The White Flight, Grounded

A discussion about elitist online communities and platforms has taken flight, with some people growing increasingly concerned at the implications of online communities that aren't immediately available to anyone and everyone. It's simmered, but I first really picked it up when I read Anil Dash's post You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club. I love Anil, he's a super smart guy, and I've followed him for many years. But he's wrong in asserting that services like Svbtle and App.net trend towards a larger non-egalitarianism. And that they form country club-like organizations, which once seeded with this elitist culture, will perpetuate it ad infinitum, causing a socio-economic rift in its user base and the inevitable mono-culture.

This discussion seems to stem from an insensitive, inarticulate and unthoughtful post on PandoDaily about App.net, which argued that the problem with Twitter was/is…

Everyone was allowed on, which is great, but at the same time, everyone was allowed in. As PandoDaily contributor Francisco Dao told me recently, every open system degrades over time, due to the quality of the incoming participants. (He also used the word “cockroaches,” but that’s a different story.)

The problem was never the people who started using Twitter, it was and continues to be, Twitter's inability to keep both new and old users happy at the same time.

Anil doesn't mention this article, letting the accusation fall on no one in particular, a space in which it's a little too easy to make up arguments. But he cites two other posts that essentially boil down to "white, well-educated people only want to hang out with other white, well-educated people, and it's a problem". Yet somehow in all of this hemming and hawing no one ever points out that the reason these services — in western markets — are seeded with white male techies, is probably because that is the overwhelming demographic markup of techies! They are mostly male. They are mostly white.

Ideal? Of course not! Should it change? Yes. But the arguments put forward conflate so many issues that it's almost irresponsible. Not to mention that even if the notion of non-free or closed services as 'country clubs' was agreeable, it's at most indicative of a symptom, not a cause. It might perpetuate the problem, but given Twitter's alienation of certain users, how is not building alternative a solution? It's not like App.net takes your race, color and creed before allowing you access; it simply asks you to pay for the service. It seems like an almost alien notion in today's world, that a company would have, gasp, a business plan. Here we are, so used to companies with free platforms flailing around while they try to monetize their popularity, until they inevitably settle on their users as their products. Yay open. Yay inclusion.

But worst of all is the comparison with 'the white flight'; a comparison which violently twists the words 'unwanted people' from 'trolls, spammers and jerks' into a socio-political-laden remark brimming with race and class implications.

Excuse me, but… what… the fuck?

PandoDaily's Trevor Gilbert completely misrepresents and then oversimplifies his misrepresentation of the problems facing Twitter in comparison to its early days, and from that a discussion about race and class is zapped into life like some grotesque Frankenstein creation?

I haven't heard a single person talking about App.net mentioning the population of Twitter as being the problem. It all comes down to their policy changes and continuing disregard for the needs of the tech crowd over the general population somewhere in-between leaving their apps to rot while crippling competitors, the dickbar, trending topics, degrading DMs and still (still!) not syncing mentions and DM unread counters. Different groups have different needs, and that the needs of tech nerds are different than those of Justin Bieber fans can come as a surprise to no one. Unless of course you're a writer for The Society Pages, a hammer to all the not-quite-but-almost nails of the world.

As I'm writing this, my Twitter stream is blowing up not with people complaining about other people on Twitter, but about Twitter itself. Why? Because these people, of whom I am one, helped build Twitter, and now Twitter has outgrown us and failed to provide the tools needed to interact with it in a meaningful way.

As for Svbtle, you may have reservations about its personality as a brand, but how is it different than any collection of writers be it old-fashioned publications or any of thousands of online magazines? It's specifically not an open community because it's not meant as an open community, and that is its defining quality. There is room for curation as much as there is room for mosh pits. You can point to Medium and say that they have something interesting going on with their liking system and seemingly open categories, but isn't it a little misguiding to post about the exclusion of people on a platform which at the moment just as exclusive as Svbtle? Or are you saying that you can stop a revolution from a country club?

Anil: But there’s an aesthetic and editorial sensibility that permeates any defined online community that is almost always inherited from its earliest dominant users, and once it’s established, it’s almost impossible to change.

