Binge Watching in the New Normal

Pandemic restrictions have been lifted, but just last week I was buying some KN-95 masks because I live in California where things are just on fire for months at a stretch.  There was a brief conspiracy theory about why we all had masks on hand when Covid hit, and then we reminded people it was literally raining ash over most of the state during the summer of 2019 so we needed them to breath.

All of which is just another reason to stay inside and watch TV.

• Hacks – HBO Max

The show is about an aging stand up comedian, Deborah Vance, who was an early female presence in the genre (think Joan Rivers) and who has been doing a Las Vegas show for many years running on the same material.  Her agent sends out a 25 year old female comedy write who was just fired from her last gig for being too controversial on Twitter in an effort to get Deborah’s act to appeal to a younger demographic.  The two meet, don’t like each other, and the usual generational sniping begins which ends with grudging acceptance than a genuine relationship.

This could have been a very predictable show.  In fact, it often is very predictable.  I am not spoiling anything in my description above because you’ll see it coming a mile away.  But Jean Smart’s performance as Deborah Vance manages to make it rise above what could have been another throw away series about show business and the generation gap.  I don’t want to sell the rest of the cast short.  There are plenty of good performances, but Jean Smart is the anchor that sells it.

• Manifest – Netflix

In the air flight 828 experiences some severe turbulence.  When they land in New York the passengers and crew find that five years have passed since their flight departed.  They have been missing, presumed dead for most of that time.  The government wants to know what is going on, a shadowy defense contractor is very interested in the passengers, a scientists fringe theories seem to be born out by the event, and a semi-religious following starts obsessed with the people who disappeared and were returned with flight 828.

Meanwhile, the lives of the passengers all moved on while they were away.  Kids grew up, spouses found new partners, jobs and technology and science went along without them.  And some of the passengers start hearing voices in their heads, giving them vague instructions or showing them visions.

There is a lot of possible content there to mine to drive a story.  But the writers try to have it all, and in trying to cover all the possible angles, end up with a show that feels like it doesn’t deliver fully on any front.  The episodes jump around, dealing with relationship issues, the NSA investigation of the passengers, the defense contractor’s odd motives and experiments, seeded with plenty of Walking Dead-like flash backs to make sure we know everybody’s store.  The whole thing just didn’t jell for us and we stopped after the first season.

• The Kominsky Method – Netflix

The show follows the aging Sandy Kominsky (Micheal Douglas), a one time aspiring actor from New York who ended up in LA and never quite made the cut.  So he became an acting coach and opened his own school of acting, which he runs with his daughter.  He has still lived the LA lifestyle, has been married three times, has slept with numerous stars, and tends to favor much younger women.

The show begins by contrasting him with his best friend, Norman Newlander, who came out from New York with Sandy and who found great success as an agent and runs a major talent agency in LA.  He is also Sandy’s agent, but never finds Sandy any work.  Norman is played by Alan Arkin in that very typical cranky, cynical character that has worked for him for so much of his career.

The show is very good and we burned through all three seasons pretty quickly.  It does remind me a bit of Brockmire in form, if not in content, as it starts off as a pretty light show about two cranky old guys complaining about their prostates and Norman chiding Sandy about who he is sleeping with, and then develops into a much more serious show about death, children, and one’s legacy.  But it remains funny and and not too heavy.

• Community – Netflix

This has been floating around in my periphery for a while.  Netflix kept pushing it at me as a recommendation for years, and it has a reputation as a show with a cult following, but the show’s description on the service did not spark any interest, nor did the title card featuring Ken Jeong dressed as Napoleon.  Not that I dislike him, but a little bit of Ken Jeong can go a long way.

And then I found out that Rick & Morty season five wasn’t going to be on any of my streaming services until the season was complete… looking at you HBO Max after you made a big deal about how you now have the show… you can get first run movies but can’t get an Adult Swim cartoon until it has been aired elsewhere I guess… and started looking up Dan Harmon to see what his problem was and made the connection with Community, which is basically the show he did before Rick & Morty.  So I started to watch it.

The basic, first episode premise, is that now ex-lawyer Jeff Winger, having be caught out lying about having a bachelor’s degree, enrolls at Greendale Community College in an effort to find the shortest path between him and a degree so he can get back to what he is good at.  His plan involves finding a study group that he can use to help him along.  He lies to them about being a professional tutor to get them to join him, but they somehow become a solid group.

While Jeff is the main character and the de facto leader of the group, it is TV and movie obsessed Abed who is their soul as well as being the wink towards breaking the 4th wall as he describes their situations in movie and TV tropes and cliches which the show often then embraces.

