53: There’s Gonna Be Some Flapping
Accidental Tech Podcast
Marco Arment
4.3 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2014
⏱️ 126 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
- Follow-up on why Flappy Bird was successful.
- Kieran Healy's excellent article with science.
- John Gruber and Merlin Mann at SXSW '09.
- Goofball Jones' anonymous criticism of John's "shtick", and John's defense including many links:
- An explanation of John's "schtick"
- Some podcasts where John talks about things he likes:
- Masterpiece: Ico
- The Incomparable #100: Who Cares What We Think? - Why we do podcasts about what we think of things, good and bad.
- An ATP episode about how we deal with criticism
- The massive WhatsApp acquistion by Facebook, the huge value of mobile messaging, and the web giants' chilling effect on competition.
- The "Copland 2010" argument that Objective-C needs to be replaced:
- John's original "Copland 2010" article from 2005
- Copland 2010 Revisited (in 2010)
- We Need to Replace Objective-C (Ash Furrow)
- Replacing Objective-C and Cocoa (Steve Streza)
- Objective: Copland 2010 (Guy English)
- Separating language shortcomings from API shortcomings.
- Casey got us to talk about LINQ briefly.
- Long-term evolution of programming languages.
Sponsored by:
- Ting: Mobile that makes sense. No contracts, and pay only for what you use.
- lynda.com: Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials. Free 7-day trial.
- Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code CASEY for 10% off.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Don't say anything funny now. That's a really good, uh, that's a really good ending. So don't say anything funny and you can always put it at the beginning of the show. |
| 0:06.3 | That's true. Time has no meaning in podcast. Marco, you were the master of time and space. Oh god. |
| 0:13.1 | Some follow up. Do we want to talk about Flappy Bird and getting an argument again? |
| 0:17.4 | I, I would, I would just like to say that I think most of the feedback cited with me that Flappy Bird is actually a good game. |
| 0:25.5 | Not a great game, but it was that it got most of its popularity, at least the initial popularity boost that got it into the top charts, which then made social elements really take over. |
| 0:35.3 | Got a lot of its popularity simply because of its merits. And even though it is not, it is not like, you know, it's, to me, it's, it's like a McDonald's hamburger of games, not even a McDonald's. It's more like a Wendy's hamburger of games. Like, it's like, you know, it, you shouldn't like it. It's terrible. |
| 0:53.2 | It's complete junk. However, it's good. No, no, that's, that's McDonald's. Wendy's is good. McDonald's is not good. Except breakfast. Breakfast is good. |
| 1:01.7 | Well, whatever people eat at McDonald's, it's actually good. Is there anything there? |
| 1:04.6 | Yeah, breakfast is good. The burgers are not, but breakfast is good. |
| 1:08.2 | I've actually found it like on long car trips where I have to like stop at a rest area somewhere in the middle of nowhere to eat. |
| 1:14.2 | I would, if I have to pick between the major fast food chains, and you're really somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I would go with McDonald's because |
| 1:23.6 | they're, they've always been extremely good about quality control standards. |
| 1:27.8 | And so it's just, you know, you're guaranteed to get the same crap everywhere. |
| 1:31.2 | Whereas like Wendy's, I like Wendy's better in an ideal case, but I've had a lot of like, I've had a much wider range of Wendy's quality. |
| 1:39.7 | Where did we stop on the way back from South Carolina? I thought we stopped at Wendy's. |
| 1:43.5 | We did. That was in a fairly populated area. I'm talking about like, if you're just stopping like the Pennsylvania turnpike or something, you know, where like you're really in the middle of nowhere. |
| 1:50.8 | And you're, and you have like the Roy Rogers or the McDonald's, or like the TCBY, you know, that, yeah, this is, this is our new podcast. |
| 2:00.5 | This is it. So John, what do you think about the Flappy Bird follow up? |
| 2:03.7 | I think the feedback was it's hard to tell the Twitter, especially because of course I only see the replies that I mentioned me or, you know, like people might be at |
| 2:12.1 | mentioning just you to say they agree with you. I wouldn't see those or whatever. But I think the majority of the feedback was they agree with you. |
| 2:19.5 | And that just goes to show that the majority of people are often wrong about things. |
| 2:25.5 | Like as is often the case in this podcast where I don't do any preparation, like we sort of just talk about things in the moment, right? |
... |
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