During an idle lunch chat at work yesterday somebody said that they enjoyed reading “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” book and wondered if the movie would be any good. I looked it up on IMDB and mentioned that the lead actress Jessica Brown Findley was in “Downton Abbey”, and they said that the movie also features Lily James from the same show. As these random conversations go, Lily’s thick eyebrows were mentioned, and that reminded me – of all things – how thick and bushy Leonid Brezhnev’s eyebrows were.

So I pulled up image search with his photos on my phone to show what I meant. And as I was idly scrolling his Wikipedia page, I then mentioned how, in the mid ’80s when I was growing up, there were a couple of old guys who were in power for only 12-18 months before passing on. So that brought me to this Wikipedia page to check the exact numbers. And I was shocked.

Growing up in the fifteen or so years of USSR, we were obviously exposed to a lot of propaganda. And a lot (and I mean holy cow of a lot) of history of the communist party and its glorious deeds stretching all the way back to 1917. Statues of Lenin were everywhere. Statues of Stalin were everywhere – despite Khrushchev’s campaign to dismantle Stalin’s cult of personality. And despite shallow mentions of repression, purges, forced labor camps and great famine that, collectively, killed over 20 million people between 1935 and 1953 (when he died) – a figure that does not include another 20 million that died during World War II.

We were taught that Lenin’s brief time at the top was succeeded by Stalin’s 30 years of power. Followed by about a dozen years of Khrushchev and almost 20 by Brezhnev. Three towering figures that have ruled the Soviet Union over 60 years.

And here was the name that I never heard of – Georgy Malenkov. Right there between Stalin and Khrushchev. His swift ascension through the party ranks as a close associate of Lenin. Eventually becoming Stalin’s right-hand man and second in command in early 1950s. And succeeding Stalin as Premier of the Soviet Union the day after his death.

A week later he was forced to resign from the Secretariat by Khrushchev. Following a short political struggle, he was forced out from all top party offices two years later. And in 1957, he launched an unsuccessful attempt at a coup against Khrushchev.

He was exiled to his hometown in Kazakhstan. He later was given a two-bedroom apartment in Moscow where he lived quietly, with no political ambitions, until his death in 1988. There were no eulogies on state television. And there was no grand state burial service to honor his achievements. First books about him were published after Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

They say the history is written by the victors. His name was never mentioned in Soviet history books that we read at school in the 1980s. As far as those books were concerned, Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as the leader of the country. There was never that gap of a week – or a couple of years – depending on what political position we’re talking about. It was like Georgy Malenkov never existed.

By the time the first books about him were published, I was out of school and Soviet Union did not exist anymore. The whole structure of societal order and market forces that people knew in the last 75 years collapsed. People were forced to adapt to the new world after 3 or 4 generations of living in a state where everything was owned and controlled by the government. Nobody had either time or inclination to go back and revisit the country’s history. Even though, for the first time in generations, the old archives were finally wide open for historians to read about everything that was kept under tight wraps by the party apparatus.

It was like Georgy Malenkov never existed.

I’ve been playing a couple of games from the same developer, and along the way talking to my not-quite-yet teenage son about paying money for games.

The thing that I tell him about in-app purchases, as well as paying money for stuff in general is to think about what you’re getting out of it. Let’s forget for a second that behind every decent game there’s a whole bunch of people – designers, testers, programmers, managers – without whom this piece of entertainment that keeps you occupied wouldn’t exist. Let’s forget for a second that not only those people expect to be paid for their effort, but the nature of capitalism dictates that a profit is expected to be made on top of that as well. So let’s put that aside.

The concept of pay-to-win (or p2w) is that you pay to get things that make you more powerful. You get to beat the game quicker or more easily. You get an advantage on non-paying players (more on that in a moment). And, at least for me, you get to enjoy more of the game sooner.

When I talk with my son about in-app purchases, I talk about what he expects to get out of it. Is it a one-time purchase for something that is gone, so to speak, after you use it? Is it a one-time purchase for something that you can use for as long as you want until you get something better. Or is it, perhaps, something that gives you ongoing benefits for a fixed amount of time – like in these two games where you pay $2.99 and have certain daily benefits for 30 days.

And I always tell him that entertainment is in the vast majority of cases not free. I tell him that when we go to a movie theater, we pay $8-12 for a ticket for something that lasts about a couple of hours and might not even be that good by the end of it. I tell him that watching his favorite soccer team or the last episode of Spongebob comes with a three-digit monthly bill from Comcast. I tell him that if I want to enjoy the latest book in “The Expanse” novel series, I need to pay.

And I also tell him that some of that entertainment can be enjoyed if you’re willing to wait longer. That movie will eventually find its way to basic cable, heavily peppered with ad breaks. That book will eventually find its way to the nearest library, with an additional healthy wait if it gets too popular with other readers. But that some entertainment might never be free, such as top-level sports competition or anything Disney.

Instead, I say that it is the “pay to enjoy” model. I pay to enjoy movies on the big screen instead of waiting a few months until they’re available in digital formats to be watched at home. I pay to enjoy reading books from my favorite authors as they are released instead of waiting until they get to the library. I pay to enjoy albums from my favorite performers instead of trying to catch a song or two on free streaming networks peppered with, you guessed what, ads.