Anyway, I am through season two and am hooked.  It is a show that I laugh out loud at regularly, as my daughter can attest.  My main problem is that I started watching it on my own, and now I wonder if I should go back and rewatch the first two seasons with my wife, get her to just pick up in season three, or simply keep the show to myself.

Young Again

While I do not play much, I do keep an eye on TorilMUD still, and I am always interested when some long time mechanic gets changed.  This time around it was age.

Back when it was created, in the Sojourn MUD days, it was an attempt to not only create a Forgotten Realms MUD, but also tried to bring Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2.0 mechanics, so back when I started playing it in 1993 was a place where you could find THAC0.

One of the mechanics that they brought over was age.  Age was very much a thing in long term AD&D campaigns, but it was also something that could be quite relative.  You could spend a year in a campaign where your character would only age days.

In a real time, always running video game though, time keeps passing even when you’re logged off.  In TorilMUD one real life minute is one in game hour, so every day in game, where 1,440 minutes pass, ages you 60 days.  You are aging five years a real life month or 60 years in a real life year.

I have characters from 2003 in the game, which means they’ve aged nearly a thousand years.  Even my main, a half-elf who has had the rejuv treatment a few times, is pushing 700 years of age and has not benefited from the experience.

For elves, not a big deal.  They just get better with age.  But humans and half elves and… well… most everybody else… they have shorter life spans.  A human rolls up at age 18, gains stamina into their 30s, and then starts to lose stamina and strength slowly after that.  (Though, oddly , they kept gaining movement points, so you might have a weak, low hit point old paladin who could walk the length of the world as long as he wasn’t wearing any armor.)

To counter this, necromancers had a spell that would rejuvenate you, reducing your age to a more viable range.  Like everything, there was some randomness to it, and inevitably I would be close to optimum and take one more hit only to roll big and end up younger than I wanted, losing a few hit point in that direction.

There was also an issue with paladins interacting with necromancers at one point, though I think they relaxed that rule.

But now the devs have decided that maybe aging isn’t the best idea.  So with the latest patch notes they have declared eternal youth:

We’ve removed character aging with this patch. The concept of character aging is a relic from the past that adds nothing to the game today, while punishing players returning from a hiatus. Your character’s age has now returned to the realm of your personal roleplaying, where it belongs.

So it goes.  It fit into the world of 1993, and perhaps wasn’t a bad thing when the MUD was only running four or five years between pwipes.  But now, 17 years into its current run, age is really more of a punishment than a useful mechanic.

But isn’t that the way it goes with life?

Summer Movie League – Still Incredible

Week six of our Summer Fantasy Movie League is in the books now.

This past week saw yet another film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit the screens as Ant-Man and The Wasp opened up on Friday.  That left the weeks choices looking like this:

Ant-Man and the Wasp      $804
Jurassic World            $267
Incredibles 2             $229
The First Purge           $201
Sicario 2                 $89
Uncle Drew                $71 
Ocean's 8                 $48 
Tag                       $34
Won't You Be My Neighbor  $23
Deadpool 2                $20
Solo                      $13
Hereditary                $12
Sanju                     $11
Avengers: Infinity War    $11
Superfly                  $6

Ant-Man was clearly called to dominate the box office, something that was never in dispute.  But when you’re filling up eight screens and have a limited budget there are more factors in play.

Also on the list was The First Purge, the fourth installment in that franchise, which felt a bit over-priced to me.  Also, as I noted in last week’s post, it opened on Wednesday, so for FML purposes it wouldn’t even get a boost from Thursday night previews, as it previewed on Tuesday night.  Priced where it was, so close to The Incredibles 2, I felt it was a non-starter.

So the choice of anchor seemed to me to be between Ant-Man, Jurassic World, and The Incredibles 2.  Estimates for the latter two were pretty close, putting them near $30 million each, at which point my back of the envelope calculation indicated that Ant-Man would have to get close to $96 million to me a worthwhile anchor.  That was above the high estimate for the weekend, which was $88 million.  So unless somebody was really underestimating Ant-Man, it wasn’t a viable pick.

And in the match up between Jurassic World and The Incredibles 2 I felt that the price advantage of the latter, which would let me spend more on filler, overcame any box office advantage the former would present.  Estimates were far closer than the price difference on that chart.

