There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities—and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.
From Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business on Wired.com.
Here’s a fun discovery: Ubisoft has released the soundtrack for Beyond Good & Evil, as high-quality MP3s, for free. They must have done it some time ago as the original download page has disappeared, but happily it has found a home on MySpace.
Most people probably have never heard of Beyond Good & Evil, a third-person action-adventure that was released back in the 2003 holiday season — and promptly lost among the Maddens and Tony Hawks that dominate that time of year. A shame too, because it is an awful lot of fun, and remains to this day one of our all-time favorites. There is nothing particular about the game that stands out as great. Rather, everything just comes together — the characters, the environments, the voice acting, the music, the story — to turn what is essentially a sequence of mini-games into something compelling. Even now, several years later, we still occasionally fire it up, and it is still a blast. Playing the soundtrack at work is a surreal treat.
If you like the genre, and you can find a copy, it is worth picking up. Here are the Amazon links on the off-chance you can find a seller: for the Playstation2, for Windows PCs, for the Xbox, and the GameCube.
Marc Andreessen (who you might remember from a little product called Netscape) has an interesting article up today, called Age and the Entrepreneur. At 37 years old, this is a topic that has certainly crossed my mind; a nagging feeling that the obligations of home and family make entrepreneurial expression much more difficult. You can’t, after all, live on Ramen out of the back of a car (I’ll tell that story later) while you create the next Great American Product. The article is basically a recap of a frightfully thorough study by Dean Simonton, professor of psychology at University of California Davis. Marc asks a couple of very relevant questions (for me anyway) at the end, and I am looking forward to his follow-up.
Interestingly, the findings are similar, though considerably more detailed, to what Napoleon Hill reported in Think and Grow Rich: as a general rule of thumb, the early 40’s are the start of the most productive period of a person’s life (unless you are a poet, apparently).
My first automotive love, when I was still far too young to drive, was the Saab 99. That black 99T was a thing of beauty! These days I drive a 2001 9-3 SE. But boy oh boy would I love to have a day in the Aero X. I’ll have to add it to my Blender project queue.
Brian Beckman, author of the Physics of Racing series (for which I am mighty grateful), has a video up on Channel 9 talking about the complexity of modeling vehicle dynamics, tires in particular. I had no idea he was working at Microsoft, on programming tools of all things, but apparently he’s been there quite some time. If you’ve ever attempted to implement tire slip ratios (hasn’t everyone?) this will all sound very familiar, but it is reassuring to know that even a Very Smart Person like Dr. Beckman has the same troubles.
I am going to have to rethink the whole idea of a roadtrip, as Bloomberg reports Russia Plans World’s Longest Tunnel, a Link to Alaska.
I have, for a long time now, been experimenting with various bits of game and simulation technologies. I’ve written simple landscape renderers, entertaining mini-games, and even a fairly convincing vehicle simulation. All along I’ve felt that I should take these bits and turn it into This Thing or That Thing. I should have a vision, a product. I should sell it and get rich! Always the steam runs out and I wind up back where I started, a little bit wiser but not really any further along. I went through another round of this recently, which involved burning everything to a DVD and wiping the drive clean. Very therapeutic, but not terribly useful otherwise. And now I am trying to figure out what to do next. I can’t just drop it, though I couldn’t tell you why. I have a compulsion to create. I don’t feel like creating in a vacuum; it should be out there getting used and shared and improved. I would still like to get rich at some point, even if I can’t see how to do it from here. I keep coming back to this line from The Neverhood.
I create because…I have to. May you find value in it.
