great online advisors can claim the win.

“See, we told you v1 was underpowered and had terrible battery.”

Or, “See, we told you that Tesla would have to change that no-grille design if they wanted to sell more cars.”

Problem is, they have merely predicted the inevitable. Computers will get faster, cars will have different visual touches, tablet operating systems will become more capable. Meanwhile, many must sit back and watch as the collective club nods sagely at each other for fear of ending up being the one who was wrong.

For being the one who liked Apple Watch 1.0, they will suffer the future torment of “I told you so.” And then won’t they feel dumb? After all, isn’t the most important thing to appear smart? Turns out ™, you can be smart and disagree with the crowd. You can be insightful, and not correctly predict the future. And more essentially, simply by offering a different viewpoint, you can create a much more interesting discussion.

Am I encouraging vehement Mac vs. PC era arguments? No. Am I saying that the conventional wisdom of a few high profile voices is always wrong? No. But the discourse suffers from the fear of being in the out group, the fear of having a dissenting opinion. If we were all wrong a little more often, we’d have a much more varied conversation and foster inclusivity at a basic level.

So, I’ll say it. I think all of these products are great, intriguing, and worthy of discussion from many viewpoints, not just criticisms of their most obvious compromises. And none of them are perfect. None are above criticism, but they are above only criticism.

If you think the same, you should not be afraid to say so, because understanding why something is the way it is informs us of the reality in which we live and not a fantasy where we get to design a world we would prefer. After all, we don’t study the horse only to say that it is not a unicorn, and that if evolution (or deity) had only included a three-foot horn on the horse’s forehead, it would have been an acceptable creature. Instead we understand the beauty of the thing as it is, what evolutionary steps may have led to its current form, and maybe every so often wonder if the unicorn is out there somewhere.

The unicorn becomes part of the larger understanding, just as our wished-for versions of iOS or a Mac Pro with gaming GPUs should be a part. Speculate, certainly. Criticize, of course. But don’t forget that the larger part of the fun is to analyze and thus further understand the things we are interested in. Stop caving to the social pressure of being right. Be reasonable, be considerate, but worry more about appreciating the thing before leveling the same criticism that a half-dozen full-time pundits have already articulated.

It’s ok. Appreciation is not equivalent to inferior intellect.

[natebarham]

latining:

It is 2007 and I am discussing the comparative merits of the Circle Orboros versus the Legion of Everblight when I hear a loud crack and a sharp pain in my rear. I jump and shriek in fury.

“Relax, it’s a compliment,” says the Pressganger.

I curse out the offending player.

“Look, you can’t play with us if you’re going to get emotional over every little thing.” The rest of the players nod in agreement.

I leave.

As I said in a post a while back, I write here when it is important, when the subject matters to me or should matter to you. I’ve never been a part of tabletop, but I have been a bystander to less physical forms of harassment of this sort. I didn’t realize what it was at the time, didn’t know how to differentiate it from humor.

I do now.

If even the small allowances that I have seen contribute to a larger culture that makes this acceptable, then it is the least I can do to point out such egregious and disgusting behaviors whether tabletop, competitive PC, or any other kind of gaming.

[natebarham]

Bicycles and Backdoors

Steve Jobs famously called the computer a “bicycle for the mind,” an extension of ourselves that would not only make life easier, but improve it. And although the idea began with the Macintosh, the device closest to this particular Jobs ideal didn’t arrive in earnest until the iPhone.

The iPhone is the computer for everyone, the one we can all use without an instruction manual and without extensive training. We use it in line at the DMV and as we wait for the water to boil; we use it at the breakfast table and (though it might be a bit crass) on the toilet. It is a part of us, it is us. We work and we play on it, ask it questions when we don't know the answers, even send photos and communications we'd be embarrassed by were they ever let into the light of day.

I wouldn’t let you know what I say to my wife in the privacy of our bedroom, though if you had a warrant and a surveillance team, I suppose you could listen. But even more than that—more than that—I'd never let you read my mind, let you know what I don't even choose to tell her.

Never.

