How many Jan-Michaels does it take to save the Universe?
Why Can’t I Decide What Content I See? Failbook? Failboat!
(*sigh*). Yes, another rant on Crapbook… I know, I know… “get a life already“.
I recently read this article about how Facebook has changed it’s logarithms for what it decides is shown in your news feed. How it tailors your feed based on what it thinks you find most interesting, gives each post a calculated “rank” and all the different factors that go into calculating that. And of course, where there’s ranking logarithms there’s SEO marketers trying to figure out how to spam content into your feed, in front of your face, regardless of whether you might actually be interested or not. After all, that is the ultimate goal of marketing, right?
Now, I’m not talking about the ads that are shown along side your feed. I’m talking about the content that actually finds it’s way into your feed. This can come in two forms: “suggested posts”, pages you have never before “liked” but Facebook’s filters thinks you would, and filtering in or out posts from pages you have liked and even posts your real life friends make. The later being what actually puts me off.
Yes, your Facebook news feed is a highly filtered and calculated list. I’ve sometimes noticed that I haven’t seen any recent posts from a particular person and I start to wonder, “huh, I wonder what happened to Joe Smith? Is He dead?” So, I pop on over to his page only to find out that nope, he’s very much alive and has been posting all sorts of things, I just haven’t been seeing them in my feed. You see, Facebook selectively filters your friends list to show posts from the last 50 people you’ve interacted with, then selects posts from other friends based on the content and whether Facebook thinks it’s something you might be interested in.
I assume this is done to make more room for those suggested posts you might be interested in. Well, in fact you’re probably not interested and, in fact, may be downright against. This is a complaint I hear allot from friends and people I follow. The vegan who, because she liked some page related to food, gets span for the local steak house. The person who posted some comment on a political figures page whom their against, now gets suggestions to like pages from that group. Yeah, no thank you.
Facebook apparently looks at up to 100,000 different criteria when deciding what to put into your feed in order to create the “best newspaper in the world” (Zuckerbergs quote). Seriously, it does not need to be this complicated. If that is really your goal Zuckerberg, then it really comes down to these simple rules:
- Show me posts from the pages I like. Stop trying to figure out if I would like it or not. If I liked the page, chances are I will like what they are posting. If not, let me decide to block them.
- If I friend someone, show me their posts. Usually I don’t friend someone if I don’t want to keep up somewhat with what they are up to. This might not include just the last 50 people I’ve interacted with either. Again, if someone is posting things I don’t want to see, I’ll go ahead and block them on my own, thanks.
Twitter is an example of a working version of this (I really wish more of my close friends were on there). If I follow someone, I see all their posts. If I follow a product, I see those posts. Granted, this means that if I follow more than a couple dozen accounts then my feed can be rather huge. However, twitter offers lists, allowing you to group various accounts together (you don’t even have to be following the accounts in the group) to organize those tweets that you really want to see versus those that just fill up your feed. The thing here is, and where it is better than Facebook, I get to decide who goes in what list. And yes, Facebook also allows you to create groups but it is primarily for applying privacy settings to the posts you make, and feeds in those lists are still subject to filtering.
All in all, I think it’s time I really put more of my online social energies into Google+. Of course, it has it’s own set of issues.
