the F rant

1. There’s no point to it.

World of Warcraft and other online games and spaces have a point – make friends, complete quests, shoot people, etc. Second Life is like when you were 14, hanging around outside Doncaster Shoppingtown with no money, window shopping. Without Linden Dollars, you ain’t nuttin.

2. It’s becoming a pissant catalogue of bad advertisements.

When there’s no point but to look around, then you need something to see. Companies aren’t embracing it as a genuine “third place”, they’re simply turning it onto a showroom – look at Toyota et al. TEST DRIVE HERE!

3. Visually, it’s not very good.

It looks like those bad “virtual reality” prototypes from the late 80s, except not 3D. Graphically, it leaves a LOT to be desired.

4. LAG!

Not only are the graphics second rate, but the nature of the “download to watch” means it is bandwidth hungry. I’ve got a whopping ADSL2+ connection but it’s still very laggy.

5. There’s bugger all people on it.

That 2,000,000 people are on it is rubbish. I’ve never seen more than 10 people in any one spot, and that was a bloody busy area. World of Warcraft and America’s Army has immense areas filled with people. That’s ultimately what these online areas are about about – social interaction. WoW and AA have multiple means of communication – whispers, chats, group chats, party chats. Second Life isn’t about sharing. It isn’t about shared experiences. It isn’t about achievment with colleagues – no matter how nerdy those achievements might be!

It’s a shame because I think conceptually, it could be very, very cool. But right now it’s not.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

Interesting statistics regardless of where you stand on the issue of the
U.S. involvement in Iraq – here’s a sobering statistic:

There has been a monthly average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theatre of
operations during the last 22 months and a total of 2,867 deaths.

That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 soldiers.

The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000 persons
for the same period. That means that you are about 25% more likely to
be shot and killed in the U.S. Capital than you are in Iraq.

Conclusion: The U.S. should pull out of Washington and move to Iraq.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

Are you easily amused?

Are the sort of person that thought the three concurrent, unrelated plotlines of Crash or Syriana was the height of genius?

Are you led to be impressed by a filmmaker, no matter how weak or forced the plot, simply because he has joined two unrelated plotlines together with a tenuous and contrived link?

If so, you will LOVE Babel. I was bored out of my brain.

I thought it was weak. It was like watching three average short films, with characters that weren’t well developed, in scenarios where the viewer was forced to sympathise with their plight, all linked by… um… the fact that one of them went hunting, gave a gun to someone else who sold it to someone else, who someone else accidently.

I loved Amores Perros. It was a really great film. Babel is the same format, however done very badly. The multi-plot concept as a means to make a film is tired. Leave it alone.

Don’t leave it up to me, here’s a good summary of the best reviews:

“…all his films feel overly “directed” in the worst sense of the word: the jumbled chronology…and the plotting feel arbitrary: Bad things don’t merely happen to his characters; González Iñárritu inflicts these catastrophes on them.”

Andy Klein, Los Angeles CityBeat

“A collection of often powerful scenes in search of something grand to say.”

James Kendrick, Q Network Film Desk

“This is one of those movies that would work better at home, where you could pause the tape when you need to take a break or fast forward when things start to slow down too much.”

Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone, TheMovieChicks.com

“In the end, a film of profound ambition is unmasked as one without real purpose, a misguided attempt to make a serious, important statement despite having nothing, really, to say.”

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

“Iarritu has enough talent to shake up conventional moviemaking. But he still hasn’t figured out how to use it.”

David Denby, New Yorker

“Succeeds only in making noise.”

Chris Barsanti, filmcritic.com

“What was that all about?”

Con Frantzeskos

FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment

The new AFL site has just come online. Sorry, the BETA site, from the little sign they’ve got on the top, has gone online.

Unlike most over BETA sites though, this one isn’t off the main site, for use in testing, it’s the REAL DEAL! So it’s not BETA, it’s the RELEASE site. We don’t have the option of going back to the main AFL site if we are having troubles, that’s it.