Back on Monday night I was all-in on 4x The Incredibles 2 as my anchor.  Even after the Thursday night previews came out on Friday morning showing Ant-Man doing pretty well, I stuck to my picks in other leagues while many jumped onto Ant-Man at the last minute.  In the MCats league, which locks Friday morning, those who picked The Incredibles 2 in the TAGN league changed on the preview news.

On the filler front I wavered.  On Monday I was all for 4x Deadpool 2, not knowing that the film was facing a steep drop in theater count.  It disappeared from my local AMC multiplex for the weekend.  I guess I will wait for it to hit cable.

Eventually I settled on 4x The Incredibles 2, 1x Ocean’s 8, 3x Hereditary, a lineup that spent exactly $1,000, something that probably holds too much sway over me.

Summer Movie League – My Week Six Pick

And after the lock it was time to watch the weekend unfold.

Ant-Man did $11.5 million in Thursday night previews, which was pretty good.  It needed to do about 8.5x that to own the weekend.  Meanwhile the ticket pre-sales were being compared to Spider-Man: Homecoming, which did $117 million its opening weekend.

But Ant-Man ain’t no Spider-Man.  Arachnids own insects and after all of that Ant-Man managed a very respectable, but not exactly blockbuster, $76 million for the weekend.

Meanwhile, The Incredibles 2, which had been neck and neck with Jurassic World in the daily box office all week long/  They pulled ahead for while, but ended up in third place, just $250K behind the higher priced dinos.  That made The Incredibles 2 the anchor to have, with the perfect pick for the league looking like this.

Summer Movie League – Week Six Perfect Pick

The First Purge, having gotten its initial wave of fans earlier in the week, came in fourth with $17.3 million.

All of which left the scoring for this week at:

1. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $122,517,418
2. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $122,410,754
3. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $121,768,961
4. Too Orangey For Crows – $121,369,556
5. Kraut Screens – $106,794,508
6. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $104,134,469
7. grannanj’s Cineplex – $100,033,084
8. aria82’s Cineplex – $96,458,682
9. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $95,301,183
10. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $94,323,075
11. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $94,323,075
12. Joanie’s Joint – $94,225,854
13. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $93,752,566
14. I HAS BAD TASTE – $93,574,053
15. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $86,308,838
16. Goat Water Picture Palace – $86,308,838
17. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $986,730 (did not pick)

The four at the top of the list were the four that went for four screens of The Incredibles 2 as their anchor.  Nobody got the perfect pick, but with the right anchor choice the four of us were not far off of that number.

The next four were people who favored dinos as an anchor.  Then there were the people who anchored on Ant-Man.  And, finally, Goat and SynCaine, who both went with four screens of The First Purge.

Oh, and Pak, who didn’t get home in time to pick.  That has been a problem this season.  While I have seen a change in picks from people, based on what they pick in other leagues that lock on Friday, the Thursday morning lock, along with the new multi-league picking interface, is causing people to miss picking.  I dropped a couple more people off the board as they had missed three weeks in the season.  And so it goes. (If you got dropped and want back on, let me know.  I just don’t want anybody to feel set upon because their score is way down the standings.)

This left the season totals looking like this:

1. Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $603,065,595
2. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $590,348,451
3. I HAS BAD TASTE – $587,819,013
4. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $579,764,517
5. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $579,222,560
6. Kraut Screens – $568,801,026
7. Goat Water Picture Palace – $567,210,010
8. Ben’s X-Wing Express – $554,031,284
9. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $551,941,723
10. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $547,327,977
11. grannanj’s Cineplex – $533,347,159
12. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $532,241,910
13. aria82’s Cineplex – $512,780,141
14. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $495,971,483
15. Too Orangey For Crows – $489,786,891
16. Joanie’s Joint – $478,589,151
17. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $477,878,801

As I noted last week, you don’t have to be number one for the week to get ahead, you just have to do better that those ahead of you. Corr and I both managed that and, while he got the win for the week, I managed to jump into first place overall.

With that over, we are now looking at week seven and some new choices.

Hotel Transylvania 3        $523
Skyscraper                 $394
Ant-Man and the Wasp       $387
Incredibles 2              $201
Jurassic World             $174
The First Purge            $111
Sorry to Bother You        $74
Sicario 2                  $45
Ocean's 8                  $40
Uncle Drew                 $38
Won't You Be My Neighbor   $30
Tag                        $21
Three Identical Strangers  $16
Whitney                    $14
Deadpool 2                 $11

After a few static weeks where we didn’t lose many films, this week saw a purge of a third of last weeks options. The Avengers: Infinity War, Solo, Hereditary, Superfly, and Sanju all got the chop.

