Cubes and Lawyers don't mix.

So there have been a few odd developments in the legal side of cubing of late. The original legal history of the Rubik's cube was a bit mixed-up and checkered, but most of that was over by 1980.

Back in 2012, Rubik's tried to block DaYan (one of the first companies making improved 3x3x3 cubes) from exporting cubes and there were a few instances of cubes being destroyed at customs, and DaYan experimented with using an alternate color scheme or unassembled kits as workarounds, but for whatever reason this was short-lived and DaYan was back selling regular cubes by late 2013.

There was also some issues in the EU with Simba Toys of Germany, where Simba felt that the function of the puzzle should only be a patent and not a trademark, where Simba went through a 10-year legal battle with Seven Towns, the company in charge of administrating the Rubik's IP. I have seen differing accounts of the winner of the legal battle, but only because Rubik's likes to talk about the EUIPO  decision, (European Union Intellectual Property Office) and that was later overturned by the ECJ (European Court of Justice).

The two new problems are a little closer to home for Americans.

The first of two recent problems is that Rubik's brand is suing Duncan Toys and Toys 'R' Us. This is about trademark, and not the patent.

I had always assumed that the reason Target and Walmart never sold other brands of cubes is that they had a distribution deal with Hasbro and/or Seven Towns to sell real Rubik's cubes and didn't (and weren't going to) have a deal with the other manufacturers. In the last few years, the only other cube-like puzzles that I've seen in the big box stores have been the toys made by Meffert's, like the  Skewb Extreme, The Molecube, and the Gear Ball and Gear Cube puzzles.

However, I was not entirely surprised at Duncan's recent entrance into retail cubing. (You should know Duncan from their excellent Yo-Yo products.) The Quick Cube wasn't released until just a few years ago, and well after the expiration of Rubik's patent. (Applied for in 1975, granted in 1977, it should have expired in 2002.) Unlike DaYan or Simba Toys, Duncan already has a great grasp on the toy store market in the US.

I really like the Duncan Quick Cube, because at $5 it's an easily obtainable starter cube, and it's a much faster cube right out of the box than a Rubik's brand cube is. With a little bit of silicone lubricant, it's an even better cube, and I actually bought a handful of Duncan cubes for other people in an effort to start them off cubing with something decent. With a Rubik's brand cube, especially now with the tiled redesigned model out, it's not exactly a comfortable cube for beginners. More emphasis was placed on making a Rubik's brand cube not able to be tampered with or disassembled and a lot less emphasis was placed on smooth turning, so I couldn't recommend it. If you really want a Rubik's brand cube that works well, it takes months of breaking in for it to have a chance to be comfortable, and some of them get really loose and catchy by then. On the other hand, if you're the sort of person that thinks you're going to turn the cube so hard that it's going to pop apart and you feel compelled to eat one of the pieces but might accidentally choke on it, then by all means stick to the Rubik's brand cube.

The other lawsuit is that Rubik's brand is suing TheCubicle, an online speedcubing retailer. It's disappointing, while not entirely surprising. Since TheCubicle does some assembly and customization and is inside the borders of the US, it makes them appear to some as an infringing manufacturer and not just an import company.

I would have to imagine that nobody that buys from TheCubicle is trying to get a Rubik's brand cube, and anybody that even knows about TheCubicle is well aware of the difference between a Rubik's brand cube and other brands of cubes. Sadly, all suing TheCubicle seems to be doing is driving a wedge between speedcubing hobbyists and the Rubik's brand.  I find this rather sad because speedcubers are what have helped keep the Rubik's cube one of the most popular toys of all time for this long. We have long been emissaries for cubing, when all Rubik's has done in the same time period was make the same product with very little improvement and no effort to make a premium product for speedcubers. They're still using the same design for their 4x4x4 cubes that they were using in 1982 that still has the same design flaw it's always had while other companies have made vast improvements in the mechanism. Their current 2x2x2 is better than their 80's 2x2x2 only because that was such an exceedingly low bar to clear, and many could argue that the new 3x3x3 is actually worse for speedcubers as it allows no corner cutting whatsoever and is too variable in quality right out of the package.

I can understand Rubik's desire to protect their trademark, but as their patent has expired it should have been logical for them to expect to face some competition in the marketplace. While I don't know how much these lawsuits have cost them, I have to think that they could have fostered more good will and maintained more sales by designing better cubes - both for beginners and for the speedcubing crowd. It would have again given them some measure of patent protection, and cubers wouldn't be in the awkward position of not being able to recommend the product of the original designer.

