Since yesterday, I’ve seen links appear from The Rodent’s Burrow, Rodent Household, The Magic Rat, and Larry the Lab Rat. Strange.
Now I forget: Are badgers and ferrets considered rodents?
At any rate, I’m glad this blog is so popular among our rodent friends. Next up, I’m planning an ad campaign to increase readership among waterfowl, which has been lacking.
Also, the above-linked Rodent’s Burrow has “My dice are trying to kill me!” t-shirts. Nifty.
I’m not impressed with htAkismet. I see no effect in the number of spam comments that hit this site. Maybe it hasn’t started to do its thing yet. I really wish it had some kind of “here is how I work and here are the IPs I’ve banned” control panel.
At any rate, I just got 600 spams in a three hour stretch, two-thirds of which were for “ringtones”. We all have different tolerances for this sort of business, but this is more or less my personal limit. I have added “ringtones” to my list of forbidden words, which is my orbital death-ray solution. Note that if you drop that word into a comment the system will eat it without even telling me. I’ll never see it. I suggest humans switch to using the term “ringsongs”, or perhaps, “crap nobody wants like, ever, man.” Either one. It’s a trade-off between brevity and accuracy, really.
And let me just add that I see ringtones as one of the sleaziest, most lothesome scams to emerge from the mobile phone revolution, which is really saying something. The average cell phone bill is an incomprehensible ten-page morass of gibberish and nonsense leading up to the “Ammount Due” on the last page, a number which is clearly generated using the Mersenne Twister. I’m careful to never read the fine print of my bill aloud, lest I summon some slime-covered demon from the lower planes. Despite this danger, I have to give them credit for actually selling something people want in the midst of bewildering and then subsequently screwing them.
This is not the case with ringtones. I’ve always thought that the $1 per song on iTunes was excessive. That’s about the same ammount I would pay for a song on CD, except the CD version comes with – you know – a CD, as well as album art, lyrics, and a nice jewel case to protect these treasures. I can play it anywhere without having to ask Steve Jobs first and without needing to infect my computer with “install” iTunes. But ringtones take this ridiculous transaction and turn it into something far more absurd. Song rental.
The ringtones on my phone aren’t $1, they’re $3. You’re not just limited to listening to them on your iPod, you’re limited to listening to them on your phone. When someone calls. You aren’t getting a song, you’re getting part of a song. Oh yeah… you’re not buying it, you’re renting it for 90 days. This is like charging someone twenty dollars for a half-eaten hamburger.
The “free” ringtones, I’m sure, represent something even more horrible. There must be a reason spammers want to get people to download them. I can only guess, but I’m betting this is a way to get a user’s phone number and a way to circumvent the “do not call” list. Hey! We have an existing prior established ongoing and totally legit business relationship with this guy. He downloaded a ringtone from us! That deal is a lot worse than renting part of a song for $3.
What? I’ve gone off-topic? Twice? In each paragraph? Sorry. Where was I? Oh right:
Don’t use the word “ringtones” in comments.
UPDATE: This sucks. Akismet apparently does its thing BEFORE checking for forbidden words, which, in effect, removes that feature from WordPress. So annoyed.
I mentioned before that I always follow links to people who link to me. Last week I visited one such site, and a lone captcha appeared in the middle of the page, with nothing else. “This is strange”, I thought, “This idiot has their entire site behind a captcha? That can’t be good for traffic.”
Now I was really curious as to what sort of freak would do such a thing. I entered the captcha, but somehow messed it up. Another one appeared. This is why I hate these things, dangit! I tried again. I managed to mess it up again. I tried a third time, and when it failed I suddenly realized I’d been had.
Every captcha used a different scheme. This should have clued me in that something was wrong. The page didn’t have any other text, which also should have clued me in.
I’m sure I was entering them properly. What I believe I was seeing was part of a spamming mechanisim. First, the comment spam program runs into captchas. It then lifts the image and presents it to a human like me, and waits for me to tell it what the captcha says. I’m sure every time I entered a valid captcha I was causing a spam to appear somewhere, for someone. Once it finds a willing dupe like me, it will keep showing them captchas until they get bored or give up.
(It might not have been a weblog comment spam program. It might have been making lots of user accounts on a forum, which would then be used for spamming.)
Evil, but I give them full points for creativity. They can’t hope for much traffic like that, but they weren’t really trying that hard. If they really wanted to defeat captcha in volume, they could harvest some boobie pics from around the net, make users enter captchas to move from one image to the next, and then post the results to FARK. That would give them all the captchas they could ever need.
I hope the people that design captchas learn from this: The current generation of captcha-creation is overkill. Purple text on a red background with blue dots over it with the characters “1lIjt”, all rotated at different angles and overlapping one another, and then run through a wobbling distortion filter? Are you serious? Sure, nobody would ever dream of writing software to defeat that, but half the human beings in the world can’t be expected to get it right on the first try, either.
