Sky-high ticket prices: there’s no shortage of bad guys
Truly, these are wonderful times: never in human history have there been so many places to pay ridiculously inflated prices for tickets.
…is your favourite artist ripping you off?
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Magic-powered joy machines
A wee column I wrote for PC Plus has made its way online:
Buying a PC online often feels like you’re playing the world’s worst text adventure. Do you want the new Argonomicon 15, or the Mongrolodian F2? Would you sacrifice a half-gig of RAM if it meant getting the F9321A processor instead of the F32321?
It’s all about specs.
Shouldn’t it be about sex?
I don’t mean sex in the horrible, local newspaper advert “SEX! AHAHAH MADE YOU LOOK! BUY A FRIDGE!” sense. I mean in the sense of possibility, of excitement, of the sheer joy of doing amazing things that make everyone think you’re amazing too.
Reviews: it’s the middle ones that matter
Whether you’re selling ebooks or giving away MP3s, designing T-shirts or creating iPhone apps, if you’re creating something for public consumption then sooner or later somebody’s going to criticise it.
How you feel about that will depend on the mood you’re in at the time, the way it’s expressed and the critic’s grip on reality — iOS app reviewers in particular often appear to come from different, more stupid planets — and even the nicest criticism can sometimes feel as if somebody’s ripped your heart from your chest and stomped on it as you stand there jetting blood – but it’s important to separate the reviews that matter from the ones that don’t.
As a rule of thumb, if the review’s at either end of the scale — if it’s one star out of five, or five stars out of five — then the review doesn’t matter. As nice as they are, five star reviews often mean that the reviewer knows you and likes you, or quite liked the thing you did and wanted to give you a big thumbs up. Similarly if it’s a one-star review, the reviewer may have decided in advance to hate what you’re doing, and only paid attention to it to confirm the initial prejudice and give you a good shoeing.
Sometimes — I’ve been guilty of this — the score is pushed in one direction or another because nobody reads or cares about two and a half star reviews, so you try and entertain with fulsome praise or a devastating slagging. I once wrote that Feeder were the best live band in Britain when what I really meant was that of all the British bands I’d seen that week, a list that began and ended with “Feeder”, Feeder were definitely the best.
The ones that do matter are the ones that say “but”. This looks good, but. The story is believable, but. The drum track is amazing, but. That’s criticism you can use. You might not agree with it — your response to it may well be “You BASTARD! How dare you suggest that my description of thirteenth-century dentistry was irrelevant to the wider narrative! I am AWESOME!” — but if you choose to pay attention to it, it can be a really big help.
I think you’ll find that I’m taking the piss
Me, taking the piss out of iPad 3 speculation that gets entire articles out of analysing an invitation:
If you look at the launch invitation the Calendar app icon is nice and clear and Retina-y, but just look at the Keynote icon to the right. It’s so blurry you can barely make it out.
It’s clear what Apple’s doing here: because its Retina display is so powerful and awesome and amazing, it probably uses quite a lot of battery power. Apple’s solution? Make the bits you aren’t looking at go blurry to save pixels. Thinking like this is why Android can never win.
In the comments:
so its not just out of focus, apple has invented a display that knows where you are looking?
Muppetry.
Battle of the book bots
Thanks very much to Mike, who sent me this one: it’s a really weird story about battling book pricing bots.
with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
The internet has everything.
All dead Mormons are now gay
In response to some Mormons’ posthumous baptisms of people who weren’t actually Mormons, such as Anne Frank, somebody’s decided to fight back with playground humour. Alldeadmormonsarenowgay.com enables you to look up the names of dead Mormons and posthumously convert them to homosexuality.
I’m quite sure that’s offensive on about seventeen different levels, but it did make me laugh.
On torrents
Andy Ihnatko has published a great post about piracy. He’s no fan of the studios, as he makes clear in his post, but the idea that everybody who pirates is a freedom fighter is risible. Here’s part of an imaginary conversation about torrenting Game of Thrones:
What’s wrong, Scrumpkin?
Oh. You want it right now.
But — umm — the release date is only, like, two or three weeks away. Just hang on a bit. You’ll be fine.
Yes, I heard you (please, sir, there’s really no need to shout). I understand that you want it (and I hope I’m not misquoting you) right the ****ity-**** NOWWWWWWWW. But you can’t have it now. You can have it on March 6. It isn’t even as far away as you think. Remember? February is the super-short month?
(Sigh)
You’re already torrenting it, aren’t you?
Annnnd now you’re also calling me a d*** because I expected you to wait two weeks, and you’re claiming that you’re “forced” to torrent it because the video industry is bunch of turds.
I like Andy’s no-harm-done test – if you torrent it because you love it so much you can’t wait a single second longer to get it then you should buy it when it finally does come out; that way, there’s no harm done – but come on, if there’s an ideology behind piracy it’s usually “I want free stuff”.
10,000 copies of Coffin Dodgers
Somebody bought the 10,000th copy of Coffin Dodgers last night, and I thought I’d provide a breakdown of the numbers for those of you interested in the whole self-publishing thing. As you’ll see from the figures, it’s clear that giving copies away for free is a brilliant marketing strategy, except when it isn’t, and that it works exceptionally well, except when it doesn’t.
Screw you, Yahoo!
Mic Wright has got his hands on an email from Yahoo! that the firm doesn’t want widely circulated: it’s going into the “crappy articles for insulting rates” business.
As he writes in a related post: “It is the mark of a dysfunctional industry that the senior executives of major newspaper groups retain salaries touching of £500,000 and above while they tear down freelance rates and slash jobs in the newsrooms.”
Cynical book-flogging bastards
One of my friends has discovered the dubious joys of Young Writers’ literary competitions for children. Young Writers and similar programmes are well known in some circles, but parents’ knowledge of them tends to begin when their excited offspring tell them they’ve won a writing competition of some sort:
Having been showered with congratulations by her proud parents, your child heads off to school on cloud nine to tell her friends and teachers of her success. But her mood is less jubilant, when she discovers that she’s by no means the only “winner”. Most of her friends’ parents have received the same letter.
Your mood takes a further dive when you read the letter in more detail and find that it’s going to cost you £14.99 plus £2.50 postage to buy the book containing your child’s work. OK, the price comes down the more you buy – “a great keepsake for other family members, capturing a snapshot of Julie’s work at this age in a format that will last for years to come” – and postage is free if you buy four or more. But it seems a ghastly amount to pay for something where your true interest lies in only 50 precious words written by your child – the rest won’t hold quite the same fascination, let’s face it.
I need to word this very carefully, because the child’s inclusion isn’t dependent on buying the book. That means it isn’t vanity publishing, where you have to pay someone to print your (or your child’s stuff). What to call it, then? Cynical, pester-powered publishing? Bastard publishing?
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