I promised the Internet I'd get a Tesla.

I tried, but had to turn down the car, send it away, and cancel the transaction.

I planned to wait until the Standard Range Model 3 dropped, and as soon as it did I placed my order. In 2 weeks to the day, the car had arrived, driven right to my doorstep by a Tesla delivery guy.

I was hit badly with the quality issues I wrote about. The internet is obsessed with panel gaps and paint issues, and some of that is overblown, but my car was a bit... asymmetrical. Portions of metal missing clearcoat and/or blue paint were exposed. The rear taillights had a gap big enough to nearly fit my pinky finger. 

The issue that made me turn the car away, however, was a gap in the rubber lining between roof panels. I had no idea where water would go - would it enter the body at the roof? Would that cause rust or electrical gremlins?

Seeing that gap, delivery went from "not great" to "stressful." Thankfully, an interruption in the paperwork process gave me cover to take a breath, text a couple Tesla fan friends, and reach the common sense solution to walk away from the car.

Once I refused the car, things went smoothly. The guy promised to destroy existing paperwork, gave my car's keys back, said thank you, and promptly drove away. 

It only took one phone call to get my deposit back, too. I called and asked for it on a Saturday morning, and it reached my bank on Tuesday.

Tesla's people were universally nice. I was prepared to go to war to get my deposit back and was delighted to see it totally wasn't necessary.

I look forward to getting one someday.

I was recently asked: 

What will work be like 30 years in the future?

I'll be speaking on it at UCSD! I go once a year or so to my graduate alma mater and talk jobs (or do mock interviews), but the most recent invitation had a really intriguing premise.

The talk hasn't happened yet, but I'm super excited to have been invited to this one by my dear friend Tina. 

So as a means of preparation, let's talk about it! Here are some thoughts that may or may not find their way into the talk later:

Change will be driven by the private sector

Working practices evolve in the private sector first, then trickle to non-profit and public. In the long run, it affects everyone.

In the US, government will fail to protect workers. China and Japan never had the pretense of doing so. Europe will probably be the sole major economic region to protect or advance workers' interests.

However, regulation is not the only way in which the world improves. Private companies' competition for labor will affect your ways of working. 

Software is Eating the World

That phrase is primarily an investment thesis written in 2011. I have many, many thoughts about that essay and why it's close to the point but fails to hit the nail squarely. (Worse, the examples touted have not aged well. Zynga was never going to replace Nintendo or Sony, Shutterfly was never going to replace the printed photo shop at your local pharmacy when cloud storage already was going to, and Groupon was never destined to be the world's biggest direct marketer. But that's Silicon Valley hyperbole for you.)

But the fundamental wisdom - that software will inevitably and inextricably get involved in all facets of life and work - is correct. Amazon was software eating WalMart. Uber is software eating taxi hailing. Tesla is software eating automotive design. Software eating manufacturing is also known as automation, which is already the bogeyman ending the blue collar labor class in the OECD countries. 30 years hence, that work will be done. 

You will be a knowledge worker.

You know that Japanese phrase "monozukuri," pastorally referring to making things with your bare hands? Like the 12th generation sake maker, still doing it the old fashioned way?

Yeah, that's not you.

It's beautiful, but that's not your future.

We are in the midst of an industrial revolution centered on software.

Software is already pivotal to virtually all jobs, regardless of field. Any professional uses software as a tool to accelerate their productivity, and the alternative is a stark idea.

• Business practitioners spend their days in Microsoft Office rather than typewriting memos that get hand-delivered and generating their own forecasts by hand.
• Scientists spend their days in R or Python, regardless whether the science is hard or soft, rather than doing their own statistics by hand, bringing predictive rigor to everything from physics to political science.
• The creative class - artists, designers, or musicians - are on their computers all day, rather than doing their work on fragile paper in ways that are extremely difficult to tweak, reproduce or mass produce.

In most of these cases, these professionals aren't programming and don't have to know how. They simply have fluent usage of a tool. Look now at any job description, and odds are you'll find at least one requirement (or desired skill) to use a piece of software effectively.

So if software is eating the entire world, whether you're doing business, working at an ad agency, manufacturing industrial equipment, or managing distribution of donors' money at sites across Southeast Asia, that creates an unbelievable demand for the creation of software to do all these tasks. That in turn creates unbelievable demand for people who can create software - and that's why those people are wealthy. 

And it's not just programmers or engineers who are cashing in. People who are collaboratively part of a controlled business process by which good software is made for ordinary people are also involved. These people have titles like Designer, or Product Manager, or Producer. 

The software industry is special in historical terms. Generally, there is no prior point in history at which one could freely join the economic upper class of the world's most civilized societies, without regard for birth, using knowledge that is freely available on a black mirror anywhere in the world. In the past, you had to be born into the correct social class, or have the ability to attend a university (which was a tall order in most of the world for centuries prior to the late 20th century) to gain expensive knowledge, or be able to behaviorally signal identification with the upper class (which meant your family sent you to the Ivy League). 

The software industry is also special because it leads the way with regard to changing work practices. The software industry invents tools and is summarily the first to put them to use (Slack, for example). If the software hipsters are doing something right now, it's on the bleeding edge and you'll see early-adopter companies get involved in a few years. In recent years, distributed companies (made entirely of remote workers) come to mind.

Speaking of...

Remote work will be OK.

The pieces are already in place. All that remains is for work cultures to catch on.

Companies are finding it rational to pay less, accept workers' geographic constraints, and conduct business over email, Webex and Slack.

There are so many reasons why companies will pursue the trend:

• Lowers real estate costs
• Can pay workers less (market salary in virtually any other city is less than that of San Francisco or Seattle, and those savings are magnified when you take into account taxes on those wages, cheaper insurance costs, and so on)
• Already plays more nicely with whatever flexibility employees want, whether maternity/paternity, elder care, child care, or something else
• Might lower risk of sexual harassment incidents (I look forward to someone studying this)

Life will get better for workers thanks to better information.

It's not a Marxist revolution, but Glassdoor or a service like it will democratize knowledge on the workers' side. Workers will learn to avoid bad employers thanks to review info, and the labor market will increasingly behave like a market - that is, workers in demand will command good prices and bad ones will not. Aside from salaries, improved benefits such as health insurance and maternity/paternity leaves come to mind.

