Today, a video’s making the rounds of a Southern California car chase that jumped from the TV to real life, giving one young man a front-row seat to the action.
I was curious to see if the video was matched up to the local TV news broadcast, so I synchronized the two videos side-by-side to see. The results are below (view full screen):
There are two versions in the video. First, synchronized to the TV broadcast on screen, and second, to real-life events.
Note that the TV broadcast is exactly ten seconds behind real-life, with the news station operating on a ten-second delay. Live news commonly uses a five- to ten-second delays for unpredictable live coverage, like the recent car chase that ended in suicide accidentally broadcast by FOX News.
As much as I was hoping to debunk this, it appears to be real (or a particularly convincing fake).
Nearly a year ago, my nephew Cooper and I launched Playfic, a community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games from your browser.
I haven’t talked about the site much, and have barely touched it since we launched, but I’ve been delighted to see people slowly discover it and use it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, I’m the only one privy to these delights, since I never got around to building a good way to browse or search them.
So far, there have been over 600 games created on Playfic. While many of them have been simple sketches or tests, over 20% have more than 1,000 words in the source code. What kind of things have people made on Playfic? Some of my favorites so far:
But two of my favorite examples happened in the last two weeks.
First, Wired’s Chris Kohler published an interview with Infocom’s Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky as an interactive fiction game. The game was written on Playfic and embedded in the article.
As if that wasn’t awesome enough, today came the first release of Text Glitch, a very early attempt to port the wonderfully creative Glitch multiplayer game to a text adventure.
It’s very alpha, only covering the Alakol region, and doesn’t have any interactive elements beyond simple exploration yet, but for fans of Glitch, it’s a trip.
I was a big admirer of Glitch, and very sad when it closed its doors last month. I love the idea of preserving its collective memory in a text world you can explore.
This is exactly the kind of surprising thing I was hoping to see on Playfic. Give people a new outlet for creative expression, and they’ll find it and use it. Simply by making it easier for anyone to screw around with Inform 7 and share interactive fiction from their browser, crazy awesome things emerge. I hope to do some work on it this weekend to help shine a light on some more of the wonderful things the community’s created.
Nearly three months have passed since XOXO, and I’m still digesting what happened in Portland on those warm September days.
The writeups on The Verge, Boing Boing, and Wired summed it nicely, and I did a big roundup of reactions from attendees and the press over on Kickstarter.
In case you couldn’t make it, we released the videos for every talk last week, over seven hours of video from 24 amazing speakers. There are too many great talks to mention, but personal highlights include Dan Harmon, Chris Poole, R. Stevens, Julia Nunes, and Adam Savage.
Here’s my opening talk from the conference portion of the festival, a quick ten minutes talking about what XOXO means and how it happened:
At each event, I’ve started looking at them from a new perspective, hoping to learn what works and what to avoid, if we ever do XOXO again. A big event, like any startup, is a series of small decisions that roll up into a joyful or miserable user experience.
I’ve talked a bit about the philosophy behind XOXO and what we were hoping to accomplish — celebrating independent artists and hackers using tech to make a living doing what they love. But I haven’t talked at all about the logistics of running the festival, and all the decisions we made that made it unique.
After organizing Build for three years, XOXO was Andy McMillan’s fourth major event, but my first time organizing anything bigger than 50 people. From Build, Andy came equipped with concrete ideas about what makes a great conference. I didn’t have any experience running an event, but I’ve been to enough conferences to know what I like. Fortunately, we have very, very similar tastes.
Put simply, I designed the festival that I wanted to see in the world, with the hope that enough attendees shared my interests — if you care about the things I do, you probably had a great time at XOXO.
Speaking only for myself, here’s why I think XOXO worked and what we were trying to do.
Tone
XOXO was a snark-free zone, a reaction to the cynicism and knee-jerk contrarianism that’s so prevalent online. Playful, sincere, supportive, and meaningful. I wanted them to feel comfortable enough to approach strangers and make new friends. I never wanted them to feel like they were being marketed to. I wanted people to experience everything I love about Portland, have great food and drink, and never feel bored or confused. More than anything, we tried to optimize XOXO for fun.
During our opening comments, I took a moment to encourage everyone to approach people standing alone, or join groups of people they don’t know, knowing that everyone was supportive and nobody would be turned away. At the closing party, I heard self-described introverts tell me this guidance fundamentally changed their experience of a conference. They weren’t stumbling around alone anymore.
