The place I worked in, seems to have a rule of thumb of picking titles. When faced with limited purchase slot, prefer long running title than short titles, even if the short titles is better. There are technical reasons, such as the difficulty of arranging new rights, and availability of products to work on. But there’s non-technical aspect too, namely, with so many products, when a title ended, it’ll most likely be forgotten by most (move on, nothing to see here). Long products will stay longer, and there’s a sticking aspect of the cash cows buying after they had invested in it (“too late to stop” thing).

Microsoft in the other hand… seems to prefer selling big titles (something like our novel publishing sister-company). Keep things in development, and release when it’s ready. Well, at least from a casual enthusiast’s point of view.

Personally… I think… I’d prefer them to do things in reverse. Thought of it while being tortured with standing, back-ache, steamed and light oxygen deprivation during the commuting trip home.

The logic in it? Well, books, I pay for those. Naturally, I want titles I’m really interested in. But I also prefer shorter stories, because I had to pay for each releases and I prefer to finish paying the investment sooner and go to the next.
Software in the other hand, at least web services, are mostly free-as-beer, so does beta software. And like beer, let it come in free flow, every drops of it in bite-sized releases. Besides, every time something new came out, we’ll come to check it right? At least out of curiosity, then talk again about it rather than always talk about the competition.

Other thing. I’ve seen a lot of case, about political issue, where peoples are quoting “experts”, as in journalists or the geeks (in social-politics). The population can’t find the right words for their emotions, so when someone coined a great arguments for their side, they take it as their own idea (and the person as sort of prophet). I think, it’s not that bad to give “geek credits” even if it’s not so much for practical use other than being “in the cutting edge”; after all, the authoritative voices are influential, and they had short patience(?). Do it for good image.

There’s not much online store in Indonesia, especially for computer. The popular stores must be, Bhinneka (known for being more expensive than most Mangga Dua standard) and Rakitan/Quantum (more or less the same as other stores around).

Why? Maybe, just maybe…

• Taking care of online shop is troublesome and costly.
• Lack of interest in online shopping. Even if they’re interested, they would shop from personal importers in online forums with cheaper price.
• They know, their site will just become reference price list and the customer will still go to another stores and haggle the price down.

Culture… *knocks head*

Besides, unlike online shops in US, they don’t offer crazy bargain price or discount or rebates. Even if there’s discount, it’ll still be higher than the average price. Again, this might had to do with the culture.

The distributors play the game with lots of smaller partners (something in level of mom-pop shop). Because many end customer bought their retail from there, the distributor might not want to disappoint them by giving big players price advantage. While the shops… they had almost fixed price among one and another, like a cartel.

Disclaimer: done without formal research or observation and had to be taken as assumption.

And any other countries in the matter of fact.

Is it weird for adults there if they can’t drive? Regardless of if they could afford a car or not.

Maybe because of the corrupt system of getting driving license here, I sometime feel I’m getting weird look when saying I can’t drive and prefer taking public transport, or if I say one of my main requirement if looking for my own home would be how long it would take to reach bus stop by foot.

Second part of the rant.

There’s an egoistical cell-phone users behaviour around me that I saw a lot. Usually it’s not from tech or modern social butterflies that uses communications for their activities daily. In my case, it’s circle of housewives and age group that are used to old communication (landline) or using mobile phone only to manage their business. This egoistical attitude is “want to call but don’t want to be called”. They had phone, but only to call others such as sending command to their shop staffs for example or asking why the other friends are so late.

Calling back is another thing though. They could keep their phone in silent in bag and don’t pay attention at all. This means, don’t expect the call will be answered, they don’t know and don’t care.

In my opinion, it’s a totally egoistical attitude. Why have a phone at all?

When much of the population is of old age and no more as productive as they used to be, the powers being doesn’t simply give new children as the next generation. Instead, they torn away the elderly, pulling out every usable guts inside and stuck it in the newborn.

Why, you might ask. Well, isn’t it obvious? So they don’t have to deal with the cost of getting those new gutters when they can use something that’s already there.

Now sorry about the personification way of speech, but isn’t that how IT procurement works without deal contract with manufacturer?

Cell phone plans, basically there are two types. Pre-paid and post-paid. Post paid users are the loyal users, even if they had less features.

