YouTube recently made Google+ identities a mandatory component of the comment system as part of a large upgrade to their shitty commenting system. This is, strangely enough, actually provoking a user revolt on YouTube for reasons I mostly understand. However, I'm writing this post because I think this is the worst thing to revolt for. It's not like there's no reason to revolt - I'm actually thrilled that YouTube is facing a real threat of a Digg-style exodus. But Google+ is not a reason to exodus. On it's own it's actually an improvement and I'll explain so further down the post. But read on first.

Aphorisms are short sayings intended to imbue deeper meaning through it's interpretation, designed to be easily memorizable and easily shared. In a way, they're the 1700s equivalent of some of the more slightly thoughtful forms of modern Internet picture captions. I guess this metaphor also makes Benjamin Franklin, a guy who really really liked aphorisms (and espousing their supposed moral truths, especially to French prostitutes, usually during coitus) the 1700s equivalent of your typical Reddit user.

A little while ago I talked about a certain Kickstarter project and it's... complicated relationship with the words "DRM free". Well, it looks like Team 17 is willing to reopen that particular can of worms again with the Humble Bundle "DRM-free" release of Worms Reloaded by withholding features.

I completed the visual redesign of the main site I was talking about a few days ago. The new theme, "MahoSpace", is much more visually distinct than the previous theme, "DoujinMart". For starters, we have this nice nebula background and some subtle starfield parallax effects... which only look good on a desktop or laptop with inertial touch scrolling. So the vast majority of users won't notice it, but I'm sure some designers I know will get a kick out of it.

So I have transitioned the site over to NearlyFreeSpeech's 24PHP5.4 instances, after having to deal with more than a little bit of issues regarding changes made in those respective platforms (Apache 2.4 doesn't like oldschool Order allow,deny directives; PHP5.4 wouldn't work until I truncated cache tables manually, etc). This means that the website is going to be faster, use less memory, and support more features (at least for me initially).

My apologies for not updating the site as frequently as I wanted to. Some things changed in my life but I'm fairly settled now. I've got a bunch of stuff planned in the future; mostly regarding future site updates. My host (NearlyFreeSpeech) recently added a new site runtime with no per-request memory limits. For those who aren't me, I've been having to hold back on particularly ambitious site functionality because the modules required for that functionality would put me over my request limit. That's going to change in the "24PHP5.4" runtime.

The economics of game development are completely unhinged from the way they're monetized. When you go and buy a game you're told that they're very expensive, that they're going to be $60 (or regional equivalent) a piece and that you should keep hold of them because they are most certainly valuable objects. But the cost to make those copies is actually zero - ever since the beginning of the CD era distribution costs have slowly fell to the point where, with digital distribution, the cost to actually ship a file to your machine with the game on it is on the order of pennies per copy.

Upcoming furvor over the new console hardware has boiled over into the Internet's usual escape resovoirs of arguments and hipster contrarian counter-arguments. Specifically, the idea that console hardware will now attach digital-style, non-transferrable licensing to packaged products, ostensibly to counteract actions on behalf of certain retailers to cut game publishers and developers out of their revenue stream through selling used games. More specifically: screw GameStop, we're not letting you give your games to other people.

The main governing law regarding online services and copyrighted content is the "Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act" (OCILLA), or DMCA Title II, commonly known as "DMCA takedowns". It provides a legal requirement for online services to take down infringing content and ban users who frequently accumulate takedown notices.

There are two incredibly effective marketing techniques both involving the creation of throw-away value propositions to get someone to accept another, related value proposition. The first one is the foot-in-the-door technique, where the throw-away proposition is relatively non-committal, and the related proposition is more involved. The idea is that getting someone to accept the throw-away proposition mentally prepares them to accept the later related one; since the person already has dealt with you, there's less transaction anxiety.