Some of the out of state visitors for SXSW might appreciate this shirt. You can get your own here at protoculture for $20. If you’re down on 6th street at Aaron’s Rock N Roll you can buy the antidote to this shirt that says: “F*ck y’all, I’m from Texas.” I don’t imagine they sell a lot of these due to the fact that they would only be funny outside the state or the country.
I was inspired by this post to start using Feedburner to supply the news feeds for letterneversent.com. If you subscribe to the original RSS feeds you do not need to change anything unless you wish to use the feedburner feeds, which will provide some useful features like integration with my del.icio.us links as well as browser-friendly display and nice statistics on how many people subscribe and what they use to view the feed.
All you gaming geeks will appreciate this graphic. It shows all the games that have been based on id software’s various 3D rendering engines including Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, and Doom 3. Unfortunately, past success does not guarantee future success, so it will be interesting to see which games use the Doom 3 engine other than Quake 4. Many new games are based on Epic Games’ Unreal / Unreal 2 engine and presumably Valve Software will license their incredible Half Life 2 engine to developers. For a shape of things to come check out some of the screenshots from the Unreal 3 engine.
This is the funniest thing I’ve seen today. Some guy made a video advertisement to sell his ’88 Dodge Aries K car. I admire people who spend this much time and effort doing something just for a laugh.
Last night some guys from work and I grouped up for World of Warcraft. Before I quit for the night we did a bit of dueling and I actually did pretty well, especially considering my heals (healing spells) are pretty weak. Here’s a few good strategies when dueling with an affliction-specced warlock character:
Against warriors:
Here are a few changes to the site. I’ll need to check my AdSense account to see if my clicks have gone down as a result of the change over from the previous template, but I won’t be able to do that until Google has re-indexed the site. I’m curious how the horizontal banner will differ results-wise.
The WordPress team has released its latest upgrade to the open-source, PHP-based blogging system. The major upgrade seems to do with their new templating system, which seems to be working pretty well, although I had to tweak out a few things to get their default template to work. As you can see, I have modified it a little and will be making more changes to it in the future. I had to turn off pretty permalinks to get the previous entry links to work. I’m using an image rotating script I found to make the header image swap randomly.
A few things are still needing work. For example, the feed links at the bottom of the page are not working correctly, or at least, they’re not for me. One thing I think will really help WordPress is that the new default template is nice. They’ve had trouble competing on the template front, but the adoption of the new templating system should create a lot of interest.
When I need a quick dose of human reality (or voyeurism?) I visit grouphug, the anonymous confession website. Some confessions are heart-wrenching, but many are as you would expect, portraying the most widespread and ordinary themes of human suffering: lust, heartbreak, frustration, depression, loss, rage, and pain. It would be interesting to break down the confessions into types. Here’s one I found funny due to its wiseass disingenuousness and its reference to the movie, Breaking Away.
I am a cutter too, I guess. My friends and I are all cutters. Our dads work in Indiana at a rock quarry. I am an excellent cyclist and my friend Dennis is not too bad either. One time he swam into a flooded quarry and pretended to be locked into a refridgerator. So the Italian cycle team is coming to our tonw to ride in the big race, the local college is having a race before hand that I think i can win. Once a I was practicing riding my ten speed on the Interstate and this truck driver was sticking his hand out eh window to let me know hiow fast i was going then a cop pulled him over. hahahaa
I work for a company that publishes video games. It’s just expected that you spend some amount of time playing games and staying current, otherwise when everyone is talking about the latest thing they’re playing you won’t know what they’re talking about. You have to stay in context.
The biggest thing to happen in a long time is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (wikipedia entry). Everyone I know is playing it and new people get sucked in all the time. It is that good. I don’t even play subscription games and I’m playing it. Even people who have never played an online game before have caught the WoW bug. It’s a phenomenon.
They have sold somewhere around 500,000 copies of the game and their current active subscribers are estimated at 350,000. That’s in just two months. Each one of those 350,000 people pays $14.95 a month to play. It’s no wonder traditional media giants like Fox and Viacom are itching to get a piece of online gaming action. When you compare it to the time you spend watching cable television it is not difficult to justify the expense. It is bigger than Everquest 2 and it is scaring the crap out of anyone who is expecting to compete with it in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online games, as they say in the biz). The game is just that good. It is not revolutionary, but it takes ideas from everywhere and does everything well. Quality speaks for itself. WoW removes any arguments for producing a bad game. A game can be done of the highest calibre.
If you’re looking for a new experience, World of Warcraft is a game that’s fun, accessible, flexible and deep. Check out their website and let me know what you think. I’m the warlock “Sivori” on Sargeras server. Send me a message and we’ll go fishing.
Today I had to laugh when I saw the following press release from Wired Magazine: “WIRED Magazine Announces Nominees for Sixth Annual Wired Rave Awards“. The most cursory investigation reveals evidence of Wired’s continued conflicts of interest passed off as journalistic appreciation, this time in the way it promotes its business / advertising partners for their apparently meaningless Rave awards.
I’d love a little info on the nomination process as at least two of the five nominated blogs, Kevin Sites Blog and Wonkette (owned by Gawker Media Corp.), have direct business relationships to Wired Media. It should be no surprise that nominees for the Rave Awards are selected and judged by the editors of Wired Magazine. If you continue down the list of nominees you might discover similar relationships, but these were the most obvious.
I detailed this sort of cross-promotion previously. In this case, it is glaring. For example, Wired Media’s resident journalist-bloggeur Xeni Jardin is credited on Kevin Sites Blog as the site producer and creator. Xeni Jardin also lists Kevin Sites Blog on her personal website as one of her projects, yet this somehow does not disqualify the site from competing for “Rave” awards promoted by her employer in the Blogger category.
Furthermore, the aforementioned Wonkette is wholly owned by Nick Denton’s corporate alter-ego, Gawker Media Corp., and staffed by paid blogger Ana Marie Cox. The fact that Ms. Cox is a paid blogging employee should be disqualifying enough, but let’s not forget that Wonkette’s parent company and Wired Media have an open business partnership involving another of Gawker Media’s hot “blogging” properties, Gizmodo. On Gizmodo’s front page they promote Wired’s Gadget Lab newsletter and have done so for many months. An exchange of lucrative advertising space and who knows what else. Gizmodo’s promotion of Gadget Lab almost certainly has more to do with promoting Wired’s own magazine subscriptions (why else would you join an email newsletter?) and advertisers than it has to do with an appreciation of gadgets.
This is exactly the sort of thing most people hate about the “blogging” world. The pretense is that these individuals craft an image of a reality that does not exist and they have that power because of their credibility as journalists and media experts. These nominated blogs and individuals are important because Wired and its editors say they are. But what if the editors / judges are friends or business partners with their subjects? Where is the line between journalistic appreciation and conflict of interest? Or, the line between blogging and advertising-driven hackery? At the very least, if you have a direct relationship with the organization in charge of the nomination and award process you should be disqualified.
