Less than one year ago, I wrote that AI would soon be able to generate new music on demand. As an example, I imagined it generating a Beatles/Skrillex mashup about hoverboards.
Well, here it is… almost. It's not perfect. It wouldn't allow me to use real artist names in my request, and it doesn't have enough Beatles influence, in my opinion. It sounds more like Fall Out Boy meets dubstep, honestly. Still, it's still a massive leap forward. Here's what it generated for “A 1960s rock / dubstep mashup about hoverboards.”
Here are some mobile games that don't suck. Most are paid. Most have no advertisements or in-app purchases. Some offer to remove ads for a fee, which I recommend paying.
Not everyone can buy games, yet we all pay eventually, either with our money or with our attention. We buy the product or we are the product. This list is for those who would rather buy the product.
DATA WING (iOS, Android): A free racing game with high production value, a great story, and fantastic music.
Lifeline (iOS, Android): Text with a stranded astronaut in real time to help him find his way home.
Space Marshals (iOS, Android): A top-down space/western shooter with stealth mechanics.
The Room Two (iOS, Android): A 3D escape room. The other games in the series are great, too, but The Room Two is my favorite.
Nowhere House (Android): A 2D escape room with a cartoon style. The other games in the Dark Dome series are also great.
Rusty Lake: Roots (iOS, Android): Unravel a family's history by solving escape-type puzzles. Profoundly weird. Some have compared it to Twin Peaks, which I've never watched. The other games in the Rusty Lake and Cube Escape series are also great, especially Rusty Lake Hotel, Cube Escape: The Lake, and Cube Escape: Seasons.
Super Mario Run (iOS, Android): Mario with a single button. Some complained about this game, but I found it satisfying. It has that classic Nintendo polish.
Plants vs. Zombies (iOS, Android): Defend your garden by using your plants to fight off zombies. The sequel should be avoided, in my opinion, because it's ruined by mechanics that manipulate the player into purchasing power-ups.
Why compile this list? I'm hardly a gamer. I just want to highlight games that offer exceptional experiences by avoiding ads and in-app purchases. The lesson? Choose a business model that supports your art, rather than ruining your art to make money.
If I'm wrong about the dangers of social media, so be it. In fact, that would be a good outcome. We would need to find another cause of the discord and the weird rebellious conformity of our time, but they wouldn't be caused by the tools that are now so intertwined with society, and that would be a good thing. On the other hand, if I'm right about the dangers of social media, popular opinion will inevitably come to understand that harm more clearly over time. There will be many casualties along the way, but learning the hard way is sometimes necessary. Either way, it will be fine. I don't think I'm wrong, which I why I continue not to use social media, but it will be fine.
One of the trickier aspects of digital life is the constant pressure to opine. To have a strong opinion on a subject, and to share it with the world. It’s literally baked into the design of the most popular platforms… ‘What’s on your mind, Jamie?’ wonders Facebook. Some of the finest minds in the world work extremely hard to encourage you to tell everyone what you’re thinking and feeling. No wonder it’s hard to resist.
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If I am honest, I know very little about most bad things going on in the world. Certainly not enough that sharing my view will inform or educate or enlighten. Yet whenever I see a news report, an urgent need rises up: what shall I say about this? I have a feeling about it – which must be shared! (And ideally in emotionally charged language, since that will receive more interactions).
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What social media has done is to make silence an active – rather than the default – choice. To speak publicly is now so easy that not doing it kind-of-implies you don’t know or don’t care about what’s going on in the world. Who wants to look ignorant or indifferent? And besides, who doesn’t want to appear kind or wise, or morally upstanding in front of others?
But the result is an undirected anger from all sides: frenetic, purposeless, habitual and above all moralising.
I agree. Of course we should criticize wrongdoing, but knee-jerk, impersonal, emotionally-charged reactions are sometimes profoundly counter-productive, and that's precisely what social media selects for. I actually wrote a blog post in August expressing very similar concerns, and I wish I could have quoted Jamie in it.
In writing about the dangers of social media, I've encountered the objection that social media probably isn't worth worrying about because people said the same thing about the internet, television, radio, books, and so on. I think this objection is flawed for two reasons.
The new blink-182 song Dance with Me is extremely catchy, but it can't really be added to playlists or played at the gym, for example, because of the sexual joke at the beginning of the track. I mean, the whole song is about sex—fair enough—and individual sensibilities do differ. Still, the spoken part is so jarring that I wouldn't want to play the song in polite company.
I've encountered this problem before, usually with bonus tracks that play after several minutes of silence. They can be great songs, but there's no great way to add them to playlists, and there's no way to add the first song without the silence and the bonus track. It would be trivial for an app to implement a technical solution to this problem: just let the user choose an offset of some number of seconds and apply that offset whenever the song is played from a playlist. However, it's not clear if that would be worth the added user interface complexity. Most people would never use the feature, and they might be confused if they saw a menu item for it somewhere. Perhaps the easiest solution would be for publishers to release alternate cuts more often. Let's get a version of Dance with Me without the joke. Let's get Maybe I'm Just Tired without the bonus track.
Not long ago, an acquaintance had their identity stolen. The case was rather serious, with the perpetrators draining thousands of dollars from the victim’s bank accounts.