Both Twitter and Facebook started out fundamentally different than what they are today, as did Tumblr and Flickr and any number of popular services, which is why we're having this discussion at all. Size dilutes. You can't state on the one hand that communities stay true to their seed, and then on the other that there's a 'white flight' because they don't. Which is it?

Beyond that, it's a massive fallacy that communities should be everything to everyone. The very word itself, community, stems from common, as in shared, as in 'this is what we share'. If you include everyone in your 'bottled ships club', it's unlikely to be about bottled ships for much longer, which really sucks if you just like to hang out and talk about how awesome bottled ships are and how best to make them.

An Acrobat Scripting Rant

I want you to know that it is quite hard for me to write his entry and not riddle it with profanity. Over the course of several months a hobby project of mine, something as geeky as a character sheet for the roleplaying system Silhouette, had me spending quite a bit of time with Adobe Acrobat’s built-in scripting engine, and I feel compelled to make sure you don’t repeat my mistake.

PDF’s are a staple of the digital pen and paper world, and yeah, the idea of a PDF character sheet makes a lot of sense over other more flexible solutions, such as an HTML file; most importantly because of the layout of course. To a larger degree however, I chose to experiment with Acrobats scripting because it seemed like a fun thing to do.

The thing is, while Acrobat does indeed have an almost full scripting language available for PDF files, it is in every way possible a usability nightmare and carries with it all the hallmarks of an alpha implementation.

First of all, on the whole process of writing code, there are largely no hotkeys (and assigning them through OS X doesn’t work). I hope you like your mouse, because you will be using it a lot to go to Advanced » Document Processing » Document Javascripts.... This is where your scripts live. And every single time you need to test your code, you have to close the editing window and any other miscellaneous sub-windows, all of which of course lock access to the rest of Acrobat while open. Oh, and these windows don’t disappear when you press Escape either. Hand on mouse, it’s the hard way.

Want to make another change? Advanced » Document Processing » Document Javascripts…, select file, find code bit, edit, save, close, close, refresh. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Script code can live in many different places in Acrobat, both in ‘files’ of a sort, each of which you access through the afore-mentioned Document Javascripts… menu point, as well as on any of the form elements in the document (and on each form element it can live in various parts of it, like under ‘validate’, ‘calculate’ or ‘action’). This sounds like a good idea in theory, right? After all it’s much easier to quickly plot in some JS for a button to make it work than it is to write the JS needed to assign said code to the button.

The problem is of course, that other than straight up forgetting what code you’ve assigned to a form element and having to fetch it through Advanced » Document Processing » Edit All Javascripts… you can also write code that assigns scripting functionality to those very same form element hooks. Except when interacting with form elements in HTML for instance, any such code is thrown out the window at the end of the session. In Acrobat you actually assign code to the element. It stays there indefinitely.

That would be a really good idea if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s pointless, as you can assign that very code on document initialization every time anyway. Now you have to deal with the fact that at any point if you assign code to an element, you have to remember to clean up after yourself, lest you want a nasty surprise down the road.

With the horror of the development environment in mind, I was very mindful to keep all my code in a single file. Until of course I hit about 1280-some lines and the internal editor croaked. There is no warning about this while you’re editing your code and there is no line-counter in the margin of the internal editor (which is nothing more than a text field in essence, which given that it doesn’t have line-numbers obviously has nothing as advanced as color coding, folding or any other sanity-inducing amenities). You’ll find out that you stepped over the limit when you’re unable to open the JS file again.

Of course you can create multiple JS files inside of Acrobat, but I never found out how to make them read each others global variables or even how to execute functions across the file-to-file gap.

So to consolidate all of the code into a single file, you can switch to using an external editor, which is better in many ways; using your editor of choice, which isn’t as 1981 as Acrobat’s, for instance. But… Acrobat opens the code in the your app and then waits in the background, beachballing until you quit the editor app again.

Yes, Quit.

It doesn’t check to see whether the file is being updated so you can keep your app open in the background; you literally have to quit the app, to activate Acrobat again and see your changes.

Madre de Deus.

