As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
[…]
it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real.
“If I couldn’t complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.
It is known as “gold farming”, the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games’ makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.
The trading of virtual currencies in multiplayer games has become so rampant in China that it is increasingly difficult to regulate. In April, the Sichuan provincial government in central China launched a court case against a gamer who stole credits online worth about 3000rmb.
The lack of regulations has meant that even prisoners can be exploited in this virtual world for profit.
Lady Gaga, presumably not born this wayI can’t claim to be a big fan of Lady Gaga, especially since her new hit single Born This Way is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself.
In fact, you’d probably have to bribe me to listen to Lady Gaga. With, say, 20 GB of disk space on Amazon’s new Cloud Drive serviceWhich, as a matter of fact, is precisely the deal today – for $0.99, you can get the upgrade to 20 GB from Amazon, as long as you download Gaga’s album. This is a good deal despite the forcible auditory abuse, and it ends today, so hurry up!
For 99 cents this is a great deal. 20GB on Amazon Cloud Drive is 4x the size of Microsoft’s SkyDrive and 10x more than Dropbox. The service also integrates with Amazon’s new music service so you can access any music you buy from Amazon on any device, immediately without re-uploading.
I found Secret of Kells on Netflix. It was only 90 minutes, so low-hanging fruit indeed. A really wonderful, enchanting story. The plot summary from Wikipedia lays out the plot:
The story is set in the ninth century and gives a fictionalized account of the creation of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript and known today as one of Ireland’s greatest national treasures. Obsessed with building a mighty wall to keep marauding Viking raiders from destroying the Abbey of Kells, Abbot Cellach expects his young nephew Brendan to follow in his footsteps. Brendan has apprenticed in the scriptorium of the monastery and has heard the story of Aidan of Iona, a master illuminator who is working on the Book of Iona. Later, Aidan himself comes to the monastery, accompanied by his cat Pangur Bán. Brother Aidan has escaped from the Vikings who have destroyed his own monastery, and had brought the unfinished Book of Iona with him. Taking Brendan under his wing, Aidan asks Brendan to venture into the forest to look for gall nuts to make ink, though the boy is fearful as he was forbidden to go into the forest by his uncle. Brendan eventually decides to venture into the forest, where he meets a forest spirit named Aisling. She is suspicious of Brendan at first, but soon befriends him after helping him find the gall nuts. Though Cellach learns of his adventure and forbids him from leaving the abbey’s confines, Brendan secretly defies it as Aidan teaches him illumination while Aisling introduces him to a wider world.
of course Wikipedia goes on from there to summarize the entire story, which is spoilertastic, so don’t read the rest until you’ve seen it. Hopefully the excerpt above is sufficient to motivate you to seeking this one out, though.
I particularly liked the Harold and the Purple Crayon sequence! 🙂
Sorry if it disappoints you guys, but there’s not gonna be any more Hobbes & Bacon… not for a while, anyway – our comic is more of a skit show, we do a gag, sometimes two, and then we move on, just like Family Guy or Robot Chicken, if we kept going, then it would be a strip about Calvin & Hobbes, and that’s just not what we do.
We tried to stay true to what Calvin & Hobbes meant to us, and what the style and atmosphere was, and I hope that we were able to capture what people loved about the strip – which is impossible, we’re not Watterson, we’re the Heyermans – there’s no way we can totally capture his style, no matter how much we tried.
But the most important thing, what we really wanted people to do was to go back and read Calvin & Hobbes, or support Watterson by getting the books if you don’t have them.
We don’t make any money on the strip, so hopefully you take all your desire to read more Calvin & Hobbes and support one of the most amazing artists of our time.
Some of us were lucky enough to be around when it was happening, to read Calvin & Hobbes in the paper, and if you’re like us, it guided and shaped who you are, and drove you to be different and be creative.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Pants are Overrated would be a completely different thing if Bill Watterson hadn’t created his masterpieces every day when we were kids.
I did a lot of anime-blogging on Shingu when I watched it and my post on the finale (SPOILER LINK!!) had some pretty heavy, informative discussion. A listing of all my Shingu posts is here.
J complains that the Mac version of Kindle is not exactly stable:
The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI†(although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-updateâ€. I had originally thought the problem was with the version available in the Mac App Store (which, thanks to Apple, is much, much older), but no, the direct download from Amazon does it as well.
I’m guessing that Amazon is starting to wean itself from Apple given that there’s the issue of in-app purchasing hanging over their heads. I’m not really sure if there wll even BE a Kindle version in the App Store in two months, esp if Apple sticks to the June 30th deadline for in-app compliance.
Even if Amazon and Apple divorce, iOS/OSX users will eventually be able to use the web-based version of Kindle though. I haven’t used it yet, it’s still in beta, but it should be available soon. At such point I would expect Amazon to dump a lot of dev resources into the web version as well to keep people from jumping ship to ibooks.
Here’s the trailer at AICN. I think this one comment in the Trackback thread below summed up my impression perfectly:
May 04, 2011 7:16:10 PM CDT
CLASH OF THE 300 PRINCES OF PERSIA!!!
by goldentribe
in 3D, to boot. argh indeed.
Frankly, the most amazing thing about the Arnold era of Conan was his raw size and speed. The man was a mountain that moved like a tornado. Momoa seems to be about 1/2 the bulk, but 1/2 the speed. Jumpinng around in the air or twirling the sword doesn’t mask the fact that he doesn’t (in the trailer, anyway) have the same ferocity and power. Conan needs to be giganticly muscled because he moves a 40-lb hand-and-a-half sword around like it’s a six-shooter.
Plus, what’s with the rock and roll soundtrack? If they aren’t going to reuse Basil Poledouris’s astonishing score then they better aim at least in the same direction. The trailer gives little confidence that there will be reflective scenes like Theology that establish Conan’s worldview, or whether Conan even has a worldview beyond HULK SMASH. If the score is all rock and roll, we can assume the movie plays in the shallow end of the plot pool.
Let’s see how he does in the film. But the inheritance of the modern era of comic-book derived action storyboarding, and the 3D baggage, doesn’t look promising.
Are we in for EMO Conan? Or will we see him punch a camel?
What’s the point of Steam, really? Suppose I were interested in picking up Portal 2. I have a choice, I can buy the retail version from Target or I could use Steam (which came pre-installed on DENT). Is the game full-featured in either case? Is there extra DRM in one and not the other? If I buy the retail disc, I can still install that on more than one PC, right? (I’m not going to game on anything other than PREFECT or DENT anyway).
is a straight rip-off of the far more talented Madonna’s Express Yourself.
Which, as a matter of fact, is precisely the deal today – for $0.99, you can get the upgrade to 20 GB from Amazon, as long as you download Gaga’s album. This is a good deal despite the forcible auditory abuse, and it ends today, so hurry up!
