More on remodelling the games industry

Following on from my original post about Greg Costikyan's screed (long well-worded written rant) and new company...

Over at Edge Online:

'Costikyan says that even those already taking advantage of this space [distributing games over the internet] are chasing the wrong goal by offering casual games or publishers' back catalogue titles. This ends up selling games to people who aren't really interested in them. "We'd rather try to sell games to people who already buy them," he says.'

Um, wtf? People who want Valve's entire back catalogue aren't the people who are interested in games? Okay, man. Whatever you say. And "chasing the wrong goal"? How else are you going to "re-engineer the customer" into accepting that downloaded games are just as good as boxed versions, other than by demonstrating so? This guy may know his shit when it comes to game design but I'm not sure he really knows that much about changing mass-market behaviour. Somehow, I don't think slogans like "Corporate games suck" are going to cut it. We're not that much like sheep following the trendy revolution (I hope. Who am I kidding?) You need to prove your benefit to us first. Or get a giant corporation to back you and put the competition out of business (but that's a bit antithetical). Maybe get Valve to prove the benefit for you ;)

That being said, he's doing a hell of a job getting interest in his company. He's a bit of a viral marketing genius, getting a cheap logo and website design out of this recent attention. Nice work!

I can't find a point-by-point summary of the long boring screed, so I'll work on doing that over the weekend if I don't find one by then. Might be handy to refer back to in months to come and see how well he's doing with it.

Tagged: games

Remodelling the Games Industry

An article/manifesto/announcement here on Greg Costikyan's blog - he's actually following up on his previous games industry rants and trying to set up his own company to combat the insidious effect of EA on gaming innovation. I thought I babble a bit, but he goes on at great length about the problems of the games industry as it stands, and proposes a solution in his two-part article, "Death to the Game Industry: Long Live Games" at The Escapist. Part 1 is here and is his very lengthy description of the problem, complete with diagrams that are the equivalent of business buzzwords. Part 2 is here and is his proposed solution. I shall summarise the main points of Part 1 eventually, but his proposed solution is:

1. Developers fund the games themselves (with what? venture capitalism I assume)
   
2. Blow up retailers (Huh? Yeah, that's what I thought. I'm pretty sure he means "get rid of the current publishers-to-retailers model and have developers distribute the games themselves")
3. Change consumer perception of downloaded games vs. solid media. (i.e. that downloaded games are scary/unreliable and solid media is the only way)
   

Now I'm not going to go through the points of his whole screed just yet coz it's late and I'm already sleep-deprived... but is it just me or is this exactly the direction Valve are going, but without the big song-and-dance? They have Steam to distribute their product, which they are also licensing out as a distribution platform - thus supplementing their Half-Life 2 and other games sales income with something more steady and presumably providing them with a source for funding any future game development, nicely removing the need to pitch their games to venture capitalists instead of publishers...

Fair play to both of them, I say. Enough with FIFA and Championship Manager 200x already.

One point I have to make about changing consumer perception - I have no personal experience with Steam so I don't know how they resolve this issue - I do have a very healthy and justified mistrust of hard drives and their ability to choke and die, losing all my data. It's nice to know that I have a DVD kicking about in a drawer that I can just reinstall from instead of having to sit online for days to re-download all the software. That kind of thing eats up my bittorrent bandwidth! I hear you can burn the games to DVD once you have them - how exactly does that work? Would I be able to reinstall and reactivate it without an internet connection? The Steam website doesn't really tell you anything other than to install their client, and I'm not doing that until I know what it does. Well, that and I don't want their games coz I'm rubbish at FPS. I might get it soon for Rag Doll Kung Fu though...


Tagged: games

Religious hypersensitivity follow-up

Woo, the BBC news people posted my comment! (Okay, in among about twenty others. Not the point!) They've cropped it down nicely, too. My original post about this article is here.

They've updated the article sicne my original post and now tell us that yes, the objection was to the book-slicing. Silly people - did they not realise that by citing Muslims as the reason, they were saying that it's okay to cut up the Bible and the Talmud? They've also added a quote from the Muslim Council of Britain. Nice to see that I was on the side of reason after all.

'The Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC News website: "We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork.

"We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham's piece.

"Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive." '

On another note, one guy, Jai Gomer, comments is that he is "disgusted" by the artist's comment in the article that "...It shows that all religious teaching comes from the same source". Jai goes on to call the artist narrow-minded and a bigot. Calm down, dude! The guy was trying to defend his art, not come up with a PC sound-bite. I very much doubt you can really describe him as "One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ" just coz he's only addressing the Abrahamic religions. I'm sure he knows there are other schools of thought out there and he was just talking in the context of his current piece which, by the way, does NOT say that those religions are the only religions. Sit down and think clearly about things before leaping on your "this is policitically incorrect!" bandwagon and you'll lead a much less stressful life.

Tagged:art | religion | tate

Nine days until Serenity :) (Seven if I get tickets to the UK premiere, but that's unlikely... and only two if you're in the US. Lucky buggers...)

Bon Jovi are my friends

They went to all the trouble of hiring a plane to tow a banner over London with the message "Bon Jovi says Have A Nice Day". Saw it over the St Paul's area on my lunchbreak. Aren't they nice?

Or maybe they're just plugging their new album.

Unfortunately, my phone's camera is too low-res to see the plane in the photo, let alone the banner so no picture available.

Tagged: music London

Ten days to Serenity :)

Blogger in IE vs Firefox

I was so confused... Yesterday I posted with some tags separated by the pipe symbol | and they displayed fine. Earlier today I posted and the posting process tripped out the | symbols and put the links all next to each other. Now I realise that for some reason posting through IE strips out the | symbols. How odd.

Sorry for bothering you, blogger support! Issue resolved. Well, workaround discovered, which is good enough for me.

Speaking of Firefox/IE... I'm using tableless CSS to format my blog and make it scalable so people with 1280*1024 resolution don't have to view it in teeny 800*600 columns and people with teeny columns can still read it (hopefully). If I reduce the window width in Firefox it goes to a width of about 600px before the main container drops down below the sidebar. It did something similar in IE until today and now the main box drops below the sidebar at about 900px, rendering the changes useless. What's up with that? Update: forgot I cut and paste some code from a test in my Lost post that was in a table. Table now removed, readable in 800*600 again :)

Tagged: blogger | IE

Eleven days until Serenity :)

Religious hypersensitivity at the Tate

BBC News reports that the Tate Gallery removed a very benign work of art on a very flimsy basis.

"The gallery said: "Having sought wide-ranging advice, Tate feels that to exhibit the work in London in the current sensitive climate, post 7 July, would not be appropriate."

What could be inappropriate in today's climate about a piece that aims to say "that all religious teaching comes from the same source, whatever name you give to it" according to its creator, John Latham?

For once, I actually filled in their "tell us your views" section. Religious over-sensitivity annoys me. I can't see anything remotely offensive about this piece and can only assume the objection here is that the Quran, having been cut in half, was not treated with the respect it demands of its followers, but I didn't know that the Tate was in the business of upholding religious commands. I very much doubt they're going to remove any exhibit with topless women in it, even though that is deemed unholy by some interpretations of the Quran. You can't just pick and choose the bits of a religion that are easy to comply with and leave the rest.

The only other thing I can think of that might cause offence would be that the creator has dared to put the Quran on the same level as other (lesser) religous texts, but that's a rather extreme speculation and highly unlikely.

My comment to the BBC is copied below:

"As a mixed-race person who grew up in an extremely multi-cultural environment, I don't understand how this piece is more offensive to Muslims than it is to Jews or Christians. By objecting to it on Muslim, rather then religious grounds in general, the Tate is only promoting segregation rather than the acceptance of all religions on equal footing. How is this a good thing?

It could be viewed that since Muslims are supposed to treat the Quran with the utmost respect, it is offensive to them to cut it in half in order to convey a message - but that is the very nature of art; provoking thought by drawing criticism. If the gallery aims to preserve its reputation of showcasing thought-provoking and interesting displays I would have thought the current climate of heightened cultural sensitivity was precisely the right one for a piece like this.

From a objective point of view, this piece doesn't desecrate the Quran any more or any less than the Talmud or the Bible and objecting to it on the grounds of potentially offending Muslims is displaying a disproportionate level of sensitivity. Were the piece to be a commentary on Muslim sectarianism or their lack of integration into society or celebrating imams who promote terrorism then pulling it on the grounds of "the current sensitive climate" might be understandable. This artwork made no comment on the current climate and from my interpretation, it just tried to highlight the similarity, rather than the differences in three major religious texts. By removing it, the gallery has done the exact opposite."

