Weekend Edition: Internet Memes

In an effort to better educate our readers about nonsensical references to idiotic internet fads and viral videos, DFTC proudly offers some of the source material for the best of the interwebs. We will try not to bombard you with too much all at once - it might break your brain.

To begin, please enjoy a news report which started (or was at least on the front edge of) the phenomenal success of "autotuning" on Youtube. 

Both the original: 

And the autotuned version: 

A Timely Rant about the Netflix/Qwikster Debacle.

I woke up this morning to an email from the CEO of Netflix. He and I are on a first name basis, so this isn't altogether surprising. If you happen to subscribe to Netflix, you probably have the same email in your inbox right now. Whether you have taken the time to read it (or will later) is entirely up to you, but maybe I can save you the time. Here's the nutshell version of Netflix latest communication:

"We recognize that we could have handled the recent change in pricing structure better and that many of you (or perhaps we should say the few of you still left) are none-to-happy with us. We are not going to change the prices back (well, we're going to spin it like we're doing you a favor by not increasing prices yet again... at least not yet). Rambling about business justifications for splitting the two services. Oh, btw - from now on your DVD service will be called "Qwikster." The name "Netflix" will be reserved for our streaming service. There will be two separate billing items on your credit card, and two separate websites for you keep up with to manage your queues if you continue to subscribe to both services. Have a great day, and please hang in there with us as we continue turning the screws.     -Reed"

Let's back up for a moment to the halcyon early days of Netflix. What a fantastic concept. DVDs by mail with postage paid return envelopes. An incredible library of entertainment delivered right to your door for what I think we could all agree was a more than fair monthly subscription. Blockbuster had no answer - it tried to play the instant gratification card, but unless you wanted a recent blockbuster (no pun intended) or a recent straight to DVD release, their brick-and-mortar stores really didn't have anything to offer. As evidenced by their nosedive into bankruptcy, the margins on their video game rentals were not enough to offset the losses Netflix caused.

As time wore on, and video rental stores became scarcer and scarcer, there was still some demand for instant video gratification - just not enough to justify the rent on a 3000 square foot store front. Enter video-on-demand services, Redbox, and eventually Netflix streaming. Coming out of the gate, Netflix streaming was something of a novelty. It was cute, really. Not a lot of offerings, but they also weren't charging customers anything for the privilege. This was probably for the best, since most people without the tech-savvy to hook their laptop to their 50 inch plasma screen aren't going to watch a two-hour movie on a Dell sitting in their lap. If they won't use the service, they won't pay a lot for it.

But slowly, Netflix was added as a bonus feature on higher end electronics - PS3s, Blu-ray players, and some dedicated devices were rolled out to allow Netflix to stream straight to your television. Business boomed, and suddenly there was a small, but noticeable charge for the feature on your monthly bill. This was to be expected. Netflix had to pay for the right to offer these movies and shows, so we needed to offset that costs.

Then came the pricing structure change. Netflix split the services altogether, increasing the overall cost to have both a physical DVD service and a streaming service. This pissed a lot of people off. Personally, I was annoyed, but I had at least seen it coming unlike many customers. This change wasn't entirely Netflix' fault - studios had finally gotten wise to how lucrative streaming could be and realized it wasn't a passing fad, so each contract renewal with content providers was costing Netflix exponentially more and more money. What was Netflix' fault was the way it was rolled out - abruptly - and the size of the increase relative to the overall subscription for those of us on the bottom tier of their customer base (who presumably make up a sizable fraction of that base).

The backlash was pretty phenomenal. Short of Gamecock football games and national elections, I can't think of any other single event that has taken over my Facebook news feed quite this way, and it was overwhelmingly negative. Lots of people talked about leaving. Some actually did. Enough, presumably, to get a half-assed email apology from the CEO today.

And what does that apology amount to? Our bad. Here, try juggling two different websites instead of one integrated service. We thought that would be more convenient for you.

Thank Netflix. I really love your service. Really, I do. And at the end of the day, it is still a pretty affordable option. But thanks to your bone-headed customer service and PR campaigns, I have to wrestle with whether or not you, and your Star Trek reruns, are worth it.

