[Cyberyeti]

A postscript to a previous post of mine (#301 in this thread):

Quote

NCSoft.

NCSoft are a Korean MMO publisher that know what they're doing in the Korean market but are clueless when dealing with westerners. They took over and probably at the time saved City of Heroes, a MMO I've played for more than 8 years. Out of the blue, a month ago they sacked all the staff and disbanded the US studio and said the game was closing in 3 months as it didn't fit the new company vision. Earlier in the day, the developers were talking about what their plans were for the next 2 years, so this was a huge shock to them too. The game is still profitable. They won't now sell the IP, even though several consortia want to buy it and NCSoft will never use it again.

Efforts are continuing to save the game, but there's little we can do if they won't release the IP although it looks like there's going to be a serious fan led attempt to build our own superhero MMO as the others are crap. The campaign on social media however to save the game is a new phenomenon in the industry. A petition with more than 20,000 signatures was started and a vigil was held (and thoroughly reported in the MMO internet press) where we managed to fill 2 servers and overflow onto a third. It will be interesting to see if any western studio will deal with NCSoft or any other Korean publisher in the future, as there is a real sense of outrage among the MMO community and press, and a growing group who won't touch anything NCSoft has anything to do with.

Well something really strange has happened. 3 groups of ex CoH players got together (2 as volunteers, one professionals reskinning another game) to produce separate attempts at making a successor game. Ours (we are missingworldsmedia, our game is City of Titans, I suspect I'm not allowed to post links to another commercial organisation here) came to kickstarter Wednesday morning. We've so far as I type raised $184K of our $320K goal in about 41 hours of the 33 day KS period, with amusingly some of the ex-CoH devs chipping in too. I'm amazed and humbled that as well as the lower value pledges, 20+ people have trusted us with $1000-$5000 of their money.

UPDATE: Less than 6 days in and we have 331K/320K already pledged, we are funded and going after stretch goals.

[gwnn]

The lack of a proper off button on phones/tablets.

The same manual for two products, mine being inevitably the cheaper one.

[barmar]

gwnn, on 2013-October-08, 00:38, said:

The lack of a proper off button on phones/tablets.

My Kindle Fire has an off button.

Quote

The same manual for two products, mine being inevitably the cheaper one.

Or how about a manual that only works when you have Internet access? What if what you want to look up is related to connecting to the Internet?

[onoway]

barmar, on 2013-October-08, 11:26, said:

Or how about a manual that only works when you have Internet access? What if what you want to look up is related to connecting to the Internet?

Or a help phone number which refers you to the internet address!

What got me today though, was cancelling a program. They charge your card within minutes of buying but say it can take up to 15 business days to refund.

[mike777]

onoway, on 2013-October-08, 20:53, said:

Or a help phone number which refers you to the internet address!

What got me today though, was cancelling a program. They charge your card within minutes of buying but say it can take up to 15 business days to refund.

You are young....15 days sounds fast.....I am old.

[Vampyr]

Dove Soap adverts that pretend that Dove is not soap.

[Trinidad]

Vampyr, on 2013-October-11, 18:27, said:

Dove Soap adverts that pretend that Dove is not soap.

I don't have the composition of Dove Soap at hand, but technically they are probably correct.

A soap is a salt of a fatty acid (e.g. sodium stearate or potassium oleate). Many soaps are good surfactants which means to non-chemists that they can be used to remove grease when washing with water. But there are many surfactants that are not soaps.

So it is perfectly possible to make a soap free "soap bar" from these other surfactants.

Rik

[Vampyr]

Trinidad, on 2013-October-12, 00:17, said:

So it is perfectly possible to make a soap free "soap bar" from these other surfactants.

Wow, I didn't know that.

[barmar]

One of the columnists in my town newspaper wrote this week about pet peeves, in response to a podcast about a book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. She'd started making a list of her pet peeves.

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I"). Then she remembered a time when her daughter came home from school after getting into a fight with her best friend, because the daughter had inherited the habit of correcting people's grammar and had pulled it on her friend, who found it annoying. Luckily, the girls eventually laughed it off, but still...

After recalling that incident, she tossed the list she was making.

[Vampyr]

barmar, on 2013-October-12, 21:12, said:

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I").

This is a pet peeve of a lot of people I know.

[kenberg]

Last night Friendly Persuasion was on TCM. I had never seen it so I thought I would give it a try. Gary Cooper and all were portraying Quakers, so they said "thee" a lot. I didn't hear any "thou"s, although I am pretty sure some of the "thee"s should have been "thou"s. . I found the movie unwatchable so maybe there was a "thou" or two later on, I can't say.
When I suggested after fifteen minutes or so that we try something else my wife's reaction was "What took thee so long?".

