Kickstarter is a wonderful website and has taken over as my dirty pleasure from fiverr.com (See my blogpost about fiverr).
One of my other strange, unexplanable pleasures is interesting decks of cards. I really can’t explain this one, as I don’t even play that many card games these days but I do love a good deck so I have been looking at a few on Kickstarter and I found some great ones!
Here’s a few you might be interested in:
I was inspired a recent post I read on a design website about some of the strangest things that live on this planet. I did some research and decided to call the post “Kill it with fire!” because my lord there are some horrible things out there…
Anyway, if you are eating or squeamish then probably best not to read on but for those of you with a stronger disposition hit up the read more to see some things I found.
I feel that everyone should do a top 10 list of the previous year and so here is mine. The top 10 games you should have played, and if you haven’t should pick up now as they’re probably cheaper.
In at number 10 is Dungeon Siege III. As the name would suggest, this is the third instalment in the Dungeon Siege franchise. Although I have played each Dungeon Siege I wasn’t actually aware this was coming out until the day was upon us. If I’m honest I simply purchased this game to tide me over until the grand release of Diablo III (sadly still not out) but I was presently surprised. The co-op is a little lacking but if you want some solo gaming and like me, you too stay up at night awaiting the announced release date of Diablo III it’s worth a look.
I have to hold my hands up here and say that I haven’t actually played the 1st Witcher game although I have heard a lot about it. After seeing Simon from the Yogscast do a let’s play of the game I decided I would give it a go. I found myself drawn into a very well thought out world that really was very immersive. A word of warning though, this game is not for the young as contains as many nude scenes as a softcore porn film and as much bad language as a Quentin Tarantino movie. If you’ve already got through Skyrim for the 4th time it may be worth a look.
The third instalment in the Assassin’s Creed games (although unlike every other 3rd you couldn’t guess from the name). In my opinion it’s not as good as the second simply because I find the tower defence sections of the game are out of place and rather “naff” but still a good game in it’s own right.
Another 3rd instalment! They sure did make a lot of thirds this year… Anyway. Saints Row started off much like GTA, an open world sandbox-type game where you do missions, get money, get better stuff and slowly take over the city. GTA has since decided to take a more serious path and with each game released becomes more “real”, Saints Row has decided to do the opposite. In this game you can shoot people with a squid bazooka to mind control them. Need I say more? Get it simply for the comedy value.
“But Minecraft has been out for ages!” I hear you cry! Well yes, it has, but 2011 saw the rekease of Minecraft 1.0, the official full release and so it’s in here. I have spent more time than I care to count digging dirt blocks to fassion a 300ft penis with working lava ejaculation, but that’s a story for another time. Although the game can provide so many hours of entertainment (especially on a multiplayer server) the fact it has such a large mod community means it has almost endless replay potential. If you haven’t at least played Minecraft by now, where the hell have you been for the pas couple years?!
I was all set to write some informative post about some Youtube features I’ve had in my head for a couple days now and just before I do, I hear about this news so thought I best be one of the millions of people giving their 2 cents.
Notch is the creator of Minecraft (real name Markus Persson) and if you don’t know what Minecraft is then welcome to the internet and the year 2011. Recently Minecraft moved from Beta to the long awaited full version and to celebrate Notch decided to hold a conference called Minecon (clever name right?). It was held in Vegas and many of the “famous” membors of the Minecraft community were to attend.
Probably the largest of these celebs were Simon and Lewis from the Youtube channel Yogscast. Incase you haven’t heard of the Yogscast then let me give you a little background as it’s important in this situation. Simon and Lewis began making Youtube videos about World of Warcraft until they swicthed their attention to Minecraft as soon as the multiplayer alpha was available. Since then the channel has grown into the largest game related channel on Youtube with over 1.2 million subscribers and 532 million video views on their main channel alone.
I think most of us at some point have given something to charity, I know I have. The problem I’ve always found with donations is that you give £X and then have no control over how that money is spent. After reading a few news reports (that were probably only 10% true) about how charity budgets were spent I slowly began to stop donating until I found myself with £0.00 donated to charity this year. It was time to make a change.
Just around this time one of the Youtube duo’s that I regularly watch, The Vlog Brothers, talked about a charity scheme they donated to. It’s called Kiva and it’s exactly what I was looking for in a charity, one that helps around the world and where I can choose what my money is spent on.
How it works
You sign up to the Kiva website and you’re presented with a list of people who are requesting loans. These are people around the world who require a loan and for some reason, can’t get one from the bank. Often the problem is that the repayments they would have to make to borrow even a low amount is far too high for them. Once you have found someone who is requesting a loan for something you believe to be worth your money then you can donate anything from $25 upwards.
Once the person/group has the total requested then the funds are released to them to spend and repayments begin. Each month a small repayment is made to you and all the other investors until your have your money back, ready to re-invest in someone else.
So, with your $25 (or however much you donate) you help countless people as you can re-invest that $25 again and again. Currently the chance of getting your money back is 98.9% which I think is pretty damn good.
So why not get involved like I have? Click the link below so I can see who’s helping out and sign up.
Also, for those interested, you can see who I’ve been lending to and maybe join in with the same loans HERE.
First a note: I blame Paul Madden for getting me hooked on Fiverr and he shall never be forgiven.
