Exhibitionism

Well looky here. Life continues to tickle, quietly, while I look the other way. This page is slowly but surely becoming one of those abandoned parking lots, weeds growing through the cracks in the cement, surrounded by rusty graffitied warehouses all around.

Surprisingly enough, this blog isn't going idle because of my usual laziness, although there is plenty of that to go around.

My new dilemma is the conflict between the public and the personal.

See, I used to be one of those twitchy secretive types. I would never brag about accomplishments, maintaining a dignified silence and assuming that the right people would find out about my deep internal coolness. I hide my feelings from all but the closest to me, afraid of the ridicule of the masses if they knew the extent of my ambitions.

It's all very middle school, really. It's as if everyone is constantly looking at me, thinking of me, waiting for the tiniest chink in my armor to undo me completely.

Here's two crazy things I learned recently:

1. Nobody is paying attention to me. Everyone is thinking of themselves.

2. Attention feels good. I freaking LOVE attention. Attention is better than candy, and sometimes even better than money.


This little blog here was formed in my more secretive phase, when I was shyly emerging from my shell like a slimy butterfly. And it's completely anonymous. I don't use my usual online id, and there's really no way to trace it back to secretive little me.

In the meantime, the real me has become a bit of a publicity whore. I'm organizing a meetup, for Pete's sake.

So talking softly into the void of LifeTickles is becoming unsatisfying. Whither the adoration of the masses? The flame wars? The stalkers? I need more attention!

To quench my thirst for attention, I'm considering de-anonymizing LifeTickles. Publicizing my innermost thoughts to internet strangers is less problematic than publicizing them to family and employers. I'll have to plan the outing very carefully. Maybe once the employers are out of the picture....

Fartz R Us

Now that I am selling actual entertainment products to actual real live people, I am starting to understand that I had absolutely no intuitive grasp of people en masse. What do they want? What is really going to take off? What is really going to piss them off?

Overall, large groups of people, even those with expensive gadgets, will act almost exactly like a toddler. They want bright shiny objects, lots of blinking lights and happy sounds, they want to be told they're awesome, and, more than anything else, they love farts.

My next project: Flashy Ringy McFartenator, where a blinking cartoon monkey sings your praises in farts. Every time you touch him, he giggles. And farts some more.

The more revolutionary technology gets, the more it reveals that people actually haven't advanced emotionally since the stone ages.

I'm a turkey

I celebrated this great Thanksgiving holiday by working and avoiding family and social interaction. Life without a laptop seems completely unimaginable. Are there actually people out there who live in the real world? I’m probably asking the wrong crowd.

I wish that I had witty observations to report on the state of popular culture, politics, or other stuff people care about. However, my life has been spent completely absorbed in day job and secret night job (and no, I’m not a lady of the night, but I’m sure that would give me better stories). I’m pretty much becoming a complete bore, able to talk only about the state of my very very narrow field. Even politics have been boring ever since Obama got elected. Is it bad that I want Palin back? At least she stayed relevant long enough to give us this lovely gem:


Gobble Gobble

Yeah, that’s a dude slaughtering turkeys behind her. Not even SNL could have staged this shit.

I can haz sleeps now?

I spent the whole evening reading icanhascheesburger and writing promotional material for our iPhone game. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Last Pirate Rant

Ok, final post on the pirates, and then I’m done. The obsession is unhealthy and unproductive, and I’m pretty sure I’m developing an internet addiction, with a nice dollop of RSI on the side. As my last pre-cold-turkey outpouring, I just need to get this off my chest. Here’s the list of common arguments I hear in defense of piracy. Allow me to explain why they’re wrong.

Dude, Apple totally suXorz! They’re a bunch of Nazis and I don’t want to give them any more money! Rage against the corporate machine! Yeah!

Well. First, let’s make the assumption that you actually bought your iPhone and didn’t beat up an old lady on the street to steal one. In which case, I hate to break it to you, but you already gave Apple a whole bunch of money. If you’re now trying to get back at them by NOT paying for my $4 app, guess who gets more hurt here, me or Apple? Seriously, word of advice – if you don’t want to give money to Apple, don’t buy their phone. Problem solved.


Dude, everyone overcharges for apps. I mean, come on, $4 for software? WTF! I’m trying to teach the greedy bastards a lesson.

Short answer: if you can’t afford $4 for a game, you can’t afford an iPhone. Return it and learn to manage your money.