Inequality will worsen. Make sure you win.

The incentives are already established for some benefits, such as remote work or parental leave. However, there is nothing here that suggests a lean toward greater egalitarianism. 

"Good" workers will be more and more skilled. It's commonly said that a bachelor's degree will no longer be an entryway to a career, but a Master's degree is. In the future, a "good" worker will have some skillset, and some light MBA-like business knowledge, and a healthy sprinkling of technical/computer/software ability, regardless of the field. The extra knowledge will likely come in a new form, such as online learning courses, university certificate programs, or "nanodegrees." That's a heck of a skillset, and it's hard to obtain. 

Those people will command crazy high salaries, and the rest will founder in jobs with lesser advancement trajectories. The result, at scale, is higher inequality. 

It is highly unlikely that you individually can resist this trend.

Just Maybe...

Those things I feel pretty good about. Now let's engage in a little speculation. These things are each somewhat less likely. With my favorite UCSD grad school era vocabulary word stochasticity in mind, some of these things will happen:

You will be surveilled at work.

Alexa devices will be around every office and every meeting room, probably as soon as Amazon announces a super-easy way to project your screen and/or connect to conference calls. Using office phones, or company-paid cell phones, will result in all communications logged, including audio calls. You'll be able to be "fingerprinted," even when you think you can't. Microphones picking up your voice will feed into AI systems that can recognize your voice uniquely. Facial recognition, integrated into all your devices, will be the norm, so your device will know without a doubt it's you. (So will your usage logs, and the law..)

This will probably come into wide usage by a combination of user convenience, IT admin convenience, and publicized corporate scandal. The surveillance will keep your corporate behavior in check - say, don't start any Office Space-esque schemes to embezzle - and it may also muzzle other behaviors resulting in out-of-office friend-making, dating, or #MeToo material.

Companies that act in a mature fashion, who trust their workers, will use surveillance only in compliance cases. The vast majority of companies who act with less scruples will use technology to micromanage workers in dystopian fashion. This is already happening to Amazon warehouse pickers and other low-skilled workers. Surveillance cameras combined with facial recognition will replace the time card. Companies will also execute against that desire poorly - think of a simple keystroke logger deciding whether or not you are "productive" - with soul-crushing consequences.

In the long run, you'll have long stints at jobs.

"Job-hopping millennials" is not caused by millennials somehow being sensitive snowflakes. It's a response to the labor market. We had crappy jobs in the Recession with high incentive to leave, and the current job-hoppers in peak conditions making the rounds on Marketplace are not professionals like you. They're service industry and construction workers. 

In knowledge work, institutional knowledge (the knowledge that isn't trained, such as which people can actually get things done) carries high leverage. The value of this knowledge will comparatively increase as companies decrease their investments in training, and instead of investing in training, companies will be motivated to fear your departure. They'll choose to be incentivized by the fear of your departure, not the opportunity of training, and will spend more on your quality of life after you prove yourself.

The greatest new ideas will continue to come from the US.

For the US's many, many, many faults - this country invented the Internet, invented the smartphone, and invented every great service that runs on top of them. As long as the US culturally teaches the value of questioning what is taught, and other countries fail to do so, it will continue to have the best ideas and capture the most value.

...but the Chinese will censor you anyway.

This one has lower odds, but fittingly a higher impact if it happens. The possibility is that you, as a worker at a Western company, may have to pay attention to what offends the Chinese government, and may either self-censor or be censored.

The most direct possibility is that Chinese ownership of international companies will continue to expand, those executives will be controlled by the Party, and the executives' control will mean that things which are offensive to the Party in mainland China will also not happen overseas.

I'll remind the UCSD audience that on-campus students produced a lot of noise about the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker.

There are indirect possibilities, which are embodied by the game publisher Ubisoft. They have been producing two versions of a popular game, one Western and one, slightly modified, that would pass muster with Chinese censors. They announced that they'd make the Chinese version universal, so as to simplify their work. In this case, the Chinese government didn't exercise explicit control, but rather a Western company made a rational business decision that had a side effect of giving the Chinese government veto power over a game played by people outside China.

That was the first, and Ubisoft rolled it back after an outcry, but that very possibly the future as more companies begin to have exposure to a Chinese customer base.

The US is generally hands-off about business, but it is an extremely xenophobic country, and is likely to pass regulations that would protect companies from Chinese political influence. But given the economic power that comes with 20% of the world's population and tight control, this may be a point of strategic conflict played out over a long time.

------

I'm giving this talk in about a month and excited to hear your thoughts. 

Retreating into 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

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.

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? 

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.

I've wanted to write some good words about good things lately. Let me just toss them all into one post:

Sega

Nintendo

Sony

It'd be weird if I left out my own employer, right? The exclusives coming out of Worldwide Studios are really on point lately. It seems like there used to be tiers of studios, some making AAA games and some making weirdo off-kilter stuff or Vita ports. I think we've reached the point where every studio has released, or will release, award contender titles. 

Marcus D - Retro'd 2

I'm a big Marcus D fan, that's known. 

His latest album, Retro'd 2, is one of his best works - 20 tracks of genuine love for games, expressed over a massive variety of styles.

No one track represents the entire album super well, because of the high stylistic variety. I recommend a listen (and a purchase!):

http://marcusd.net/album/retrod-2

Man oh man, is this thing made with love. Look at that cover art! This American dude has gone to Tokyo to reside to Live The Gaming Dream, and look at that cover that results. Marcus seated intently at a Japanese arcade cabinet. A cigar putting off rainbow-colored, pixel-shaped smoke. Presumably elder game-music-composer dude I can't identify, standing behind him and looking over his shoulder, as if he were a ghost looking in from the beyond. 

To say nothing of the source material: Mega Man. Out Run. Super Mario World. PilotWings. SimCity. Mischief Makers. Mystic Quest. Chrono Trigger.

And for the fans who bought physical, it gets delivered in a Super NES game box. 