Tagged: art religion tate

Second series of Lost

It's started. Yay! :)

For those of you who don't know, it's a fantastic drama mostly based in reality with the occasional really bizarre event thrown in to confuse you. IMDB link

I do wonder... they're in a tropical rainforest. There's been no mention of finding petrol or oil (and most of that on the plane was probably used up in the first episode's explosions). Yet the main characters are constantly walking around with flaming torches made from sticks with cloth wrapped around them. Magic ever-burning cloth, I think.

Hmm... my OKCupid Lost Character Test results follow:

Hurley

You scored 53% kindness, 36% courage, 36% seedy past, and 48% secretiveness!

"For the record, my belt HAS dropped a notch. I'm a big guy. It's gonna be a while before you're going to want to give me a piggy back ride."

Dude, you are Hurley. You are a kind soul with some terrible luck. While you're always lending a helping hand, you're not exactly the bravest guy on the island. What you do is even more important - keep people entertained. The only problem you've got is that whole jinxed numbers thing. You're so secretive, no one on the island even knows that you're a multimillionaire! Let it out, dude. There's no use trying to keep it all bottled up inside, man.

Tagged: Television | Lost

12 days until Serenity...

Not impressed with Blogrolling

Today is the second time in as many days that I haven't been able to access blogrolling.com and since I'm using it in my sidebar, it just kills the blog completely :( Apparently, "Squid is unable to create a TCP socket, presumably due to excessive load." If they're having ongoing problems, they should have the decency to tell us, even if I am a freebie user.

It is very nice not to have to go into my blog template every time I want to add a link, but if it's going to keep killing my blog, it's just not worth it. I'm going to remove their code as soon as the site is back up and I can get my links.

I'm in a blog-maintenancey mood this week. Totally repainted the site, so it doesn't look quite so cookie-cutter any more, added trackbacks from Haloscan and added an RSS feed. More work to do over the weekend, perhaps...

Experimenting with Technorati tags for each post: blogroll

14 days to Serenity :)

WoW plague and Player vs Real World dynamics

In Collision Detection, Clive Thompson comments on the WoW plague saying:

"Maybe we should be using online games to study the effects of a real-world bioterror attack? Maybe FEMA and the government should hire Blizzard to build them an online world, and populate it with players by offering it for free. They researchers can test the effects of a contagious bioterror attack such as smallpox -- by releasing a virtual version of it, and seeing how players react."

I have never heard a worse idea in my life. Has this guy ever played an MMORPG?

Real-world behaviour does not exist in these worlds. The whole draw of them is the escapism from the constraints of the real world - players are breaking the quarantine because they can, with no fear of recrimination. They break the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules, when most of them wouldn't dare in real life. I'm sure some of them go out an infect as many people as they can just because it's funny to see animated avatars collapse into skeletons - when it's your real world cousin who catches Ebola and dies it's not so funny, and no one in their right mind would break a quarantine in order to spread the disease.

My point is that you can never use gamers to predict real-world behaviour, because the very essence of gaming is to escape those real-world restrictions and consequences and get away with behaviour you would never be able to in real life. And therein lies their beauty.

Goodbye to freedom in the UK (part 2)

Holy crap - I can't believe they're even considering this! A draft anti-terror bill for UK law. Key points, again from The Guardian.

"New offence of publishing, possessing or disseminating publications that indirectly incite terrorist acts or are likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing a terrorist act"

So if they don't like the look of you (see previous post) they could arrest you under this provision for selling a map to the wrong guy? Obviously you could argue that this is an absurd interpretation, but that's not the point. It makes this possible and spreads out the culpability to includes not just the guy who actually plans carries out the terrorist act but pretty much anyone associated with him. It's not my fucking fault if I give my college mate a photo of a tube station and he then marks potential bomb positions on it, but the quote above would make me culpable in his terrorist act.

Outrageous!

Of course, in any sane world, I wouldn't be prosecuted for this but we're not living in a sane world any more, are we? We're living in a world where you can be arrested for acting a bit funny.

It gets better though:

"New power to extend the maximum period of detention without trial from 14 days to three months. This must be approved by a judge on a weekly basis."

