Category: INTERNETZORZ

#oneaday Day 963: Being an Attempt to Rescue the English Language from the Imbeciles who Pervert it So

I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this post, as I know for a fact that most of the people who follow this blog, whether they're regular commenters or not, are literate and perfectly capable of using the English language correctly. I just thought it would be fun to have a whinge about some of my pet peeves with regard to English usage… or lack thereof.

I'm not entirely sure what it is about the Internet that makes people's English usage so much worse. The world has plenty of intelligent people in it, yet if you were to go solely by Internet comment sections it would be hard to believe that. I know intelligence is a much more complicated equation than simple spelling, punctuation and grammar — and there are specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia to bear in mind — but the fact is, technology should make it easier than ever to write things technically perfectly. So why do people not bother?

Laziness, usually, or a desire to get whatever is in their head out into the digital domain as quickly as possible. Most people would be quick to blame social media for this one, with the presence of "Like" and "Comment" buttons on pretty much everything these days encouraging people to spew their facile musings all over things they really have no knowledge of whatsoever. But it's actually a much older problem that, most likely, stems from more real-time forms of communication such as chatrooms. "a/s/l" is a linguistic object of ridicule these days, but in the early days of Internet communication it was an essential part of the "introductions" process when entering a new chatroom. (For those who don't actually know what it stands for, it's asking everyone present what their age, sex and location is.)

Chatrooms often got very busy, and it thus became important for people to be able to make themselves heard as quickly as possible. Consequently, a lot of the abbreviations we use (and/or ridicule) regularly today entered popular usage. Some had been around for a while; others had changed their usage significantly, occasionally leading to comic misunderstandings when one speaker thinks that "LOL" means "lots of love" and the other thinks it means "laughing out loud".

This is no excuse, though! Proper English usage when addressing another person online is, to me, a sign of respect. If you don't take the care to spell and punctuate correctly when addressing someone, to me that says that you don't think they're worth more than the bare minimum amount of time it takes to bang out a furious, cackhanded message and then switch to another tab to, I don't know, watch some porn or play FarmVille or something. (Or both. The mind boggles at that possibility.)

Anyway, rambling explanation over, allow me to present the crimes against the English language that irritate me the most at present. If you are guilty of any of these, please stop being guilty of them, because they all make you look like a bit of a tool.

(Oh, before I go on, my day job requires me to write in American English so I am not going to cover any of the silly things they do with English, such as misusing the words "momentarily", "solicitor" and "patronise".)

1. "LOL" is not a substitute for punctuation.

I've lost the original Facebook post (not by me, I hasten to add) where I first became aware of this obnoxious usage of "lol", but it happens all too frequently, particularly in comment sections. "LOL" is not a substitute for a comma, full stop, semicolon or indeed any punctuation mark.

To judge whether or not using "LOL" is appropriate, read the thing you have just typed out loud. Did you laugh out loud when you got to the "LOL"? If not, remove it and replace it with an appropriate punctuation mark. In fact, even if you did laugh out loud, please remove it and replace it with an appropriate punctuation mark.

2. It's "definitely", not "definately" or "defiantly".

Definitely. Definitely. It's not that difficult a word to spell. It's no "accommodation" or "antidisestablishmentarianism" and it's certainly no "floccinaucinihilipilification". So stop fucking it up.

Also, every time you use "defiantly" instead of "definitely", you are significantly changing the meaning of your sentence. Compare and contrast the sentences "I will definitely do the chores" to "I will defiantly do the chores". One is a nice assurance that you will do the things expected of you; the other suggests that you are going to be an arse about it.

3. Games (and drugs) are "addictive", not "addicting".

"Addicting" is a word, but not in the way you think it is used. Angry Birds is not "addicting", it is "addictive". "Addicting" is a verb. "Addictive" is an adjective. Observe:

"I am addicting my little sister to Angry Birds because it is better than crack. She finds crack worryingly addictive."

(Note: I do not have a little sister, and no-one I know is addicted or in the process of being addicted to crack. Also, Angry Birds is shit and I would rather my hypothetical little sister were addicted to crack than play that bollocks.*)

In fact, no. The word "addicting" is a surprisingly difficult verb to put into a sentence without it sounding stupid. So just stop using it. Addictive. Addictive. Got it?

4. When you write in lower case, you look like an imbecile.

I know professional writers who write everything — blog posts, status updates, comments, even their own name — in lower case when they're "off duty". It makes them look like imbeciles. I don't think I need to say anything more than that. The Shift key is right there. Your little finger is probably hovering over it anyway as you type, so stop being so fucking lazy and use it.

5. This review is "biased", not "bias".

I'll grant that speaking like a twat is something of a meme on the Internet, but any time you accuse something you read of "being bias", you look like a complete cock. An article exhibits bias if it is biased. Not the other way round. Or any other arrangement.

If you can't remember the difference, how about you just say you disagree with what you have read rather than accusing it of "being bias"? Or, better yet, just close that webpage before clicking the "comment" button?

6. Apostrophes denote possession, not plurals.

CDs. GCSEs. Sofas. Not CD's, GCSE's and sofa's. Under no circumstances are you to use an apostrophe to denote something is a plural. Why? Because it's wrong, that's why. Even when using an abbreviation. And even when the word you are pluralising ends with a vowel, which appears to be when this issue more commonly raises its ugly head.