Meeting (and Befriending) Your Heroes

Before Retro'd 2, I managed to catch a Marcus show (with Substantial) in London last March as part of a work trip (such luck!) and I had the great chance to really converse with Marcus (and the inimitable Funky DL)! I didn't sleep that night - way too exciting to meet some heroes and find that they're awesome and genuine people.

Marcus and I, to my surprise, bonded over the Yakuza series (thanks again, Sega!) and I told him I'd shout when I was next in Tokyo, where he resides.

I followed through, and so did Marcus! We've since met up a couple times and bonded over life as expat, games, music, and more. Picture perfect bromance, really.

Still, I was stunned to find myself listed in the Special Thanks in the Retro'd 2 official album booklet (in the shape and style of a Super NES instruction manual, naturally).

Baby's first Special Thanks mention! 

As I told Marcus, it was a big surprise and a bigger honor. 

Documenting Your Values

On further reflection, I couldn't think of a better place to unlock that achievement. I think Marcus's Retro'd project specifically signifies more than just fun video game tributes. It's the best of that genre, if you want to call it that, but it's building toward a cultural statement about the escapist power in the artistry of video games, the nostalgia toward the 16-bit era, the childhood spent in front of consoles and not TV shows, and those three elements' power to bring people together in this hyper-narrow area of interest.

Or is it that narrow? I want to compose a manifesto, not unlike the Holstee Manifesto:

But one that documents the culture exposed in Retro'd and unites its fanbase. I think there's a broader group of people who live this life and are going unconnected, and it's high time that the Internet (and the occasional PDF print-out taped to a wall) fixed that. 

If you can identify with this much, give me a shout. I'd love to hear your thoughts and your sentences and your values.

I've been meaning to write this post for over two years. It's about time I did it.

Ever since I first laid eyes on an NES around age 4, I've loved video games and they've been as natural to me as water to a fish.

Everyone who's come across me knows some version of this.

I was reminded this morning that I wrote papers in school - from 5th grade composition class all the way to an undergraduate senior thesis - showing love for games, their creators, their history, and their unique contributions to the future of art.

I'm reminded often that my (perhaps suboptimal) choice of college major was Japanese, out of a desire born around age 10 to learn the language of the place where the games came from. 

I tried to enter the games industry a few times and got chewed up and spat out. There was the editorial gig at Shacknews. There was the internship at Realtime Worlds (RIP). I almost found a way in via events staff at an E3. Each time culminated in disappointment and a dead end. Naturally, that got discouraging.

Despite the prior failures, I couldn't stop myself from continuing to try. It was just in my bones. I'd have an existential crisis for the rest of my life if I didn't make it into the world of video games and make it stick.

Quoting myself from 2010, after the collapse of Realtime Worlds:

I had a quick talk with my boss on the way out of town. He asked if, after this experience, I'd stay in the games industry. My answer: "Hell yes."

But each time I tried I sought hints or patterns about who got to keep their jobs. It seemed that business leadership kept their jobs, so I focused my grad school studies in management. Studios closed with a single failure - best to aim for publishers and platforms where portfolio offerings provide job security. Job listings looked for e-commerce experience. 

So, off to Japanese e-commerce I went. The intent all along was just to show e-commerce experience, though it'd provide for a good trade to work if the games industry would never work out. 

That move, despite a couple detours, proved correct. In Tokyo I established Japanese working experience for real, became established in analytics tools, and started to show signs of rapid development. 

As I started a job search in 2015 I mostly looked at e-commerce, but through a grad school alum there was an opening at Sony. I tossed in a resume, and - this is where luck was preparation meeting opportunity - the alum recognized me, knew there was an unlisted opening that was a perfect fit, and referred me to that. "That" was the analytics team at Sony Interactive Entertainment, where they used the same tool as the Japanese e-commerce company and needed a Japanese speaker who was comfortable in an informal US-based tech environment and knew gaming products inside and out. 

Once I was called a "unicorn" in my first-round interview, I knew things looked good. 

In spring of 2015 I relocated to San Diego, started at Sony, and entered a whirlwind of never-ending releases and new features. There's only been expansion - higher salaries, more PTO, more world travel, larger teams, more collaborations, more celebrations of new releases, more employees-only sales.

I work directly on the PS4 console, which is an amazing thing to say. I have a dev kit - the magical weird-looking console that has secret options and features. If I really want to nerd out, I have four dev kits - a classic PS4, a PS4 Pro, a Vita, and a PS TV (remember that thing?)

In short, I found just the thing: a secure job in the games industry, dealing with Japan all the time, having a meaningful impact on the actual product and platform. 

I know exactly when it sank in: E3 2016. I had been in the job for a year by this point and knew it was going to stick. At 31, I finally walked into the trade show I had read about since I was about 10. I've walked into dark and exciting games events before, but never into one so large, loud and well-produced that it was like walking into Video Game Disneyland. The floor's energy is itself energizing - you feel like you could forego sleep from now on and just soak in new games. It only gets better in evenings when you surround yourself with industry friends and their friends. I now have a friend crew that spans all 3 of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Those fascinating, smart, funny people had become a circle I belonged to. I have peers, and they're awesome. That signaled to me that I had made it into the industry for real.

If I could talk to my younger self, the only thing I'd need to say is: it all came true.

PS:

This job is an absolute joy. I pretty much never go to bed or wake up dreading work. I never have a case of the Mondays.

It turns out that you can identify with a company's mission/vision/values. Sony overall stands for respectful attitudes and R&D and engineering and experimentation. Even at a US-based subsidiary that's predominantly American in ways of working, the benefits of Japanese corporate paternalism show up with wonderfully generous health insurance, relocation, training and travel. After a year of this perfect storm of awesome I felt deep down that I really could spend the entire rest of my career with Sony. That's not to openly state a commitment, but rather to say that this good fit is so strong that there's no desire to hop anymore. 

In a very Slumdog Millionaire kind of way, Destiny might have changed my life.

For all my talk about a lifelong love of video games, I spent the vast majority of that time and energy in shooters.

Over the last 20 years I've obsessed over 3 Quake games, 3 Halo games, and a smattering of others in between. I consistently made it my culture, whether it was high school spent "antisocially" making friends over IRC, or watching Red vs Blue with my Halo clanmates (who doubled as college roommates), turning the show's dialogue and our own badly executed plays into inside jokes.

