Clone Forums: Part Two

After the my Original Entry on clone forums sparked discussion here and elsewhere, I decided to prove to people that one could make an alternative to the GMC which wasn't a clone. And here it is:
The Alternative GMC

It's basic, I know. But it's there to make a point, not to look stunning and attract a lot of members. At the moment I'm not intending to use it as a proper forum, but I may change my mind. Feel free to comment in it on issues which affect you and your opinions of it. Be nice. If anyone seriously offends me, I'll edit their post to dumb it down a bit. I hope you can be courteous to me as I tried to be to you.

Please take some time to take in what the Alternative GMC has to offer. I feel you may find it of use.

Horationisms: The Craze Begins

As an avid viewer of CSI:Miami, arguably one of the best police-based programs on our screens, I am particularly fond of Horatio Caine, and his little quips.

In case you are unaware of what I'm talking about, I'll explain it to you. At the start of every episode, just before the titles, Horatio will make a very cheesy comment about the Crime Scene whilst slowly removing his sunglasses. It's the same every single episode. It might as well be in his contract to do so. (In fact, it probably is!) The lines are similar to many in James Bond.

Due to this, I'm trying to start a new craze: Horationisms. Essentially, you create a phrase that could be used on the show. Here are some examples:

(After finding a body in a climbing centre) "Looks like he be-laying forever more."
(After finding a body in a comedy club) "Looks like he had his last laugh."
(After finding a body with a spike through it) "What a piercing blow."

I'd love to see what you can come up with, readers.

How not to be Loved

I made a slight faux-pas today. My teacher overheard this conversation I simulated between our headmaster and a Year 7:

"How are you boy?"
(Shaking) "Fine, thankyou Sir"
"Well, let's get this other with. Bend over and drop your trousers."


I just hope he doesn't report it. I don't fancy being expelled right now :P

Wannabe Forums and my Terrible Hate

I hate seeing all these wannabe forums which are obvious rip-offs of others. They assimilate the original forum and then advertise themselves as being so much better. Which generally, they aren't.

As you may discover later in this blog, I am quite a regular user of Mark Overmar's Game Maker, which is a very useful tool when creating games...as you might expect. The main place to go for users of Game Maker is the GMC, or Game Maker Community. This forum provides help with programming, sounds and graphics and is altogether very useful. Sadly, it seems that many are envious of the GMC and those in charge of it. These people then decide to create forums which are exact replicas of the GMC, containing the same boards and sometimes rules. They are then all joined by the same few people who post the same games on there so that every copy-cat forum you go on contains exactly the same games. So they are all identical to each other...and the GMC.

The real problem I put to people who make these forums is "why?". There is absolutely no reason for them to create them. A recent response I received was "why not?". Can you people not understand that that response is not valid?!? It makes no sense. You cannot seriously counter a question with the same question turned around. Not as a valid argument. Never (though someone may later disprove this).

I have a absolute hate of these forums. I mean that. I don't feel like "Oh, well. It's annoying, but what can you do?" because I know that I can do something and that if I keep telling people then maybe, just maybe, they'll get the picture and stop creating the clones.

I am infuriated by two (yes, only two!) other things. The first is that other people don't notice what I am saying. Take, for example, the Lar Game Forums a particular pet peeve of mine. Let us look at their structure and compare it to the GMC's (in brackets) . First, a "News" board ("Announcements"). Then varying degrees of questions and answers (exactly like in the GMC). Next there are "Creation" ("Game Maker Creations"), "Works in Progress" ("Work in Progress"), graphics and sounds "Resources" (Same as GMC) and finally "Whatever" (if you want to talk off topic, go to a forum designed for chatting) and "Your Website" ("Web Site Announcements").

I don't mean to pick on Lar Games particularly but hey, it's convenient. They are in many ways identical to the GMC. There is no point using them. Yet, despite this, they have 617 articles. 617! Many of which are duplicated on the GMC itself.

The final point in my purge is that the owners of the forums fail to notice what they're doing wrong. To use Lar Games again, I posted a topic asking why they had created a clone. It was promptly locked. This is the case wherever I tell people off. They just tell me to piss off or say I'm jealous. Excuse me? I'm jealous? How can that compare to the fact that you have a pixel perfect replica of the GMC?

But anyway, I'm off now. It seems that there are more n00bs creating forums as we speak and I'm off to explain this to them. Bye!

EDIT: See here for an explanation of the Alternative GMC, a forum for Game Maker without the cloning.

