In Praise Of...

What's good? This stuff is.

Retreating into books

Nobody needs an excuse these days to step away from The News, whether you're getting it from TV, radio/podcasts, or print.

Books, you guys. The ideas are fresh and you can dig more deeply into them. Shopping for them has never been easier. Depending on your subject matter of choice, the act of reading is likely much better for one's blood pressure.

I've started accumulating a backlog of stuff to read, as if a backlog of games wasn't enough.

Speaking of books:

Nike

Nike seems to be on a tear lately, and it might be more than just the goodwill generated by the excellent Shoe Dog (the memoir of founder Phil Knight).

It is, however, my book of the year. The quotes from the covers are all accurate - Phil is an excellent storyteller and writer. Imagine something akin to the glorious business insanity of The Social Network, but remove Silicon Valley and tech entirely and set it in a sleepy 1970s American town prior to globalization and the internet. On every occasion I picked it up, I wanted to stay up all night to keep reading.

As someone who frequently thinks of entrepreneurship, I find an easy sympathy for Knight and his business adventure.

A coworker with an unparalleled eye for detail was quick to criticize for leaving out Knight's entire dark side, which is alleged in University of Nike. It's real. The book effectively ends at Nike's 1979 IPO and only gives a tiny epilogue to cover the events of the 21st century, which is where the controversy lives. The sweatshop controversy gets a defiant (but ultimately passing) mention, but the book doesn't acknowledge the existence of any of the allegations about the University of Oregon and Nike's veto power in many areas, including academics and research, as well as a nearly House of Cards-esque power play over specific administrators' personal lives.

I think these things can exist in parallel and I give the book a pass. If you're writing a memoir, wouldn't you leave out your misdeeds and worst moments? If you're an American president, do you leave in the things that could be seen as war crimes? Are you obliged to tell the whole truth? I'd much rather read Shoe Dog than OJ Simpson's If I Did It.

If Walter Isaacson was writing a biography, this critique would be entirely on point. But no, this is Knight's memoir, written in first person. (And it's pedantic to make the point, but Knight doesn't quite fit into the league of people who Isaacson covers.)

The book goes a long way to try to describe the Nike ethos, which is centered on athletics but in a way that's accessible to all. Nike's apps are living that ethos and the results can be really great.

The Running Club app is a great companion for runners, and has been for years. They were perhaps the first to put tech into running, beginning with the Nike+ chip and iPod connection back in 2006. As soon as the iPhone got location tracking, the app made use of it for maximum precision in distance tracking. And lately, Guided Runs (with a spoken word soundtrack over your run) seem like the latest killer feature. The latest ones sound more like coaching, which is super welcome. Even though I've been a minor runner for over 10 years, this audio coaching helped me shift my mindset and find new enjoyment in running, even as I age and slow down.

The Training Club app is similarly hitting new heights and is a mainstay on my phone. The simplest parallel I can think of is Beachbody, best known for the P90X workouts. Except where Beachbody charges $15/mo for a subscription to a premium product, Training Club has roughly comparable workouts and is free, instead making Nike products and e-commerce first-class citizens in the app to make money.

Both apps have excellent integrations with Apple Health, for you iPhone folk, and the workout times and calorie burns are piped in for tracking in MyFitnessPal and other apps.

Interestingly, in Japan specifically, multiple friends of mine have gone to work for Nike. Any Japanese company can push out ambitious and smart people, especially foreigners. I wonder what Nike Japan's pull factors are.

The Game Awards

The Game Awards, an awards show for video games modeled on the Oscars*, finally came into its own in 2018 and felt like a big-boy event. The event was well-produced, with much less of the cheese factor of years past.

Quoting an interview with the maestro Geoff Keighley:

I love the freedom of being on digital. In many ways, our show looks better on digital - we're live in 4K on YouTube, which you can't even get on traditional television. We're on the new TV; most gamers around the world, they watch the show on their 85" television through Twitch or YouTube. It's the same experience, it's just not through traditional TV.

In short, it's no longer "modeled on the Oscars." It is the Oscars, but for our field, and delivered our way.

