Potpourri
Lots of moving pieces today, so instead of five separate posts, I'm bundling.First, and I forgot to mention this in the "Glasses, The Past, And The Future" post last week, but I think for creative people, Penny Arcade was a Chicago Pile Moment. It made everyone realize that not only was the Internet a tremendous creative outlet, it was also quite possibly a commercial one.
Next, and this is a shocker, the Origin distribution platform now has a refund policy for EA published games. You can hit the link for the details, but you basically have a 24-hour window from the time you launch the game to ask for a refund.
This is great for consumers, even with its limitations, but it's great for EA in a business sense, too, because it gives them an incentive to comply with the first rule of making the consumer happy: don't release broken shit.
Plus, how long has it been since we've seen a gaming company compete by offering more to consumers, instead of less? Finally!
I found out yesterday that there's a radio station in Portland, Oregon (KINK-FM), that has a series of 20-25 minute in-house concerts from hundreds of musicians. It's called Bing Lounge After Hours, and it's a terrific resource for just wandering around and listening to new groups. It's well worth checking out if you're a music fan.
There was a post over at Deadspin today about Hank Aaron, and what I always loved about Hank Aaron is that he was an honorable man. Baseball today seems filled with d-bags (Ryan Braun, Alex Rodriguez, and about a hundred more) whose only objective is to cheat the game as much as they can. Aaron was old school, and he was a bad-ass, but he did it without shouting for attention.
I think there are very few men who could have handled the racist anger that surrounded him as he neared Babe Ruth's record, because it was horrible. He did, though, and he broke Ruth's record, and he did it with grace.
There's a multiple exposure image of Aaron hitting his 715th, and it's quite beautiful, plus a link to an interview with Aaron over at LIFE, and all of it is here.
Lastly, Elmore Leonard passed away this morning at the age of 87. If you've never heard of him, you need to come correct and read some of his work, because he was a fantastic writer. Here's an article about his rules for writing, and it's both insightful and very funny at the same time. Leonard was one of the last writers of lean, taut prose, and his writing creates a kind of focused stillness as you read it that's very special indeed.
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