lol

[icycalm]

I actually did not find that article so bad. Boring yes, but that was because of the subject matter. Here's a link for those who want to check it out:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... ustin-Wong

And the title is completely nonsensical, except if Fei Long's official backstory mentions that he was being discriminated against when he was young, because of his race. They should have just used the subtitle.



In unrelated news, I am currently trying to find a page with Pauline Kael's essay "Circles & Squares", so as not to have to pay the $12 to the rights holder. An excerpt:

Kael describes German cultural critic and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer as "the sort of man who can't say 'It's a lovely day' without first establishing that it is day, that the term 'day' is meaningless without the dialectical concept of 'night,' that both these terms have no meaning unless there is a world in which day and night alternate, and so forth. By the time he has established an epistemological system to support his right to observe that it's a lovely day, our day has been spoiled."

lol

[taidan]

Another entry for a lol article:

Bullet Points: The 9 Most Pants-Pissingly Hard, Disturbing and/or Badass Video Game Villains

[icycalm]

Apparently this Shoe guy is leaving 1UP/EGM or whatever, and for some reason I ended up reading the official announcement. Emphasis is mine:

http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=869 ... Id=1002446

Not just putting the best videogame mag in the business out the door each month, but energizing his team, working tirelessly with difficult publishers to snag exclusives and solving problems across the group.

You're also going to see me taking a much more active role in the content side going forward. Between myself, Sam, Jeff and Milky, we think we have a pretty strong brain trust to go forward with, and we're all looking forward to working with all of you to take this network to the next level.

I don't know wtf is up with these management monkeys and the phrase "going forward". He uses it like half a dozen times in that post. I guess they think it makes them seem optimistic.

[taidan]

I find it is also used when something big (and perhaps not wanted) occurs and they wish to forget about it.

If someone leaves, someone is fired, a magazine or website section is shut down, or a scandal pops up, they are always "moving forward".

And when are these guys going to realize that I don't care about exclusives, but of how good their reporting and content is? Exclusives are pretty crappy when those that have it give us worthless information and sloppy previews.

[Mr.Stevenson]

Most magazine editors know that their exclusives aren't what they ideally would want to focus on, but for reasons which icycalm explained they must, or they will almost certainly condemn themselves.

[icycalm]

And when are these guys going to realize that I don't care about exclusives, but of how good their reporting and content is?

If you are anything at all like other gamers, this isn't quite true. Every time you type the title of an upcoming game into Google and click on ANY of the sites on the first few pages (1UP, IGN, Kotaku, Gametrailers, etc. etc.) you are feeding this mad frenzy for exclusives.

I do it all the time, though I have a better excuse than most (I run a gaming website, after all).

[taidan]

Truth is, I used to love exclusives. When I was a PC Gamer subscriber, seeing the word next to any review or preview made me feel like I had an edge over my friends, that I knew more about the subject than them.

Eventually I saw how exclusives caused all sorts of embargoes so that others couldn't say a damn thing.

I realize now that editors have to gun for them in order to gain revenue and readers. It is still interesting to see someone like Hsu put on his best face and tell the readers "we're working hard to bring you the best exclusives", and you are guaranteed to see a few hundred replies thanking him. It really is what they want to see.

[Mr.Stevenson]

It really is what they want to see.

When you say "they", do you mean the readers, or video-game magazine editors/video-game website directors? I gathered that you meant the readers, but I need to ask to be sure.

[taidan]

That is correct.

[Molloy]

That marketing speak has taken over most companies. Look at most of their slogans and they always have these stupid 'ing' verbs - building, growing, learning. I used to work for General Electric and they've had some new slogan every 6 months, with huge banners all over the place. They'd sit you down for 'one-to-ones' and get you to couch all your performance in the context of these meaningless criteria and give you a six sigma rating, which they've also ditched since I left apparently. I used to completely rip the piss describing myself as 'dynamic' and 'pro-active'. The management loved me. I turn my boss onto the phrase 'let's ring fence that issue so we don't end up missing out on low hanging fruit' and he co-opted it without the slightest hint of irony.

[icycalm]

I am currently lolling with my latest reply in the non-game thread:

http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=5506#5506

When I post stuff like that I always sit back afterwards and reread it a couple of times, laughing my ass off with my assholicness.

But, really, what the fuck am I supposed to do? These kids somehow stumble on this site -- God knows how! -- and then they post their nonsense in my forum, and how am I supposed to respond to that? Even if I felt like becoming their teacher, and even if I had the required time and patience (which I don't!), most of them are incapable of learning anything. In the end, the only thing I can do is have a few lols at their expense and then ban them, once they prove to be too much of a nuisance.

I haven't banned that guy yet, but most people who post nonsense here refuse to take the hint when I ask them to "please stop posting in this thread", and 9 out of 10 of them force me to ban them.

What a miserable situation. I mean thank god for the occasional lulz, otherwise I would have already made this forum invitation-only.