A Word About our Title

I’m pretty sure I addressed this in the first iteration of DFTC (yes, I just abbreviated my own blog - can you stand the pretension? Can you?) but sharing with you the origin of our blog title is good filler, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with babies, pregnancy, or parenting, thus fulfilling a goal I set for myself when returning to blogging - to give a sh** about something other than my own tiny universe. Yes, I’m psyched about the baby, especially now that she's finally here. Yes, parenting is a big deal. Yes, nearly everyone we know is in this boat with us. But not everyone, and we at DFTC (there it is again!) care about all our Constant Readers, not just the ones that care about us back. Moreover, filler is good, as our readers will note with dismay (or apathy) that posts on this blog have fallen off of late, in rough correspondence to the weeks since Olivia has graced us with her presence. I'm sure there's no connection.

Anyhoo, as the picture in the header indicates, I stole this title from graffiti - specifically, graffiti in the garage outside my freshman dormitory.




… Did you expect more?

I could leave it there, but that would make for a pretty crappy post.

The phrase was probably scrawled by a drunken frat-guy who considered the thought deeply philosophical, but I thought it was a fairly decent motto for that year of my life. College was good to me. I had come from a high school experience that was less than ideal to the “big city” of Columbia and was busy coming into my own. Far from feeling like an outsider, as in high school, I immediately found a circle (several circles, really) of like-minded geeks. I lived with a roommate who never slept, in a room with fake vulture and a light-up reindeer named Lupus. (If you immediately heard Hugh Laurie’s voice saying “It’s never lupus,” you are in the right place my friend)

Classes were challenging, but not ridiculously so (I assiduously avoided science and engineering in favor of business classes - hence my less than taxing course load), and as a result I enjoyed a high degree of free time for wrecking the toy aisles at Wal-mart at one a.m., LAN battles on Unreal Tournament, rolling twelve sided dice (yeah, that’s right), and consuming an unreasonable amount of Waffle House. It was a chaotic time, but in the best sense of the word - unpredictable, exciting, spontaneous. I certainly can’t say it was the best time of my life - I’ve been blessed way above my pay-grade in the years since then - but it was a good year, and the writing on the wall summed it all up pretty well.

But subsequent years have also been well summed up with this phrase, in good ways and bad. (This is me getting deep, so try not to get your ankles wet.) Life is not orderly, nor is it meant to be. We forget the chaos at our own peril, since the chaos is life happening.

Or it’s just a piece of graffiti that struck my fancy. Whatever.

Requiem for my video games

Hmm...I wonder if this qualifies as "fair use"...

I doubt very much that I will ever permanently put aside all of the stupid, addictive, time-wasting, mind-sucking video games I have wasted my life on over the past three decades. Childhood indoctrination is just too difficult to overcome, and, damn but it feels good to crush a Goomba after a long day.  That said, my wife's patience with me sitting on my ass and asking for "just one more level" before I load the dishwasher or change our daughter's diaper is likely to wear thin in the very near future. Probably that lack of sleep thing. Whatever.

In any case, for reasons that might once have been somewhat in my control but are no longer, most of my time wasting addictions have to be largely set aside for the next ten or twenty years. Maybe only four if I can get Olivia interested in a two-player game. ("Sweetie, that is the chainsaw. It's the weakest weapon.You'll want to find a shotgun quick before Daddy snipes you from behind. M'kay pumpkin?")

It felt appropriate to pay a brief tribute to some of the greater offenders with which I have wasted a measurable fraction of my life. I should note before posting this list that, where video games (...and music...and movies....hell, pop culture in general) are concerned, I more or less stopped paying attention in the mid-2000s. There are no current-gen console games on this list. But here they are, in all their outdated splendor, starting with...

Final Fantasy VII - I could easily just say FFVII-XII, excluding XXI (monthly fee for FF? Yeah, right). VII was the first I ever played, and I've played it through several times. Arguably one of the top five RPGs of all time, VII was a soul-sucking time vacuum. How many hours did I spend breeding chocobos so I could get a golden chocobo, so I could get Knights of the Round, so I could defeat all of the Weapons, none of which actually contributed to resolving the principal storyline of the game. Damn you sidequests! And I still never fought enough battles in the early game to see Aeris final Limit Break (has anyone outside of Japan actually had the patience for that?). Between the various incarnations of Final Fantasy and the replays I've done, I'd estimate anywhere from 600 to 1000 hours of my life were stolen by Square Enix. In terms of my current profession, that's half a working year. Damn. That's just depressing.

Heroes of Might and Magic III - One, two, and three were all fantastic games. Four is better off forgotten, and I hear great things about five, but my current computer is not what one would call "fast" or "good," so I can't speak directly to the merits of the latest game, or the sixth version due out shortly. These are great strategy/tactics titles, where you accumulate resources, build castles, recruit creatures borrowed from various mythological and fantasy traditions, and try to accomplish different goals (or just kill the other guys if you aren't into the campaign games). Maps come in various sizes, and the length of any given game corresponds roughly to the size of the map. Excellent in both one player and multi-player modes. I can't even estimate the hours I have lost to this game. Probably a few hundred just waiting for Dave to finish his turn so I could whoop his ass.