"...We didn't Need to Shoot the Commercial"

I'm at a loss to find out the name of the product or the women which this advert centres around, so I'm hoping you'll know which one I mean.

"[Person's name] came in to apply for an actress job in an advert. Her skin looked so great that we didn't need to shoot it."

I am paraphrasing, of course. But anyhoo the fact remains. This advert exists and should be destroyed. It doesn't work. Her skin does not look good. It looks awful. All blootchy and...eww. Not cool. I don't like it. I personally would thus avoid this product. The advert then goes on to show her pointing out how she recommended it to two people. Yes, let me re-iterate that. Two people. That is...stupendous. What a feat. It must be good. Except, wait. One of those people was her mum. The other was a friend. Either, I deduce, she only has one friend or she doesn't like this particular one and wants her to have blotchy skin too.

This may, like everything else, seem a vile attack on one particular advert but I promise you it isn't. I am just trying to make the point that advertisers are trying to be smart and failing horribly. Sometimes it works, I'll admit. They aim at a more human approach, to allow the viewer to really associate with this woman and her skin. This advert though, has missed its target completely and, like others of the past, fallen into the endless pit of Advert Blunders. I just hope that they can come up with something clever next time which actually makes people want the product, rather than avoid it.

They're Gonna Taste Great...again

Oh, how I've missed that young boy and his irritating little song about Kellogg's Frosties. Fortunately for me, he's back! Though it may not be the same boy. But still. A new advert! A new song!

After the first advert, there were several rumours that the boy in it had committed suicide since he had been bullied afterwards. I believe we can cast off these rumours as false now due to two things: 1) If it's the same boy, he evidently isn't dead. 2) If he did kill himself I doubt that even Kellogg's would allow themselves to reproduce the advert and lead another boy to suicide. Though I may be wrong, obviously. These large corporations have done much worse in the past...

Timecop

I was fortunate enough to catch Timecops on ITV 4 the other day. It's about cops...who can travel in time. As my initial prejudice had summised, it was quite honestly awful. It was a clever, if obvious and common, idea. But it was so damned confusing. As so many Sci-Fi films and TV series are willing to point out, changing something in the past will damage the future. Timecop was also happy to point this out to us. Normally in such circumstances it's something simple, like the time traveller accidently scarring himself and said scar growing across his face. But Timecop, evidently aiming either to confuse people or to draw in a more intelligent audience when that one step further.

Warning! Spoiler!

I hate to give plots away, but this one barely deserves the word.

It seems that a thief has gone back in time to aid himself in a crime he did in the past so that he doesn't get caught. The Timecops thus go back to stop him. They take with them an old cop who was in the initial enquiry. Immediatly you can tell he's a baddie because the program is so damned obivious. Anyhow they go back and, to cut a long (and tedious) story short, the older version of the cop finds his younger self and then gets shot in front of him. His limp body then disappears through the time/space continuan or whatever.

Now what I don't understand is how the hell this works. I can't begin to understand it because I quite simply don't understand it. I am at a loss to what happened, how this affects anything or whatever the hell else. If he dies, then he wouldn't disappear, he would lie there, dead. Then the cops would do a DNA swab (It's 1977 but I doubt ABC would be smart enough to know that they didn't have such techniques then), find out that the body belongs to the cop, who's younger self would be standing next to them, and they'd have a fit.

As you can probably tell, I'm babbling. I'm scared and confused so this is what I do, I babble. So here I'll leave it. The Timecops have returned to now, and they're here to stay. Now we can just hope that they don't try and remake it, and confuse poor people like me even further. I can just about comprehend Dr Who, but I'm afraid the Timecops left me behind in 2007.

Welcome

Welcome to the Public Life Blog.

I understand that many of you may wonder whose Life I'm making public and possibly whether it could be you. Sadly, poor reader, I'm not interested in tabloid showbiz type stuff. I am in fact talking about lives which are already public, or life in general. I was going to call this Life Commentator, but that was too long. I then pondered with calling it Real Life, but that was already taken. So here we are, in Public Life - Your connection to the real world.

I hope you enjoy the blog which will follow and the posts which I make. Please don't take offence if I insult your country, religion or suchlike. I'll be making a fair hack at most people...though Americans may be quite a common feature. It's worth pointing out immediately though that I am essentially always talking about one person. I understand that not every American is a gun-toting maniac and that not every Christian is trying to impose his or her views on me.

I may be contraversial, but that's always a matter of opinion.