New Gaming

You know that game Angry Birds, right. Dan's addicted, so you should. Anyway, its creator, Rovio Games, or more accurately its CEO Peter Vesterbacka recently predicted the death of console games. People would rather play fun games they can download for about a dollar than spend about fifty on console games which are difficult to upgrade. Apparently, the future is in mobile gaming.
Of course, Rovio has made a profit of 42 million dollars with those angry birds of them, so Vesterbacka's claim is not at all unfounded. What baffles me, though, is that he's kind of right.

I admit I'm kind of a gamer. Not really, since I only have a DS and an old laptop. (The DS affectionately called Nintendo's little pet cow) But I do know that even games I'm able to play far outclass the crap mobile phones throw at us. I'd take an awesome story over mindless bird-slinging every day. Other people, however, seem to think otherwise. While I'm playing Final Fantasy, my brother (and dad, too!) are shifting jewels around for hours on their facebook accounts. Of course, Bejeweled is funny. But who in their right mind can play something like that for hours every day? I'd die of repetiveness-induced boredom.
Another example: Just a week ago I was replaying Phoenix Wright just for the awesomeness that it is. For those who don't know it: Phoenix is an attorney who has to defend clients, win cases, etc, and it's amazing. The story is well thought out, the characters are interesting and all deeper than Bella Swan (Even the minor side characters!) and more cool stuff. When I showed it to my brother, his reaction was something like
"Do you ever have to do something? There's only text and occasionally you have to show people evidence to get them to say more things."
When I told him that was the entire point of the game he dismissed it as boring and went upstairs to play FIFA 20XX, a game with a story mode that's even more shallow than Twilight.

To summarize: Some games are works of art. Some aren't. Games designed for mobile phones are by definition not. Whoever prefers those over real games is an idiot in my eyes. Sorry, Dan.

But seriously: Which castle do you prefer?

Yay privacy.

Soo... Apparently Vodafone's security is so terrible that every person in the world can easily access all voicemail messages in their system. This includes every single voicemail of every single politician, since they all use phones distributed to them for work and sharing a provider. The news had a field day with this. Politicians did not yet respond.

Faith in humanity: -1.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Fortunately, you're someone else's other side too.

Everything that happened I deemed too uninteresting to write about. I started doubting whether my judgments of interestingness were too strict when the skiing vacation didn't make the cut. Nonetheless it is high time for an update... I think it has almost been two months.
Of course, this requires me to find an interesting subject to write on. And with a lack of awesomeness in my personal life, what's better to write about than local news? That's something you people don't know about anyway. So...

Today's headline: "ING-top renounces bonus and salary increase."

The ING is an important bank. I don't know whether it operates internationally or not, but I assume you've never heard of it. The director and two managers were somehow egligible for an enormous bonus almost equal to their yearly salary, and apparently they also were planning on giving themselves a 2% raise for the next year. With the word "bonus" being absolutely taboo after recent events involving Ahold and whatnot, the public response was predictable: Google history shows an increase of about 1200% in the search term "cancel ING account," there have been quite a lot of actual cancellations already, and the local medium for politicians to communicate with people, Twitter (Yes. We're pathetic like that.), almost exploded with #ing tags.

ING's response, five days later, was that they didn't anticipate people's reaction caused by the bonuses, and they did not foresee "the damage this would do the the restoring trust of our customers and the community in us." BS, if you ask me. Only morons could not have seen this coming. Oh, wait.