(no subject)
Aug. 28th, 2005 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progOnce again growing skeptical of the participatoryculture.org folks. Their DTV channel guide is moderated, and they don't tell you why or how, though they mumble things about decency standards in the FAQ. I can understand wanting to be wary of porn and spam, but surely there are better ways of attending to this than using human bottlenecks? Over the last three days, one (1) new channel has been added. I submitted The Gameshelf as a channel, and I bet they're getting hammered with similar requests as their software gets more attention.
So what are they filtering against? If it turns out they're making decisions based on subjective notions of content quality, I shall be severely unimpressed. So far I'm willing to believe that they're swamped and unable to dedicate the time to manually picking through submissions. (Which still makes me unimpressed, though in a less severe way.) I have made a post to a forum asking if they need more volunteers, or something. We'll see.
Interesting that this is not wholly unrelated to Volity. Ideally, lots of game parlors will appear, and we're not planning on introducing any human moderation or "hard" filters to the system. We do have some cool ideas for user-driven moderation, though, which should not just knock out any spam we get but, more importantly, help alleviate Sturgeon's Law.
As much as I will love every game development effort that finds its way to our system, I don't doubt that 90 percent of it will still manage to be crap. Giving users a way to help each other find the good stuff is a special challenge, and one that few providers bother with.
New, undecorated Gameshelf homepage, including episode guide with links to information about the games we cover: http://gameshelf.jmac.org . Props as alwys to my technical consultant![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daerr for helping me renoogle jmac.org's namesever setup once again.
Drove a Hybrid car for the first time... this feller, a Toyota Prius. Passenger Karl noted the LCD touchscreen that's below the LED dashboard display and declared that I was driving a Nintendo DS.
In truth, the UI was pretty awful. All the readouts were in the center again, but the speedometer was numeric-only -- barf -- and the five-position gearshift had only two positions labeled: P and B. (B? So, park, and... "brake", maybe? So my two choices are "stop" and "stop"? What?) I sat there staring at it after starting the engine, not sure how to actually make the car go forward. I actually had to look in the owner's manual to learn that the gearshift's visual feedback is an animated meter up next to the speedometer. Ew.
(B, by the way, was apparently the low-gear setting. Whatever, guys.)
Other than that it was OK. It stopped on a dime but it accelerated more sluggishly than I'm used to... was definitely crankier than my 8-year-old Corolla or any of the other gas-guzzlin Zipcars I've known lately. I don't know if this is endemic to hybrids or not.
The continuously updated cartoon depiction of the energy-flow direction among the battery, engine, motor and alternator on the LCD screen was fun to watch. More fun than watching the road, possibly; screech!! I don't know if that screen had any other purpose, though. I've tried to convincetaskboy that it had a Tetris mode where you steered pieces with the steering wheel and hit the brakes to do a quick-drop but I don't think he believed me.
kyroraz invited me to dinner on Friday and we got a chance to try the new Princess & Dragon expansion to Carcassonne. It is a.k.a. the OM NOM NOM variant, since 12 times per game you get to set a meeple-eating dragon tearing across the board, sound effects optional.
However, it seems lot more dangerous at the start of the game than it is at the end, because of the smaller board and higher meeple density. Then again, there do tend to be more meeples on the board later in the game, and the volcano tiles (which let you effectively teleport the dragon wherever you'd like) may further keep the threat level high. I guess I'd have to play it some more to see for sure... I definitely want to.
You people who have no idea what I'm talking about are probably so jealous of my life right now, eh? snort
Ate at a Quiznos for the first time. It was good. Why was it good? Because I like toast, that's why.
I found a certain mostly-ex-goth housemate's dancin'-skeleton dishrag the other day. She turned down my offer to return it so now it's Halloween every day my kitchen, huzzah. I mean, boogity boo!
So what are they filtering against? If it turns out they're making decisions based on subjective notions of content quality, I shall be severely unimpressed. So far I'm willing to believe that they're swamped and unable to dedicate the time to manually picking through submissions. (Which still makes me unimpressed, though in a less severe way.) I have made a post to a forum asking if they need more volunteers, or something. We'll see.
Interesting that this is not wholly unrelated to Volity. Ideally, lots of game parlors will appear, and we're not planning on introducing any human moderation or "hard" filters to the system. We do have some cool ideas for user-driven moderation, though, which should not just knock out any spam we get but, more importantly, help alleviate Sturgeon's Law.
As much as I will love every game development effort that finds its way to our system, I don't doubt that 90 percent of it will still manage to be crap. Giving users a way to help each other find the good stuff is a special challenge, and one that few providers bother with.
