We've Been Here Before

(Alternate title: Too Many People are Thinking of the Children)

I’m trying to figure out how to implement a practice of regular updates — something like either the Media Notes or 5 Things format that loudpoet uses. (We'll see whether it's sustainable over the long term.) 

...but I never know where to start with news coverage/commentary. There’s too much to mention and it’s impossible to track it over time. Which stories are going to be ongoing developments and which ones will end up forgotten? 

There was a legitimate political assassination in mid-June, and it got lost in the cracks between the president’s humiliating birthday parade and the armed occupation of Los Angeles. And while those stories were crazy enough to make everyone forget how Social Security data was compromised and the White House served as a car dealership, they were still eclipsed by the uproar that accompanied the public's re-discovery of existing Jeffrey Epstein information. 

(And that recap omits the “Big, Beautiful Bill” travesty.)

It might make more sense to stick with more game-focused news. The story there has been payment processors restricting access to online storefronts. It looks a lot like the 2021 crackdown on adult content, but as Thomas Manuel notes:

This coincides with some weird stuff out of the UK where a law is forcing websites to verify people’s ages before they give them access to information that might not be suitable for children. It’s a weirdly synchronous attack on freedom of expression — an uncoordinated public-private partnership that threatens the few remaining fun/free spaces on the internet.

Payment processors Visa and Mastercard are facing some resistance for this move, and the U.K. age verification scheme has encountered its own issues; people can bypass U.K. protection measures by presenting video game screenshots in lieu of actual age verification. However:

It could affect this year's Interactive Fiction Competition.  

Image credit: Ksenia Chernaya  / Pexels

Different lessons from Mozart

 

Geoff Engelstein brought up Amadeus while writing about “the question almost all of us have to wrestle with - what do you do when you realize that you’re very good but not great?”

I… don’t find that question very relatable? (Let’s meet back here later to discuss what it's like to realize that you're very good.)

Amadeus lives in my head for a different reason: it shows that most of us have to make an effort.

In the movie, Salieri is stunned that Mozart’s music needed no editing, revision, or correction. Who actually works like that? A freakishly talented, once-in-a-lifetime genius, that’s who.

The rest of us need to struggle through multiple drafts and revisions while strengthening what works and discarding what doesn’t.

It’s the Ira Glass quote about closing the gap between the works you’d want to create and the works you create when you’re just starting out. You need a lot of practice to develop your skills, and that means being kind to yourself when your early practice falls short. 

Look away from the remarkable brilliance of the person working without rough drafts to recognize that everybody else is experiencing similar struggles to improve. That's why the genius is notable! What made you think you'd be an exception? 

And on the topic of getting a lot of practice, Blaugust is coming up. I wasn’t successful at writing a post every day during the month of August in 2023, but I have published a post every month for the past year, and that’s better than nothing.

Truck Quest: The cutting edge of 201X

When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest, we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected to.

  

Although the Guy Fawkes mask was an obvious idea, it wasn’t a good fit for our paranoid activist. There’s no way his efforts to undermine exploitative globalization would use a mass produced commodity that generated revenue for a major entertainment conglomerate! Samson might have had some unusual opinions about how society should work, but he wasn’t an idiot.

Instead, we looked at some of 2018’s cutting-edge solutions for remaining unrecognized: 

• Anti-identification glasses. Abstract patterns printed on cheap plastic frames. 
• Extreme makeup. People were providing advice in YouTube tutorials. 
• Custom software filters. (This was the least interesting solution, from an artwork perspective.) 
• Hyperface clothing. For overwhelming systems with too many false positives.  

Samson ended up with several different disguises to remain incognito.