A few months ago I wrote about the failings of MAFIAA’s business model and pleaded with the aether for them to find something better. Well, now it would seem that a small independent games studio 2D Boy has discovered a solution I am willing to support. So I bought World of Goo.

But let me first tell you a little bit about my gaming history so you’ll have a better sense of why World of Goo is only the third game I bought legally. The first game I ever bought legally was Theme Hospital way back when my 166mHz pentium with 16 megs of RAM was the best gaming rig money could buy. I only bought that one ecause I traded in a birthday gift from mum that wasn’t all that great. Later I bought Resident Evil together with a friend and then … then we discovered pirates. Back then it was still possible to just go to a newspaper or some such place and find an advertisment from pirates selling games and other software for cheap.

So we bought from them a lot, mostly because we were too poor to buy games legally. Later broadband came to our neck of the woods (this was still ISDN for some, slow ADSL for the lucky) and we downloaded many games. It was awesome. Of course we continued to do it because it was what we could afford and lately it turned more into an exercise in downloading games simply being much easier and more readily available and the fact that most games these days simply aren’t worth the money they’re asking for.

Along comes World of Goo. This simple and marvelous game that’s so addicting it’s impossible not to play. And from a wonderful studio that is against DRM and other draconian measures of protecting copyright. I admit that at first I downloaded the game illegally if not for anything else than just because that’s how I’m used to trying out software, however as soon as I learned 2D BOY didn’t support DRM I made a decision to buy the game.

It was a rather interesting sensation this, buying a game I’d already pirated for rather cheap money (I probably spend more in an evening of drinking) and even though I didn’t get any physical copy but a digital download I don’t mind paying for the game. This is a business model I think more, many more, publishers should adopt. Instead of making bad products and shoving them down our throats under draconian security measures the publishing world should be more like World of Goo. A simple and brilliant game that makes it a point to be against DRM and, here’s the shocker, people want to buy.

In fact, I don’t know anyone who after a while of playing the game, didn’t say they feel guilty for downloading illegally and are going to buy it because it’s, quite simply, worth its money and doesn’t come with strings attached.

Tags: commentary, intrigues, life

God and science are in love and have been since the dawn of time. Ensue the flames! But no, seriously, give me a listen before you bash my head in, that means you religion monger! Yes, you too dear crazy scientist.

For very long I have listened to you people bicker back and forth on the internet, bicker forth and back in real life, have wars almost all about whether god exists or doesn’t exist and whether science is real or a fake. For fuck’s sake people, enough! In the interest of full disclosure, I have until recently fought vehemently in these wars and would take any opportunity I could find to bicker with religious folk over their beliefs.

Until, one day, I realised just how bad everything I was doing was. I’ve tried explaining this to one Unimatrix who still fights with great fervor and won’t let up no matter how much I try to show him the sad trap all warriors on the side of science have fallen into – they’re making science into a religion and have forgotten all science is about.

Aaagh the flames! Stop that, hear me out. Let me show you just how many correlations there are between people defending science against religion and … religion. It’s gonna scare the shit out of you, especially if you’re one of the warriors.

Knee-jerk reactions

Modern day science warriors have knee-jerk to anything and anyone saying their beliefs could be wrong and that there is an alternate explanation for a phenomenon. You will recall that this is the kind of thing religion prides itself in and has forever, most notably during the inquisition and let’s not forget about how eager religion is in damning anyone that says God is wrong. Science is about thought and discovery, it’s not about saying anyone who doesn’t believe you is an idiot.

Nonbelievers are stupid idiots

This is very common in modern-day science warriors, they will simply call everyone who isn’t on their side stupid and ignorant. Even religion didn’t use to be this bad until the modern day. Science isn’t about convincing people you’re right and they’re wrong, science is about knowledge and it doesn’t care who believes and who does not. As long as other scientists find you to be correct you’re good, real scientists don’t care about nonscientists and their beliefs, many scientists themselves are very religious. For example Newton only found his stuff by trying to explain God’s modus operandi, Einstein was bent on discovering who or what God is and relativity was the lovely side-product. So why do you care so much?