Related note: "it's" is short for "it is", while "its" means "belonging to it". This is, I'll admit, a particularly stupid rule, since it breaks the "apostrophes denote possession" rule by overruling it with the "apostrophes also denote missing letters" rule. Stupid language.

7. If you're going to swear, just swear.

You're not protecting anyone's innocence by writing "f**k". Everyone knows you mean "fuck". If you're going to censor naughty language, censor it completely. If you're going to make it clear what all the words you've asterisked out are, then you may as well just type them all out properly, you f**king c**t-faced w**ksplat, you t*sser, you kn*bjockey, you complete twunting sh*tbag b*****d. ("Twunting" is not a swear, despite it sounding like it should be.)

8. You're a twat if your knowledge of "your" and "you're" is poor.

As Ross from Friends put it so succinctly: "Y-O-U-apostrophe-R-E means 'you are'. Y-O-U-R means 'your'!"

Read your sentence out loud. Could one of your "yours" be replaced by the words "you are"? If so, you should be using "you're" instead.

Here's an exercise. See if you can spot which ones are correct and which ones are not.

1. You're mum's face smells of poo.
2. Your not very good at this, are you?
3. You're defiantly going to get some of these wrong.
4. Get you're f**king words right lol
5. You're very brave if you successfully managed to navigate your way through those monstrosities.

9. Have fun!

Above all, have fun with language!

Actually, no, bollocks to that. Learn to write properly first, then have fun with it.

(Author's note: Any indication that I am a pompous grammar Nazi in this post is entirely intentional and mostly played for comedy value. Mostly. Comments that do not follow the above rules will be printed out and fired into the sun, then deleted.*)

* not really

#oneaday Day 962: Signal to Noise

We're reaching saturation point with social media. In fact, I think we got past that point a long time ago, meaning that we're at the "completely sodden and dribbling all over the carpet" stage.

There is too much social media. There are too many possible places for people to share things that nobody cares about with people they don't know. And it seems that every day some bright-eyed startup CEO decides that what we really need is yet another social network service of some description.

I've indulged in a few of these superfluous social networks over the years. GetGlue was a bit of fun, allowing you to "check in" to movies, books, games and even "topics" that you were interested in, leave comments and discuss things with other community members. This was at the height of the "gamification" craze, so there were plenty of achievements to collect, and you could even get some real-life physical stickers sent to you if you collected enough achievements.

Similarly, Foursquare and the now-defunct Gowalla proved fun for a little while. During the period of time when I was unemployed and quite spectacularly depressed, I made extensive use of Gowalla to "tag" various places around Southampton and assist with building up a crowdsourced map of places of interest. I even made some actual real-life friends through it, but since then location check-ins have lost their lustre — what's the point, really?

Then I tried Path, which promised to be a high-quality mobile-focused social network. But since you can access Facebook, Twitter and Google+ — the biggest social networks in the world — via your mobile phone, why on Earth would you need a mobile-specific one? Sure, Path had a lovely interface and the bizarre ability to track when you woke up and went to sleep, but it was ultimately pointless.

Today, I reviewed an app/social network whose purpose remained completely obtuse to me even as I made use of it — and even as an employee of the company frantically tried to convince me that the service was worthwhile via both Twitter and the service itself. (I'm not going to name it as I really can't be bothered to be chased further — I gave it a fair shot, I explored it, I found it to be a complete waste of time. Sorry.)

The service in question allows users to, like GetGlue, "Like" things. Any things. Like cake? Then "Like" cake. Like Tori Amos? Then "Like" Tori Amos. Not sure whether you like broccoli and stilton soup? Then add it to your "To-Do" list, then "Like" it if you like it. Great. Sure. Fine. One question: why?

This questionable usefulness was only further obscured by the fact that the app also, for some utterly unfathomable reason, allows its users to "plant" "Likes" at actual physical locations, meaning you can claim to have hidden, say, an iPhone 5 in your local McDonalds, or Jedward in your local sewage works. Fun for about five minutes again, sure — and a means of seeing who lives vaguely near you and likes Jedward — but again… why?

There's too much noise and not enough signal in social media these days, in short, and this fact is a big part of why I stripped back on all "non-essential" social apps a while back. I keep Facebook, Twitter and G+ around because there are people I regularly speak to on all of those, but outside of those "big three"? There's really very little reason for a lot of these services and apps to exist, but the amount of money being thrown at them by venture capitalists is terrifying.

Kind of makes me think that I should come up with an "innovative" idea for a mobile social network in order to attract several million dollars' worth of funding.

Okay… give me a minute.

Thinking.

Eureka! I got it. Everyone likes taking Instagram photos of food, right? Well, I propose a social photography network that is nothing but pictures of food with a selection of retro filters (some of which are available via in-app purchase). You can "check in" to the food you're eating, discuss it with other people and share photographs of your lunchbox. It'll be a big hit. I'll call it "füd", all in lower case, naturally.

That'll be two million dollars, please, Mr Venture Capitalist. KTHX.

#oneaday Day 958: Gratuitous Self-Promotion (And Promotion of Others, Too)

Hello! How are you? Great!/Sorry to hear that! (delete as applicable)

I have something to share with you that I've been working on recently. Some of you may have already seen what I've been up to; it may be news to some of you. I thought I'd share it here, though, in the hope that I can get more people looking at it.