Why Comic Books and Coffee Mugs Prove I Don't Understand Feminism or Marketing.

I want to be able to say that I'm not sexist. I'd like to think so. Every once in a while, something will set me off and I tailspin into some remarkable rabbit hole of self-loathing that makes me think that either I'm some sort of naive idiot or some evil monster.

This time it was a coffee cup.

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy a few weekends ago, and I really liked it. That's not really noteworthy, since it would seem that lots of people went out to see a movie that most people would have laughed at the premise of ten years ago. In fact, it's so many people that it's the number grossing summer film in the United States. In an effort to be additionally supportive, and to give me a frequent reminder of the film, I purchased a coffee mug that has four of the characters from the film on it.

So now I hear Peter Falk's voice in the back of my head going "Sorry to bother you, but there's one thing that I don't understand there. Aren't there five members of the team in Guardians of the Galaxy?" (For those of you too young to get the Columbo reference, just have a look on youtube.)

Who's on the coffee mug? Well, Star Lord has to be on the mug. It's practically his movie from start to finish. The bounty is on him, it's his spaceship, and it's his mixtape. Rocket and Groot are on the mug because they carry a lot of the jokes in the film. Drax is on the mug because he's awesome and nothing goes over his head. (Side note: Drax is so awesome that they also have a mug that's just him. I presume that the marketing department thinks that coffee drinkers identify with Drax.) I ask my wife while we're in the store - "Why isn't Gamora on the coffee mug?" - to which she wittily replies, "Gamora doesn't need coffee." She's not a fluff character in the film, by any means. She gets lots of screen time and several awesome action sequences.

So, then I start considering possibilities and the rabbit hole starts opening up on me. First, I think that they really did leave Gamora off of the mug because she's a girl, but then that would imply that the marketers think that comic books fans, especially ones that drink their own coffee but go the movies won't be accepting of her. Then I think - but I noticed that she was missing, and aren't I part of the intended demographic of both the movie and the coffee mug? So then that means I must feel guilty that a woman wasn't included, when women wouldn't actually want her to be on there to be objectified, so I'm bad for trying to introduce gender into a discussion that it shouldn't even have been in in the first place? It's not like the marketers can be wrong - after all, any time I don't get a commercial it's not because it's a bad commercial, it's because I'm not the intended demographic.

Don't comic books play into male adolescent fantasy a little too often for women to not be included, even if they're present for obstensibly the wrong purpose?

Then I think about it some more - Gamora is being played by the same actress that plays Lt. Uhura in the new Star Trek Films, and the lead Na'vi character Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar. Is there a coffee-drinking man or woman that watches science fiction films that would decline to buy a coffee mug if she was on it? I think not. At a certain point, I have to abandon trying second-guess a feminist viewpoint and go back to trying to see the fan viewpoint. They're a team, she's on it, she should be on the coffee mug.

There's contact information on the bottom of the mug for the company that made them. Since it's here in America, I guess I will try to talk to them.

Let's try this in the contact form and see what happens:

I recently picked up one of the Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy coffee mugs from my local Wal-Mart retailer and opted for the "Character" mug over the "Drax" mug just to have more of the characters but I was still a little disappointed that Gamora was not included. I have been often reminded that I don't really understand marketing.  In those cases where I don't understand the marketing it's often the case that I'm not the intended demographic anyway. I don't actually drink coffee, but I got it for my wife who does. We're both over 40 and have a couple of kids and we all enjoyed the movie.  So - is it because I'm not the standard demographic for this product, or is it because of some marketing reason that I'm unlikely to understand that Gamora's not on the "Character" mug? (Or is there some simple explanation that I've entirely overlooked?)

I'll follow up on this post when I get some sort of a response from the mug manufacturer.

The harsh reality of being old.

When you're really young, it's not that important to get it 100% right - just the idea that you're trying to do things and putting yourself out there is enough

When you're still young but not brand new, it's easy to be brash and outspoken, and perhaps people don't criticize what you do all the time because they can say, "Oh, they're still young. It's OK, they'll grow out of it." You can establish yourself as you develop your identity, and people will flock to you initially out of novelty, and then stay with you out of a sense of familiarity.

Everybody understands that things change, and perhaps the four year old and the ten year old look at the same things and have a completely different approach - to the point where the four year old couldn't even imagine what the choices of the ten year old would be, and the ten year old can't imagine the choices of the twenty-one year old. Once you've matured that much, perhaps the path forward becomes more intuitive, and sometimes when you can step back and look at all the changes, it's easier to see how you got from point A to point B. That doesn't stop the temptation of doing something brash just to get attention, or maybe just sticking by your guns and hoping that you find the right people to appreciate you.