Replacing them are Hotel Transylvania 3, Skyscraper, Sorry to Bother You, Three Identical Strangers, and Whitney.

Hotel Transylvania 3 is the big opening this week. Summer time is big for kids movies, as we have seen with The Incredibles 2. But as a franchise, Transylvania doesn’t have the clout of Pixar. In a weak week, at least as far as the summer so far goes, its projected $45 million-ish opening makes it the big dog. If you run with it as your main anchor you can only have a single screen, but you’ll have lots of room for filler.

I suppose is says something that a film featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is playing second fiddle to Transylvania. Skyscraper, the previews for which give me a Die Hard vibe for some reason, doesn’t have horrible reviews. It is in the zone with Tag and Transylvania. But I don’t think anybody is going to be fooled into thinking it is anything for than a vehicle to show The Rock doing crazy things on an exploding building. I’m pretty sure I’ll watch it when it hits cable. But for its launch tracking has it at $35 million or so, not a blockbuster, but well into the “good for just normal movies” zone.

Sorry to Bother You, as with the next two pictures, has already been available in limited release and is making the list due to an expansion of their theater count. Sorry brought in $725K last week across just 16 theaters, making it the top per screen earner. While critically acclaimed it does strike me as a bit of a blue state feature, and its pricing seems to indicate that FML does not see it going past $7 million for the weekend. Still, a lot of good buzz makes me wonder if it might exceed expectations.

Three Identical Strangers is a documentary… a strike against any Summer film right there most days of the week… about triplets separated at birth who later are reunited. Again, out for a couple weeks now in limited release, it is expanding.

Whitney, the Whitney Houston biopic, should have been on the list last week, as its earnings would have put it ahead of Solo, The Avengers, Hereditary, and Superfly. (There should have at least been a Best of the Rest option last week, though that is hindsight speaking.) This week it is down in the 14th slot and its value depends a lot on whether or not it will see an expansion in its theater count. Still, it is ahead of Deadpool 2, which I expect will see a further collapse in its theater numbers this week.

So what do you go with? Is Ant-Man really going to drop more than 50% in its second week, as the pricing seems to indicate? Is Hotel Transylvania 3 going to be able to stake out enough of the kids market to make The Incredibles 2 tumble this week? Does The Rock have more draw than forecasts allow?

My Monday Hot Takes league pick this week was 4x The Incredibles 2, 1x Sorry to Bother You, 3x Ocean’s 8. I strongly suspect I will change that before Thursday.

And, as I always say this season, picks lock in less than 24 hours from when this post goes live, so go make them now!

The July 2017 Update Brings Revamped Strategic Cruisers to EVE Online

The last big update before summer vacations sap the momentum from development at CCP.

Yes, I made this myself since CCP failed me…

At least CCP has stuck with the same naming scheme two months running.  I expect there will be no August update and by September they will change the naming pattern again.  But on to the update.

Strategic Cruisers

The big deal for this patch, judging on the number of times CCP has posted about it alone, is the Strategic Cruiser revamp.  Introduced with the Apocrypha expansion back in the first half of 2009, these were to be modular ships that could be refit with various subsystems to adapt them to different roles.  Relying on materials from wormhole space to be produced, they were quite rare for a while before expanding and becoming main line doctrines for many alliances over the years.

However, they did tend to be fit and left in one configuration much of the time.  Asher had us bring subsystem refits on a deployment at one point, but fitting and forgetting seemed to be the default.  I have a Tengu that has been essentially the same fit for years.

Strategic Cruisers… now with skins

CCP ran a focus group and took input and at the end of the day changed these key items:

• Subsystems reduced from five to four, with the electronics subsystem abilities being folded into the others
• A subsystem bay so you can haul subsystem refits without filling up your cargo bay
• Ability to remove rigs without destroying them
• Scan Probe Launcher CPU reduction bonus moved from subsystems to hulls
• Overheating bonus
• Changes to construction materials
• Models updated to support SKINs

The details, or links to posts with the details, can be found in this dev blog.

If you have a strategic cruiser, when you log in today it should have been updated, have four subsystems installed, and a fifth one in the subsystem bay to make up for the one you lost.  There is a spreadsheet detailing what you should end up with based on what you started with.  There are only 1,024 possible fits per ship to sort through.

Additionally, you should get some skill points refunded for any you have used for the racial electronics subsystem skills.  Since I have that trained up to 4 or 5 for all of them, I should get a nice pile of skill points back, which I plan to apply to getting Command Ships 5 trained a bit more quickly.