I'm talking about the website Games Are Evil. I was a contributor there a while back in the post-Kombo years, but was then lucky enough to score my gig at the late GamePro. I kept abreast of what the team was up to during and after my time at GamePro, and always felt a certain degree of "attachment" towards it, even during the times when I wasn't actively involved.

So when it became apparent that the site was in need of a bit of a "reboot" and resuscitation, I was keen to step forward while I had a bit of free time on my hands. I'm lucky enough to have a flexible (and well-paid) enough day job that I have time to take on a "pet project" like this as well as fulfilling my other responsibilities, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to gain some experience in running a site as well as experimenting with some "alternative" directions and content strategies.

That "alternative" thing is key. Having had some interesting conversations with a couple of my friends in the PR industry in recent months, it became clear that a lot of representatives were becoming frustrated that the vast majority of gaming sites focused on the upcoming blockbusters, while "B-tier" titles (for want of a better term — I'm not saying their quality is lower, only their profile) went forgotten, or were barely acknowledged with a somewhat dismissive news story. As such, I felt that there was clearly a gap in the market for a site to cater to the "niche". Since Games Are Evil was not particularly beholden to advertisers or investors, the time was ripe to launch something of an experiment — a video games site that deliberately eschews stories regarding things like the Call of Duties and the Mass Effects of this world in favour of smaller-scale titles and interesting stories from around gaming culture. My original manifesto from when I took over can be found here, if you're curious.

Since taking over the reins at GrE, I've launched a series of regular columns from a range of talented and enthusiastic writers keen to write about their passions. These columns are becoming the main focus of the site, supported by a few daily news stories and occasional reviews when we have code to hand. Each column has a tight, narrow focus and  concentrates on a specific genre or aspect of gaming culture, meaning that readers of Games Are Evil will be able to follow their favourite niche and get to know the writer of said column in the process rather than having to scroll through page after page of news which might not be relevant to them. The model which I wanted to follow with this was the way old-school 1up used to work — people came for the personalities rather than necessarily the specific content of the articles. It's too early to determine whether or not this has been successful or not so far, but I am very proud of what the team has achieved to date — we've seen some great columns ranging from comprehensive roundups of Minecraft news to in-depth explorations of obscure strategy games.

Here's some handy links for you to find your favourite column and follow it:

  • Distant Worlds — a weekly roundup of news from the MMO sector. What's new, what's hot, what's not.
  • FreePlay — a weekly delve into free-to-play and freeware games to sort out the "must plays" from the microtransaction-riddled crapfests.
  • Insert Coin — a weekly exploration of arcade machines, arcade restoration and arcade culture.
  • READ.ME — a weekly foray into the world of visual novels (I do this one!)
  • Swords & Zippers — a weekly roam through the colourful worlds of Japanese role-playing games (I do this one too!)
  • Tactical Tuesday — a bi-monthly deep dive into some of the most obscure, underappreciated and fascinating strategy games available for PC.
  • The Craft — a weekly roundup of what's new in the world of Minecraft.
  • The Vault — a weekly dive into the annals of history to rescue underappreciated or forgotten classics from obscurity. Fans of the Squadron of Shame will be right at home here.

It's early days for the site's new direction as yet, but things are starting to come together nicely. If you've been reading the daily new content, thanks! If you haven't, please feel free to check it out. Leave a comment on articles you'd like to discuss. And please, please share anything you happen to read that you find interesting, entertaining or just plain awesome. With your help, we can make Games Are Evil into the go-to destination for "alternative gaming".

Gratuitous self-promotion (and promotion of others) now over. Normal business will resume tomorrow.

#oneaday Day 945: Reviewing is Broken, August 2012 Edition

Game reviews are broken.

This is a pretty well-established fact by now, I would have thought, but the issue rears its ugly head any time something interesting but flawed such as Papo & Yo shows up and is, overall, worthy of praise but riddled with technical issues.

Let's stay with Papo & Yo for a moment to illustrate my point. (I won't be spoiling the game here, so read without fear.)

Papo & Yo is, technically and objectively speaking, filled with flaws. The frame rate is pretty poor at times, there's a lot of screen tearing and the collision detection is occasionally a bit off.

Does this make it a bad game, though?

No.

Does it prevent it doing what it sets out to do?

No.

This is ultimately all that should matter. And yet IGN notes that "poor design outweighs any interesting concepts", ultimately concluding that the game is "bad".

Well, yes, if judged next to something that is longer, more polished and designed primarily as a "game", I guess Papo & Yo is "bad". The problem comes when you consider the fact that all games are not created equal. Papo & Yo was put together by an extremely small team who did not have the budget to do more than they did. It succeeds admirably in telling its powerful, emotional story despite its technical flaws, which cease to matter almost immediately after starting to play. It was also not designed to be a "good game" — it was designed to be a vehicle for telling its story.

I'm reminded of a post I wrote a while back concerning visual novels and interactive movies. Back in the dawn of the CD-ROM era, if anyone dared to release a title like this that focused on the story at the expense of what would be traditionally called "gameplay," it was slated without mercy. The mantras of the day were "gameplay is king" and "graphics do not make the game".

To be fair, a lot of these "interactive movies" were simply poor stories, too, largely proving that (at the time) game studios simply did not have the budgets to compete with Hollywood. But some were enjoyable, and I can't help feeling that some of them may have had a better response had they been released today with better technology and storage capacities.