Converting people

Ever since its inception religion has been all about converting heathens into followers of the one true God, whichever of the many Gods that would be, science … science wasn’t. But these modern day warriors of science care much more about convincing people to follow the one true path of science and leave behind their ancient and stupid belief systems. Why? Why does it matter so much to you that everyone you know should follow the one true path? Are you by any chance religious and science is your religion?

We are absolutely correct

Religion is dogmatic, science is based on hypotheses and theories. The base of everything scientific is recognition of the fact that you could be wrong if somebody finds a better explanation. The base of everything religious is “We are right and you are wrong”. Why are you, dear science warriors, making this same mistake by saying science is infallible and religion is wrong? Do I sense a bit of hypochrisy right there?

Conclusion

There are probably many other correlations between religion and the mockery people are making out of science. But most of all I believe we should all realise one simple fact: Science and religion are just working models of the world based on our observation. There is no point in figuring out which is better, which is more correct, because they can both be correct. In fact they both quite enjoy coexisting and love each other. Hell, they even each have a perfeclty valid explanation for the other.

Science says that God is a mix of psycho-social phenomenae created either out of need to explain what we couldn’t explain mathematically or logically at the time of its inception or created by leaders so as to easier lead their people. A control mechanism if you will. While faith is, according to science, a coping mechanism. Most of all, science explains God as being an idea rather than an entity. That’s not saying God doesn’t exist … science does NOT say God doesn’t exist. So stop it you fucking morrons, stop trying to convince everyone God doesn’t exist because you have absolutely no scientific basis to be saying taht.

God, on the other hand, explains science as a puzzle. God put all of this funny stuff in place for us to figure out, it’s one giant puzzle and once we’ve figured it out, become smart enough to face him, we get to see what or who God really is. Some religions also explain it as a test of faith, but that’s based on the incorrect belief that science is about disproving the existance of God when in fact science has been trying for a long time to explain, rather than disprove, God. So you see, God doesn’t say science is stupid, God just says science is the explanation while he/she is the reason.

Now that I’ve shown you just how morronic all this fighting is. We can get on with our lives, stop fighting, leave religion to its working model, leave science to its working model and … well I guess the only thing left to do now is endure all of the flames coming from both sides of the fence. That’s what I get for sitting on the fence I guess.

Tags: commentary, food for thought, society

For the past few days I’ve been partaking in a rather vibrant forum thread celebrating the male to female differences. It started off with a school mate asking for photos of our female school mates, presumably because he’s horny and too lazy to go looking for chicks at the faculty himself. But I decided to make a thread out of it and started trolling, so it quickly grew up to be a lofty six page thread of halfseriousnes and halfmockery of all that is feminism. Most of all, I was later told that it’s earned me a slap from a lass I’ve yet to meet. Guess I’ll know when I meet her!

Part of the thread was devoted to romance and even though I proposed a purely hypothetical idea of what us male humans like to find romantic, strangely enough many others quite agreed to a point and even stranger, one of the girls seems to have run an experiment on her boyfriend and discovered that my hypothesis holds. Wewt for me!

So, if we give extrapolating an algorithm out of the whole ordeal a shot we get something like this … I should really draw a graph … hmm let’s see if I have a tool for it. *consults twitter*

Tags: advice, commentary

For anyone who doesn’t know, MAFIAA is a blanket slang term used for the combination of RIAA, MPIAA and their worldwide alternatives. In short, MAFIAA stands for all the corrupt and comically deluded copyright holders out there who are proponents of unfair copyright protection and criminalising their own paying customers.

Before we begin this argument let me say that I support artists getting paid for their efforts, I support art and other copyrightable content, what I don’t support is the MAFIAA and that is why, yes, I am a pirate and no, I do not intend on ever going to prison over it, I don’t even intend on ever admiting that what I’m doing is hurting the industry because as every artist (besides Metallica) you ask knows, and Microsoft publically admited, piracy is good for business.

What MAFIAA is doing wrong

Let’s have a look at what exactly the MAFIAA does and why it’s wrong shall we.

First and foremost, suing their customers. Everyone would think that it doesn’t make a lot of business sense to sue one’s own customers each and every time they misstep, but the MAFIAA has decided to do exactly that. Because their sales have started to drop due to new and more popular media becoming available they have, instead of adopting and changing, started suing people. This is wrong.