Curation
Curation is the most important factor of a great event. A clear editorial voice, a coherent theme, and who you invite to participate changes everything that comes after it — good curation brings great attendees, generates word-of-mouth, great press, and opens all kinds of doors.
Curation isn’t limited to just picking the speakers. In our case, it included the videogames and their designers in XOXO Arcade, the films and their directors at XOXO Film, the musicians in XOXO Music, every project featured in the Market and Hack Cafe, and all the local food carts on the street.
To get great speakers, you have to actively recruit them. For several speakers, XOXO was their first talk. Fortunately, designing the XOXO lineup got easier with each successive speaker, opening the doors to higher and higher profile people. By the time I approached Adam Savage, the lineup was already impressive. After we got Adam, signing on Dan Harmon was that much easier. But it was always a hustle, crafting and customizing the pitch for every single speaker — convincing them it was worth their time and effort for a first-time festival.
Location
The city, the venue, the neighborhood’s walkability, and the proximity to great restaurants and bars make the difference between an amazing event and a total slog. In many ways, the event is the location. Good events can succeed despite a bad location, but an amazing location can salvage even the most poorly-run event, giving attendees a memorable experience from the surrounding area alone.
It’s amazing to me how many conferences get this wrong, usually for convenience, cost, and capacity. Most commercial event spaces have no character at all, and are in less than ideal areas. Convention centers and hotel ballrooms are well-equipped for large events, but are universally awful places for a creative event.
We held XOXO in a historic two-story brick building in southeast Portland, formerly an industrial laundry converted into an arts space. It didn’t have a stage, lighting, sound, wifi, or bathrooms. But it had character, and it was in a perfect part of the city, with two great breweries within a half block and an awesome nightclub across the street, ideal for our opening party and music event.
So we built out all that infrastructure because it was worth it. And on top of that, we customized the venue for our needs, cracking open a long-defunct loading dock as our main entrance, constructing new stairs out to the street, and building a huge wooden deck for outdoor café seating in the parking lot.
It would’ve been way easier to just give up and use the Oregon Convention Center, with all of its creature comforts, but it has no soul. And every out-of-town attendee would leave thinking that Portland was like the area around the convention center.
We spent tons of money on all that stuff, but there’s no question it made a huge difference.
Talk Format
Panels are the best way to make four interesting people boring. They’re hard to prepare for, too much pressure to be interesting on the spot, and usually end up a meandering and unfocused conversation touching on a handful of topics. I hate them. Even with a strong moderator, I’d universally rather hear four short solo talks from each person than a four-person conversation. Why? Because preparing a solo talk forces the speaker to think carefully about what they want to say, conveying their message and meaning in a concise way.
As a result, the conference portion of XOXO was entirely solo talks, save for two interviews. I don’t love the interview format either, but logistical issues made an interview the best option for both. We made the best of it by getting amazing interviewers, each one an expert and accomplished speaker in their own right.
Another thing missing from XOXO: audience Q&A after talks. Opening up for audience questions is always a huge gamble, giving the captive attention of the entire room to a single audience member. That kind of free attention always seems to inspire the one douchebag in the audience to promote their website or try to impress the crowd with their rambling commentary on the subject. “This is more of an observation than a question…” Sit down, jackass.
One benefit of avoiding professional speakers is that they’re much more likely to actually attend the festival, instead of parachuting in and out for just another paying gig. All but one of XOXO’s speakers stayed for the entire festival. So, instead of Q&A, we encouraged attendees to go talk to speakers at the evening events and buy them beers. This worked really well. (Maybe too well, in the case of one speaker who showed up before his talk with an epic hangover.)
Single Track
Multiple tracks allow for more talks, more attendees, and more money. The drawback is that you’re dividing the attention of attendees and forcing speakers to compete against their peers.
By its nature, multiple-track conferences are forced to pit the most popular sessions at the same time as one another, so that attendees split fairly evenly and don’t flood any single room. The result is that attendees are forced to choose between multiple things they want to see, and you end up missing half of what you were hoping to see.
It also changes the shared experience, exposing attendees to ideas and people they may have not sought out on their own. At XOXO, every attendee heard the same speakers and could reflect on them together. I think this is a much better experience for everyone.
Commercialization
Conferences make money in two ways: ticket sales and sponsorship. Unlike journalism, many event organizers don’t have any qualms with mixing editorial and advertising.
