reg:exp

Dots and Dashes

Here's a quick update of my never-ending search for the right pen and paper:

Dot Grid Notebooks
Before they closed up shop, I used to buy Japanese notebooks with a faint 5mm dot grid from Mai Do in Palo Alto (apparently the SF location is still open). They had just the right form factor (B5?), though the spiral binding reliably broke and started to spill pages when I got through 3/4 of the notebook.

While in Seattle, I found the Behance dot grid books at Peter Miller, the architecture book store near Pike place market. They are beautiful, sturdy, and have great paper. They are a little large, and the $14-$18 price tag is steep, even if you "value your ideas."

Since my last Behance is filling up quickly, I spent some time searching for alternatives. While I didn't find any other notebooks, I came across Incompetech's Graph Paper Page that lets roll your own graph paper designs (including crosses and dots) from parametric templates. I'd love to make a spiral-bound book from those templates, just have to find a small-volume printer with good binding services.

Behance has a one-page PDF of their "actionpad" available for download as well which has dots and "action step" areas.

I also got a free Maker's Notebook a few weeks ago which as a light-blue eight-inch two-weight grid. Unfortunately, it's book binding makes it pretty uncomfortable for me to write as the pages just don't like to lie flat.

Pens & Markers

For regular sketching and writing I switched to Prismacolor Fine Line markers. They're not quite as smooth as the Micron pens but, unlike the Microns, they don't leak from a little bit of shaking in a backpack.

For bold lines, I found the Pilot Bravo!, also at Peter Miller in Seattle. A little too thick for writing but great for highlighting thicker lines in sketches. Oh, and it's cheap.

Sharpie's Pen on the other hand is mediocre (what did I expect?) and certainly doesn't hold up to Prismacolor pens. Not enough ink flow, and a bit scratchy.

Spore gets hammered on Amazon for DRM

Will Wright's Spore was released today and the reviews on Amazon are abysmal. When I checked, 38 of 47 reviews gave it one lonely star. I'm not particularly interested in games, but what's fascinating here is that the dominant reason for the low reviews appears to be that folks are really ticked off by EA's use of DRM. This may be a genuine expression of outrage from disappointed buyers or (more likely) it may just be the fad-du-jour to post a hostile comment - I don't think that the original motivation matters much. Fact is, any visitor to the product page is currently overwhelmed with angry negative posts in the comments; any other comments about the game itself are easily lost in the noise.

As any small independent publisher can attest to, early reviews on Amazon are hugely important for raising awareness at the long tail end of products. Books have been written about how to promote your self-published tome by eliciting good reviews. Do these strategies matter for big sellers at the head of the curve as well? How much of an impact will all this negativity have on EA's bottom line? Enough to start rethinking DRM? The game did immediately capture the #1 sales spot in games, so folks are clearly still buying.

Here are some screenshots in case the negative reviews mysteriously disappear, as apprarently happened on amazon.co.uk:

Update#1: Looks like others have picked up on this as well.

Update#2:Now that it's Monday the rest of the working world of online journalism is covering as well. We're up to 650 comments and a one-star average. The backlash-to-the-backlash is gathering momentum as well, with some people complaining that they can't find any useful information in the forums with all the DRM screaming going on. That makes it more likely that in the near future something will happen with the review page (wiping, locking it down, ...?). Some more captures:

Monday, 9am PST:

Monday, 12:30pm PST:

Update #3:
Keeping count of the 1-star reviews stopped being interesting at the time those comments hit 1k sometime yesterday. But here's a wrinkle to file under there's-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity: I kust came across the following ad that Amazon is running on Google. Search for spore drm and you'll get the following sponsored link:

More MTurk Experiments

More Mechanical Turk experiments are on their way... Here's a quick preview of some data collected in response to the task "Write a one liner that sums up your life."

This is a random wordle visualization, but it seemed very a propos -- the ominous clod of particulars hanging over the collective submitters' lives.