Of course, I'm talking about Street Fighter. While it's Capcom's second biggest franchise (Resident Evil is their biggest) it's not experiencing the sort of mainstream popularity that it used to. While arcades were starting to dwindle at the end of the 80's, the strength of the Street Fighter II series games made arcades relevant again and paved the way for the character versus character fighting game to become the dominant paradigm of the arcade, instead of all of the shooting games that followed in the footsteps of Space Invaders and Defender.

In its middle age, the Street Fighter III series tried to abandon all of the old characters except Ryu and Ken, and had many problems retaining an audience due to its extreme difficulty and unfamiliarity. Later versions of the game brought back some favorite characters, but it was too late and still too difficult a game for mainstream audiences.

As a mature game, the Street Fighter IV series which is currently on its fourth home release over the course of  six years has tried to straddle the line between innovating and keeping the fan base satisfied. While it's selling more copies than it did during the Street Fighter III era, Street Fighter's overall cultural relevance has waned a little. More people are familiar with the cheesy "Street Fighter" movie with Raul Julia and Jean-Claude Van Damme than are familiar with the newer "Street Fighter:The Legend of Chun Li" starring Kristin Kreuk. It really hit home for me on Tuesday this week when I picked up my copy of Ultra Street Fighter IV. I had been to Target at lunch earlier in the day and had walked through the game section. If they had the new game, I didn't notice. Even when I got to my local Gamestop after work to pick my copy up one the way home, it's not like they had a big cardboard standup in the store or a bunch of copies on the shelf. I handed them my preorder receipt, and they had to look for it. It took them just long enough to find it that I had a moment where I started to worry that CAPCOM had delayed the release date and didn't tell anyone. Maybe now that the game is this old, they don't worry about the marketing so much because they figure they're not going to get any better audience that what they already have?

I like the new characters, although they're not entirely new. Hugo, Elena, Rolento, and Poison were all available characters in other games, and Decapre is visually similar to Cammy. Despite my concerns, Decapre plays like a completely new character. For that matter, the other four new characters have all had some adjustments to them that make them play a little differently than their previous incarnations.

The challenge mode in the game that gives you a set of specific objectives for each character in an attempt to teach you the moveset of each character had gone unfinished in the previous edition of the game, and at the moment is still unfinished. A future patch has been promised, and I will be looking forward to it. I found that I had never really learned Yun and Yang properly from the previous version without the challenge mode. Sure, you can go in training and mess around, and it's not like you can't look up the moves. but I found the challenges a good foundation for learning the other characters. Another feature of the game that I hadn't quite expected is that it pulls in your data from other games, so it knows that I played SFxTekken, and it knows what my scores and character usage from Street Fighter IV:Arcade Edition are.

I'm pretty happy with the game, even if I'm not the most awesome player of Fei Long or Vega or Dan on the internet. I'm looking forward to a lot of games against my older son and my friends. (My older son plays as T. Hawk, and I heard that they made some improvements to his moves. I guess I better watch out.)

The only thing that seems to bug me about the game is one of the the reasons that I waited to get the full retail version of the game on disk was so I could have all the costumes in one shot and get that over and done with. As soon as the game came out a new set of costumes was announced. I know, it's the new thing to monetize add-on content to every game, and it just doesn't sit well with me.

Maybe it's because I'm old.

...so maybe LEGO is like the Weak Nuclear Force?

I had planned for yesterday to go to a LEGO event with my kids. I wasn't exactly sure how it was going to go, since it wasn't (for us) a usual LEGO event. I presumed that the local movie theater/outdoor mall wanted to capitalize on LEGO fans being there the weekend that The LEGO Movie opened, so the timing was not unusual. We don't have a LEGO store here (the nearest one is at least an hour south of us) so it was run by a third party company that does really expensive half-day summer camps using LEGO and claiming to work on kids' STEM skills. There were two parts to the event, bringing your own creations for judging, and a speed-building competition. The flyer that we saw told us that the event started at 10:30, but not really any specifics about how the rest of it was supposed to go. The theme for the build was supposed to be the Sochi Olympics. Both kids built small structures - my older one built a snowball fight amongst athletes, and my younger child had Arctic Batman on a bobsled. Thinking that it wouldn't pay to show up too early, we opted to get there around 11:30.  We drove around the shopping center, found a central place to park, and then figured out where the event was but left the builds in the car. We found the event set up on  tables outside, right near the place where the bands play there in the evenings. It was a little warmer than usual, and scattered clouds and fairly high humidity made us wonder about the viability of an outdoor event. Then, we found the schedule. Submissions went well past 12:00, and the judging was 1-3. The speed build events were broken up into age groups, but the middle school group that my older son would have competed in wouldn't have started until 2:45 according to their schedule. Nobody was enthused about the idea of leaving their builds there alone (sure, there were event people there, but they can't watch everything), and nobody would have been comfortable standing around with their builds for 3-4 hours outside until the judging finished. Plus, there was the matter of lunch, so we'd have to either separate or leave the builds behind.

