Paul (not his real name) has never seen the movie The Divide. He’s a horror buff and sometimes tries to find odd and decidedly bad flicks to watch with his wife. The Divide would have fit the bill. It made $16,700 at the box office – that amounts to about 2,100 tickets sold – and closed with $130,839 in the bank. It cost $3 million to make. → Read More
As fans of D&D will attest, there are not many games as satisfying as Gygax’s original but darn it if it wasn’t fun to try new platforms when they came out. Tunnels & Trolls, created 37 years ago by Ken St. Andre, wasn’t so much a D&D knock-off but an alternative. St. Andre streamlined the D&D rules, reducing the complexity, and added a bit more humor. For folks unable to get the… → Read More
If you’ve ever gone “deep” into the nastiness that the YouTube commenting section can be, then you know that it’s not a pretty place. Depending on the type of content you’re visiting, fights will break out, mothers will be dragged into the conversation and it’s just not fun to be around. Who are we kidding? No matter what type of content it is, a YouTube… → Read More
You get a thick skin when messing around on the Internet, and that can go either way. You can react, like a nerve burned raw, or you can become a troll. This is a story of both.
I’ll paraphrase the story here, but go and read it yourself. It’s quite short and very concise. It shows a man’s descent into fear and his eventual recovery and uncovers part of the Internet that, in a word, horrifies… → Read More
One of the unending debates in blogging circles is about the value of comments. How do you encourage the best comments and discourage the anonymous trolls? Do you even need comments? Or do you enforce civility by requiring real names, through the use of Facebook comments (which is what we currently use on TechCrunch) at the expense of discouraging conversation?
But there is a middle ground… → Read More
Patent trolling is often a lucrative hobby for many companies that have fallen into hard times. Like the junkies they are, the trolls will spin all sorts of delightful stories exonerating themselves of their actions in order to grab another infusion of cash. That’s why it’s not surprising to read this discussion from the trolls at Lodsys, a company that is now charging small mobile developers for… → Read More
As you probably remember, Geohot – George Hotz to his parents – is the kid who unlocked the original iPhone and, over time, became one of the foremost experts on iPhone unlocking and jailbreaking. A few days ago he announced an iPhone 4 jailbreak but, in an addition to the post, he states he’s probably not going to release it and may quit the scene. Another good man dead and… → Read More
There’s just no hope anymore. The GOP, one of the two great political parties in the United States, recently requested people submit ideas to be incorporated into the party’s platform this fall. A Web site was created. And then, predictably, people starting trolling the site. “A ‘teacher’ told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish! And the same thing about whales! We need… → Read More
Sisvel, an Italian research company, apparently has some sort of patent that entitles it to shut down folks at CeBIT. The license, based around MP3 playback, shut down our beloved Meizu along with 50 other booths. Unfortunately, we didn’t see the raid go down. It would have been cool to see the paratroopers. Police raid CeBIT stands [Register] → Read More
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