Luxury Problems

Modern video games are amazing. While the early first-person shooters had made-up monsters and made-up weapons like a nail-gun or a plasma gun, the modern ones incorporate the virtual equivalent of real weapons in the game. It’s like racing games from a decade ago, where you could choose and configure a “real car” and pretend to notice the difference in how it handled corners. There’s nothing better than to play “Call of Duty” online with friends from a country with voluntary military service and just casually mention that you trained with the Heckler & Koch G3 and the Uzi submachine gun in “meat-space” when you were drafted into the army. The resulting drop in their testosterone levels is enough for two or three kills.

Where games are still in need of improvement is the AI though. It’s just not I enough. They probably started with writing AI routines for zombies, because they don’t do much, and then called it a day. A big improvement I would like to see is that even single-player games should be networked, so that the AI on the hundreds of thousands of consoles can exchange information and learn in a huge cluster. “Number of human players killed per unit of time” as a fitness function could be easily optimized by a genetic algorithm, with the behaviour of all the human players as data.

In any case, I got so fed up that I tried to hire some WoW gold farmers in South-East Asia as my opponents. But because I paid them, they became very deferential and wanted to make their customer happy, so they let themselves killed easily and afterwards congratulated me. I like that behaviour in real life, but it was like exercising on a resistance machine without a counterweight.

Well, even if they’re pretending to not be smarter than a computer, at least I’m paying for the satisfaction of humiliating another human being. And it’s only WoW gold anyway.

I’ve decided I need to think myself down to average people and figure out “what the users think”. I might as well get paid for it, so I’ve accepted to be on a user panel, giving input to a health insurance company wanting to improve their web site and get more people to sign up for the single-room hospital upgrade and such. I hope I can learn something from the “if I was an average-user, I would not understand this” comments of my co-panelists.

Our moderator, a pretty young thing, probably with a BA in English, shows us different designs for their new web site. One of the designs has what looks like a bunch of pictures scattered over it, presumably of satisfied customers, all put up in neat white frames like Polaroid photos, and when one mouses over a photo, a little story pops up about how the person in the frame was really ill and how the insurance company helped them.

Apart from the fact that noone remembers Polaroid, I point out that noone would believe the little stories, because either the photos are stock photography and the stories are made up, or, if these people really exist, then they are selected out of a user survey that could be a thousand times the size of this little sample, with an average story that is not nearly as heart-warming as the ones chosen.

Our moderator tells me I am cynical for thinking this. But how can it be any different? Would a profit-oriented company really allow to put people on the front page of their site who are saying negative things about it? I’m astounded at the ability of people to believe that the person really exists and the story really happened, all on the combination of a photo of below-professional-model attractiveness plus a few words written by a marketing department. Probably was an evolutionary advantage a million years ago.

Well, I suppose it’s better than a product that is only endorsed by a cartoon character.

It’s bad enough that my wealth advisor didn’t get me into and out of Volkswagen AG when the signs were there to see for months, he also didn’t get me tickets for the London premiere of “Quantum of Solace”. I had to go with the civilians when it opened Friday night.

Brand Cameo was not up to date when it counted, so I took my DeBerry Light Writer Pen and started taking notes. For women’s clothing and accessories, the tipping point to going nova and being mass-market is when Madonna wears it or uses it. For men, it’s when it shows up in the latest James Bond.

Even though they only warned against using mobile phones when the movie started and I could see other guys with illuminated laps, they kicked me out around half-way through the movie. That was a bit of a problem, but I found a guy in front of the cinema who already sold the movie on pirated DVD. That’s good enough. Cost me 50p.

Back home, I got a bit annoyed when I discovered that the movie was a version that had been filmed in a cinema itself, instead of one that was leaked from the movie studio. I didn’t care about the quality, but it meant that guy or one of his pirate friends had been able to get into the premiere and not me. I decided to completely sever my connection to my bank.

After 90 more minutes of pausing, forwarding and skipping over the action scenes, I had a complete list. As usual, I had had the Tom Fords and the other stuff for months, but starting next week, I’d be seeing the plebs wearing them everywhere. Removing the items from my wardrobe and putting them into boxes for charity took me another 20 minutes. Then I got a better idea. Sent them to my contact in Hong Kong for copying. Should be a nice profit when we flood the market in two weeks.

I’m halfway to London with the Ambien kicking in but I’m tired of reading Information Anxiety 2 and my Longines watch is metal-on-metal with my MacBook Pro, so I switch to the lilliputian seatback screen and start re-watching Donnie Darko.