Not exactly loyalty. We don’t have number portability here, so all those social connection would become obsolete if we switched. Telling each and everyone is a tiresome job, not to mention costly if you choose using SMS to inform… dozens to hundreds of them ? Keeping the current number has it’s convenience, that is everyone I know already knew I’m here.

Not exactly the same problem… but I could feel the same for Facebook or Twitter. I would use it because peoples I know is already there. I don’t have to play an MLM agent promoting everyone to go there, but the mass and momentum is strong enough to pull peoples I know and don’t know into the place. The position then become so dominating, looking for alternative would be difficult. Personally, I hate posting the same thing everywhere, that’s annoying especially in the age of social web aggregator like nowadays. Second… well, not all resource I like in Twitter is available in the alternatives.

That’s old, here’s new thought of something old. Back then, the social networking which at least I know is… maybe Spartan in today’s view. The online profile we know in social networks are personal website with articles and later blogs. The networking is formed in chat, instant messenger, e-mail, forum or mailing lists, any way possible. Of course, real life if possible. Tracking the connection using link list, web ring, those days :P

Distributed network, independent. Probably nice if there could be such thing again plus new technology isn’t it. A distributed system, something like FOAF file as XML based database secured with… OpenID authentication. But because many peoples just use free hosting like Wordpress or Blogger, every host should support it. Not only because installing is a hassle for most; most doesn’t even allow saving file into the directory (e.g. saving file to add this Live Space to use Bing’s webmaster tool).

I heard that teen had weird sleeping pattern. They stay awake until late at night, and sleep until much later.

My sleep pattern is… like comfortable seasons of the year.

• January (0-1): sleep
• February (2-3): sleep
• March (4-5): awaking, still rather sleepy
• April (6-7): a bit sleepy
• May (8-9): normal
• June (10-11): getting sleepy
• July (12-13): afternoon hibernation
• August (14-15): getting better
• September (16-17): concentrate
• October (18-19): somehow, enjoy
• November (20-21): late, but enjoy
• December (22-23): where the fun starts, although it ends quickly

Of course, not the yearly pattern of tropical zone where half year of rain is concentrated in 2-3 months. For those who actually experienced what it means of taking the best and worst of four seasons, forgive my stereotype-based interpretation (^-^;)

Sometime, it’s hard to talk about something. One factor is disparity of information, where someone had information, and part other got no single idea what that other party is talking about. Felt it sometimes when I raised a topic or news and the others had not yet get information of it.
The case usually go around the more obscure facts, or the news hasn’t reach the usual popular English language news channels. Well, vice versa when they start talking about figures and merchandises.

Other time, they just think it’s too bothersome to talk about. Like when someone pushed an information to the discussion forum, then everyone just… too bothersome to discuss, lets just goes on fapping.
This means, lets post scan, or figure, or any collectibles, then doing fanboy cheers. Frankly, listening it is mentally taxing.

Doing news post hit-and-run in the forum is annoying enough, but changing a topic that can be used for sharing information into place to just repost pictures from various image gallery site is just so… can’t find the word to say it, maybe “regrettable” would do.

Completely into noise chamber.

Of course, there is the… saturated factor. After being too long in the community, feeling that you’ve done those and is getting too old to be all jumpy, too old to play with the echoes; not to mention someone else has already mentioned your point in better words that if you speak, it feels like beating the dead horse.

Today, I checked my Hatena Antenna page for updates. There’s a shocking update on one site, an adult game site I often visit (don’t play, too expensive and not enough time). As far as I know, this studio is quite clean. Although incorporating sexual relationship in the game, the plot itself (as far as I know) are romance, drama and miraculous. But then…

This website cannot be browsed excluding Japan.
Some foreigners seem to be having an antipathy against EROGE.
Therefore, We prohibited the access from foreign countries, to defend our culture.
Sorry for you of the fan that lives in a foreign country.
minori Inc.

For those wanting to read it on-site: http://www.minori.ph/

What they call eroge, or erotic game, is an industry. Maybe not as huge in sales as the major studios like Square, Capcom, Konami, etc, but there’s dozens of studios big and small working on these visual novel games. The genre of course, range from romance with minimum sex events (some can even cleanly excluded), to those catered for “special interest groups” (think, fetish porn). Well, in Japan, they flourished, some live and die, some thrives, just like any other businesses.

