T w e n t y S i d e d
It is quite strange and disorienting to see ads for myself on my own website. Rest assured this is just a temporary thing. Soon those will be replaced by regular ads for things that are not me. My site is joining Themis Media ad network – the company behind The Escapist – as part of their ad network. This shouldn’t affect the content of the site in any other way, although if you’ve been coming here every day in the hopes that I’ll start posting hate speech and pornography, you’ll be sorry to hear that is no longer an option. (Note that they don’t own the site or anything. They’re not hosting it. I’m just flying under their flag. This is a deal either of us can walk away from if it doesn’t work out, so you don’t have to worry about me “selling” my own site.)
I’m doing this out of naked greed. I’m trying to amass a mountain of riches so that I may live in the sort of opulence befitting someone of my epic magnificence. All will fear me and tremble at my power. No one can…
Whoops. Sorry, I’ve been playing Overlord recently. I’m suffering occasional bouts of megalomania as a result.
Anyway. New ads. Hope you don’t mind my smiling mug looking at you while this thing gets rolling.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
It’s okay. I use Adblock!
And here we thought your ego had gotten away from you :).
In any case Overlord rocks the minions (especially the browns) are cute and funny. My only problem with it was that the DRM meant I had to download a no-CD hack to play it on the PC.
It’s about time, Shamus. Im happy for you, and am surprised it took this long for a network to pick you up.
Suppose a blog network comes calling and asks you to join their umbrella. Would you be opposed to it on principle? (I recently faced the same question when I moved my old politics/religion blog to Beliefnet)
Hello
I have been watching your site since 4 months ago, very good site.But I want to ask, when will you start giving critical reviews again, they are my main source of entertainement on this site (now that DM has ended).Something in SH’s or NN2 style.
Glad to hear this; your writing is very impressive and I’d love to see you make a career of it. Or at least an obscene amount of money.
Ads? What ads?
*middle-clicks AdBlock*
Ooh. Those ads.
Do you get paid per page view or per click? If it’s the former I’ll leave it disabled on your site, as I do with most of those I care to support.
Your smirking visage is rather less jarring than the orange stripes suddenly adorning the page. :)
I have most ad sites blocked via hosts file, but it seems Themis is going through. I’ll leave it that way, as I’m sure your / the Escapist’s ads won’t be the horrible annoying kind.
And here I’d been holding out hope for cartoons with naked babes spewing hate-speech. What an awesome combo!
I like the new ads, but I think they need a border of some kind, especially since the color scheme is so much at odds with your own site’s muted blue colors.
You employ a subtle dotted line as a border around our posts, and as horizontal bars near the top of the page. Perhaps something similar, then, around the ads?
I, for one, welcome our new megalomaniac geek overlord. I would like to remind him that as a trusted commenter on his site, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in his underground coffee caves.
Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime!
Shamus, does ad-block deprive you of a teeny-tiny micro-payment? If so, I’ll put up with that terrible photo of you :)
Your smiling mug is AWESOME. I hope those banners never leave. Can I steal one and put it on my blog?
I’ve had Adblock disabled on here for quite some time, but it seems that NoScript is preventing these ads for showing. Any idea what sites I need to /allow in order to give you miniscule amounts of money with every pageview?
EDIT: Different edit system! I preferred the original … but what I was really editing for is that I noticed my avatar had changed … and I was getting used to my square monocle guy!
I, too, am on the AdBlock bandwagon. So yeah.
I *don’t* use AdBlock, and the banner ad at the top of your blog is incredibly jarring. Really does not fit with the rest of the page at all. I don’t think there is any other place on that page where the banner-ad would look worse.
But congratulations on the ad-network thing! Really!
Just as the overall quality of The Escapist (although Unskippable was a great refreshment… I’m talking mostly about the community) begins to decline and I eventually stop going there altogether, my most favoritest site on the internets starts to merge with it.
This is a situation in which irony totally sucks.
It’s okay, though, Shamus. You’re still cool.
vdgmprgrmr: I’ve noticed the change in community as well. Younger. Less polite and friendly. More combative.
I think it’s odd, because the site itself is smart and grown-up. This isn’t a site run by jeering fratboys like SOME gaming sites I won’t mention. Anyone can generate community and traffic by pandering to the various platforms-based factions and pitting them against each other. The Escapist doesn’t do this, but the community is feisty and combative anyway.