Steve was right. This little computer is a bicycle for the mind, but not in that it lets me do things faster and more efficiently (it does that, too). It's an extension of the mind, a part of it, an inextricably intertwined augmentation of our thoughts. The iPhone (and the smartphone in general) lets me store more thoughts, remember moments more often and more vividly, and it is able to do so because I trust it. I trust that my musings and photos and videos are safe there. And more and more as time goes on, this has become true.

It's not a fetishization, Mr. President, it's a fact. The contents of my phone, and other devices where I store things that I have yet to elect to share with the world—and may, in fact, never share—are private.

These unshared thoughts, imaginings, creations are just that: unshared.

They are private.

And no. Not you, not your three letter organizations, not anyone has a right to see them if I've decided that they are so. Take them by force if you can, legislate if you must (and you should), but don’t leverage the locksmith as if it’s his responsibility to let you in. He doesn’t have a right to it either.

This device is a digital extension of my mind, a container for my thoughts, a memory of more precise capacity and greater longevity, a secret part of who I am, that I may open to you if I so choose. There is a key, but like the one for my biological mind, I and only I am the single person who may use it.

No one—not even the President of the United States—has a right to that.

Would you read my mind if you had the chance? Is that where this ends? I thought that we had the right to remain silent, to withhold that which would incriminate us. Do we have that right? Or will it dissolve as soon as it becomes technically feasible to circumvent it?

The particular phone you want to access today may not have been an extension of its user’s mind. But the key that will unlock it would unlock mine and my wife’s and someday my children’s. It would open a door for actors from less benevolent governments, if only enough to slip in the steel toe of a combat boot. And as we know, once a crack has opened, any number of plague ridden vermin will find it. It is a matter of time, an outcome so certain that decades of research and billions of dollars have only just been able to stave it off.

And so, though I have the right to remain silent, I choose to say this: many have claimed that this case is not about one phone (the government seems to see it otherwise). I will contradict them, arguing that it is about precisely this one phone because one is all. By opening one, you’ve opened them all.

By weakening one, you weaken us all.

[natebarham]

Important and Valuable

Something has shifted. A year ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago, this site received updates frequently. Whether a quoted line, commentary on a post, or a longer piece on a topic of the day, the Site. Got. Updated. Many times, to my mild irritation, the posts were little more than a “chiming in.” Some story would light up in the Apple, Tech, or gaming community, and I made sure that Think Critical had its say in the matter.

This drove traffic. Not a lot of traffic, mind you, but enough that I felt satisfied with how things were going. I followed analytics (at one point monitoring multiple apps on my phone, iPad, and desktop browser). Some months they went up. Some months down. Sometimes an article would hit and there’d be a spike, or a link from a friendly site. Sometimes the articles I felt were best had little to no impact at all.

On traffic.

Then I released a novel and then another. I began working with other sites more frequently, publishing articles for The Magazine, The Loop, and Tools & Toys. And I became more active on Twitter, posting and sharing far more often than I had in the past. You know what I didn’t think about?

Traffic.

I deleted the apps and ignored the analytics. Why? Was it because I didn’t like the numbers? No. I was happy with them. I just didn’t want to care about them anymore. I was tired of measuring success by looking at traffic. So I stopped.

This week, Ben Brooks wrote an article that struck home with me. He discussed “good content,” how difficult it is to find, and why sites produce so much garbage. Amongst several salient points he asserts:

This isn’t even to say “don’t publish unless you know it isn’t crap”, but it is important to know that you are publishing something you think stands a chance to be good. If you do that consistently, it is easy to gain readers.

He’s right, though I’d tweak the ending a bit and say that doing so puts readers first. So many of us who began writing sites like this one talked a big game about valuing readers’ time and attention, wrote deep dives about our reader-first designs, and then proceeded to post as many linked list items or quick comments as we could stomach.

Have I consciously posted content to this site that I know to be garbage? No. And I can say that with confidence. However, standing still does little to encourage improvement. So, from here on expect only posts which I deem important and/or valuable to readers of this site or to myself. Not just interesting, not just topical, not just to maintain traffic. Maybe you’ll hear from me less often. Or maybe more often, but more briefly. Either way, be assured that I’m not angling for clicks, counting eyeballs, or watching the traffic.

Let’s make a deal. I write about what I find important and valuable. You stop by once in a while and enjoy it.