For those of you who don’t know what Fiverr is I will try to explain. Fiverr is a website where people say they are willing to do something for the princely sum of $5. What kind of things I hear you ask? Just about anything! Things range from “I will take a picture of me holding up a sign” to “I will dress like a pea and dance for you on camera” (both of these are actually on Fiverr at the time of posting).
Anyway, I was at the TinkVisibility conference in Leeds last year and Paul Madden was talking about things he had purchased off there and I remember thinking “That’s not bad for $5″. Well, some time later I created a Facebook fan page for something (I can’t actually remember what now) and needed 25 likes before I could register the name so I remembered Fiverr and decided to give it a go.
A bit of searching and I found the “gig”, 300+ likes for $5. Perfect!
So fast-forward to today and I probably check Fiverr a couple times a week and end up purchasing something so random just because I find it funny.
If you’ve never tried Fiverr before I suggest you take a look, if nothing else it will entertain you for 10 minutes.
And here’s what my latest purchase was, just for this post!
Those of you who know me should know that I’m really not a big fan of Apple (biggest understatement of the year?). I agree that they make stunning looking products that most other companies try to copy but I also believe they over charge for that by crazy amounts. That being said, every now and then they show me something that I think has the possibility to be great.
Before we jump into Siri I’d like to flash back to the Xbox Kinect. When I first saw the Kinect I was amazed, and that’s something that doesn’t happen very often to me. Not because of the games or that it was a “Wii killer” but because of the technology behind it. This was a piece of hardware that was only a bit bigger than an old webcam that would track your entire body in 3D space, recognise your face and you could give commands to by talking. This was dreamed about only a few years ago and here it was on a games console for just over £100. Amazing.
Jump forward to now and a lot of people class Kinect as a “gimmick” and I can see where they are coming from but I really don’t blame that on Kinect, I blame that on game developers/publishers trying to shoehorn it into their games. When I pick my Kinect out of the corner and dust it off I am still amazed by it’s tracking and how much more accurate it is than both the Playstation move and Wii. Like all technology you see demos of though it’s never quite as good as they make out or you hope, and for the Kinect it was it’s voice commands. I’m nto sure if it’s because I don’t have an American accent or because I’m often drunk while using it but I have often found myself shouting “Xbox play” a few times before giving up, getting the pad and another beer.
And so we move onto Siri. I didn’t watch the Apple press event where people were hoping for the iPhone 5 for the simple reason that I didn’t care. Unless this magical piece of technology came jailbroken and with 1/2 the price tag I expect it to have then I wont be getting it. Because of this I missed the announcement about Siri, Apple’s new voice command software for it’s iPhone (and probably other i-devices soon). Not wanting to be left out of the loop I recently looked it up and found a video of UK company Stuff.tv with a hands-on which will be at the end of this post. I was impressed. Very impressed.
I had a think about it and I realised that many of the problems that plagued voice command software before no longer existed. The software was often large so it wouldn’t fit on a portable device but now if my phone doesn’t have at LEAST 8gb of storage then I’d go insane. It needed a clear sound to be able to work out what was being said. Well, modern mobile phone mics have noise cancellation and are generally better than expensive mic’s that were around 5 years ago. They took a lot of processing power. Well, phones now have dual core processors. My phone currently has 8 times the power of my first computer in just 1 of it’s cores.
I finally come onto the big one. Search Engines. If I said to some software “What’s the weather like in New York” then there are many steps it has to go through before I get my answer.
First off it has to work out what I actually said, which is no small feat with regional accents, different languages etc. Once it knows what I said, it then has to interpret that so it knows what action to take. Well, it doesn;t really have to do this step. If it can simply get what I said from speech to text then it can simply fire that query off to a Search Engine such as Google. Let’s try it:
There we have it. Wee have a nicely formatted result and none of the work was done on my machine, it was all done by Google and this is the biggest change to modern voice command software, they all have access to this power as they all have access to the internet.
So, in conclusion I’m more than a little impressed with Siri but until I get my hands on it I’m not going to go crazy.
So, we had Kinect which set the bench mark. Now we have Apple raising the bar so now I look to Google to make it open source and improve on it yet again. Don’t let me down Google, I don;t want to have to switch phone!
Video after the read more:
Well, since gaming is a pretty big part of my life I decided that I should have an area on my website for it. Other than showing what game’s I’m currently playing I thought it would be cool to keep a list (for my records more than anything) of games I’ve played.
I’m currently 35 games into my list and I have just realised how many games I’ve played in my life. I started by just listing games where I’ve played almost all sequels and ones that I’m currently playing but thinking back to all the consoles I’ve had, each with 50+ games, and that’s not even including PC… I’m going to be here a long time! I suppose it gives me something to do in my ‘spare time’ (as if I have any of that).
You can see what game’s I’m currently playing and see how far I’ve got with my list HERE.
It’s a well known fact* that a great 404 page means you have an amazing website so I couldn’t leave this website without one!
You can check it out HERE or by typing in some random stuff after my domain name I guess. Feel free to share it round and put it in all your “Top X 404 pages in the world ever – part 2″ I know you all have!
*not actually a fact
I have just completed the Friends section of my website. It’s a place I can name drop people I know but also give them a hand by linking to their website’s (do follow of course).
I don’t think I’ve missed anyone but if I have then you should be a good enough friend to know how to get in touch with me!