The rabbit is still Harvey’s evil twin but at least the Ambien’s taking the edge off. Everything’s going smoothly and then there’s this awful look on Jake Gyllenhaal’s face and his house has been flattened. I can’t remember what caused this in the original version which wasn’t “formatted to fit your screen”.

I try to forget about it but I can’t so I swipe my credit card and punch in the number for Brickwork.

“Hello, Brickwork India.”

“Hi, I need to speak to Guptash [surname deleted].”

“Sir he’s not at work right now - it’s 3am here in Bangalore.”

“This is very important.”

“Understood sir, I will patch you through, one moment please…”

A groggy Guptash answers: “Hmph… hello?”

“Hi Guppy, it’s Bryan, I’m on a plane so should keep this pretty fast.”

“Is this another pan-and-scan question sir?”

“Related. I’m watching Donnie Darko and Jake Gyllenhaal’s pad has been crushed and I don’t know why.”

“No problem sir, please bear with me while I retrieve and review a Donnie Darko plot synopsis…”

As I wait for Guppy I count how many rows I am from the rear exit. Five. Five rows, five sheep jumping over five rows after ditching in the Atlantic… and I’m asleep. Dreaming Ambien dreams.

Guppy can write up his report in an email.

The Colonel needs another favour - one of his start-ups’ “business model” is serving as a broker for WordPress themes (two years ago, people would still have referred to it as “an eBay for WordPress themes”), and has recently noticed a competitor that is “a broker for WordPress themes for cloud computing.” Since that does not make any sense, I’ve suggested his company should just escalate and be reborn as “a broker for WordPress themes for mobile cloud computing”, but they’ve somehow managed to patent the idea and barred others from claiming to be in that market. The patent office in the US will grant anything.

They seem to receive all the share of mind these days, so he’s asked me to please help him Lehman the competitor, and not just reduce its value like last time. I tell Dikran to hack into their systems (yes, the 80’s are back) and have a look around.

The term “open door policy” is even more dated than “hacking”, but seems to apply here. They’ve configured Exchange / Outlook so that everyone can see everyone’s calendar and schedule appointments with each other. Dikran asks whether he should just schedule a lot of offsites for everyone so productive work slows to nothing, but I ask him to implement a more subtle approach: Schedule a few meetings for the CFO, and then one or two for the CEO one or two days later.

It’s important that those are scheduled outside of the current “month view” so they are not immediately visible to the owner of the calendar. Dikran’s Linux friends are always saying, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, so someone else will notice these meetings soon enough.

Title the meetings for the CFO “re: cash flow” and the ones for the CEO “cost cutting / headcount”. The resulting rumours should take care of morale quite nicely and leave the company deader than Joost. Maybe we can hire some of the early leavers too. Those seem always to be the best people.

So I’m leafing through a website dedicated to the trainers Hugh Laurie wears in House when Dikran calls.

“Hey Bry, how ya doing?”

“Not great. I’m surrounded by four days of falaffel wraps and used towels because I won’t let the maid into my room. I don’t want hotel management to find out that I’ve hacked the TV and wired it up to my MacBook Pro to watch aXXos.”

“Bummer. How’s New York?”

“A little unnerving. Ásta’s left for London via Reykjavík and I think I have Paradise Syndrome, like Hugh Laurie or Dave Stewart. It’s when you can’t relax, knowing the world has let you achieve everything you wanted to achieve.”

“Have you? I thought nobody was reading Luxury Problems yet, and we’re still working on [deleted] for you. Speaking of which: I was phoning to say there’s a delay from the Norwegians’ side. Looks like it’ll be a month overdue.”

It’s not the first delay, and the smell of degraded hummus in my room has put me on edge.

“What is this bullshit Dikran? Are you holding out on me? About to play Zuckerberg to my Winklevoss? … And are you phoning me from Zankou’s again? What the fuck?”

“Of course not Bry, chill.” he sounds evasive. “Anyway, I gotta go, my tabbouleh’s ready.” And then he hangs up.

Howard Hughes never had these problems with the Spruce Goose.

The Colonel is taking the old cliche “We’re not only investing money, you’re also getting our experience and contacts” to its logical conclusion by charging 30 % of the common shares for zero dollar investment. CEOs only get his business card, and they each have a slot once a week in which they can call him. Pity that most of his contacts are in the online porn industry though, where he made all his money.

