b.l.o.g. (blogs let others gawk) May 5, 2017 New is the new old I’m always amused at conversations that lead into how a specific demographic has a special or implied, exclusive understanding about a specific communications technique. Just because someone knows how to upload a video to YouTube, this does not make them a Social Media expert (nor does it make someone an eCommerce expert because they sell doilies on Etsy). For some people, today’s youth who knows how to upload a video to the Internet is akin to yesterday’s youth who used to help set the VCR. In each ones time they were both considered tech geniuses regardless of their actual skills.



As the adage goes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This applies to perceptions of any skills competency. Just because a person has an understanding of something you don’t understand, that does not make them an expert in a subject matter (and them being an expert in one aspect of a technology doesn’t immediately make them an expert in all aspects). Bringing this back to the topic of communications. New doesn’t always involve doing something different. While the tools may change, the fundamentals have always remained the same. Believe it or not, social media is just one of many tools available to achieve your goals and those old tools? Well, in some cases, they are still just as viable for communications as the new tools. Old is new. New is old. Rinse, repeat. Comments Off on New is the new old February 22, 2017 2016 election numbers perspective The next time someone tells you about how the people who elected trump represent half of the country, remember this information (collected from U.S. Census data and final election results). Based on an estimated U.S. population of 322,762,018 for 2016, Trump voters accounted for: 19.5% of the U.S. population

27.2% of eligible voters

31.5% of registered voters (Breakdowns follow and please feel free to check my math.) (more…) Comments Off on 2016 election numbers perspective February 16, 2017 Former Wikipedia Game Zero Magazine talk page (Posting so I don’t loose track of the text) {{WikiProject Video games|class=Draft|importance=low}}

{{WikiProject Magazines|class=Draft|importance=low}} ==Untitled==

I will do my best to qualify and locate back-up references to notables lists. The key problem here is that most of the web from 1994/1995 is no longer available. Some of the promotion we did within the newsgroups is still locateable, but none of the IRC based promotion we did is archived. Also, most if any of the early links to the magazine are no longer on the web anymore. Archive.org only has 1996 and on for the most part. I can personally vouch for all of these statements as can the entire staff of the magazine as we were pretty proud to be setting these milestones. Some noteable examples of sites referencing Game Zero were the NCSA What’s New page which is now gone, as is Iway Magazine (which was an early Internet spotlight magazine) which ranked Game Zero as one of the top 25 gaming sites/top 500 on the web in 1996 (although, as soon as I find the hardcopy though I will try to scan it in and post for reference). In alot of cases, for dates, I should be able to locate material with time/date stamps which I could make available, it will just take some time to track it all down. [[User:bcRIPster|bcRIPster]] 04:33, 19 December 2006 (MST) Another comment… The way the web version came about was this… In early 1994 we decided that we needed to do something to contain costs with the magazine, and the web looked like it might be just what we needed. Over that summer we looked into various ways to get online including a brief stint on Prodigy. Eventually I figured out that I could get dial-up access through a company called Primenet, and I signed us up for service in September ([http://groups.google.com/group/misc.test/browse_frm/thread/922ccb6f3d670f6a/47c5601aca17f6b4?lnk=st&q=gmezero%40gz.bomb.com&rnum=380&hl=en#47c5601aca17f6b4 my first newsgroup post through Primenet seen via Google] [http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=bomb.com&url=bomb.com Alexa page showing date domain was first active], although we sold the bomb.com domain in 2002 ). Initially I signed up our account reserving the domain name “bomb.com” because previously my MicroVax II based UUCP node had been named BOMB… so I figured this was my new node on the Internet and I should keep the same name. Needless to say the rest of the staff weren’t amused. We then started converting and uploading content to the new site we were building, we first previewed the link that November in the (at the time) high traffic IRC channel #vidgames, in conjunction with our last printed issue of the magazine. We next previewed the site on some [http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atari.2600/browse_frm/thread/26c62ae5b7861f84/07afb837bd679a0e?lnk=st&q=&rnum=5&hl=en#07afb837bd679a0e select newsgroups in January]. We formally began promoting the website on the newsgroups on February 1st of 1995, eventhough we had already been online “officially” two months earlier. We received alot of good feedback and with the upcoming launch of the new E3 show, we invited some of the other prolific #vidgames members to include their E3 commentaries on our site. One of these was Jer Horwitz who shortly after the E3 show announced he was starting his own web magazine. In response to that I pulled his article from the E3 spread as I didn’t feel like giving him free advertising (yes, it was petty, and the worst thing is, the article is now lost as we suffered a major data failure in 1996 were we lost alot of our archived e-mails as well as a good number of unpublished content). With the realisation that nobody could remember the damn URL “www.primenet.com/~gmezero”, we finally then purchased a new Primnet account under the name “team-0″. We registered the domain gamezero.com, and had the account configured so that the www domain name resolved the account’s web site. And lastly, that April (1995) we went crazy doing new promotion of the new URL everywhere I could find to, to counter IGO’s launch. The only real screw up that came out of this URL restructuring is when Wired magazine gave out [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/streetcred.html?pg=3 a link to our WipeOut FAQ and misprinted the link]. Not only was the link type-o’d, but it was constructed using a primenet.com URL structure that made it hard to actually figure out what the correct link was.

