Posts by Andre Alessi
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Hard News: Asking for a Contribution, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
or perhaps we could fold him back into the brine – in some kind of Super-Marination process?
Soon bloggers here will be packed in like the sardines they secretly are.
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Peter Darlington,
Like Melissa Lee, I enjoy a good mixtape...
Boom! Roasted.
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Dave Patrick,
FYI, for those among you who like the odd old game or two - GOG.com sells official, downloadable, Windows-compatible, DRM-free old games. I've bought Descent / Descent 2 / Total Annihilation - Kingdoms and a few others from there - ridiculously priced at mostly less than $10 each (US, but still stupid prices)
Well, now I know what I'm going to be doing when I get home!
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
I think Steam deserves a lot of credit for making it possible to buy and use games in a reasonable fashion.
Steam has been great for me personally, as have other channels like D2D, etc The way in which old school and indie games are starting to show up in these tools is likewise great-I find it amazing that I can drop $5 for a legal, retail version of Civ II.
The complicating factor here is data usage caps. I’m on a plan that lets me use about 100-150 GB per month without blowing my budget, but I imagine that most people wanting to buy and download a 20+ GB game ( World of Warcraft , Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, etc) would have worries about being speed-capped or charged major overusage as part of their decision to purchase a game online at all.
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I’m generally happy to pay what’s asked for a given song (or movie, or TV series, or whatever) as long as the process for doing so isn’t too onerous. It’s seldom a question of price, although if I’ve decided I only want one song off an album, but my only option is to pay twenty times the price of that one song for an entire album of songs I’ll never listen to…well, that’s when my sense of propriety is strained to breaking. I’ll often not want the bloody song any more at that point.
PC game piracy is a more interesting area of piracy for me-in theory, I could be saving $100 NZD by downloading pirated copies of the games I buy, but I never have*. (Almost every game I buy is a digital download-I abandoned hard copies of games long ago after so many DRM conflicts with my entirely legitimate optical drives.) I’m heavily invested emotionally in the success of the gaming industry, because that’s where a lot of my enjoyment in my free time comes from, and I can see a direct correlation between the money I use to purchase the game and the continuing success of the game publisher.
* I should clarify, I have downloaded three PC games in my time. Two of them, I downloaded free copies of because the publishers offered no demo versions and I didn’t know enough about the games to want to invest without trying them out. One of those games, The Witcher, I immediately went out and bought at retail prices after fifteen minutes of playtime. The other, Hellgate: London, has something of a notorious reputation in the PC gaming community, and quite frankly I’m glad I never bought it. The third was a torrent of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Awakening, which I had already legitimately bought via EA’s online store, but was unable to download due to an issue with EA’s store which wasn’t resolved for the better part of a year.
Anyway, continuing on with the gaming theme, here’s an awesome D&D parody of that awful “Like A G6” song, called “Roll A D6".
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Done and done.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Kumara Republic,
And am I not the only one to think of Medgar Evers’ immortal quote, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”? That was in context of the US civil rights movement, but unfortunately it can also apply to terrorist organisations, in which case it overlaps with the Cycle of Revenge (TM).
But sometimes the death of a person invested with symbolic significance acts as an attack on that idea. It isn't as if people like Bin Laden were irrelevant to jihadism, or as if the entire thing could simply be argued out of existence with a few forthright blog posts.
Almost ironically, it's Bin Laden's own success at evading capture for so long that has made this such a powerful symbolic act. If he had been killed a few months after September 11, he would have quickly been replaced, and we'd see the same cycle we see with many jihadist organisations-a new leader with the same policies and an even more diffuse structure. Instead he became a figurehead, which makes the fact of his death profoundly destructive to the organisation in question.
Will this stamp out anti-Americanism and extremism in the Middle East? Of course not. Nothing can do that other than the growth of secular democracy in the region, combined with easy access to worldwide media and travel. What it can do is put a dent in a criminal organisation that spent a long time after September 11 killing a lot of people (mostly in developing nations, lest we forget.)
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Lovely, lovely post. I can't help but agree that this is a symbolic end to something, whatever that "something" might be.
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Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
The fabulous, extravagant MajelaZeZeDiamond, YouTube queen of dancehall songs about vaginas,
Of "Girls, Come And See My Vagina?" fame?
Edit: It appears not, although I don't know whether that makes anything better:
Also this is now a Friday music thread!
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Brash is a racist of the willfully ignorant variety. He may be affable and soft-spoken, but any sixty-five-year old man who uses phrases like "full Maori" when discussing Maori identity, or who uses the "Treaty grievance industry" dog whistle, is not going to have attempted to educate himself over the intervening half decade. That stuff might be dismissed as mere stupidity coming from some middle class twenty-year-old with limited life experiences, but Don's a big boy and he knows what he's saying.
Just look at the fact that Hilary Calvert jumped ship to join him, according to the Herald, specifically because of his position on Maori and the Treaty of Waitangi:
In the afternoon, Ms Calvert and Sir Roger meet Dr Brash in his Auckland apartment. Among the issues discussed are Dr Brash's position on the Treaty of Waitangi and Maori issues in general. This strikes a chord with Ms Calvert, who has been a fierce opponent of the Government's position on the foreshore and seabed legislation.
When you're to the right of Rodney Hide on Treaty issues, euphemisms like "differences of opinion" no longer apply. Brash is an unrepentant racist, and it's terrifying that he (and Calvert) may well have some input into the policies of the next government.