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Thanks! Life has gotten busy lately, but starting this week I should have time to do some short write-ups again.

These posts on Lost are really good, I hope you do more of them!

http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/a-little-bit-of-watchmen-while-you-wait/

It’s almost time…

I really enjoyed the Alec Baldwin Hulu ad… being in Canada, of course, I could only watch them online, and they didn’t bother giving us any 3D glasses, so I didn’t even get to see Chuck in 3D though it was broadcast that way here, too. But I heard from most people the Sobe ad was pretty impressive.

They probably could have held the Cardinals to a field goal if they had gotten those safeties straightened out sooner. All is well that ends well though Wished there hadn’t been so many penalties. It was a little sloppy on both teams behalves. This was the big game and they weren’t playing very clean… they both had a lot of silly mistakes that were uncalled for. Still, it was a very good game.

I thought the ads kinda sucked aswell. There were only maybe four of the usuals… Budweiser, Coke, Pepsi, and Go Daddy. No one else though… none of the big corporations. I was really expecting a big battle between the TV companies with Samsung losing their License with the Super Bowl and Vizio getting it instead. I was surprised at how many car ads and cell phone ads there were. They were more like normal ads than the usual showman ship ones the Super Bowl gets. My favorite one though was probably the Sobe 3D ad. It was the only one that really looked 3D. The Disney one wasn’t that great and neither was the NBC one(for Chuck ?).

Or maybe I’ve just been permanently contaminated by seeing “behind the wall” of the hatch in the awful Lost video game, which isn’t canon anyways.

Sort of ironic the way you worded this… if you consider we may have seen Jughead all along… behind a hatch, buried under ground, behind a wall of lead, highly unstable, and with a failsafe that needs to be set off every 108 minutes.

I think you know what I’m talking about. Oh yeah.

For instance, corny it may be, but I use a bit from a bootleg version of Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia” for Lisa; “She can dance a Cajun rhythm, jump like a Willys in four wheel drive; she’s my summer love in spring, fall and winter, she can make happy any man alive.” She likely doesn’t feel the same, as I’m aware that she nor anyone else I know share my fondness for the Dead, but that song has always felt “our-song”ish to me.

My family gets a Pixies theme; “Where Is My Mind?” for my father, “Wave of Mutilation” for my mother, “Debaser” for my sister. Work got a White Stripes theme, using “My Doorbell” and JW’s Raconteurs side-project’s “Steady, As She Goes.” Lisa’s brother and sister got a couple Oasis songs. Sci-fi fans that you and your wife are, you got the Doctor and Torchwood themes.

Sometimes it’s just frequency of calls. JM got a live version of Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias”, just because he calls me often and I’m really into that song right now. Ditto my general ringtone for anyone without a custom, which is currently Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long”.

Oh, incidentally, my favourite track for a ringtone I just can’t bring myself to use, though I use it for a morning alarm; Rilo Kiley’s “A Better Son/Daughter”. It has this great big swell that sounds perfect as the start of the ringtone. I just picture being at work with a bunch of seniors and having “And sometimes when you’re on, you’re really fucking on, and your friends they sing along and they love you… but the lows are so extreme, that the good seems fucking cheap” booming out of my shirt pocket. And you need to understand, Jenny really hits those “fucking”s hard and loud.

The whole concept of offensive ringtones which carriers would have never provided amuses me.

But with audiko and a large library, virtually everyone in my address book has their own ringtone; I had a dozen of them when Telus was charging me $3.00 a pop, now that I can put all I want in, I’ve gone nuts, I’ve got dozens.

I’ve mentioned here and there that I believe Sony would love to charge its users to use PSN. But, since they want to compete with XBL, they can’t do that without first being an established and superior product. Thusly, it’s free.

I do feel that one of two things with happen within the next year on these fronts: either XBL will move to a free platform for online gaming, or PSN will add a paid premium service.

On another subject, I loved the bit about the last level in CoD 4 on veteran difficulty. I’ve been trying and failing at it a lot lately, haha.

Honestly, if I’m not in the beta by the end of this month, my hopes for Home are going to be even more eroded. It’s not that I care much to wander around the somewhat desolate servers; it’s just that, by now, people like myself should be getting a chance to review and look at this thing. They’ve created the GAP as a community to give feedback on just such things; its few thousands of members should just be automatic for the beta. They did the whole “download the theme to apply for the beta” thing, which I did right away. I’m beginning, more and more, to suspect that they’re keeping people with high online presence away, to the best of their abilities, and I find that a disturbing prospect, like they’re trying to hide something.

But what I intend out of Part 2 is to point out that, no matter how good the features are (and you and many others give me the impression they’re not great anyway), this is just entirely the wrong approach to competing with XBL; even more, as this beta crap underlines, it’s how out of touch Sony is with… well, the fucking INTERNET, period, like they don’t even know it’s there. Nearly 2 years from PS3 launch, and there’s still absolutely no integration between PS3 accounts and the internet? At ALL? It’s not 1997 anymore; web integration is absolutely crucial to the success of any technological endeavour, and they seem more concerned with creating a virtual mall than giving PSN users a bloody signature image showing which games they’re playing.