And that’s just the big stuff. Then there are all the small things, most of which I’ve gladly forgotten; but just as an example, read-only elements don’t fire mouseover events. Because… Becaaaauuuuseeee. Who knows?! Acrobat has a built-in tool for copying out elements in a grid-like fashion; which is great for use with list-like forms and in my case needed in particular for the skill list on the character sheet. The tool however is utterly unconfigurable and names the resulting fields in the exact way I didn’t want them named (element names are read-only with code). Tabbing order? Forget about it. And if you want to chance it, you have to dragging form elements up and down on a list. I had over a hundred elements on that list (tabbing order is read-only with code). Code speed is sluggish to say the least, the documentation is bewildering and I have no real clue what exactly causes the code to be initialized.

And the list goes on and on and on.

Love it or hate it, Acrobat is an industry standard; I wish I could say the same for their scripting implementation.

I did finally manage to finish most of the ideas I had for the Silhouette character sheet—which I’m unlikely to ever actually use, but who cares—and it’ll take one serious pile o’ cash before I go back.

A Day in the Life...

In an attempt to halt the furry-fication of my workstation wallpaper, I have my screensaver kick in early and leave any assailants at a login screen. Today I returned from a meeting, only to find that as I tried logging in, Vista, as a part of our network policy, persisted in asking me to change my password. Now. Not tomorrow, not five minutes from now. Now.

How do you change your password you ask? Choose ‘Change User’, which automatically logs you out, only for you to then log back in so that you can change your password. “But won’t that cause any open applications to close?” you ask. Yes, it will. “But isn’t that like extending the middle finger to the user, rather than protecting his data?” you ask. Yes, yes it is. And I may be mistaken, but I swear I heard a gleeful cackling as it did so.

Of course, when Vista was done hurling my sacred and precious user data into the sun, it promptly changed the resolution to 640×480, asking me for a new password. I relinquished one, and was reinserted into the hell that is Vista. I immediately tried changing the resolution and setting my primary/secondary monitors back to their original order, but couldn’t. Blink. Blinketi-blink. 2×24” at 640×480; live with it.

So I restarted. Again.

Thanks Microsoft.

PS: And this isn’t mentioning the times the login screen has been black with a cursor on top. Vista loves playing ‘guess a course of action, fucker’ with me. I wish the feeling was mutual, that would really raise my quality of life.

PPS: “Windows 7 is coming, it’ll make everything better.” Dude, I doubt it. I really do.

So I Cancelled My Killzone 2 Pre-Order

I just spent the last half hour running through the Killzone 2 demo, a game for which I had previously been looking forward to quite a bit, going so far as to even pre-order it. However, after this playthrough, I’ve had to cancel my pre-order, which serves as a good prelude to this entry.

Killzone 2 is already getting plenty of accolades for its graphics, and even for its gameplay. It currently holds an impressive score of 90 on Metacritic and is sure to sell in the millions. Congratualtions to everyone who worked on it, I’m sure it will entertain many and hopefully break well more than even.

And I don’t mean to be the cynical prick trying to bring down this apparent masterpiece, but…

I don’t care much about graphics. Most games these days look pretty good, and to be honest it takes a lot more than grungy graphcis to impress me. Killzone 2 does have some nice touches, but while well-crafted, it’s also exactly what I expected.

In fact, I think I’ll coin the term JAWZ. Just Another War Zone.

Despite being able to launch very awesome spaceships across the stars and have them hang in low orbit, the soldiers are still equipped with rifles that have no punch beyond 20 meters. A shame that, otherwise this war would probably have been won considerably easier. Obviously, this is meant to pull the player in close to the Helghast, and as such it works. Even if I personally would have liked a slower, more deliberatly paced war game, in which your most effective strategy at any given moment isn’t to charge and punch them with the butt of your rifle.

Apparently ‘Sev’ has some pretty impressive biceps.

Now, despite what I want and what I get being to different things, I’m not set on disliking Killzone 2. It’s just that they remarkably managed to implement some of the most annoying, grating and unsatisfying gameplay mechanics out there. In some ways, it’s like seeing a first person shooter from ten years ago, which just happens to look really good, but which carries with it last millenium design methodologies.