But after about 2010 that all went quiet. 

While the industry obsessed over Facebook games and avoiding competing with Call of Duty, my beloved genre went into a major slump. I slumped with it.

2011, 2012 and 2013 were challenging. Years of failure and opportunities gone awry. I barely played any games during the time, either. Any time I tried shopping for them, there was nothing that grabbed me. Starting a game usually instantly led to a disinterest and a desire to do something else. I can't talk about causation and mild depression, but I can talk about correlation and mild depression. 

Destiny brought my love of games back to life. Other games have become the base of internet culture (see also: Overwatch), but the arrival of Destiny was like a violent gasp of air after finally surfacing from underwater. 

I started launched it only to see what my shiny new PS4 could do. You know when you get a new console, but you don't have any new games, so you go looking for demos, just anything to show off the system? 

The Destiny demo had no more obligation than that. But the demo may have been the only one ever to convert me from a skeptic to a buyer. And it did it after just two levels.

I had never seen an FPS level so stunning as the moon. The game went on to tantalizingly borrow elements of MMO design: inventories, upgrades, subclasses, elemental items, and gorgeous, epic level design.

And brought best-in-class FPS gameplay: fantastic, natural controls. Solid, predictable guns and satisfying sounds. A soundtrack worthy of thousands of hours of repeated listens. 

What a game. I'm sure there's some API out there that can tell me how long I spent in the game. But I happily came out of the slump. All those hours got all my brain chemicals back in their normal, happy balance. 

Destiny took me back from "almost non-gamer" to "PS4 is the center of my household." Had that not happened, I'm sure I wouldn't have paid attention when a job opening appeared at Sony PlayStation.

Bungie, you did me a solid. Thanks for an excellent game.

Today, Destiny 2 releases. And I'm online with my crew. This is going to be great.

I believe that the 10-year mark after a certain date is a weighty one. 

In my experience to date, almost all things cease to be relevant after 10 years. The ones that remain just might remain for life.

I hold up many things to this bar, but I contemplate most:

• Music
• Life experiences

Music

Maybe it's just a pattern of aging, but I can't enjoy most music from my collection after 10 years. I can't still habitually listen to the Blink-182 or Incubus from my high school life, or the Jimmy Eat World and Paul Oakenfold from college, or the J-pop from the very end of college after my Japanese major was a fait accompli. Trying to listen now just undermines my previous love for it. Lyrics get picked apart and revealed to make no sense. Melodies wear thin. Heartbreaks dull.

The 10-year mark for dropping music isn't sudden, like the flip of a switch. It's more like a cliff, where interest falls off very slowly after 1 year but drops off dramatically in years 8, 9, and 10. 

But a few outliers have survived past the 10-year mark and thrived. (If you were wondering, the loungey wonders Supreme Beings of Leisure and the Middle East-inspired downtempo geniuses Dzihan & Kamien are going strong after 15-ish years.)

What is it about those artists and albums? Is it better music? Is it lighter and more accessible? Or is it deeper? Is it tied to particularly strong or pleasant memories? Does music change more rapidly today thanks to technology?

Sometimes I come near the 10-year mark and fear that I'm about to stop liking music that I managed to hold on to for that long. The Samurai Champloo soundtrack, which was deeply influential as I finished my college Japanese studies, suddenly got a little stale last year and it made me uncomfortable: I never want to forget the optimism and infatuation with which I dove into Japanese culture in college, and I tightly associate Champloo with that chapter.

Life experiences

10 years seems to be enough to separate me from most life experiences - then again, I was just 22 at the time.

That's a significant age for a typical 4-year college student, since 22 marks graduation and transition on to new things. So for me, it's been a flood of former milestones, thanks to Facebook Memories keeping track of the exact dates.

College itself feels like a remote memory. I'm no longer drawn to Austin, no longer spellbound by the UT Austin campus or looking to relive my frequent drives through the western hills. My core friendships have survived, and thanks to that there are new memories with the same folks to keep the nostalgia fountain flowing. 

Likewise, my time in Spain was transformational at the time, but I haven't kept up my Spanish and I've never been back to the country. 

The anniversary that actually inspired this post was my departure to Japan for the first time, which had crossed 10 years in late December 2016. The trip was a magical three weeks of nothing but exploration. That trip began my love affair with Tokyo and it hasn't ended. It may be rough to work in Tokyo, but it's hands-down my favorite place in the world to play.

Speaking of playing in Tokyo: I'll never forget catching up with college friends in the middle of Tokyo during that trip. Not only was it comfortingly familiar to mix old friends and a crazy new place, but it added even more excitement to have their experience and knowledge to guide me around busy places like Shibuya and Shinjuku for the first time. 

On the other hand, as I write now, I'm days away from the 10-year anniversary of leaving for rural Japan on the JET program. That memory is only receding. In retrospect, it was a sad and overwhelmingly lonely time. 

Still, with a job working for Sony, and with both business and pleasure travel to Japan in my upcoming calendar, it's safe to say that the country overall survived crossing the 10-year threshold. 

From my life right now, what will survive its 10-year anniversary?

Preface

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to be more giving. Five months in, it appears that the most help I've provided is to people on their job hunts. So I'm writing here to generalize the thoughts I give.

If you're someone I know and you and I are talking careers, I'm not writing this to replace the contact I have with you. I'm just hoping it helps more people, too.

This will be a short series of posts. I previously wrote about Supply and Demand, as a means of helping you frame your career management and negotiating jobs.

Don't Make My Mistake

Many students, myself included, came out of school wanting to show our flexibility. Somewhere along the way, we're invariably told that we can and should do anything. 

This is nonsense. Beginning in your schooling, your individual experiences will be distilled into a small number of short phrases that actually describe you.

In my case, the list of actual phrases read as follows, in 2011:

• Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
• Video game industry expertise
• Business Analyst
• Statistics

That was it. Sure, my resume showed other things, but my resume sucked back then. We'll cover that in an upcoming post.

