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[Jan. 30th, 2009|01:36 pm] |
I've been trying to pay off my credit card forever, and I almost always try to pay $50-$100 more than the minimum payment. But no matter what I did, I never seemed to make any significant progress in doing so - every time I'd pay a few hundred dollars off, some huge emergency would pop up that would require me to undo any of my progress.
So I was looking at my statement today, and I realized something: minimum payments totally aren't. Right now the minimum payment on my card is $65, and the financing fees/interest amount to about $50. That sounds fine - even at the minimum payment you're shaving $15/month off of your bill. Then I noticed that there was an additional charge labelled "Payment Protection/Services" that was $25. It's a service charge Discover puts on your credit card and then expects you to pay interest on.
So I started looking back through my statement history, and apparently this "services" charge is there every month, varying based on how much credit I have outstanding. It always seems to be just enough to ensure that it's greater than the minimum payment minus financing fees by a few dollars. So when I was making payments that I thought were easily $50-$100 more than the minimum payment they were really closer to $25-$75. It's hardly a shock that a credit card company would do something sort of sleazy, but it does surprise me that if you're making the minimum payments, you're actually losing money - nevermind treading water. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 26th, 2009|11:22 am] |
Root canal tomorrow. I really hope the tooth is 110% dead so I don't feel a thing.
I wouldn't feel quite so nervous if it weren't for the fact that, due to my horrible insurance, I'm having to get it done by a grad student at UNC. Who is at least partially deaf. Somehow I keep picturing images of a dentist-in-training who can't hear my screams of pain while I writhe in agony under deadening fluorescent lights in a crappy student cubicle that doubles as an operating room. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2009|01:46 pm] |
So this week has been on a bit of a wacky schedule, and as such I haven't gotten nearly as much work done on personal projects as I would have liked.
Monday was a regular slightly lengthened 9.5 hour day of work.
Tuesday was a snow day, but I still ended up doing probably 9 hours of work off and on from 9 AM until 8 PM.
Wednesday was almost a 13 hour workday, which sort of sucked.
Thursday I allowed myself to sleep in an extra hour having worked until 10 the night before, and now my boss has stormed out with a Mysterious E-mail and half the office is debating heading out early.
Maybe tomorrow we'll see some sanity return to my work hours, after a week of stupidity, feature launches gone awry, and frantic e-mails in the night? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 22nd, 2009|10:59 am] |
Can someone explain to me how Benjamin Button got 13 Oscar nominations?
I can see a special effects or makeup nomination, obviously. And even maybe a best actor or actress nod for the immense effort to get facial expressions and emotion out of layers of CGI and pretending to be on scene.
But best adapted screenplay? Seriously? Best director? Best picture?
It was a horribly paced Forrest Gump knockoff whose scifi/magical realism conceit gained us nothing that some other untimely disease like cancer could have. It has little if anything to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald's very short vignette, and I am sort of stunned that something so blatantly engineered for Oscar glory has the most nominations. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|10:49 am] |
And immediately after posting that to Live Journal, I get this IM:
| (10:48:47 AM) NYPDagent8320922: hey Malachi im 6`6 7lbs sexy as good sir an im single lookin fa da right anus ta set ablaze, so if u liken wat u see char-broil at me an well do da offense/defense Hindu martini |
A seven pound man who is six feet six inches! HOT!
I question, however, how one can char-broil at someone - I realize it's a transitive verb, but I thought that only meant you could char-broil something, not necessarily char-broil at something.
Regardless, no martini is worth setting your anus ablaze. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 5th, 2009|09:52 am] |
The dog has had diarrhea about once an hour for the past three nights. I'm absolutely exhausted.
Welcome back to work, I guess. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|12:28 am] |
I finally managed to sign into Home in after two hours of trying, and I can't say I'm at all impressed. I mean, I knew going into it a lot of what I wouldn't like: The fact that everyone is an attractive and skinny young adult, the fact that they're trying to monetize this thing like making money is going out of style, the fact that it's basically a glorified VRML chatroom and there isn't a ton to do in it.
But there are a lot of really bad lower-level things you don't notice until you're actually playing it. Like how uniform everyone is. I knew they'd be monetizing clothing, but even Microsoft was more generous in its default clothing options - everyone here isn't just young and skinny, they shop at the same section of the same store. 90% of the people you see will be wearing one of three tops, and any of three indistinguishable different sets of jeans.
