Geeky in the bad way

4:39pm: "nobs"
Lunch was entended by two hours because the power in the office went. I currently have not just a cup of tea but also a packet of mini hob-nobs. Life is good.

12:08am: http://bm03.livejournal.com/91512.html

1:50am: Late!
http://bm03.livejournal.com/91217.html

6:08pm: "pre-teenage girls"
A brief discussion on the BBFC's decision to ban the game Manhunt 2 with one-time GamesTM freelancer and former Head of State, Iain turned into an incredibly rambling, multi-layered discussion touching on game censorship, the current gaming political climate in the UK, government support for the games industry, the very concept of art itself, and not one, but two implied threats of non-consentual anal intercourse.

( If you can turn this into anything that resembles one coherent argument, then more power to you. )

2:11am: "clearly stealing"
That's it. Microsoft are clearly stealing my thoughts.

*applies tin-foil hat*

12:53am: "you"
It was Svet's ninjas, I tell you!

8:56pm: No comment.

9:06pm: "posting up"
Some time ago, you may remeber me posting up my Mario Kart DS friend code.

I have recently invested in a copy of Picross DS- which you all should too, because it's great- and my friend code for that is as follows:

206259-263437

Happy addage!

10:22pm: "swearing for the sake of swearing"
...and that's Uni over and done with, or at least it was at noon. I am now officially unemployed, although I prefer the term "recovering student".

Afterwards, me and Andy went to go see Magicians, which was pretty decent- it's not amazing, it's certainly not as funny as Peep Show, or at least not in the same way, and there's quite a lot of swearing for the sake of swearing, but that's balanced out by plenty of gratuitous shots of Jessica Stevenson's glorious cleavage. Oh yes. And a fairly decent storyline, and a handful of good gags, obviously.

12:30am: "PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE"
Coming onto LJ to make this post, I discovered that LiveJournal has just brought back the birthday reminder emails. Appropriately enough, they posted it up on my birthday.

Now, if only they'd done it a bit SOONER, somebody might have SAID SOMETHING. Now I've got to be PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE and not comment on other people's journals, as if I'm not TALKING to them. Thanks a FUCKING lot!

Anyway- that post I was originally going to make:

There's an Opera-tan! There's an Opera-tan!

4:54pm: "blubber"
Will I ever do a proper update? Who knows?

( In the meantime, YouTubery )

5:50pm: "fur"
I just put my cup of tea down on the floor. When I picked it up, the base of the cup had developed a layer of fur. I think it's about time I vacuumed...

1:11am: "razor"
There are two hundred and eighty eight fucking strips in that comic! The last thing you should ever do before I'm about to go to bed is give me a new webcomic to read, especially one with that many strips! You absolute bitch! I've got to get up in the morning!, etc.

Uh. Yes. Anyway. Not feeling so good, as demonstrated in MSN theatre:

[23:42] F!LL: oi oi
[23:43] beemoh.co.uk: evening
[23:43] F!LL: how goes your fine self
[23:43] beemoh.co.uk: not well :(
[00:46] F!LL: y u not well?
[00:50] beemoh.co.uk: manflu™
[00:50] F!LL: nice job with the tm
[00:50] beemoh.co.uk: TY
[00:50] F!LL: i appreciate it
[00:52] beemoh.co.uk: been ill since wednesday- felt like my head was going to explode
[00:58] beemoh.co.uk: flatmate has kindly donated some beechams, incidentally
[00:59] F!LL: hurray!
[00:59] beemoh.co.uk: although she's a pharmacy student, so I'm worried that it might be less "beechams" and more "coursework"
[00:59] F!LL: LOL
[00:59] F!LL: case study
[01:00] F!LL: her own concoction
[01:00] beemoh.co.uk: it *is* orange
[01:00] beemoh.co.uk: I, personally, can't think of anything in nature that comes in orange
[01:00] beemoh.co.uk: apart from, of course, the Orange.
[01:00] beemoh.co.uk: (clue's in the name, see)
[01:02] F!LL: still not ill enough to blunt your razor sharp wit i see
[01:02] beemoh.co.uk: god no

Now had it been 'wit' and not my actual train of thought, it would have been far funnier.

Other news: stuff! Woo.

7:58pm: "think"
You know, I think the fact that I get this explains an awful lot...

12:02am: It's snowing! It's snowing! </child>

3:45am: "shouldn't give"
Right. If there's one thing that they shouldn't give people who have been drinking, it's a bouncy castle.

If there's two, it's a bouncy castle and the music of Girls Aloud.

10:48pm: "the coast"
Hang on...

An abandoned island off the coast of Japan?

Where have I seen that before?

12:05am: Happy New Year, Internet.

2:05am: http://bm03.livejournal.com/67843.html

1:05am: "behind"
Since everyone's putting their Wii numbers on their blogs, bastards I figured I'd show how behind the times I am, and show off my shiny new Mario Kart DS friend code. Enjoy:

309324-113380

I look forward to choking on your colletive dust.

