New System

posted on may 28, 2002, tags: site

I've been doing some reorganizing around Rage, and I've changed the weblog layout a bit. Instead of the date being used as a link to view an entry individually, I've now begun (thanks to Linus' idea) using the actual entry title as each item's permalink. From now on, if you want to view an entry on its own, click the italicized (and underlined) title at the top of each entry. This facilitates my ability to post multiple entries per day. Yay!

Read, Play, Avoid Ads

posted on may 25, 2002, tags: web

I suggest you download and read Manual, a new jointly-written "book" by some of the Internet's greatest webloggers. You can find it here (requires Adobe Acrobat). I've only read about 3/4 of it, but I am really enjoying it.

With the money my mother gave me for my birthday, I purchased a Nintendo GameCube today. I bought it for one reason: the Resident Evil series. I love those games. And the remake of the first one is amazing. I've only played it for about five minutes, and I am blown away. I can't wait for the next few. Also, the Cube is very neat looking. It's very compact, and the games are on mini-compact-discs. Remember when you were a kid and you saw a mini-cd in a movie, and you knew that was something we would have in the future? Well, the future is now apparently.

Nothing on the Internet is free anymore. I know I'm not the first person to state that, obviously, but I've just been feeling it more and more lately. Today I had to pay for a year of access to GameSpot "Complete," which really just means I'm paying money to see stuff that a month ago was free. The content isn't any better, I just have to pay for it. The one good thing is they've removed all the advertisements from every page (including commercials before video clips). At least that's something, I guess.

The whole thing got me thinking about how much I despise advertising. Don't get me wrong—if a commercial is entertaing, I enjoy it. But I hate how annoying ads are getting. The Internet is one thing (fucking pop up ads everywhere... thank god for PopUpKiller), but do I really need a SprintPCS logo on my cell phone? Fuck no. And do car dealerships really need to etch their location into the back of cars they sell? I mean, for Christ's sake, I see more advertisements in a given day than I see people! My point is that for some reason, we have come to accept that ads are just a part of everything—we let them appear everywhere—and it's got to stop.