The only exception is Mikkel. Mikkel is a Danish entrepreneur who is now running the usual blog site / RSS feed / affiliate marketing thing everyone is doing if they’re 22, have an MBA from Stanford and were able to talk a friend from MIT into acting as CTO. Mikkel desperately wants to go the opposite direction: While the Colonel is investing his online porn revenues in Web 2.0 to give them a facade of respectability, Mikkel’s goal is to become a porn mogul. Maybe he is rebelling against his parents.

So the Colonel has taken Mikkel under his wing and shows him the ropes. First he had to disabuse him of the notion that 60 % of online porn is really consumed by women. Despite it is obviously squarely marketed to men, he somehow has this romantic notion that there’s a lot of women in the world who want to watch other women get slapped on the forehead with a man’s genital organ.

The hard part for Mikkel is going to be to convince his employees that this is the future of the company. What he wants his company to do is to build a kind of Pandora or Last.fm for sexually stimulating material: The site shows you a few images and asks you to vote on what gets the blood pressure up. Then it does a collaborative filter to figure out what you might like based on what other users voted on. Further interaction with the site acts like a gateway drug to more and more abstruse perversions. It’s like the music sites always say “Discover new stuff you might like!”

Of course it’s all taggable, mashable and RSS able. Also, they recently developed some facial recognition software that’s going to be useful.

It’s when I find myself seriously considering buying a Kaleidescape system to deal with my escalating media habit that I finally acknowledge that I have a problem. But where to turn? Karl’s in transit to Zurich, so I post a question on Ask Metafilter, using the angsty luxury-guilt phrasing that serves as catnip/crack over there on the Blue.

I get a lot of answers, most of them patronising, but this one poster says that I need to read this book called Information Anxiety 2. So now I’ve ordered it from Amazon and I’m stressed about the fact I just added more to my to-consume media list. Amazon says Information Anxiety 2 is 350 pages - a sadistic length given the subject matter. It should be a fucking haiku.

Having re-read the Metafilter comments I’m no closer to a solution but I feel like I need a shower. Then it hits me: I’ll FedEx my media to Brickwork and Guppy can consume it for me. Shame he did computer science at Bangalore University not lit crit.

I’ve just got back to the Library Hotel after a hellish afternoon acting as side-gunner for Ásta, over from the UK to shop. Our personal Mogadishu was Abercrombie & Fitch’s flagship store on Fifth.

It’s incredibly dark inside, vintage Faithless is pounding, and I feel like I’m at a rave with a poly-ethnic Bacardi ad crowd plus the guests from your parent’s 30th wedding anniversary. My elbow-padded Massimo Dutti jumper clings awkwardly to my armpits in the throbbing humidity.

I collapse into one of the pseudo-expensive brown leather armchairs, while Ásta works through the made-in-Macau stock looking for loungewear which fits properly and perfectly represents “Brand Her”. We’d probably have more luck scoring pills in here.

When I get bored of eyeing the jailbait greeter-dancers jiggling on the stairs, I give Fred a ring. Fred’s family own a major clothing retailer on the Continent, and he’s currently doing his time as head of the Nice store.

So he tells me that the quality of the SKUs from their factories in Vietnam is getting so bad that they have taken to hiring middle-age actors/actresses and assigning them in couples to each store.

The shills dress like Scandinavian tourists, and go up to any girl who looks unconvinced by a garment she’s trying on (it’s always a girl). They ask her where she found the article on the shelves, saying it looks nice and that they want to buy it for their daughter. Emboldened, the girl buys the item after all.

Fred says average shopping baskets are up 15% for the shifts when these knock-off Ingmars / Birgittes are doing the rounds; he wants to tell me more when he’s next in town.

All this unreality has made me hungry. I grab Ásta and we head out for rice pudding.

Sometimes when my chef cooks a pot of lentils, he leaves it on too long and the ones at the bottom burn. Maybe Dikran let the script run a bit too long too, in any case the start-up has closed.

As always in such situations, rumours of the impending demise flew before the catastrophe was confirmed. The web admins were the first to notice in the logs that our fictitious users were not coming back. News travelled through the network admin department, development, product management, finance, board of directors, and at the end, HR.

HR besieged the CEO to at least help find new jobs for all staff. The CEO and the Colonel had all these great contacts in the industry they could tap to find new positions for everyone, they said. All the other VCs and their portfolio companies must be screaming for good staff.

Luckily, the Colonel had put so little money at such a low valuation, and secured it through a collateralized loan note, that he could recoup all his money through selling the X-Box from the break room and a few of the rubber seating spheres from the marketing department. So he was glad to help.

140 characters is really not too much to ask.