It all starts with a…

Theater

The D-Day-like landfall that opens the demo looks and sounds pretty good (if a bit repetitive), but soon reveals itself as pure smoke and mirrors. Lots of big fireballs and machine gun fire, and no real casualties… This can work; check out Medal of Honor: Allied Assault’s D-Day landing, for a considerably more convincing piece of theater (for its time).

So, there I was, standing in the middle of a ‘killzone’ as it were, and though people were shouting that I should get a move on, there was no penalty for not doing so. Now I’m not saying the player should always be penalized for taking longer than what is required to keep the theater realistic, but at the same time, if you have motars, machineguns and dropships dialed up to 11, perhaps a little encouragement, in the guise of flying lead, isn’t out of the way?

I try to pick off the enemies on the bridge ahead, the ones that are spraying bullets everywhere and launching motars, thinking I might be able to loosen up the resistance a bit before I get there. But, like the snipers in Half-Life 2, they aren’t real enemies, but some other contrivance, and you have to kill them by following the script laid out, not through the use of gameplay.

Great.

So I move up and get closer to the bridge. There’s been a lot of ‘acting’ going on around me, but I didn’t pay attention to any of it, because I thought I was there to kill; after all, it’s KILLzone, not ‘THEATERzone’. But no.

I try to pick off the guys on the bridge again. No luck. Until I’m told to pick up the rocket launcher. So I shoot the bridge with the rocket launcher. It blows up, which I knew it would, because the truck was carrying something red, which of course reads as ‘shooot heeereee’.

Unsatisfying in every way. Luckily it gets better, right?

Multi-Fronts?

Well, actually I should go back a minute, because before getting to the rocket launcher, you get out from under a bridge, where you are actually faced with two fronts at one time! Not a bad thing by any means. It forces quick reflexes, on-you-feet-strategies and allows for some pretty cool level setups if done right.

Of course, in this case, having had my eyes on the bridge from the very first moment of the level, I didn’t notice that I had baddies on my left now, and they in turn didn’t call much attention to themselves. So when I was hit, I though I was being shot from the bridge… After all, I was trying to follow the script I though had been laid down by the designer.

  1. Approach bridge.
  2. Pick up rocket launcher.
  1. Kill baddies on bridge.

As it were, this of course wasn’t a multi-front, because the guys on the bridge are puppets, and can’t kill me… I don’t know who they’re shooting at, but it ain’t me.

So no, nothing interesting here, just a misleading and poor directional setup.

More Theater

Eventually everyone’s dead, and my friends move along to the next area. I still have the rocket launcher, and play around a bit with trying to see if I can throw my six-shooter away and carry just an assault rifle and a rocket launcher, a setup I like considerably more than the six-shooter and rifle. But alas. So I keep the rocket launcher, thinking it’s more fun than the rifle anyway…

Alright, whatever, I’ll get going, alright? Well, now there’s a turn to the left, and someone is shouting something to me about enemies coming in. I just make it in time for the APC’s to roll up and baddies start pouring out.

HAH! I think. Good thing I brought my rocket launcher, it was made for taking out APC’s.

Or not.

So I pick up a rifle and start shooting. Meanwhile my friends are dying all around me. Apparently I’m the only one with a heart, as no one else is reviving them, and so I go about doing that as well. Except, once I revive them, they don’t take cover. They just keep sitting in the beach, thinking no one will see them or some such. They go down again… I’m thinking ‘how do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?’.

Now, I could swear I take down that machine gunner several times, but he just keeps…

Respawning

If there is one thing on Science’s green Earth I hate, it’s respawning. It is the lowest, worst, most horrible piece of design a game can contain. Yeah, sure, there are cases in which it makes perfect sense to have respawning, and I acknowledge that. But Killzone 2 makes a virtue of showing you only the worst.

As it stands, there’s a long standing tradition in first person shooters in particular, to use respawning as a way to keep pressure on the player, so that he is forced to move forward, which then triggers to the respawning to either stop, or continue from a new location.

