06.19.08
There’s something fucking wrong with Canada
Seriously, if this judge is still on the bench in a month, I’ll lose all faith that anyone in Canada has sense.
08.31.07
This guy passed the bar?
From Jack Thompson’s new temper tantrum at Take Two:
I want to bring to your attention the fact that at www.rockstargames.com anyone of any age can order Manhunt 2 and receive it, with no age verification whatsoever. Asking a 14-year-old if he’s 17 is not age verification, now is it?
How the hell is this guy a lawyer? Not only is that legal age verification in the United States (and, in fact, has been by precedent since the 1960s, when the issue was first tested by adult telephone services,) but also the Take 2 site only takes credit cards - which are themselves acceptable forms of age verification in the US since the early 1970s. Either the Florida Bar is obscenely easy, or Jacky Boy has been taking some anti-memory pills. That he should send that phrase on to the FTC and activist groups is so deeply ignorant of the law that it’s almost embarrassing to know who Jack is.
Jack, I write family-friendly game titles for a living, including family licenses from children’s cartoons. I want you out of my industry. You do far more damage than you prevent. Get it through your head: you’re a poor lawyer, a poor activist and a poor excuse for an adult living in a representative democracy. Stop flogging the bear: you may be a media whore, but the bear’s gonna turn around and bite you, soon enough.
And by bear, I mean “barratry.” Since you don’t seem to understand the law, Jack, please look it up (the various news blogs covering this are unfortunately referring to the COPPA decision; the COPA decision I just linked is far more germane.)
I greatly hope that the Take 2 lawyers will take barratry into consideration. This is the clearest case of abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in years, and that’d put a hell of a lot of weight behind the disbarment we all so desperately want to see.
08.16.07
God damned new WMP
Yay, windows media player pulled the only two things I use in the new version. Not only is the toolbar context menu that shows your library from collapsed WMP gone, but there’s also - get this - no way to look at your entire media library at once. Want to find a song that isn’t well categorized? You’re screwed.
There was a time when I respected the WMP interface team. That time has passed.
01.18.07
C’mon, seriously, do some damned research
On the one hand, I love things like “10 worst” lists. They help me remember that other people out there hate things as much as I do.
On the other hand, if you’re going to write a Ten Worst DS Game list, you just need to read through the game list. I can tell this author didn’t. How?
Nowhere in his ten worst occurs Whack a Mole. Then again, IGN gives whack-a-mole a five, so I guess the stupid isn’t yet monopolized.
10.26.06
Obligatory Halloween Post: Costas Efthimiou Fails It
Yet another mathematician who uses a silly premise to get Halloween headlines. This one’s kind of a flop, though. Costas Efthimiou claims that the population growth rate of vampires makes them fundamentally impossible. His reasoning is that, starting in 1600 from a population of 538 million, if each vampire converts one person into a vampire once a month, it will be only 2.6 years until all humans have been converted.
Now, this is a bit like saying that if a grasshopper eats a pound of grass a minute, given 1 billion grasshoppers and 500 million pounds of grass, then the Earth will be barren in about 30 seconds. Sure, the math works just fine, but the data is obviously wrong. Dracula was hundreds of years old (potentially thousands; the book doesn’t actually say,) and had created half a dozen childer. Lestat is 300 years old, and has only created two. Unfortunately I don’t wear enough white makeup and black hair dye to name any other vampires, but their birth rate is on the order of either decades or centuries, not single months.
So, fear not, Vlad: no matter what biology, history, zoology, archaeology or common sense may say about you, math hasn’t disproven a thing.
09.15.06
Why Don’t Advertisers Understand Tivo?
I find it nothing short of amazing that a market this valuable can be run by people who so thoroughly misunderstand their consumers. FX is running some new show, and doesn’t want the commercials for said new show to be skipped. In a move of spectacular density, they are running a still image for 30 seconds, so that it’s visible during fast forward.
Nevermind that this will alienate your current viewers. Nevermind that most DVR owners use skip instead of fast forward. Nevermind that we stop focussing our eyes after we press the button. This is stupid for one very simple reason.
There are a few series of commercials which I actually stop and back up for. Not many, but some. The Guinness “brilliant” campaign, for example, or the Toyota Prius campaign where the car steps on the robot bug then drinks its juices.
We now live in an era where people are not bound to watch commercials. Trying to force them into it is a guaranteed failure. Either make your demographic want to watch, or don’t get watched. Those are the choices.
09.07.06
Joel On Software: Please Get Off of Software
Am I the only person who’s sick of watching people like Joel On Software spew obvious nonsense? Starting a business is about not throwing away your budget. Most of us don’t have a several year old blog full of other nonsense to convince VCs to recapitalize us just because we lit our first budget on fire to watch the pretty dollars burn.
Most of us starting business have to be “efficient.”
