WillWybrow.com

I love the fact that there are some bits of my internet presence that only some people read. It lets me put different viewpoints or facts out to different people, and not worry about them going to the wrong places.

But lately, those things have been converging. My Tweet feed is on the site, my site is on Facebook, and it’s all united under my name.

That’s because, the trouble with having so many places to put my thoughts is that other people don’t always respect the distinction. They will put references to one medium into a message on another, and then it prompts those who don’t regularly access all areas to do some background reading, which then defeats the point. So I decided to embrace it. There are not many information streams that I output that do not cross over. I keep one isolated - that one’s for me to make my own personal notes in a place where being cryptic doesn’t matter. But other than that, if I want to say something to some people but not to others, it has become almost impossible.

I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with it this way. But then, I’d no rather go back to complete internet anonymity. It will take some thinking to figure out a way to do both.

Ideas welcome.

…September 11th caused the popularity of blogging…

…then you might just be a douchebag.

My twin brother turned me on to blogging in 2001. At that time, not too many people were actively blogging. That soon changed after 9/11. Blogs boomed in popularity and On the Fritz was one of them.

Halfway down his “About” page on his website.

This guy also thinks that Rick Rolling started in 2007 with an episode of Family Guy, and that it’s intrinsically homophobic.

Do this guy a favour and drop him a line at fritz@fritzliess.com to let him know how much of an incompetent fool he really is.

I remember first getting “MSN” as it was colloquially known (and still is, a bit) at the tender age of… I’d say twelve. My memory isn’t perfect, but it was twelve or thirteen.

Since then, it’s held its own as instant messenger of choice for me and the people I speak to most. But think about it… are you in any significant way similar to how you were at that age? Different hobbies, different friends, different institution of education, different level of education, different uses for instant messaging… Can one program really hold up for so long and through so much change in its users’ mindsets?

Well, apparently it can, since I’m still a user of it. Almost every day, too. Friends are still there, and I haven’t stopped adding new ones. But, I decided to ignore the fact that everyone still uses it and take a look at the actual program itself. Here are a few of the observations I have made:

So, from the top down, then…

First, this bar is mostly filled with crap: stuff like “Go to Windows Live Today” and “change the colour of your window” and the rightmost one - displaying the File, Contacts, Actions… menu that’s already at the top of the screen… This is all just unnecessary. I’ll grant the ‘e-mail’ button; people will want to check their mail if they use Windows Live for their e-mail.

Next, no thanks, Microsoft, I don’t want to enrol in your crappy Customer Experience bullshit programme. I don’t know how to get rid of this bar. Maybe it goes away if I click the link? Well, I’m not going to click the link.

Moving on, this is the worst bit. Pop-out Flash advertising. Not only are they unsightly, they are annoying when you mouseover them and they take up half your screen with flashing bright colours. And, of course, integrating the Flash plugin uses up a load of extra memory for no reason. Some of them even have sound…

Finally, there is a reason I don’t use Live Search to query the internet: it’s shit. Everyone who wants to find something uses Google. They own searching, it’s time to give up trying to take it away from them.

So, what I did was start cutting out all the bits of useless crap using a graphics program. I also removed some of the empty space that I put in myself (just to balance out the contact list to advert ratio), and look what happened:

I accidentally invented Google Talk.

I have seen the Facebook advertising sign-up process. I know that you can choose to target people according to their listed personal information.

So, I am listed as ‘in a relationship,’ and my ‘religious views’ were set to ‘atheist’ (and I have changed them to Secular Humanist recently). SO EXPLAIN THIS ONE TO ME, FACEBOOK:

Also, I thought that if you weren’t paying very much attention and you read it as though it had a comma in the middle of the title, it could be very provocative to sensitive people like my pal, CJ (whose first name is ‘Christian’). They should be more careful.

Just now having ordered my Dan Dennett lecture ticket over the phone, I have to say that the BHA has rekindled my love of ordering things over the phone.

This is partly a complaint about the NSS’s ordering website that does not allow you to specify an alternative delivery address when you make a purchase from their online shop. It’ll take much longer for my package to get from my card’s registered address and my present residence. It’s upsetting because I ordered some really cool things, and I want them now.

Anyway, the BHA lady was really friendly and helpful, and the experience was really personal and flexible, not like rigid online forms and faceless checkout systems.

If you’d asked me this morning, I’d have said online systems were much better as there’s less chance of human error. But now I think we still have a way to go with them.

