keith R mcbride

App.net

Last night, the App.net Kickstarter-like project closed its initial fundraising period with over $800,000 from over 12,000 backers. The project aims to, at a minimum, offer a Twitter-like service where users pay a fee to fund development, rather than advertisers. On the idealistic side, App.net wants to create a foundational network where multiple services can co-exist and users and deveopers choose how they are used.

Twitter has slowly been cutting off or obsoleting the work (and business) of third-party developers. Users wanted ways to shorten URLs in tweets, or post pictures and videos. Developers put their own time and money into those endeavors only to see Twitter build their own and leave them stranded. I can actually forgive those steps, as Twitter’s goal should be to make their service the best they can. However, in the drive to finally bring in revenue, Twitter is pushing their ad model. Beginning with “promoted trends”, they first included the material on the website and in their own first-party clients.

As with YouTube or Facebook, Twitter is monetizing content from advertisers. YouTube doesn’t charge you to watch a video, but they force you to watch an ad before it. If YouTube doesn’t control your video-watching experience, they can’t ensure you’ll see that ad (like on iOS), or drive them any revenue. There is now foreshadowing that Twitter will axe third-party clients, or at least those that don’t meet the “guidelines” in order to make sure they’re making money on you somehow.

App.net hopes to create an alternate-universe version of Twitter, as if they hadn’t gone to an ad-based revenue model. By requiring a membership fee, App.net eschews the need to shoehorn ads into a service that has no need for them. If you can’t understand why reopening the gates of user-driven syntax development (@username, #hashtag, and $cashtag were all community constructs) and allowing free input and output from a global Twitter stream is worth money, then you really aren’t the demographic for App.net anyway. Twitter, as-is, is a great service. Twitter, circa 2008, was a different service completely.

Craft Beer

Craft brewing has seen a massive influx in both interest and money in the last few years. There are more breweries today than their have been in decades. Despite that growth, the product is becoming both more expensive to create, and more expensive to consume. Ingredients are often locally grown. Batches are made on a scale of hundreds of cases rather than hundreds of truckloads.

The main question people seem to pose about App.net is:

Why anyone would pay for something they already get for free?¹

MG Siegler suggested that a paid service can’t beat Twitter:

[App.net] won’t ever grow big enough to truly challenge Twitter. Maybe you think that’s fine. Maybe it could exist as a self-sustaining smaller network. That’s nice — but that’s not what drives anyone. No one sets out to be second-rate. And the best people don’t flock to those services. That’s why these things tend to not work.

The major domestic brewers haven’t gone bankrupt. They still sell tons. Somehow, though, others have carved their niche and managed to make quite a profit doing so. Does that imply Sam Adams or Brooklyn Brewery or Dogfish Head are “second-rate”? Does it imply that Bud Light is the best beer in America because the most Americans drink it?

Obviously, there is a massive difference between a social network and a beer brand. There are other networks out there, though, that I’d caution to call “second-rate”. Is Last.fm second-rate? Is Stack Overflow second-rate? If there is money to be made with those services, why scoff at them simply because they aren’t mainstream?

Ralph Nader

Raph Nader is a lot of things. He will be nost notable, for better or worse, for his participation in, and effect on, the 2000 Presidential Election.

After seeming lack of interest from Democrats in Washington, Nader sought national attention for his slate of campaign issues. He wanted campaign finance reform. He wanted better healthcare, better education, better workers’ rights. He wanted lots of things that the Democratic party was supposedly for.

Yet, Nader broke off. He was criticized for hurting the Democratic party, which he admittedly aligned closely with. On election night, the results were tallied, and re-tallied, and probably re-tallied again. Many posit that Nader cost Al Gore the state of Florida, and thus the entire election.

Nader had little chance of ever winning that election. I don’t suppose he ever believed that he did. It isn’t the true goal of a third party to win an election. The Democrats, however, would’ve won that election had they paid any attention at all to that annoying Ralph Nader.

People donated money to Nader’s campaign. They believed in what he stood for. Maybe the Democrats slate of issues now don’t completely represent what Nader wanted a decade ago, but they’re certainly a lot closer. By that logic, Ralph Nader won, and so did his supporters.

There’s a chance App.net can make their revenue model work and develop something new and different. They have a much better chance at success than Nader did. But, if they don’t, I’d like to say that I put my money on the side of the open and accessible internet.

I’d like to say that I backed the ones who wanted to build something really cool, not the ones who wanted to sell me Bud Light.

I first played Max Payne on the PS2 shortly after its release. It was one of the few game-playing experiences that really stuck with me. I ended up later playing the Xbox version, Max Payne 2 for Xbox, and Max Payne again years later through backward compatibility on the Xbox 360. Clearly, I am a fan. I have always, and probably always will, claim Max Payne as one of my favorite games of all time.

Max Payne was released a few months prior to Halo in 2001, and at that point a shooting game with style and story was a rarity. More importantly, Max Payne wasn’t a shooter that happened to have style and story, it was style and story that happened to be a shooting game, and an awfully good one. The comic panels. The flashbacks. The narrative. It was something I had never experienced in a game before.

Max Payne 2 took the series a few steps further. It had better physics, better graphics, all the bells and whistles of the era. At that point, any fan of the series would’ve been shocked to hear that there wouldn’t be another installment for nearly a decade. Games have evolved. The original developer, Remedy, moved on to create the Payne-like Alan Wake title. Rockstar was going to re-invent Max Payne.