[icycalm]

Just came across this "Link's Crossbow Training + Wii Zapper" review on Euroidiot, written by Mathew Kumar, a euroidiot (he's from Scotland) new games artfag who used to write for IC:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=88233

It's like the first hybrid game/hardware review I've ever seen. I guess he is reviewing the "product". Quite a change from his old artistic ways, but I guess at the end of the day a man has to eat.

[icycalm]

I think you're right that the terminology hasn't arisen for fighting games because it's been a largely stagnant, niche genre, catering to a specific dying breed of gamers. So we can make the distinction. Powerstone, Smash Brothers, Jump All-Stars...neo-fighters. Designed towards accessibility, so the worst of them (sorry to say, Powerstone) end up being button mashing fests and the best of them (Smash) can reveal a lot of depth amidst their astonishing simplicity. And the other camp would be classical fighters. There, done.

http://forums.insertcredit.com/viewtopi ... 723#283723

I would call this "the blind leading the blind" but it is perhaps better described as a discussion between blind people on the subject of the color of the sun.

[JoshF]

Is that the same as a post-fighting game?

[icycalm]

I've no idea. Perhaps! I couldn't make this stuff up if I was being paid to.

[icycalm]

New Porn Journalism:

YOU HAVEN'T BEEN PARTICULARLY IMPRESSED BY THE WRITING THAT'S BEEN DONE ON PORN, I TAKE IT.

It's so waffly and generalized. Most people just talk about Porn, full stop. But porn changes, it's just like art history, and I don't think there's really been a good book on porn history, you know, like on the changing aesthetics and the changing narrative structures within it. There is this totally condescending attitude where art deserves to be studied extensively and every single change is catalogued and we have pictures to prove it. There's names for everything — cubism, symbolism — but with porn, you know, people think, "Oh it's just porn. It's kitsch so we can talk about it in general terms and nobody's going to know shit."

http://www.nerve.com/Dispatches/Goodman ... asp?page=5

[icycalm]

New Art Journalism:

During his later years in Kansas, Burroughs also developed a painting technique whereby he created abstract compositions by placing spray paint cans in front of, and some distance from, blank canvasses, and then shooting at the paint cans with a shot gun. These splattered canvasses were shown in at least one New York City gallery in the early 1990s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs

[new_pornographer]

http://kotaku.com/5008653/americans-bra ... u-is-wrong

Regardless of whether you like Kojima (and his games) or not, as far as I can see what Kotaku did is go to the great insurmountable effort of taking a little excerpt from a magazine sitting on a coffee table (in this case EDGE), twisting it into a little 'controversial' piece guaranteed to generate hits and then when such interpretive piece is debunked, take it personally and cry "WE WERE NOT WRONG!"

Is Mr Ashcraft having his peroiod? Anyway, I lolled away.

[taidan]

I keep trying to avoid Kotaku, but its coverage of MGS4 seems to cause lots of rage among fanboys. Either they write something like the above posted link, or are called out for revealing potential spoilers, causing links to spread like wildfire. I suppose that is what you get when you have sites like Kotaku that focus on speed rather than accuracy, with readers that are paranoid about too seeing much information on a Kojima storyline, yet crave that constant flow of news and gossip.

Anyway, here is this:
http://www.gamesradar.com/f/the-top-7-g ... 9370318082

Amazing to see them condemn an entire genre because in their eyes it wasn't complex enough.

[JoshF]

Someone should tell them they're actually mindless players.

[new_pornographer]

Oh, MAN! I saw that little article myself yesterday. I'm not sure what I laughed harder at, writing brawlers off as 'mindless' or thinking that Gamesradar are the first people to write off FFVII as worthless crap; the tone of that particular part makes them seem as if they see themselves as mavericks breaking a sacred taboo, when in fact the 'FFVII is rubbish' argument has been circulating for years.

[Macaw]

By their fucking logic Mario Brothers is just walking right and 'mashing' the jump button so therefore it and the entire genre must also suck.

Fuckheads.

[Molloy]

I'm beginning to think the more wrong an article it is, the more likely it'll get linked everywhere and get loads of hits. The people who don't know better link the article everywhere, especially if it's a list because every idiot loves lists. And the people who understand it's shit tend to link to it on every forum on the net complaining about it. Best to ignore this stuff altogether if you ask me.

[icycalm]

I'm beginning to think the more wrong an article it is, the more likely it'll get linked everywhere and get loads of hits.

This is a fascinating phenomenon of modern times. And in fact you are wrong, "correct" articles also get linked everywhere and get loads of hits -- there's just no way to distinguish "correct" from "wrong" ones through their effects. The explanation for this is to be found in McLuhan's concept that "the medium is the message" and in Baudrillard's theories of the simulacrum and hyperreality:


The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation.

The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float [...].

Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.


Heavy stuff.

[Molloy]

Interesting quotation. I'm very hung over at the moment so I'll try and dissect that at another time. :D

There's a tech journalist I enjoy reading called John C. Dvorak. Here's a video where he explains how he boosts hits on his columns. I think it's quite funny but alot of people take these things far too seriously.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