Dwell On It » Fail

For the love of god, Montresor!

Tateru Nino — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:25:58 +0000

Hey, Linden Lab. Please, can we get (say) three blog posts in a row without egregious typographical errors?


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Advertising context failure

Tateru Nino — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:44:40 +0000

I’d pretty much call this a failure of contextual advertising placement.


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Qarl Linden laid off

Tateru Nino — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:49:54 +0000

Have you heard of Qarl Linden? Someone who comes close to having super-powers.


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Admitting you have a problem

Tateru Nino — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:50:29 +0000

I’ve been on the sidelines of what any number of journalists have called ‘antennagate’. Leaving aside the juvenile reporting aspect of it all, Apple did about the worst thing it could do under the circumstances (other than filing lawsuits against its customers, perhaps).

More adventures in retail signage

Tateru Nino — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:36:38 +0000

Our local Safeway store recently put these signs up at every register.


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Conroy and the thunderstick

Tateru Nino — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:04:48 +0000

Senator Stephen Conroy, speaking at the launch of National Cyber Security Awareness Day, made a truly woeful slip.

I must hasten to remind you that Conroy is the Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Why? Because his fumbling prose about the Web is essentially the equivalent of calling a modern military assault rifle “a thunderstick”.

Until next time

Tateru Nino — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:02:44 +0000

Everybody makes mistakes.

You do. I do. We all do.

Mistakes are an inevitable part of living and learning. We make mistakes all the time, we learn from them and we move on.

There are, however, two broad categories of mistake. There’s the honest mistake, and there’s the institutional error.

Journalists who write about virtual worlds are a major let-down

Tateru Nino — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:46:53 +0000

Got your attention, have I?

Okay, so not all of you are a major let-down. Some of you, I’ll grant, are not. Mistakes do happen – we all make them. Nobody’s at their best when they have to write an article about something that they know nothing about, surely.

But for pity’s sake, make an effort! The fact is that if what you know about virtual worlds is based on what you read in the media, you probably know less than nothing about them.


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Games For Windows Live is a blight

Tateru Nino — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:39:21 +0000

So, a little while ago I had my first experience with a Games For Windows Live game, that being Red Faction: Guerrilla which I’d gotten as a part of a bundle.

About three hours into that process, I realized that Games For Windows Live (GFWL) is a blight on the face of PC gaming.

New comic: Not your rights, obviously

Tateru Nino — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:17:45 +0000

Jump to the new comic, or new readers can click the banner to begin at the rather rough beginning:

A sampling

Tateru Nino — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 03:48:34 +0000

Well, a lot of comment-spam turns up here. 100% of it gets caught, at the expense of maybe 1 in 100 legitimate comments winding up in the spam folder accidentally and needing to be fished back out.

It’s a pretty unusual mix.

The who with the what now?

Tateru Nino — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:44:46 +0000

At one of the big shopping centres today. The Target store had a bunch of these signs liberally distributed about.


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Quality and excellence

Tateru Nino — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:18:51 +0000

If I cannot judge the quality and excellence of your company by your corporate communications, what can I judge it by?

Do it or I’ll sue you!

Tateru Nino — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:12:42 +0000

You generally hear this sort of thing from irate customers arguing with staff. The “I am a lawyer” or “I have a lawyer” or “I know a lawyer”, followed by the threat of a lawsuit.

If you ever, ever get the urge to say anything at all like this… don’t. If nothing else, it makes you look like what is generally known as “a towering mound of asshead”.


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To whom it may concern

Tateru Nino — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:34:32 +0000

Dear person who has been executing denial-of-service attacks and trying to hack my blog,

Hi. You know who you are. I must admit that I’ve watched you going about all this with, I confess, to some amusement. Today really wasn’t such a good day for you, was it? Nor, apparently was yesterday or any other day.


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The end-of-year release schedule, and how it messes up the games industry

Tateru Nino — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:12:00 +0000

The games-release calendar generally stinks. Most of the year’s game releases are crammed up from September through November. Games will get pushed out the door, ready or not, just to get them on the shelves by Black Friday or Cyber Monday, with a short-tail of releases winding down through December for those titles that just weren’t ready enough or couldn’t get fabrication time.

The idea, of course, is to make huge quantities of revenue. In practice, though, what’s happening is that the games industry is shorting its own revenues, killing game franchises, and often putting studios out of business.

Booth-babes

Tateru Nino — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:40:18 +0000

Nothing a games-publisher does says “We have no respect whatsoever for our customers” than booth-babes – except perhaps the EA Sports division.

I know, some of you EA marketing folks are among the regular readers here, and I’m not tarring you all with the same brush, but you might want to hide under your desks for a few minutes, because I’m going to speak very plainly.

They’re not RPG elements

Tateru Nino — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:51:32 +0000

They’re just not.

You see “RPG elements” on the back of game-boxes for assorted games, frequently tactical combat games, or mentioned in game reviews. The thing is, that what they’re referring to as RPG elements aren’t actually RPG elements.

How do you spell gullible?

Tateru Nino — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:54:56 +0000

“!quit”

These ‘copyright protection’ devices are scattered all over Second Life. People are still actually buying them. At best this is like burying an iron knife under your threshold to keep witches away and then telling everyone who passes about it.

Play it now – 2K Huge Games Pack

Tateru Nino — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:55:47 +0000

If the Meridian4 games pack doesn’t turn you on (and face it, it might not), Steam’s got the 2K Huge Games Pack.

That’s Sid Meier’s Civilization® IV, Sid Meier’s Civilization® III Complete, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Shattered Union, Prey, CivCity: Rome, Civilization IV®: Warlords, Sid Meier’s Railroads!, Railroad Tycoon 3, Railroad Tycoon II Platinum, X-COM: Terror From the Deep, X-COM: Apocalypse, BioShock™, X-COM: Interceptor, X-COM: UFO Defense, X-COM: Enforcer, Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, Freedom Force, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, and Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization.

Dwell On It » Fail

For the love of god, Montresor!

Advertising context failure

Qarl Linden laid off

Admitting you have a problem

More adventures in retail signage

Conroy and the thunderstick

Until next time

Journalists who write about virtual worlds are a major let-down

Games For Windows Live is a blight

New comic: Not *your* rights, obviously

A sampling

The who with the what now?

Quality and excellence

Do it or I’ll sue you!

To whom it may concern

The end-of-year release schedule, and how it messes up the games industry

Booth-babes

They’re not RPG elements

How do you spell gullible?

Play it now – 2K Huge Games Pack

New comic: Not your rights, obviously