And then there's the idiotic design decision to have things like videogames, bowling alleys, and pool tables exist in the physical gamespace. Sure, it's neat-o that you can watch someone else play bowling or pool in real time, I guess. But I'd rather it just teleport me and anyone I invite into a private instance of bowling. Why is physical space a limitation in a virtual world? Why can't more than one person be playing Ice Breakers on the same arcade machine at the same time? Is having an avatar physically there to demonstrate that people are, in fact, using the feature of arcade games so important that we turn away users who want to try it?
Leaving stores is a pain. Hitting circle to leave makes sense, but then having to hit "X" to confirm I want to leave the store and having circle cancel my request to leave is infuriating - especially when you're embedded a few menus deep. To leave the store you have to keep hitting circle until you're at the top level of the menu, then hit circle one more time to quit, then hit "X" to confirm the quit. Hitting circle again throws you right back into the store.
And while we're discussing the stores - there's simply no content yet. Not that I want to pay fifty cents for a ridiculous cowboy hat or a dollar for a freaking virtual footstool, but there are people who might actually want to customize their home experience to get away from oppressive Home logo t-shirts and barebones white furniture in their ridiculous yacht club villa. But even if they do, they're choosing a single footstool, or from a single variety of lamp. It's at a point where you're not even paying for the privilege to be an individual, you're just paying for the privilege to put up more generic crap in your house or a different colored hoodie.
The whole thing is, essentially, a dystopia of corporate entities appealing to eternally rich and attractive twenty somethings, where the idea of work is laughable and people exist to simply consume and be entertained. A world where individuality is defined by how much you spend, and where monetization of a service is more important than whether the service has a reason to exist. This is basically Brave New World: The Videogame. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 29th, 2008|06:32 pm] |
So I just watched Enchanted via the Netflix streaming fancypants XBox upgrade. And all I have to say is: What the hell is this? The whole point of the movie is to tear apart all of the idiotic (and some would go so far as to say dangerous) tropes of traditional Disney animated films. Everything from the talking animal sidekicks and bursting into song to the iron-clad gender stereotypes and unrealistic portrayals of love and relationships.
Except they only go halfway. They openly mock the talking animals, the evil stepmother cliche, the bursting into song - the shallow filmic tropes. But any of the thematic stuff is reinforced here. Love still conquers all, the one-true-love thing saves the day, miracles and magic do happen, the man still saves the damsel in distress. Which is particularly annoying, because they bloody bring up how love and relationships aren't simple - people fall in and out of love, people cheat on one another, there's no such thing as Happily Ever After, and any relationship that doesn't end in breakup ends in death.
At no point is this brushed under the rug more clearly than the climax of the film, where Giselle decides to end up with Sean Penn Lookalike instead of Cyclops. This would, by the film's own logic, fill her with guilt - she's breaking up Robert from his One True Love, and she's turning her back on her supposed One True Love to be with him. Instead of the pretty princess with her singular hero, she's acting out of rational self-interest to the detriment of the happiness of other people while very much in the realm of It's Complicated. The idea should either fill her with the guilt of a sinful act or at least hesitation before giving into her own desires. But none of this matters, because hey - they're each other's True Loves, so it's totally cool!
Sure, it's a more enjoyable film than Last Action Hero. But at least Last Action Hero didn't try to point out how absurd and dangerous the fascist, hyper-militaristic teenage fantasy portrayed by action movies is only to have the final act involve a massive shootout. Self-referential parody is cute, but if you bring up legitimate criticisms of your own work in the process be prepared to address them. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2008|09:27 am] |
So what the hell is this?
Yes, yes, I realize you can sue for anything and with any luck they won't win. And I also realize that by and large record companies struggle to make bajillions for their shareholders when their product is both ubiquitous and easy to pirate.
But it was already a stretch to sue the creators of Napster, BitTorrent, Gnutella, and others - the parallel was made to suing electronics companies for creating the VHS. Attacking the technology that allowed people to break the law, it was argued, is missing the point. Attack the pirates, not the technology firms that create products that allow people to pirate. But this suit is tantamount to suing Sears and Best Buy for housing the VHS recorders that allow people to perform illegal activities!
