Category: ranting

Apparently FarmVille [facebook.com] is like crack [slashdot.org]. But beggs Facebook stream is more clogged with invites to Mafia Wars [facebook.com] than found black sheep. beggs thinks this says something about his friends… beggs will stop talking in the third person now.

Or, why the Vikings were willing to die:

From the über useful “20 Things Worth Knowing About Beer” [theoatmeal.com]. I guess the Viking reign of terror in northern Europe can be lumped in with the crazy guys who think they are getting 72 virgins. Really, it’s too bad they can’t drink alcohol, ’cause they’re going to need an endless supply of beer to deal with 72 non-virgin girlfriends after they have their fun with them.

I play EA’s Scrabble a lot on my iPhone. Great game, with one annoying little mind fuck: I can play with my wife locally as we both have the app installed, I can play with others who have the application on their iPhone but only if they bought the application via the US iTunes store. Or, I can play with friends on Facebook, but only if they are in the US… Why? Because there are two versions of Scrabble on Facebook and in the app store—one by EA and one by Gamehouse Social. The EA version is only for use in the US & Canada while the Gamehouse version is for everyone else.

And both games (or Facebook on their behalf) actively block users from using the wrong version of the application based on their location. Most likely by geolocation based on IP… anyway, I can’t play the US version on my computer here in Singapore. Why? Read the fine print:

SCRABBLE game code and certain audio visual materials © 2008 Electronic Arts Inc. All Rights Reserved. Published by Electronic Arts Inc. under license from Hasbro, Inc. EA and the EA logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. HASBRO and its logo, SCRABBLE, the distinctive game board and letter tiles, and all associated logos are trademarks of Hasbro in the United States and Canada and are used with permission. © 2008 Hasbro. All Rights Reserved.

That’s on the EA application page [facebook.com]. The T&Cs on the Gamehouse application page shed more light on the issue:

SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the United States by Hasbro, Inc., in Canada by Hasbro Canada, Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons, Ltd., a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. SCRABBLE® and associated trademarks and trade dress are used under license from Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Mattel name and logo are trademarks of Mattel, Inc. and used with permission. Mattel and J.W. Spear & Sons are not affiliated with Hasbro or Hasbro Canada.

Emphasis mine.

Yea, this is a relic of the pre-globalization, pre-internet age… the dark ages of licensing.

At least in this case EA owns both the internet and mobile rights to the game, so I can play with a few of my Facebook friends in the US from my mobile—but only from my mobile, I can’t load the app on my computer. Remember?

Licensing is a serious cluster fuck in the digital age. The reason I use the US iTunes store is there is not iTunes music or movies or TV shows for sale in the Singapore store… only applications—and not necessarily the same ones as in the US. Luckily having lived in the US most of my life I still have US credit-cards so I can pay Apple and all is good. Yummy content for me. But I can’t play Scrabble on my iPhone with the guy sitting next to me at work… And the two Facebook apps don’t cross pollinate so we can’t even play that way. Like I said; cluster fuck.

Unfortunately this is all SNAFU. I have run across this issue from other angles before. Anyone living outside America knows that only some of the movies—even big ones make it overseas. This is due to the complexity of local distributes buying the license to show the movie. And even if the movie makes it to the theaters it might be a long, long time before it is released on DVD. Or maybe never. But we are all used to that, same goes for music and TV but it’s less obvious.

Where this crap gets really Japanese demon-sex-horror-anime fucked up is when you bring in things like mobile and internet rights. Take a movie, Generic Hollywood Blockbuster Movie. The studio will sell the distribution right to this movie to some number of companies to get it distributed around the world. It may sell the rights to distribute a few still images to the same people or it might give them away for free on the internet, or it might sell or give them away directly to local mobile telecoms operators to sell or give away to subscribers as an advertisement. Then there is the music from the movie, which may or may not be produced and distributed by the same studio or a subsidiary of the same studio that made/produced/distributed GHBM. The songs will have physical distribution rights, digital distribution rights and even mobile ringtone distribution rights…. and these and other rights will all be on a country-by-country basis. This is what most lawyers do for a living—contract negotiation. And remember; “contract negotiation is like flatworm sex; both parties are hermaphrodites trying to rape the other party.”

Did you ever wonder why content is so expensive? It’s expensive to create high quality content. But it’s stupidly expensive to distribute it via this web of money-grubbers. Too many hands in the cookie jar equals no cookies… Trust me, I have a friend involved in the Nokia Comes with Music thing… Hermaphrodites. Rape. Cluster fuck. SNAFU.

But anyway. This post was supposed to be about subliminal messages. In particular a subliminal message in the splash-screen of the EA iPhone Scrabble app:

See it? It’s not really hidden, but click the image to see it in-your-face.

This post [neoformix.com] over at Neoformix shows a great graphic displaying where the swine flu ‘pandemic’ really fits into the big picture.

Yea, that’s right, a whole 8,118 deaths from swine flu. And this chart covers the 300 days up to November 24th. Twice as many people have died from dengue fever, and 200 times a many people have died from the runs! Diarrhea for god sakes has killed 200 times as many people as swine flu. Almost as many people died from leprosy! Holy shit!

And lets not talk about the millions who have died from fat white people diseases, like the 14 million who died of cardiovascular disease. ‘Cause you know that most of those 14 million were McDonald’s junkies.

I mean really, would the media find something else to talk about? Oh I know. How about the 151 thousand people who died from WAR!

Bait and switch, like verbal slight-of-hand is one of the primary tools of politics and advertising… you should already be scared. It’s a sad state of affairs, and anymore it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys ’cause they all play the same game by the same rules; coercion as needed to meet the party line.

So, today I came across a link to an info-visual about the upsides of legalizing marijuana [sloshspot.com]. Nice, nice, I totally agree that we need to rethink the whole marijuana is illegal thing and I’m on the “Amsterdam model” side of the debate, though I want to see more debate before I make up my mind. But wait… what is this uncouth bait and switch with the statistics:

All the information on the info-visual references statistics that are marijuana specific… except the statistics in big ass green used to shock people… That $14.1 billion says Will be spent to reduce drug use and availability in 2009, (emphasis mine). But drug use implies more than just marijuana. This is the kind of dishonest behavior that makes me not like people in politics (and advertising) regardless of if I agree with their stance or ideas (or like their products.)

And let’s not mention that you can make statistics say anything you want, so this kind of cheating should be unnecessary. And always remember that 63% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Finally as a complete aside… I know some of the people that would be contributing to that $20 million for Virginia! You know who you are! “Puff puff, give. Puff puff, give. You fuckin’ up the rotation!”