From today on, you have to pay to make comments on their website. 0.0  This is obviously an outrageous idea because online-magazines benefit from comments, as they provide additional content. I actually often skim articles and skip forward to the comments, to see what people say (although it sometimes melts the brain). The downside of comments is of course spam, even our tiny blog attracts spam-bots, but it is controllable with modern software.

Some claim, that making readers having to pay in order to make comments, may increase the quality of user generated content. This is most likely true but it makes the idea of paid comments even more an impudence. You can see it this way: Making users generate better comments and making the contributors pay for it, is basically a piss-take. Especially since newspaper-sided heavy comment-moderation could solve the problem of questionable comments as well. Also, reading comments is optional.

Another reason why this is an outrageous idea is, because you can only pay via credit-card. This means, you can not comment anonymously anymore. What comes into my mind are the new plans of the Chinese government, to prevent  Chinese people to surf the Internet anonymously in the future. Whatever they will do, they will have to show their real names. Although this might have positive side effects such as lowering denunciation, the reality is, that freedom of speech is much more in danger. Freedom of speech to pillory politics and greedy elites, not just of China or Northern Korea, but also Corporate America, Russia, even the oh-so-nice Tibet and many more states. Once that is not needed anymore, we can talk about real names.

So why may this action by The Sun Chronicle be a smart marketing move? Well, because now, this rather unimportant newspaper, is mentioned in many newspapers all over the world. While this may not be monetizable, there is another benefit: It raises attention to the problem of old-school newspapers and publishing houses, making money in the Web 2.0 times.*

Thanks for reading

*(not that I care tho, because 95% of newspapers are either turbo-capitalistic propaganda  for the elites ( for example Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper kingdom) or elites-kiss-ass-papers written by naive, well functioning idiots).

Found at  thedailywh.at

Cya

Now check out the alternate ending of the movie. Softy transforms into …

Hehe

Filtertyp (EQ freak of Polignostix)

For those gangsters who do not know about IP numbers and how to hide them, I found this technique to hide in the city from the police:

Artist: Lio Bolin, http://saintsulpice.unblog.fr/2009/12/01/liu-bolin/

For those gangsters and hardcore guys out there, who know about all this, I suggest to post, tube, twitter with style and use this bad-ass pipe while doing so:

Artist: Mar Johns, http://www.marcjohns.com/blog/2009/12/badass-smoking-pipe.html

Farewell my friends

Filtertyp (EQ freak of Polignostix)

Now all that misses are some nice fries right?

Ups, and the removement of a few million (yes, million) landmines, that still exist.

Pointed at by J. Kreider.

Source: thedieline.com

Love is all around the world

Filtertyp  (Lowpass loving Member of Polignostix)

kajanova.com wrote:

“Gangs today have never been tougher.. they pimp hoes, get into gang fights, sell drugs and of course.. use Twitter. [...]

Using Twitter to chat about illegal activities is f$#king retarded. Listen gang members, your mom’s computer has something called an “I.P. Address” that can be tracked by the police[...]“

An additonal note:

There are also gangs on Youtube. And some have been caught because of that. There is a gang – mind you, not some stupid street kids – that made a lot of money with real estate and ripped people off. They showed their wealth on Youtube. Those videos are now secured by the prosecution and one important element to get them behind the bars. lol

p.s.

there are things like proxy servers and i.p. hiding etc. …. shhhh , hehe.

Cu

Filtertyp (filtering stuff for Polignostix)

If you ever wonder what certain terms mean,that normal dictionaries do not talk about, then go here: Urban Dictionary. Worth to bookmark if you often take part in online discussions or read them.

Cu

Filtertyp (Member of Polignostix)

Also check out  v2.0 which focuses on different aspects:

Cu

Filtertyp (Member of Polignostix)

First, you need the Firex Mockup Redux plugin which can be found here. This plugin adds the buttons of the upcoming Firefox Version 3.7 and 4.0.

Second, if you add the All-glass plugin to Firefox you can even embed the Windows 7 / Vista Aero Glass look. You can find it here.

Third, – but this is optional – if you add the Personal Menu plugin, you can to customize your tools bar. It can be found here.

Further instructions can be found on the site which I linked to first.

Have fun!