You see, gameplay isn't king. Not all the time, anyway. In something like Geometry Wars, sure, gameplay most certainly is king, though the beautiful neon presentation certainly doesn't hurt. But in something like School Days HQ or Papo & Yo, gameplay is not king. Gameplay is not even in the king's court. Story is king. And alongside this comes the necessity to judge a game based on how well it is achieving its objectives rather than how "good" it is compared to all other games. In no other medium do we judge individual creative works against everything else ever created in the same medium. No; we judge bestsellers against bestsellers; literature against literature; arthouse movies against arthouse movies; blockbuster against blockbuster.

Both School Days and Papo & Yo are "bad" if we're to judge them against other, more "gamey" experiences. In School Days all you do is watch animé sequences for 20 minutes and then occasionally get to pick between two options. In Papo & Yo all you have to do is navigate the environment and solve some fairly simple puzzles. But neither game is setting out to be a "fun" game. Both of them are setting out to do one thing and one thing only: tell a story. They accomplish this in completely different ways. And they both succeed admirably, regardless of their game mechanics and regardless of any technical issues.

Most gamers I speak to on a regular basis seem to recognise this fact. So why, exactly, do we persist in judging all games to the same standards? This isn't about giving a "free pass" to "art games", as I have seen a few commentators remark in the last few days. It's about judging a game on just one thing: how well it achieves its goal. Screen tearing (which, let's not forget, blighted the original Uncharted to a very noticeable degree) does not affect how well Papo & Yo spins its tale just as, to flip the argument around, the stupid, nonsensical story doesn't affect the fun factor of Call of Duty.

As always, then, the best way to judge whether or not a game is something you want to play is simply to try it for yourself — or at the very least discuss it with your friends and get the opinions of people you trust. "Good" and "Bad" are relative, arbitrary and ultimately quite useless descriptors when referring to creative works, and so I firmly believe the sooner we get out of the habit of judging all games against some ill-defined "canon of greatness", the better.

#oneaday Day 938: Stop Shouting, Start Talking

As I have said before on a number of occasions, I do not enjoy conflict, disputes, arguments or anything that gets a bit "heated". My own social anxiety tends to make me overthink it and repeatedly go over it in my mind and worry that it's "personal", even if it isn't. And the sort of passive-aggressive comments that inevitably come up when one of these situations arises inevitably make me paranoid that they're talking about me, even if they aren't.

But that's a little off the point of what I wanted to talk about, though it does involve conflict.

For those who weren't following the debacle on Twitter earlier, Gearbox Software, developers of Borderlands 2, chatted with Eurogamer about an addon character that would be following the game's launch. The developer in question (Hemingway? I'm writing this on my phone so can't be arsed to multitask) commented that this character had a skill tree called "Best Friends Forever" that provided a number of significant boosts to a less skilled player, allowing them to play alongside someone very familiar with first-person shooters and still have a good time. Things like being able to ricochet bullets into enemies if you aimed vaguely near them rather than having to be properly accurate — real noob-friendly stuff, and actually a really good idea to make the game accessible to less skilled players, or two co-op partners of uneven skill.

The trouble arose when the developer referred to this particular set of abilities as "for want of a better term, the girlfriend skill tree". This was misquoted by Eurogamer in its own article as "girlfriend mode" and the whole thing then spiralled out of control through the usual game of Chinese Whispers, making significant proportions of the Internet very angry indeed and effectively tainting what was actually a very good idea with the distinct whiff of sexism.

The dude's words were ill-considered and stupid and Gearbox should have apologised for them rather than poncing around trying to do "damage control" like they instead chose to. The fact they were said at all is symptomatic of a large sexism problem within the video games industry, and this is an issue that should be addressed.

Addressed calmly and rationally.

Unfortunately, that latter part is what is escaping commentators on both "sides" of this debate. One side starts yelling about how awful this is, making increasingly over-the-top arguments, then the other strikes back in exactly the same way, leaving everyone looking rather foolish. I of course understand that this is something that people are passionate about — particularly feminists who work hard to promote a much-needed female equality agenda — but "passionate" should not mean the same as "angry" or, at times, "disrespectful". Any time either side descended into all-caps sarcasm (and BOTH sides were guilty of this several times throughout the day) it just ruined the point of what they were trying to say and ended up looking rather childish, really.

I'll reiterate: I believe sexism is a problem in society, particularly in the video games industry. But spitting feathers, swearing, making false comparisons, wilfully misquoting things and taking a "who can shout loudest" approach is just counterproductive, surely. I accept that it is frustrating every time something this stupid happens, and I agree that it should be talked about — there were plenty of people out today just wishing everyone would shut up, which isn't a helpful attitude to take — but yelling isn't the right way to go about it because it just leads to a downward spiral of both sides becoming more and more defensive.

Instead, what is needed is rational, sensible, calm and honest discussion. Those upset by the comments should be able to point out that they were upset — and why — without fear of reprisal. Those who didn't see why there was a problem should open their minds and see the other side's viewpoint rather than immediately going on the defensive. And the hidden third faction who just wanted everyone to shut up should calmly accept that different people hold different views, and just because they don't want to hear about something doesn't mean that no-one should talk about it.

