Just a quick bit of housekeeping here, folks, nothing much to see. I'm not used to being popular, so I'm a tad mystified by the flow of Game Center friend requests that arrive on my iThings every day from people I don't know, and who, to be honest, I have very little interest in being pretend internet buddies with. I'm 44, y'know? I very much enjoy challenging personal friends, professional acquaintances or WoSland readers at games, but not some random adolescent from Bumhole, Nebraska.
The big problem with the internet, though, is that even many otherwise sane and decent people still insist on using absurd playground nicknames to identify themselves rather than proper human names, or at least – as in my own case with Game Center – the recognisable name of their app/business/whatever. So a request from "sUP3rKEWLd00d__87" might, horrendously, turn out to be from a person I actually do know in some way and would (inexplicably) wish to be "friends" with.
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Category
iOS, navel-gazing
It’s been a pretty big year for WoSland, with average traffic more than doubling in the year, all previous individual records smashed, a new name, a spinoff site and a fancy redesign bringing your favourite modern culture chronicle visually into something approaching the 21st century. We’ve slacked off a bit in December on account of some exciting videogame-development commitments and the holidays and stuff, but rest assured we’ll be back in full effect in the New Year. Meanwhile, here are the old year’s top 20 features (ranked in order of most views) in case you missed any of them.
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Category
navel-gazing
So I had a little go at the BBC Lab’s morality test, a large-scale experiment which is designed to try to formulate a snapshot of the morality of modern Britain. Who wants to take a guess at what turned out to be my most prominent moral dimension?
Click below to find out!
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Category
analysis, navel-gazing, society
Alert readers may recall a few weeks back I gave an interview to a blog written by a bunch of – well, let's call them "games journalists" for want of a more accurate term. A straightforward enough business, you might think – ask questions, get replies, publish, done. It didn't work out quite that simply.
While the interview caused a huge hit spike on the site and an unprecedented number of comments (over 100 compared to their usual three or four), this sudden influx of visitors and attention caused great consternation among some of the blog's editors other than the charming and talented young writer who'd done the interview.
Two of them – a pair of particularly lily-livered Future Publishing corporate drones – whined all over Twitter and elsewhere that the (incredibly mild) arguments in the comments were so beastly and upsetting that they were considering deleting the entire site, rather than attract all these awful, horrid people (ie, readers) to it by speaking to such a nasty man.
Long story short, to spare the hurt feelings of the less-popular stories on their blog (which is to say, all of them) the interview has been quietly deleted. So I've retrieved it and posted it below for posterity.
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Category
culture salvage, navel-gazing
If people really can’t behave in other comment threads and insist on derailing them with irrelevant and disruptive posts, as a last resort the comments in question will be moved here. People are also free to use it for general off-topic chat.
Category
navel-gazing
