delmorpha.com

If, like me, you run Firefox web browser and have a great piece of software called ABP (or AdBlocker Pro as its otherwise know) this post and my blog additions will not affect you too much. Together they make the internet a great advert free place, and the only exposure I get to adverts online now is when stupid MSN Messenger gets my email in its own choice of browser (i.e. IE7) rather than my “default Internet Browser” (this pisses me off).

Anyway, I hope you’re not too offended by the addition of one of my favorite websites, Play Asia, and their new additions to my blog. Maybe one day this blog will drive enough traffic to make the 1 to 10,000 ratio or whatever it is to generate some money online, but maybe not! I support Play-Asia and buy all my cheap region free Xbox 360 games from them now that Lik-Sang is gone (and there goes the only healthy competition on the international games import market, thanks Sony).

The great thing is that apart from some localisation on the front cover, everything from the manual to the game menus is in FULL ENGLISH. Thats right, NTSC-J games for the Hong Kong region are around half the price and exactly the same as the PAL English counterparts. I’d even argue they were better because they don’t have any of those filthy multi-language menus supporting German, Spanish and French. Plus you get them months before their Pal release, for instance, Gears of War I had weeks before I came home and people were still like “what… you have Gears of War… its not even out yet?!?”. To add insult to injury I told them it cost me 40000 won (ie £20) and that it was in full English and they go mental!

So stop paying unhealthy UK prices for games and get over to Play-Asia now; they have a big list of games that will definitely work on UK machines so you won’t ever get stung again.

Fortunately I own an NTSC-J Xbox360 so I don’t ever have to worry about cheaper English language Asian games (ie games released for Hong Kong) but you’ll find a lot of games are region free. Avoid anything by EA though… they suck balls by locking all their games to specific regions so they can bleed you of more money in the UK through regionalised advertising sponsorship…. bastards!!!

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Touching one million people is my goal… not in a weird pervy way my usual readers might be thinking, but in a logical, I know, he knows, she knows way.

We all like to think our voice is heard, and more over that if we have something important to say our voice is going to be heard. I am trying to embrace the power of the internet to see if thats true. I have read articles about this before; how in some way we are all connected to the whole world by a chain of 6 people, but recently the idea has been playing on my mind.

Like a pyramid scheme, the logic is simple. I know 20 people, who in turn know 20 people, and so on and so forth. This is not a con, it is simply an educational exercise to be completed by a bored Software Engineering graduate (read GEEK) to test the power of this.

Potentially the plan goes like this…

1->20->400->16000->2560000000

There we go, simple and effective. The maths and implementation aren’t quite that simple, but without going into those details, a pyramid scheme would only need another layer or 2 and the idea still works.

Why?
I have a few reasons really, but the main one is to see how far an online voice can travel. I find it interesting that we have a global interconnection of information and communication, but on the whole we can still be fed disinformation, lies and half truths by peers, advertisers, governments, whoever. I read a great Violent Acres article entitled The Government who cried Wolf and her sentiment was shared by myself in a lot of the things I write. It’s not an original article, but its nice to hear someone who describes herself as an “Average Joe” (she is far from it in my opinion) waking up to these facts.

I like to think that we all have the power to touch others and in the complete opposite way to the emails I receive daily offering viagra, porn, to be enlightened, to pass this chain mail on to 5 of my friends and something good will happen to me, etc etc, I want to put something in motion that has the potential to make a difference. People believe these emails (still! It amazes me!), but I want to see if they will do the same in an effort for research and development.

Plus, this whole Sony hate month is coming to an end, yet they are still pushing their lies about how well the PS3 is doing and that makes me sad that a just because a company has a massive base, a stock pile of cash, and a direct line into the media they can inject lies, like a poison coursing through the veins of society, and people just lap it up. I want to see if email has that potential if we, the people, find something out that effects us all, if that information could hit the mainstream mind.

Whats in this for me?
Nothing more than the satisfaction of intellectual development and the stimulation of a bored mind.

Whats in this for you?
Ah, the age old question of give and take! Well, in an ideal world I will develop a means of giving a voice potentially massive portal for people. All news is subjective, but a means of hearing real peoples voices in regards to events, news and the real world sounds like a good thing to me. Having lost faith in the mainstream media, I want to know what real people are thinking and whats really going on.

I guess this is what sites like Digg are with a twist, but I’m interested more in the ability for users to filter out what news is relevant to their own lives. There are still a few details that need ironing out but the motion has begun.

Really, just the peace of mind in the potential for knowing whether or not if you had something to tell the whole world, how well you would be heard!

Apologies and Thanks!!
I should apologise and thank everyone who does take part in my experiment for the time they have taken to pass the email on, and for their efforts to see if my goal of enlightening the masses works.

In my email I request you Carbon Copy my 1to1000000.co.uk email address so I can see how many people you have touched, so please be assured your email address and those you send it on to will only be used by me for my own research and will not receive any unsolicited emails. This is a research project and I am not a 419 scammer!!!

The website will be up and running sooner rather than later hopefully, so in the mean time, please feel free to peruse my angry blog.

CD-Wow is getting the Lik-Sang treatment in another case of corperate scumfucks being able to use Copyright Law as the reason to force the UK into high retail prices with no other options.

Explain to me how this harms the artists and I’ll go back to buying my albums in the UK. We are told time and time again we are to “support the artists” as a justification for the iron fist of the RIAA and things like this reiterate the greed element of the record industry. I want to support the artists I love but I won’t be ripped off in the process - like Sonys shakedown on Lik-Sang, CD-Wow will just be another long gone Asian website that helped the consumer by offering the UK access to that level playing ground the rest of the world has access to.

You are lucky to find an album for under £10 at a retail outlet (average price for a cd is around £13 these days), and with CD-Wow offering most chart CDs for less than £7.99 delivered each, its easy to see why the big boys in the UK would be losing out… hell, it puts the pricing some where in line with the rest of the world! The last time I checked, the artists (i.e. the people I want to support) got paid on a per CD basis (who also get fucked by the Industry but from a different angle), and as every single CD CD-Wow sells is legitimate I would be doing my bit for them, but unfortuately the system doesnt get enough of a cut.

With CD sales declining (less and less original artists, more covers by cretins, more copy cat bands in a vain attempt to have a “current” artist on every label and expensive pricing in the UK all being factors for this), the UK has to do something to try and “win back” the buying public. Taking CD-Wow away from us isn’t going to do them any favours.

Im tired and will finish this in the morning!

Digg(tm) has to be one of my most visited sites for the past 9 months and I really do love to hate it now. Dugg(tm) news, as it becomes increasingly more popular, its becoming rife with over elaborating article news in a sorry attempt to get people to view their own site.

I am sick to death of people saying “The Best Flash Game EVAAAAAA!! w000t!” or “Unbelievable Work..ZOMG!?!” only to lead to some decade old piece that some teenage asshole has just found for the first time.

I guess social networked news brings its own take on internal “editorialism” but I’m pleading with the World here, for people to have a bit of self control the next time they feel the need to use a superlative to describe something they Digg… ask yourself these questions:

1) Is it really the best/amazing/unbelievable/life changing? If not.. STFU else goto 2;
2) Will it still be amazing in a few days/weeks/months? If not.. STFU else goto 3;
3) Has the article been online for more than a year? If it has, most of the people on Digg will have already seen is so STFU else goto 4;
4) STFU

You see, the moral of this rant is that the best articles on Digg are those that don’t self gratify and allow the reader to decide whether they really are amazing. Most of the time you’ll find its just better than average…