But… I should save this rant for that blog.

If Sony keeps it as it is now people will greatly lose interest VERY quickly. Home’s “servers” allow a max of 64 people in each one. So in order for you and your friends to meet in the “Warhawk” room it isn’t always going to be an easy task and it will require some circumventing. This isn’t a problem in the BETA because one, we don’t have any of the sponsored rooms and two, there is never anyone on and there has only ever had to be an opening of multiple servers(because the 64person limit was reached) a handful of times. In the final version of Home though I have to wonder… why will it be more “benficial” to wait for Home to load up, which takes a ridiculously long time, either walk or travel to the Warhawk briefing area, again traversing around Home takes some time aswell, and then I can load up the game. It seem easier and faster to just send an XMB message to my friends and load Warhawk straight from the XMB. And with games that support the “party” system the Home “game launching party system” is really just a collosal waste of time.

I see the only way for Home to “encourage” or “influence” people to stay and participate in and use it regularly is to promote it everywhere with free stuff. Have free “re-deemable codes” for expansions for games perhaps. Play in the Warhawk room on a said day and you are entered into a drawing. Have random drawings among every person that uses Home every day for a chance to win free in Home upgrades, perhaps a larger apartment or a new clothing pack. My point is, outside of standing around a 3d world with a 3d avatar talking in 2d text there isn’t anything else to do in home. Literally.

The game room is a disaster, the few games they give you for free are a joke because there are MUCH BETTER free flash games online and the Home games are so “buggy” that they will often times leave you more frustrated and confused then amazed and willing to stick around and play them. I understand its only a BETA and some of these “buggy” issues will be changed but once you play these games you’ll see its not so much a development issue as its a choice of game issue.

The Home theatre… HAHAHAHAHAHA biggest over hyping joke ever. For starters… it has featured many improvements over the “original” Home theatre but when it takes FIVE times longer to “stream” something than the length of the actual video I find it would just be easier for me to go and download the video from the PSN store in a fraction of the time.

Ahhh, and the Marketplace. It has “doubles” of every store. Probably an idea Sony had when they badly “presumed” that obviously all 64 people would be rushing to their digital store to download stuff! *sarcasm* Even when the stuff is free and the servers where maxed there were only three or four people in the marketplace. Oh, and did I mention that the Marketplace is only to buy Home products… not that I want the PSN 3Ded, I just thought I’d clarify that

The best and coolest thing I’ve probably seen in Home was the “Ubi Days” event sponsored, designed and partially developed by… Ubisoft. In Home we had a “limited time” location made available themed after all the stuff Ubisoft was unveiling. There were helicopters, tanks and all sorts of other End War, Prince of Persia and H.AW.X. related stuff scattered about but the coolest was a rather large gathering area “outside” the main promo entrance where a huge screen had been set-up and it broadcast the Ubidays press conference live in Home. After the press conference it just played a loop of various trailers until the Ubi days area was closed off.

It is thrid party support like that that will keep people coming back to Home but right now Sony isn’t utilizing any of the options at hand. They’re just sorta sitting around with their you-know-what up their you-know-where. Home has amazing potential, unfortunately, I think though that Sony has lost some of their edge in the “develope and revolutionize” department and so in turn Home will be a big let down. Here is to hoping it won’t and since I’ve already written too much I’ll end it here. Least now with the new BETA we can talk about Home

It is no different that door locks only keeping out honest people. Only, in this case, the homeowner gives you a key that doesn’t work, resulting in an electric shock when you grab the knob. It then repeats when you leave. The whole time, they have their face pressed into the screen of the second-story window, telling you, “c’mon in”.

Well, NIAC, there’s lots of good reasons to never purchase a Nickelback CD. But seriously, the industry’s ham-handed attempts at DRM are almost comical.

I actually bought one of the famed Sony root-kit CDs back in 2004 (Dave Matthews Band, “Stand Up”. Awful album, but that’s not relevant.) What was deeply amusing about it was that it didn’t work with Apple machines. It just used a Windows autorun script to install, and they didn’t bother (or couldn’t figure out how) to make it work on Macs.

What really makes this funny, though, is that they were aware of it; the instructions with the disc said “If you’re on an Apple computer, transfer to your MP3 player as usual.” Not only do they apparently not realize that it takes only one uploaded copy to get it widely disseminated on the ‘net, it’s almost like they didn’t think that MP3s burned on Apple computers would be compatible with Windows computers.

What pisses me off is that most of these idiotic DRM attempts do nothing to slow down the people they’re targeting; it just makes regular law-abiding citizens go through a lot of hassle.