I expect that this will lead to some interesting results once people start playing with the fittings on the main server.  They have been on the test server for a bit now.

Project Discovery

Previously Project Discovery helped the Human Protein Atlas project.

We’re talking exoplanets now

Project Discovery will now be used to help analyze data from the CoRoT telescope in order help search for exoplanets.  As before, by helping with this project you can earn credits for in-game items.  Details can be found in this dev blog.

Other Items

• The Rupture, Munin, and Broadsword ship models have all been revamped.  They still all look like power tools.
• Battle station structures have had a graphical revamped to bring them up to the current state of the game.  Expect to see high quality spikes on Sansha structures.
• The drop rate for blueprint copies for Small Ancillary Armor Repairers has been temporarily increased.
• The materials required to build pirate faction battleships has been increased.  This is the second phase of the plan to make these battleships less common.  In the last update the drop rate for blueprint copies was reduced.
• Back end code for The Agency event starting on July 18th deployed.  Drops will include Strategic Cruiser SKINs.

And then there are the usual range of fixes and minor changes.  You will now, for example, get the transition animation if you change SKINs on your ship while in a station or citadel hangar.  Further details can be found in the Patch Notes and on the Updates Page.

As with the June update, no new music was included with this release.  I wonder if the music production time is going to support CCP’s VR games rather than EVE Online.  We did at least get a development update this week.

Anyway, the release has been deployed and is waiting for me to get home from work.

The July Release has been deployed! Check out this news item for more information! – https://t.co/5FC2WQu5aw #tweetfleet http://pic.twitter.com/VLSwXsmPQf

— EVE Online (@EveOnline) July 11, 2017

Prime Day and Amazon-a-versary

Today is Prime Day at Amazon, a day in which there are special deals for Amazon Prime members.

Prime Day 2017

The main deals are on Amazon products like the Kindle or the Echo.  Not exactly as interesting to me as the Steam Summer Sale, but I’ll go take a look all the same.

Today also happens to be an anniversary for me with Amazon.  Twenty years ago today, July 11, 1997, I placed my first order at Amazon.com.  You can go see all of your order history on your account page, which can be both fascinating and disturbing.

My order was for a book, because at the time Amazon was pretty much an online bookstore.  But they were expanding into music CDs as well.  The whole thing wasn’t profitable yet, but it was the dotcom era and people were interested in grabbing market share first and making money later.

That second bit was the catch of course, and the downfall of companies like Netscape.

I went to Amazon.com twenty years ago because they had selection beyond even the largest local bookstore.

Today the profitable enterprise that is Amazon it is my first stop for all sorts of things.  I recently bought a replacement filter for our refrigerator from them.  It has become to people today what the Sears catalog must have been for those in rural settings back towards the end of the 19th century, and then some.  They own Twitch and the Internet Movie Database and Goodreads and Alexa and Audible, each of which touches my online life.

Amazon is hardly perfect, but they do seem to be here to stay.

The Pokemon GO Phenomenon

Dad, there is a Zubat on you!

-My daughter, in the middle of the SF MOMA

Pokemon are literally everywhere these days.  Pokemon GO was everywhere this weekend.

I must admit I am a bit jealous of those who have smart phones for one.  The lure of Pokemon made me consider ditching my ridiculously cheap pre-paid burner phone… that is pretty much just a phone… in order to be able to join in on the fun.

It is one thing for my Twitter feed to be all abuzz about some new game, but it is quite a new thing to be able to actually see people engaged with a game out in the world.  On Saturday I drove my daughter up to the store to get a new inner tube for her bike.

In the car she was telling me all the Pokemon she could see.  Meanwhile, just looking out the window I could clearly see people hunting for Pokemon.  You see three guys with their smart phones out in their hands, one wearing a Pikachu shirt, and there is little question as to what they are pointing at.

My daughter wanted to get her bike going, which she has ignored for a few years, in order to ride around with a friend in search of Pokemon.  The park in our neighborhood, which has a Pokestop , has people walking all over with their phones out.  My daughter says that there is a group that camps the park and has a lure… a cash shop item that attracts more Pokemon to a location… running all the time.

Nintendo has been big on getting its users to get up an exercise from time to time, there being the Wii Fit, or the Pokewalker that came with Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver, to the built-in pedometer in the 3DS, to the simple reminders that come up during some games to encourage players to take a break, stretch, and maybe get some exercise.