I doubt the spammers are even trying to keep up with them. Honestly, I’m sure just rotating the letters 45o is more than enough protection to defeat OCR attempts. There would be no reason for spammers to struggle with the OCR, when they could just use the trick I outlined above.
Problem: People in Asia don’t want to buy the XBox 360.
Solution: Launch an ad campaign asking these potential customers, “What’s Wrong With U?”
Even in English, this comes off about as well as, “Dear Jerk, why won’t you be my friend?” Even if this really is the tone they want to take, the phrase itself is a horrible idea. It’s a mildly insulting figure of speech between English speakers, but how is it going to sound in Japanese, Cantonese, or (I’m guessing here) Korean? It will come out something like “What defect do you have? or “What is the difficulty that you are experiencing?” Not exactly catchy. Maybe they need a jingle to go with it.
PC users know this won’t work, because Mac users* have been using this one on us for years to no avail.
To be fair, I’m almost as curious as MS as to why they aren’t buying the 360. Is it price? Is it just too soon for another console? Lack of titles available in their own language? Is it the Wii? I’d like to know as well, but I bet I could come up with a smarter way of finding out. In fact, this ad campaign seems to be an attempt to solve the problem without needing to address it. “Whatever the reason you don’t want our stuff, just get over it and buy a 360 already.”
* I’m not prejudiced, “some of my best friends are Mac users”!
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If you’re having trouble with wayward players derailing your carefully designed plot, you can always fix this by making the game non-interactive.
Let me know how that works out for you.
Lileks has a beautiful picture of a young mother and her baby (halfway down the page) which he lifted from a humorously silly ad, circa 1956.
Pictures like this really get to me. I’ve described the feeling before as temporal vertigo: The dizzying sensation you get when you are given a sudden, brief perspective on a long expanse of time.
Once in a while I’ll see these old ads and I’ll get that gut-punch sensation as I realize just how much time has passed between then and now. Saying “fifty years” doesn’t give the same impression as imagining all the stuff that can happen in fifty years, and even that is nothing compared to seeing a tiny bit of the past preserved, and realizing that the moment, and the people, are gone.
Several times he’s posted pictures from the 30’s. Images of a mundane day in the big city, which was a lot less big back then. Businessmen in hats shuffle from one side of the street to the other. A woman pushes a baby carriage – the big black kind with the large wheels that we always see in cartoons and never in real life. An old man catches his breath on a corner before working up the air to finish his smoke and cross the street. None of them are aware that this moment is being captured, and will endure for decades. All of them are now dead.
The woman in that ad would be in her mid 70’s today, if she’s still with us. The adorable baby is probably 51 or 52. They’ve lived their lives without me ever being aware of them, and now I have a picture of the two of them together, fifty years ago, and I can’t shake it.
Also: I agree with James. Her haircut is great.
Dance Dance Revolution has a good reputation for helping young people stay in shape. Now someone has lost weight just by playing the Wii – presumably by standing and waving the wand around and not by parking himself on the couch and just exercising his wrist. For the last couple of years years I’ve been expecting a game focused on exercise to show up. It hasn’t happened yet – at least not on a large enough scale to appear on my own limited “industry trends” radar – but recent controller innovations indicate that someone might start thinking in this direction soon.
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| TOP: A high-end DDR Dancepad. MIDDLE: Nintendo Bongo controller. BOTTOM: XBox360 Guitar Hero controller. |
I think so. Maybe now that Harmonix is no longer making Guitar Hero they will investigate something along these lines in their now-copious free time. Maybe someone else will take a crack at it. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the next console generation before someone works up the nerve.
I have a pretty clear picture of how something like that should work, and an excellent picture of how it could be royally screwed up, which is more than likely.
The key here is that we want to harness the “just one more level”, or “just a few more minutes” nature of videogames, and tie it in with some form of steady, low-impact exercise. You want the player to keep going, keep playing the game, and keep exercising.
And here is where things are likely to get hosed:
The game should in no way be focused on racing.
The most obvious thing to do is to plug an an exercycle into the XBox and have the player “race” against the CPU. This is a terrible idea which is doomed to failure. Here is how that little drama will play out: The player is going to select a challenging race, and then pump furiously for two minutes. They will then stagger away from the machine, exhausted, dizzy, and suddenly keenly aware of their heart and the role it plays in sustaining their life. They will walk – perhaps crawl – away from your device and your game, not feeling particularly fulfilled, either from an exercise or gaming perspective. They will not return.
I suggest that the exercise in our theoretical game should be an aspect of the gameplay, not the entirety. It should be steady and prolonged, not intense and short. It should allow the player to slow down when they feel fatigued and speed up as they recover, without punishing them for the respite with things like total failure. All of this lends itself to more interesting gaming, and (as an added bonus) is less likely to kill them.
So the idea is to present the player with a more or less “normal” game experience, and then provide them with motivation to keep pedaling. Let’s outline our needs:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Videogames + Exercise”
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
T w e n t y S i d e d
