By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
Compared to the horror that was yesterday, today was spent with good friends in one of my favourite places! I'll let the illustrious Sebastian (pictured above) take you through it in detail, but essentially we strolled around the wonderland that is IKEA, shared lunch, cracked jokes and generally had a great time. For someone still coming down from shattered nerves, it was wonderful... well, other than for the sudden floods of course!
Thank you to @Sebasu_tan and @hanezawakirika :)
@Sebasu_tan on The Twitters, not Google Search+:
It's January 11, and @Rubenerd already has 15 posts. Is he sure he isn't doing a Post A Day 2012? :D
An astute observation good sir, and I'm flattered you counted! To prevent temptation though, I missed out on the first two days of January, to relieve the instinctive pressure to continue the PostADay2011 challenge into 2012.
That's not to say I won't be posting frequently any more! For example, aside from your tweet, this post had little substance to it whatsoever. Quite literally, I only mentioned the word "substance" twice.
UPDATE: The title should be "pre-owned" games! Don't know why I wrote it as "pre-shared"!
The illustrious Sebastian of A Lonely September and @Sebasu_tan fame has posted an article about pre-shared games which I felt compelled to comment on, aside from the fact the person in question is awesome of course ^^.
Titled under New and Pre-owned games... Together, Seb explores the issue of pre-owned games and their potential impact on the gaming industry. He argues (and I hope I'm not mischaracterising his points) that all the profits from pre-owned games are returned to the retailer, with none being rewarded to the original game developer, then goes to discuss the challenges of selling pre-owned games in an era where activation keys are the norm.
I agree with the latter wholeheartedly. To a certain extent with online stores like the iOS App Store, Steam, the iTunes Music Store, the Amazon Kindle store, Audible.com and so forth, media is tied to a particular owner. The idea of the first sale doctrine that exists with physical media is eschewed (gesundheit) in favour of being "licenced", as such I can't "lend" or sell that media to someone else. It's a dangerous slippery slope, and I hope it's challenged in court more often.
In terms of his former point however, I'm inclined to disagree with my friend Seb here for the first time! Well, only partly :)
I don't buy (if you'll pardon the bad pun) the argument that pre-owned games represent a lost sale for new games, which hurts game developers. Industries regularly trot out figures claiming piracy is costing them trillions of dollars for example, but that assumes that a meaningfully large number of people would have bought the media had they not pirated it. For those with hundreds of movies on hard drives that would have cost thousands of dollars to buy on Blu-Ray or DVD, I doubt this very much.
I think the logic is equally dubious for pre-owned games. As Seb pointed out in his post, given the prohibitive cost of new games, it seems doubtful everyone who bought pre-owned games would buy new copies if the pre-owned versions didn't exist. A few might, but not most.
Sebastian may be onto something though. We have no evidence this happened, but its irresistible to speculate that a couple of the large gaming companies leaned on their distributors and asked them to stop selling pre-shared games. "Nice looking store you got here! Gee, it'd be a shame if suddenly we had to raise our wholesale cost if you won't get rid of your pre-owned games sections! Nudge nudge, wink wink!"
This site design post is even more fractured than usual, owing to continued sleep deprivation. As such, you shouldn't read it, other than to read the tweets from other people.
Something entirely unexpected, from hanezawakirika on Twitter:
hanezawakirika: Though I don't have @Rubenerd 's CSS skill, and I can't find any templates I'm happy with either. I usually edit templates. ==a""
And this when I replied with exclaimed surprise:
hanezawakirika: Well, your blog looks good anyway. :< RT @Rubenerd: I have CSS skills? This is news to me!
This is quite possibly the first time anyone has complimented my CSS skills on Twitter, perhaps ever! Assuming you're not reading this through RSS and are seeing this post on the original site, you can probably see why!
Alas, as owning an easel and some tubes of paint don't make you an artist, my perhaps above-average knowledge of CSS doesn't make me a designer. Still, given my ridiculous workload over the last few days and my ensuing lack of sleep, I appreciated the ego stroking XD.
