WELCOME to the personal home page/blog of Matthew La France. Please enjoy your stay.

3/30/2007

I've been bitching about this forever and decided to finally do something about it. I've replaced the Google search at the top of my page with Yahoo search, and added an MSN search as well, putting it and the Google one a little further down the page.

I think there was a time not so many years ago when Google was the best search engine around. Now, I find more often than not that searches I try yield frustratingly irrelevant results. Not only that but trying to position oneself on these search engines has become a business. There are books, websites, and professionals devoted to positioning a site on Google. My PSX Anime List is a page about anime related PlayStation games. I can put "playstation anime games" into yahoo and my page is number 3. I can put the same query into Google and my page ranks so low I've never seen it on the list. There is a disservice to the user occurring when they are looking for a site about anime games on Playstation and cannot find one using Google when in fact a fairly comprehensive one exists. Therefore Yahoo is now my personal search engine of choice and I recommend that everyone try their queries in both Google and yahoo (or altavista, alltheweb, same engine) and see which one yields more useful and relevant results.
2 comments

3/28/2007

I'd like to follow up to my last post. I want to thank David for bringing to my attention the probablilty that eBay is trying to adhere to various state laws that can vary greatly as to what constitutes "obscene". I feel like it's a little ham-handed the way eBay puts it, but it's their perogative to run their site how they choose.

The country on the other hand...

There is some good news (OMG it's good news! When is the last time you heard that?) to be had regarding another peice of regulation that is overly broad and ham-handed, the Child Online Protection Act. No matter how hard it is to dissagreed with a peice of legislature titled such that anyone against it must obiously be for the harm and corruption of our children </sarcasm>, at least our legal system is still willing to and capable of striking down laws that are quote "impermissibly broad and over-vague".

From the wiki:
On March 22, 2007, U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. struck down the Child Online Protection Act...commenting that "perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."
2 comments

3/25/2007

Here's something someone could answer for me. Why does everyone have to play the morality police? I'm reposting an auction on eBay for the DVD (That I purchased off of eBay a few years ago mind you) "A Chinese Torture Chamber Story". And here is what I see:

"eBay does not permit the listing of sexually-oriented material that features pain, torture, rough sex, rape, violence, or bodily injury. This includes items described as: "sado-masochistic" (S&M, BDSM), "extreme", "hardcore" and similar references."

Mind you, this is in the adult section of eBay, an area that is already hidden away amongst the "everything else" category as it is. Now the powers that be have every right to run eBay however they choose. But my question is why? Why does BDSM for instance have to be singled out as inappropriate for thier adult only area? If people want to see it, and people want to do it, and no one is (unwillingly) hurt in the process... I mean seriously. I have to assume that it's more an issue of eBay wanting to cover thier ass and make certain that nothing that is illegal gets listed or something, but that kind of goes without saying. I don't understand the blanket policy. I really feel like more and more this whole country is waging a bizzare morality war. Can't people lighten up? The last time I checked we considered ourselves a free country, but apparently not free enough to buy BDSM related DVDs in an adult section of an online auction. :P I guess it's time to start hitting xxxbay or something. (FYI: This DVD is a legitimate Hong Kong movie with fairly high production values and is rather funny and entertaining in some respects. It is available on Amazon.com. I could sell it there instead, it's more the principal that angers me.)

I think there's just a segment of the population that wants to pretend that nothing they don't like exists and if it does, it needs to happen somewhere far away from them because it doesn't have anything to do with thier lives, or anyone's around them. All the queers should live in San Fransico, the prostitutes in Vegas, and the repulbicans in Washington. Something like that I supose? I don't know, I give up.
5 comments

3/19/2007

Today I saw an ad for Wii Play and it made me realize what the Wii is. It's the Atari 2600. The 2600 was an inexpensive computer that hooked to the TV and played games that the whole family could play. It caught the attention of every household in America, yet it failed to hold that attention for long. It was the very definition of a fad (though a well lived one). The Wii is bringing back the 2600 via it's innovative hardware. The question is, will the whole family gather around the TV again, and for how long? It unarguably created the console video game market that exists today but the Atari age came and went with many people who played the those games never picking up a game controller again. I'll be curious to see if the Wii can make the casual gamer "hardcore" enough to keep playing the Wii.

But enough of my anti-Nintendo musings. Lots going on. I saw 300 and Ghost Rider recently. 300 was good, but a little disappointing. What I liked the most was the fighting and the boobies, what I liked the least was the one-dimensionality of the patriotic story. Ghost Rider was highly entertaining. I have not read more than one or two of the comics, so I'm not coming at it as a fan, but I really enjoyed the movie. The only difficult part was getting used to the CG Ghost Rider and his mono-syllabic grunting. Once I started to understand Ghost Rider as a character, I had no more complaints.

I've been playing some Dead Rising again. I'm working on a complete game (save everyone, defeat all psychopaths) right noe. I signed up for Gamefly and am looking forward to renting various 360 games that I have either not played, or played extensively, but not on my own console/gamertag. Oblivion is one of the latter, as is Dead Rising. Bullet Witch is one of the former that I have qued up. Also looking forward to some new releases like Dark Messiah Might and Magic, and Bioshock.

Haven't translated much WtPC recently. I'm taking a break after my marathon translating the past few weeks.
6 comments

3/08/2007

Happy birthday to me! My birthday present to myself was to take most of this week off and use it for translating more WtPC. I've managed to translate more than 12 script blocks over the past 15 days. This should bring me to somewhere around the 80% mark towards completion of the script translation! I'm currently translating the events of August 21st in the game. The game ends on August 28th if that gives you an idea of the total progress. Granted, there is a lot of wrap-up and 50% or more of the dirty stuff happens hear the end, but there is no doubt that the end is in sight. :)

I also took this opportunity to try to show An Inconvenient Truth to many of my family and friends. I also took the time to calculate my personal CO2 impact for a year and make a donation of $60 to Native Energy help offset my contribution by funding new clean energy projects. I strongly encourage you to follow my example, and consider making a donation to help reduce your own impact on the environment, or at least take a look at An Inconvenient Truth to learn a little more about the impact we are having as a society on the phenomenon of global warming.



Other stuff, I've updated the PSX Anime List with some additional PS2 titles that have come out recenlty including an Ah! My Goddess game for PS2. I watched Zero no Tsukaima recenlty which I found to be quite enjoyable. It was obviously "inspired by" Harry Potter, but other than being derivative, was it's own quite funny and enjoyable series. It was a comedy but threw in some seriousness and drama similarly to Slayers, and like that same series, seemed to suffer slightly for it. I enjoyed the comedy the most, and was sad to see a lot of the last few epsiodes lose that lightheartedness. There is a second series seemingly in the works, which is a good development.
4 comments

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