It seems that the music industry looks at it less like the piracy issue of 20 years ago (a "don't copy that floppy!" style educational issue) and instead look at it more like a drug trade - with the users, dealers, and manufacturers of oh-so-evil P2P software all having equal blame. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 15th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
From my stupid daily beer industry updates e-mail:
"The Cannes Silver Lion-winning iPint application for beer brand Carling is the target of a $12.5 million lawsuit suit against parent Molson Coors Brewing Co. by Hottrix, the developer of the iBeer application. London agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay created iPint. According to the lawsuit, Beattie McGuinness Bungay contacted Hottrix to license the developer's $2.99 iBeer application, which uses the accelerometer inside the iPhone to simulate drinking a beer. Nevada-based Hottrix, whose application was one of the most downloaded in the iPhone App Store, rejected the request. The lawsuit contends Beattie McGuinness went around Hottrix, creating a near copy of the application, called iPint, from Sweden's Illusion Labs. iPint was released for free, causing iBeer sales to suffer. Clearly iPint's popularity comes from the fact that it shares a central feature with iBeer ‑‑ the application appears to fill users' iPhones with beer, which they can then "drain" by tipping the phone ‑‑ and only costs exposure to the Carling brand, as opposed to the $2.99 fee for iBeer. The iPint was developed as part of a mini game created for Carling, called Barslide. In it, players help a sliding pint avoid obstacles on the bar, and are rewarded with a frosty virtual beverage."
A twelve and a half million dollar lawsuit over an iPhone app that lets you pretend you're drinking a beer. I just... there are no words for how idiotic that is. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 18th, 2008|01:48 pm] |
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Not to toot my own horn too much, but this totally made my day today. Hoo-ray. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 22nd, 2008|10:51 pm] |
So I'm gonna take a break from ranting about work and lamenting my own laziness to post some actually game related news.
( Cut because it's long ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|04:17 pm] |
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This article on CNN claims it will show you how to be an optimist, but it is really just a bunch of ways to trick yourself into having a happier mood. I was disappointed in their ability to fundamentally change my personality in five easy steps. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|01:30 am] |
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I know it's been said before by me and by others, but does Sony's Home freak anyone else out? It's like they've designed a virtual world based entirely on their ideal customer - wealthy, young, stylish, and beautiful. Everyone lives in penthouse apartments or homes out by the yacht club while walking around in designer jeans and listening to Sony label music their PSP on the way to work where they are oh-so-productive on their Vaio. It continues to disturb me that while Microsoft's ad campaign is based on the hardcore gamer they think you are, Sony's ad campaign seems based on who they want you to be. Old people aren't welcome in Home - they're ugly and out of fashion. Children aren't welcome in Home - they have no disposable income. It's just a very odd (and, quite frankly, insulting) way to develop a brand's image in the marketplace given the interactive nature of the medium. This isn't like only having attractive young people in your commercials; it's telling your customers they need be those attractive young people. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 19th, 2008|11:48 am] |
Saw Cloverfield last night. Still collecting my thoughts. On one hand, it's a generic big-budget bad movie. But it's also sort of interesting for various reasons, despite basically being Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project.
The story is absolutely paper thin. Even including the ARG elements (which I'm loathe to canonize) you just end up with a monster attacking a city plus some Lost/Abrams style mythos puzzles whose payoff doesn't justify the effort needed to decypher the clues. The characters are largely unlikable and do entirely idiotic things, and the shakey-cam viewpoint can get sickening.
That said, it's an interesting look at the effect of the YouTube aesthetic and user generated content (and to a lesser extent, amateur 9/11 videos) on commercial media. And it reminds me that I really, really dig first-person narratives in visual media. Be it in games, handheld first-person films, or third person Children of Men style long takes that make you really feel there, I dig the idea of removing the walls between the audience and the film where it makes some semblance of sense to do so. And making a monster-attacks-city movie from a personal civilian perspective certainly provides an appropriate context for that sort of intimate film making to be done.
And as always, I really dig end of the world movies. They serve as a wonderful allegory for an existentialist view of life - thrown into a situation you never asked to be trying to make sense of the world around you that has seemingly arbitrary rules beyond your control and making the best of whatever time you have left. Think The Metamorphosis except instead of waking up to find you're a cockroach you wake up to find a monster fucking your shit up. |
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