Related articles
- What you should know about Facebook’s News Feed algorithm (girlwiththemarketingdegree.wordpress.com)
- Facebook’s News Feed Ranking Uses 100,000 Weighing Factors (news.softpedia.com)
- What the Latest Facebook News Feed Changes Mean for Your Business (socialmediatoday.com)
Naoki Urasawa’s Monster
A couple of weeks back I finally finished the Monster series anime. The fact that it only took me about a week to finish all 74 episodes is either testament to how awesome it is, or a sign that I need to start taking on some more projects here to occupy my time. I know this is somewhat an oldie… I’ve heard allot of good things about it, I’ve just never taken the time to watch it. Until now that is and let me tell you I am very glad that I did. I was, at first, afraid that it wasn’t going to live up to the reviews I’ve read – it certainly did. Written by Naoki Urasawa – known for his intricate manga series, and produced by Madhouse Studios (of Death Note fame, among many others), Monster is a great anime take on the classic horror / mystery style story. Here’s a trailer:
I think this is my new favorite anime to tell you the truth. It differs from others in that it’s a classic horror / mystery style anime, or Seinen. Despite it’s name, there’s no real “monsters”, strange creatures, giant robots etc. It’s in a very realistic setting and also very story based, which is typical for Seinen. It’s definitely a slow burner, being 74 episodes at about 22 minuets each, but like a good book that is hard to put down, I found it very hard not to watch just one more episode. And then just one more… And maybe just one more (suddenly realizing the sun has started to rise…). If you like a really good story-based series as much as I do, I definitely recommend this one – if you haven’t already seen it!
The story starts off in 1986, a divided Germany before the destruction of the Berlin wall. Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a neurosurgeon from Japan currently practicing at Eisler Memorial Hospital in Düsseldorf, Germany and is considered to be the best in the country. He is the head of Sugary and is favored by the chief of medicine, even poised to marry his daughter Eva Heinemann. One day, Tenma is pulled from a surgery on a woman’s husband to treat a more hi-profile patient, an opera singer who has suffered a brain trauma. Though the signer lives, the woman’s husband dies. She confronts Tenma hysterical, asking him why he abandoned her husband to die, why he didn’t perform surgery on him since he was first. This encounter makes Tenma start to ponder whether he had done the right thing in following the directors orders and operating on the singer instead.
After some time, Tenma is called in on another emergency surgery. Two young kids, twin brother and sister who had just witnessed their foster parents murdered were brought in to the emergency room at the hospital. The girl was suffering severe psychosocial trauma, but was otherwise physically alright. The brother however, had suffered a severe gunshot wound to the head and needed surgery to remove it. Just as Tenma was about to perform surgery on him, the mayor of the city suffered a stroke and was flown in to the hospital. Tenma was ordered by the director to stop the surgery on the boy and concentrate on the Mayor. Tenma however, certain that the boy would die if he did not perform the surgery, disobeyed the directors orders and operated on the him instead, letting other surgeons handle the Mayor. As a result. the boy lived but the mayor died.
Because of his disobedience to the director, Temna is stripped of his title as chief of surgery and demoted to the lowest doctor position in the hospital. Without his status and title his faience, Eva, rather curly breaks off their engagement. Tenma however, undeterred by this, carries on as a regular doctor, standing behind his decision to save the kids life, and that the director and his latch-key doctors were selfish uncaring jerks that might as well be “better off dead”… Well, a week later the director as well as several other prominent doctors are found dead, poisoned by contaminated candies. The boy Tenma had saved and his sister have also vanished.
Nine years later, Tenma has made a comeback. He is once again the chief of surgery at Eisler Memorial Hospital and is living by the code that “every life is created equal and deserves to be treated equally”. He no longer puts hi-profile cases above anyone else and he thanks the boy he saved for making him realize this.
However, there is an ongoing string of cereal murders is taking place across Germany and when Tenma treats a patient suspected of having ties to the killer, he will come face to face with Johan Liebert, the charismatic but psychopathic mastermind behind the murders, a man of pure evil who also just happens to be the young boy whose life he saved nine years prior. This attracts the suspicions of Inspector Heinrich Lunge who believes Tenma must be somehow linked to the murders. From this point on, Tenmas life will never be quite the same.
Like I had mentioned earlier, what really makes this such a great show is the extensive storyline and plot twists. Just when you think you have the whole story figured out and are wondering how it’s going to remain interesting for another 50 episodes, a new character comes in and a new story arch starts to develop, changing everything. There are some episodes that some have called “filler”, they aren’t. Every episode adds detail to the story so that you can see the whole picture when a new twist comes along.
