No Maps for These Territories

Our new skit cracks me up.

When white dudes can get asian skills, the world shall quake in fear.

I watched “The Bridge” recently, which is a movie about the Golden Gate bridge, and people jumping off of it.

Watching these people kill themselves by jumping off a bridge, all I could think of was that if I ever decided to kill myself, I’d do it with the vices that I’ve had to cut out of my life as I got older. I would smoke five packs a day, drink myself retarded, eat burritos and bbq and steak every meal, you name it. If you’re gonna go out, might as well go out like that, right?

Except, that’s the rub. Vices are for people who enjoy life. A vice is something that’s bad for you, but gives you pleasure. Presumably if you’re looking to kill yourself, nothing really gives you pleasure anymore, which is why you’re wanting a way out.

Meanwhile, I love life, and I’ve had to spend the majority of my 20′s learning how to cut out my vices, quitting smoking, drinking less, eating healthier. As long as you want to live, you have to cut out the vices in your life that you enjoy so much, and as soon as you want to die, the vices no longer have the same allure. I guess the only time vices really work is when you’ve not really thought through the consequences of your actions, like I hadn’t when I was younger. Aint’t life a bitch.

Okay, seriously, how hard is it to stop people from spamming my Noobtoob videos on Youtube?

Every single day, I’m wasting my time deleting literally 20-30 comments on our Noobtoob videos that are spamming sites giving away “free shit”. Oh, and I’m marking them all as spam, which you’d think would trigger their spam machinery to realize that hundreds of people have marked the SAME TEXT as spam for a MONTH.

Now, if this was a clever, constantly evolving, brilliant pirate attack, that’d be one thing.

But these guys are making thousands of accounts, and literally cutting and pasting the same fucking string into every post. And this has been happening for about a month. WITH THE SAME TEXT.

Youtube got bought by google, theoretically there’s some really smart people working there.

Let me give you some advice. Grep the incoming comments for this text:

“I’m getting my copy of Halo 3 for free at halo3.wantsDOTit(replace DOT with .) I also get a free xbox 360 elite system. “

And then delete all those comments, and ban those user accounts, and the IP addresses they came from.

Better yet, extend this to a more generic algorithm of “Anyone who cuts and pastes the same text into 100 comments on videos is a spammer.” Also, really not that hard. You can make a simple hash for each user’s last X posts, and then compare the hashes when they post.

It’s getting really goddamn annoying, especially considering the simplicity of the possible solutions. Stop swimming in your pools full of gold coins and fix it.

iflickr
Originally uploaded by tcoziahr

Okay this is hilarious.

You can purchase a bobble head in Metroid Prime of yourself.

So any time you’re in your space ship, there’s a little bobble of you on the dashboard. And you can even click on it and bobble the head with your hand.

The Wii is fun.

iflickr
Originally uploaded by tcoziahr

Wow, I might actually start using flickr now.

There’s this badass new flickr app on the iPhone that with ONE CLICK takes a picture and auto-uploads it directly from your iPhone to your flickr account.

Course, I’m writing this post from the website. If I could tie it in so that it would take a pic, upload it, and then open a window for a blogger post, that would be even cooler. Either way, this is pretty sweet.

Okay, this is the coolest news I’ve heard all month.

Google is dropping $30 million to back an X-prize for a moon landing.

If you go back through my blog entries, you’ll see that I’ve had several slobbering rants about the space program, and the fact that we’ve got all our eggs in one tiny little basket, and we haven’t been back to the moon in my lifetime, and WHY THE FUCK ARE WE HERE IF NOT TO EXPLORE.

I mean, seriously. Imagine your petty problems. Then think about the fact that we’ve never left our solar system and not a single one of us knows if there’s other life out there, or why we’re here at all. Your problems don’t mean shit. We should be spending all of our effort to get out there and see what’s going on.

So yeah. Thanks, Google. Hell, if I find out about any attempts to claim the prize in the bay area, I’ll donate my time for free to get the damn thing going. Apparently private enterprise is the only thing that’s gonna get us off this rock, because governments don’t seem to give a good goddamn.

You know, I’ve recorded 57 episodes of Noobtoob now, and even though Yuzo and I are much more fluid and relaxed on the air now (Go back and listen to our first 10 episodes if you want to hear what stilted and painful sounds like. Seriously. It takes a long time to get your sea legs and not sound like a robot.), there’s still some issues that I constantly wrestle with.

One is preparedness. Often times, like tonight, I give a review for a game like Metroid, and then after we’re done recording, I think of like 10 things I could have mentioned about the plot or the mechanics or the controls that I think would have made our review better, and it bugs me that I think what I said was far too shallow and low on examples.

However, we’ve also tried the other way, where we actually take down some notes on things that we want to say about a game, and that’s a disaster. You end up reading from a script of bullet points, and a show that’s mostly about discussion and interaction ends up losing that ability to talk to the other person, because you’re waiting for your next list point, and barreling through something.

We’ve learned a lot about how to speak, too. A two person show, you have to talk to each other, not the camera. Any time you step outside first person, and say “Yuzo did this” or “we thought this”, you’re talking about yourselves, instead of to each other, and then the show stops being a discussion. There’s a lot of easy conversational traps to fall into, and it’s stuff you don’t think about in a normal conversation, because it’s okay to not be first person in day to day life.

Anyway, I think we recorded a great episode tonight. And an intro skit that involves the phrase “Damn right your ass is bleeding”, which is always quality. I just wish I’d remembered to talk about how the enemies in Metroid take too many shots to kill, or how allowing you to scan objects in game allows them to skip a lot of crappy plot movies, since you get to discover the data yourself. Ah well. Someday I’ll perfect this whole game podcast thing.

We’ve got a new skit up, which will be the lead-in for episode 56 of Noobtoob, and I think it’s freakin hilarious.

Especially nice is me slapping Yuzo’s ass when he wasn’t expecting it.

Everyone should read this talk by Hamming, called “You and your Research”, like right now, especially if you’re concerned with being a more productive and useful human being. It’s full of gems aplenty, I kept thinking the whole thing was quotable while I read it ,but here’s some of my favorite ones.

(Thanks, Richard!)

“But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work… When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems… The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go.”

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest… Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime… I don’t like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done.”

“I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?” I wasn’t welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!”

“I finally adopted what I called “Great Thoughts Time.” When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: “What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?”, “How will computers change science?””

“I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

“I have found that it paid to say, “Oh yes, I’ll get the answer for you Tuesday,” not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday.”

“There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers’. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, “Yes, yes, yes.” What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; “Yes, that reminds me of so and so,” or, “Have you thought about that or this?” When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, “Oh yes,” and to find those who will stimulate you right back.”

Go read it!

I just signed up for twitter, since I want to see how well it integrates with SMS and IM.

So, do any of you guys actually use Twitter? Or are all of my friends too old for this stuff?

Maybe I should make some younger friends.

Actually, that sounds creepy, maybe not.

I signed up under my tobin dot coziahr at gmail dot com address, if any of you want to add me, or just mail me if you’re using it and I’ll add you.