Already Chrome 11 but snot enough

When you think that my browser war sheet was published like four months ago only, and Chrome was at the 7th version, aptly named 7.0... I couldn't help but wonder why the hell they still bothered with the .0 part. Considering that their strategy of who has the longest dick is just to be sure to have the greatest post count version number, they could streamline said number.
Why don't they give us a break and go right for Chrome 99?
Think of the opportunities when will come the time for the next release!!! OMG!!!!!

Loreno Confortini, level design alla maniera antica?

 

There are days like that when you feel quite a bit more lucky than usual. I wouldn't tell you how I came across Mr. Confortini's website, it's so convoluted that it wouldn't even make sense. Point is, praise gracious Eriounios and King Wan, for Mr. Confortini may seem to be an obscure artist not particularly renowned outside of certain Italian circles, and yet he deserves more light than he gets, for his work is simply put, truly gorgeous and admirable.

 

Mr. Confortini, in his mid 50s, specializes in ink drawings of "perspectives and landscapes of cities, cross-sections of buildings, castles and cathedrals" and other maps, all drawn by conforming to antique styles. In my opinion, this noble exercise would find its rightful place into the complete collections of production artworks for real strategy games, for example.

Here is his biography and curriculum vitae:

LORENO CONFORTINI born in Mirandola (Moden) in 1954.
In the early nineteen-eighties began his activity in architectural designs, cartography and perspective views of cities and ancient buildings.

Since 1987 he has collaborated as illustrator and graphic artist with 'Bell'Italia', a monthly magazine published by Giorgio Mondadori (Milan), and with other publishers.

In 1994 he was awarded the prize 'A book for Tourism' by the European Federation of Tourism Press for the volume "Ancient Castles in the St. Marino Republic". This illustrated book, with a foreword written by Jacques Le Goff, was published by the Tourism Office of the St. Marino Republic.

In 2003 he produced, in collaboration with a colleague, the illustrator Francesco Corni, the volume 'Italian Mills', with text by Vittorio Galliazzo, both authors doubling as publishers, which first gave an exhaustive illustration of the various types of water mills in the Italian regions.

In 2005, on the occasion of an exhibition organised at Burg Taufers by the Südtiroler Burgenistitut (The Castle Institute of South Tirol and Austria), he printed the second edition of his catalogue 'Villages, Cities, Castles and Fortresses', a collection of views drawn alla maniera antica.

He has produced large maps of a great number of towns, such as Bologna, Modena, Parma, Brescia, Sabbioneta, and of castles, churches, and medieval villages. Other works have been widely published in special editions on the occasion of cultural events sponsored by public and private institutions.

He lives and works in San Felice sul Panaro, Modena - Italy.

The downside of this, however, is that all images on his website are, unfortunately, all downsized, and finding the publications wherein his arts are fully disclosed is one of the hardest treks ever. You will notice that this exposé of his competences is a transcription of the Italian page. So in order to get the right book references, you'll have to look for the Italian names. And sorry, no ISBN found either.

Just a database about nuclear tests

Check it out.
A lot of these videos can be found on streaming websites as well. Just in case you want to make a realistic nuclear bang in your future game.
Try to look for a 1 kiloton test as well. Makes a fireball that's about 60 meters wide.

3DS vs NGP

Let's compare both Nintendo's 3DS and Sony's NGP.

The first one is going to sell like hot cakes, again, merely because of that cool 3D gimmick, but which will surely will add very little to substantial matters. This simple addition, totally superficial, which by the way is far from perfect the moment you're not standing right in front of the screen (the image doubles when you're a bit off-axis) will certainly not rise the production cost of the console by much (the 3D effect mainly is a trick of display). Well, we know that Nintendo will sell that one waaaaay above its true screws and bolts price, as always. It's not a surprise either, they're not in the business of making games. They sell cheap plastic toys, which is pretty much where they come from anyway.
That's the core of their disruptive strategy : selling hardware gimmicky coolness to people who don't care about video games. NDS, Wii, and 3DS.
So, next to the augmented reality, you'll have waterproof console (play underwater !!) and true holograms ala Star Wars (with obviously crappier graphics than if displayed on a flat SuperOLED screen, but never mind).

Then you have the NGP, which is a true developer's wet dream, the ultimate Swiss Knife, but which will certainly be considerably more expensive, and not as cool on the surface. It comes with two thumbsticks, a multi touchscreen, games on cards (bye bye stupid UMD), a touch pad on the back, and plenty of network functions. Yes, it's a dream come true. Nothing to best Nintendo, but certainly much more complete in promises, and probably far more rewarding game wise.

Yet... no stylus.
No tactical games for you guys. If you think you can play a RTS with the tip of your fingers on such a small screen, I have a prime swampland to sell you.

Well, hold that. We already managed to convince millions of players that you could get a true FPS experience on consoles. So why not?

Besides, isn't it what the PSP should have been? Isn't it a bit... superfluous?

