Red Recondite

Interesting.

A ‘movie fan’ posted a comment to my Awesome Max Payne Review.  I was suspicious, because, let’s be honest here, this blog isn’t exactly high-caliber reading material, despite the eloquence of that particular review.

I searched for his comment in good ol’ google, and it looks like the same text, “i suspect the storyline for Max Payne is a lot more exciting when it’s happening in the form of a video game…“, has been posted everywhere else, with minor variations.

Looking at movie fan’s link, Kingdom of God Media, and the typical motivation for blog spam simply isn’t there: there is no money to be made.

1. There are no ads.
2. He has a donate link, but I have difficulty imagining that gets much action.
3. He does link to an Amazon.com page selling a book he wrote, but that’s only on his other blog, Books By Patrick.

And, true to its tag line, “The Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Revealed Through Movies, Music and Television”, it does interpret movies, music, and television with a religious frame, but not a ‘convert the heathens’ frame.

So, why?  Why, Mr. Patrick Roberts, why do you post the same comment everywhere?  It is not a bad comment, sure, but what do you have to gain from it?

By process of elimination, or perhaps by process of lack of imagination, I’m only left with ‘self promotion’.  At the very bottom of his blog, there are several links to ‘blogtoplist’, ‘blogtoparea’, and other such blog-ranking web sites.  By posting the same comment to multiple web sites, he is probably google-bombing his blog to a higher ranking.

And, because of the very minor variations in the comment, and the fact that my anti-spam filter did not flag it, I am under the assumption that he went to each site and posted the comments himself, without the aid of a spam bot.

So, I wondered how he found my eloquent review.  While my review is perhaps the lowest ranked item in a standard Google Search, it is in the first few dozen hits for Google Blog Search.

Do not see Max Payne.

Up-to-date weather information + Google Maps = Best Thing Ever.

And here I thought I was clever.  Alas.

The Wii Wheel is surprisingly well crafted.  I expected it to be a worthless hunk of plastic, because:

1. My Gamecube steering wheel makes Mario Kart Double Dash unplayable.
2. Excite Truck’s wii-mote steering is not very accurate.
3. The Wii Zapper, a similar peripheral, is annoying at best.

And yet, somehow, the Wii Wheel works well.  The only problem I have with it is hopping into a turn while skidding in the wrong direction, but I experienced the same difficulties in Mario Kart DS, where only the D-Pad is to blame.

TiVo recently announced the discontinuation of their TiVo Rewards program. I had amassed 10,000 of these mystical TiVo Rewards points while participating in some odd rituals that I do not understand and cannot adequately explain. Clearly, I had some spending to do. Read the rest of this entry »

I read about it on the gaming blogs, but I didn’t believe it in my heart.

I just experienced my second red-ring-of-death… jeez. I got my first 360 back in May of 2006, and it died a good 13 months later in June 2007. Yesterday, the new one died, a scant 9 months later. Thankfully, I purchased the Best Buy replacement plan both times, so I replaced it without any hassle.

I still prefer the 360 to the other current-generation consoles, but this high failure rate is very ridiculous.