Oh, judge approval makes it all okay, does it? Considering the whole point of increasing the period of dentention without trial is "because the police and security services needed longer than the present 14 days because of the difficulty of obtaining forensic evidence" Is it just me or does that say that they want the power to detain people for longer when there's no evidence? If it's on the basis of a judge's opinion, surely they'd need to present compelling evidence to the judge. And if there's compelling evidence, they should charge them. You can't start on the presumption of guilt without justification, but that's exactly what they're trying to do.

Also see Polly Toynbee's comment, "Why was the IRA less of a threat than Islamist bombers?" Good question.

Goodbye to freedom in the UK

Scary article in The Guardian today:

"They handcuff me, hands behind my back, and take my rucksack out of my sight. They explain that this is for my safety, and that they are acting under the authority of the Terrorism Act. I am told that I am being stopped and searched because:

• they found my behaviour suspicious from direct observation and then from watching me on the CCTV system;


• I went into the station without looking at the police officers at the entrance or by the gates;


• two other men entered the station at about the same time as me;


• I am wearing a jacket "too warm for the season";


• I am carrying a bulky rucksack, and kept my rucksack with me at all times;


• I looked at people coming on the platform;


• I played with my phone and then took a paper from inside my jacket."

So we should remember to always look policemen in the eye. Yeah, that wouldn't be suspicious at all. And for god's sake, don't look at other people on the platform!

Why are these policemen allowed out with such atrocious training and guidance? You can't prevent terrorism by stopping random people in the street coz you don't like the look of them! Even if you think you can, use some common sense - the guy leaned against the wall with his rucksack - hardly the actions of a man carrying a bomb. What incriminating evidence were they expecting to find? I suppose unfounded arrests are a step up from shooting innocent people in the head, but that doesn't make them okay. Particularly when looking "suspicious" can now legally be used as justification for searching my house and confiscating PCs, random electrical equipment and maps without leaving a receipt or inventory of the goods taken. I suppose they were hoping that the maps would have handy little crosses with Plant Bomb Here marked on them.

This later section is the one that inspires me with the most confidence in the police force:

"3.20am I am interviewed by a plainclothes officer. The police again read out their version of events. I make two corrections: pointing out that no train passed between my arrival on the platform and when I was detained, and that I didn't take any wire out of my pocket. The officer suggests the computer cables I had in my rucksack could have been confused for wires. I tell him I didn't take my rucksack off until asked by police so this is impossible. "

Always reassuring when they just make stuff up.

Edit 23/9/05:
London cops mug blogger - boingboing.net.
David Mery's website (the arrestee). The original article is there under "2005-09 Innocent in London"

MMORPG diseases!

I don't play WoW myself, being a bit hooked into Guild Wars at the moment, but I thought this was too cool not to mention

"...Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it's a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn't be shocking when some players come back and haven't been cured.

And that's exactly what's happened. Players are returning from this instance to towns with the diseases, spreading it, and Blizzard's in a panic to keep things under control..."

Heehee! They should just set up apothecaries, or a bath house or something. Maybe alter the disease slightly so it's less virulent in younger players ;) I think it's brilliant that it's acting just like a real civilisation.

Hmm... must remember to buy Fable: The Lost Chapters, and save up for Black & White 2

Simulated Golfing

In my previous post I speculated on how entertaining it might be to practice golfing with the new Nintendo Revolutions wireless controller. That very weekend, my boyfriend's flatmate went out and bought Real World Golf for the PS2, and the Game Trak system entirely of his own accord, so we spent most of Sunday faux-golfing.

It's not great, particularly at £50 (£29.99 game + £19.99 Game Trak). The Game Trak thing works by connecting retracting strings from the base box to specially-made gloves with clips. They're not as intrusive as you think, but you have to play with this tiny 12-inch plastic golf club in order to get your grip right and it's really hard to be consistent, since you can't really line up the "club" against your imaginary "ball". Maybe if you're a real golfer you already know how far out your hands should be, but me? Haven't a clue. Also, if you swing hard it's easy to yank the base out of position and thus totally screw up your next swing, since the movement tracking is all relative to your initial calibration.