What of the NGP's price? Will people even feel the need to buy the NGP, when, on the surface, it doesn't really look like it's that much new? I mean, the difference between a maxed out PS2 and PS3 was not so huge as it was between a PSX and a PS2, but visible enough on a large screen, say glaring on new generation HD screens, but on a handheld screen roughly of the same proportions as the PSP's...

Tough game for you, Sony guys. The NGP may do OK, but the strong lineup will be the key. The rest is just coating and wouldn't depress the line on the scopes by much.
Besides, the "Too-Many-Things in 1" syndrome just reeks off too much of the Game Boy vs Game Gear, in some way, and I'm quite sure that the 3D without the glasses has already guaranteed Nintendo great future revenues.

Finally, when you think of the casual-social gaming bloom, you may think that the NGP killer could be the Xperia Play itself.

Perfect Video Game Business Model

There's a blog I like to read from time to time. It's Bruce on Games. It's generally full of good insight or at least thought provoking matter, and is a healthy reading when it comes to thickening your brainstorming card deck. Still, like with many other insiders, they seem to lack something quite crucial about reality, something which means that no matter how hard they may try, their vision of the situation, their perspective, is just too narrow, perhaps too biased.
Here I present such an example: Gambling as a video game business model.

The eternal problem of selling a video game as a stand alone package is that it can and will be stolen. If people think that they can get away with stealing then they will, so the level of theft can easily reach the high nineties in percentage terms. In other words often very few users of your product are actually paying for the work that you have done.

The way round this is alternative business models, so the customer is forced to pay in a different way. These can include online games with a monthly fee, pay per play, sale of in game items, advertising or sponsorship, etc etc. All these and more are being used successfully and the industry continues to experiment in order to find viable ways to be rewarded for their work.

When I was Head of Corporate Affairs at Codemasters working for the Chairman, Jim Darling, we were fully aware of the blight of software theft on the business and often discussed ways round it. One idea was online gambling, where we made money from people betting within the game.

[...]

[Jez San OBE]'s online gaming company, PKR, is a huge success.

Ok. That's what I call missing the point. Entirely.


With gambling, he has essentially found a way to make money online with "some kind of game", but it's not the same as having found a new business model to make traditional video gaming more profitable, or profitable again.
Surely, this brings us back to the question of piracy, for which it's generally blotted out that the prime issue is economy; in that the middle class, or whatever remains of it, lives on ever ballooning debts and has been getting poorer and poorer decade after decade, with industries being destroyed and reassembled overseas.

It's quite tragic, in fact, that the electronic based industries, more open to piracy and therefore seemingly more fragile, paradoxically seem to be those which are so under-involved in economics and politics. It's like kids who have never grown. It's distressing.

Clearly, there are obvious primary priorities between putting £60 in a game or in your kids' clothes and food. It just boils down to that. Multiply salaries by ten for everybody, while keeping the same value on goods as it is now, and you'd solve a huge part of the problem. This money exists, we know where it went, and it's not in the people's pockets (clue: it's called Kapital and Banksters).
There would be minimal inflation, because the amount of money is already there, it does not need to increase, so prices wouldn't go up, purchase power wise, but keep stable (commercial laws could help). Primary resources costs wouldn't skyrocket either: they can't, "we" already produce too much. A slow down of the consumption would be a prime directive. Improving quality and durability would force industries to focus on more sustainable development (and I can't tell you how much I'm very cautious with this, as it's currently used to push the world in a direction which is nothing sustainable at all, and only used to allow authorities to peek into people's lives a bit more).

Again, all the money is already there, the amount does not need to change. It just needs to end in different hands. The mere fact that the money supply grew, prices climbed, yet income didn't really follow pretty much proves this. What hasn't worked one way won't work the other way just because income is increased to the levels it should have been at now ... let's just muse about the lack of income recalibration that hasn't occurred over the last two or three decades, relative to the hording inflation - where are we know? Yeah, good job. You've been stolen. Ouch.

Piracy gives the illusion that there's a massive loss of money, while in fact a great many people who acquire illegal copies would have never paid for it to begin with.
The problem with this illusion, which is nothing more than a fallacious argument often repeated ad nauseum every two weeks by editors complaining about lost sales, is that it also makes creators think there's a viable industry there to work in, and therefore they decide to make games.
So while in any other industry, a lack of sales couldn't be blamed on "piracy" but the simple fact that people don't have much money left to buy your stuff, in the video game industry, this silly corporate talk is entertaining a lie that keeps acting like a siren, until the ship crashes, unavoidably.

The other reason video game workers and consumers don't seem that much involved in politics or syndicalism of any sort is because of the dumbed down infantile culture that permeates so many studios which share the mental leftovers of the Internet bubble: cool kids working at Google and just sort of living their dream, having the political, historical and economical culture of a shrimp.