Unfortunately, the very nature of the Internet means that immediate, passionate knee-jerk reactions are the way most people go — and once someone gets up on their high horse it's very hard to get them down again, regardless of what viewpoint they hold. It becomes exhausting for everyone involved and everyone observing, and just ends up leaving a distinctly bitter taste in the mouth — one that could have easily been avoided had the issue been addressed promptly, calmly and rationally by everyone involved.

Instead, we get what we had today, which was a bit of an embarrassment for everyone involved. I sincerely hope that one day we can sit down and talk about these things without all of the RIGHTEOUS FURY, because then we're much more likely to get something productive done about it.

Because seriously, people, it's 2012 and we're still discussing gender issues. Surely the human race should have moved past this sort of discrimination by now?

At least there are certain corners of the Internet where sexism is tackled effectively, calmly and rationally — just as it should be. Check out this great story to see How It's Done.

#oneaday Day 937: The Olympics Are Closed

The Olympic closing ceremony finished not long ago, a little late, and now it's back to normal for Britain until the Paralympics start, at which point everyone will suddenly get interested in sport that isn't premier league football again for two weeks and then forget all about it when that is finished. (Incidentally, people, you can stop saying "don't forget about the Paralympics" any time you want. They're still quite a way off. I doubt anyone is going to forget they're happening — and more to the point, I doubt the media will let anyone forget they're happening, either.)

The closing ceremony was… well… uh… a bit poo, really. After the genuinely impressive spectacle that was Danny Boyle's opening ceremony — noteworthy for its greatest achievement, which was stopping British people from being snarky for two whole weeks — the closing ceremony just couldn't match up, and seemingly made no effort to.

This is nothing new for Olympic closing ceremonies, of course, which always tend to be a bit poo, particularly when compared to the opening counterparts. But this was just… bizarre, really. And not especially good. There was a lot of celebration of British music that wasn't that good — Jessie J, Tinie Tempah, Taio Cruz (no, I didn't know he was British, either) were particular lowlights — and some utterly sacriligeous bollocks in the form of Jessie J butchering Queen with her characteristic out-of-tune caterwauling. Apparently the Spice Girls were involved at some point, but since I had left the room to go for a dump as soon as a video of John Lennon came on whining his way through "Imagine" showed its face, I missed them. And I'm not sorry. The Spice Girls never were good live. They were, however, responsible for this .gif of David Cameron clapping on "1" and "3" (twat!) and Boris Johnson dancing like your embarrassing uncle at a wedding:

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the closing ceremony was the palpable sense of relief as 60 million British people all unlocked their underpants and let rip with one of the biggest waves of snark I've ever seen. Everyone was obviously backed up from two weeks of genuine pride in the country, the achievements of our athletes and the fact that holy shit you guys, we did an Olympics and it didn't suck! It was obvious that everyone felt a lot better after ripping the shit out of the closing ceremonies, so it is, of course, entirely possible that the whole event was designed with precisely this in mind. In which case the whole thing was a wonderfully-crafted work of art that managed to get two weeks' worth of clogged-up snark well and truly ejaculated from the British public just in time for us to go back to the humdrum mundanity of everyday life tomorrow.

Or perhaps it was just a bit poo, really.

Still, regardless of how it ended, the Olympics have been an impressive spectacle and it's been nice to see people taking pride in athletes who obviously do what they do for the love rather than the money. There have been many comments over the last two weeks concerning the obvious differences in attitude between the (mostly) very sportsmanlike Olympians and the whiny, overpaid, spoiled little crybabies that are premier league footballers, and it's true. I hate football precisely for the attitudes that are typically on display from the oafs who are at the top of their game, and there was not a trace of that throughout the Olympics… well, for the most part, anyway. Winners often appeared to be genuinely humble and proud of their victories, while those who missed out on gold didn't tend to blame the referee, the other team, the other manager, the fans or anyone — they simply remained gracious in defeat and, in many cases, promised to come back fighting even harder at the next opportunity.

That's the true thing that should be celebrated from these Olympics. The opening ceremony was cool, sure, and the closing ceremony was entertainingly bad, but neither of those two things are what the whole experience is about. It's about taking pride in the sporting achievements of one's country, and if it can even crack the jaded, cynical old heart of a curmudgeon like me then it's truly something to be applauded.

#oneaday Day 936: Biggest != Best

No, I'm not talking about penises.

Let's talk about Facebook.

Facebook is massive. Facebook has taken over most people's daily existence on the Web to such a degree that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely believe that it is the Web. Like, all of it.

It's not. But then you probably knew that already.

But the fact stands that it is a massive global phenomenon, and something that has happily grown and evolved over time from its humble beginnings up to the multi-bajillion dollar business it is today.

Thing is, though, as it's grown, it's sort of lost sight of what it's for.

"Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you," the login screen used to say. When adding a friend, you used to have to indicate how you knew them, and the recipient of that friend request had to verify your story. It was actually quite a good idea that got around the MySpace "friend collecting" issue, whereby people would just add and add and add each other and then not talk to any of their 40,000 friends. Facebook's systems ensured that you 1) were actually friends with the people you marked as friends and 2) didn't fall into the "popularity contest" trap.