The Party Game section is quite fun but if you're as rubbish as me it rapidly gets exhausting. You can knock balls through giant floating hoops or balloons, or hit numbers on a fake dartboard. You have to be pretty bloody good to reach their target to unlock the 301 Darts, but that's fair enough coz at my level of inability I would probably never finish a round of 301 darts. Another thing was that my bf allegedly ;) never hooks the ball when he's playing in the actual real world, yet every shot he took flew off to the left on this thing. Either he was doing something really weird that he doesn't do in real golf, or it's over-sensitive to follow-through actions and bending your left elbow at the end of your follow-through sends it spinning off to the left. Very dubious.

A big issue is that you really need two Game Traks to play multiplayer - it would have been nice to provide two sets of gloves since the things aren't cheap at £20 each. Single-player is okay by yourself but quickly gets tedious for spectators. It's golf, after all.... and amateur, almost by definition.

I can think of much better ways to spend £50. Like adding to my PSP fund. Feel free to donate to my PayPal account ;)

Creepy Causality

Could have been interesting to be a participant in trying to see if the fluctuations recorded during paranormal events were in fact the cause of said events.

"Until now, most studies of parapsychology have concentrated on measuring existing phenomena and subject responses. In the project proposed here, we intend to collect together the results of some of these studies and actually synthesise a "haunted" space using infrasound, temperature, humidity, air movement and electromagnetic fields that have been associated with "haunted" environments. "

Found through boingboing.net today... They don't mention that the Haque's projects page lists this project as Oct 04 - Apr 05 though. I wonder what their results were.

Hollywood executives at work

A brilliantly quotable Neil Gaiman interview where he talks about making Mirrormask and adapting comics (or graphic novels) for cinema.

'Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who wrote "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Shrek" and
some lovely movies, were brought in by Jon Peters to write the first draft of the Sandman movie. He hadn't actually read any "Sandman" because he had people to do that kind of stuff for him, but he had figured out that what the movie needed to be successful was a giant mechanical spider. He wanted a giant mechanical spider because that would make any film a hit. Elliot and Rossio, who had read "Sandman," who went in with their pitch and looking forward to it and going, "But there's no room for a giant mechanical spider."

"I know it, I'm Jon Peters, and I want my giant mechanical spider!"

I was thrilled on going to see "Wild Wild West" to see that he had finally put this giant mechanical spider that I'd been hearing about from Elliot and Rossio for five years into a film with no ideas of any kind." '

Mirrormask looks fantastic! Not sure why it hasn't been given a release date here in the UK yet. Maybe they're holding back on announcing it until it's been screened at the London Film Festival. I would love to see it there but they do make it really hard to book tickets - you have to fill out a paper form and post it to them along with a blank (well, maximum amount specified)cheque that they can fill in when they've allocated you some tickets. Or you can fill in your bank card details and post it to them. Hah! my card details through Royal Mail? I don't think so.

Anyway, The Aristocrats got a nationwide release - I would be extremely unimpressed if Mirrormask didn't. It's a real film! The Aristocrats is a well-marketed but rather dull documentary of comedians describing a joke, occasionally deconstructing it, blaming the audience for looking at it the wrong way if they didn't think it was funny and failing to miss the point that this so-called brilliant joke is only really great for the guy who gets to tell it. The film could have been (and perhaps wanted to be) a fantastic showcase of the different styles of each featured comedian but instead, the few who actually tell the joke in its entirety usually do so in a self-conscious I'm-only-doing-this-coz-you're-making-me sort of way, which pretty much kills any joke. The film has its few moments but it's really not worth more than 2 out of 5.

South Park censored by religious fundamentalists

Don't you just love the way Christianity gets shovelled into everything in the US these days? South Park is being censored for repeat broadcast.

"The Lord's name has been excised from any "-damned" expletives."

And sure, the changes are being run by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. But if they don't approve the changes, bits of the episode doesn't get restored - they won't broadcast it at all! Why buy a show that works hard at being the most offensive show on television if you're going to start snipping it according to your own sense of morality? Goddamn tree-hugging hippies!

Telling notes by Bush

You've probably already heard the faint-chuckle story of Dubya apparently asking Condoleeza Rice's permission to go to the bathroom. The Guardian online has done a "highly (un)scientfic" handwriting analysis of his note, the results of which are particularly amusing in light of his slow reaction to the New Orleans hurricane aftermath:

"The positioning of the crossbar of his "t" is a sure sign that "George will stay in a bad situation for much too long … because he is afraid that if he makes a change, it might get worse. It is hard to plan too far into the future."