Secondly, after the MAFIAA finally realised that perhaps record sales aren’t everything and has decided to allow downloading of their copyrighted content they ladened it with DRM (DigitalRightsManagment), which is all fine and good but not they way they decided to do it. What’s wrong with current DRM schemes is that it creates a world of trouble for anyone who legally downloads music and video by this content being useless on any device other than the one it was downloaded on. However, pirates have no such problems, they can play their downloads any where and at any time.

Thirdly, the MAFIAA is commiting an extreme act of idiocy and displaying a complete lack of business sense in how they distribute their content. This is especially apparent in videos and movies. First you are overcharged for the ticket at the gate, then you are bombarded by advertisements neatly placed in the movie and when it’s all over, if you want to watch the thing at home, you have to pay an extortionate amount of money for the DVD. Or download it at an extortionate price and then being able to only watch it five or so times. Let’s not even touch the fact of wht happens when your player breaks down and all your movies and music are only playable on the one they were bought for.

For last we have the biggest idiocy MAFIAA has ever created and it happened just yesterday. In their flamboyant taking down of youtube content, which I’m not exactly certain why they do since Monty Python has lately proved just how useful putting copyright content online for free is, by increasing their sales 23000 percent. I can personally attest that if I can’t find videos of a band on youtube, lately, I just don’t even know they exist. Oh right, what happened was that Death Cab for Cutie (I think) couldn’t share their own music on their own website because the MAFIAA took down the video, so on the band’s own site all you could see was a “This video is against copyright, go away foul pirate!”

The FUD

The MAFIAA has over the years spread a lot of FUD about copyright and all the ways they can fuck you over if you decide to pirate. They made a big deal out of convincing people that pirating equals stealing, however judges disagree, but this is something most people don’t know. MAFIAA has also done a great lot to convince both people and governments to criminalise piracy, however if piracy is such a crime, why has there only ever been ONE trial? Furthermore, if MAFIAA is so right in what they’re doing, which is what a lot of people think, why then do they fold and cower in the corner the moment somebody pushes back?

We can go further, if the MAFIAA is so incredibly certain they’re only suing pirates, why do they want to bribe ISP’s to hand over filesharers, which is by the way illegal for ISP’s to do since the MAFIAA is not a law enforcement agency. While we’re on this whole discovery thing, the MAFIAA is known for poking and proding then walking away if nothing comes up quickly enough. There have even been cases of network geeks playing around at the office, which resulted in the MAFIAA suing their printer. You know, the machine that prints out sheets of paper? Well it was sued for sharing music on the internet.

What the pirates are doing right and how MAFIAA can learn from them

Pirates, on the other hand, are doing exactly what the MAFIAA is not. They’re providing quality service completely free of charge with the only risk involved being a few viruses here and there, or some trojan. But a person can easily protect themselves against those.

Let me give you a little comparison here, I can buy something legally, go through the trouble of walking somewhere for it, then being encumbered in how I can use what I’ve bought, if I rip it for easier use I’m a pirate, so I have to buy the whole thing again in downloadable format, then if I want to play it on my iPod I have to buy the whole thing again for the iPod, if my equipment dies I have to buy the whole thing AGAIN. So in a few short months I could be buying the same thing four times if I wanted to be a law abiding citizen. Fuck you! Or I can just download it from torrents, it works anywhere I want it and it’s mine forever.

Dear MAFIAA, the reason you are losing customers is not because we’re all turning pirates, but because you are offering a subpar service at a very high price. If you would provide the same service as pirates do (downloadable, no DRM) there are MANY people who would be glad to download your stuff legally. And for the love of god, do you STILL not understand that all these years you were getting new customers by people SHARING stuff by either borrowing CD’s from one another then deciding they want to own one or … soemthing else. Guess what, that’s what we’re trying to do with youtube these days, but you won’t let us. Pray tell, if you don’t let my friend show me the cool new band/movie they’ve discovered, how do I discover it and become a customer? That’s right, I don’t.