You can still go back and watch the show for free. I might have to host a watch party in 2019!

Tesla and Sheer Power of Will

I'm getting a Tesla.

Two reasons why:

One

I feel morally compelled to, given that climate change is taking the Unbelievably Bad trajectory - it's worse than most worse-case-scenario projections. Record-breaking summer heat worldwide and record-breakingly fierce tropical storms worldwide should be enough to convince everyone. Even places that genuinely try hard, like California, experience Beijing-like pollution due to severely dried air, due to global warming.

This post isn't about that. If you know me well enough to read my blog, you're probably already on board.

Two

Tesla disrupted everyone. I came to write that. This bit flipped in my head one recent morning and had me planning a purchase for the last couple weeks.

Friends who talk cars with me know that I've been an obsessive BMW fan for years. But Tesla's world makes BMW's look dumb. As I recently wrote to my friend Robert:

The Tesla screens embarrass BMW’s iDrive. Why is Spotify support part of a $3k package? Why should I be satisfied with a 10% improvement in MPG? Why is maintenance $2k a year after a short warranty period? Why do I need suspension and cooling totally redone after 60k miles? Why is quality of life only improved once every 7 years on a generation change? Why has nobody made *any* progress on Autopilot? Why should I indulge in BMW’s fan culture of collecting old cars and pouring unreasonable amounts of money to keeping them running?

Tesla's cars are flawed. I don't care at all about the debate surrounding its stock, but there are clearly valid criticisms of the product.

Quality

The quality-issues are well-documented - perhaps at their most representative, while journalistically verified, in this NYT piece. The oft-quoted "manufacturing hell" turned to "delivery hell" because it turns out that the car business is a complicated logistics machine. Let's be honest - manufacturing hell isn't finished, either; it's just turned to quality hell. A Model 3 I test drove had a clear issue with wind noise. Owners (or would-be owners) with paint issues abound.

But there's precedent for improvement in quality. The first cars that were exported from Japan were laughing stocks on wheels. Quality was terrible, as is every country's or every manufacturer's when it first starts. Japan learned and improved its quality, to the point that the Japanese word kaizen (continuous improvement) is taught in business schools worldwide. Moreover, Korea followed Japan on a path to quality. China may be at the start of that path now.

Also, we fail to notice that we're passively forgiving established manufacturers for their quality issues. Toyota, synonymous with quality itself, tarnished its image with stacks of dangerous recalls for its American-built cars, even Lexii. American and Korean cars frequently have wide panel gaps, a criticism the car guys level at Tesla all the time. For years, BMW has been notorious for electrical "gremlins" causing ambiguous issues - especially in the first year of production of any model. Anecdotally, my Mini - a BMW-designed-and-built car - had a panel fall off at speed.

No car maker has flawless quality. We should talk in percentages, not black-and-white. Tesla is worse now, but improvement is learned.

Also, I have absolutely no idea how this bug can come to be, but it's hilarious.

Performance / "driver's car" status

Sporting performance is learned too. The Model 3 Performance's track mode seems to have figured it out, mostly by way of listening to a highly-qualified "user" (ie an accomplished test driver) and tweaking the software on the fly.

Moving on..

Tesla learns the automotive industry's game more quickly than other manufacturers are learning Tesla's game. While Tesla has nixed the performance criticism and continues to work on its quality matters, nobody else has learned simple online ordering, straightforward trade-in offers by Blue Book value, documenting issues at delivery to be fixed at any time later for free, over-the-air software updates (even for bug fixes), Autopilot, or comprehensive charging networks. Or, with very limited exceptions, a 200+ mile EV powertrain.

More concisely, Tesla is getting to its [BMW] M3 fighter way faster than BMW is getting to its Tesla fighter.

It's the automotive chapter of the famous essay / investment thesis, Software is Eating the World. (Side note: that essay has not aged well, but the central idea that a software-defined thing will disrupt its incumbents is pretty compelling.)

Power of Will

Tesla didn't disrupt by software alone. Having a car company isn't easy. Employee accounts and Elon interviews both point to fanatical 100-hour weeks. This strikes me as one of those historically rare moments of intense, focused concentration by a handful of brilliant people. I think this was necessary, perhaps more than the software, to disrupt the auto industry.