It’s not uncommon for conferences to sell keynote talks, on-stage mentions, video interviews, blog posts, tweets, email blasts, and brochures distributed to every attendee. This is in addition to all the standard on-stage advertising, swag bag inserts, outdoor tents, vendor booths, and branded conference merchandise. Everything at a conference is for sale, including you.
XOXO took a different approach. Instead of sponsors, we had patrons that contributed to the event. What’s the difference? Our three patrons weren’t bidding for your attention — they wanted to make the event better, and they wanted to participate in it. We gave them passes to the event for their team, mentions in the guide and homepage, and that’s it. Wieden+Kennedy invited attendees to a party on their roof. Mailchimp quietly picked up the bar tab at XOXO Music, without any prompting.
As a side effect, this self-selected for interesting, creative companies. The kind of company that’s excited to buy a keynote slot and shove their brand down everybody’s throats with email blasts isn’t the kind of company that’s open to this kind of low-visibility patronage.
The result was better for everyone: attendees never suffered a deluge of unwanted advertising and sponsored keynotes, and these three companies helped make something great, while meeting some of the most interesting people in art and tech. From a cost-benefit basis, I’d argue that each patron walked away with something more important than other sponsorship — meaningful connections and a whole lot of goodwill. I’d love to find more creative ways to incorporate patronage in future events.
Big conferences can keep their payola. I’m happy to leave that dirty money on the table.
The Attendees
All the decisions that you make shape the attendees that decide to show up, and ultimately, the attendees decide the fate of a conference. Our attendee list was a ridiculously great roster of creative people.
The biggest challenge for XOXO, if we decide to do it again, will be the attendees. XOXO is a festival for artists and makers, not for people focused on business, PR, and marketing. If enough of those people leak into your event, it shifts the focus and creates a downward spiral that’s hard to recover from. The trick is that the biz/marketing/PR crowd often has more resources, and it may take some creative measures to keep them out.
There’s also a larger tension between inclusiveness and intimacy. Attendees want an intimate event where they can talk to every person in the room over the course of three days. But, at the same time, I don’t want to run an event for the same 400 people every year. I want more diversity and more new voices, with a better balance between artists and technologists, and a better age, gender, and racial breakdown. And, if I’m devoting a chunk of my life to this, I want something with a larger cultural footprint that can make a difference in more lives.
But to do that without excluding the core group of XOXO that made it great, we’d need to grow the attendance, at the potential cost of intimacy. My hunch: an event double or triple XOXO’s size with the most creative people in art and tech will still be amazing. Big conferences don’t suffer because of their size, they suffer because of a bad crowd.
Looking Forward
XOXO was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. There’s something so magical about connecting interesting people together, and you never know where it will lead — new projects, startups, friendships, marriages… it’s hard to imagine never doing that again.
I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true — you had to be there. Words only go so far, so we made a little montage that tried to convey the feeling of XOXO a little better. I hope you like it.
My eight-year-old son and I are completely obsessed with Spelunky, the brilliant 2D platformer-meets-Roguelike game that launched last week on XBLA.
How obsessed? Yesterday, at brunch at Slappy Cakes, he asked me to make this:
Tasty!
The new Spelunky is a reboot of the brilliant 8-bit freeware game that Derek Yu released in 2009, still available for Windows, with an unofficial Mac port.
Spelunky borrows two elements I hated back in the 8-bit era — randomized levels and no way to save progress — and makes them eminently enjoyable. Like NetHack meets La-Mulana, Spelunky is brutally hard. Like other Roguelikes, when you die in Spelunky, you’re dead. There’s no way to continue.
In an interview with Anthony Carboni, Derek Yu said, “When you die and have to start from the beginning, it makes death meaningful, just like in real life.” I’d recommend watching the interview, and Derek trying to play his own game, on New Challenger.
Unlike other hard games, Spelunky feels fair to me. Every time I die, I know that it was my fault. I never felt cheated because of awkward controls or unpredictable behavior, because the processes running the environment are so consistent and learnable. You can palpably feel yourself mastering the game, learning the mechanics and traps and creature movement and every other detail, until the next time you stupidly fumble.
To feel what it’s like to play Spelunky, and how deep it goes, I’d recommend reading Tom Francis’ quest to find the lost city of gold.
P.S. Eliot just came downstairs to tell me he finished the Worm level, grabbed the Crysknife, and unlocked the Super Meat Boy character. If you’ve played the game, you know how hard that is. My boy!