The character development in this series is also excellent and rather prudent. Every seeming unimportant character winds up playing a larger role later in the story, especially as things start to change later on in the series. There will be times where the main story will leave you hanging, wondering if someone is dead or alive when the story suddenly forks off on someone new. However, it always meets back up with the main story line, adding to it to make it even more intense.
The “look and feel” of the series is very fitting to era in which it takes place. The older style of animation adds to the sensation of being set in the early ’90s. Character appearance also fits the personality of each person within the story flawlessly.
Again though, and I can’t iterate this enough, what makes this series is the story. If you haven’t already seen it you definitely should. You’ll find it hard not to forget sleep, work and social obligations and just keep watching. It used to be available on Hulu, but it has recently been pulled (because Hulu sucks hard when it comes to having any kind of selection whatsoever), but it’s on Netflix instance queue. If these aren’t an option (say, due to local restrictions) and you wish to watch, message me for alternative places where it’s streamed.
Photos and Character Bio Links from MyAnimeList.
Featured Image by mick347.
Related articles
- Revisiting Monster (Overview) (otakuovertherainbow.wordpress.com)
- Viz bringing back Urasawa’s ‘Monster’ with omnibus editions (robot6.comicbookresources.com)
- Urasawa Naoki Talks with Top European Artists (thedorkreview.blogspot.com)
Big Daddy, Little Sister – Bioshock Alt Art and a Little Backstory
Just a small collection of Big Daddy and Little Sister alt art images I’ve stumbled across somewhere on the internet recently. In honer of how much I absolutely loved the original Bioshock, I’m going to incorporate these as my current background and header themes for a while.
Note: I have found most of these images on various image sharing boards on the internet. I have noted the original artist on images where known. If you are the creator of one of the “unknown artist” images, send me a link to your works and I will be happy to credit you.
Going through these images has reminded me about how truly amazing this game was and how much I miss it. The whole Big Daddy and Little Sister saga from the original Bioshock was one of the elements that gave that game some of the awesome feel it had. Now, I’m not going to go into a full review of the game here but the basic premise of these guys, if you are unfamiliar with the series is this:
The game is set in the 1960’s where the player Jack, after barely escaping with his life in a violent plane crash over the mid-Atlantic ocean, swims to an estranged lighthouse, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Once inside he discovers a subversive pod that transports him to the underwater city of Rapture.
Rapture, a city on the ocean floor founded in the 1940’s by a man named Andrew Ryan, where “the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small“. Without restrictions, science here has flourished however, not necessarily by humane methods. The discovery ADAM, a mutant substance found in certain previously undiscovered Sea Slugs that reside at the bottom of the ocean, has lead to the development Plasmids, a substance that can genetically alter and mutate a person to give telekinetic “magical” control over elemental powers such as fire and lightning. Having this power however, comes at a costly price as the ADAM slowly deteriorates the body and mind leading the citizens of the city who consume it to slowly become insane and distorted unless they can keep consuming more ADAM. The people of the city were slowly becoming crazed mutated versions of themselves, called Splicers.
The need to mass produce ADAM became ever more a necessity. Experiments, done rather curly, found young girls had the proper metabolism to be able to regenerate new ADAM – and even recycle ADAM from the dead – by ingesting the Sea Slug, basically turning them into living ADAM producing machines. A geneticist by the name of Brigid Tenenbaum gathered many young girls from around the city, infused them with the slug and mentally conditioned them to harvest ADAM and thus creating the Little Sisters.
The effects of ADAM were twice as hard on the Little Sisters though, and forever locked their minds and bodies in a twisted childish state, never growing old and becoming more creepy in apprentice over time.