I don’t want to pay for something before trying it. Once I try it for free, I’ll buy it if I like it. (Right…)

Ok, kind of see the appeal of this argument. You don’t want to spend money unless you know what you’re getting. However, this argument does not hold much water. We’re talking about a couple of bucks here. Do you take a bite of a muffin before buying it? Do you see a movie before paying for a movie ticket? Do you try a cup of coffee before buying one? Yeah, didn’t think so. And unlike the items listed above, you can use an application for an unlimited amount of time. Asking to pay to try is not unreasonable here.


But… software isn’t a muffin! A muffin has concrete costs per item, whereas software you make just once and can sell an unlimited number of times, never having to work again!

Not exactly true. There is an oft-rehashed summary of some concrete software costs which scale with the number of users (hosting fees, bandwidth cost, support time, etc.). But there’s also the fact that you can spend months writing something with absolutely no return. That’s a huge investment. If your product hits it really big, then yes, you’ll figure out how to make money, pirates or no. If your product is completely unpopular, then, well, tough luck. You played the lottery and lost. Again, pirates don’t really come into the picture here.

However, if you’re somewhere in the middle of that range and not quite making enough to make a living, losing customers to piracy can make that crucial difference. That’s the crucial amount that can discourage indie developers and new ideas. If people can’t make a decent living off decently popular apps, soon enough the only people making these applications will be large companies that can make the huge investment. Perhaps some people would prefer it that way. However, for people who claim to hate the large corporations, this is probably not the result they were expecting. If you want new, original ideas from indie developers, you need to pay them for their efforts.

Ok, glad I got all that off my chest. These are all things I would never say to a pirate directly, of course, because I know there’s no point. In the end, people just like free stuff. And there’s really no reasoning with someone who can defend their right to steal my work directly to my face. Enjoy, dude. You need it more than I do.

Life Lessons from Auntie Lux

And here is the promised list of Don’ts in Dealing with Pirates. Let’s hope someone else learns from my obsession. Pirates are elusive and skittish creatures who should not be approached lightly.

1. Don’t accuse the pirates. They attack when cornered. It is not a good idea to go on a torrent site (which is distributing the fruits of your labor, for free) and suggest that they send YOU a donation for using your software, rather than to the guy who took 2 minutes to crack it. You WILL be inundated with vile unprintable commentary that will question your right to be on the site, the size of your reproductive organs, your sexual orientation, and potentially your mother’s weight. All of this will inevitably be misspelled and will hurt you more than it hurts them.

2. Don’t send a Cease and Desist letter to a site that makes its money distributing stolen software. Sure, they’ll pull the offending item for a day. But the pirates will come back, and in greater numbers. This is a fleeting victory.

3. Don’t Google your product name every hour. Yes, it’s getting pirated. Yes, there are more pirate sites up every time you look, in every conceivable language. Yes, you are becoming completely obsessed and Google in your dreams. Seriously. Just. Stop.

4. … hold on, Googling…

5. Don’t become emotionally involved in other highly publicized IP cases. Calm down. Tetris is doing ok, whether or not I flame a forum full of teenage boys who feel like they have a God-given right to free video games. For your sanity, just stay out of it.

6. Finally, and most importantly, do NOT give away any identifying details when approaching the pirates. They will retaliate.

Tomorrow, the much shorter list of dos.

Arrr!

As all five of you probably know, my better half and I have created a game for the iPhone, now for sale in the iTunes store. We passed a critical milestone a couple weeks ago – we got pirated.

This turn of phrase has confused people in the past, so an explanation. Someone bought our application from iTunes, and then hacked the file and shared it with other on torrent sites, which means that thousands of people have now downloaded it for free. The worst part? Whoever does this generally posts a guilt trip on the site: “I put a lot of work into hacking these, you guys. Be a human being and donate some money to me! Here’s my Paypal link!”

Let me tell you – when you pour your heart and soul into something, getting pirated is about as flattering as getting mugged and then seeing your valuables for sale on a street corner. However, I have learned something along the way. For everybody’s benefit, I present what I have learned from my time with the pirates. Who, unfortunately, did not look like this:

Well, maybe they did. Who knows? They’re online. From now on, I’m assuming that all the weasels stealing my stuff look like Johnny Depp. Shirtless.

Tomorrow: How to deal with pirates. And how to NOT deal with pirates (hint: truth is not the way to go).