Sound good to you? It does to me.

[natebarham]

Those Blocking Blockers

I write about Apple, the software, hardware, the services that orbit them, and design (whether it's in the aforementioned categories or in videogames) because I’m intrigued by those who make things with better user experiences in mind. I don’t want stickers plastered all over the palm rest of my laptop, or a shiny reminder of my lovely wireless character badged on my seven hundred dollar phone. I despise the litany of splash screens on most big-budget games, and software that doesn’t try to make itself easier and more efficient to use grates on my nerves when I’m forced to interact with it.

For the last year or two, no single source has frustrated me more than the mobile web. Huge squares of irrelevant “promotional content” appear on initial load accompanied by a tiny “x” that I must attempt to tap with a relatively giant finger, and I think to myself: What if my dad or my grandmother tried to close this ad? They sometimes have trouble tapping targets in the system software, let alone these intentionally minuscule areas meant to send the user to a site that they actively don’t want to visit.

See, I’m getting angry already.

It’s the worst. And Apple has, with iOS 9, decided to allow third-party software that puts an end to it. Good riddance, I say. And though that is harsh, I’m afraid there’s simply no other way around it. Most publishers are so hopelessly entangled in the web of bloodthirsty ad networks and the paradigm that those networks have nurtured that it must feel a bit like Cirith Ungol—on a good day.

And unlike poor Frodo Baggins and Master Samwise, even the most well-intentioned publishers cannot seem to extricate themselves from the grasp of the ad network system as it stands today.

Álvaro Serrano gets to the crux (horcrux?) of the matter in this week’s edition of The Morning Coffee:

The value proposition that ad networks offer publishers and advertisers is pretty clear: just let us do our thing, and you’ll get relevant and profitable ads served automatically to your readers. You see, it’s the “automatically” part that’s the problem.

In order to serve enough ads at the current paltry pay-rate, publishers are essentially forced to accept terms (which they then push onto their readers) so unfavorable that everything is fair game, from autoplaying video (even when the option has been turned off on the publisher side), to performance reducing javascript trackers, and battery-sucking sliding panels that follow the reader through the content, waiting to pop up, obscure the text or images, and trick the user into tapping on the ad through a combination of stuttering, jittering, and jumping around until it feels suddenly like a full-screen, single-digit frames per second game of punch the monkey.

Well somebody needs to get punched. That’s for sure.

Now don’t get me wrong. Publishers have a right to their livelihoods, and some are taking into their own hands to double down on their ad-soaked madness. The current method seems to center around simply blocking the blockers. And that’s fine. What I sincerely hope happens is that these sites will cease to receive traffic and that sites that use a more sober model flourish. I’d even welcome a “Blocker-blocker” page that says something like: “We see you’ve chosen to use a content blocker. Try our new reader-friendly design, and add us to you whitelist (link to instructions).”

In this case, the user is at least actively agreeing to give the new scenario a try. With the current model, we’re all just opted into everything with no recourse or alternative. Something needs to be done, and publishers who have carefully built their business models around the emaciated skeletons of a veritable Shelob’s Lair, are not going to do it without pressure from the outside.

I can’t tell you how many times in the last several years I’ve watched the network spinner in the upper left corner of my iPhone status bar as it twirls away for minute after unending minute while I read an article wondering: “Is my internet really that slow? What is it loading?” Only to force-quit Safari thinking it was some sort of loading bug or hangup in the system, then after a reload, realizing that it was simply the cost of doing business. Bye-bye data allotment. Bye-bye battery life. Hello, irritation at imagined but non-existent system bugs, and thus, irritation at Apple.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m done with that.

And yes, the worst of the publishers are Gollum in this analogy, and you, dear reader, are one of the dangling skeletons. And unless you've got a spare vial of elvish starlight, you're just as screwed as the rest of us.

[natebarham]

Apple TV: it’s in the game(s)

Around the web, site after site, podcast after podcast, people are talking about a new Apple TV—one that doesn’t even exist yet. However, thanks to the stunning track record of Mark Gurman and 9to5Mac, the new set top box seems a relative certainty in the face of Apple’s trademark secrecy. I’ve been writing here about the prospect of a new and vastly improved Apple TV for years now. At this point I’m starting to feel a bit like Gene Munster.