It’s a poor decision, because you’re forcing the player to play the game the way you want him to, not in the way he wants to. In single player games, I’m all about the cautious strategy. I take my time, hold back, lay down suppressive fire and pick off the enemies one by one.

But I can’t do that, because Killzone refuses to let me play the way I want to play! Not because it can’t, but because it won’t.

So after the beach landing, you and another guy head down a hallway to a room, in which four or five Helghast have unwisely set up base amongst plenty of red gas canisters and red barrels. And you know what that means, right?

Well, if you’re thinking, I’ll just hang back up here and pick them off one by one, as any sane person would do, since the walkway provides plenty of cover and safe angles… Well, you’d be like me. But you wouldn’t be like the designer, who thought something along the lines of: “I need to lure them down. I need to make this area insane and awesome! Like Michael Bay would do it!”, well then you might get a job working on Killzone 3.

As it turns out, there’s a small room of sorts, with three doors in it, from which an endless stream of Helghast will emerge. You take down a baddie, a new one emerges. Ad nauseum. I looked around once inside the room and found no teleporter or secret passageways, so I guess they just happened to have been stacked in there in just the amount it took for me to get to a triggerbox that turned off the spawn point.

Oh, and my friend? He was incompetent, and got shot. As he lay there screaming in pain and agony… I went to the loo as a ‘Fuck you! You should have paid more attentin in boot camp! I’ll leave you here to bleed to death!’...

Which I did.

But of course, I needed him to get to the next area, so…

Strict Conditional Progression

“Cover me while I hack this blah blah blah”, he told me. Fair enough I thought, and crouched behind him, with my aim on the door behind us. And sure enough, Helghast spawned happened to appear in the room where we came from.

Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t see either of us, and apparently didn’t know how to move into position either. So they just kept running from cover to cover, just out of sight from us, while my friend was doing whatever he was doing behind me.

A minute passed.

I sure as shit wasn’t going to poke my nose out. Why would I? I paid attention in boot camp! Rule #1 of warfare: Don’t get shot. Rule #2: No seriously, don’t get shot, you’re likely to have to play through respawning enemies again, and you don’t want that!

Two minutes passed.

Wait a minute, I smell a rat here…

Three minutes.

Oh for fuck sake. As suspected, HackTime equals WhenAllHelghastDead.

So I killed them. Something I took abslutely no pleasure in, because by this point I was already putting together this entry in my head. All the while I was thinking that if they wanted me to kill the fucking Helghast, why didn’t they just set up a situation where I couldn’t take full cover? Where their AI didn’t break like fine glass underfoot of my mighty boot?

To set up a situation where the amount of time it takes someone to do something is equal to ‘Now + when all enemies are dead’, is trite and lazy. Not only does it break easily, as shown in the demo (perhaps the last place you want to see something like that happen), but when it breaks, it absolutely ruins the illusion of the world and your investment in it.

In Closing

There’s nothing wrong with linear and controlled experiences. And perhaps the full game surprises. But even if this demo just happens to showcase all the things I hate in one concentrated effort, that in itself doesn’t bode particularly well for the full game.

I don’t even mind the clichéd red-eyed enemies, or the standard-fare military banter (which could have come from any military game, it’s that ‘meh’) or even the JAWZ. But I mind lazy design, and I despise games that have the illusion of letting me play it in my own way, when in fact it can only be played in their way. That the theater fails to convince is one thing, but their use of respawning and strict conditional progression are just downright catastrophic design decisions in my book.

This might not affect you. I’m afraid it’s a work-related injury in my case, and if you enjoyed the demo, feel free to sound off below, so as to make me look like the fool I am.

But, at least this leaves up time for me to play some more GTA IV, which I’ve been enjoying very much this last week, and possibly even some Gears of War 2, though I honestly suspect it will leave me as non-plussed as both its predecessor and Killzone 2.

That’s just my opinion of course, and I’m probably just a stuck up idiot with delusions of grandeur.

Kinetosis, You Bitch

In the case against intelligent design, I say it’s time we stop worrying about the appendix—that wretched evolutionary deadend—and start focusing in on what must surely be the single most retarded piece of code in our collective reptilian brains; Kinetosis.