Nintendo revolutionises console controls

From Wired News:

"...the controller -- which uses motion-detecting hardware to pinpoint its distance from the screen, location in the room, and even pitch and yaw -- promises a whole new way to play console games.
The controller itself, which is wireless, has a surprisingly different form factor. It looks very much like a television remote control; it is vertically oriented and held in one hand. Your thumb can rest on a directional pad or large A button, and your index finger curls around to grip the B trigger on the underside."

Cool! So it's basically a hand-held pitch/yaw-sensitive gun. Sounds great to me! I cannot for the life of me get the hang of aiming with D-pads or analog joysticks. This could finally bring the FPS genre (and any other game that requires aiming) to people like me with crappy thumb control. Yay! I wouldn't quite describe myself as "someone who would be intimidated and confused by the standard two-joystick, ten-button layout of a PlayStation 3 controller". I'm just crap at using it.

Hmm... I wonder if there'll be a force-feedback feature. And whether it could be used to practice your golf swing. How good would that be? Download (or create) a map of your club's course and practice your golfing anytime, without paying the fees. And without all that tedious walking. And if you're a complete beginner, you'd probably save a fortune in golf balls.

Like my lame title pun? See, I'll be a games journalist yet...

How To Pick Up Women

I found a nice article in on The Observer's website the other day about PUAs - Pick Up Artists. Men who study techniques in order to pick up women. I just love the way that a guy reading an article in a magazine about picking up women is sad, but if you charge him $2,500 and tell him it's a secret club... Woo, they're in!

In addition:

"The teeth, along with the Lasik eye surgery, shaved head, defined goatee, tan and subtle extra inches on his boots all came to him on the orders of Mystery, the world's greatest seduction master, and Strauss's mentor when it came to writing his latest book, The Game, in which he penetrates the secret world of the modern pick-up artist, or PUA."

Ah, the secret world. So FastSeduction.com is a secret world now, is it? Hmm... I suppose it did originate from Usenet. But it's a great guide to developing confidence and teaching yourself to stop acting like a wuss. Sure, you stat off faking it but as with everything, once you succeed a couple of times, you start believing in yourself and a lot of it becomes real and second-nature.
I'm all for this kind of thing. Anything that means I don't get hit on by losers who wobble up drunk to me going "Wow, you're really deep. I can tell coz I've been watching you and you have this faraway gaze that shows you think deeply about things"

Uh-huh. Or maybe I was just bored. (This actually happened to me in a bar. I was bored.) And for god's sake, don't tell a girl you've been watching her unless it's in a sentence like "You're so beautiful - I couldn't take my eyes off you" Otherwise, it's just creepy. I know you could argue that it's shallow to accept the compliment when it's about beauty, but come on! "You're deep"? The guy doesn't even know me!

Getting back to the point: The article goes on to say

" Techniques such as negging and peacocking have always existed, but this is the first time the alphabet of male seduction has been painstakingly translated and written down."

No it's not. See previous link. Also, please pass it round to all your male friends. Although if their workplace is as draconian as mine (mmm... censorship), they'll only be able to access it at home. My point is, I like being fooled into thinking I have a connection with someone - isn't that what all new relationships are about? You get that fantastic little thrill of having fun with someone new (note to bf: not looking for someone new, but remember howmuch fun it was when we first started flirting?) and talking to someone projecting faked confidence is much better than missing out on a fantastic guy because he's too shit-scared to say anything more then "Uh... hi" Or even worse, too insecure to avoid dropping himself into the "Friends" zone. Yes, the dreaded LJBF.

But yes, as long as you follow the cardinal rule "'Always Leave Them Better Than You Found Them" then there's nothing wrong with using a few techniques to pull women. Making us feel like the greatest girl in the world, then sneaking out without a word in the middle of the night - that's shitty. At least treat us with respect and talk to us over breakfast. We like being with a guy who makes us feel good about ourselves. So go! Learn techniques! Spread the word! :)

[Quick caveat: Don't take everything on fastseduction.com as gospel truth. We don't all want guys to treat us like crap and if we call you on manipulative behaviour, that does not make us bitches. Just keep us guessing a little. Also, just like you, sometimes we do lose phone numbers or we're just too shy to call. Use your own discretion coz some of those rules are a little harder and faster than reality. Also, for long-term happiness, there's absolutely nothing wrong with oneitis. Unless she's not interested - in that case, you're rapidly sliding back to AFC-land and need to go out and get some #-closes quick.]

