Tempus Circulatum : Back to the future again

Ok, so my involvement with The Wellington Makerspace has shifted phase in a fairly dramatic way, in that I’m now a share-holding customer of the business rather than a partner. Various reasons, mainly to do with the chemistry not working. Would I do it again? Yup – but never the way we just did it.

If you don’t know the terrain, you’ve got to start small. If your entire modus-operandi is based on successively biting off more than you can chew (either in terms of $ or knowledge), then you become a slave to external dependencies. You become an employee… and prone to the same biases and forces that prey on traditional/legacy, debt-based businesses. One way or another, you become an employee.

So I’ve changed phase.

A byproduct of the makerspace experience though, is a change in thinking about the blogosphere… because one thing we decided we were going to do early one (and which (like everything else we decided to do), we did not actually do) was to do projects that blogs would want to blog about… rather than paying for advertising. This was going to be part of the product-development cycle. Instead it turned out to be entirely about training/bespoke-jobs… but I’m still kindof stuck with inspiration of “creating content” rather than just commenting on what other people have done… and being a customer of The Makerspace, I now have the facilities, and possibly the network to do it.

I’ve been commenting on what other people have done rather than doing anything myself (on this blog) for years now. Time for a change in phase. I’ll still pull in various things I find interesting… that are building blocks in the future that we’re building – but over the last year, these had already tailed off to a couple a month – rather than the several-a-day, breathless repetition that used to suffice.

So there you go.

I didn’t actually mean to write that. I meant to write about this:

Which I’ve just backed, even though I find that kid quite annoying for reasons I can’t quite fathom (is he an actor? He’s like a cross between a young Michael J Fox and Kyle McLaughlin. We haven’t gone back to the 80s have we? I mean what’s up with David Helgason’s collar? He looks like a baddy from Wayne’s World. We’ve definitely gone back to the 80s). The preparedness and polish of this positively reeks of big money behind it before it’s even started. And lo – it’s pulled down over a million, straight off the bat, with a whole month to go… which means it’s hit the Kickstarter-Triple-Cherry-Jackpot, ie “How Much Money It’s Made” becomes a story in itself, which means it gets into the mainstream news.

That aside,

This is the future that’s been longing to happen for a long long time – it’s a 1980s dream… Lawnmower-man-tech. Would I buy one? Shit yea – I don’t even play games, and I’d definitely buy one.

The fact that they’re offering it to devs before it’s even a commercial product is a really good sign as well… although I’m seeing copy-monopoly symbols everywhere… and if they HAVE got big money behind it before it’s even started, then I bet there are all sorts of nasty IP surprises lying in wait… because as I said earlier on, if you bite off more than you can chew in terms of $, you fall prey to the biases of traditional/legacy business models.

Or maybe not. Whatever. I funded it. Partly.

It’s like an internal-reality version of kinnect… or better still Leap… absolutely made for each other… the ability to hold your own hand up in front of your face is a very very special type of “Hello World”.