But no. The real deal is that people wouldn't bother pirating games if buying legal copies was not a problem. When I mean problem, the real one is not about the game's price, but people's income. It's a subtle difference, but it has a lot more to do with psychology than with cold equations.
You can lower your price as much as you want, you won't change much if the people still get the impression that the world's damn unfair and a few lucky bastards rack millions while you're left with a few pennies at the end of the month once you've paid all the bills. Case: the massive piracy on smartphone apps.

What we're seeing about piracy is so obvious because Internet enhances all, and the pseudo crisis of 2007 is only the peak of the iceberg, something that's been going on for longer than that.
So all those schemey over complicated new business *solutions* are no solutions. They're just painting, coating, but the core is still rotten and not getting any saner. Those so called solutions are even more silly because they complicate matters, while people beg for simplicity and a sense of liberty. Subscription, DLC, etc. All that is shit. Oh but wait, people actually want that shit. They're so stupid that they beg for it. Their empty lives drive them to waste their money on "virtualities" which are even more anti-productive than cigarettes.
It's no surprise that within such nihilistic societies, people are ready to pay for the likes of WoW, which by all means is not that much of a game but rather another job which just alienates you by exploiting psychological backdoors and giving you little reward at all in return.

Feeding Microsoft when Gates feeds Monsanto

There are things I hate with a passion. One of them is Mosanto. Another is Cargill.

And one thing I'm really close to hate, aside from the monopoly it holds on PC OSes (and wonderfully illustrated in Bill Gates's open letter from the 70s), is Microsoft.
Microsoft, BG's ever growing supply of money.

So what happens when our nerdy BG buys about 500,000 shares from Monsanto - poisonous killers of crops, farmers (not just the African ones) and liberties- for $27.6 M in the second quarter of 2010, and the news breaks out in late 2010?

Nothing.
The video game industry remains silent.
Controversial? All but an euphemism.
Sure, with billions to make, who'd shake the boat by pointing out the disgusting ties between Gates and Monsanto, and therefore logically risking the business profitability of Microsoft and millions of jobs depending on the sales of games on the Microsoft console?

Still, here's a couple links you should read, if you don't want to die silly. (And as always, don't miss the comments section when there's one!)

Gates Foundation ties with Monsanto under fire from activists
Bill Gates Foundation Buys 500,000 Shares of Monsanto
Should the Gates Foundation sell its stock in Monsanto?
Gates Foundation invests in Mosanto: Both will profit at expense of small-scale African farmers
Chemical Relations: Monsanto and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation


Seriously, there are times when I feel a bit heart-torn when I know that making video games in such an age of disgrace is not particularly fertile for the mind, and is often said to keep people away from important matters (just like any entertainment consumed in droves and nothing in video games actually encourages people to do otherwise), but do we really have to flush everything, including ethics ?

EDIT : I forgot something. Did you ever hear of the Doomsday Vault ? Surely, you want to read the following article : Doomsday Arctic Seed Vault: Do Bill Gates, Rockefeller and GMO (genetically modified organism) titans know something...
Hello? Is there anyone still sane on this fucking planet?

--- Special Blackwater Black Ops/XE Services Update ---

Machines of War: Blackwater, Monsanto, and Bill Gates. An excerpt:

A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater's Black Ops, 9/15/2010) revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. Blackwater was renamed in 2009 after becoming famous in the world with numerous reports of abuses in Iraq, including massacres of civilians. It remains the largest private contractor of the U.S. Department of State "security services," that practices state terrorism by giving the government the opportunity to deny it.

Many military and former CIA officers work for Blackwater or related companies created to divert attention from their bad reputation and make more profit selling their nefarious services-ranging from information and intelligence to infiltration, political lobbying and paramilitary training - for other governments, banks and multinational corporations. According to Scahill, business with multinationals, like Monsanto, Chevron, and financial giants such as Barclays and Deutsche Bank, are channeled through two companies owned by Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater: Total Intelligence Solutions and Terrorism Research Center. These officers and directors share Blackwater.

One of them, Cofer Black, known for his brutality as one of the directors of the CIA, was the one who made contact with Monsanto in 2008 as director of Total Intelligence, entering into the contract with the company to spy on and infiltrate organizations of animal rights activists, anti-GM and other dirty activities of the biotech giant.

Contacted by Scahill, the Monsanto executive Kevin Wilson declined to comment, but later confirmed to The Nation that they had hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and 2009, according to Monsanto only to keep track of "public disclosure" of its opponents. He also said that Total Intelligence was a "totally separate entity from Blackwater."

However, Scahill has copies of emails from Cofer Black after the meeting with Wilson for Monsanto, where he explains to other former CIA agents, using their Blackwater e-mails, that the discussion with Wilson was that Total Intelligence had become "Monsanto's intelligence arm," spying on activists and other actions, including "our people to legally integrate these groups." Total Intelligence Monsanto paid $ 127,000 in 2008 and $ 105,000 in 2009.

...

This is getting out of hands!
- Whose hands?