Writing about Red Alert 3 made me realise that there needs to be a cool word for the DRM crisis that EA have instigated. I wanted to make a play on the word “dictatorship,” but it didn’t pan out. So for now, we’ll have to call it DRMinism. It rhymes with ‘feminism,’ which is almost good enough. But, fuck DRM.

I, uh, watched this mad film just now, “Cashback.” And it’s mad. Like, really mad.

It’s about a few things really. Some prevalent themes are: artistic oggling; female nudity (and one could argue that this and the previous item are basically the same, but they aren’t); and Sainsbury’s. Aside from these, there’s a peppering of love, insomnia and then there’s a plot built on that. Apparently, not sleeping gives people the power to magically stop time.

This was such a fucking stupid film. Nothing actually happens in it at all. Some guy with a really decent life breaks up with his girlfriend and suddenly stops sleeping. It’s about the fragility of the human emotional state, but it’s horseshit. These days, everyone (especially those of the male persuasion) is really desensitised to emotion. Everything rolls off people today, and nobody gives a shit. Oh no, you broke up with your girlfriend. Big whoop, far worse stuff happens to people all the time and who cares? Nobody. But for some reason, this really talented guy with a decent life gets granted magical powers to freeze time. It’s a big whole part of the film. At first I thought it was just a metaphor or visualisation of his daydreaming, but then he starts doing stuff in his frozen moments. And he cracks his fingers to unfreeze time. What the fuck? If there ever were a “Bernard’s Watch: the Movie,” where Bernard grows into a closet homosexual starving artist trying to make it in art school, this film is it. And he works at Sainsbury’s (which is portrayed completely unrealistically). Arrgh, the stupidity of this film is elevating my blood pressure a ton.

I think it’s safe to say that I didn’t “get” the point of this film. Obviously. Why does he have magical powers? Why, with these magical powers, does he not just take stuff from the tills at his work? Fucking hell, I always wished I could freeze time and dip my fingers into the cash drawers at work. No, all he does is strip women and draw fucking pictures of them. Yeah, all well and good if you can draw, but why not take a bunch of cash as well? Jesus, it’s not more morally reprehensible to nick a few hundreds of pounds from a multi-million pound corporation than it is to undress women without their permission and draw pictures of them. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FILM TRYING TO SAY?!

I need something to reduce my blood pressure, quick…

Oh yeah, that’s right, my superfast fibre optic internet connection. I watched Iron Man today for the first time in reasonable quality since the cinema. That’s not to say I didn’t try; the telesync (should this be capitalised?) version was awful and the VHS screener was slightly better. It was amazing, but Downey Jr. looks different every time I watch the film. Good actor, though.

So, I am pushing for financial contributions to create a really sexy Linux-based server for the house. It would store the house’s shareworthy files to save four things: 1) personal space on hard drives; 2) the need to download things more than once (which would piss our ISP off, I’m sure, all the unnecessary bandwidth); 3) the transfer of files to and from PCs (requiring everyone’s computer to be on and someone there to grant access) and 4) the insecurity of personal shares on computers.

I want to write a bittorrent program that lets users submit torrent requests and it handles them automatically and fairly (queuing users according to past use, for example). But I won’t do it without a server, so in order to encourage me to program and develop my skills, any personal donations of computer equipment (quad core processors, SATA hard drives etc.) or hard cash would be appreciated incredibly.

But without a server, we’ll probably end up with a shitty network hard drive.

Nine of your Great British Pounds, every month, could be forked out for a lot of things. Maybe you could sponsor some charity? That’s great and all, but why not spend it on something a little more tangible? Regular expenditure like that could also just as easily be going into a savings account, but £9 is a little bit, well… little for that. It’s better off spent, I’d say.

City of Heroes

What if you could design your own superhero from scratch, with incredible flexibility? What if you then took your superhero around the streets and districts of Paragon City, a bustling metropolis rife with crime? What if your hero earned new powers during his or her lifetime, being able to take on more threatening villains? What if your hero could team up with other heroes on a short-term basis to take on even bigger tasks? And what if your hero was inducted into a SuperGroup, with long-term benefits and allies and a chance to build up a super base?

I’ve never played an MMORPG before. RPGs in themselves are a little daunting from the point of view of a player who is used to running in, shooting up the place and moving on, with little regard for what is the core aspect in an RPG: the character improving with experience.

I did enjoy my brief stint with Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls installment, and Pokémon is always good fun. But this is number one on the list of MMORPGs, an otherwise untapped genre.

