Case in point: MegaUpload. The site was shut down in the middle of the PIPA/SOPA debate/outcry. I remain undecided whether this was hilarious inability to see past first-order thinking, blind stupidity or whether someone on the inside really didn’t want SOPA to go through and chose to pull this off to galvanise the masses against the House. The jury is still out on that one and feel free to make up your own theories.

Back on topic, though – MegaUpload, while being a data haven for people uploading films and MP3s that were occasionally in breach of copyright, was primarily a place for businesses – mostly small and medium privately-owned entreprises – to store their data so it would be safe in “The Cloud”. Their clients/customers could get at files they needed and the business didn’t have to worry about paying for terabytes of SAN storage as well as the hefty bandwidth fees that they would incur if they ran their own file service.

The fact that the SOPA/PIPA and now ACTA are giving America the power to essentially go after any site that hosts content in breach of copyright, even unknowingly, means that cloud providers are now at huge risk of liability. Either that or become private police, snooping on their users’ data, much like DropBox was accused of, despite claims by them stating that their staff had no access to user data.

Cloud providers the world over now have a decision to make: sacrifice user privacy in order to protect their own interests – and thereby likely lose a lot of business from the more privacy-sensitive clients – or close up shop.

For more information on the latest threat to net neutrality, ACTA, have a look at this:

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too!

Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

Without further ado:

So I got Skins to shoot some rough & ready clips of me flailing wildly with my poi in the hope that someone somewhere finds some new ideas!

A world where physics don't always apply

Also there are dragons.

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard about Skyrim, then just accept that there are. The whole story sort of hinges upon the return of the Dragons as being a cataclysmic, pivotal event in the world of Skyrim.

And yet, people are more afraid of them than they have any right to be.

The problem is that the dragons in Skyrim: The Game, as opposed to Skyrim: The Story are two different things entirely. In Skyrim: The Game, they dragons are undoubtedly powerful. They do fairly serious damage and take a while to kill, owing to massive amounts of HP and being able to fly.

Oh and they breathe fire.

Unfortunately, they possess the tactical ability of a baked potato. They will stay and fight to the death until their carcass lies at your feet and you’re looting it for dragon testicles to use in your latest alchemical experiments.

This is not how I would expect a race of nightmarish terrors, who haunt men’s nightmares and are the stuff of hushed legend, to behave. After I noticed this, having fought the ‘storyline dragon’, I couldn’t stop noticing it.

It’s present in pretty much any game where there are antagonists. They will all, without exception, run screaming at you and try to give you a steel-and-sorcery wedgie. It’s not noticeable for the most part, as in most games, there is a pre-determined path that the designers have chosen to have the player follow. You accept that you’re going to go through the game, murder tons of dudes, gain levels, become more powerful and eventually, anything that breathes in a vaguely querulous tone in your direction gets to die. That’s fine.

It doesn’t work as well in an open world like that of Oblivion and now Skyrim. Think about it. Imagine you are a bandit inhabiting the wildlands, eating diced rabbit and gravel pudding to survive and preying upon the occasional unwary passer-by. Self-preservation is going to be foremost in your mind. Ergo, you will not run to your death waving your cheap iron sword at a bloke who is kitted out in full armour and is carrying a blade that appears, ostensibly, to be made of the souls of the damned.

Would you fuck with this guy? Didn't think so...

OK, you’d consider it if you had some mates with bows and arrows and maybe a spellcaster or two, but not alone and certainly not toe-to-toe.

Yet this is exactly what every computer-controlled angry thing de jour does in every encounter. I will discount, for the sake of argument, the mutant rats, spiders and other critters considered to be too stupid to realise that they’re rushing head/snout/mandible-first into a major physiological reconfiguration by way of axe.

However, there is no excuse for developers not to write  some self-preservation functions into the AI that governs the ‘higher’ lifeforms, like the human enemies and packs of wolves. Having wolves hunt as a pack, wearing you down, flanking you and minimising their own risk while harrying you would make an already good game downright amazing. The immersion factor which is already fairly hight, would skyrocket.

Imagine if while fighting a dragon with a squad of soldiers, the dragon, now wounded, half flies, half limps away crushing trees and setting fire to the countryside as it does so. Your task now is to track it to its lair and finish it off. It’s now desperate and it has nowhere to run. It’ll fight you till the bitter end and not give up until either it or you are dead because it has no other choice. In the wild, the option is always there to retreat and re-group. When you fight a group of enemies, often you will find yourself backtracking down narrow corridors to spread your enemies out and give yourself the advantage.

It would help the game feel that much more thought-out if the hostile AI did the same – pull you into a hall or room where their friends were waiting with sharpened kebab skewers and fireballs.

Here’s a nifty infographic to summarise this shit.

Not all hope is lost, though. AVAAZ and a bunch of other sites are bringing people together to let the US Senate know that this bill has opposition and that people are fed up of corporations trying to stifle free speech for the purposes of profit. Sorry, that sounded far too communistic but I couldn’t think of a better way of wording that.

Here’s another great explanation of why this shit is horrible