As you’ve noticed, there haven’t been a lot of posts here lately. Between one thing and the other, things have just been a little too hectic. Work is very busy, and there’s a lot to do at home as well.

Hence the last thing I need is another distraction, such as a blog. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take a more substantial break - probably until early August. If anything really strikes me between now and then I’ll post it, but otherwise expect very little.

In August I’ll probably come back with a new format for the blog too, tweaked to make it a bit easier to keep up with things.

So I’ll be back in August. Unless I get some really good idea I just have to blog about, that is.

I have a few suggestions for jets and 4WDs too. A little bit different to this one…

Really fantastic production values for only 36 hours from start to finish.

Makes me wonder what a creative mind could do with a spirograph.

A little bit too balanced, actually. I rather suspect these would work well to play…

As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.

Given the usual state of my home office, this doesn’t actually make me more likely to buy one…

I love a good heist movie, and this one looks like it has some fun conspiracy theory stuff added on over the top of it all.

Aftering buying a Wii in 2006, I got an XBox360 and PS3 to go along with it. And a few games as well.

Over the next few months I’ll do a series of game reviews (and there’s likely to be a fair gap before the last few, as I haven’t finished them yet…). I’m looking at games released in Australia in 2007. I’ll also review things that come out in 2008 as I play them.

Once I’ve covered them all, then I’ll announce gaming’s most prestigious prize: The Exasperated Calculator Game of the Year.

The shortlist (aka ‘Games I played’) for 2007 includes:

• Bioshock (Xbox 360)

• Mass Effect (Xbox 360)

• Portal (Xbox 360)

• Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

• Uncharted (PS3)

• World in Conflict (PC)

I’ll try and review all of these by the end of 2008.

If you have any thought that it’s possible for these people to be funny, watch the trailer. It’s one of the most horrible things I have ever seen.

Please buy me one of these, work. I promise I won’t be completely distracted by shiny marbles all day long.

Someone once demonstrated that differences in the way people rolled cigarettes were driven by tax policy. It’s probably the same here.

I think this is a good idea. But maybe I’m lying…

It’s incredible, really. It totally transforms the comic, but it still works.

There are some side issues here, but a big part of it is peer to peer. Which brings me to this story from today that online video distributors can save a lot of money by using peer to peer protocols

In the example given, Democracy Now saves $1,000 (of a $1,200 bill) by using BitTorrent. My question is - who ends up paying that $1,000? If we assume (and it’s not a great assumption) that everything is competitive, then that $1,200 represents the cost of pushing that many bits to end users. If it goes down, then it must mean that $1,000 worth of bits are now being pushed by someone else - in this case, the upstream bandwidth from the users.

So who pays?

At first, probably the ISP of the end users. Their bandwidth out gets used up, costing them money.

They’ll pretty quickly pass that on to the end users. Which means they’ll increase prices for everyone.

So what’s DemocracyNow really doing here? They’re pushing the costs of distributing from themselves on to end users. Which, due to the way pricing is set up, will be borne equally by everyone, regardless of how interested they are. In fact, people who have no interest at all in the video probably end up paying for this too.

I’m not arguing against net neutrality - there are other reasons why it’s a good idea. This is probably more an example of how the pricing for internet access is set up wrong - flat rate charges create strange incentives across the Internet, not just for the end users.

But that $1,000 saving? That doesn’t exist. You’re just making other people pay it.

Looks beautifully acted, should be quite good.

Hannibal Lecter would be proud.

Congratulations Denver on being chosen #1 for Lust.

Not a perfect fit, but given there’s no apparent editing it’s quite uncanny how well it all fits.

That’s a little over the minimum length of a novel.

This is part of a continuing trend in the computer video game business, with the really big publishers consolidating. In some sense, this is a lot like the film business - the big studios make up a very substantial proportion of the total turnover of the industry.

But the big difference is with the next level down. In the film industry almost everyone is a contract player - directors, writers, and actors all move from studio to studio, only settling at one studio for the amount of time to make one or two projects. But in the games industry most of the ‘talent’ is permanently employed, staying with the company for many years.

This is odd - in many respects the requirements are the same. Video games are expensive undertakings these days - $10-20 million to produce, millions more to market and distribute. This is still well short of the cost of a major movie, but the gap is closing.

In fact, the structure of the video game industry looks a lot like the movie industry of the 1930s. The studio system lasted until the vertical integration of the industry was stopped and a single tycoon (Hughes) stepped in. At present, much like the 1930s film industry, the video game industry has a few stars (which, in this case, are the intellectual properties like Halo or Quake), and most people in the industry are relatively anonymous.

So what will change? My guess is that it will be the rise of the talent.

At present there isn’t a single famous video game writer, and only a couple of famous ‘directors’ (the analogy isn’t perfect, of course). In fact, if you look at the industry’s Game Developer’s Choice Awards the nominations for writing, art direction and so on only mention the game, not the actual writer!

That’s slowly changing. The enthusiast press has been paying attention to the project heads for a while, and is starting to pay a lot more attention to the writers as well.

Once people know the names, the names can ask for more money. A few people can do this now, but as the media pays more attention, more people will become famous (at least in the video game world), and they’ll start to move from project to project in search of better money.

And once that happens, then the game publishers are going to start to look a lot more like Hollywood - they own the IP for some of the series, and they bankroll the whole thing. But the people making the games aren’t usually tied to any one publisher, and they move around a lot more than is the case now.

And this will be a really good thing for games, because the best talent will be recognised appropriately, and the best projects will attract the best people.