The new site uses flash modules and info to display information, much of which is totally superfluous. We’ve got a whopping big graphic in the middle of the page, news way out of the way, TINY litle mini thumbnails of the club logos and the shittest match preview module I’ve ever seen. No details of upcoming matches, no times, no dates, no nothing. It’s a bloody shoddy first draft of a site at best!

Let alone there’s no blogs, no discussion board / forum, no interesting interactive, Web 2.0 capabilities.  Nothing that suggests this is anything other than a top-down website.  Poor functionality aside, it’s not a very engaging site at all.

Footy starts TONIGHT kids (thank God)!

Telstra, SPIN Communications, CFour and the AFL should be ashamed of themselves for letting this rubbish get through to the public. A lot of work to go before this is even presentable.

FOOTY: Sport in general, FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends

There’s an ad on TV (or at least it was on TV) that absolutely sh*ts me to tears. It shows emotive footage of pollution, small seabirds covered in oil, burning refineries, clouds of smoke, barren landscapes and then has a text caption: “Some of the biggest problems in the world today were financed by banks”, and then goes on to say, in essence that banks are evil – except for Westpac. This utterly cheap thinking is worthy of a kick to the corporate head.

Westpac makes so much of it’s corporate reputation, and yet damages in entire image of the banking industry by basically legitimising the rubbish hurled at banks by the most uninformed socialists and anti-capitalists.  Furthermore, it builds Westpac up as a target for future backlash WHEN (not if) one of the millions of projects that Westpac funds has some environmental or social issue attached.

Obviously some goose at an ad agency came up with the concept and the Marketing Manager has approved it with absolutely no foresight into the unsustainable and quite frankly stupid messages this ad sends.

What’s worse – instead of focussing on the products at hand, the methodology with which Westpac is going about improving the environment or their lending process, it simply goes the “emotion” angle. This emotion hurts the message and worryingly, it also hurts the credibility of all banks and financial institutions. Man, the only time emotion ever worked on an ad was the old “Memories” ad for Telecom Australia, which is here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hbu4EnkqZM]
Well, I wanted to put a link from that ad here, but nobody has posted it onto youTube, Revver, etc. And I LOVE “Footy Franks”. If you find it, please post the link in comments…

Westpac, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business

Melbourne put 6 goals past Adelaide in the A-League Grand Final and won the match in a canter. To quote the late Jack “Captain Blood” Dyer, “nice sizzle, shame about the sausage”. It was a good game, but any game that one sided isn’t really that enjoyable to watch.  Mind you, I’ll take the premiership any day!

Unfortunately, my experience of the game was sullied by the unmerciful booing of the losing Adelaide team by the Melbourne Victory crowd. Call me old fashioned, but I always thought it was good to be humble in victory and graceful in defeat?

But just when I was thinking that the crowd should be ashamed of themselves for booing Adelaide, in his speech, their captain, Ross Aloisi, said that the referees had “ruined the game”.

Compare and contrast Nathan Buckley’s post match comments after the 2002 Grand Final to that one, hey?

I started booing Aloisi with the rest of them. That dog.

FOOTY: Sport in general

ALP Shadow Minister Peter Garrett, former frontman of Midnight Oil and all round anti-US guy, has supported his party’s endorsement of a new major US military base in Western Australia.

In the greatest headline I’ve ever seen, The Age has used Garrett’s own lyric from the song “US Forces” to describe his support. The headline screams: “US FORCES GET THE NOD“.

FREEDOM: Economics, Politics and Business, FUN: Music, Culture and Entertainment

To “celebrate” St. Valentine’s Day – the only Saints day invented by the florist industry – the Google homepage (you don’t need the URL link, surely) has a graphic of a strawberry dipped in chocolate, with the chocolate curling to make the tail of the “G”.

Here’s the thing – they forgot the “L”, so the image spells “GOOGE”.

FUTURE: Digital Media, Marketing, Insights and Trends