Using word association with the Max Payne series, I’d probably answer, in order: noir, New York, comic, snow. Shockingly, Max Payne 3 has basically none of these, yet somehow still exudes the feeling of those original titles. It’s as if the character modeling, voice acting, and mood are amped up so high that they drown out all the blatant departures from the series. You are controlling the same Max, even if thousands of miles, and several years away from your last meeting. Shooting people in slow-mo is like riding a bike.

Just as Die Hard With A Vengeance is a huge departure from the Die Hard series, Max Payne 3 takes Max out of his expected setting and mood, but eventually McClane and Payne both let their character outshine their setting and pull you back in. A review from Grantland describes the (literal) foreign feeling:

Now Rockstar has set its latest game in a Portuguese-speaking locale deeply unfamiliar to most Americans. More intriguing yet, they’ve done almost nothing to ease the game’s audience’s atmospheric entry into this world. [T]he game’s Brazilian characters speak Portuguese throughout; this allows Max, and the audience, to remain confused and off-kilter to a degree most games wouldn’t dare permit.

I realized the fact that I felt disconnected with the old Max Payne was an intentional parallel. Max himself was removed. He had no clue where he was, who he was with, or what he was doing. While Vengeance ends up being an entertaining movie, it feels like McClane is inserted into that story. It is impossible to imagine that Max Payne 3 could’ve starred some other generic cop. The brooding narration mixed with depression and worthlessness IS Max Payne. Geeks of Doom describes in their review:

[W]e also see Payne battling his inner demons more desperately than ever before. He’s always been a man of the drink and of the pill, but now he’s possessed by them; they get him through the day and overtake his very being after the sun sets.

Although Max never utters the cliché, “I’m getting too old for this shit,” he does remark that he’s an old man, a mess, a shadow of his former self. Maybe the game itself is “too old for this shit” after letting other shooters pass it up over a decade. For a game that predates the entire series of Halo, Gears of War, and Uncharted, maybe Max (and his game) is an old grizzled man by comparison. Maybe there is no room anymore for slow, dark, story-driven, single-player shooters.

Max is a relic of a previous (gaming) generation. If this is how Max walks into the sunset (literally), then I wish him the best. It was fun to see him come out of retirement for one last job.

To keep the Die Hard comparison going, maybe it is a series that really should stop at number three.

Last night, I re-watched Iron Man, the first film in the march toward The Avengers. It was difficult to remember that before going to see Iron Man in the theater, there was no such thing as a “Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Sure, there had recently been film trilogies for X-Men, Spider-man, and even Blade, but Iron Man was Iron Man, and that was that. The novelty of any comic film series was always which sidekicks, partners, or villains might make it into the short two-hour representation of decades of comics. X-Men always gave the best opportunity because of their large cast of characters. Little did we know…

After its initial premiere, there was a “buzz” around the internet that a short post-credits scene in Iron Man was worth staying in your seat to see. I’m not sure how many other movies have ever had meaningful post-credits footage, but the rumor seemed more than substantiated. Even four years later, and several films later, that scene still gave me goosebumps. Not only did it mention SHIELD and the Avengers, it had freaking Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. This wasn’t the joker card foreshadowing to end Batman Begins, this was serious business with a character cast already. It was the first (public) indication that Marvel intended to make movies more than single-character or single-team arcs. That isn’t how comics work, why should the movies?

Ever since a run of relative flops in the comic book film genre (Elektra? Ghost Rider?), prognosticators have been calling for the bubble to pop. Surely, audiences wouldn’t continue putting $200M+ down to see heroes on the big screen. Right?

Was Marvel trying to head off this looming crash? Or, were they finally just in a position to retain their character rights as an independent studio and do things the right way? Probably both. The only real answer is that the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a huge success for Marvel. Maybe it is just prolonging the impending crash a few years, or maybe it is truly a repositioning of the genre, a rebirth even.

Maybe comic book characters don’t need to be re-imagined for broader consumption. Maybe audiences can handle some less obvious themes from a hero film. Maybe people will keep spending their hard-earned money to see a film series spanning several years. Maybe they just needed a better reason to do so.

A recent article from Gawker positioned The Avengers as a possible negative for the industry:

But after feasting on The Avengers and all its superheroes, is anyone going to care about a Green Lantern or even a Wolverine in quite the same way? Hey, I like Hugh Jackman, too, but he’s just one action hero. How can he compare with Iron Man and the Hulk and everybody else in the same movie? I’m scared that The Avengers will convince filmmakers that they’ve got to double- and triple-up their comic-book characters to get audiences to come.

It’s too easy to point at The Avengers and say they are successful for throwing a bunch of heroes up all at once. We’ve already had five X-Men films, some successful and some not. The difference between the good X-Men films and the bad X-Men films was the quality of the writing. The concern here should be quality not quantity. The team featured in The Avengers have already carried their own respective films. Elektra didn’t. Robin wouldn’t.

I think the line drawn in the sand by The Avengers on May 4 is that Marvel has proven that for fifty years they’ve had some incredible stories published by some amazing writers and artists. They don’t need Hollywood to “fix” their stories or their characters.

For decades, comics needed Hollywood. Now, Hollywood needs comics. Disney paid $4 billion for Marvel. Maybe we won’t ever see Tony Stark battle alcoholism or see Ant-man abuse his wife, but we can do a hell of a lot better than emo-Spidey playing the piano.

Screen Rant has a good summary of which Marvel properties are held by which studios.