Whizz forward to today, and the Facebook of 2012 is a very different place. Now we get people promising "2,000+ friend requests" if you Like one of their pictures. I don't want two thousand friends. I want my online friends to reflect people I actually know, and occasionally give me the opportunity to meet someone new who is relevant to my interests and/or knows people that I know. Give me two thousand newcomers from all over the world, all of whom are vying for my attention simply to make some arbitrary number higher than everyone else, and you sort of lose that.

Part of the reason for this change is the different in what Facebook thinks we should use it for these days. I first joined the site quite a while after many of my friends had — at the time, I assumed it was going to be one of those passing fads like MySpace, and would quickly disappear into obscurity. But I found its value while on a trip to the States to visit my brother — while abroad, I could share the photographs I'd taken and easily stay in touch with my friends as a large group rather than emailing them individually. It was nice.

Over time, things started to shift. Facebook's big change to something a bit closer to its current layout upset a lot of people, and the addition of "applications" marked the beginning of how the social network looks now. At the time, I was of the attitude that the people complaining about it were bleating on about nothing, but in retrospect they may have had a point. As everyone's news feed started filling up with FarmVille brag posts, the signal to noise ratio started getting worse.

Then came the brands. Facebook undoubtedly thought they were doing everyone a favour when they opened up the previously "personal" social network to companies and businesses who wanted to grow their social presence. And in some cases, it worked well, with companies able to engage with their customers and post important information as and when needed.

Unfortunately, this too lost the plot somewhere. Now, pretty much every brand page uses the same obnoxious "engagement strategies" to keep people commenting, talking and Liking — the worst of which by far is the fucking awful "fill in the blank" status update that invites commenters to give their own meaningless opinion on something utterly asinine and irrelevant to the company's product. ("My favorite color is ____________!" proclaimed the Facebook Page for The Sims 3 on one memorable occasion. Over four thousand people replied.)

You see, people seem to absolutely love posting things that have absolutely no value. People love thinking their opinion is important, that they are being listened to, that the things they say are somehow valuable to someone.

The things you say are valuable to someone. The people they are important to are called your family and friends. Not the PR representative for The Sims 3. They don't care what your favourite colour is. They just want you to keep giving them page impressions and comments and Likes.

Likes. Fuck Likes. The Like button is Facebook's most enduring legacy, and one of the biggest blows to actual communication in today's connected world. Why comment any more when you can just click "Like"? It means nothing, particularly when it's connected to a sentence for which the verb "like" is completely inappropriate. ("My grandad died. So sad right now." "Insensitive Twat likes this.") It's a meaningless metric designed to measure how many people have seen something you have posted and want to interact with it, but are slightly too lazy to actually write anything.

The diminishing sense of Facebook's usefulness for actual communication is perhaps best exemplified by the current way someone's profile looks. Known as "Timeline", the theory behind it is that it is an easy to navigate history charting everything interesting that has happened in someone's life.

It's a sound plan. Unfortunately its implementation is just terrible.

The problem is that there's no consistency in how posts show up, and seemingly no understanding of how people read content. Leaving aside the fact that one's profile cover image and fairly pointless basic information takes up over 500 lines — or nearly half of a 1920×1080 display — there's seemingly no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted at the "top" of one's profile.

The conventions established by blogs and earlier social networks dictate that the most recent things go at the top, so anyone checking in on someone's page doesn't have to scroll around or search to find something new. Yet with all the sources from which Facebook can pull information these days — games, external sites, apps, Spotify, Netflix —  there is no consistency in what goes where. For example, at the time of writing, this is what the top of my Timeline looks like:

What a mess, and very little of it is stuff that I 1) actively shared and 2) feel people really need to know. I deliberately shared the RunKeeper stuff because I like sharing my fitness achievements because it helps keep me honest, but I have no need to show people who eight of my friends are, nor do people need to know that I achieved Bronze Level 2 in Five-O Poker, a game I reviewed earlier in the week and specifically told not to share shit on my timeline. At the other end of the spectrum, pages that I have "Liked" elsewhere on the Internet — and thus wanted to share with others, perhaps because I wrote them or just found them interesting — have been unhelpfully collected into a single box that shows just four of them. This behaviour changes seemingly daily, with Liked pages sometimes showing up as individual posts on one's Timeline (useful) and sometimes being collected into that box (not useful). At the time of writing, Facebook appears to have decided that "not useful" is the way to go on this one.

Let's scroll down a few "page heights" and see what else we have:

The left column? Sort of all right. The right column, though?

SO MUCH IRRELEVANT CRAP.

Including posts from games that I 1) didn't press a "Share" button in once and 2) have since removed from my Facebook account.

There. After five screen-heights worth of scrolling, I finally get to one thing that I actually want to share with people — my recent WordPress posts, aka a feed from this blog to my Facebook Timeline. Again, though, like the Likes, they have been collected together into a box that displays very little relevant information and, in this case, is put in a stupid, stupid place. Why stupid? Because the most recent post in that little WordPress.com box came considerably after the RunKeeper post at the top of my Timeline — and certainly considerably after all the spammy crap those games have plastered all over that infuriatingly useless right column.

"Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you" my arse. "Facebook is a digital scrapbook maintained by a five-year old with ADHD," more like.

I'll see you on Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

#oneaday Day 934: Stop, Check and Check Again

The social Web is an incredibly frustrating place to be at times. I'm aware that I've commented on this subject a number of times before, but it's important: the spread of misinformation is at best irritating and at worst incredibly dangerous.

