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Rite of passage – All this →

My older son had to go to a meeting at work this morning. He works at a grocery store in town and I assume the all-hands meeting was called to prepare the staff for an especially busy day because of a big sale.

Thing is, my son’s a bag boy.
via Rite of passage – All this.

Dr Drang doesn’t believe his 17-year old son should have gone to a store meeting with little to no relevance to him as a bag boy, but I disagree.

As someone who got their first job at 16, I know what it’s like to go to meetings that have little impact on what you do, day-to-day. I was still a high-school student at that time, and on the weekend, I’d work a few hours at the local Apple reseller.

I’ve been to my fair share of meetings that I probably didn’t, strictly speaking, need to go to, being a filthy casual and working one day a week. But here’s the thing, I always wanted to go because it meant I kept in touch with my colleagues I didn’t see every day, including all the ones I wouldn’t see regularly, due to them not working on the weekend. Going to those meetings kept me in the loop with all that was going on in the business and ensured I was seen as the reliable guy who’d turn up for meetings he wasn’t necessarily needed at.

Sure, I didn’t need to go to those meetings. But I’d like to think I’m a better person — a better employee — because I did.

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Evolution

At the start of the year, I picked up a MacBook Pro with Retina display. Half late-graduation present, half-birthday present to myself. It’s the best Mac I’ve ever used, but then again, why wouldn’t it be?

I mean, you would think that given the innumerable and considerable technology advancements since the last time I purchased a Mac (March 2011), that any new Mac would improve upon every aspect of my previous Mac and then some. I don’t know about you, but I would definitely be questioning what the tech industry was doing if there were regressions of any kind.

Thankfully, there aren’t. I’m excited to say that the MacBook Pro with Retina display gets pretty damn close to my perfect machine. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted from a portable Mac. It’s powerful without being too bulky or heavy. It has great battery life without sacrificing portability, and while it may not be as upgradeable as I’d like (more on this in a bit), that’s a compromise I’m willing to accept for a machine that is otherwise everything I’ve ever wanted out of a personal computer, especially seeing as Apple offer configure-to-order options that satisfy the vast majority of customers, including your truly.

Because specs matter, my MacBook Pro comes with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of flash storage. The amount Apple charge for the 1TB flash storage upgrade borders on the extortionate, but there’s a price for everything, and that was a price I was willing to pay for some of the highest-performing flash storage around. Yes, my new MacBook Pro cost me a pretty penny, but considering this is a computer I’ll be using for hours at a time, every day for the next three to four years, I think the price was pretty reasonable. And since my Retina MacBook Pro now supports 4K displays at 60Hz, I don’t think I’ll be upgrading from this machine any time soon.

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Spectator Sport, Part II

As one World Cup ends and the other begins, I’m wondering how I managed to cope with The International 2014 Playoffs, where 123 games of Dota 2 were played over four days, starting at 2am our time and going for a solid 12 hours.

It was pretty mad.

Alright, so it’s not exactly the FIFA World Cup. But it might as well be: the total prize pool for this year’s The International Dota 2 tournament is going to get pretty close to US $11 million, making it bigger than the Tour de France ($3 million) and the US Masters ($9 million)¹. Not bad for a game that’s free to play — and especially so considering everything bar the original $1.6 million has been contributed by players, representing a quarter of their total contributions to the game since May this year. To be fair, Dota 2 is the most played game on Steam by a long shot, but make no mistake — it’s making money, hand over fist, for Valve.

Ever since I started playing Dota 2, I wasn’t really sure what Valve were doing putting an emphasis on watching the game being played, as much as they did on actually playing the game. I’ll probably never understand why random pub matches can have hundreds of spectators, unless there’s some kind of video-game watching club on the internet somewhere that I’m not privy to. But after watching The International playoffs and soon, the main event, I now know that it’s about watching as much as it is about playing.

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Who won the World Cup (of arm folding)? →

The way those three players timed their turn brings up another important point. You’ve got to turn to your left, sure. But how? Like a disapproving dad, a la Iran’s Javad Nekounam? Like a terrified bunny rabbit, as we see from Croatia’s Luka Modrić? Like an automaton, like Ecuador’s Jefferson Montero? Like a man hugging himself after a long therapy session, like Ghana’s Kwadwo Asamoah?

Further World Cup reading: Lionel Messi is very impressive, on the field and in the stats. The World Cup, redesigned looks at what an aesthetically-modified tournament would look like. And last but not least, an Australian-developed wearable is giving Columbia the technological edge. (Too bad they’re out, James Rodriguez’s first goal against Uruguay was bloody fantastic.)

The Slap

Unique

Once I figured out I wasn’t good enough to play Dota 2 competitively (like the majority of Dota 2 players, I guess), I started playing for fun. And for some really cool, unique items that granted custom hero animations, like the super-cool custom Frozen Nova animation you see above for Crystal Maiden.

My piece over at AppleTalk writes about how I’m mostly OK with in-app purchases, including the ones offered by free-to-play titles like Dota 2, which offer no gameplay benefits other than minor cosmetic changes:

But eventually there comes a point where you realise you should spend something on a game. For me, I reached that point after spending a few hundred hours in Dota 2 without paying a cent

I started off by completing Drow Ranger’s Jewel of the Forest set, something I already had most of the items for. And then it kind of snowballed from there. I remember one of the earliest items I “had to have” was this one game where a Juggernaut had a Blade Fury animation that looked different to normal — watching the replay, I found out about the Fireborn Odachi, which I then hunted down on the Steam Community Market and purchased. Later on, I found out about Juggernaut’s Kantusa the Script Sword, only available with a limited edition SteelSeries mouse or via the Steam Community Market — as luck would have it, I managed to find the exact mouse during a recent trip to Malaysia.

Then it was Necrophos’ Scythe of Twin Deaths, with it’s 360-no-scythe animation when casting his ultimate, Reaper’s Scythe.