And here’s the argument that I’ve been toying with in the last few days.

Specifically in the realm of games, and especially mobile games – how much difference is there between advancing in the game by paying with money and paying with time?

Most people advance by putting a lot of time, grinding through the “obstacles” carefully placed by the game designers. People in this group have what I consider to be disposable time. For this group, putting in 12-16 hours a day to hone a perfect execution without using any extra resources is a cause for celebration in forums.

And some people advance by putting some (dolphins) or a lot of (whales) money into it, triggered by the “opportunities” carefully placed by the game designers. People in this group have what I consider to be disposable money.

So far I have failed to find an argument that people in the first group use to look down, or even rage, at the second group – that can’t be turned on its head and used in the exact opposite way.

If you say that people who put a lot of money into your favorite game have an unfair advantage over free-to-play participants, the same argument goes for people who put a lot of time to grind through it. If somebody is willing to put 10-12 hours every day, would you consider that to be an unfair advantage over somebody who “only” plays for an hour or two? If that is not unfair, how different is paying a couple of bucks to get the same advantage?

If you say that people who are new to the game should “pay their dues” before they get to the same level of achievement as those who have been at it for a while, let me introduce you to the history of guilds and unions. Let me also point at how “well” Europe (on average) is doing in these unprecedented times of technological innovation. But that’s a side note.

You might say that people who “rush” though the game by paying for everything and skipping the important basics end up being pretty terrible at playing it. That you need to grind the basics to “properly” enjoy the more advanced things. Let me tell that there are some pretty terrible players out there in every game, no matter if they paid anything or not.

And the most ridiculous argument that I read just the other day was that the money the whales spend on games should instead by donated to charities, or at least done as 1-to-1 match. Makes me wonder if the person who wrote that comment spends one hour of community work for every hour they spend on playing games. If so, kudos.

I wonder if there’s an argument to be made against pay-to-win players that can’t be turned on its head. Note that I say players and not game developers. I am not asking you to rage against studios that focus on subscriptions, loot boxes, add-ons etc aka the greedy bunch. Focus only on people who are willing to pay to enjoy their games as they see fit. Convince me that I’m wrong.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing around the changes Verizon corporate is bringing down on the Tumblr communities. People are talking about the freedom of creative expression, the future of safe spaces for fringe interests and the good old days before the engagement-driven ad “opportunities”. Yahoo’s billion-dollar purchase of the not-quite profitable platform was accompanied by grand promises:

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.

…

In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

There’s a certain beauty in the natural cycles of web chaos. And there’s also a big difference between sustained and sustainable. The history so far has shown that it is not a sustainable endeavor to build a popular social platform that is held in high esteem by both users and the market forces. It’s a rather awkward place between being a sustained loss center, and being stuck in a somewhat unsavory self-reinforcing cycle of business decisions that go counter to the whole notion of, well, social.

As for me, with the impending shuttering of Google+, I’ll be writing more right here in my own little web garden.

Software is never quite done. Even if you have all the features put in, and all the known bugs fixed, if you stand still, the world will slowly pass you by and leave you behind.

A modern app is, more or less, expected to be everywhere. People expect seamless sync between all their devices, intelligent offline, presence of all the screens in their life, and constant adaptation of how the app behaves to the ever-evolving world of technology that we live in.

The same goes for web sites. Space Jam is a rather wonderful memento of the early web frozen in time. But it’s a curiosity, a rare peek into the world of yesteryear.

Content is king they say. Whoever they are, they don’t tell you that the presentation of content matters. As I was switching my site to be fully HTTPS earlier in the year, I was reminiscing on all the non-content maintenance work that I keep on doing on a semi-regular basis with my site to keep up with the latest and greatest. To keep up with what is “expected” of modern web sites. To get a feel of the burden the technology evolution is placing on hundreds of thousands (millions, tens of millions?) of web developers that find their carefully constructed houses of cards gather cobwebs.

• In 2012 I’ve switched to using web fonts, and I kept on tweaking those ever since – for body, headings and navigational elements.
• In 2013 I’ve switched to fully responsive design, scaling the overall layout to behave well on a variety of screen sizes.
• In 2014 I’ve switched to use 2x / retina images on relevant hardware, which required going back to the archives and resourcing all the images in the interviews that have been published until then.
• In 2015 I’ve switched to a single-column layout, rearranging the content to flow better across a variety of screens.
• In 2018 I’ve switched to HTTPS, even though the only user-facing input box is the search tucked at the very end of the page.

Is the latest 3 year gap an indication that things are slowing down? Maybe. But probably not. I’m still tending this little web garden of mine. The latest chapter, so far, has been adding support for dark mode:

On the left is the regular version of Pushing Pixels. On the right is how it looks like running under Safari Technology Preview on the latest macOS 10.14.1 (Mojave), with the work under way to add the matching CSS selector support to Firefox and Chrome.

I hope this little web garden of mine will be there in 10 years. In 20 years. Hopefully in 40 years. There’s a lot of tending ahead.

Note: since this post was written, Safari for macOS 10.14.4+ and Firefox 67+ have added official support for dark mode. Chrome has added support for dark mode starting in 73 on Mac and starting in 74 on Windows.