Filtertyp

(Member of Polignostix)

Imo ingame advertisment is game content that is profit (money,money) orientated and not matter (great immersive game) orientated . Hence they suck no matter if they are violent or not.

Have a nice day

Filtertyp (Polignostix)

Interesting to note: The background texture in the images is not noise, it’s solar granulation. Each grain is a bubbling cell of solar gas that is approximately the size of Texas. [ Source ]

Check out more amazing photos of Thierry Legault on his homepage which you can find here.

Have a nice day

Filtertyp (Polignostix)

Other news sites like The Daily NK, Sina.com, Stnn.cc, Cnii.com.cn and iToday posted about it as well. Also the Chinese Wikipedia mentioned the fake Twitter account, as if it was real, according to David Sowka. Peter Walker of guardian.co.uk wrote about it, too.

David Sowka describes that he opened up the Twitter account and feed it with the help of news services like Tweetbots, Twitterfeed and Feedity. Those services generate new messages regularly on his twitter account, based on the published news of the official KCNA website, so that David Sowka does not have to actually work, to update his Twitter site.

The Twitter site had just a few subscribers/followers in the beginning but the numbers exploded when North Korea began the testing of atom bombs and rockets at the end of may 2009. For more details and how the hype also rose in North Korea, you can visit the article by David Sowka here. (translation by google)

At Least Andy Greenberg did some research and contacted Korean Central News Agency of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He received an email stating, that they do not have a twitter account. Another hint that the KCNA Twitter account is fake.

So, in conclusion, my believe that people need to be more cautious when it comes to believing the media, has been proven once again. In fact i think, education about the media system is the most important thing to achieve for those political activists, who want to break up the current hierarchy of elitist exploiters and their systems of lies and distorted reality.

I am not just talking about North Korea but also about those shiny capitalistic countries (USA etc.), the so called communistic China but basically all countries.  Because, besides dilettantism, like in the aforementioned case and mindless articles by camp followers, there is of course the willingly and elaborated political influence by a lot of media corporations, by bending the truth, leaving out facts, telling flat out lies and other techniques. But to go into detail I would need to write another (huge) blog entry.

Update: The account has been suspended “due to strange activity”. Hehe.

Thanks for reading

Filtertyp (Polignostix.com)

Games, Magazines, Industry, In-game Advertisement

I read computer game magazines relatively often and what I perceive is that most articles – be it game reviews or other articles – are just boring, normalized, superficial and lack any depth; exactly like most games. Most – if not all – game mags are not much better than advertisement free sheets. The whole vibe of the computer gaming scene is actually one which is superficial and denoted by greed, bragging, materialism.

The first paragraph contained a lot of general allegations so let me elaborate one example: greed.

1. We got greed by a lot of the MMO players in game. They subordinate everything a game offers to collecting items and money.
2. We got greed by more and more powerful investors and gaming corporations who subordinate everything to maximizgin profits. This often leads to cookie cutter games.
3. Another form of greed is by gaming mags but also players who constantly long for new titles. This is an extreme horniness about new titles as if they were important to mankind. The pace of the hype coming and going regarding new games is  actually extremely quick these days. Hyped and highly anticipated games may be sorted out of the premium game shelves of game shops within a year or even half a year. I for example remember how fast the top title Bioshock was available for 10 bucks and sorted out of the premium game shelves within not even a full year.

A lot of the aforementioned attributes have to do with the fact, that more and more titles are published but especially because they get supported (but also pressurized) by more and more money. This puts more and more hectic into the scene. It i.e. results in more and more advertisements. Even in games, inside the virtual worlds. Imagine playing a knight wandering through a medieval scenery and all over sudden you stumble on an advertisement by a real world corporation. I have read strategy papers of advertisement companies… and I can tell you they are extremely horny about gaming advertisement. So there is more to come for sure.

And there are of course concrete examples who already have in game advertisements. Quake Wars and Anarchy Online to name just two. And because advertisement companies try to make the advertisements somewhat fitting to the virtual world and because the avarage gamer is not very receptive to virtual gaming atmospheres, in game advertisement will spread for sure.

But advertisement is not just about banners. Advertising companies try to get articles in magazines and pay for it. This is also common in other industries. Why all of this? Because more and more investors are interested in the game industry. Why? Because they are avid gamers! I am just kidding. Because they hope to maximize their amount of money they got. The real powerful elites of the gaming corporations (or investors behind smaller companies) would do the same in any other industry branch and do not care about gamers at all. And by the way  -excuse me for being polemical -  if you have ever seen pictures of them, those people look exactly as expected. Normalized suit capitalists.