So, my older son and I seemed too uncomfortable with the whole situation to even bother. We saw an interesting ski jump that someone had made before we left, but it didn't seem compelling for us to stay. On a hunch, we drove to the nearby Toys R Us. As we drove over to Toys R Us my younger one was pretty adamant that he wanted to go home after that, so I didn't bring up the idea of going to the LEGO movie since he didn't seem like he was going to have sufficient attention span to hang out in the theater.

As an intermission to the whole escapade, I was crossing the major thoroughfare that separated the mall from Toys R Us only to have someone creep past the white line by at least a car length. I honked at them, so they would stop and I could finish crossing without incident. As it turned out, they turned into the Toys R Us anyway but I found that odd since they would have had plenty of time to do it way before I was anywhere near them. As I passed by the car, I could it was a rather old woman driving alone. I didn't know what to make of it at all. I parked on the far side of the parking lot and tried to keep a low profile. She snaked through the parking lot and eventually honked at us as we were walking towards the store. I told the kids to stay back at the curb and went over to talk to her.

The second she rolled down her window I immediately apologized. I tried to explain that I had only honked because I thought her intent was to try to jump out in front of the rest of the traffic before the light turned green in her direction, and I wouldn't have honked if I had been able to tell if she was turning right. (No, I didn't see a turn signal. It's Florida, it's rather commonplace.)

She looked at me with a rather dazed expression, and merely said. "Oh."

Then she told me that she only had a question and wanted to know if there was someplace she could buy some printer ink like Best Buy or something. I told her that she had missed the turn for Best Buy and that she was better off going to the Office Depot just east of there so she didn't have to make multiple left turns in a row.

I shrugged off my uncomfortableness and headed into the store with the kids. As it turned out, our hunch was correct! Toys R Us was also doing a LEGO event tied into the release of the movie! So, my kids walked around the store for a few minutes, the event started at 12:00, each of my kids picked up a free minikit that has two different forms, and we got a coupon that entitled us to a $15 gift card if we bought "The LEGO Movie:The Game" for 2DS/3DS that day. We passed on that particular deal since we felt a little too pressured to pick up a game we didn't know anything about, but there were a lot of good 3DS games that were buy one, get one 40% off.

Unlike previous build events, this one was done assembly-line style. Each kid in line was given a plastic bag and two instruction sheets. Each yellow cardboard bin of parts had a number on the front, and you grabbed that many parts from the bin. For example, since we were building a car, the number on the front of the tire bin and the hub bin were "4", and the number on the steering wheel bin was "1". Unfortunately, that meant that the kids didn't get to stand at the tables and build, since there was barely enough room for all the bins. We got our free parts, looked at some tablets in the "R" Zone, and picked up a couple of DS games.

Since we didn't opt to build in the store, it took my older son a few minutes after we got home to realize that the sets were missing a black 1x4 piece. Not really a problem for us, so he added one to both sets and built them pretty quickly.

So, here's the minikit in both forms, flying car and regular car.

It seemed like the shopping center event could have been fun if there was something else for the kids to do - like if they had had a table where kids could freebuild, but I could also see where having a freebuild space could make it complicated for people showing up with their own stuff. If it had been a regular store with its own restrooms and air conditioned space it might have made up for the length of time also, but then you don't have people wandering around the shopping center like the shopping center would want. The LEGO event at Toys R US had a free raffle in an attempt to get people to hang out until 2:00, but that didn't seem like a good idea for us either.

If the event is compelling, then I think it's easy to get people to stay, but the minute it feels like a 'gotcha', there are some of us that are just going to run away as soon as they smell any funny business. On the other hand, maybe there are just people that drive around looking for whatever they can find, compelling or not. Although if that's the case, just remember that they don't usually have printer ink at Toys R Us.

Who are these people who need kiosks?