12:04am: "bottom's beginning to fall out"
Now I don't really have much against advertising- obviously I'd rather it wasn't there, and there are limits to what I will and will not put up with¹- but I'm willing to accept that if I want something and I'm not willing to put my hand in my pocket for it, then I must recieve it at some (for want of a better term) disadvantage.

In the dark days of dial-up, this was, say, Freeserve not offering the same range of content as AOL did, or later on, having to use an 0845 (10p/min) number rather than an 0800 (free) one, free online services usually have fewer features than their paid counterparts- like Flickr's 200-picture limit, or not being able to use your own layout on Livejournal. In Television, it has always been a short break in progamming every 15 minutes or so.

The bottom's beginning to fall out of the TV advertising market, due to a combination of the market getting saturated, recent limits on certain types of ads, and people doing other things like playing videogames or internetting. Understandably, the broadcasters have had to seek out alternate revenue streams which is why we see all those slappervision-type programmes at night, those dodgy quizzes, and how every single new show these days seem to be coupled with a premium rate phone/text competition or vote.

These are all unpleasant, but on the by and large, I can deal with them- SV can only be broadcast late at night when I'm probably not watching anyway, the quizzes are quite similar, or shoved into the arse end of the EPG, and votes/comps tend to be made into an integral part of the programme- notably the votes for who does the tasks in I'm A Celebrity, the music channels, or to a lesser extent, the games on The Big Breakfast, if you can cast your mind back that far.

(See also: DVD re-sales, merchandising, price gouging on-demand services)

If anything, they might be better than ads, since I don't have to support any of these if I don't want to- whereas if I buy a product which advertises, I am contributing to paying for the ads.

Paying a subscription for a channel is, considering, the most preferable option- I can support only the programmes (or channels) I want to, and there will probably be more choice of programming, since Super Niche Channel 57 would only need a couple of hundred subscribers to break even, rather than the millions upon millions of viewers needed to register at all on the inadequate TV ratings system⁴ and fight for the last remaining scraps of the advertising market.

Unfortunately, Sky have fucked up the pay-tv system (albeit in a misguided business model way, rather than a strictly evil, monopolistic one) in such a way that it's very difficult for minor channels to offer a subscription system, as once people have paid out for what they percieve as "Sky", they're not inclined to pay any extra⁶ for the other channels.

WARNING: Point imminent

The problem is, OFCOM have just done this, which allows networks to just come out and straight-up ask you for money to keep running- not a subscription fee, which- sensibly- they're allowed to advertise for anyway, nor payment for a vote or competition entry- just "give us your money or we'll stop doing programmes."

This is something they've had Stateside for some time, most notably used by faux-religious channels to screw money out of the weak-minded and by 'public' channels which wind up only showing dodgy 1970's BBC re-runs because that's all they can afford.

Not that a 1970's BBC re-run channel would strictly be a bad thing, arbitrarily speaking- it can't be any worse than some of the truly abortive attempts at TV channels clogging up the 'Entertainment' section, Hollywood TV- however, the way they ask for money is to essentially run telethons- a la Children In Need- and literally hold their programming to ransom.

Remember that episode of the Simpsons, where Homer becomes a missionary? And the climax of the show gets interrupted for that very reason? Yeah, like that.

It's bad enough that real charities keep trolling for donations- I go a fair distance out of my way to avoid the Charity Muggers who camp Debenhams (although my opinions on CMs are a matter for another post, god knows this one doesn't need another footnote) guilting me into donating rather than leaving me be and letting me pick what charities I want to support for myself- without it happening on TV as well. Even then, a minibus for the local Specials is one thing- at least that's a good cause. Lining the pockets of some wannabe Murdoch is another.

Anyway- rambling over. Discuss.

-----

1 - I'm not overly enamoured at the idea of paying for something and seeing loads of ads², for instance, nor am I too happy when the same advert gets run over and over³.

2- At present, you're allowed twelve minutes (or so) of ads per hour on average- a figure that Sky channels run right to the edge. Given what you're paying per channel on a Sky sub it would be unfair to expect them to be totally ad-free, but I would view six to nine minutes an hour as acceptable⁵. Obviously this would have to be on a sliding scale (You pay just over £16/year per full-fat BBC channel, while this would require tweaking, it would be a good comparison model) but is a nice happy medium.

3- a-ring-ding-a-dingding-ding ding neeyow...

4- 10,000 households to represent a population of 60 million? Fantastic!

5- There are dribblings of a break length backlash in the industry, notably UKTV made a big deal of its shorter adbreaks a few years ago, and recently a US news network (I think MSNBC) experimented with a single sponsor for its main bulletin/show. Sky News also saw success when it dropped ads altogether at the start of the Iraq war, and Sky Movies ran ads about how their movies were uninterrupted⁷ shortly after Film4 went ad-supported.

6- There are (or were) people who don't see why they have to pay for Sky since they've paid their TV licence, so it's a bit like that.