An incomplete list of other things that came out of such effort:

Smartphones
Desktop computers
Jumbo jets?
The moon landing
(regrettably) The A-bomb
Some unknown quantity of scientific projects that I'm not savvy enough to know about. Gene sequencing?

I think the single biggest disappointment that comes with 'adulthood' is finding out that the people who do that kind of work are few and far between. (And the proportion that have that talent but burn it on finance robs the world of yet still more greatness.)

Shoshin

Quoth Wikipedia:

"Shoshin (初心) is a word from Zen Buddhism meaning "beginner's mind." It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would."

Here, have that in a chill beat to study to:

Tesla may be shoshin thinking applied to EVs. How else do you get to powering a two-ton luxury car with lots of little laptop batteries? If "delivery logistics hell" is shipping a few thousand cars to customers (remember, incumbent automakers ship millions per year), it at once screams "rookie mistake" but perhaps should also scream "rookie opportunity."

The Japans, They Are A-Changin'

Just around 5 years ago, I ditched the Tokyo life to return home.

Now, after 3 years of returning as a work visitor, I've been repeatedly exposed to the neighborhood where I used to reside, from the other side.

Things are changing, and rapidly. For once, believe the Japanese government's hype: this place is globalizing rapidly.

It began with a trickle of things this corner of Tokyo didn't have before: hey, the neighborhood got good Mexican food! Craft beer, whaaaat!

More tellingly, language support exploded. English is now pervasive on trains and menus, and Chinese started to pop up. I've seen precisely one sign for a Chinese language conversation school, which seems like Patient Zero for what will be an epidemic of interest in the language.

But the biggest sign of all - and one that has anecdotally exploded in 2018 specifically - is immigrants. For about the last year or so, observers such as The Economist saw small municipalities sneakily grant visas to foreign students to try to combat depopulation. But in the last few days the government has embraced the idea at the national level and announced new visa types for workers, especially in sub-white-collar careers such as construction. They've given in to the inevitable - if they don't want to shrink as a populace, they have to let in foreigners. I'm sure many tongues were bitten in Tokyo's halls of power.

As I walk around Shinagawa, a Tokyo ward slash locus of Japanese globalization that combines a transit hub, an IT cluster and a stack of tourist-friendly hotels, I see explosions in the things that are immediately visible, like Caucasian and South Asian salarymen - and audible, like Mandarin speakers. (They are so loud.) The legendary convenience stores are seemingly staffed by 0% Japanese. Restaurants already have large numbers of non-Japanese waitstaff.

I'm sure I'm also failing to notice stacks of immigrant professionals who blend in well in both appearance and behavior, like the very well integrated Chinese, Korean, Mongolians and others I worked with when I lived here.

The immigration is good. Residing in Japan will become more accessible for it. The travel guide I wrote 10 years ago endorsed internet cafes as a place to check your Internet, because smartphone roaming was unfathomably expensive and prepaid SIM cards were illegal in Japan. (SIM cards are now airport mainstays, like the rest of the world.) Your waiter will understand your order if your Japanese isn't impeccable. Residential bureaucratic nonsense will be less painful as procedures are standardized, information is translated, and permanent residence becomes achievable for more. Mexican food will finally be edible. Smoking is on the decline and it's no longer inevitable that you come home reeking of ashtray. Working practices are finally being questioned.

Friends of mine are moving to Japan to stay. Funny thing: lack of school shootings is a pull factor.

That accessibility reveals that Tokyo is eminently livable. Housing is available. So is health care. With some exceptions, so is education. The income mark for 'a good life' is well lower than any other major world city.