So here we go again. Only this time it’s different. For one, the rumors are rolling in at an unprecedented pace. WWDC saw a reduced price on the multi-year-old current Apple TV. The assumed hardware (an A8 variant of some kind) is powerful enough to do more than simply stream video content. Advancements in hardware interaction (Force Touch, Taptic Feedback, etc.) have granted new abilities to a possible physical remote. And improvements to Siri have reached a level of polish—especially with Apple Watch—that could make the physical remote less important in the overall picture.

The most interesting facets of this topic occur to me in two categories: improvements to the TV watching experience and gaming. Both are a bit of a black box at this point in time, which shows that Apple’s cloak of secrecy isn’t entirely transparent, even to the likes of Gurman. When I consider my hopes for Apple and actual video content, I simply throw up my hands and say something like, “Just fix it! Take the TV problem, run it through the Apple design machine, and fix it.” Because truly, I just want to be able to watch the shows I like, find new shows, doing it all quickly and easily without having to worry about which service has which shows on which delay or time limit. I just want to sit down and watch TV. Oh, and the experience of getting to the show should not suck. Pretty simple request of the company known for intuitive, thoughtful design.

Now, the second interesting facet—gaming—is where I have my doubts. Circling all the way back to the Pippin, Apple has terrible sense when it comes to gaming. Their biggest wins have come when they just let someone else handle the problem. I probably trust Apple less to design a gaming interface like GameCenter than I would Microsoft to design my phone or desktop UI. In fact, that’s a certainty because I’ve used all of those things. And I’d much rather (gulp) use Windows (it hurts to even say it) everyday than do all of my games interaction via GameCenter. Just imagine replacing Steam, Xbox Live, and PSN with Apple’s solution. Not good. Even after the iOS 7 revamp—good riddance green felt—Apple shows no sign of understanding how people play games on their devices, let alone understand the lessons that other gaming companies have learned in designing similar systems.

All this isn’t to say that Apple won’t just go ahead and open the floodgates of iOS third party developers and let them make their own way. That is actually the scenario I see as the most likely. My worry as someone who is invested in games for traditional consoles, PCs, and mobile is not that Apple will create a gaming platform that fails, but that it will create a platform that is tone-deaf. For instance, will there be a controller, and by that I mean a first party, go-to piece of hardware? If so, will they pack it into the box? Everything that I know about the games industry as it stands says that they have to. But Apple usually doesn’t put both feet into a market unless it has a vision for what that sector should look like post-Apple. And that is always a very different picture than whatever preceded it.

Perhaps the vision is to use the included remote (which all the familiar sources are saying is more TV remote-like than game controller-like) as the primary control device as with the Wii. Maybe the system will promote the use of other iOS devices as something akin to a whole roomful of Wii U gamepads. And regardless, with the MFi program which already supports game controllers, there will be a number of third party options, all of which are likely to be terrible and expensive. The possibilities are many. For once, I’m very uncertain not only of what Apple will choose, but also of whether it has the skill set to be successful.

Either way, Wednesday’s event should be very interesting for gamers casual or otherwise to watch. It’s as clear as we’re likely to get that something with Apple TV is going to happen, and that something is at least tangentially related to a more active push in the gaming space from Apple. Let’s hope that their vision is more “a real computer in your pocket” and less “the simple way to keep everything in sync.”

[discovergames-blog]

Faking It

I mean seriously, consider the scenario that has to happen in order for the “fake gamer girl” thing to make sense. A woman would have to first encounter or learn about the gaming community. She would find (in the average or aggregate) a hostile, elitist, corporatist, anti-intellectual, hegemonic group full of angry, petty, whiny, sexist, racist, smug, disgusting, gatekeeping losers. And she would then have to say to herself, “Oh yeah, I gotta get me some of that.”

At which point, despite a total and complete lack of interest in videogames, she invests hundreds or thousands of dollars in games, consoles, peripherals, and materials for other activities like cosplay and streaming. And then she spends the great majority of her leisure time playing games, writing about games, talking about games, making games, making gaming cosplay, going to gaming conventions, writing and drawing fanfiction of games, streaming games, and participating in gaming forums.