Coming out of a Saturday shift a little earlier than I expected to, I popped into a couple of stores on the way home. One of them was a music store, the other a big box electronics retailer. I didn't buy anything at either place - my intention in both cases was to merely get some eyeballs on what they had available at each store.

At the guitar store, I was greeted when I walked in and they asked about why I was there. I also saw that they had a fair number of people in the store in various locations, so if I had any subsequent questions I could ask them. They had a lot of new things in stock, everything was well-marked with prices and model numbers so it was very easy for me to see what was new from the last time that I was there. They've done a great job to make the store easy to navigate so people can find what they want.

There certainly are a lot of musical instrument retailers online, and there are lots of products that they sell that nobody would have any problems purchasing mail order. Effects units, cables, some keyboards, stands, and maybe the occasional microphone are probably bought online every day without issue. When it comes to guitars, basses, and drums, a lot of the time people want to try them out in person before they buy them, so music stores are still doing OK having physical stores although most of them are using a hybrid business model where they have a strong web presence in addition to the store.

At the big box electronics store, my intention was to put my eyeballs on Sony's new Playstation 4. They did have a PS4 kiosk set up. They also had a display next to it showing a constant stream of Sony commercials and promos. I had thought about actually touching the controller, but the only game that anybody was playing was a soccer game that I was unfamiliar with, so I didn't see the point of trying an unfamiliar controller in an unfamiliar context. Oddly, this was the only part of the store not swarming with salespeople. I had also noticed that they had changed the back middle section of the store where they sell computers to be more like an Apple store. White furniture, places to sit down and be interrogated by salespeople, and then a slew of terminals in the back that was sort of like a sales counter that caused me to walk around it instead of behind it even though it was the same width as the rest of the back aisle. As I was walking through the computer section I though I should see if they had a plain, simple, corded mouse. If they did, it was not apparent. I then started looking to see if they had any Wacom graphics tablet products only to realize that everything they're trying to sell is a touchscreen these days, so graphics tablets have turned into a super-niche product when they were just regular niche products before.

Looking around at the store layout, I now realize that they had converted more of their square footage to kiosks and help desks for their customers and had fewer shelves for actual products. As I walked out, there was an older man with a clipboard that asked me about my shopping experience. I presume that they didn't make him wear a store shirt in an attempt to get people to give truthful answers. At first, I said that it was OK, but that I didn't get anything. He told me that they also wanted to get impressions from people that were just browsing. So, I decided that I was going to have to tell him what I thought without editing, since I felt like I was asked a direct question. So then I said:

"Seriously? It looks like you guys have turned most of the square footage into kiosks. It's like walking around in a tank full of sharks."

I politely ran away at that point.

Driving home, I started to think about it. If electronics stores are losing market share to the internet, then the  people left getting phones and computers at brick-and-mortar stores are more likely to be people that are less tech-savvy and less likely to have already researched what they want. So, the people that don't buy anything should be complaining that they don't like the store because the store wasn't designed for them.
I used to like going to this electronics store 15 years ago, but that was when the only kiosk was a cell phone kiosk, and we had the good sense to walk around it.

Strangely, I talked to the same number of people in each case. One. In the guitar store, I was greeted right away, and walked the main path of the store with no subsequent distraction even though there were salespeople nearby at every turn. In the big box retailer, I only talked to the guy with the clipboard at the end and had to make a small effort to avoid the kiosks. Since the context of the two conversations were wildly different, it made a giant change in the shopping experience for me.

As shoppers, maybe we all need to ask ourselves what kind of shopping experience we expect from a real store that we don't get from buying online, and what retailers provide those other experiences? Conversely, as providers of goods and services, perhaps we can think about how we can provide the best experience for our customers. Maybe it's a pretty showroom, or maybe it's an efficient store layout.

Good luck getting any help at the kiosks on Black Friday. I'll be home having a turkey sandwich. 

With regard to the title, you'll have to pardon my poor Jerry Seinfeld impersonation. I'm starting to think that I'm really doing an impersonation of Gilbert Gottfried's impersonation of Seinfeld anyway.

The Unbearable Intrusiveness of Marketing (with apologies to Milan Kundera)

I finally managed to make my way to real hi-def TV the other day, after having my 16x9 480p tube TV conk out on me after several years. I found a TV in a brand that I was happy with that was the same size as the tube TV that I had before. I had convinced myself that I would be perfectly fine with a 720p60Hz television, only to find that the TV I was going to get was no longer available and I had to get the 1080p60Hz model that replaced it for $11 more. My previous attempts at figuring out if I could get a 1080p television had convinced me that the difference was going to be somewhere around $130, but I apparently lucked out.  I have not put the old TV out by the road yet as it had been raining a lot and I have not found a silver Sharpie or a good Spanish translation of the phrase "Damaged Power Supply".