The immigration will also ruin Japan. It'll get the same stuff as everywhere else: craft beer, Mexican food, Blue Bottle coffee, Tinder. What sets it apart? You no longer miss the creature comforts of home, but it gets harder to find the unique. If you chase authenticity, you'll have to go further and further off the beaten path. But expanding bullet train lines and government ministry initiatives to boost tourism nationwide, not just Tokyo/Osaka/Hiroshima, are working too well. I'll probably deal with lines at a museum 3 hours outside Tokyo next week. Kyoto is overrun with visitors to the point that policymakers are trying to address the problem by way of introducing peak pricing into tourist landmarks. Anecdotally, restaurants seem to struggle to keep up with running at full tilt all the time, which kills the magic of Legendary Magical Japanese Customer Service.

It'll just be another rich city - another Singapore, another London.

In 2008, you would really struggle in Japan without a local guide. In 2013, a guide merely enhanced your visit. In 2018, you simply don't need one - you can get a full, authentic experience, completely without assistance. By the Olympically imposing 2020, this place may be totally overblown. The travel guides that try to live on the bleeding edge - NYT Travel, Conde Nast, Monocle - will inevitably raise the question.

But thank goodness, there's still quirk. In a 7-11 I spotted what is probably beer-flavored sparkling water in the beer section. It branded itself as being good for, among other use cases, meetings. Without missing a beat, my dear friend Chloe remarked:

I really like that America is like “we shouldn’t have beer at meetings” and then WeWork just went 🤷🏻‍♀️ and added kegs. Japan is like “we should develop a special set of beverages for this situation”

God bless this wacky, silly place.

In praise of...

I had so much fun sharing stuff I like last time that I thought I'd keep it up! Here goes, enjoyable things to brighten dark days:

The Hitman reboot

Whilst in a YouTube rabbit hole on game design (more below), I learned that the 2016 Hitman reboot looked super duper fun. So I bought it, and boy oh boy is it paying off. It's a funky concept - it has 6 levels, which are designed to be replayed a dozen-plus times. It's supremely cleverly designed. On a recent visit, my brother and I dug deep into the game and really came to grips with 3 of those levels. My brother's picky about games - he needs a lot of depth and strategic options - and so he sticks to franchises he loves, like the Arkham franchise and Dishonored. In a single weekend, Hitman sunk its teeth deep into him. We're both in love with the hilarious possibilities for assassination and the butterfly effect of each action in the game. There's a "Hitman 2" (something like the 10th actual game in the Hitman franchise) coming this year, and we're both hype.

The feather in its cap: it's the rare game that keeps me up past my bedtime.

Game Design Videos on YouTube

In days past, if you had a deep curiosity about game design, it was hard to come across serious information about it. Print game magazines, fun though they were, never went deep enough. Occasionally, a book got published that might have some tantalizing details about the super-fun-sounding inner workings of game creation. Occasionally, Gamasutra (a game dev news site connected to the GDC conference) would publish something cool. (Side note: Virtually all of my senior thesis citations were to Gamasutra articles.)

Now, there's a wealth of fun stuff to dig into. GDC has a YouTube channel that posts older talks (say, from the previous year's show). It gives a great impression of what it's like to attend the good talks. Amateurs sometimes make great analysts, as is the case for Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit. My favorite of them all is Extra Credits, and despite the silly voices and artwork is written by a professional game design consultant, James Portnow. (Side note: Most of my senior thesis citations of Gamasutra articles were written by Portnow.)

Evo

Evo, the fighting game tournament, is still the best thing in esports. It has the unpredictability and spectacle of March Madness, but condensed into a weekend. It has the most diverse, respectful, hype community out of large competitive game communities. While the rest of gaming struggles to contain toxicity, the fighting game community overwhelms its own members with its positivity.

Special shout out to fellow UT and Rakuten alum Doune2 for nearly taking out the eventual winner in pools! I did *not* think that I'd see up and coming esports players in my personal life in my 30s, but here we are. Looks like I'm a Tekken spectator now!

Cowboy Bebop

Still good. It occasionally airs on Adult Swim, even now. I try not to spend too much time indulging in pure nostalgia for its own sake, but if you need 20 minutes to reminisce, this show won't disappoint.

A Cloud Guru

The time came to pick up some new skills - particularly, AWS. A Cloud Guru is actually making it easy to understand, and AWS is hard. I'll be transitioning my skillset to AWS over the next few weeks, thanks to these guys.