Crazy pen-spinning tricks

Pentrix.com

Strange and pointless geeky fun for those dull classes when all the teacher does is read off the board.

My new Samsung E530 reviewed

Okay, it was new in July when I wrote most of this post but I could never be bothered to finish it until now.

I like it! :) It's cute and it has a half-decent 1 megapixel camera, so I can still take photos even when I'm not carrying a bag big enough for my camera. I won't bore you with a description of the features available, just describe how they feel in a practical sense. For a thorough description of features, click here for Mobile-review.com's review.

Text messaging

The T9 dictionary is very handy, but for some obscure reason my phone has randomly reverted to German three or four times, which is quite annoying. I'm used to Nokia phones which are very intuitive but this phone has some nice texting features - holding down the # key brings up a menu of symbols, displayed nine to a page each with a number next to them so you can select the symbol you want instantly. Entering ".." automatically changes to a smiley ":)" which would be a good feature if I didn't use ellipses... They automatically get switched to .:) which isn't quite the same meaning - it should replace " .. " (including spaces) with a smiley instead.
After a few months of use, I do find it very annoying that it doesn't save the last input setting. So even though I always use the T9 dictionary with automated sentence capitalisation, whenever I start a new message I have to spend an extra couple of seconds changing the input from ABAB to T9Ab. Grr...

Camera

It's not bad - I have a half-decent shot of a warehouse skeleton, which looks a bit like a 50s picture postcard to me. Don't be fooled by the full-screen option for the viewfinder mode! It sounds great coz otherwise your viewfinder is only half the screen area but all it does is crop the sides to show you the middle half of the photo, which makes framing impossible! I don't know whose bizarre idea that was but it makes no sense at all! It would have been a better idea to rotate the image display for full-screen view since the screen is portrait when held as a phone and the photos are landscape ratio. But never mind. The "standard ratio" image image display is good enough to frame the photo properly, which I guess is all you really need. It was a nice idea that was just badly implemented.
A minor gripe - you can't resize images once they're taken - O2 have a size limit on their MMS so I have to keep changing the camera settings depending on whether I'm taking a photo for my photoblog or sending to a friend.

Sounds

Firstly... this phone is absolutely riddled with mad noises for every little thing you do. The first thing was hunt for the sound options so I could turn off the bleeping every time I opened a folder, closed an option, changed a setting, etc. Once they're off it's pretty handy to browse through the interface although the volume is very loud when the phone is open, so please don't start browsing your ringtones on the train. I think there's only the one speaker, so it has to be loud to be heard when the clamshell is closed.
For messages you can't set it to vibrate and beep! Very annoying because with it in my bag or pocket, I rarely hear the tone and in my house I can't hear the buzz. It's not easy to switch from one profile to the other, either. Ringtones are your typically annoying mad jingly tunes but the Samsung Mobile website has a handy plain RingRing option that you can download through WAP (Basic Ring 2). Also, they sent me a voucher for a free flight to select cities in Europe, which was nice :) You can use an MP3 as the ringtone as well, so it's easy enough to pick whatever you want.
Voice clarity is pretty good.

Other stuff (aka I'm bored of looking up features on my phone)

• Looks cute and feels nice :)
• Bluetooth is good although I haven't figured out how to synch/transfer messages to my PC yet. Samsung Mobile provides a bunch of software on their website but no instructions as to what it's supposed to do.
  