Every year, Apple’s keynotes hype the latest and greatest iOS software, receive unprecedented media coverage, and tout hundreds of new features on the Apple homepage. But then, like an evil Santa Claus, Apple asks their most passionate fans to wait months to play with the new toys. This year, like the year before, they didn’t announce a release date, promising only sometime “this fall.”
If you’re a diehard Apple fan that desperately wants to run a buggy beta version of iOS 6 right now, your only legal option is to shell out the $99 to join the iOS Developer Program. Affordable for a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough to keep out casual fans from accidentally bricking their phones and cluttering up the Genius Bar.
But over the last couple years, a cottage industry’s popped up around illicit UDID activations — startups exploiting Apple’s Developer Program to sell access to prerelease iOS software, usually for less than $10 per device. The craziest thing? Apple doesn’t seem to care.
Do a search for “UDID Activation” and you’ll find a dozen web sites, including some advertising on Google, with SEO-friendly names like ActivateMyiOS, Activate My UDID, UDID Registration, and Instant UDID Activation. Unlike casual registration trading of the past, these new startups offer secure payment options, solid customer support, Twitter and live chat, and quick turnarounds. One service even offers an AppleCare-like guarantee called “SafetyNet” that protects you if you lose your device or buy a new one.
Behind the scenes, each service uses the same simple backdoor: Registered iOS developers can activate up to 100 unique device IDs (or UDIDs) for their account, an essential tool for testing apps on multiple devices. Once registered with Apple, the activated device is also able to run prerelease versions of iOS, though developers are forbidden from sharing prerelease software outside their own team.
Ignoring these warnings, activation services charge a small fee to add a customer’s device to their developer accounts. When they hit the 100-device limit, they just register a new account with Apple.
I spoke to the founder of UDID Activation, an activation service based in Galesburg, Illinois, who asked not to be named. “I set up a new Apple developer account every time I need another list,” he said. “I have 30 developer accounts, all with the same name and address, and Apple’s never said anything.”
There have been isolated reports of Apple disabling developer accounts, but some of these services have been running uninterrupted for years without any apparent consequences.
“It’s obvious it’s there, and there are tons of people doing it,” said UDID Activation’s founder. “If they wanted to look into it, it wouldn’t be very hard for them to find out what was going on. I’ve been doing this for about three years and I’ve never been contacted by Apple, and they’ve never shut down my accounts or anything. It really does seem like they don’t care that much.”
I chatted over instant message with a support representative from a competing service that claimed to have ten iOS developer accounts and a bot to reactivate expired UDIDs. I asked how often Apple kills their accounts. “Never in five years,” he said.
Apple clearly states in its Developer Program License Agreement, and on its Developer Portal, that membership can be terminated if a developer provides pre-release Apple Software to anyone other than registered employees, contractors, or others with a demonstrable need to know or use the software to build and test applications. Apple adds that unauthorized distribution is prohibited, and may be subject to both civil and criminal liability.
Despite Apple’s threat of “civil and criminal liability,” the service operators I spoke to didn’t seem concerned. “In the developer section, there’s a notification that says selling spots to your developer account can get it shut down,” said UDID Activation’s founder. “But I’ve never heard of anyone getting their account shut down for selling spots.”
It might not be that simple. Detecting fraudulent activity isn’t as straightforward as it seems, unless Apple actually purchased activations from each service to identity the account holder. Purchased accounts don’t look any different than normal beta testers, though the rate of registrations could be an indication of service violations.
For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that’s likely worth the risks. UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows over 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone. At $8.99 for each activation, that’s over $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts. Their homepage claims that over 19,000 devices were activated so far, and that’s only one of several services.
Outside of commercial services, some fans are forgoing commercial services and self-organizing, using discussion forums to crowdfund shared developer accounts, as these Reddit members did last year. On Twitter, authorized developers trade UDID activations for followers and retweets, or just offer them for fun.
Apple may not like it, but all of these back-alley transactions are clearly meeting a market demand. The software may be buggy, incomplete, and not ready for mainstream consumption, but a sizable class of power users doesn’t care and is willing to pay to use it.
For these cheap and impatient users, activation services offer an easy, affordable, and low-risk way to experiment with the cutting edge before the rest of the world. And until Apple starts cracking down, there’s little reason not to use them.