Civilization - I probably lost more time to III than any of the other titles, but the Sid Meier gaming franchise is pretty solid all the way around. This is a world-building strategy game in which the player, appropriately, plays the leader of a civilization from 5000 B.C. until the modern era, or until a competing civilization wipes him from the globe. Really great game. The only real downside is the mid-game lag, where if you are not actively engaged in military conflict you are really just pressing Enter about three hundred times per turn. That, and the sheer length of any given game. Playing for an hour or two a day, a single game can take days.

Bloons 4 - Damn, dirty apes. Bloons is my modern Tetris, or Snood if you prefer. A fairly simple tower defense game where monkeys throw darts at "bloons." I don't know why the target balloons are called "bloons," but they are. This is a stupid game. I admit that. The only saving grace I can argue for it is that it isn't a Facebook game.

Unreal Tournament - Haven't actually played this in a while (again, see my lamentations regarding my current computer), but I did lose many nights in college to LAN battles on Unreal Tournament. It's a first-person shooter, much like Doom before it and Modern Warfare since, but with aliens, space age weapons, low-gravity battle arenas, and a pretty sick multi-player mode. The updated Unreal Tournament (I believe it was out in 2004...yeah, I know how out-of-date that is) added vehicles into the mix for larger boards and absolutely devastating weaponry. The Goliath was a beast. That is all.

I kind of expect by the time I have the free time to enjoy video games on a regular basis again I will (a) have other hobbies, or something more pressing to do, and (b) none of my favorite games will be easily available anymore on any platform I have access to. Much like King's Quest from the stone-age of the computer era, technology will leave these obsolete favorites in the dust. What games have cost a chunk of your life?

Teachable Moments

"Turn me around. The game is on."

One of the things I have looked forward to most about being a parent is the opportunity to share my wisdom and warped perspective on the world with my young, impressionable progeny.  As evidenced by previous posts, I have probably spent more time than is strictly healthy envisioning ways to turn my child (or should we be so blessed, children) into a veritable nightmare for the poor teachers she will one day be assigned to learn from. You poor, poor souls....

Even though my daughter is not yet old enough to retain any of my wise instruction, I am trying to get in the habit early of finding and utilizing “teachable moments.” The phrase “teachable moment” is a popular buzzword (buzzphrase?), which I can really only tolerate using with a healthy dose of irony and/or sarcasm. Since virtually all of my instruction to my daughter is laced with irony and/or sarcasm, I think I’m safe.

Over this Labor Day weekend, we encountered a few teachable moments. During the first quarter of the USC v. ECU game, I was able to instruct Olivia on the definition of a “piss-poor effort.” Spike TV’s Star Wars marathon allowed us to observe an “overly simplistic paradigm of good and evil.” On Sunday, we were fortunate to have a few people over to play cards, and we learned all about inside straight draws, bluffing, and throwing good money after bad. Not that there was any actual money involved. Ahem.

And my obligatory Labor Day weekend yard work and grilling allowed us to expose her to early olfactory associations: sweat, fresh cut grass, charcoal smoke, grilling meat = daddy.

The weekend was also full of teachable moments for her parents. The things I learned:
1. Nothing starts your day quite like a triple helping of spit-up in your boxer clad lap.
2. Four hours of uninterrupted sleep is a blessing beyond dreams of avarice when you have a three-week old infant.
3. There is a nexus of cuteness at which some adults will voluntarily cease all higher brain function in favor of making “squee!” noises. Mostly this effects the female of the species (not to be sexist, but it does), but there were a few males who lost all reasoning, too. In case you are wondering, the equation for this appears to be 2 human infants + 1 kitten weighing less than one pound crawling on said infants = 1 cretinous mass of adults.  
4. Until daddy grows mammary glands or the baby is bottle-trained, he is nearly always the wrong person to hold her, even when she’s not actually hungry. Conversely, if she is not actually hungry, nearly anyone with boobs seems to have the ability to keep her happy.
5. Our baby’s bladder control is inversely proportional to the newness of the clean diaper. To put a finer point on it, there is a 50% chance that any given new diaper will be soaked through before we pick her up off the changing table. That’s talent.

All in all, a very instructive weekend. Hope yours was just as good.