Or, in the common tongue: ‘motion sickness’.

If you’re one of the lucky two in three who don’t suffer from motion sickness, let me break it down to you: There you are, minding your own business, happily playing a computer game of some sort. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s Doom. And it’s going really swell for you to boot, offing hell spawn left and right like a crazed war vet left behind by society and now armed with a high powered rifle and scars on his soul that wake him up bathed in sweat at odd hours of the night.

Then BOOM! Our of nowhere, you’re nauseous. You stomach feels bloated. You can’t concentrate and you feel like you’ve been up for days. And the only thing in the world that can possible counter this horrible condition is… Nothing.

Yes. Nothing. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it! You can lie down, close your eyes and feel as if you’re going to puke your guts out. But it won’t help, so…

Luckily there are some early warning signs that can help you avoid a full on attack of motion sickness in case its trying to creep up on you. To help out fellow kinetosists, I’ve gathered them up here: Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip.

One moment you’re fine. Ready to take on the world, raise children and trade stocks. The next, BOOM! You’re mistaken for a drug addict as you scramble around on all fours, drooling from the side of your mouth and mumbling some indecipherable language only perceptible by fellow kinetosists, and which in general translates to: ‘Fuck this shit, I want out!’.

And if there is a God, and she would be willing to do this to her flock, then she ain’t benevolent. I’m tellin ya.

Google Reader exposes hypocrites

Rikke and I both use Google Reader and its share items freely, not only with each other, but in my case also with the general public. As it turns out, the new ‘Friend’s Shared Items’ is being scorned by a range of people, one of who even goes so far as to say it has ‘RUINED CHRISTMAS’ for him and his family.

The problem arises when items are shared using under the new feature, they automatically become available to any of your gmail contacts who are also Google Reader users. And there is no way to disable the new feature, or indeed manage the contacts that can make use of it.

This has caused something of an outcry (via Gruber), where at least one user goes so far as to exclaim this feature as having RUINED CHRISTMAS for my family!.

Give me a break.

I have no delusions of being able to turn the tide on this trend. But since it was brought home to me in extraordinary fashion in the past few months, just how reactionary people become when they’re given the channels to do so, at least I can raise a flag of dissent, and hope to be heard.

Gruber doesn’t think it’s a good idea to turn Google Reader into ‘a sort social site’. I disagree. I make good use of it, and while being able to manage who of your contacts are able to follow your shares, or the simpler solution, being able to turn off the feature entirely, is of course a needed option.

But you have to be something of a nincompoop, to point your finger at Google for ruining Christmas, when the real problem in fact, is hiding your true colors behind white lies and hopes of ignorance, lacking the courage of your your own convictions.

Or, you simply fail to understand, that on the intarwebs, nothing remains secret forever.

More:
Security through obscurity.

Update:
Lo and behold, they fixed it.

The Problem With Social Networks Is...

These are things that, in this brave new world of the ‘consumer content provider’, would increase all our combined standards(s) of living(s) substantially:

  • Being able to sort out ‘HDR’ images on Flickr, like for instance this one, or this one or hey, even this one. Yes yes, it ‘can be done better’, but that’s not the point. The point is, it shouldn’t be done at all. That or a license should be required.
  • Sorting out AMV’s on YouTube. Yes, Anime Music Video’s… The idea is kinda good; the general implementation? Not so much. Don’t believe me? Try searching for “AMV Linkin Park”. That should land you about 28.000 results! Twenty Eight Thousand! (for kicks, try spelling it “linking park amv”, and see the results jump up by a few thousand… what does that tell you?) Now I love me some angsty teen hybrid rap/metal (I do, check my last.fm), and despite their latest album being largely worthless, I can see the chemistry between that and big bouncing manga tits, flying robots and swarming missiles. But enough, is enough, and really, can you call it a ‘music video’ if it’s a random serious of clips out of sync with the music?.
  • Sorting out ‘fan trailers’ on YouTube. Yes, it would seem YouTube has become the defacto hang-around for teens with all too much time on their hands. A quick search on YouTube digs up a cool 20.000 fan trailers=, as it would happen, I did a quick survey, and out of those 20.000 fan trailers, 19.998 are actively dangerous for the human mind to observe… Scary stuff.