Another result of this development is, that a lot of games do not risk anything and try to go new paths. A good example is probably Runes of Magic, which has written “Let’s copy World of Warcraft  and produce a money cow” all over it. In case you do not know, World of Warcraft is the blockbuster MMO game of the MMO industry, which is played by over 10 million people worldwide, according to its developer Blizzard. Runes of Magic copied a lot of World of Warcraft and is probably the most soulless, boring, major gaming title, without any depth in atmosphere and intellectual content, that I’ve ever played.

State Of Mind Of Gamers And Loving Things For Themselves

Perfectly into the picture of a mindless gaming scene of course fits a large portion of the gamers. Let me give an example which shows  the state of mind of (a huge part) the MMO gaming scene. Let’s have a look at the game World of Warcraft.

I played this game and I like the PvP aspect of MMOs the most. PvP  means player versus player fights as opposed to player versus computer generated enemies such as dragons. I was not the only one who focused on PvP of course and I think most of the other PvPers were interested into the PvP because of PvP itself.

The majority of players however, preferred PvE in its various forms. It can be quite entertaining and pleasing to pass the computer generated adventures with your friends or guild comrades and is perfectly fine. It is not worse or better than playing PvP.

But after some time, challenges against computer generated enemies are not challenging anymore because the enemies actions are foreseeable. So, a lot of people just play hours and hours to kill certain strong enemies, like giant dragons, in order to get special item rewards. The urge to get those rewards, is so extreme, that players kill the same enemies (they re-apear after some time) over and over and over and often actually hate to do it!

This urge to get items in order to improve the players avatars (the figure that represents the player and is visible in the virtual computer world) is so strong, that it is maybe a nympholepsy, because the game developers always add new and better items to the game. So basically, people are chasing a carrot on a stick, held in front of  a donkey. The carrot has the label “best and most impressive items” on it.

Attributes Of Virtual Life Are Just Consequential

Another example, to show how much donkeys like carrots, is this: At the end of 2006, Blizzard made it much easier to get rewards from PvP. Unsurprisingly the PvP anticipation exploded. There were so incredible many people who started to PvP to get those items rewards. People who never played PvP joined the battles and even admitted to not PvP anymore after they get their wanted rewards. They were like brain dead zombies with dollar symbols in their dead eyes. And they exactly played like that: like idiots with zero interest in strategies etc. And since the gamers need to pay a monthly subscription fee to play those games (other pay models exist tho), more and more investors are interested in the MMO gaming market. I mean: Can there anything better for a capitalist to make people pay him monthly to chase virtual items? (Well, yes, to make them pay for virtual items directly. This is actually coming.)

But all of this is just consequential: Which behavior of gamers do you expect, if you know, that a large portion of the real society, functions very similar, compared to the life within those virtual worlds. I think that those small virtual worlds show very explicitly, what mankind is about. If there came an alien down to earth, I would show it MMOs in order to make it understand humanity.

Thanks for reading

Filtertyp

Who is Elsevier ? The company states on its website: “As the world’s leading publisher of science and health information, Elsevier serves more than 30 million scientists, students, and health and information professionals worldwide. “

Well, this is an important role, a role that needs to be performed with a lot responsibility. However, we live in capitalism, which is about profits first and we do not have a free open access system to informations and news about scientific research.

So the pharmaceutic company Merck payed the publisher Elsevier to produce a “serious” and “trustworthy”  journal in order to praise the products by Merck. Elsevier did and called the magazine The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. Magazine NR. 2 featured 12 advantageous, non scientifical articles about the medicament Fosamax and 9 about the medicament Vioxx.

Michael Hansen, the Elsevier chief executive, admitted that this journal – and 5 others – were made to look like serious journals. Journals that a lot of people rely on, for example doctors who prescribe drugs.

Now how did that came out ? Well this – along with emails which were about discrediting or even ” neutralizing” doctors who were critical of the company Merck – came out in a court case in Australia. In that court case, Merck was accused by people who had heart attacks after taking Vioxx.

Thank you for reading this

Filtertyp (Moog Filters Loving Member of Polignostix.com)