7- Sorry, just being awkward with this one

12:07am: "two pounds thirty"
Gah! Up- and then-downgrading to and from IE7 has killed the internet on my laptop, and so this post is brought to you in fucking-freezing-near-the-window-desktop-machine-o-vision.

Still- just managed to win two pounds thirty out of Omar and a friend of his, neatly making up for the pound I lost early in the year, two-and-a-bit times over. £18.50-me-do.

EDIT: Fixed it! Hello, laptop! Hello, heat! Hello, non-americanized keyboard!

4:13pm: "transcend Wal-Mart"
The following is an opinion piece I wrote for GPol on the subject of a recent issue in Boston regarding advertising for the most recent Grand Theft Auto rehash PSP game on public transport.

It's a touch underdeveloped (and nonpublished) due to nobody really paying it any attention in the staff forum, but it needs posting into the world anyway. Tell me what you think.

---

IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE VILIFICATION OF THE M RATING?

Kudos, first, to Mr. Grabauskas for seeing past the controversy and daring to suggest that there might just be other evils in the world than videogames.

However, any real congratulation may be premature.

The wheels have been set in motion so that, once those for Vice City Stories have ended their run, no more adverts for games rated 'M' or 'AO' will see the light of the station again.

Banning AO adverts isn't really much of a gesture on the part of the Transit Authority- as we know, the number of AO games released is low- a mere 23 according to Wikipedia- and so can hardly represent a major stream of income for anybody selling advertising.

The reason there are so few AO titles- as we should all well know by now- are because they're not economically viable. They're not economically viable because, amongst other retailers, Wal-Mart- responsible for a massive percentage of game sales Stateside- won't stock them. If they won't stock your game, it's finished, according to publishers. You can see this in the fact that Atari felt the need to release a modified version of Fahrenheit for the American market in order to drop to an M rating, and that a certain minigame was crudely hacked out of GTA: San Andreas.

If you like, you could say that there's a bit of a stigma of sorts around the Adults Only rating.

Now, suddenly, there's a problem surrounding the M rating, for Bostonians, at least. M-rated games are now apparently unacceptable, and despite Grabauskas' assertion to the opposite in his letter, there is a victory, and there is a battle, fought part way down a very slippery slope.

This is the beginning of the M rating's vilification.

The viability of an M rated game has now taken a minor hit in that one of its advertising spots has now been placed out of reach- a hit which will increase in size if more transit systems follow Boston's lead, as Portland has already. However, this doesn't spell disaster just yet- plenty of M games get along without advertising.

Should Wal-Mart decide that the furore over Mature titles is a big enough issue, we can expect to see those games disappear from their shelves as well, as we nearly saw happen with the T-rated Bully, which makes a Mature game as big a risk as an AO title.

(That being said, the Grand Theft Auto brand might be big enough to transcend Wal-Mart's power and push people into the specialist store, which can only be a good thing)

This could be the beginning of a stealth version of the Comics Code, and could cripple this artform in the same the way it crippled its own- and it could be a much harder one to shift.

We can't afford to let this happen.

6:05pm: "stab"
Because it was a bit of a giggle on aqua_eyes' journal, and given what joranj seems to be getting up to at the moment, it'll probably be right up his street, too: The Stalker Meme™!

Answer the questions in the screened comments below.

(2 Points) My first name:
(1 Point) My last name:
(5 Points) Take a stab at my middle name:
(3 Points) Who was my first celeb-crush:
(2 Points) Where do I live:
(3 Points) What am I afraid of:
(2 Points) Do I smoke:
(3 Points) Do I drink:
(3 Points) How many siblings do I have:
(2 Points) Do I have children:
(2 Points) Do I get along with my parents:
(4 Points) What's one of my favorite things to do:
(2 Points) How many piercings do I have:
(3 Points) What's my favorite type of music:
(4 Points) What's my favorite TV show:
(3 Points) What's my favorite animal:
(2 Points) What's my favorite color:
(3 Points) Name something I hate:
(4 Points) Name a talent I have:
(4 Points) What kind of shoes do I wear:
(4 Points) Do I have any pets:
(2 Points) Who am I dating right now:
(5 Points) What am I studying in school:
(5 Points) What is the color of my room:
(4 Points) What are my political views:
(3 Points) What's my religion:
(5 Points on creativity) If I were stranded on a desert island, what would I bring:

EDIT: Answers now available in a friends-only for those who completed the quiz.

3:42pm: "pussy"
Decided to pussy out and not complain just inquire as to what happened rather than rock the boat.

As it happens, most of the noisemakers weren't invited as such, and brought their own fire extinguisher to empty all over the place. I am out of cereal, but it was only about a bowlful, so probably not worth getting worked up about, especially since nothing else went missing- I'd even left my bag in the front room and nothing got damaged/thrown about/extinguished, which is quite amazing.

Going to the RSAs or whoever next time, though.