I was glad to be able to separate my Wii from my PS3 again, so that they weren't both tying up the same screen. Once I had it hooked up, I was excited to see the PS3 reissue of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, and the Blu-Ray of Wreck-It Ralph. It was also nice that my younger son could go play Wii again if he didn't like what was on the PS3. With the TV conflict sorted out, gaming around the house mostly went back to normal and I would now be telling you about how much I liked ICO and Shadow of the Colossus and how much they mean to gaming and how I'm going to really enjoy playing them again and my older son will get to take a crack at ICO for the first time.

Except that I'm not. (At least not today.)

The thing that's really gnawing at my brain at the moment happened a night or two after the TV debacle got straightened out. We were trying to round up the SuperMonkeyChildren at bedtime when we got distracted by something. The Wii, which I was sure was off, was flashing its blue LEDs from the drive tray in all sorts of strange patterns in an attempt to get my attention. (Yay, it worked.) I checked to make sure that nobody had left a disk in the drive, and then I turned the TV it was attached to on to see what the heck was going on.
It wasn't already on, and I turned it on only to see that there was a message. I figured it was going to be a system message like "You played Super Smash Bros. for 1:27 and Sengoku Basara:Samurai Heroes for 4:15 - what happened to Wii Fit, you lazy slug" but it turned out to be a message from outside. Since it's nearly impossible for anyone to send a message like this on purpose thanks to Nintendo's overly protective online strategy for the Wii, I should have figured out even before I opened the message that it could only have come from Nintendo itself.

The message was Nintendo telling me that I should buy a Wii U since I already had a Wii and could use all my existing controllers on it already. My first offhand thought was sending a response that said "Well, if I hadn't just replaced my TV...", while SuperMonkeyWife just suggested I send a response along the lines of "Well, if you're buying...". What I realized was two things. One, this was the first time that I had been marketed to this way, and two, if Nintendo had been paying attention like the way it's able to pay attention now it would know that I have eventually bought almost*every console they've ever put out, just not always right away. The Wii is the first Nintendo console that had any substantial online capability, and so it's their first console that seems to be tracking aggregate gameplay data to find out what people are playing. I presume that Microsoft and Sony were already doing some amount of this for XBox users and PS2 users that played online in the previous generation - the GameCube didn't really do much in the way of online other than a handful of titles so I imagine there was hardly any reason to track usage stats.

I know that my PS3 figures out which titles to suggest to me based on what games I have save files for, so I guess it's not long before I see the same message from Sony about buying the new PS4 this holiday season. I don't think it's going to tell me that I can use my PS3 controllers, though. I'm in no rush to get a PS4 anyway. I could be a little more excited about the WiiU once Pikmin 3 is out, but ultimately if there are still games to play on the Wii and PS3 that still seems like a good thing. If I'm always looking for the next console instead of the most satisfying game, you end up with something like this:

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person." -Milan Kundera


*While I expect to eventually get a 3DS and a WiiU, there's little chance I'm going to go back and get a Virtual Boy.

The perils of innovation. In a can.

I was reading the other day about the forces that hinder companies from real innovation and I was a little bummed out by the idea that most companies have become so risk-averse that it creates very few actual improvements. It got me thinking - what would happen if Edison had worked in today's economy? How long would they let Edison tinker with finding a commercially viable solution for the light bulb before they fired him and defunded his project? Would we have looked at William E. Sawyer vs. Thomas Edison and seen the same things that we see with Apple and Samsung now fighting over the finer points of their respective technologies?

Now, I do see the point of incremental technological improvements. We are always improving our computing capability by making new processors that can do more with the same or less power. We work on improving the cost to manufacture solar cells, so that it can become a technology with wider adoption. Chemical improvements are being made with batteries to make them larger and more reliable. These things can go on as planned, and we eventually reap some small reward from it, but it would be nice to see some real innovation once in a while. It's also possible that real innovation is going on behind the scenes however slowly, but thanks to the protective nature of companies and new products we don't see it particularly often. They're scared to hint at anything that might turn out to be a failure. About the only time we see high-profile failures any more are movies, cars, and food - but these failures are more failures of fashion than function. You may not want to drive an Aztek, but the car failed in the marketplace because it was ugly, not because it had rampant mechanical problems. I was going to cite a movie example here but Ben Affleck has taken enough heat about it already so I don't want to pile on. (Correction: One of my editors said that with Ben's recent Academy award win for Argo, maybe I shouldn't make an obtuse reference to Gigli. After all, Ben didn't write or direct Gigli anyway. ) So, I'm going to skip straight to the beverage part.