I’m not sure about the cause of this, although my first guess is that it would be a side-effect of the open topic policy. At any given time I’ll stop by and see the hot threads listed on the front page. Great stuff like: Abortion, communism, “Is Yahtzee losing it”, Should Pot be legalized, and other conversational Molotov cocktails. It does not make the forums look like a nice place to hang out and make friends.
I’m not sure though. I’ve never run anything larger than this lemonade stand, and I don’t know what sorts of problems you run into as the community scales upwards.
I don’t think it’s a result of open-topics (although it probably has something to do with it) because back in the before-times, that was its allure; being able to have friendly conversations on the internet about things that normally would be ‘conversational Molotov cocktails’.
Now, they still have the open-topic policy, but many people don’t really seem to be all that concerned with the impression they give. I think it’s because of popularity. When a community is small and secluded, the proportional similarity with the average community outside of it can be skewed, but as the size increases, the proportions within it become more and more similar to mass society. So The Escapist community became more popular, and its original proportions (usually very mature and educated) began to switch to more common ones (some mature and educated, many kids with internet acting like they’re mature and educated, and many plain idiots).
Well, since The Escapist made the change relatively quickly (at least it seemed that way to me), we wound up with two groups. One consisting of the older members who try to keep things the way they were, and the others who don’t really care what they do on the internet, and we get things like “proper grammer dude ur on the internet lol” (someone actually posted this in my direction) and “did you just refer to the father of comunism :O get out now” (another real quote, though not directed at me).
I just hope that your increased popularity won’t have a similar effect (as I like your site for many of the same reasons I liked The Escapist; friendly, intelligent discourse and no bickering or hostility).
Sorry if this post seems to ramble a bit. I just started writing and couldn’t very well stop myself.
Regarding the comment on the Escapist community, I think the whole decline began when they took on Zero Punctuation. It’s not something against ZP in particular (I’ve watched all of them, and watch every new episode as soon as I can), but, really, consider this: I read somewhere-or-other that traffic to The Escapist went up by about 300% after taking in Yahtzee and his reviews. The way ZP is structured, it’s BOUND to attract idiots, immature kids with access to the Internet and trolls. You didn’t get many “ur kidding rite? lol” or similar posts before ZP came along, did you?
Hmm, that reminds me — I need to check out the Overlord expansion pack before the sequel comes out later this year…
Julian: I actually didn’t get many (actually, I don’t remember a single one) until Stolen Pixels started being hosted. Not trying to say anything about SP, just stating a correlation.
I’m sure there was a large change when ZP started being hosted, but I wasn’t around to see it, and I’m sure the average user maturity level took a relatively serious hit, but when I became a regular there, it didn’t seem bad at all.
This has your face all over it… what I was wondering.. what is the
of which you speak?
(weasely voice)
And more importantly, where dost thou store it master? I wish to know this so that I might, uhh, count it and, uhh, quantify thy magnificence!
(/weasely voice)
Adds? on your own site? Shamus, you haven’t sold out have you? :)
Mountains of riches with which to care for his aged Mom. Such a good boy.
Caring for mothers?
Man, that’s so last millennium…
Shamus, you should be putting your mountains of riches to good use, like drugs and hookers.
Definitely not taking care of your aged mother…
While I use AdBlockPlus, I only block advertising sites that actively annoy me. I don’t mind advertising in general, and I do appreciate it when it’s relevant to me. But there are things I can’t stand. Blinking animations? Gone. Flash that chews up my CPU? Gone. If you can avoid annoying me, I’m happy to see your ads.
I haven’t yet blocked your ad provider. But…
I also use NoScript, only enabling JavaScript (and other plugins) on an as-needed basis. Ahh, the web is so much faster and more pleasant. I turned it on for shamusyoung.com so comment editing worked. But I’m not seeing any real advantage to turning it on for warcry.com (which seems to be who I need to turn it on for to see your ads), so I don’t plan on turning it on. So my suggestion, assuming you want to get impressions out to people like me, is to either host the JavaScript off shamusyoung.com, or see if you can avoid the JavaScript in the first place.
Best of luck with the advertising!
You need a hat.
I have no idea why I thought of this when I saw your ad, but now that it’s in my head I can’t get it out.
