masona

Garfield, and M:tG in general, has been a huge inspiration for me over the years. Magic is such a creative system of constraints, story, card complexity, competitive ecosystems, strategy and metagaming. It also allows a really personal approach to deckbuilding, play style and fun in general. Not to mention the financial aspect of the secondary market, which is an entire field in and of itself... A lot of the lessons learned from studying the game's strategy have helped me cultivate new mental models in my approach to problem solving.

At one point I even took a career break and designed a game, like Garfield says, that I wanted to play that couldn't find. The game is called Sin Rummy - a variant on Rummy based on Gandhi's seven social sins. It was tough to develop, design and produce but I was able to use a lot of intuition from playing Magic all those years to balance it. My starting design constraints: a complex game with tons of replayability that would be easy to pick up and learn, all printed within a single deck of cards. I was super happy with the end result (even if the Kickstarter didn't go nuclear as I had hoped) and still play it all the time. If anyone wants a copy, send me your address (email is on the site in my profile) and I'll mail it to you.

Whenever I see these kinds of stories about ridiculous mass trends, I think ‘This is the kind of stuff my kids will rebel against.’ That gives me comfort.

Reminds me of the story in Invisible Cities - a young man dreams of the perfect city that contains all of his favorite things. By the time he arrives at the city of his dreams, he is an old man and sits off to the side with the other old men, who have moved on from the dreams of their youth.

I’ve been rereading that book over the last couple of weeks and recently did some consulting in the ag space - so I’m really intrigued by what you’re writing! Hope to see it up here one day.

Another major shift that the article neglects to mention is global arbitrage. The advancement of camera + software quality and accessibility means people can make great pictures anywhere.

These days there are a lot of studios in the stock houses like Getty and Shutterstock that are based in Eastern Europe, or Asia, where the small amounts of money from stock images can really add up over time.

Copying styles, compositions and concepts of historically successful stock images means these producers make out quite well for their regional market by selling to more expensive markets.

Photo prices are going down for American photographers but it's still good money for smaller economies.

Lately I've been imagining what it would take to create an AI-generated food image. It's super hard!

Just the rights management issue of the training set is a tough question. Then you have to account for quality, direction and dimensionality of light, food styling, props, custom products or ingredients, the list of challenges goes on an on.

Then after the image is produced, if you're a food company, all your imagery is a kind of 'claim-based' imagery meaning consumers assume it is real and in some cases, there are laws preventing the use of fake foods in ads.

I'm curious about the implications of a world where AI stock photos are ubiquitous, but some styles of imagery are pretty far out at the moment.

Source: Spent 15 years in the commercial photo industry.

Anything free is going to ding your search ranking - just reverse image-search any image from Unsplash and you'll find thousands of content-farm clickbait adware using the same image. If your revenue is dependent on search ranking, that can get expensive really fast.

There are a ton of two-sided marketplaces out there that try to do this. It's a messy challenge involving rights management (no good photographer will agree to the contracts these companies offer), production workflows (all companies do it differently) and assignment complexities (by 'high-quality' you mean 'high-quality and custom to the project' because a nice but generic picture is mostly useless).

But you're right in that free photos like the ones from Unsplash are super expensive in the long run because of the search ranking penalty (you get grouped with all the spammers who are using those same free photos).

Wawa was a grocery chain long before they were a gas station, and I know they are imagining a future without the ICE. It's one of the ways they'll crush the BPs and Exxon that are first and foremost gas stations.

I grew up thinking that roots brought nutrients to trees, but the more we learn about fungi the more I wonder if trees are just the mechanism of fungi farming their own nutrients out of thin air. Maybe the entire tree, both above and below the ground, is a root.

The project was a special kind of restaurant. Here’s a funny story about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/7t5bdm/tifu_by_getti...

In 2014 my friends and I made up something similar, and it went viral. Only the NYT and the Guardian called to fact-check, and when they couldn’t verify the story, didn’t run anything.

Everyone else ran it without even contacting us, even though our info was on the page. When your business model is based on impressions, fact-checking is an unnecessary expense. Ad revenue is what matters.

The funny thing is, the content farms masquerading as blogs don’t have as much power anymore because they have to pay just to have their stories seen. So it doesn’t seem to work as much anymore (based on a few more experiments we did).

It's an interesting point that he thinks the site would not take off if he launched it today, compared to when it started in 1998.

Similar to the early adopters of Instagram who built huge followings simply because they were there first. Anyone starting today has to face a huge headwind: the content algorithms.

Are there other examples of vestigial platforms that are leftover successes from before?

Email newsletters are the last outpost of unfiltered connection - I shudder to think of what happens when personal email dips below 100% organic reach.