Yes, I could add ‘–amv –“fan trailer” –hdr’ to all my searches online, but what I’m talking about here is much larger than that. We are on the brink of a global catastrophe, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m talking about an international effort, through the UN even, to finally get to the root of this problem. Forget about M- or AO-rated games, this is serious business, because this isn’t just corrupting the youth of today (as if the youth hasn’t always managed to corrupt itself; it’s called ‘evolution’), this is actively wasting everyone’s time. And surely, that must be worth getting to the root of.

A funny sidenote is, and you can try this at home, if you change the sorting of the search results on YouTube, you’ll see that the number of results change. The default is ‘sort by relevance’, which gives us the 28.000 Linkin Park AMV’s. Now try sorting by ‘date added’... It drops to 15.100!... How can there by nearly twice the number of videos under ‘relevance’ as there is when sorted by date?! What in the hell is going on at YouTube? (scrape here for answer)

Regardless, I hope the world has heard my plea, otherwise I’ll have to resort to a little thing I like to call intensive carpet bombing, with extreme prejudice.

Have a good day.

Remove The Annoying Technorati Ticker

So Technorati redesigned recently. Generally speaking I’m not much of a fan of the candy-drop look, but I in particular cannot fathom why they would add a ticker, which inelegantly flickers across the top of the site, displaying tags (such as, and I quote: “free porn”).

Very helpful… No wait, that other thing… Yes.

I too thought we killed the Marquee tag, and no I don’t generally have much use for Technorati, but when I do finally go there I don’t want to be distracted by a damn ticker! So I threw together a very simple stylesheet and put it on userstyles.org, which, if you’ve got Stylish extension or Greasemonkey installed, you can go right ahead and install without a hitch.

Go get it now.

The Audio Quality of Audiobooks

Why is it, that people are a-fuzzin’ and a-cussin’ over the quality of digital music, but no one says a peep about the abhorrent quality of most online audiobooks. I was just looking through my audiobook library, and all are 24 to 32kbps!

Even with fantastic narrators like Joss Ackland—who does a wonderful Heart of Darkness—all soul is sucked from their voices; and for what? To save bandwidth? Bah, humbug! It’s not as if audiobooks aren’t already insanely expensive as it is, so at least give us the quality we deserve.

Now, I could be wrong, but since I only have audiobooks from Audible and iTS (which is Audible), I’m going to go right ahead and blame Audible for not doing their job properly.

Ultimately, I end up getting stuck on most audiobooks, simply because I can’t deal with having to spend hours on end in 24kbps-land.

Need: Feed Filtering Service

Kataku posts nearly 45 entries a day! That is insane! Who the hell has the time to read that many entries?!

I need someone to filter through Kotaku and post the 2-3 news-worthy posts they have. And please, please stop posting about game-related paper craft. Nobody cares.

A shame really, as Kotaku, like Joystiq, which is also up there with 22 some posts a day! Newsflash: There can’t possible be 22 interesting things happening in the world of film every day!

Same goes for Whedonesque and the other top-posters, really.

Kotaku

Yahoo's Trailer Site Stinks

What the title says. I’m a massive Bourne fan, and their stinkin’ trailer site is teh blows (again!). Great; thanks Yahoo. Please; pass the baton to Apple, they know what they’re doing.

Either way, that’s one exclusive trailer. So exclusive in fact that I can’t watch it…

Update: Despite everyone writing in to tell me that it works, I can assure you that it still doesn’t work. And this is not the first time a trailer decides not to play for me on Yahoo’s site.

Update: At work now, on a Windows machine. Still doesn’t work. I’m wondering if they’re blocking countries on the IP. Usually things like that are listed on the page, but I see nothing…

iPod Tries to Kill Me

I love how, when you want to take your iPod with you, and it’s docked, and you check to see if the icon is on the desktop, and it’s not, but the iPod is still ‘Do not disconnect’, but you can’t eject it, so you take it anyway, and then there is no music on it… At all… Like the files are still there, but the index is gone, and so you just realized that you have to fill it up with 30GB of music again, which takes hours to do… But you’re off to work, and you only have time to write a short incoherent rant?