Why I think piracy isn’t bad

I’ve already mentioned I’m a pirate, but let me explain a little about why I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong with this. What I download are mostly television series that are not yet available in my country, there is nothing wrong with this because if the MAFIAA isn’t willing to sell me their product there is nothing wrong with me borrowing it from those the MAFIAA is willing to sell to. I still pay cable television, I still pay all television fees and if the series were broadcast locally I would watch them on television and would not download. So yes, they are downloaded, they are pirated, but they are STILL paid for!

Another thing I download a lot is music. Now, the latest Amanda Palmer record WKAP (Who Killed Amanda Palmer) I bought legally straight from the band. They were so kind as to provide me with an instant download that was not DRM laden. I never felt the need to pirate this album. I also bought another of their albums that I also pirated, but I bought a CD because there was added value to it – it was signed. Usually, however, I only pay for my music by ways of propagating it upon others and have over the years gotten a lot of bands new fans and sometimes I buy merchandise, again, straight from the band.

You might have noticed a pattern here. I refuse to buy anything from the MAFIAA because almost none of that money goes to the artists, I prefer buying directly from the bands or, in case of TV series, paying royalties through my cable company.

As for movies, no I don’t pirate much of those because in the past few years the MAFIAA simply hasn’t produced anything I could deem worthy of my time and more often than not when watching a high budget movie I get this icky disgusting feeling that they should be paying ME to watch all of their advertising instead of being fucked over front and back and risking being sued if I watch it from the wrong angle and don’t see the advertising well enough.

MAFIAA, please change your business model, you’re being stupid.

Tags: commentary, food for thought, rant

With Lord of the Rings on the telly and my dear old aluminium Merrick warming my thighs I embark upon a mission of high importance, a mission of dire beginnings, a mission of great consequence and a mission of practicing the useless. I a stand before you today to try and teach you of the dangers we are all facing – the dangers brought on by the endless hordes of noobs in the world.

But first, a little introduction by Nahtze (Jeremy from Pure Pwnage):

As Nahtzee lovably explains, noobs have ruined the gaming industry, but when you think about it, noobs have destroyed much more than just the gaming industry. Just look at how, for example, noobs have destroyed the music and movie industry. Back in the good old days of radio and television whatever was of the best quality in that it told the best tale or had the best musicians or even just had very awesome character development was what made it to the top charts and gained heaps of money.

Nowadays, however, our televisions are filled with the Big Brothers and American Next Top Models out there. Hell, even the sitcoms and so called education shows are much less about being entertaining and whatnot, but just about … hell, what ARE they about? To be honest, I find it increasingly harder to tell what television is even about, it would seem all the noobs out there just sort of gobble up anything you throw at them and because they’ve been told it’s awesome they also think it’s awesome and love it. So, because of the standardless noobs even those of us who would LIKE something worthwhile to watch, but there simply isn’t anything available anymore.

Or take books for example, a while ago only good authors could become successful, geniuses like Boccaccio, Orwell and similar had a hard time succeeding and proving to everyone that they’re a good read. Nowadays … well, nowadays we have schams like Dan Brown becoming instant best sellers and stories like Harry Potter being thought of as the height of literary creation. Fucking tasteless noobs, you’ve destroyed literature for us so the good stuff doesn’t even make it onto the shelves anymore or tries so hard to be different than the popular stuff it becomes unreadable. If you want to be taken seriously as literature, you must be different than pop, but be too different and yuck, unreadable. So if we could just somehow kill all the noobs and thus give popular literature a better name, the really good books wouldn’t have to try so hard to be artsy and we could actually all enjoy them. Yes yes, chicken and egg problem. Whatever.

So what else have noobs destroyed for the rest of us? Political debates? Most certainly. Education? They’ve destroyed it with all religious campaigning against reason. Well, noobs have destroyed everything, or are on the verge of doing so … it sucks. Go away noobs, please, just all drop off the face of the planet and go live on Pluto or something.

Tags: commentary, rant, video

Earlier this week students of Slovenia suddenly discovered a large increase in student food certificate prices. Naturally a great outrage soon followed spannign multiple bulletin boards, news-like articles and at least two outraged facebook groups on top of a boycott “event”, also on facebook. How nice and lovely, students fighting unfair price increases that are wholly disproportionate to other normal price growths. In fact, prices everywhere seem to be dropping due to a so called recession, why student food went up is illogical at the least.

