featured!

I have no idea why this happened or how long it will last, but right now, we're the top featured video in the Video Game category on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/categories_portal?c=20&e=1

I started getting emails that people were commenting on and subscribing to our video, out of the blue, and I went and looked and saw we were featured.

I guess an employee of YouTube has to hand-pick the featured vids, because we've got like 400 views compared to hundreds of thousands for the other videos on that category.

We might not even be there anymore by the time you see this post, but for now, it's pretty cool.

EDIT: Good lord, we're still featured, and we've gotten over 50,000 views. I'm flabbergasted. We've gotten a shitload of new signups on the forums, a bunch of comments on youtube, and a huge number of people subscribing to our video feed to check out the future eps. What a huge break. Thanks, anonymous YouTube employee. :)

you've been meme'd

I pretty much never do web memes, because they usually involve stupid lists of questions where people give one word answers, or fill out quizzes, or any other number of inane things that tell you nothing about a person but allow them to talk about themselves without really sharing anything. (Have you ever gotten drunk? Yes! LOL!)

This one is pretty interesting though, in that it asks you to share five things about yourself that other people don't know, and that requires a bit of thought. And it's fun. So since I've been memetagged by Richard, away we go:

1) I was in a public service announcement in Maryland for abstinence. It was me and a puppet holding a gun, and we compared having sex before marriage to playing Russian roulette. I was young and in theater and I wanted the experience, god help me.

2) I obsessively count things, all the time. Number of steps I take, number of seconds I'm brushing my teeth, you name it, I'm probably counting in my head. It's not like I'm OCD and I have to do it a certain number of times, it's more like either a) I get bored and can't help myself, or b) it's an activity like watering my lawn or something where I can't tell how long I've been doing it, and I count internally to measure the passage of time. Otherwise I'd get lost and I wouldn't know if I'd been doing it for a minute or an hour.

3) My right ear is noticibly higher than my left.

4) Adrienne and I have no anniversary, since we have no idea how long we've actually been dating. Which is pretty cool for someone like me who doesn't really dig special days.

5) When I was younger, I had nonstop fantasies that I was actually a robot and everything presented to me was a fitness test. I figured my parents were assigned to monitor me, and I would always run scenarios through my head where I was having to count or find patterns in tiles, or send out energy rays at certain points in a room, or any number of other dumb things.

Whew, that was tough, I wanted to make sure I thought of shit that you all genuinely wouldn't know, which was harder than I thought.

monetizing of the web

You know, the monetizing of the web has really kind of made people into dicks.

I've got a pretty thick skin, but Yuzo and I posted NooBTooB links in a few forums that were dedicated to the games that we were reviewing, saying that they might like to check out our reviews and discuss them with us, and the response was really disheartening.

There were a few people who actually watched the video and gave some feedback, but we got a large number of people who immediately screamed "self promotion" and panned us.

Now, what does this mean, exactly? I spend a lot of time on the web, and I see in big popular sites like digg, people will post a link to a story that forces you to go to THEIR blog, which in turn has AdSense ads on it, at which point you click through to the original content that they're linking to. This is dishonest, leech behavior, seeking to get some money out of content that you didn't create.

What this is doing is making the mindset that any time you promote something of your own for ANY reason, people have an immediate negative connotation. NooBTooB is 100% original content, and we're linking back to ourselves, the creators. We have zero ads anywhere on our site, of any kind. We make no money at all off NooBTooB. All we want to do is build a community, have a discussion, and find other gamers to chat with and possibly do events of some sort as we grow.

It's an interesting and difficult problem to solve, and it's tricky for me to approach, because waves of negative idiots make me want to not bother with them anymore. It's frustrating to spend a lot of time and effort on something that you think is really cool, and to have it shat on by people simply because I present it to them instead of them finding it through the "linkvine".

I assume it involves some sort of "critical mass", where you're no longer a person trying to get eyeballs, you're a shared cultural object. But it's just sad having been reading the web for the last 10 years, to watch it go from a place where people share things that they've made into a place where people are jealous about other people's attention because it's considered something that will make them money. I've got a job, I don't need a check from google adsense, I just want to make something cool that people will enjoy, and have fun doing it.

i'm a vodcaster

Yuzo and I have been playing around with making NooBTooB into a "vodcast", which I guess is what people are calling it for lack of a better name. Call it an internet tv show, or whatever. We taped last week's episode on a handheld camera and I synced the mp3 with the camera video and encoded it for YouTube.

I think it came out pretty well, check this bad boy out.

blogger sucks

So, at the end of December, Blogger started sending out malformed RSS data. It failed validation that I ran against the URL, and Livejournal stopped updating and started throwing errors in consuming the RSS feed. I wrote to their help desk and got no response.

I set up a perl script to run hourly and substitute a more forgiving encoding in the XML file, which seems to have fixed it. There's no way to change the encoding in the Blogger interface, so they'st still feeding me (and evidently lots of other people) broken data. However, Livejournal interpreted that change as entirely new data, so I apologize to those of you who read this blog through Livejournal, you've got a shitload of new posts from me.

Anyway, blame Blogger for fucking up their RSS encoding. It should be okay from now on.

hoofing it

The world is a very strange place on foot.

Earlier this week, my car had to have emergency repairs, leaving me with four hours to wait for it to be fixed. I live about two miles away, so I walked back to my house to wait.

A few minutes into my walk, a car full of people drove by really slowly and screamed "LOSER" at me. I just started cracking up, which I don't think was quite the response they wanted, but the thought of these jackasses driving around screaming loser at strangers was just so bizarre to me, I couldn't help it.

While watching people drive, I saw no less than five people honk at each other, and one set of people nearly came to blows. One guy actually drove around another guy, cut him off, hopped out of his car, and then started screaming that the guy should get out and fight him.

Next, I ran into a guy standing on the side of a busy six lane road, cock out, pissing in a plastic bottle. He wasn't even trying to find a bush or any privacy at all.

I was also passed by about four people pushing shopping carts with what was probably everything they owned, and another handful of dudes who were either talking to themselves or mumbling something about me as they passed. This is in a two mile stretch of El Camino, not exactly near any sort of urban centers, or shopping centers that have carts.

It's funny, I used to walk all the time in Pittsburgh, but I've been a car citizen for about seven years now, only walking around when I head up to San Fran, or go out in nature and take a hike. I need to get back out on the streets more often, it feels like fucking thunderdome out there. Not to mention I saw about twenty little tiny shops with either no signs, or signs in languages I couldn't understand, I want to wander into them and see what the hell they do.