She does this not only despite having absolutely no interest in games, but also despite the near-constant barrage of sexist attacks she must deal with on a daily basis. She has to deal with an industry and community that reminds her she is unwelcome at every possible opportunity, from marketing campaigns that assume women don’t play games (or worse, cast them in the role of the nagging girlfriend), to microaggressions in online play, to rape and death threats and even doxxing and swatting.

And some sweaty, pocket-mining basement-dwellers would have you believe that she goes through all of this, spending all this time, money and energy, and enduring all of this harassment and hostility, all without any passion, love or even interest in videogames. And all for what? To “get attention”? Oh yeah. That makes sense. I can definitely see women lining up around the block to get this sweet deal: “Step right up, ladies! For just a few thousand dollars, and the majority of your free time, you too could be eligible for (almost exclusively negative and violent) ATTENTION from angry men and boys without social skills, who believe your only value lies in sex appeal, and who will treat your very existence with suspicion and hostility! Yes, for the mere price of enduring a constant deluge of rape and death threats, you will have access to a steady stream of ATTENTION from the most unpleasant and undesirable people on the planet! You may find it difficult at first to spend so much time and energy faking interest in a hobby you don’t care about at all, but with a reward like ATTENTION from swearing teenagers and smug date-rapists, you can’t afford to pass up this deal of a lifetime!”

[natebarham]

I don’t often use direct reblogs here, but this post deserves it and to be read in full.

[natebarham]

The Sluggish Web

There's an article making the rounds by the ever-reasonable Nilay Patel at the Verge. It's called The Mobile Web Sucks and it goes out of its way to blame Safari and other browsers for the often painfully sluggish and terrible experience of the web on mobile. Around said web, several have noted, some more spectacularly than others, that the Verge is one of the guiltiest parties in pushing the sort of JavaScript-laden ad garbage that truly causes the problems so many users encounter, fight with, and oftentimes don't even recognize as the fault of the site they are visiting.

It would not surprise me in the least if almost every ordinary user blames not the site or the ads or the browser (if they could even tell you which one they have) but the phone itself, be it a Galaxy, Lumia, or iPhone. Certainly they'd say, it's Apple (Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft, Google)'s fault that this is slow and broken. Probably just a scam to get me to buy a new phone. And why wouldn't they think this? In the age of pocketable supercomputers and heart-rate monitoring wrist-worn comic book devices, it couldn't possibly be a simple web page that brings all this computing power to its knees!

Well, actually, it isn't. It's one web page that giddily connects you to dozens of ad and spyware networks, who then inject all manner of tracking, monitoring, and generally performance and battery-life sucking "features" that bring it all down. John Gruber sees a reckoning. Rene Ritchie at iMore saw enough reason to defend the ad model in writing and podcast format. Many seem ready to overtly jump on the content-blocker bandwagon as soon as it arrives with iOS 9.

Up to this point I've been on Ritchie and iMore's side in this debate, though I'll cop to using ad block when showing sites in my classroom (if only to avoid the inevitable giggling at whatever weight loss animation loaded up that day). But now, seeing the improvement not only in load times but in battery savings, I'm liable to join those reckoners. If you're running an ad, be honest about it and run the ad. Make it bold and clear for all I care, but don't stuff a bunch of invisible tracking down the pipe and expect me, my battery, and my data plan to just take it like the skinny kid who's afraid if he lifts his fists, even in self-defense, you'll just hit harder.

I understand that this is the way the web works. I hope, though, that it isn't the way the web has to work.

[natebarham]

Watch Intuitive

What does it mean for something to be intuitive? I used to think I knew: any object or system an average person can use by guessing. Imagine a machine which, from the outside, has no adornment or ornamentation whatsoever: a black cube, let’s say. Six sides of shiny metal, no wires, no switches, no cables or levers, just a black box. Since you already know it is a machine, you can reasonably assume that is does something. What it does, you can’t be sure, or even really guess. There is nothing in its design to help you understand what it is for—not intuitive.