These phrases describe what you can do, starting right now, as evidenced by exactly one of two things:

• Existing work experience (this includes internships)
• Academic credentials

And that's it. Anything else you may wish to use to apply for a job, such as an online course or a passionate desire to learn a subject, doesn't count.

Specialties Are These Short Phrases

Your particular combination of short phrases is your set of specialties. This set evolves over time, and like a bonsai tree, you can prune certain ones or let them grow.

I listed my specialties coming out of grad school, but that was 5 years ago. In 2013, my list looked like:

• Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
• Experience working in Tokyo
• E-commerce industry experience
• Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Analytics

Compare the two lists, and you can pretty accurately guess what happened, even if you've never met me. The true story is that I met a Japanese e-commerce company, they liked a combination of 3 out of 4 of my specialties. 

They took a Japanese-speaking statistician with a business bent, and turned him into a Japanese-speaking analytics pro. I have to admit that the company's decision made a bit of sense.

Mix and Match

In 2015, the list evolved a little to look like:

• Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
• Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Analytics
• Experience in a consulting firm
• Experience in e-commerce
• Expertise in video games

By 2015, I began to pick among previous experiences and present the best combination of them to fit the job I wanted. Video games had been out of circulation for a few years, but it was perfectly OK to pull that back out. 

Be Rare

There are not too many people who have Adobe certification, speak fluent Japanese, and have US work authorization. This has worked in my favor.

Having a rare combination of specialties limits the number of companies who want you, but the ones who do will really want you. This results in higher salaries, better retention (i.e., raises), and a higher profile to leap from should you decide to move on. 

This Will Be Your Resume and Your Interviews

Your specialties will form the backbone of your next job application, and your resume will be a part of that. We'll do that next time.

We'll write a resume that shows momentum, and then use that to direct the conversation in interviews.

Thanks for reading. I'd like to hear what you think. Tweet me at @blakerson.

I have never seen, before or again, anguish the way I saw it on my Japanese friends' faces when I came in to school on March 11 (US time). 

Preface

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to be more giving. Two months in, it appears that the most help I've provided is to people on their job hunts. So I'm writing here to generalize the thoughts I give.

If you're someone I know and you and I are talking careers, I'm not writing this to replace the contact I have with you. I'm just hoping it helps more people, too.

This will be a short series of posts. This is the first one, and it's because I encourage you to have the correct mindset about your job search.

The default way of thinking about "getting a job" harms you.

When we're young, it seems like "getting a job" or "getting a job I like" is a destination we'll reach by using little more than luck and a resume free of typos. It's often characterized as an audition process. We talk about making it past the current round of interviews and into the next one. We're all but sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. 

I've learned that this is a toxic mindset. It harms your ability to get jobs, and the ones you do get will be lower quality for challenge, leadership, and compensation.

There is Supply and Demand. You provide the Supply, not Demand.

These two economic concepts are tightly related:

1. Supply and Demand
2. The Labor Market

The labor market, being one of many kinds of markets out there, is characterized by supply and demand. That's the definition of a market: a place where buyers (demand) and sellers (supply) come together to buy and sell.

Consider who's handing money to who in this transaction. Companies, which use money to buy your labor, are the demand. You, as an individual willing to sell your labor, are the supply.

• Most companies buy an unbelievable amount of labor. A company of 2,000 employees, averaging $150,000 of costs to them a year after salary, taxes and benefits, means the company spends $300 million a year on its employees. 
• An extra $5-10k in your salary is a drop in a $300 million ocean.
• Suppose the typical tenure at that company is 3 years. Using back-of-the-envelope math, that's 700 employees coming/going in a given year, which means two heads turn over every day counting Sundays. That's 10-15 hires (not interviews, but actual signed/sealed/delivered hires) a week just filling in gaps, before accounting for growth of the company. HR drones see the mundane routine of this hiring transaction, yawn, and to quote patio11, think "I wonder if the cafeteria has carrot cake today?"

In light of these figures, I think it's safe if we relieve ourselves of all the heart-pounding moments of interviews and calls and replace them with something a little more pragmatic and lower in blood pressure. And cold-blooded. We'll get to that process in additional posts, but while we're focused on the mindset...

If there's something you want, you have to find the right buyer for your skills

There are consequences to the new mindset that you're selling and the company is buying. Importantly, it stops you from believing a few falsehoods about your job search:

Falsehood #1: You can get that job in a highly competitive city if you just make it through the process.

I have too many friends who want to move to a cool city (take for example San Francisco) without taking into account what SF companies deal with.

Suppose you're a generic marketer. Companies in SF don't need to hire you and bring you out to SF. The area is already lousy with marketers. This is true for pretty much any role that isn't "software engineer from a top university." 

From the company's perspective, you are added expense and trouble. 

The expense is straightforward: those already in SF don't need relocation assistance. 

The trouble is because companies are risk-averse. If you were offered a job and relocated, then something went wrong during relocation or you bailed right around your start date, then not only is the company on the hook for some expense or liability, but then Mike the hiring manager and Sam over in HR have to explain to their managers why they chose you over the litany of local candidates for whom these things wouldn't have been an issue and wouldn't have cost the company 1-2 months of time in filling the gap on Mike's team.

Mike and Sam are aware of this. Why should they stick their necks out just because you like San Francisco's latest food trend?

It is possible to get a job in a city where you are not residing. It's also possible to get relocation assistance. But it requires that you not be generic. You have to be a specialist possessing skills which are needed in your field (or at a specific company) but are not already available on the local labor market. 

Falsehood #2: You can win a career shift on the back of your prior (unrelated) experience.

Suppose you're an artist by education and by career. You have a degree from a known university, specializing in graphic design, and you've worked in graphic design since graduation. You've had some exposure to websites, so you start applying to web engineering jobs. From the company's perspective, they fear you being a hanger-on, dragging down the productivity of existing engineers by requiring all kinds of hand-holding. Not to mention, there are probably engineers already applying to this job. It's possible to close this gap, but not immediately. I'll discuss how to do that in a later post.

Falsehood #3: Your desire for a company's [environment/perks/culture] mean you can work there.

We all have preferences in terms of working environment, company size, hours, travel, the balance of pay vs perks, team size, competitiveness, location, and many more things. And it's great to want those things. If we decide that one company is the right set of characteristics for us, that's great, but it means nothing until that's true and the company decides they want to buy your labor.