Now we just need a certain person to start blogging again themselves. Imajustsaying.
For those who either don't remember or have the attention span of an Antarctic Newt (wait, are there newts in Antarctica? What about Gingriches?), last week I blogged about A Lonely September, the blog site of our close friend Sebastian from the UTS Anime club. I lamented the fact fewer people seem to be blogging now, and celebrated the fact he was bucking the trend. Like the proud Antarctic Newt.
Despite this glowing endorsement however, Seb was quick to mess with our minds. No sooner had I blogged about his blog (yo dawg, I heard you like...) than he changed his site theme. He timed it eerily well, leading me to believe he has hidden cameras installed in my place of residence, or has access to my MySQL tables and was able to see my draft posts. Is it weird to admit I'd be more terrified of the latter?
But I digress. To further mess with our minds, Seb claims to have changed his blog theme again.
Sebasu_tan: Changed blog layout... AGAIN. We'll see how I feel about this one in the coming days...
And now, in the time it took me to quote that tweet, he's announced that he may scrap all these changes and move back to TwentyTen:
Sebasu_tan: I'm tempted to go back to twentyten, to be honest... >.>
We'll be following this story as it develops.
Fewer of my friends are blogging now than ever before, which is a shame. In the spirit of friends helping friends, I've decided every now and then to share some blogs from people I read and enjoy, and that perhaps you should be reading too, in the hopes that perhaps it'll help reverse this trend :). Today we look at A Lonely September.
I first met Sebastian during a screening at the UTS Anime Club. He was substantially taller than me, with masses of light blond hair and a French accent so strong I couldn't understand a word he was saying. After reminding me I wasn't wearing my glasses, I put them on and realised he was in fact shorter than me, with dark coloured hair and sounded as French as me. Which is to say, not at all.
Even moreso than me, Seb (as he friends call him) is a worldly soul. Originally from Lima, he's an Australian citizen with ancestors originating from Peru, Spain, Holland and China according to his about page.
This is where I first ran into some serious issues. Holland of course refers to the specific area of The Netherlands, but many English speakers use the term to refer to the entire country. Is his ancestors specifically from the area we now know as Holland, or was he just referring to The Netherlands?
It only gets worse with China. While most people associate China with the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China that predominantly operates from Taiwan also considers itself the sole legitimate government of China, and even maintains the original Chinese characters instead of those simplified ones that are easier to write but look infinitely less cool. Which one is his ancestors from?
Should we be concerned that he intentionally obfuscated his origins? Is he involved in some dodgy business dealings that necessitate such shady writing?
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, or ahead of his blog specifically. Perhaps in an attempt to render me foolish in the eyes of others, I was in the process of taking a screenshot of site, uploading it, and putting it here for the world to see, but no sooner had I done this but he quickly changed his blog theme. Whereas before he used the Twenty Ten theme by the WordPress team, he now appears to be using San Fran, a theme presumably named after San Francisco where those cable cars and fog are.
Ahah! FOG! He's clouding our judgement, you see. I'm on to you Sebastian, you sneaky, sneaky devil you.
My second issue had to do with his server reliability. Upon entering his URL into Firefox and pressing the ENTER key which is located imminently to the left of the keyboard's edge under most circumstances, I was presented with this error message:
Now I hear what you're saying. Ruben, it's entirely your fault, you didn't spell his domain name properly. While this is entirely true, I fault Sebastian entirely for this. If you're going to have a domain name, the least you could do is register every conceivable misspelling of it to redirect to the real address. With domains costing less than $20 a year to register and maintain, Seb could solve this problem for the low, low price of a few thousand dollars a year.
As I've written above, A Lonely September is a great read and consists of prose and wit that far eclipse mine: I have every confidence he can fulfill his dream to be a writer ^_^. Wait, did I write that above? Never mind, I intended to put it in there, and intentions are everything.
He's been running the site for over a year now, and I look forward to the next one :).
Disclaimer: This post was written Tuesday morning, but was only published Tuesday evening due to workload, a gigantic headache, alien invasions and the like.