1515: Bring On the Weekend

I’m having a fairly shitty week. Not only have I not been feeling particularly 100% for a lot of it (though since I took that day off to rest and recuperate a bit, the rest of the week seems to have flown by) but a lot of things have been going frustratingly wrong, too. Nothing major or anything; just a mountain of tiny annoyances that, when added all together, just make me want to throw things.

For one thing, our coffee machine broke. It’s been working perfectly for ages — about 13 months, if our receipt is to be believed — but the other day it just decided that no, it was no longer going to pour coffee out of its spout; instead, it thought it would be a much better idea to pour the coffee inside itself instead. (I don’t even know how or why that is happening; there’s nothing blocking the spout or anything, so I can only assume one of the bits that goes voonkarankachank when you turn it on has stopped moving to where it goes clunk.) Hopefully we should be able to return it to where we got it and get it replaced, though. If not, it’s taking a trip back to Nespresso.

Then my laptop’s battery buggered up again. I only had this fixed back in January, and now it’s stopped charging again. Well, no, that’s not quite true — Windows says it’s charging and it works absolutely fine when plugged into the mains, but the battery percentage never gets off 0%. The Internet says I should try freezing it, but I’m not doing that. Fortunately, given that the machine was repaired not all that long ago, Novatech, bless ’em, are going to take a look and repair it for free. Their customer service has been consistently excellent any time I’ve needed it — which is mercifully infrequently with both my desktop and laptop systems I got from them — and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others.

Then some documentation I sent off in order to cash in some investment I don’t really understand that my parents had been holding for me didn’t arrive at its destination, which has delayed me coming into possession of a pleasingly large amount of money which I could do with to do things like pay off my credit card and, you know, pay for things with the new house.

None of this issues are “game-breaking” as they can all be resolved pretty easily; it’s just frustrating when all this shit happens at the same time — the same day, in the case of the latter two. Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to get them all sorted out and I can get back to being pissy at people who won’t talk about anything but Titanfall.

For now, I’m off to bed with Hatsune Miku. On the Vita. Yes.

1058: Badvertising Revisited

[Preamble: I know I said comics would be back, but I realise this was a rather foolish promise to make given that I am in the process of moving house and my Mac (which holds the Comic Life software I use to produce them) is now packed up. So you can live without them for a little while, I’m sure — at least until the chaos of the next couple of weeks is resolved!]

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can’t quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there’s a touch of both, because there’s a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let’s consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it’s a “good” way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I’ll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I’d have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it’s broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

Making noise without me telling them to
Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I’m trying to do
Urging me to “interact” with them
Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it’s usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it’s entirely possible that several times in a session you’ll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being “stuck in bad odours” or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I’ve seen is on GameFAQs’ mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You’ll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to “swipe”. “Fuck off,” you’ll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can’t do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you’re stuck in a stupid interactive “experience” about a phone you probably don’t give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? “Get ready to interact!” they’ll say. “Get ready to fuck off!” I’ll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I’ve lost count of the number of adverts I’ve seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don’t know why, well, I don’t think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I’m happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don’t use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I’m trying to do, that’s when I start thinking about installing one. And that’s not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I’m not going to see it at all.

1002: Irritants of the Modern World

I have a peculiar sense of déjà vu as I write this as I have a strange feeling I’ve written a very similar post before… but d’you ever feel like the world just isn’t quite built with you in mind?

I’m not talking about difficulty getting around — though obviously there are people out there with physical difficulties for whom the world literally isn’t really built for — but rather a sense of detachment, a feeling of not quite “belonging” to modern society, a sense that others are “getting” something you’re not. (No filthy comments!)

I’ve been having this feeling to an increasing degree over the past few years. When I consider the things about modern society that irritate me, I sometimes find myself wondering if I’m just being unreasonable or if there is, in fact, some sort of root cause for the feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration I so often feel.

Let’s take a few examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Firstly, one from my professional life. I review social and mobile games for a living, from the perspective of whether or not they’re likely to be profitable and if developers can learn/steal something from each other. Objectively speaking, I can recognise the patterns in design, structure and the use of compulsion mechanics to draw players in and encourage them to spend money, but I can never picture spending my own money on such titles. It might be because I’m a traditional (or “core” as we tend to be called nowadays) gamer and thus have certain expectations from my entertainment — expectations that more often than not aren’t met by puddle-deep mobile and social games — or it might be something else. Rage of Bahamut, for example, which is complete crap in almost every way it is possible for a game to be crap, is immensely successful and has been showing up high in the Top Grossing charts ever since its launch. I do not understand this.

Then there’s the perpetual popularity of terrible, terrible television shows and the attached assumptions that you should know who Rylan(?) from The X-Factor is in order to have a successful water-cooler conversation. Thing is, every time X-Factor comes on, all I see on Twitter from the fairly broad spectrum of people I follow is unbridled hate — but they’re still watching it. I do not understand this either.

Then there are smaller, stupid questions. Why do people buy clothes with dates they probably weren’t born in printed prominently on them? What possible use could a 19-inch 1080p television be? What sort of pillock falls for those text messages that tell you how much money you could claim from your “recent” (and non-existent) accident? Who wakes up one morning and decides they want to be a loss adjuster? Why would I want to join yet another mobile social network that does nothing more than allow me to “Like” random things? Why do so many people respond to those utterly inane brand posts on Facebook? More to the point, why does the block of cheese we have in the fridge have its own Facebook page?

I do not understand any of these things either.

It’s not difficult to see why certain subcultures, be they socioeconomic or interest-based, find themselves feeling somewhat alienated from “normal” society, whatever that is. I certainly do at times, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one out there. There are too many unanswered questions out there, and either I’m not looking in the right place for the answers or the rest of society just doesn’t care.

Oh well. Time to sleep. The world will continue not making sense in the morning. This has been your after-midnight philosophical bollocks for the evening; hopefully I should be feeling a little more coherent come the morning.

Good night.