From the company's perspective, your desire means nothing (in the best case). The company's concern is filling in the hole left by Dave when he quit without warning, which makes Mike's life much more inconvenient since there is one person's work to be done. 

I previously mentioned the best case. I mean this. In the best, case your desire to work for a company is disregarded by the company. In less-than-best cases, less-than-scrupulous employers will use your desire against you in negotiation. Commonly this equates to lowball salaries, poor benefits, no relocation assistance, and other hallmarks of an employer that does not respect you as a skilled professional. I would encourage you to avoid these situations.

Don't be driven by demand

I believe that these falsehoods are driven by the mistaken belief that we're on the demand side, that we're choosing The One Job and then throwing ourselves at it. When we think of ourselves as the demand, and phrase things in terms of "I want ...", it drives us toward places where we can't sell our labor effectively. That ends up somewhere between unemployment, a lowball salary being accepted, or dissatisfaction on the job.

Coming soon

I'll write more posts about isolating your skills, creating a resume that shows momentum, and keeping interviews short and sweet without breaking a sweat.

I'd like to hear what you think. Tweet at me: @blakerson

The Future, as defined by Back to the Future, has come.

I wanted to write a great deal of thoughts. But this one post stood out above all the memes, pictures, and Christopher Lloyd + Michael J. Fox reunion stuff:

Happy ‪#‎BackToTheFuture‬ day, people(s). Cool as it was all going to be, keep in mind Doc & Marty had no internet. Great Scott!

--Bill Nye

First, two necessary disclaimers:

• It's noteworthy that I neglected to write about E3 here last year, so my most recent E3 post was from 2013. 2012-2014 proved to be an uncomfortable phase in life. Add to that my lack of interest in what was going on in gaming at the time. I'm happy to report that that's all changed and I was able to bring my characteristic interest, passion and predictions back for this year. More about this soon, but a big part of it was...
• I'm now an employee of Sony working on the PlayStation Store, so I'm obliged to start with the comment that these opinions are my personal ones and not those of Sony the company. There's no secret/unreleased info here, and while it would be easy to call me biased, I plan to continue to call 'em as I see 'em. More after the run-down.
• Bonus third disclaimer: I'm very late! This was a lot to work through. Sorry about that. 

1. The manufacturer and publisher pressers still rule the day.

These events are still by far the most efficient in terms of the game info delivery per unit of time ratio. 

There are a lot of red herrings, which I'll condense to a rule of thumb: what causes cheers and applause may not sell, and what sells may not cause cheers and applause. 

That said, I think we all like to take the overall temperature of a manufacturer/publisher by their overall quality and breadth of games shown, as well as the tenor of the event. (Also, it is still encouraged to get on the hype train for games you think you'll love.)

I'll take the manufacturers in chronological order:

Nintendo comes first, because I think their Nintendo World Championships event should count as their presser. The fanboys were assembled in the theater, there was a great show put on by all involved, and the appearances by Miyamoto-san and Reggie lit the place up. 

New IP and upcoming releases not only showed up, but they showed up in really interesting and creative ways. A new mecha-football game on 3DS was newly announced and a competition title at the same time. Super Mario Maker's use in the tournament shows its creative potential (and humor potential). A DLC announcement for Smash 4 was greatly performed, too.

Their true presser, a YouTube presentation, showed a relatively weak hand. New Zelda on 3DS appears to be the highlight. The new Star Fox finally showed up, and it is indeed Star Fox. I'll buy it and enjoy it. Seeing none of the new flagship Zelda for Wii U was a disappointment, but on the other hand after that game the Wii U console may well be a lame duck.

But Nintendo will be fine. More on them later.

Microsoft comes next, and they ... didn't seem to change much. I should lead with their strong suit: HoloLens may just be magical. The Minecraft demo looked really, really fantastic. 

Unfortunately, MS has a history of polished tech demos that don't live up to the magic. In 2010 I was pulled in by the magic of Kinect and the potential of Dance Central. It didn't work fantastically in actual living rooms, and the hardware was optional, so it sank. Two Ars Technica reports (here's the latest) lament a "startlingly small field of view" on HoloLens prototype devices. 

There was some stuff that one would think couldn't go wrong (but did). Oddly, MS led off with announcing backwards compatibility with the 360. This is a feature that only matters at launch, when the library is lacking and the previous generation is still going strong. 2 years in, the One and the PS4 are both mainstream consoles producing great games. Combine that with some weirdly couched language about discs and permissions and downloading, and one gets the impression that it's limited-release emulation, closer to Nintendo's Virtual Console than across the board back-compat. That's going to irritate gamers when the feature doesn't work for their game of choice. 

The Elite Controller looks great, I bet it feels great, and it's customizable... but it's retailing for $150? What? eSports types might spring for it, but that is a small audience.

Aside from that, their game content seemed hamstrung by a smaller first-party portfolio compared to Nintendo or Sony. The only memorable presentations were Halo 5 and Gears 4. And those were honestly lacking impressiveness.

In my experience, the Gears presentation wasn't visible. Everything was too dark. To Tycho at Penny Arcade, who has opinions on the franchise, it was less impressive for other reasons:

The demo of Gears of War 4 was, in my opinion, the only off note in the Microsoft press thing.  That’s not an indicator of a bad product or anything like that, there’s no way to know.  I’m saying that was a bad part to show and the whole thing just needs to bake.  Gears is, like Warmachine or Doctor Who, one of my things.  This means that I extend it some sympathy, because it does something uncommon, something I can’t get elsewhere.  Even then, with an optimal audience, I couldn’t find much to hold onto.

MS got to include some third-party and multiplatform stuff, like Square Enix's rebooted Tomb Raider and Ubisoft's The Division. The association with the Tomb Raider demo came off to me as MS trying to respond to the Uncharted franchise over in Sony's house, which is a system-seller unlike Tomb Raider. (That's a give-and-take thing: MS caught up and won in racing sims. Halo is still better than Killzone.) But the game is ultimately multiplatform and credit is due to Square Enix for making such an impressive-looking demo. 

