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went for a walk in a bad mood thinking about how much we've ceded to ads. how much is destroyed either because it was less valuable than ads or because its value cratered as it became increasingly inundated with ads. How much time and money itself is wasted on ads. How fundamentally disconnected advertising is from letting people know whether they would like a product or service or how that product or service compares to others.

Then I got to thinking about the absurd amounts of processing power my phone has and about how, outside of faster network speed, it feels like there's nothing that makes it particularly nicer than the phone I had 5 or 10 years ago (which had a headphone jack, btw)—I'm still just text/voice chatting with friends and I'm still not particularly interested in watching video or playing games on it¹. Then I walked by a kid talking on his watch like he's Dick Tracy² and what are we even doing here? I do not doubt there are some nice things about smart watches but the ergonomics of talking on it seem worse (and the sound quality on both ends) and to say that is handsfree is the hollowest win imaginable.

And the thing about so much vaunted real or fake future tech (smart appliances, AR, touchscreen everything, flying cars, jet packs) is that it's either obviously shit outside the realm of a book or movie, or it's only useful in incredibly limited situations, or if you put an amount of money and energy into perfecting and supporting it that companies can't or won't spend. And yet, so much of our society requires this idea of progress completely separated from any idea of improvement so what can we do but have the courage to redesign everything every year?

Anyway, those are some thoughts that are arguably related

1. Hell, as impressive as the apple's arm computers are, it's not like most of the improvements have meant much for what I do day-to-day. I do way more voice calls and some more screen-sharing than I used to but also I do most of that on my PC I built like 7 years ago.

2. Like he's old enough to even understand what that means... Like I'm even old enough to understand what that means—the movie was already an anachronism and I was 2 when it came out.

• a lot of capitalism-likers¹ like pointing at arguments that a market economy can be mathematically proven to create the most value for people, which I have to admit that I've read a microeconomics textbook and the math even adds up at a glance. but the thing they avoid mentioning about it is that at least in the simplest formulation, these proofs only hold in an environment of what economists call perfect competition, a set of assumptions which can basically be expressed as "every product in a category is interchangeable, starting a business and going out of business are both free, perfect information is universally available, and all buyers are rational." this set of assumptions carries with it two really funny corollaries that obviously don't describe the real world and which I will always remember: nobody makes a profit in the long term² and advertising does not exist³.
• I have a dim view of behavioral economics but I think a lot about the experiment from the chapter "the cost of free" in dan ariely's "predictably irrational":

IN ONE EXPERIMENT, Kristina Shampanier (a PhD student at MIT), Nina Mazar (a professor at the University of Toronto), and I went into the chocolate business. Well, sort of. We set up a table at a large public building and offered two kinds of chocolates—Lindt truffles and Hershey's Kisses. There was a large sign above our table that read, "One chocolate per customer." Once the potential customers stepped closer, they could see the two types of chocolate and their prices.

When we set the price of a Lindt truffle at 15 cents and a Kiss at one cent, we were not surprised to find that our customers acted with a good deal of rationality: they compared the price and quality of the Kiss with the price and quality of the truffle, and then made their choice. About 73 percent of them chose the truffle and 27 percent chose a Kiss.

Now we decided to see how FREE! might change the situation. So we offered the Lindt truffle for 14 cents and the Kisses free. Would there be a difference? Should there be? After all, we had merely lowered the price of both kinds of chocolate by one cent.

But what a difference FREE! made. The humble Hershey's Kiss became a big favorite. Some 69 percent of our customers (up from 27 percent before) chose the FREE! Kiss, giving up the opportunity to get the Lindt truffle for a very good price.

1. I'm saying this here instead of "capitalists" to clarify that it's about their opinion of a mode of production not their class role

2. since anyone can enter the market, cut $1 from the price of a widget, and sell them in preference to everyone else, ad infinitum, until everyone is selling as many widgets as is humanly possible for exactly the amount of money they cost to make

3. since the rational, perfectly-informed buyer is never going to spend more than they have to on a widget

Armored Core 6 has me thinking about what had me bounce off Horizon Zero Dawn so hard and I really hope I can articulate it without it sounding like 20 year old game design discourse.

Like the gameplay loop itself, what the player is actually doing, is so tight and interesting and provides routes for doing it in different ways that that takes up the brunt of my attention, and the story being minimal and cryptic and dry, requiring a lot of interpretation, suits it extremely well. While everything I saw about HZD suggested to me a work of media I'd really enjoy as an HBO miniseries or a comic, but seemed to mostly revolve around missions where you Sneak In Somewhere, shoot up a technopagan rave, and repeat.
Like the missions and scope was broad and expansive, but what you did in that space seemed a little bland, vs a more finite number of missions of limited scope that you can approach in a variety of different ways.
Like ultimately there's no point in comparing these two games beyond refining my thoughts about my own tastes, they have such entirely different creative goals that they may as well be from other planets, it's just fun to feel like I've got a closer read on which one's atmosphere I can breathe.

I feel like I've gotten to watch veteran ac players learn in real time how much hornier mech game fans have gotten since their day.
"You here for the bleak megacorporate warfare?"
"Instructions unclear, added foam injector to pile bunker."