The most recent example was a result of this image:

This image has been doing the rounds recently — first on Twitter, where the supposed exchange took place, and subsequently, as tends to happen, a day later when Facebook's denizens caught up with the rest of the Internet.

It is, of course, bollocks. This exchange took place, oh yes, but it was not between Piers "Cuntface" Morgan and Bradley Wiggins. No, instead, this is what happened:

 

You have doubtless noticed that the person who replied to Piers Morgan was not, in fact, Bradley Wiggins, and was instead one Colm Quinn, who just happened to mention Wiggins in his tweet, which is where the misunderstanding came from — probably from someone who doesn't quite understand how Twitter works. (Ending the message with "@bradwiggins" could look like a "signature" to someone not familiar with the way a typical Tweet is structured.)

As usual, however, the fact that "BRADLEY WIGGINS GAVE PIERCE MOREGAN AN AWESUM COMEBAK" makes a better story than "SOME DUDE YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF GAVE PIERS MORGAN AN AWESOME COMEBACK" struck, and it struck hard. The (inaccurate) story spread like wildfire, of course, with no-one bothering to actually check Wiggins' timeline to see if he actually said the things that were attributed to him. And it spread. And spread. And spread.

Over time, some people got wise to the truth of the matter and pointed this fact out. But more and more people continued to post the inaccurate details — and then it spread to Facebook, and the whole thing started all over again, with both sides getting increasingly frustrated with one another.

I know it's a seemingly silly little thing to get riled about, but like I say, consider the potential implications if the "fact" that started spreading was something that could actually put someone in danger, or ruin a person's reputation. When the entire social Web starts acting like Daily Mail reporters by just blindly reposting things without even bothering to see if they're true or not, we have the potential for a real mess. Just look at the reactions of Facebook-bound idiots who don't know what The Onion is for a preview of what might be.

Fact-checking isn't just for journalists. Of course, there are plenty of journalists out there who seem to think it doesn't apply to them, either, but that's another matter entirely. It takes a matter of seconds to check something like a Tweet is the genuine article. You should be immediately skeptical of anything posted as a screen grab of a bit of plain text that looks like it was written in WordPad, or anything described by someone as SO AWESOME/FUNNY/HILARIOUS/LMAOOOOOOO etc. And, most importantly, if something sounds like it was too awesome to be true, it probably was.

Respect to Mr Colm Quinn for his excellent admonishment of Piers Morgan's twattish behaviour. Disrespect to all of you out there (you know who you are) who fall for this crap every time, whether it's "OMG TODAY WAS THE DAY MARTY MCFLY WENT TO IN BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II!" (for the last time, it is October 21, 2015) or "OMG! PIERS MORGAN GOT BURRRRRRRRNED BY BRADLEY WIGGINS".

Simple routine: before you retweet or share something, stop, check, then check again. It's not that hard.

 

#oneaday Day 932: Take Control

I'm generally a pretty disciplined sort of person. I'm good at prioritising, and if I have something that I have to do I'll make sure that I complete it before I do things that I want to do.

It's when it comes to prioritising the things that I want to do that things go a bit pear-shaped.

It's easy to stumble through your days as normal and just let things happen. But if you do that it's easy to fall into routines and patterns and then wonder where the minutes, hours, days go. Those things that you want to do sometimes get forgotten amid your default activities, your comfort zone, the things that you do without thinking.

In order to fit in all the things that you want to do, sometimes you have to take drastic steps. Steps like scheduling your time.

This approach doesn't work for everyone. Some people are terrible at sticking to schedules, others simply don't like the lack of flexibility. But I've discovered (and rediscovered) several times over the years that I actually seem to work better and be rather more efficient if I plan out my time carefully rather than simply taking things as they come. It's a hangover from quite enjoying the sense of "structure" from school and university (even if — ssshhhh… I didn't always show up to my university lectures and seminars) and it's something that I should really start doing more of in my daily life if I want to fit everything in. Because even with scheduling, it's sometimes tricky to squeeze all your desired activities in, and that's when you have to decide how to make compromises and sacrifices. Thankfully, with the things that I want to do at the moment, I haven't had to make too many of the latter.

The ironic thing about people not wanting to organise themselves these days is it's so easy to do so now thanks to technology. You can make your phone remind you to do things, set email-based nags to pop up in your inbox, create task lists that synchronise between devices, take snapshots of things and store them "in the cloud" (urgh) for future reference. You can even get social and be public about the things that you want to do, making use of your friends as a means of browbeating… sorry, "encouraging" you to actually get on and do stuff.

I use a few simple tools to sort myself out. Firstly and most simply is Google Calendar. I use this in favour of iCal on my Mac because it's easier to sync between devices, is stored online rather than tied to a single device and works with iCal and iOS anyway. Google Calendar is a decent tool with enough features for what I need to do — multiple colour-coded calendars, email reminders, the ability to invite people, time zone support — and it proves valuable when I have taken on lots of things and only have a limited time in which to do them. It was especially valuable this time last year when I was going to Gamescom in Germany and every developer and publisher in the world suddenly wanted a bit of my time. (Apart from EA. They ballsed up my appointment — their fault, not mine — and wouldn't let me in to their stupid high-security compound. Fuck them. I went to go and see Larian Studios instead, which was much more fun.)