New, undecorated Gameshelf homepage, including episode guide with links to information about the games we cover: http://gameshelf.jmac.org . Props as alwys to my technical consultant
daerr for helping me renoogle jmac.org's namesever setup once again.Drove a Hybrid car for the first time... this feller, a Toyota Prius. Passenger Karl noted the LCD touchscreen that's below the LED dashboard display and declared that I was driving a Nintendo DS.
In truth, the UI was pretty awful. All the readouts were in the center again, but the speedometer was numeric-only -- barf -- and the five-position gearshift had only two positions labeled: P and B. (B? So, park, and... "brake", maybe? So my two choices are "stop" and "stop"? What?) I sat there staring at it after starting the engine, not sure how to actually make the car go forward. I actually had to look in the owner's manual to learn that the gearshift's visual feedback is an animated meter up next to the speedometer. Ew.
(B, by the way, was apparently the low-gear setting. Whatever, guys.)
Other than that it was OK. It stopped on a dime but it accelerated more sluggishly than I'm used to... was definitely crankier than my 8-year-old Corolla or any of the other gas-guzzlin Zipcars I've known lately. I don't know if this is endemic to hybrids or not.
The continuously updated cartoon depiction of the energy-flow direction among the battery, engine, motor and alternator on the LCD screen was fun to watch. More fun than watching the road, possibly; screech!! I don't know if that screen had any other purpose, though. I've tried to convince
taskboy that it had a Tetris mode where you steered pieces with the steering wheel and hit the brakes to do a quick-drop but I don't think he believed me.kyroraz invited me to dinner on Friday and we got a chance to try the new Princess & Dragon expansion to Carcassonne. It is a.k.a. the OM NOM NOM variant, since 12 times per game you get to set a meeple-eating dragon tearing across the board, sound effects optional.However, it seems lot more dangerous at the start of the game than it is at the end, because of the smaller board and higher meeple density. Then again, there do tend to be more meeples on the board later in the game, and the volcano tiles (which let you effectively teleport the dragon wherever you'd like) may further keep the threat level high. I guess I'd have to play it some more to see for sure... I definitely want to.
You people who have no idea what I'm talking about are probably so jealous of my life right now, eh? snort
Ate at a Quiznos for the first time. It was good. Why was it good? Because I like toast, that's why.
I found a certain mostly-ex-goth housemate's dancin'-skeleton dishrag the other day. She turned down my offer to return it so now it's Halloween every day my kitchen, huzzah. I mean, boogity boo!
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-28 10:47 pm (UTC)Hybrids
I recently purchased a Hybrid Honda Civic, and it is much more sane than the Prius in terms of the dash/user interface etc. Standard analog speedometer/tachometer etc. There is one additional gauge where fuel is indicated along the left side, and the battery on the right side. A meter at the top indicates if the battery is charging or assisting the engine by displaying bars to the left or right of center respectively. Also an incredibly optimistic gauge shows up to the second estimated mpg -- press the breaks, watch it climb.. wooh I'm getting 120 mpg!
Standard advertising pic found at random location on net:
I do think there was a slight drop off in acceleration between her and the diesel VW Beetle it replaced, but after a week or two I didn't notice it much. Then again, I haven't been challenged by a mullet in a turbocharged Mustang at a stop light. So maybe there's a surprise under that hood yet.
-kfoss (yeah, him.)
Re: Hybrids
Date: 2005-08-29 06:32 am (UTC)Dude!
Re: Hybrids
Date: 2005-08-29 04:28 pm (UTC)It is good to hear from you, KF. I was actually thinking about you not too long ago, remembering that
kfoss.[something].umaine.eduwould sometimes show up in the jmac.org Apache logs, which I haven't looked at in a long time.Let me know if you ever get an LJ account... I'll add you to the secret club. (Now I have to remember to actually email this to you because you don't, in fact, have an LJ account.)
Re: Hybrids
Date: 2005-08-30 05:07 am (UTC)Now, let's see if I keep up with it.
Participatoryculture.org moderation
Date: 2005-08-31 09:39 pm (UTC)We aren't moderating the channels arbitrarily for content quality, we're mostly just making sure they work in DTV, since we don't want people to subscribe to channels and have them not work. Our volunteer moderator has only excluded one channel for content, as far as I know, and that was for porn.
Our ultimate vision for this is a system where the decisions made by moderators are all 100% public. We just need to build this part.
And we're definitely looking for more volunteers. Email me at hw at ppNOSPAMolitics.org if you're still interested.