On the other end of the spectrum we have a second machine. It’s still a cube, but it is covered in knobs, dials, levers, switches, and various blinking lights. Each one is labeled in small, cramped letters using terms like rotary cycle frequency and refrigeration coolant volume, electrical current modulation and pump pressure duration. A thoroughly instructed operator could likely make use of this machine, but she (or he) certainly couldn’t guess at the process, especially if mistakes in usage could damage or destroy the machine—not intuitive either.

Now picture a third box, same basic details as the first two, only now there is a sign above it that says “Ice Cream Maker.” It’s still shiny black on all sides (odd color palette choice for an ice cream maker, I know) except for one. On the machine’s top facet, there is a bright red button, labeled “Start.” With machine number three, we’ve increased the intuitiveness of the device significantly. There is a button (and only one) and some informative text to help the user understand what that button will do. As long as I can read and understand English (which is not necessarily a given, but let’s assume for the sake of argument) I can intuit the process for using this machine. I press the button, it makes ice cream (Where that ice cream goes or how it is served, we do not know. Just go with it). Simple enough—intuitive.

So where is this leading? It leads to Apple, of course, and specifically the watch. With all of Apple’s devices up to the release of the watch, the word intuitive has meant something similar to our ice cream machine example, more precisely, the difference between machines two and three. PCs were complicated black (well, beige) boxes that took an expert to fully understand and use. The Mac made it possible for users to guess at how one might operate the device, but it sometimes limited what an expert user was able to customize, optimize, or otherwise adjust. Later OS X exposed some of the figurative knobs and levers while concurrent versions of Windows attempted to inch closer to the Mac in the area of intuitive use. By the time the iPod was introduced, intuitive had already begun to mean something slightly different. In addition to its former “less fiddly and more obvious” meaning, it took on the idea of easy.

Now the “easy” side of an intuitive product was always there, but it was with the iPod that ease of use dominated the other facets of the term. When the iPhone and iPad came along, they were in fact intuitive, but most uses of the word meant “easy to use by comparison”. This is a fine development, of course, and there is nothing wrong with using the word this way. Tapping and scrolling is very intuitive, but much of the iPhone’s interface required the device some time to teach you all of its features. What happens if I hit the home button while I’m on a phone call? Does it quit the phone app and go home? That might be the expected behavior if we take the home button literally. But the actual behavior is different. The call remains active so that you can look up information while the person is still on the line.

With our ice cream machine, it is the equivalent of pressing the one button and a door (unseen and unknown until now) opening and producing a little bowl of soft-serve. So what happens when we get to Apple Watch?

Early on, when the device was truly new and mostly unknown—even to early adopters—a significant number of commenters critiqued the watch for not being as intuitive as Apple’s other devices. On first glance (and regardless of whether they waited a week or two weeks before writing, they were still in first glance territory) the watch is in some ways more complicated than an iPhone (especially a gen. 1 iPhone). Its buttons already serve multiple, context-sensitive purposes—with the added bonus of a button that is also a wheel. Its software has multiple, context-sensitive modes for operation: glances for quick information and limited interaction, apps for complicated (and currently slow) tasks, and the watch face. Couple that with the concept of Force Touch and there’s enough going on to say that this thing resembles our black box covered in levers and switches more than the single-button marvel.

So how can this complicated, complex little device be intuitive? I propose an alternate perspective. Intuition is the feeling that one knows how something is to be done or what is going to happen next. It is amorphous and vague, even a bit mystical. It is a sense, a feeling about the world and what one should expect from it. For this definition of intuition the Apple Watch fits quite nicely. Our intuitions are naturally built upon experiences and observations within our environment. As such, these intuitions can often be wrong or misleading. With Apple Watch, your intuition (without experience) is probably the right one, and that’s the usual Apple magic generated by attention to detail easily observed after the fact by consumers and analysts. Now, the difference with the Apple Watch is that it teaches you how to use these complicated features by reinforcing your initial hunch about how any given feature should work.

For example. After several weeks using the watch, I know that some apps—like the Workout app—want to remain front and center while they are in use (Remote does this as well). If I invoke my usual Outdoor Walk or Other workout, I can easily check on my progress by simply looking at the watch. No button presses needed; no taps necessary. I also know that I can bring up the previous app (almost always Overcast) to control what is playing in my headphones by double-pressing the digital crown. Now, this feature is not intuitive in the classic sense. I needed to be told how it works. But once I know, it becomes part of my habit, and once that is the case, it becomes intuitive in a second-nature, “I don’t even need to think about it,” kind of way.