[GreenMan]

barmar, on 2013-October-12, 21:12, said:

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I"). Then she remembered a time when her daughter came home from school after getting into a fight with her best friend, because the daughter had inherited the habit of correcting people's grammar and had pulled it on her friend, who found it annoying. Luckily, the girls eventually laughed it off, but still...

After recalling that incident, she tossed the list she was making.

Being an editor by trade (and a pretty competent one by all accounts), I used to peeve like that on grammar mistakes and so forth. Somewhere along the way I saw the same light your columnist saw. Now my biggest peeve is other peevers. Especially, as often happens, when the peever is wrong and the target has made no mistake.

[barmar]

IMO, the only people who have the right (and perhaps even duty) to correct others' grammar unsolicited are teachers with their students, and parents with their children. And maybe also vice versa. In most other cases, it's just rude and condescending.

BTW, the completion of the story about the little girls is that after the daughter corrected her friend's mistake, the friend said "You think you're smarter than me?", and the daughter said "That should be 'smarter than I'" -- and that's when they started laughing, because it became so "meta". Not to mention that practically everyone says "smarter than me".

[gwnn]

gwnn, on 2013-August-15, 12:20, said:

Babies on the airplane. No, I don't care what I did when I was their age and yes, I know the parents have to put up with them for most of the day. I still reserve my right to be annoyed when they decide to cry like their life depended upon it for the whole flight. My favourite scene was with a 5-yo girl who sat with his dad next to me and wouldn't buckle her seatbelt at takeoff. When simply ignoring her dad's nice and reasonable arguments was no longer enough for her she decided that shouting in my ears was the next measure to be taken.

http://i.imgur.com/zwwPo.jpg

[Fluffy]

I think if my daughter decides that screaming in my ear is a good idea I will slap her.

[blackshoe]

Fluffy, on 2013-November-08, 10:58, said:

I think if my daughter decides that screaming in my ear is a good idea I will slap her.

In this country, if you do that in public, you're likely to have Child Services take the kid away from you and the cops put you in jail. Of course, in many ways the US today is insane.

[phikappaph]

gwnn, on 2012-January-17, 07:26, said:

please enter a password between 8 and 12 characters long but which includes at least three of the following four groups:
(...)
please do not use intelligible words, any variations thereof, date of birth, passwords from other sites, anything that has anything to do with you.

DO NOT WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORD ANYWHERE.

isn't this getting out of control?

anyway, what is your pet peeve?

Funny you should start with that. A little off color which is needed for the story but an absolutely hilarious email was sent to me about passwords and something I have an issue with every time I have to reset a password:
-----------------------------------------------
Resetting The Password


"Sorry, your password has been in use for 30 days and has expired - you must register a new one."

roses

"Sorry, too few characters."

pretty roses

"Sorry, you must use at least one numerical character."

1 pretty rose

"Sorry, you cannot use blank spaces."

1prettyrose

"Sorry, you must use at least 10 different characters."

1*****prettyrose

"Sorry, you must use at least one upper case character."

1*****prettyrose

"Sorry, you cannot use more than one upper case character consecutively."

1*****PrettyRose

"Sorry, you must use no fewer than 20 total characters."

1*****PrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessRight*****Now.

"Sorry, you cannot use punctuation."

1*****PrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDontGiveMeAccessRight*****Now

"Sorry, that password is already in use."

[broze]

People often moan about others having their headphones too loud on public transport. I don't really understand this. The journey isn't going to be too long and it's not like there aren't other noises! This just comes across as intolerant.

However what I CANNOT stand is people with excessively loud headphones *in libraries*. Why so loud??? It's already very quiet and so it's just inconsiderate.

[mycroft]

If I get distracted because I can *almost* figure out what you're listening to, it's really annoying even if there are other noises.
If I can hear your thud thud thud *through* what I'm listening to, it's really annoying even if there are other noises (note, if I can hear your half of the cellphone conversation through what I'm listening to, it's just as bad)
If I'm reading, that kind of niggling "I almost have it" noise is impossible to tune out, even as I can tune out conversations I can understand.

So, yeah, I get that one.

[barmar]

The book I mentioned earlier has lots of discussions about why certain sounds, like someone talking on a cellphone, are more annoying than others. In the case of a cellphone, part of the reason is that you're hearing a "halfalogue" -- you can only hear half of the conversation, and this frustrates the part of your brain that can't help trying to follow what it's overhearing, but it's confusing.

Loud headphones are similar -- you can almost hear it, and this grabs the attention of your brain, but then it gets frustrated trying to make it out. Also, some frequency ranges tend to leak out more than others. What results is often a buzz, similar to insect noises, that we're instinctively sensitive to.