Author Archive
Angry Buttons
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Angry Robot magnet by Dustbuster
Check out the cool consumer-generated stuff over on Zazzle – we’ll be hitting the world with our own branding sometime in the not-too-distant (but not right now!) future. The Robot-man cometh…
Robots rrrock – pt.2
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve talked about Yeasayer, and we’ve talked about Joe Meek, but what about a whole band made up of Robots?
These guys rock, and their rider’s just a can of WD40 and two spare nuts:
Is John McCain an Angry Robot?
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Angry? Yes, but not a Robot.
It’s the delightfully ranty capitolhillblue blog that raises the idea, saying of McCain after the latest TV debate:
the candidate I saw looked like an angry rusty robot finding ways to insert just about all his stump speech attacks against Obama into non-answers to questions
Now let’s not start dissing the Angry Robot’s now, shall we??? Hell, we just want to make the next great step in genre publishing, we don’t want to be leaders of the free world…
Ok, maybe we do.
Stretchy, bouncy, floppy pricing
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Stretching the price to meet your needs
Without getting too theoretical, one of the things I want to know with this business is what the value of the formats we’ll be putting our words out in really is. Sure, we kinda know a UK paperback is worth somewhere between £6.99 and £7.99, and we kinda know a hardback comes in anywhere between £12.99 and £20. But what we don’t really know is what other kinds of content-usage is worth? How much would you want to pay for an ebook, or a digital audio version, or a 500 copy only signed hardback? Sure, we have guides, but they’re rarely driven by clear, broad, market dynamics the way the price of a regular book is, or a pint of milk.
So … we’re going to screw around with things. Experiment. We’re going to test out some classic economics, straight out of the textbook to establish what pricing means for all these different uses of content we want to deliver.
And what that means is that YOU will be driving the price, just the way it should be – because if you don’t buy it, we’re not pricing it right, so we’ll have to try again…
Angry human; dead avatar. No robot.
Posted by: | CommentsDavid Pescovitz over at BoingBoing picks up on a story reported over on Yahoo about a Tokyo woman facing conviction for killing off her virtual husband.
Are such things the inevitable middle-class outcomes of the soft-side of the MMO world, where “relationships” spring-up in instants, and can be thrown away just as easily. The woman in this case may be facing a 5 grand fine, but better this than the more deeply worrying gold farming black economy that have developed in MMO culture?
A great post over at Private Sector Development Blog takes a different view – that the virtual sweatshop of the gold farmer is better than the real sweatshop of the retail giants.
Returning to the original point about the general rise in trade of services through the internet, gold farming is only one stage of development in an increasingly complex set of economic relationships. As internet infrastructure spreads further in the developing world, entrepreneurs will take advantage of low wages to outsource more complex (and perhaps better paid) online services to China and elsewhere.
It’s difficult to see the pattern – a virtual repetition of real and untenable deprivation, or a step forward in the intertwined development of emerging economies and the internet?
Either way, there are stories waiting to jump out of this. Tell us what they are.
Hot or Not?
Posted by: | CommentsI admit it, I’ve watched Ghost in the Shell too many times.
I was never a BladeRunner fan – something about it always made me want to fall asleep, though that may have been perpetually watching it half-cut at 3am when I was younger. But Ghost in the Shell? That got me, with it’s “past man, past machine” schtick. But when you see the prosaic reality underneath the philosophising, it’s both deeply disappointing and MORE disturbing than any movie. This Actroid female robot is like some kinda botox freak out of LaLaland done as only Japan can – machinated, miniaturised and perfected. Pointless but wonderful:
Simon & Schuster head east for genre kicks
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pehov
a pre-emptive six figure sum
The emerging BRIC economies should be fertile territory for genre – there’s stuff taking place in the wildfire of those hyperspeed capitalist environments Western writers have barely dreamed of. And it needs telling, or re-telling into amazing parables of the future or the mythic past.
I can’t work out if Pehov is the man to do that for Russia – and if you can work it out from his website, well, your Russian’s better than mine. But I hope he’s the sign of great things to come both from the BRIC countries, and all across the (to us at least) uncharted global territories of genre publishing.
Got something amazing? We’re looking.
Fable II, and the genre genius of Peter Molyneux
Posted by: | CommentsPeter Molyneux is one of the games industry auteurs people have been slowly been learning to think of in the same way we think about Film boys like Spielberg: commercial geniuses whose talent comes in large part from organising and enabling other peoples creativity as much as expressing their own. So when Molyneux, who these days runs Lionhead, turns to Fantasy themes to place his games, we should be interested (and are! Well, I am anyways…).
Fable II, released yesterday is a big moment. Partly because Fable I, as Molyneux himself admitted, was a disappointment; partly because of Molyneux’s well versed promo hype, but mostly because Fable feels different to most Fantasy-based gaming – less war and puzzle based, more explorative and evolutionary. Looser. Watch the trailer:
One of the things we want to do with Angry Robot is look at new opportunities for story-telling – i’m really excited to see (today!), what Molyneux and his crew are doing to take the genre forwards.
UPDATE: Cnet for one think it’s the game of the year…
Angry Robots – the photo album
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s a big wide world of Angry Robots out there – just check em out on Flickr. But there’s something about this one 
I really like.
Where to buy your Robots
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We love robots, obviously, otherwise why the hell the crazy name?
But sometimes you don’t just need to idly love robots from a-far, you need to BUY them. So whilst the global economy falls apart, and whilst we don’t have any books-n-stuff for you to buy, why not lavish your remaining liquidity on the finest robots purchasable via the whirlwhywib?
The Robot Shop is that place, selling a plethora of robotics, from complex science class stuff to R2s to Robbie the Robot posters.
Or alternatively, buy “I, Robot“, unquestionably HarperCollins finest publication with “Robot” in the title. Come to think of it, they were pretty angry too…