• Comes with some absolutely terrible Java games.
• Lifestyle options are okay but not hugely useful. I've tried the shopping list feature a few times but since the price of my shopping is wildly variable depending on whether I'm feeling energetic enough to fight through Asda or not, it doesn't really help me plan my budget any. Plus, I have no idea how much anything costs since supermarkets here are constantly "rolling back prices" (and quitely raising prices elsewhere). The display is also too small for it to be very helpful, only showing three items at a time.
• The biorhythm thing is mildly entertaining if you believe in that sort of thing. Give you a handy excuse when you're feeling lazy or thick, anyway :)
• "Pink calendar" might be useful if I was planning on getting pregnant any time soon, or predict periods. But I'm on Depo Provera. So not useful. (It only shows last month and next month, which isn't great either. I have some idea when my next one is. Will I have it on my birthday? That would be a useful thing ot know three months prior. No point in booking a beach holiday if you're going to bleed all through it)
  
• The included earphones are RUBBISH. They keep falling out, which is just annoying when I'm trying to exercise.
• Alarm has two basic alarm settings that can be either once or every day and a morning setting that you can set for every day, weekdays only, every day but sunday and once only. Nice feature.
  

That's it. Overall, probably 4 out of 5 for a phone - looks pretty, sounds great, good memory size, dubious text interface (buttons feel a bit weird), dodgy camera display but decent on-the-go photos when in broad daylight. The low-res photo display when someone calls is quite good as well - faces are totally recognisable. Wouldn't recommend if you want your phone to be an all-singing all-dancing PDA substitute, or if you're a serious T9/predictive-texter (i.e. 10+ messages a day) but there are some useful features there.

Katrina long-term timeline wiki

Quite an interesting one, too. Rather than showing the actual post-hurricane events, it's attempting to track the political decisions that led to this disaster being on the huge scale that it is. The current stuff is very detailed but they need some help with dates and reliable data sources on the previous few years.

Have a look over at The Angry Panda

Rapes/Murders after Katrina?

Okay, maybe I'm just evil and cynical here but why are there no first-hand or even second-hand accounts of these atrocities? From boingboing.net we have:

"While some misinformation may be circulating as rumor among evacuees, let's also remember that reports of deaths and violence inside the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center were dismissed as "rumor" in early days by authorities before reporters proved them to be true...

...Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee Clara Barthelemy: ... ...A six year old girl was raped in here.. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten. No hot food. No help for elderly...

...Another evacuee: "Over 20 rapes per night happening inside this place.""

All well and good linking to the dimissal as rumour, but how about a link to the reporters who proved them to be true? Or at least a name? I'm not saying that violence never happened - just frustrated at the complete absence of any kind of verifiable details. Fortunately, John B. Sibley disputes the Astrodome claims in the blog entry's comments, but of course comments like are rarely, if ever, the ones picked up for broadcast by others. There was a TV clip I saw on UK news (possibly BBC) a couple of days ago where a woman said to the cameras "Women are getting raped, they're raping babies" Raping babies?? Yeah, and you just stood back and watched while a baby was grabbed and raped, did you?

Have a look at this pervscan.com article - they're much more thorough.

Dukes of Hazzard (2005) reviewed - 5 out of 10

The first 10-15 minutes were excruciating, but somewhere durng the bar brawl scene parts of my brain melted and flowed out my ears, and I began to enjoy this. It's a fun little film. Not spectacular in any sense, the actors aren't exactly brilliant, although Johnny Knoxville did stand out as... convincing. Nothing else, just convincing, which is better than Seann William Scott has ever managed. And more than Jessica Simpson achieved, though I s'pose her part was mostly to "wiggle her ass"
Overall verdict: I didn't come out wanting those 106 minutes of my life back. Unlike with Unleashed. Not brilliant, but maybe that's coz the male eye-candy just wasn't to my taste. Willie Nelson was a good laugh, though. I'd recommend this film to rent for a night in with friends and beer.

IMDB link

Unleashed, reviewed. 3 out of 10.

Jet Li does some cool martial arts. Morgan Freeman identifies piano brands by telepathy. Bob Hoskins plays an East End Baddie with occasional bits of humour. Kerry Condon plays a girl who gets her braces removed. (I'm not sure what else her character was really there for). And there's a "heart-warming" (read: boring) bit in the middle. You may be tempted, like I was, into thinking that Oh, something's about to happen! I'll wait a few minutes before dashing out to the toilet!. But no! Absolutely nothing of any interest happens in that half hour.

IMDB page

BTW, anyone who saw it - was this film set in Plaistow (East London) or Glasgow? Coz I thought Morgan Freeman said " runs the best corner shop in Plaistow" or something along those lines. And my boyfriend thought he said Glasgow. And part of it was filmed in Glasgow...

But then why did everyone have East End/London accents? It's not like it was a US film or anything.