Read the rest of this entry »
07.30.06
Exclusive: Next-Gen Finished
Next-Gen has claimed that “senior industry sources” have told them that the world’s largest gaming convention, whose profits have just been going up every year, is suddenly over.
I’m calling bullshit. I think this is a tactic to raise traffic, that it’s a boldfaced lie (or a prank on a reporter who refuses to report rumor as something other than fact,) and that it’s a sign that Next-Gen has finally gone down the tubes.
I’m going to paste the link, rather than link it, because I don’t want most people visiting the page, but I want there to be posterity. http://next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3538&Itemid=2 Do not visit this page; it’s bullshit.
If Next-Gen doesn’t run a front-page screen-top apology for a month, their credibility has been shot to hell. ‘Course, it’s not like they’re worth reading anyway, given that they rate games starting at 8 of 10, have appalling grammar, and never admit to passing rumor off as news. (Sure, they’ve been caught doing it before, but saying E3 is over is a bit fucking much.)
E3 just started a network site, and accepted quite a bit of money to get people involved. If they shut down after that, they’re in for tremendous trouble. They provide massive marketing opportunities at comparatively low prices, make four to seven hundred dollars a head for a crowd of sixty thousand and have a massive impact on the direction of gaming.
I just don’t believe it. Cite your sources or go the fuck home. Next-Gen is nothing better than the Daily Sun.
07.29.06
Robert Fogel is a Fractionally Awesome Douchebag
This kind of linguistic sloppiness pisses me off, but for it to come from a Nobel Laureate really gets under my skin. Granted, Fogel’s actually an awesome guy who’s brilliant, and I actually use several of the things he figured out (he’s one of the pioneers of modern population economics) when I’m annealing neural networks, and granted I would have never figured out what I do today without his work, but christ on a crutch, he needs to be more careful about phrasing. Sure, he’s way smarter than I am. Still, someone needs to hit him in the face with a dictionary. Makes me highly stabby, it does, yeeeeees.
07.21.06
My First Racist Spam!
Huhuhu. So, the spammers are trying a variety of different approaches to trick me into linking to their various crappy loan and penis drug and gambling pages. Today I got my first racist spam - a semi-coherent rant about how we need to use SEO internet marketing to combat Islamic terrorism. I’d cut and paste it, except Google’s already listing them at #1 or #2 for most of their keywords, and so that’d be just as bad.
Besides, it’s funny on principle of stupidity. The actual text is kind of anticlimactic. The end result? Spammers - who rise and fall on statistics - now believe the easiest way to trick Americans into listening without paying attention is to rant about terrorism.
And if politicians are any gauge, they’re dead right. </scary>
07.06.06
Google’s at it again, the scumbags
Gee what a surprise. I tell people about my being cheated on adwords. Three days later, my pagerank 6 is a pagerank 0.
I get so tired of these assholes.
06.29.06
On Online Pornography
Well, the politicians are at web porn ratings again. Thing is, this time they’re not too far off the mark, and I think a refinement of what they’re suggesting would actually be a Good Thing™.
06.25.06
Usable Design and the RIAA
Yeah, it’s dead short: the RIAA’s page sucks. Some douche came onto IRC looking for help building a music piracy site, so I went to try to report it at the RIAA. I couldn’t find a place to report it. (I reported it to the MPAA and lied and said there were movies in there too. Hopefully they’ll pass it on.)
04.28.06
Someone Doesn’t Understand NPOV.
Whitedust Security seems to think that Wal-Mart defeated Wikipedia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
04.25.06
XMLHttpRequest - So Close and yet So Far
To be plain, I think the XMLHttpRequest object is quite wonderful. It’s a deeper realization than I’d had when I was talking about RFC2557+ some years ago; rather than binding people to URLs, it frees them to use sockets.
Or does it?
04.18.06
Greenpeace Founder Finally Opens Eyes
I’ve long been an ardent supporter of nuclear power. The numbers are in its favor, and most of the arguments against it are either born from bad data or made to sound bad by acting like the alternatives don’t have their own side effects. It looks like one of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is finally waking up.
03.20.06
Image(s) of the Day: Reparations, a Story in 30 Pictures
In the great tradition of appeasing the masses, I am attempting to get out of my earlier lateness debacle by mocking America, my homeland.
03.19.06
Image(s) of the Day: LOL, etc
Whoops! Forgot to fill the queue, and am several hours late. I’m quite busy at the moment because of the company, and so I’m missing little things here and there. This is also why I haven’t generated much blog content in the last couple of days; I’ll try to remedy that tonight. At any rate, as penance for my slackery, I’ll give you several images of the day for today, and more tonight on the normal schedule.
03.12.06
What a Beautiful Game Concept. Pity It’s So Broken.
You know, fundamentally this is just the Snake game which people remember from FastTracker and their Nokia cell phones. But, there are some differences. Read on, diligent viewer, to see purty screen shots, and also to find out what the hell I’m talking about.