So… some time ago, there is a case, around the end of May. Equality Now, a women’s right organization, campaigned in protest of a game that featured rape theme as… well, as women’s right group, I think it’s save to assume it as “degrading of women” ? The outrage seems to successfully gained support to put pressure on governments, who want to ban such games.

Let aside the fact about rape and underage first… think of it with neutrality. This is, a game. And unlike porn, it doesn’t even need real life actors other than for the voice acting.

In media, two of the most sensitive matters in general are sex and violence, that’s ought to irk peoples, followed by racism. Being in media, and in a uptight country (for general public, hypocrites country), that two issues are also shunned. Sex in particular, is more sensitive thus censorship is tighter for picture of naked women than someone getting their head decapitated brutally in psycho killer “art”.

But come on… if we can accept seeing peoples getting shot dead in game… that’s violence.

So… there goes. Westerner, you who can’t understand, please stay out, nobody’s forcing you to come in. Hope this is the last one to take such moves. Kind of reminds me to Windows E.

In Telegraph.co.uk, there’s an article that reminds me of the story in a comic I worked on, Is Farming the Root of All Evil ?

But there’s a quote that really took my interest. It quite summarize the idea I want to convey to friend during idle talk in my campus years about why the greatest invention of human being is language, and why theoretical educations are also important instead of just being “street savvy”.

"Without the surplus of food you get through farming, we couldn't have the runaway technological innovation we see today. For instance, I can spend a lifetime in school, years doing a PhD, and then teach my students everything I know in a few months. They can then go on to become more expert than I am, pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Without agriculture, we wouldn't be able to stack innovation upon innovation."

In short, inheriting knowledge and building it on the peoples who had opened the path before us.

Came from a chat I’m having… right now.

The golden rule that I mean is of course: do unto other what you wished to be done unto yourself.

It’s a great idea, although I still doesn’t like the wording that made it sounds so realistic, people do something in expectation of reciprocated action from others.

The original statement is active in nature. Do good to others. Other way of seeing it in passive meaning, don’t hurt others unless you’re a masochist.

It’s about karma, what you do will return to you eventually.

But in recent time, does the rule still works the same ? Although unspoken, I think it has shifted to another type of passive command based not on natural karma, but vengeance. If you don’t want to be disturbed, don’t get involved and shut up.

Consumer’s attention span seems to get shorter don’t they? Well, these days, competition are high so peoples prefer to have their life practical because work and competition is hectic enough for one lifetime to bother. Life is in the fast lane, so is the rhythm of life, so everything has to come fast so it can be consumed in the short time available before continue to compete against others. The faster rhythm then means that we want something fast, that includes time between rumour and product.

Anyway, actually I’m thinking of animation and comic. When I first entered the hobby at late 90s, internet is still not so widespread. That time, communities are close and like an exclusive gathering. During those time, there are many classic titles that carve their mark in memories. Even if those titles no longer become favourite, they have their followers and remembered as part of history.

Then, these days, high speed internet are more common and become communication as well as (illegal) distribution channel. There are dozens of products appearing each seasons; that’s not including from the many publications. With so much products, attention span shortens a lot to what’s now. The fans are also split among products, leaving less momentum to each than in the past.

Rather than the offset created by the creation of larger fan base as well as easier access to illegally-free material, actually the mindset is carved. There seems to be higher percentage of fad fans than loyalist fans. Other thing is the greater number of products, that in the relatively same (actually lowering) buying capacity of consumers, getting more difficult to sell. Come on, how do you expect to sell twice as much products with price already rising quadruple of what it was to peoples whose ability to buy is lowered by the rising price. If the consumer get more selective in buying, then there ought to be products that doesn’t sell as expected right ? Logically speaking.

I might slack off most of the time and missed the bigger view, but the formula is not good in my opinion.

The weather is hot, and I’m not the person who do well in handling that. Most of the day, I spent the day indoor (in office) with air conditioning. When I did walked out to look for lunch or to go to the other building… the weather is hot, sometime humid hot.

Living in such weather made me wonder about many environment friendly architectural design for tropical area. Isolating heat is easier to imagine, but keeping inside cool ? Using natural cooling ? Not so easy to imagine.

