Kythin's Rants

I recently finished the Chronicles of Riddik, Escape from Butcher Bay. I picked it up cheap at a Blockbuster near my house after hearing Penny go on about it being the best movie-game crossover she’d played. I do agree it’s good in terms of movie-game crossovers, but it doesn’t do what it sets out to do very well. (more…)

In a tute at uni recently we discussed game genres and the motivations of play that usually drive them, and player types that are usually found playing them. E.g. adventure games like the old Kings Quest series would be made for ‘Explorers’, or Counter Strike was made for ‘Killers’. (more…)

I’ve been following the R18+ for Games in Australia with more passion than usual lately, it could be the gaming subjects I’m studying at uni that are giving me more interest but I still can’t see any reason not to have the rating here. It just makes sense to me; if the anti-R18+ camp’s main arguments include anything to do with protecting children from very mature content, then how can they possibly oppose it?

The difference, in my view anyway, is that if we do have the R18+ it would be tightly controlled (because there’s such a debate, it would have to be monitored at least as closely as alcohol & r18+ movie rental laws). If we had the R18+ two things would happen; Nothing would get banned outright, but then it would be easier to put some of the currently MA15+ titles into the R18 category, thus restricting MORE games from minors more effectively.

I don’t see any reason children-protection can be used as an argument against this being added to our classification system.

More on it here via the Age:
http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//010915.html

Submitted By: kythin

ThinkGeek have always been one of my favourite places to buy geeky toys and especially shirts. Infact about a third of my wardrobe is from there! Anyway while browsing their site yesterday I came across something I have wanted since I was about 5. Night Vision Goggles.

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I got a couple of emails about my last article about the free spinner code, and have made a rather spiffy plugin for WordPress that will do the same thing on any posts or pages on the site.

You can grab it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordspinner/

There is an example of what it does in this very page. Hit refresh on your browser and see if you can tell!

See the included readme file for changelog and useage (it’s easy as pie).

UPDATE: 24th June 2010: BUG & PERFORMANCE FIX. Also, please now post questions at http://www.kythin.com/wordspinner2/

UPDATE 21st June 2010: Multiple Spinner support finally released!

UPDATE 26th Aug 2009: Just upgraded it to be compatible with 2.8.6

A while ago a friend of mine, an SEO guy, told me about the concept of ‘spinning’ content. Basically the idea is to get many articles out of one article, by adding replacement words or phrases to the one article you write. Then, every time you refresh the page, the same – but different – article is displayed. It’s mostly a way to confuse search engines into thinking you have more content than you do, but sometimes it’s useful; E.g. if you have a summary of an article which is ripped straight from the main article, you might get a duplicate content penalty from Google every time it looks at your site.

It’s always struck me as odd than nobody seems to have written anything (freely available anyway. $97? Bugger that!) for such a simple task, so I thought what the heck, I’ve got an hour or two, why don’t I write it myself? So I did, and here it is; (more…)