Really
I don’t mind the ads, or your mug, but they look a bit goofy up on top.
I think it would be a lot less jarring if you were able to insert a little white space between the “Twenty Sided” title graphic and the edge of the neon orange advert.
Just a nice 100 pixel boundry…if it won’t break anything.
I heartily agree on the banner logo space increase.
The infection of internet communities that are quite respectable by lower, more jerky members is a phenomenon that is inherent to the internet. First are the respectables, “elite” (in term of INTEREST, not social/intellectual standing) that creates a community. They are the ones willing to search a new website, and stay with it in its infancy.
Then, as the community increase, come the people with a lot less interest, who have merely been linked.
When the internet came about, there was the Elite. 4Chan was very popular, and somewhat respectable.
Then came, for the first time, the less-elite people. They went to the most popular area: 4Chan. the Elite decided to flee, and disseminated around the internet, creating various communities that have marked their time (known as the First Migration). 4Chan became the greatest hive of scum and vilanny.
Then, as other communities grow (and climate becoming more unbearable on 4Chan), the less-elites decided to join the Elite on their own website. This is known as the 2nd Invasion. The Elite realise then that never they will be safe, forever the lesser beings will be following them with their lolz and pwned! Now, it’s merely a question of keeping ahead of the lesser beings. Giantitp, XKCD, Irregularwebcomic, Tvtrope, all these area for the moment seemed to have withstood the passage of time – and popularity.
But we always have to be wary. We must bide our ambition, for if something becomes too popular, if something gather too much attention… then the product of our love will be infected again. I do hope the Escapist will be able to contain its infestation, but I doubt it.
Shamus, be wary of becoming too big.
@ Solka:
You put it very nicely, but get the specifics wrong. 4chan is rather new compared to to internet, it being created in 2003, vs the internet, at a (conservative) date of 1983. Your points are still valid however, as the same patterns happened to the early bulletin boards and usernet.
I will not pretend to know this as fact however, as I was born about the time of the Gulf War, and did not really interact with the internet until the golden year of 1997 where I clicked with computers and PC gaming, even while all my friends were off playing Mario Kart 64 and Golden Eye.
To be honest, I don’t know 4Chan. I never went there (too afraid to catch whatever they have over there!). But I heard ennough bad things about it.
Could you give me an example of early internet community that still exist today?
I believe most of them fell long ago, with the decline of Usenet.
One could always create an invitation-only site/forum, and invite only people who have proven their mettle. Anyone slipping from this lofty standard is cast out from paradise, and banned forevermore, to languish among the fetid, uneducated masses, and gnash their teeth at their fall from grace.
Yes, the Evil Overlord in me is MOST pleased with this plan.
wow, great banner Shamus…
luckily they didn’t remove the dork sign :D
AAAAAGGGGHHHNNNN!!!
MY EYES!
wait wut?
Wow,Ive just noticed that the add is for you.I tend to ignore adds altogether,so what I saw before was a bright blur in my periferial vision.It is funny though.
@SolkaTruesilver: Salon.com and The Well (well.com, now run by Salon) are the oldest still-active internet community chat boards that I’m personally aware of (started in 1985), but there are probably more out there somewhere.
It *is* a pretty smug mug.
I have adblock enabled in my brain- any rectangular field above or to the side gets ignored until/unless I look for the sidebar.
I tried adblock once, but it was more annoying to me to find the ads once in order to block them then just to continue leaving them below my threshold of awareness.
As a long-time fan of Shamus, I wanted to make sure that it’s restated that he has always had an ad or two on this site. It’s always been ignorable and unobtrusive. He’s just switching ad networks.
I use AdBlock, but I’ll turn it off just for you… ah, nevermind, already did it for the Escapist, which I already allowed to use JavaScript.
Random question: How does anyonce cope with using the internet without Adblock and/or NoScript? I feel like being tossed back into the stone age of the internet. Or maybe it’s just the IE6 that coincides with such occasions.
I use Adblock and Flashblock, and I can’t stand browsing the internet without them. I also found a setting in about:config that keeps animated GIFs from working (it just shows the first frame, now). My enjoyment of internet forums increased noticeably once I changed that setting!
I’m actually sticking with Firefox just because of Adblock. Once Adblock exists for Chrome, I plan to switch to it.