In an attempt to try to get soda drinkers to resist the temptation of drinking coffee in the morning, Coke and Pepsi have tried to find ways to leverage their own brands. Coke's last attempt at this was in 2006, with Coca-Cola BlāK which was discontinued by 2008. Pepsi had taken a swing at this a couple of times with the regular flavored but more caffeinated Pepsi AM (1989) and the coffee-flavored Pepsi Kona (1995?). Both of Pepsi's attempts were just as short-lived as Blāk was. So by now, Coke and Pepsi may have realized that the real holdouts that don't drink coffee in the morning are people that drink energy drinks, people who drink juice in the morning, and people that drink Mountain Dew. Both companies make energy drinks now, and both companies have had major juice brands in their portfolios for a long time. But, Pepsi can't help but feel that they still have an untapped market, so their new innovation is Mountain Dew Kickstart.

There are two flavors, "Orange Citrus" and "Fruit Punch". I opted for the "Fruit Punch" only because I found that most of the Mountain Dew flavor variants that I have had over the past several years that said "citrus" on the label have been a little bit too tangy for my taste. (I liked LiveWire, and they discontinued it, so I figured that it wasn't going to go my way.) It did not really taste like what I expected, as what I had heard previously about this drink was that it was "Mountain Dew + Juice". While it is true that there is juice in it, there is much less sugar in it. The 16 oz. can is 80 calories, while 16 oz. of regular Mountain Dew or juice would be easily 220 calories. After a cursory check of the label, it would appear that the sweeteners include HFCS, white grape juice concentrate, acesulfame potassium, and sucralose. There are some B vitamins in it, as well as the obligatory inclusion of glycerol ester of wood rosin without which I presume it can't have a Mountain Dew label on it. It does not have the thick mouth feel that Mountain Dew usually does, it was like a low-calorie sports drink in that regard. It might be useful to note that my wife described the beverage on first taste as "Mountain Dew + Gatorade". Coca Cola's sports drink Powerade adds B vitamins, Gatorade does not. I'm not entirely sure how much the B vitamins or the potassium contribute to the taste. There is also 92 mg of caffeine, 20 more than you would get in 16 oz. of Mountain Dew. Would I drink it again? Probably not - and certainly not for breakfast. It's cheap caffeine, but I could easily get cheap caffeine that I actually wanted to drink in other ways, and at the correct dosage.

Disclosure - I typed this entire post under the influence of most of a can of Kickstart. I had to backspace a lot more than usual.

E aho la'ula!

Wider is better?  Well that's what that old Pontiac commercial wanted us to think, anyway.

Vizio now has available a 21x9 format television, in an attempt to catch up to the ever-widening format of the movie theater (which ironically keeps widening in an attempt to differentiate itself from television).

TV started out roughly the same aspect ratio as the movies at the beginning. TV was roughly 4x3 (a ratio of 1.33) and the movies were 1.37, just a touch wider. Most television shows from the beginning of black and white until sometime during the 5^th season of the X-Files are all the 1.33 ratio. Some TV shows in the last 10 years or so are in a 16x9 format (a ratio of approximately 1.78 ). Movies over the years have utilized quite a number of different aspect ratios, as different film companies and equipment manufacturers sought to differentiate themselves. The ones most commonly encountered at the movies would be 1.85, 2.35, and 2.39. (If you don't watch any movies before 1970 you can skip 2.35.) As far as your DVDs and Blu-Ray discs go, just check the back cover where it has the info about the languages and the rating and the surround sound and you'll usually find the ratio listed.

So, let's perform some basic calculations to quantify exactly how crazy it is to watch video of various formats on various screens. Let's start with an old-fashioned 4x3 TV program on a 21x9 screen. This one's pretty easy - a 4x3 ratio is the same as 12x9, so the 4x3 program would cover 12/21 of the screen - about 57%. Next a 16x9 picture on a 21x9 screen - again, pretty easy - it's 16/21 or 76% of the screen area. Cinemascope (the current after 1970 variety), with a ratio of 2.39 is a touch too wide for 21x9, so with only a tiny bit of letterboxing , it fills almost 98% of the screen. If we do the same sorts of calculations for a 4x3 TV, we get 100% (of course) for 4x3 programming, 75% for 16x9, and around 56% for Cinemascope, somewhat the opposite of the 21x9 scenario. Running the numbers a third time for a regular 16x9 widescreen TV, you get 75% screen coverage with 4x3 footage, 100% (another of course) for 16x9 programming, and 74% screen coverage for Cinemascope.

