I find it very interesting that people who are concerned with sex and violence in video games are willing to go on the record about what is in a game and the effects of that game without ever having played it, or without any factual knowledge about what it contains.  That said, let me say I have never played Mass Effect.

Fox News managed to do just this, and it was covered nicely over at GamePolitics.com, and I found it all via The escapist including the EA rebuttal to all this.  Before you start talking about how Fox News is simply pandering to its audience, and that the game is in fact rated Mature, I would like to  say that the key point of defense that EA used was that it was OK to do what they did in the game because it is similar in content to prime-time television shows.  If there is anything that people need to be worried about, it is this: we as a society, by and large, have decided that certain things are OK to show in media.  If you don’t agree with that as a parent you need to make sure that doesn’t come into your house.  If you are concerned about this kind of issue then you need to put it into words why you think the world ought to be different than it is, and then start talking, writing, blogging, and emailing about it.

Villifying the latest example of the “decline of American values” doesn’t do anything, and doing it ignorantly and making erroneous claims is a sensational, fear-mongering, and disgusting example of what is wrong with TV news in the USA.

Personally I don’t have cable, and don’t want it, if I did have cable I wouldn’t watch ANY US news program.

Let people who actually play games talk about them.

It’s been what seems like ages since I posted on the blog (really about 2 weeks).  I’ve been busy getting finals all done, and applying for PhD programs.  Oh the travail of statements.  The other thing I’ve been working on is my website www.houssian.com.  The front page has been refreshed, and I’m working on my portfolio now.

So I was watching some of the clever new ads that Apple has out here: Apple – Get a Mac – Watch The TV Ads, and I am struck once again how similar Apple is to M$ in it’s evil ways. We recently bought a new imac, we love it in most ways (except iphoto seems to hate us and we have to force quite it regularly), but what I see about apple is that they do all the same crap that M$ does but they just do it with a hell of a lot more style than M$.

Back to my apple TV ads example, so after watching several ads I click on the next ad and it says that “watching ads requires Quicktime 7.” Hmmmmm really? It seems to me I was just watching several of them without any difficulties, and now I need to upgrade? (I was on my Dell laptop when this happened) Sounds like the same kind of crap that M$ pulls all the time by breaking functionality of some competitor pages in IE and making it hard for some companies to integrate their products with M$ products.

Some people complain about the M$ continual upgrades, Apple does the same thing, if not more often (iLife 07 & 08), and Apple is integrating some features from Leopard more tightly with .mac, which will suck another $99/year out of your pocket.

Apple just has a hell of a lot more style and is more focused on making a great experience for users and has some good interaction design, but they’re both out to control our lives and suck tons of money out of our pockets. They both do this by tightly integrating products and OS tying us to them forever with little chance of escaping. Oh and let’s just go ahead and add Google too, ’cause I can NEVER get rid of my gmail account. Where else can I store all my emails and have them searchable, and who else offers a web mail app that supports the kinds of rules that filters offer in gmail? Take gmail+browser sync+personal search and I may never be able to escape Google, but at this point I don’t want to, I’m happily sucked into their promises and superior products, just as I am starting to be with Apple.

Maybe what I’m actually talking about is the fact that increasingly larger portions of my life are spent online and in computer systems and are recorded in thousands of places. I no longer own me or my life to a large extent and there is a part of me that worries about that, and for the priviledge of doing that I need to shell out money for lots of things, my computer, my software, and my services (ISP, web hosting, and many others).

When you get a notification from a facebook app, they usually are deceitful. Sorry to those developers that aren’t jerks, but it seems that many of you are.

Here’s a screen cap from my gmail account:

Sorry I had to thumbnail it, please do click on it to actually see it, otherwise it would break my column, which I hate!

What it seems to be saying is that I have a funwall and my friend posted on it.

BUT I DON’T HAVE A FUN WALL, and I don’t want a fun wall, and I don’t think I need one either.

This is actually a request for me to add the application.

Even if my friend did use her fun wall to send something to me, it should allow me to see that without adding the application. It’s really stupid, and it makes me mad, and not only that it makes me want to use facebook less.

Anyone else feel this way?

So I used to bank at Regions Bank. There aren’t a lot of good choices for banking in Bloomington, IN if you ask me. We’ve tried most of the major banks in town, and some of the local alternatives. Most of the online banking sites are really bad, and regions closed the branch that was close to us. I think we’re going to go back to Chase, at least the online banking doesn’t suck with Chase, unlike the others we have tried.

We recently got this from Regions: (I apologize in advance for making you click the image, but he full-size image broke the column layout)

This is supposed to bring us “new benefits” and “greater convenience”

So they are coming into the 2004 by letting us choose from a list of merchants. Wow! We can access our credit card information…. ummmm again this has been around for ages. Really lame stuff. The new alert thing is decent, but Chase has been doing that for at least a couple of years, I applaud them for adding it though. Then they start taking things away. One used to be able to access register items from way back. NO LONGER. Why wouldn’t ppl want this information?

My favorite is the following

They basically took several really useful features from online banking and said screw you! You’ll need to call us or come into a bank, or just log in more often. Why would you encourage people to come into branches or call 1-800 numbers to do simple things like transfer from one account to another or stop payment? This doesn’t make a lot of business or design design sense.

Oh the follies of letting the system dictate the functions instead of well-thought out, human-centered, sound business design.

Sad…

Shame on you regions!