Archive for February, 2006

Feb
26

Toy Story meets Requiem for a Dream

Posted by on Sunday, 26 February, 2006

Well, it’s been a while since the wonderful The Shining Redux mashup trailer, and although it has spurred a lot of copycat mashups, none have been particularly good, in my opinion.

..until now that is.

Toy Story 2:Requiem is a mashup between Toy Story 2 and Requiem for a Dream. The end result is simply mesmerizing!

(via BoingBoing)

Why don’t you also check out the original remixed Shining trailer that started this Internet craze. Here and here.

Feb
26

World of Warcraft must be designed by a Japanese!

Posted by on Sunday, 26 February, 2006

Here’s an interesting article debating whether playing World of Warcraft teaches you “wrong” things about life and therefore is not fun, even harmful! (Via Waxy)

Reading it, it ocurred to me, the designer of the WOW game system and rules must be Japanese! Look at these snips:

1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill. If you invest more time than someone else, you “deserve” rewards. People who invest less time “do not deserve” rewards.

Hmm… Where have I heard that philosophy before? Ah, yes, at almost every Japanese company. Invest enough time in the company, and you shall reap economic benefits, no matter your skills!

3. Group > Solo. You can forget self-reliance, because you won’t get far in World of Warcraft without a big guild. By design, playing alone (even if you are the best player in the world) will get you worse loot than if you always play in 5-man dungeons.

Now this is getting really scary – this is a description of the backbone of the Japanese societal structure. The group is the smallest building block of Japanese society – not the individual.

So I must draw the conclusion that the gaming rules and philosophy for advancing within the game has been set by a group of Japanese company employees.

Feb
24

Jason Kottke switches to skyscraper ads

Posted by on Friday, 24 February, 2006

A-List blogger Jason Kottke has recently given up his “pro” blogger status by stopping his micropatronage (i.e. donations from subscribing readers) and settled for a more “normal” blogging approach, namely advertisements.

Check out the new look of Kottke’s site here.

(via Waxy.org)




[EDIT] In case you didn’t get it, this was sort of an inside joke by Mark Wilkie. Kottke is also catching some flak from other directions for what some call his “abandoning” of his patrons.

Feb
24

Lost in Japan – now with tags

Posted by on Friday, 24 February, 2006

Well, I fell for the hype, I added tags to the site – or rather, the usability of the site will hopefully increase by introducing them. I didn’t want to litter the site with lots of categories, especially for subjects I might not write so much about. Further, there might be some posts which are totally off-subject too. Just putting them into the “General” Category and relying on the keywords that might be in the actual text, it will be pretty hard for people to find the post through search engines etc.

For this purpose, I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis which this far seems to be doing an OK job. Next task is for me tol add tags to all archived posts, which I will do when I have some spare time.

[EDIT] Ok, call me a hypocrite if you want (see my old post about tags in cloud format) but I added a tag archive displaying the tags in, you knew it, cloud format. It’s just that there isn’t a better format that I can think of right now. Sure you can have a plain old list, but it wouldn’t be as interested. Reach the tag archive here: http://lostinjapan.groth.hm/taglist/

Feb
24

Finally Olympic Gold for Japan – and Sweden (again)

Posted by on Friday, 24 February, 2006

GOLD

Shizuka Arakawa

Finally Japan got a medal in the Torino olympics! Shizuka Arakawa blew away the competition (Sasha Cohen, and Irina Slutskaya aomng others) to finish on top.

Oh and by the way, we Swedes are getting a bit spoiled with our own athletes. The Swedish women’s Curling team took the gold, beating Switzerland in a very even and exciting match (or so I hear).

Swedish Curling team