As they years went by, Rapture eventually fell into a Civil War due mostly to a policital fude between Andrew Ryan and rival Frank Fontaine, who wanted to overthrow Ryan and seize power in the city. During this time, the Little Sisters were set loose upon the streets of Rapture. At first, most of the citizens found the girls to be creepy and distrusting and would have nothing to do with them. The girls took to creating small tunnels throughout the city to travel and hide in. However as the city started to turn in on itself due to the chaos of the war and once people found out the girls were basically walking ADAM factories, they took to hunting them down and killing the girls for their precious ADAM. In order to protect them, Dr. Tenenbaum created the Big Daddy: A human fused inside of a giant armor suite and genetically programmed to protect the girls at all costs.
By the time Jack (you, the player) reach the city, everything has turned to chaos. The citizens, almost all now splicers and so far gone that just about no amount of sanity is left, are all out for themselves. You are befriended by an unknown voice on a radio box, named Atlas, who pleads you to help him rescue his family and in turn he will help you. In order to do so however, you will have to splice yourself and get more powerful by consuming ADAM. The only way to get ADAM is to kill a Little Sister and her protective Big Daddy.
Luckily for the girls however, Dr. Tenenbaum meets up with you early on in the game and gives you a special Plasmid that, at the price of obtaining less ADAM, you can actual set the girl free from the curse of the Little Sister, transforming her back into a normal girl. You do though, still have to first fight the Big Daddy, which is no joy ride that’s for sure.
There’s allot more to the game than than the Little Sister saga, and is really only a taste of the ultimate bizarre creepiness that is Bioshock. The saga adds a moral choice to the game: weather you become as evil as the rest of the citizens by going around killing the girls to get more powerful or show some compaction at the cost of ultimate power by freeing them. Below is a video showing off various ways of defeating a Big Daddy and freeing the Little Sister. It’s really better to see than to try and explain.
This video shows just how creepy the Little Sisters are and also how violent and in most cases, extremely tough it can be to defeat a Big Daddy (although the player in this vid uses some tactical tricks), who always accompanies one.
Anyway, like I said, although the Big Daddy / Little Sister saga is a big part of the game, it is only a fraction of the overall creepy awesomeness that is the original Bioshock. I am sad that this is the only one of the series that I’ve been able to play all the way through due to recent lack of decent hardware. Sigh…
If you haven’t ever played it, I highly recommend it! Check it out!
Most images and expanded content links courtesy of the Bioshock Wikia page.
Definition of “Awesome”
Look up “awesome” in dictionary. Book starts playing video of Col. Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity… from SPACE.
This is just a test…
A slow so-long to crackbook…
It’s been a while coming now. Crackbook used to be fun – make a few new friends, re-connect with old ones… talk real topics, have conversations… collaborate both professionally and socially… could personalize your profile with the crap you liked, interact with both those that shared your internists, or “politely” (*ahem*) flame those that didn’t. It wasn’t really any better than MySpace, except that it had games! Aww yah, games?! I’m in! And well, several projects I was working on at the time linked with social media, so originally my crackbook account was just a test for things I was working on. Little did I know how it would grow, and grow it did…
At the time, it was great! But these days, it just seems to be the same repetitive posts of mostly the same old carp. Because it’s not about the content anymore, but how many “hits” they can get to their page … their linked site where they can collect those links into ad revenue… It sucks now.
Anyway… I don’t mean to bitch… well actually I do! But alas, I am looking for a new place where my online identity can reside outside of crackbook. I’ve tried Live Journal (again), sucks now. Most other “blog” sites do to, so I’m trying out wordpress… will see.
So, what I will likely post here will be geeky stuff. Tech tutorials, game stuff, interesting science facts, with a bit of … er, maybe Anime, *good* movies… perhaps some good TV (though, hard to find these days). If you like anything I post here, then follow me here or on Twitter, my new home. Otherwise, move along, nothing to see here… 😛
Thankfully, there is only one person following this post atm… I’ll promise better in the future!
This is going to be a work in progress…
… as I am transitioning from blogger as there dashboard keeps making my brain bleed. I’m still unpacking here but will invite everyone over for a big housewarming party once everything is set up. Let me know, I’ll send you an invitation.
-J
JΛΠIMUZΞ ヤニムズ 