But is it really so illogical? Is it even unfair? And for the love of <deity> are students actually achieving anything with their outrage? The answer to all those questions is a resounding no! Prices went up because they can, it’s called supply-and-demand, meaning that for as long as we continue to make demand and fill those restaurants at lunchtime prices will continue to grow. Once they’ve grown past a certain point where demand starts falling we will see a drop in price.

Of course demand won’t go down very soon because those who are bound to student certificates as their only option for a meal will continue to demand no matter what, there simply isn’t another option (this is otherwise known as a monopoly situation). Welcome to capitalism. It’s also not unfair because those who can afford will, those who can’t won’t and will find other options. Of course then there are those like myself who could afford but WON’T. Why won’t I? Because there is no way in hell I’m paying so much for student food, when I’ll feel like having restaurant food I’ll give that euro more and buy a normal lunch. Fuck ‘em and fuck their overpriced student certificates.

As for achieving anything with facebook groups, you won’t, because nobody cares. You could of course make demonstrations and continue to shout nonsense about how the government is screwing you over, but the sad fact is that in this case they aren’t. They’re still helping you pay with exactly the same amount they were helping you before, it’s just the greedy restaurant owners who have increased their monetary demands. The only way you will achieve anything is by not eating out all the time, find a better alternative if you can.

And we’ve come to the overpolitisation. Look guys and gals, I know we live in a country that’s less than 20 years old, and of course this creates a lot of problems that otherwise would not exist but PLEASE stop pinning everything on politics. It is because of stupid idiots like our commoners that last year’s elections were all about ONE FUCKING SCANDAL and nobody even touched serious topics. it is because of stupid idiots that nothing moves forward in this bloody country, it’s not because of politicians, it’s because you think politicians are responsible for everything.

Would it be too difficult to just FOR ONCE stop thinking politics has any sort of power in the world, that politicians are anything more than puppets on a string and just for once start addressing serious issues and sensible solutions to them? When a construction company fucks up a tunnel, why on earth would the minister of transport have to resign? And when food prices increase, WHAT THE FUCK does that have to do “our government is screwing us over boo hoo”? NOT EVERYTHING is about politics, politics and politicians will not help you, help yourself by buying a cup of common sense and stop blaming everything on politics.

Tags: commentary, rant

Creativity is rather awesome, I’m certain we can all agree to that. Creativity drives the world forward, it opens our eyes to new scientific discoveries that sometimes help improve our lives, but mostly just make it more difficult for the average joe to understand. Hell, creativity even opens our eyes to new artistic discoveries, even though I don’t think much progress has been made on that front in the past century, regression even, but we’re picking up from even that in this new millenia that’s slowly getting old so much we might even stop calling it new.

But creativity has a dark side, a very brooding, very dark, very difficult side, a side that is almost unbearable, a side that gives “come to the dark side we have cookies” a whole new meaning, a side that … oh shut the fuck up, you get the picture right? It’s a very dark side.

Everybody creative, for the sake of argument I include myself in this crowd, will probably agree with me when I say that the biggest problem with creativity is the creativity itself. Anythign and everything constantly makes a creative’s mind give birth to new wonderful ideas,w hich all seem spectacular and awesome at the time. But when push comes to shove, you suddenly realise you’re already working on so many ideas you couldn’t possibly start working on another one. So you shelve it.

Once you have time for this wonderful idea, which might be ten minutes later or ten years later, you suddenly realise it’s turned cold and damp, very boring, moronic and even, dare I say, mediocre. In short, most of the ideas we come up with never get realised, never come to life and, quite simply, if someone less creative came upon one of them they would cherish and nurture the poor thing until it became … something.

So if you think you’re creative, slow the fuck down, write down everything you come up with no matter how small, and as soon as you find somebody uncreative give them some of your shelved ideas you’ll never have time to get to. Perhaps we can make the world a better place one uncreative person at a time.

Tags: commentary, food for thought, improvement

Today, as many of you probably know, is Human Rights Day. Personally I didn’t know until I happened upon one @anca_foster and her One Day For Human Rights campaign on twitter. At least I think it’s a campaign, maybe it’s more of a marketing scheme for an already universally accepted day – I’m too cynical to ever have managed reading what it’s about, but I did sign the petition, because I believe in sticking it to The Man even if I don’t believe in human rights.