How would building cooling work if the ambient temperature itself is already hot ? Most that I saw used wind to take away heat, but if the wind itself felt like it’s 30–32℃, how much cooling will the building’s indoor get ?

By the way, the wind also has lots of dust from air pollution from the street. Experience about being to the window of apartment building or roof top resulted in: hot dusty (and oily) air.

Well, never read about technical articles to know exactly. But the law that “the grass is greener in the neighbour’s lawn” is true. While seems to be that peoples from colder region think the weather is nice in the tropics, I think I’ll be glad for a colder temperature naturally.

So, why suddenly this topic ? The aircon in my room is gone for service. It always work hard to keep the comfortable temperature indoor against the… well, uncomfortable temperature outdoor.

Bad topic for earth day isn’t it.

Just because I got related story from my mother this morning about her acquaintance's daughter.

The person in topic here, had personal rule to marry only person of the same belief, which seems to be taking the absolute priority above all (as in most case).

There are story I heard from history class during late elementary school about the time peoples from other country came bringing their religion. Marriage become a tool for spreading religious believes to the “market”. Well, the lesson for elementary school student doesn’t elaborate more about how it happened and what rules helped in it though, probably to avoid problems.

Then, another story from… mailing list IINM. Some guy made his girlfriend pregnant, but will only marry her if she agree to convert to his religion. Well. the parents really put up complain about that issue.

Personally, I’m agnostic, not really an atheist, but doesn’t want to go with any religion either. So… those kind of rules are just marketing for me, gathering more peoples; after all, what is a cause without supporter, they’ll become like those extinct ancient religions.

But why would a religion had to force other to follow their way ? Even by forsaking marriage, or taking advantage of peoples’ love as a tool to gain more followers? Like, “ah hell, just switch over and we can go on and live happily ever after until the day we start thinking lawyer is not such a bad idea”.

In addition, conversion could cause someone to be looked down like they’ve done a sin of treason by their community of same beliefs. But to be married between couples of different religion, the procedure is made as difficult as possible, or even straight forward sinful.

Similar discussion in forum, or local discussion group in Facebook before this does raise up issues. Although it’s believed all religion basically taught about how to live good, some had conflicting details in the way to do it.

Maybe one religion tell that they must always keep the toilet seat down and other has rule to leave the toilet seat up (of course, no religion made before invention of toilet seat actually have the free time to make rules about that).

Other issue is about the children, which way should they take. Is it their father’s religion, or their mother’s religion. Well, I did heard successful case, where in case of parents from different religion, the child become eclectic, learning more from both sides and probably become more open minded.

Docextreme asked, why do you blog?

What inspires you to blog? and were do you get most of your idea’s from, how long do you spend writing your blogs and do you have a favorite topic you like writing about

For me, I categorized blogging into two type. Those that are like article, presenting thoughts and meant to share specific topic of interest. What they call civic journalism I guess is included in this group and in my opinion, the type that attracts larger audience of that interest.

The other type is… diary that made report of experience. Except for story about certain public event, I think this one caters to smaller audience, such as friends, close one who would better understand what the hell the blogger is talking about.

As most, there are overlap on things, but most of my entries falls on the second group, online diary. That’s truer for my other two blogging spot (in which none are in Blogspot).

Although I hasn’t been able to do it perfectly, my inspiration is from a fiction I read some years ago, about an materialized AI. One night, in her dream, she flow through the web and passed through a teacher’s diary. From the data that got mixed in, her memory got somehow mixed with the person’s.

Well, that’s totally fantasy, but it gave me the concept that I tried to do, “archival of memory”. If someone on a chance saw it, will they be able to share the memory ? 
And for myself, maybe one day years later, I will stumble upon my own writing and remembered the scenes again, just like flipping photo album, but with words to describe.

Why I make it online rather than offline or even in paper and ink ? Just like online address book, it’s just convenient, and who knows there are close friends of mine interested in the stories. :D

Maybe it’s not as deep and comprehensive as technical analysis or philosophical issue, but I want to try taking the other approach.

That’s for me. :)

And two old entry from fellow in Clubhouse that’s also about this topic of why we blog.

• I’ve got 900 seconds by Nik.
• Blogging In Life by Maple.

From comment in a Facebook group today, just another obvious thought about how quickly we got bored.