But if Nintedo’s plan was to get its fans up and out of the house, it has succeeded. In my daughter’s case, my wife has gone from, “You need to leave the house” during the day to “You need to be home by…” pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, people I know who pay no real attention to video games know what Pokemon GO is suddenly.  Without any big marketing campaign, it made it to the top of the download list on the iTunes store and, more importantly, to the top of the highest grossing app list as well.

Not there haven’t been problems.  A couple of times my wife handed me her iPhone 6 so I could try the game out, only to be thwarted because the servers were down due to the overwhelming load.  And then there is the battery drain.  The app uses GPS, data, and your phone’s camera, which conspire to kill battery life at a prodigious rate, though a fix to help that is reported to be on the way. (Some battery tricks are available.)

Then there have been the real life issues.  Along with the usual tales of people driving or riding bikes while playing, or restaurants dealing with the whole thing, a news story surfaced about somebody finding a dead body while out looking for Pokemon near a river, while a group was using Pokemon lures to attract players to a remote location in order to rob them.  And then there was just some bad taste moments, like a Koffing, a Pokemon that emits noxious gas, being found at the United States Holocaust Museum.

Koffing found at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. #Pokemon #Pokémon #PokemonGo 😅✡😈💀👾⚰🎮🕍⚱📸☠ http://pic.twitter.com/I4SdxhM2NO

— EncyclopæDramatica (@EDdotSE) July 10, 2016

But otherwise the whole thing seems to have been a rousing success, where the biggest problem is simply too many people wanting to play the game.  They have held off rolling it out in other countries until they get a handle on the server issue.  Nintendo’s stock is up and I expect that we will be hearing a lot more about Pokemon GO over the next couple of weeks.  Cue segments on the news, late night talk shows, and Ellen this week for sure.  There is a Blastoise in the fountain at the White House and people are going to talk about it.

Even today’s XKCD features the game.

This could be a moment of change for Nintendo.  After the tepid response to the Wii U, largely due to self-inflicted issues, Nintendo seemed to be grudgingly heading towards the mobile market to appease shareholders.

The culture of the company has always seemed to me to be that of a hardware maker, for whom software sells the hardware. (I’ve worked for companies like that before.)  They make new versions of Super Mario Bros. in order to sell more consoles in to the family room and new versions of Pokemon in order to sell more handheld units.  And that has been a viable plan for the most part.  Certainly the GameBoy, DS, and 3DS lines have been sustained by Pokemon.  I own a 3DS solely to play Pokemon, and I doubt I am alone in that.  But while they like software sales, they measure their success as a company in hardware units sold.

And, suddenly, they have a runaway success on somebody else’s platform, a runaway success where they are only the software vendor in an environment where they do not control everything.

Pokemon GO will have more daily active users than Twitter by Tuesday http://pic.twitter.com/O7mgW5FrhJ

— Tero Kuittinen (@teroterotero) July 10, 2016

This has to be an eye opening moment for Nintendo which has, in the past, disparaged the idea of things like 99 cent apps, stating that their games have more value than that.  And now they are making bank on an app they are giving away for free vie the age old scheme of giving the razor away and making money selling the blades.

I don’t think Nintendo is suddenly going to give up on hardware.  That is too ingrained in their culture.  It is too much a part of Nintendo’s identity.  But I imagine they will be even more serious about this sort of “software only” thing in the future.

In the mean time I am waiting for people to draw the wrong conclusions from this sudden success.  You know that, right now, somebody out there is going, “Hah, I can make a GPS AR app better than that!” while forgetting that the immediate success of Pokemon GO is in large part because Pokemon is a 20 year old franchise for Nintendo that has enjoyed immense popularity.  Pokemon is second only to Mario at Nintendo, and the plumber showed up nearly a decade and a half earlier.  Ars Technica has a post up on some of the realities.

It will be interesting to see how this changes things, if it changes things at all.

Back in our little corner of the world, my daughter caught several Pokemon at the SF MOMA.  While the place seemed to be mostly populated by Zubats, she did get a Growlithe, which made her happy.  She was a bit upset that we wouldn’t let her run out of the MOMA when there was a Bulbasaur across the street by the Metreon.  When we finally did walk over there it was gone, but there was a Jynx nearby.  We went over to grab that.  As my daughter was trying to catch it, I saw somebody else walk up who was clearly there to catch it as well.  Pokemon are contested and whoever catches it first gets it.  My daughter managed to grab it, but there were not hard feelings, just a nod to a fellow fan who moved off in search of further catches.

So it sounds like Pokemon GO will be a thing for a while, the app of the summer.