It would seem that if you watch a variety of formats, that a 16x9 TV is the sweet spot where you can still get a lot of screen coverage, and that a 21x9 TV would only be advantageous if superwide movies were all you had. I'm sure the hardcore cinephiles that really want this 21x9 screen don't have to worry about watching too many standard old-school format TV shows, but I think the rest of us are not much worse off sticking with regular 4x3 TV's if they still have them (except in one area, which I'll have to save for next time). When it's time to get a new TV, I hope that a 16x9 is still the sweet spot and we haven't all been coerced into heading into ultrawidescreen land.

HD Radio's last stand

HD Radio - which is neither High Definition nor Hybrid Digital, but instead just a brand name intended to make us think they meant one of those two things - was really trying to get people interested this holiday season. I really have to hand it to the consortium behind HD Radio. They're trying awfully hard to make their system viable for consumers. It's inexpensive, there's no subscription fees, it gives people more choices over things to listen to, and there are even hand held ones about to be available, but I suspect that they may have missed the proverbial boat.

Sadly, like over-the-air digital TV, there are a large number of people that could take advantage of it, but most of those people are paying a monthly subscription for a slightly better service, even despite the current economic climate. Some are just choosing to do without entirely. ( I think I am in the second category because I can't be bothered to change the stereo out in my car.)

I guess in the case of HD radio, the impediment for me is that between my CD player and analog FM, there's usually enough for me to listen to most of the time that I don't feel like I need to upgrade. Sure the sound is better, but that strategy stopped working a while ago. I cite as evidence the low adoption rates of SuperAudioCD, HDCD, and DVD-Audio and instead a move to lower fidelity mp3 players.

What's even more amazing about the current batch of HD radio ads that I hear on the radio is a lack of a specific product. At least when you watch a Pixar movie on DVD, they're hyping how awesome Blu-Ray is, and telling you what Disney and Pixar movies you can get on Blu-Ray. With the HD radio ads, it's more like:

"HD radio is awesome. Just ask us and we'll tell you. Go buy one anywhere!"

I used to hear Circuit City branded ads for HD radio, and I've been hearing a few for Radio Shack, but in addition to those, I've also hear a lot of generic unbranded HD radio ads (presumably bought by the consortium to increase their reach). I guess that this holiday season is some sort of all-out-last-ditch effort to get people on HD radio.

I suppose it couldn't be worse than the sky-is-falling approach they took on TV's "Switch to Digital!" But my real question, now that some of the holiday tinsel has cleared - did anybody actually get HD radio as a present? Do you even know anyone who has it?

You're a nerd, go to Gamestop.

I was going to dish out a giant rant about Batman: Arkham Asylum and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 each having their own Gamestop preorder exclusives and how I thought it was a horrible trend of having exclusives tied to stores, yadda, yadda.

I'm not going to bother, though for several reasons - for one, both games are quite good on their own, and the exclusives aren't going to make them or break them. The second reason, glaringly obvious, it that it's way too late to complain about this sort of marketing. If Namco didn't get a beatdown from fans two years ago for selling people game levels that may have been already on the retail disk of Beatiful Katamari but not unlockable until paid for, then I can hardly see how complaining would do any good in this case - and the Gamestop exclusive idea isn't nearly as evil as my example. I guess the third reason is that there are a lot of Gamestops out there. Gamestop does bill themselves as "the world's largest video game and entertainment software retailer" so I presume most people that can read this on the internet can either find a Gamestop at their local mall or preorder games from their website. Gamestop is certainly more nerd-friendly in general than my local Walmart. I had it in my mind that Walmart actually sold more video games than Gamestop does, but it hardly matters to Walmart if a game company tries to drag a few people across town to Gamestop, since a lot of those people are still going to Walmart for sundries and food anyway.

From a marketing standpoint, I would assume that game companies would rather have a Gamestop exclusive than a Walmart exclusive for action titles, since the perception is that Gamestop is closer to the true "hardcore gamer" demographic. What's Walmart ever had as a game exclusive? Chibi-Robo Park Patrol for Nintendo DS? (What's that about?)