The problem with human rights is that they do not exist. I’ll say it again: There is NO such thing as basic human rights! See there is a subtle distinction between what most of us understand basic rights to be and what they actually are. Most proponents of human rights seem to believe that they’re universal even though they’re far from being universal. Firstly even though we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that’s supposed to ensure the same basic rights for everyone. But upon closer inspection you’ll notice it was only accepted by the United Nations. Now, even though that might seem universal to us western people but to be honest Slovenia, for example, was only accepted into the UN some years ago (within my lifetime) and most of the world still isn’t part of it.

What this means is that whatever country isn’t a part of United Nations is not legally obliged to uphold basic human rights. Let’s not even get into the whole discussion of a country not necessarily being a nation right now. Furthermore, even the countries within the UN don’t give their citizens the same kind of basic rights. Each declaration is different in many subtle and less subtle ways. Just for an example, in the US the right to bear arms is a “basic human right” whereas nowhere in Europe does anything like it exist.

Ok, so basic human rights aren’t the same anywhere and thus are in no way universal – let me mention at this point that even if the whole world would agree upon the same basic rights they still wouldn’t be universal because we have no way of knowing what other sentient beings might there be in the universe and what THEIR basic “human” rights are.

Notice I mentioned “agreed upon rights”, but when people hear the words “basic human rights” they don’t think of something that’s agreed upon. They see it as coming from an outside source, they’ll either say “they just are” or eventually, after enough pressure, will go to the last argument of an idiocy sputtering man of “Well they come from god, they’re god given rights” (yes I stole this bit from George Carlin). Well if this so called god were the one giving rights, everyone would get the same and most of all, they wouldn’t differ religion to religion, let alone civilisation to civilisation. They don’t come from god, nor are they universal, the only thing these “rights” are, is an agreed upon set of privileges a certain society decides to give its members in order to sustain relative peace and ensure functioning as a society. They’re, so to say, rules and even then they’re more actual guidelines than rules. Laws try to amend this problem by enforcing actual rules.

But my biggest problem with “rights” is the amount of wars started in their name. You’ll notice a leader or two, or even a whole civilisation, every few decades decrying a neighbouring country as “OH NOES, THEY DON’T RESPECT BASIC RIGHTS” and suddenly, out of nowhere, attack that country and attempt to “civilize” those people. Stop it.

And all you new age activists are no better, you’re all enforcing your will and opinion upon others with your senseless activistic endeavours. Far as us westerners go, don’t we have a so called “right to one’s own opinion”, so why do we waltz in so many other countries and cultures, like say the African cultures, and try to teach them what to think and how to act? Don’t THEY have a right to have THEIR OWN set of rights (call it an opinion if that makes it easier)?

So please everybody, before you make another big fuss out of something that doesn’t really exist, think about what you’re actually doing and let people have a culture where everyone has the right to rape anyone in the streets.

Tags: commentary, life, society

Sparkica wrote in a recent blogpost about a sexy man in minimalistic loose underwear. Initially I only shrugged it off as interesting, but then it got me thinking about just how often women talk about men’s underwear. You’ll often hear a passing remark here and there, often they’ll even give comments on your underwear flat out – especially if it’s “that kind” of relationship.

What’s most interesting to note here is that women seem to like a lot of different underwear as along as it’s on the right body. They like small and loose, like sparkica, or not so small and tight, because it supposedly makes balls look better, not sure, some even like small and tight. But the majority, like a classmate I recently asked, seem to like regular old boxers best.

This means of course that if you’re a real man you already have what it takes in your trousers – boxers. Sure your body might not quite make the cut or anything, but at least you can’t go too wrong with regular boxers, most of them will like it. Strangely enough it’s a completely different situation with men. We like thongs and other tight, revealing underwear, whereas girls don’t really like wearing such all that much. Most prefer nice comfortable granny pants, at least when they’re not in a social situation.

But most of all we must notice that women talk about men’s underwear not what’s in it. This tells us that they want you to keep it on, so no matter what you’re wearing, just remember to keep it on. Nobody likes those pesky one-eyed trouser snakes.

Tags: commentary, funny