MS needs to get called out for the only presser out of about 10 that was laden with buzzwords like "innovation," "scale" and "epic." They might have missed the memo about getting the core audience back with an E3 showing. 

Sony did much the same thing they did two years ago as well: respond with more games. Sony easily had a higher games-per-second ratio than the other guys.

But man oh man, did they play the announcement card well. (Yes, "they" - I'm in a separate subsidiary from Sony Computer Entertainment, oddly enough, and it's not like I was on the team that put this together anyway.) Starting the whole thing with The Last Guardian - a game assumed long gone - shook the audience awake. Later on they brought up Yu Suzuki to plug a Kickstarter campaign for Shenmue III - a game that was known to be long gone. 

And then... 

If The Last Guardian and Shenmue III were gaming treasures thought lost, then remaking Final Fantasy VII on the new generation of consoles is like the Holy Grail. (Full disclosure: it's multiplatform.) And the modern Japanese part of Square Enix can always find new ways to disappoint its fans (see: Final Fantasy after X; iPhone releases). But Sony's purchase of the timed exclusive means it gets announced by Sony and all the minds are blown in Sony's conference. 

If we still play the "Who won E3?" game based on the aforementioned temperature-taking, Sony won this year handily. 

2. Once and for all, here's the rule for PC gaming vs console gaming ups and downs.

A long, long time ago there was a column written by some gaming blogger that suggested that the best gaming to be had can be had on PC or on console, depending on the season. 

What it really comes down to is console lifecycles. If the console is in its peak of lifecycle (2-5 years in), that platform will have the best gaming experience possible. If you're at the end of a cycle and the start of a new one, the PC will have the best experience. 

That blogger was right, and it's surprising that the rest of the world hasn't caught on to that. 

PC is great for innovating gameplay ideas in indie development, business models, faster hardware, and now we're seeing that PC got to VR and AR first. The console will incorporate PC's ideas, polish them, and make them more available to all, but it'll have to wait until the next lifecycle to accomplish most of that.

So while it's cute that there was a "PC Gaming Day" with Day[9] hosting and a theater full of PC gaming fans, right now it's the console's turn to shine. The PC will continue to quietly develop new ideas and practices, and I bet in another 5 years the PC Gaming Day will be where it's at.

3. VR (and AR) is coming, but not yet.

The demos just all sound too rough around the edges. An internal Sony writeup from "our guy on the floor" stated as much, and he didn't spare Sony's own Morpheus tech from that review. 

4. Shooters are back. Thank goodness.

For several years, the only shooter game in town was Call of Duty, and we really needed to be saved from that series jumping the shark. While its presence at E3 is still massive (its sales justify that), shooters got a lot of love in the form of Destiny, The Division, Rainbow Six, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Doom, Deus Ex, Gears of War, Halo 5, Just Cause 3, and Ghost Recon among still more.

Shooters birthed PC gaming, online multiplayer, put Microsoft on the map, helped Activision stock reach great heights... I really can't imagine why they went away to begin with. But as someone who grew up with those series and their predecessors, I have to say I'm incredibly stoked for the next couple years.

5. Toy figurines are the new cash cow. Nintendo is saved.

For all the dithering we talk about when we talk about Nintendo and their content library on a system that isn't selling like gangbusters, the amiibo figurines are keeping the profits rolling in. This cash will more than suffice to keep them working on their next hardware.

6. We finally have meaningful facial expressions.

Tomb Raider and Uncharted both showed wonderful subtlety in facial expressions. We used to only have the power for very exaggerated facial gestures like a raised eyebrow (Uncharted's Drake used that for just about every sly unsurprised one-liner in the franchise). 

Grand Theft Auto, often the bar for quality in game production, only showed anger from its character animation.

Compare that to voice acting. It's been good in AAA games for over a decade. 

Those two games demoed this year signaled that visual acting will be a thing. That means digital actors, which in turn means we can take advantage of the subtlety of good Hollywood actors. The potential is there technically, but what about financially?

Games to watch!

-Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: After the recent DX game rebooted the franchise successfully, Eidos has no qualms about boasting the legacy of the older games. Personally, I'm super excited to see Eidos Montreal get another crack at this great IP after they constructed such a great world last time and improved upon their design mistakes with the Director's Cut. 

-Tomb Raider: Visually very strong, with a heavy Uncharted influence. Looks very promising. 

-Metal Gear Solid V: We already got a taste in the form of Ground Zeroes, but the finished product looks like it has potential to be gorgeous, deep, and oddly humorous in that most Kojima-ish of ways. Here's the 40-minute gameplay demo, if that's your thing. The game releases soon. It'll probably be a masterpiece.

-Super Mario Maker: Seriously, we've all wanted this for so long. I'm expecting some great stuff to surface.

-Star Fox Zero: New Star Fox! It looks like it's carrying on the tradition. We've had to wait long enough.

-Wattam - the new one from Katamari Damacy designer Keita Takahashi. This one appeared in very brief teaser form previously, but according to Warren Spector, it surprised and delighted him. Quoth Mr. Spector:

(Frankly, I worry that it’s so different, it might run into some commercial difficulties, but let’s hope for the best.) Wattam is a wonder. Soulful in a medium that’s often soulless… a work of childlike wonder… a real sense of discovery… and often laugh-out-loud funny. I just hope people get it. I’m not even going to describe the graphics or gameplay. I don’t have the words. Just trust me on this one…

I haven't seen any of the game in person myself but I definitely trust his judgment and I'll always keep an eye on anything Keita Takahashi does. 

And there we have it! Took quite a while to think through and write, but this year had a great E3 for games overall and for me personally. 

Next year: Will I finally get to see E3 in person?

"Social science. Psychology. Ethics. 1-2 hours. Easy. “A dystopian document thriller”. Use as context for discussing subjects like immigration or ethics."