These days, in time of fast news (Twitter, anyone?) how long is our patience ? In my issue, it's about time between press release and product release. When a product is announced, it sparks huge flame of buzz. Then before we knew it, it has become yesterday's news, a B or C rank news that doesn't deserve headline anymore.

Anything new! We're so damn bored we need something new to talk about. In a few seconds the whole world knows about it and we need new things to oogle about.

There...

Is it because of my environment that I fail to understand each and every time, just how effective is a cause, petition or any form of strike will do good ? Same thing as how I would never see the light about what’s the correlation between someone who would run naked around the city to “raise awareness” of something.

If any, I only see moment of fame, or the fun of having yourself an “identity as a group”.

Why so sudden ? Well, in other media, lately particularly at Facebook, I did get invites for causes. It’s presented as if we have millions of peoples writing their name there, then it will miraculously happens. But where’s the real program ? I for one believe the only way to make bastards follow what we want is doing it their way, find a way that will make their life miserable if they don’t comply. If not, what do they have to lose ? As far as they know, they might lose more if they bend to the will of the group.

10 millions of names in a cause against deforestation, but they still use the same amount of papers because it’s more convenient (and cheaper). How would that do any good ? The cause will only be one of yet another hundreds of similar things.
Raising awareness ? Everyone might just join because those pin collecting is fun. I remember time when rubber wristbands are fashion item more than the cause behind it. When others sees it, they see an item of fashion, and never ask what that means.

Same as petition. If we have, say… 25 thousand peoples signing the petition and send it to a company. If the company refuse, what will that 25 thousand peoples do ? Just sit down and life goes on ? This is especially true for online petition signed by peoples that for me is a bunch of faceless anonymous.

Then again, this could be the local culture. We don’t have news like in the US where we often heard about class actions from a group against something, which has any chance of success.

There’s one TV station here that specialize on news, from morning until night, almost all shown is news. I never really liked the station, probably because the owner is also a figure in political party and not rarely used the TV station for his own statement funnelling.

They always gave me the impression of slow news week. If there’s an incident, I almost hear it every time I tune on to that station, and that’s on random time. It’s as if they want to milk out every worth of news value before it became “yesterday’s news”.

Lately, I also realized something. For example, last week there’s a plane who did an emergency landing. This morning, there’s a boat crash. In the dinner-time news, they also posted various unrelated documentations (and YouTube) of similar incident around the world in presentation style that goes around… this is another incident on [date] and happened on [place]. Totally no extra value or whatsoever.

And I thought the cheap-trick of selling old news as new is reserved only for new year season.

Human seems to be programmed to be bored. Do the same work every day, and you get bored. Eat the same thing every day, and it won’t be as tasteful. Stay around stinks long enough and your nose is bored enough it doesn’t really care anymore.

Although I’m not sure the design is made as motive for people to do innovations in mind, but it works.

Here came the great philosophers and thinking minds with loyal duty, the peoples we recognize as comedian.

That away, sometimes, as we got real bored, we enter that phase when anything is alright as long as it’s new (man hunting and extreme games are born from this perhaps). It doesn’t matter if the innovation is plain stupid, as long as it’s new, and we can play with it as soon as possible.

The novelty will worn off, but at least we had our time of entertainment :D

By the way, I still doesn’t understand what pass in their mind when innovating something like wasabi-tasted ice cream.

Sometimes, I wonder why peoples could hate others so much just because of their sense of belonging.

Okay, I admit I had negative sentiment against over-reacting fanboys, or against Google and Apple. But I think I do it in a more “gave up on them anyway” attitude and just avoid contact.

But this is different. There are peoples who could hate another group because of beliefs (not limited to religious or ideological) they had. They could hate the group like their family is killed or something, just because they drink of the “media’s poisonous tongue”.

Example is the hatred against government and politician. Together with apathy, they starts badmouthing government like staple jokes, without trying to see the situation.
The enemy is source of all sorrow, if we kill them, the world will be better. Why such attitude ?

It’s like, someone who want to hold abstain in election and not do any of their own political attempt to make things better, have no right to complain, that’s what I belief.

Well, there’s also those countries considered like empire of the devil on this planet right ? Everyone think they’re the source of sorrow and take things really personally. No, not talking about terrorist countries.