Alongside Google Calendar, I've tried several other tools over the years. Evernote is pretty neat, for example. Epic Win was a cool idea that gamified your own productivity, but development seemed to stop quite a while back and it's still lacking a few features that many other task manager apps offer. Most recently, I've been playing with Springpad, which I like a lot, despite a few rough edges.

Springpad is quite a bit like Evernote, but with a few interesting twists. It's based around the concept of "notebooks", which are ways of grouping related content together. Within a notebook, you can create a wide variety of different notes, ranging from simple text notes to checklists (mini to-do lists, essentially) via tasks, recipes, books, product information (scannable via the RedLaser barcode-scanning interface on the mobile apps) and all manner of other stuff. A webclipper bookmark allows you to easily clip things into your notebooks, and the interface generally does a pretty good job of figuring out what kind of content you're trying to store — I tried it with a recipe from BBC Good Food earlier and it successfully recognised it as a recipe, though failed to import the ingredients list correctly.

Springpad also features a "social" component which allows its users to make its notebooks public, too. While I'm not entirely sure that this has been particularly well thought out, it does provide an interesting alternative use for the service, effectively turning it into a kind of blogging platform. Notes can be used as entries, the more specific types of notes used to provide specific information, and the site's in-built commenting facility allows users to build up a community. It's a neat idea. I'm not entirely sure how useful it is, of course, but it's a nice idea.

So anyway. Armed with these simple (and free) tools, I'm attempting to organise myself a bit better. After two days, I've already managed to do a bit more than I would have done otherwise, which is pleasing. I shall continue with this system for a little while and see if it's something that I want to make stick. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else, and it might actually spur me on to get some things done that I've been meaning to get done for a while.

Further updates on exactly what when I have something to share.

#oneaday Day 930: Conditional Philanthropy

I will never understand people — particularly famous types — who are deliberately obnoxious, and who clearly get off on negative attention, conflict and repeatedly proving what an arse they are.

There are a number of people I can think of who fit into this particular category, but the one who springs most readily and frequently to mind is Piers Morgan, erstwhile editor of the News of the World and the Daily Mirror and presently dripping his own peculiar brand of slime over American television sets thanks to CNN.

Piers Morgan's crimes against common decency are too many to enumerate, but his recent behaviour regarding the Olympics has drawn the ire of a number of people.

For those unaware of what he has been up to, it started here:

And continued:

And continued…

AND CONTINUED…

Morgan, it is fair to say, had something of a bee in his bonnet over the fact that some members of the British Olympic team didn't sing God Save The Queen after winning a medal. He appeared to think that this was incredibly important, and that it was worth putting down their impressive, world-beating sporting achievements for.

Then came the bribery and guilt-tripping:

Generous, non? Well, it could be argued as such, yes — he has no obligation to donate anything to Great Ormond Street children's hospital, after all — but dig a little deeper and this whole thing just becomes a bit sleazy, really. By not donating a proportion of his undoubtedly vast wealth to Great Ormond Street simply because of an athlete not singing the anthem — not taking into account the fact that winning an Olympic event is probably a pretty emotional moment for any sportsperson — Morgan is implying several things: firstly, that his apparent philanthropy is, in fact, conditional, and secondly, that athletes who do not sing the national anthem after winning a Gold medal are somehow child-haters.

The gloating didn't help.

Neither did the inconsistency:

Or the abuse:

Basically, there was just something incredibly distasteful about the whole thing. Morgan was clearly just trolling for responses, and he got them by the bucketload — and yes, I'm aware I'm part of the problem here. We don't even have any guarantee that Morgan is actually going to cough up the £15,000 he currently "owes" Great Ormond Street.

He probably will, of course, because he then gets to look like the hero who donated £15,000 to a children's hospital — and also gets to rub how much money he has in the peanut gallery's faces, of course — but I can't help thinking that it is for entirely the wrong reasons. If he feels that strongly about supporting Great Ormond Street, he should just donate the money, not hold his contributions to ransom based on something completely unrelated — something that could potentially make the non-singing athletes look like child-hating dicks in the hands of an unscrupulous (read: Daily Mail) reporter.

Morgan's not making a point here. He's simply waving his willy around in an attempt to make us all feel bad in one way or another. Don't sing the anthem? You're unpatriotic. Don't have as much money as him? HAHAHA YOU'RE POOR. Criticise Morgan's true motivations for this little exercise? YOU HATE SICK KIDS AND ARE A PIG-IGNORANT VACUOUS LITTLE TROLL.

There are several things that remain a mystery out of this whole thing. 1) Why is Piers Morgan still relevant? 2) Why are there people standing up for him? 3) Why does he have to be so fucking infuriating and get off on all this "controversy" he's stirring up? He's like that school bully who would just shrug off any insults you threw at him then punch you in the face and still, somehow, end up being the most popular kid in the school despite being the very worst kind of odious cretin imaginable.

Fortunately, this being the age of social media, at least one good thing has come out of this whole debacle: this JustGiving page aiming to make up the difference in donations that Morgan has refused to give due to athletes not singing God Save The Queen. It's a lofty goal, but if the world can harness its hate for Piers Morgan to raise £14,000 for sick kids… well, admittedly that's not the best reason in the world to give money to charity, but it's sure better than holding the donations from your own incredibly deep pockets to ransom.