Thanks iPod. Thanks.

Update: Well, I reconnected my iPod, ejected it and ehm… Now it works again. So ahhh… I’ll be over here, shutting up.

Gah! My Ears! Damn You Viacom!

It’s a good thing Viacom has thrown around their weight and forced NBC’s Conan off of Youtube; after all, how else would I ruin my near-perfect hearing, if I didn’t have the absolutely horrendous audio compression on this otherwise quite funny quantum physics clip with Carrey, Conan and the guy on the drums...?

And another thing! Can my rants be any more weird?!

Joystiq and Cinematical Annoyances

I hate hate hate that Cinematical and Joystiq posts always start with an ‘introductory paragraph’. It’s like they have a certain post- and word-count they need to hit every day, and the result is too much bla-bla-blaing.

I grabbed the intro text for the latest entry on Cinematical:

Few people today remember what Nathan Hale is famous for. Even in my home state of Connecticut, where he’s officially recognized as our State Hero, he is probably often thought of as just another one of the many Revolutionary War patriots we learned about in high school. Perhaps you have a good enough memory to link him with his most famous quote, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” (which may have been actually ripped off from a contemporary play)? Well, don’t worry if you haven’t held on to your history book knowledge; that is what we have Hollywood for. Warner Bros. will be producing a biopic about Hale, based on M. William Phelps’ upcoming book “For the Sake of Liberty: America’s First Spy.”

Here’s how a ‘story’ should be put together: The headline has to grab your attention. The first paragraph has to knock that zinger right out of the park. From there, it’s alright if you start fleshing out the real-world complexity of the situation. But that first paragraph is all important.

Warner Bros. will be producing a biopic about Jonathan Hale, based on M. William Phelps’ upcoming book “For the Sake of Liberty: America’s First Spy.”

Jonathan hale, who is a State Hero in Connecticut—my home state—is perhaps most famous for having said: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”.

A slightly crass example perhaps, but it took us from 131 to 56 words, and the improved clarity is obvious.

And clarity. Is. Everything.

So why do I follow two sites that I obviously get annoyed at whenever I read a story on there? Because gosh-darnnit, they are pretty good otherwise. (Unlike Kataku, which is a great site, but they post about one zillion new things a day, which is impossible to keep up with).

Their problem of course, is that they have me looking at the headline, skimming the text for links, and I’m out.

That’s a problem, me thinks.

PS: I don’t mean to pick on Christopher Campbell, who wrote this particular story, because as far as I can tell—even though I don’t distinguish the writers on these blogs—they all do it.

PPS: Joystiq’s every-story-must-have-amusing-image thing is also getting on my nerves, just so you know… But I get it. It catches the eye, so it works. But it’s annoying.

Symphonic Hyperbole

So I’m looking at Symphony, a new CMS of sorts, and I almost choke on my own spit as I read their header. I’m sorry guys, but I’m going to have to call you on your hyperbole:

The biggest thing to hit web publishing since the keyboard

Bull. Shit.

Being a gamer, following the games industry, I’ve seen a fair amount of hyperbole (Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever anyone?), and it never did any good to anyone. I don’t mean to pound on Twentyone Degrees... but I’m going to anyway. So I went to their site, where I found this little remark:

It will have a level of support never before seen for such an application.

Listen puppies, launch the product, let it do its thing. If you rock, the rockness of you and your product will turn people in much the same way as a vile virus unleashed by a secret government project turns people into brain-craving zombies.

Anyway, I’ve thought up a few new taglines for K2:

  • The biggest thing to hit you since your abusive parents.
  • The biggest thing to hit archeological diggings since sand…!?
  • The biggest thing to hit life, the universe and everything since the rise of molecular structures.

Feel free to throw in your own ideas.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, it’s a cool name for an app. Symphony. Nice.