Now you might be thinking “But that’s just like a keyboard shortcut! Those aren’t intuitive! It’s the opposite!” Perhaps. However, the action is simple enough (and truly, the device itself is) for anyone to learn and remember if they use it often enough. And there’s the key.

The watch is not to be measured as our computers were in the 80’s and 90’s. It is not to be measured as an iPad is, or even an iPod. None of these devices were meant to go everywhere with you, to be accessible at any time. The only Apple product that even comes close is the iPhone, and even that has its distance. It is most likely in your pocket, but it does not (in the average use case) strap to your body for the entirety of its usable existence. The watch does, and that matters. It trades some of the traditional thinking about what makes a device intuitive for what makes it invisible, second-nature not on first use, but second-nature because with the watch, users are all the equivalent of a hundred-hour-week code monkey who knows every keyboard shortcut as if it were akin to breathing. With the watch, we are all that person who just “never lifts my hands from the keyboard”. And as keyboard-only people know, once those actions are habit, the thought of using any other method seems inefficient at best and more likely just bizarre. So it is with the watch.

It goes everywhere with you. Even the most “non-techie” user interacts with it over and over every day (with the vast majority being every waking hour of every day). For every action that seems complex upon first use, there is an accompanying reason as to why that either becomes clear to the discerning user with time and practice or fades into invisibility for the person who just wants to work out and listen to a podcast (or their music) at the same time.

This device is not complicated and unintuitive, it is designed differently, with the assumption that you won’t use it for an hour a day, or only while you’re at work, or only when you want to read or watch videos. It is designed to be intuitive for those who wear it constantly and consistently, all day, every day. Will some put it down after only a few hours? Maybe. But as a person of humble means (as most of us are) $350 just to get in the door—meaning probably the most expensive watch you’ve ever bought, if you’ve ever even bought a watch—is usually enough motivation to stick with it for more than an early reviewer’s mosquito attention span that will likely be filled next week by another in an endless line of shiny gadgetry.

Ask an Apple Watch wearer if it feels easy to use after a year, and then ask the same of their iPhone or Mac (assuming they have all three, which isn’t necessarily the case). My intuition is that the watch comes out the winner for sheer practice and an overall narrowing of its feature set based on the habits of that particular person. Remember, your confusion with the Workout app, or home screen icons, or the load times on third party apps mean nothing to someone who has never opened them.

[natebarham]

So my little project/experiment of recording the first part of my novel is complete. The entire prologue for Alora's Tear: Fragments is available in audio form on Spoken. If you've enjoyed these recordings, I'd love to hear your feedback (on sound quality, delivery, production, anything you've got).

I've had a lot of fun with Spoken so far and hope to add to my profile soon. This is likely the limit for recordings from Alora's Tear, at least for now. The prologue is a nice segment in length as well as scope for the restrictions that Spoken imposes.

For those interested, I plan in the next few days to compile the four pieces I've recorded to release on BarhamInk.com.

Thanks for listening.

[natebarham]

After a nice positive response to the first segment, I've posted the second part of the prologue from Fragments on the new Spoken social network. There are some cool things going on over there. I encourage you all to check it out.

The next (and likely final) piece should be up in a couple of days. It's nice to get in front of a microphone again.

[natebarham]

Earlier today, I saw a tweet from Ben Brooks about a new service called Spoken. They style themselves as the Instagram of audio and are currently in the beta stage of development. I never really got into Instagram, but this sounded like a great way to share content using one of my favorite methods: voice. It's been a while since the final episode of Critically Speaking, and every so often I get the itch to record and publish something, though it usually isn't in the two-hour podcast vein.

Turns out, this is almost exactly the mission of Spoken. So, I got out the trusty Yeti and recorded the first segment of the prologue from my first book Alora's Tear: Fragments. I think it turned out pretty well and would love to hear what people think of it. If there's an interest, I'd be happy to publish the rest of the prologue as a bit of a teaser for the series.