This one's been sitting on my mind for a long time, but since the Penny Arcade guys started to touch upon the idea, it's about time I got it all out and laid it to rest:

• Reddit post: Look what my gf made me! (link to imgur picture of a Portal cake)
• Post ranks highly because a gamer has a gf + a cake + a Valve reference in the real world
• Website posts one of these headlines: "Best Gamer Girlfriend Ever? You Decide" - "Would YOU Eat This Portal Cake Made by a Real Person?" - "The Cake ISN'T a Lie: It's Real, and It's Delicious" - "You Won't Believe What Valve Inspired in the Kitchen" 

As I write, the Internet is atwitter with merger talks between T-Mobile and Sprint.

In the last couple years, T-Mobile has grown rapidly and competed well by marketing itself as a consumer-friendly, scrappy underdog. It's worked well.

In the same time frame, Sprint was acquired by SoftBank, one of Japan's largest and most successful companies. It's also one of Japan's three mobile carriers (unlike the US's four) and led by Masayoshi Son, an outspoken CEO. Son now acts as the face of Sprint.

SoftBank is in both wired and wireless in Japan, so I thought I'd share some distinctions between those two, and with T-Mobile.

Wired Broadband

Mobile

iPhone 5 on SoftBank, Japan

iPhone 5 on T-Mobile US

Device: $549 or more up front (example here is a current iPhone 5c, 16GB. I paid $649 when moving last year)
BYOD
Lowest usable monthly bill baseline: $30 (prepaid with automatic credit card billing)
What's included: 5GB LTE data and 100 minutes talk time
Talk minutes: 10 cents per minute

Total outlay in two years, if you almost never make calls: $1,269 (1/3rd cheaper)

No contract, no ETF.

The moral of the story

When Son-san talks to American audiences about wired broadband speeds, he may have a leg to stand on, but it's irrelevant to the transaction that's really at hand. SoftBank the mobile carrier implies Japanese precedents for slower speeds, higher prices, purposely incomprehensible plan structures, rigid contracts, and unhappy customers. 

That makes SoftBank a profitable and successful company in Japan. It doesn't get much better on other carriers because there are only two more and neither of them is interested in price competition.

Personally, I would expect the profitable and successful SoftBank, not the happy-sunshine-unicorns SoftBank, to take control of one of potentially 3 American mobile carriers.

It's early on Christmas morning and naturally, the child is awake before the parents.

It's not the ridiculous excitement of presents, of course. This year I unceremoniously overtook my mom in the income column, which results in Adult Christmas.

It's the kind of Christmas where presents are small in scale - no more big ticket purchases, no more big airplane ticket purchases... really, one tries to minimize the Tickets, Purchases, and Big. The kind of Christmas where the best possible thing is to sleep in gloriously and have some good wine later in the day.

It's also the kind of Christmas where you finally appreciate that having a home, and heat, and a loving family of any size truly are blessings. I experienced life without these things at times in 2013. A lot of musicians I follow on Facebook are saying influential things right now, like reminders to be grateful for those very things, or to call the family and friends rather than texting them. 

I'm taking the vacation opportunity to write, since I've had a chance to get some rest.

While there's small presents being exchanged here at Chez Blakey, I bought my own Big Exciting Don't Want to Sleep Present.

It's a Wii U. Shocking, I know.

I created an artificial constraint for myself by plugging things in to the living room TV. While I did an amazing "stealth install" - hiding systems inside a hollow cabinet thought to be for speakers, and fully enjoying wireless controllers - I'm now limited to three HDMI cables with which to plug in all my "next-gen" goodness.

Three console makers equals three systems plugged in, right? Nope - an Apple TV snuck in and took one slot, leaving me with two consoles.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 being there were once no-brainers. But once the Wii U was plugged in, one had to go.

Gamers who know my habits could jump to the conclusion that the PlayStation 3, with its weak UX and de-unified online experience, had to go. But no! The 360 has been retired.

Ever since I got a 360 in 2007, it's been delightful. Halo 3 provided so much fun that it alone was worth the price of admission. I believe that Xbox Live Arcade truly brought us indie games, moreso than anything Steam was doing in 2007. And the Humble Indie Bundle wouldn't even exist for another three years beyond that. Sony and Nintendo also followed in Microsoft's footsteps, followed by Apple in 2008 with the App Store, yielding the entire small/indie/bite-size/$3/$10/$15/$30 world we have today. Back in 2007, I experienced indie nirvana with Lumines for XBLA, and I may hook the 360 back up offline just to enjoy that some more. 

The 360 was also the first console to evolve. Remember this?

It's the wee little young Xbox 360 interface. Back when it was just a baby Xbox.

Over the last seven years the system grew up into an awesome adult, one that worshipped at the altar of Good UX, carrying in tow the totems of Netflix and Last.fm to lead us into a streamed living room of The Future.

But like all adults, it went off and did its own thing. In the last two years - when my own unit was unplugged and I was off in Japan, a land not known for its Xbox 360s - it continued evolving in a way that no longer jived with me. The reunion this fall was like some adult reunions where you find you no longer have anything in common with someone you used to know quite well. 

Good UX was replaced with account migrations and verification codes and email confirmations. This series of events actually happened, but is in chat transcript form for dramatic re-enactment:

MS: You have to have a secondary email address for security.
me: (choose the one on file)
MS: OK, now you have to have another one.
me: Ugh. (enter in another address)
MS: OK, verify that one with the 4-digit code we sent.
me: UGH. *gets off couch, checks email* *enters 4-digit code*
MS: OK, now click the link we sent to the secondary email.
me: @#$(*@ *clicks link*
MS: OK, so verify this using the primary security email.
me: WHAT THE FUCKING HELL MICROSOFT. *clicks button to have email sent to the *first* email.*
MS: OK, we just emailed your *first* email a security code. Enter that.
me: Jesus Christ, fuck this, I'm buying a PS4. *copy and pastes code*
MS: *cleverly offers a 'I use this address often, don't ask me for more codes' checkbox*
me: is this over yet?
MS: Are you sure you want to add this secondary email?
me: YES FOR FUCK'S SAKE I'M CANCELING MY SURFACE 2 AND XBOX ONE AND GOING ENTIRELY OVER TO APPLE. KNOCK IT OFF.
MS: I'm not going to /tell/ you you're done, but you're now in an options menu and probably done and HAY 2-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION THAT'S COOL RIGHT? WOULD YOU LIKE HELP?
me: *burns a house down*