I try to profess my love for online learning often. It's great for the students and great for the teachers.

For teachers, it's great economics. Create the course once, then it sits there and makes money. You may occasionally create updates, but that's better than the college circuit where most live on food stamps and still work stupid hours, while delivering the same lectures again and again. (Not to mention the convenience factor of just having to do it once and update occasionally).

For students, it's also great. It's convenient (take the course any hour of the day and at your own pace), doesn't create insane debt at $30/month, and is quicker to respond to what's needed in the workplace than universities or community colleges.*

*(Don't get me wrong - there is a place for a 4-year, liberal, classical university education. But not if it costs $200,000, doesn't teach people to think, leaves teachers in poverty, and creates people who ask if they can turn in double-spaced papers and if points are taken off for spelling mistakes. I have immense pride in being a Plan II graduate - I got way more out of my education than the average state-school sociology major.)

Part of the software technorati I follow on Twitter helpfully pointed out: In what other point in history could anyone learn the skills to land a 6-figure job within a year?* This is an incredible democratization of opportunity.

*(Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy you out of stress and poor conditions. Again, at what other point in history?)

Friends, believe the hype. Online education has come.

Spiral

It was 2016, and "2016 is the worst year ever" entered the zeitgeist. Between Trump's "election" and a slew of beloved celebrity deaths bringing further sad clouds over the news cycle, the intent was obvious.

2017 didn't improve the situation much.

But 2018's awfulness lives on a different scale, and here's why: it's underscored by violence.

Celebrity deaths are part of life, but the increase in school shootings means that innocent children die at a rate 100x of celebrities.

The epidemic of school shootings brings a chill effect to those of us who haven't had kids yet. How are you supposed to raise children in the United States? Do you simply wing it and send your kids in every day and hope for the best? Do you place your faith in armed security?* Does it help if you shift your finances to send the kid to a private school?**

(*Perhaps you shouldn't: the "good guy with a gun" never materializes during an incident. The armed guard at Parkland stayed outside, presumably rationally scared stiff. An colleague with military experience remarked that from a tactical perspective, a school shooting is a surprise attack, and you'd need to be SOCOM Tier 1 or Tier 2 to even have a chance in such a scenario. School teachers are... not of that qualification.)

(**My thoughts here are complicated. I went to a private school growing up. My friends' public school had more fights and more injuries. Still, mine received a bomb threat when I was young. No one's invincible.)

The chill effect suggests that school shootings aren't just depressing, sad, angering news that ruin your mood for a day. Worse, violence is often a response to other problems gone unsolved. Further bad news. The severity of the shooting epidemic will probably begin to affect life decisions - first for educated and highly mobile people, then on down to the less educated.

Back to celebrities. Anthony Bourdain rightly receives a lot of ink and pixels. The personal stories from other celebs, from chefs, and from random civilian fans are too many to encapsulate (a sign of a great man who perhaps was underestimated during his life). But let me highlight one tribute: a review of his trips to the Middle East.

His episode on Iran, better than any other, drove home that life as a visitor on the ground can differ drastically from what's on TV. It helped me to the realization that every Persian I've ever known is a delightful person. Not merely good, with which we often connote the absence of badness, but good as a force of positivity. One who makes your life better when they're around. And that Middle Eastern food looks downright incredible.

I'll highlight another: that he matured into an uncompromising good guy. Quoth Helen Rosner for the New Yorker:

Bourdain was right there, for everyone, in equal measure. He remembered names. He took every question seriously. He was twenty minutes early to every appointment, to the minute. Every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site that asked got its Bourdain quotes—and good ones, too! Not pre-scripted pablum but potent missiles of cultural commentary—bombastic wisdom, grand pronouncements, eviscerations of celebrities, flagrantly named names.

But you can't ignore that this year's celebrity deaths are suicides. Violence, by a different name.

This piece doesn't end with a comforting platitude like a resolution to be a more relaxed, more genuine, more curious, more friendly person like Bourdain was. If he were writing an episode script out of his life's final chapter, it likely wouldn't end comfortably.

It might even suddenly snap to black.