Categories: Top :: Arts :: Day By Day :: Entertainment :: Living :: Personal :: Silly :: Technology

Cynicism: Psychic Nikki .. cheating!
Fri, 31 Oct 2008

I was listening to CFNY (a Toronto radio station) this morning and they had Psychic Nikki on; afterwards I thought to do a couple weeb searches on a lark and one of the links I stumbled across I found amusing:

Tinyfrog

In essence, a few people are tracking 'psychic's weebsite predictions, and noticed Psychic Nikki has actually retroactively added events to her posted prediction lists. As the events occur she watches the news and posts them to her old lists. As a regular to CFNY I'm tempted to call in and ask her about it -- really, with her forever bragging about accuracy and prediction hit-counts and so on, she shouldn't be 'cheating'. (Or go ahead and cheat, but then don't brag about accuracy.)

For shame Nikki, for shame!

*busted*

[ Category: / day_by_day / rants ] [link] [Comments]

Gaming: Infocom sales by title, graphed
Tue, 21 Oct 2008

The number of units sold to customer ('sell through') in todays gaming industry is very different by orders of magnitude to the good old days when Lord British was hawking Ultima and Akalabeth in ziplock bags. But there were a few brave souls who carved out their niche in the fledgling indutry, and those like Electronic Arts who would survive to this day. Without going into that whole discussion however, we might be curious how some of these moderately successful companies did. Enter Infocom, pioneer of the adventure game and the text adventure (and database if you want to go that far). How did they do?

Mighty Jason Scott of textfiles has stumbled across some data, so take a peak at this graph:


See here for the Flickr page

For when the inevitable happens and the image vanishes .. from 1981-1986 Zork 1 sold 379,000 units, and HHGttG sold 254,000. Later games like Ballyhoo only sold 24,000 but even that is quite a respectible sell through for the time period.

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming ] [link] [Comments]

Rants: Dating sites mummifying the social scene?
Thu, 16 Oct 2008

Busy times of late; I should be blogging about the Google Android based G1 phone and its ups and downs, and my thoughts on if developers will lead the pack, of if developers will follow the consumer, and fiddlings with the GPH GP2x Wiz and the upcoming OpenPandora machine. But things have been busy, so for now my little rant on dating websites.

Disclaimer -- I've been out of the dating scene a long time (thank Crom for that; hell, those in the scene should thank Crom for that!) so I'm really just arm waving here.

I'll dodge the intro -- humans are social creatures; people who hide in their caves are viewed with distrust; geeks were beat up for being merely socially awkward. Etc.Instead, let me cut right to my point of concern..

We've all been there - an elevator, a club, a party, a wedding (or funeral, perv) and seen someone that attracted us. Someone attractive could be hot, or cute, or quirky or any combination. Someone could also be hot and totally unattractive. Theres body language, theres details you don't just pick up from an image .. theres the swing of the hips, the walking gate, the mischief in the eye, that spark. When you talk to someone, theres the way they move, the way they talk, the accent. Most important of course is what they say, how they say it. How you interact.

With a social dating site, my worry is this -- you see a splash of images from a person, and some book-sleeve self promotion they've written up. Maybe even some extra info. To summarize -- you've got a shopping list, a tight little summary designed to sell a person, written by people who probably aren't good at writing such advertisements.

So instead of body language, you get a couple static pictures probably lacking personality. Most people are not photographers. And you get a resume. A fracking resume for Kobols sake!

You get 'advertised' verbiage; not interactive, not tailored for you as you've met someone and struck up a chat; they're words crafted, and told to you.

You've got a feature sheet.

In essence, social sites seem to me, on the surface, to be selling people like cars are sold. Set you up for a test drive date, I suppose. And thats fine, and maybe social dating sites also create something new.. thats fine too. But as they increase in popularity (which is good, don't get me wrong) I begin to worry.. are these sites making people too one dimensional?

I mean, theres a lot of really cute quirkly girls out there, who aren't on the hot scale; will that come through as someone browsers 30 other girls on the same site, giving each one 10 seconds of photo view?

I mean, my wife didn't give me a resume when we met. I suppose while I'm posting this to the 'net's long memory, le me add -- get off my lawn or I'll whack you with my cane!

[ Category: / day_by_day / rants ] [link] [Comments]