Well, to start with, there is a lot of negativity associated with MMOs that comes from the poor public opinion of World of Warcraft and its players (I have heard some awful, prejudiced things). It could be because of the attention drawn by the people who devote their lives to playing it, but I don’t want to discuss the merits or drawbacks of that game, I want to talk about this one.

I’m going to give a quick run-down of gameplay. If you’re a big player of this kind of game and something that I’m explaining is obvious to you because it’s in every RPG without fail, just remember what I’ve kept saying over and over: first time, here, so bear the fuck with me.

Gameplay

As a hero, you’re registered with the police force of Paragon City and thrown in. There are two things you can do after the tutorial: find some crime and stop it or proceed to your contacts to be given missions.

You get assigned missions via contacts in the city. From detectives to scientists, everybody has got something for you to take care of. The burden of responsibility is on you, but so are the rewards that hard work brings. On your travels about the city’s districts, you’ll see crime in progress, including street brawls, muggings and break-ins.

To kill the bad guys, you use the superpowers you picked at character creation, powers that come from pool sets that expand with more choices as you increase in level.

One of my favourite things about this game is the come-and-go feel of teaming up. Anyone can form a casual team of people of similar levels. What’s more is that people level up at approximately the same rate. Some will steamroller ahead, but most people will be within a range of two or three levels over a long time, meaning you will team up with them over and over. You’ll start seeing familiar characters in the way you’d see familiar people around you in real life. Teaming up in itself is fair; experience and goodies are split fairly between all participants.

People might not be the most intelligent you’ll ever meet, but they sure are friendly. The new and inexperienced are receptive to advice and the veterans are happy to dish it out. You won’t be shouted at for not knowing everything there is to know about the game, and everyone is very polite, offering congratulations and other little courtesies that you don’t often find in online communities.

This is Tom Hanks saying, if you’re going to pick an MMORPG to play, why not this one?

The days of advertising your product are long gone. Recently, unless you can offer up-to-date comparisons of your product with your competitors’ product, you don’t stand a chance.

And then, of course, there are those who don’t actually have a product on the market, but specialise in the comparisons. The trouble is, there are so many comparison websites out there, which one should you use? They all have their advantages and disadvantages. So how do we know the comparison site we’re using is the right one?

If you can’t see where I’m going with this, you are a very generous reader to slow your brain whilst reading and receive the full force of my point.

Why doesn’t somebody just launch a comparison website comparison website? You know, comparethecomparisonmarket dot com or comparisonsupermarket.com?

If now, you’re thinking “well, why stop there? Won’t we then need comparisons of the comparison websites of the comparison websites?” then you are absolutely right. There’s no end to the potential distance we could get from companies selling actual products and services. It’s fashionable to not sell anything at all. At best it could be called the sale of convenience, but I refuse to believe that comparison websites are as accurate as checking all the insurance companies “by hand” and getting the prices and features yourself. And sacrificing accuracy for convenience is just bad practice. Television advertisements cost a fortune and you only really see well-known brand names and corporations purchasing advertising time, particularly in prime-time evening viewing. So that means these comparison websites are making enough to be able to firstly afford the adverts, and secondly to justify roping in more people (meaning that, somehow, these bastards are making money out of nothing).

Just checking a few of the websites I know off the top of my head, comparethemarket.com and moneysupermarket.com had adverts. Not very obvious or intrusive ones, nor were there many on each page. Gocompare.com did not have any adverts, neither did Tescocompare.com, and uSwitch.com’s didn’t come out until a few pages into their site. So that’s not where they get their revenue from. Then, of course, it twigged.

uSwitch.com has agreed deals with some suppliers across all our services to receive a small commission payment when a customer chooses to switch or apply for a product through us.

uSwitch.com

Each insurer pays us an introductory fee per sale. We don’t charge you in any way - not even a penny, and unlike some other price comparison sites, we do not charge insurers to advertise on our site, they only pay us when a sale has been made.

GoCompare.com

And there we have it. It’s plain, old-fashioned salespeople commission. Only salespeople have been replaced by faceless websites, because you can’t doubt a website. You can doubt a salesperson, and each salesperson has a given persuasive power. They’re not certain. They’re flawed. But a website? That can be an engine, something incorruptable.

But it’s all lies anyway, so fuck it.

Cruelty to pirates must stop. Call now to donate just £2 a month, or whatever you can spare. Your donations will go towards buying the nice people at thepiratebay.org a big “thank you” greeting card, or maybe some letter bombs to the RIAA.