[[User:bcRIPster|bcRIPster]] 05:53, 19 December 2006 (MST) The notable thing about the magazine’s coverage of the N64 launch in Japan was that we beat Nintendo to press on publishing photos from the event by two weeks. It was funny because the day after we had the content up, our Nintendo rep within the company called me to ask where we got the photos from. I told her, from our journalist that we sent to the show using the press passes they gave us (duh)! We had our correspondent overnight the video footage they took of the show as well as the entire press package via priority FedEx to us from the show before the close of business that day. This is how we had it up so fast. The P.R. firm was distressed that we had been able to pull this off as we were told that the Nintendo.com team had been planning a big fanfare of premiering the material themselves. From then on Nintendo would have material on their site the same day of any future announcements. [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] 02:10, 6 January 2007 (UTC) ==citation source found?== Stumbled across a cite-able reference to Game Zero. ”Internet Magazine” of Japan has hosted PDF copies of their print magazine dating back to the 1995. In issue #6 from 1995 their first Yellow Pages index featuring video game sites lists Game Zero at the front of the article with Sega, Sony and Nintendo and is called out for the Links library among other features. http://archives.impressrd.jp/im/previewer.php?vol=199507 for the full magazine index and http://i.impressrd.jp/files/images/bn/pdf/im199507-161-yellow.pdf for the specific chapter. The funny thing about this Yellow Pages collection in the second half of the section is that I can almost guess that alot of these links were parsed from our site at the time =D [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 23:26, 11 May 2010 (UTC) ==new citations found==

I had completely forgotten that Tucson Weekly news defaulted us as a standard link in their footer for gaming news for a period. Examples: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/01-18-96/eighth.htm

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/10-19-95/eighth.htm

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/12-07-95/citylist.htm We actually had quite a few linking agreements with a number of sites that wanted to provide their visitors with video game news but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of keeping up with the news themselves. Also I found a link using Game Zero as citation on the Guardian, Technology Blog. See “IBM exposes Xbox processor” highlight on “3DO M2”. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2005/oct/26/ibmexposesxbo [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 02:52, 28 January 2014 (UTC) ===More sample citations=== [http://books.google.com/books?id=OyuB3ECckp4C&lpg=PT180&ots=70qRU-V87Q&dq=%22gamezero.com%22%20-site%3Agamezero.com&pg=PT180#v=onepage&q=%22gamezero.com%22%20-site%3Agamezero.com&f=false The Rough Guide to Videogaming] By Kate Berens, Geoff Howard. 2002. Page 167. [http://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_69 SGU: Episode 69]. 2006. (podcast) refers to a java game on the Game Zero site. [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 21:16, 28 January 2014 (UTC) ===More sample citations=== To: “Processor Design” articles

http://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Processor

http://letslearncomputing.blogspot.com/2013/03/digital-logic-4-bit-binary-incrementer.html

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/nodes/kurssit/tikra/2010s/luennot/luento-01_v.pdf

http://www.rsc-sw-scotland.ac.uk/curriculum_mapping/docfiles&images/engineering/comb_logic_245.doc

http://educypedia.karadimov.info/library/appa_p2.pdf

http://101science.com/Radio.htm To: “Violence and video games” article

http://bcis.pacificu.edu/interface/?p=2804

http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/tcom/faculty/ha/tcom103fall2003/gp4/

https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/multimedia-junior-year/engli/video-game-violence-essay

http://dothewritething.pbworks.com/w/page/18128771/VideoAnnotatedSources

http://imamp.colum.edu/mediawiki/index.php?title=MTD1Notes_WEEK_4 (Citation #14 for “Violence and videogames”) To: “Violence and video games” article but lacking URL in citation

http://erikabrookefranta.blogspot.com/2010/08/domestic-violence-in-gaming-realm.html

http://erika-itgs.wikispaces.com/%5CCriteria+E To: “The Future of Console Gaming” article

http://essays24.com/Technology/Professional-Practice-Console-Gaming/2775.html [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 23:43, 30 January 2014 (UTC) BTW… discussion happening about about GZ as a “Reliable Source” [[WT:VG/S|here]]. Maybe archived by the time you’re reading this though… [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 22:23, 12 March 2014 (UTC) == Reliable source conversation == I made a request for consideration of Game Zero as a reliable source seen [[Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games/Sources/Archive_8#Game_Zero_magazine|here]]. The limited response was indecisive and the topic auto archived. [[User:BcRIPster|BcRIPster]] ([[User talk:BcRIPster|talk]]) 00:13, 7 May 2014 (UTC) Comments Off on Former Wikipedia Game Zero Magazine talk page Former Wikipedia Game Zero Magazine article page (Posting so I don’t loose track of the text) {{userspace draft|date=July 2005}}

””’Game Zero Magazine””’ was a U.S. based video game magazine published from 1992 to 1998 (although primary publication stopped in 1996). Initially starting out as a photo-copy based zine with a print circulation of 500. By the start of 1994 the publication had become a two-color magazine with a print circulation of 1,500, published bi-monthly. In an effort to expand the publication and reduce associated costs, the magazine migrated to the World Wide Web in November 1994. Initially launching with a mixture of content reprinted from the print magazine and announcing updates via the #Vidgames, IRC channel. Updated bi-weekly, the primary features of the web site were, a (pre-search engine) list of links to web sites covering anything video game related around the world, current news, and reviews. In 1995, the magazine expanded format and began publishing as a CD-ROM based magazine (which featured all of the content from the web site) that had a circulation of 150,000. The magazine is now maintained as an archive of published contents. __TOC__

== Timeline == * November, 1994, Game Zero becomes the first video game magazine on the World Wide Web followed next by Intelligent Gamer On-Line in April 1995, and then followed by several other mainstream publications. (The initial content at launch consisted of reprinting new and existing print content with added graphics{{cite web |url=http://www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/features/polygon.html |title=The Great Polygon Mystery |accessdate=2006-12-19 }})

* January 8, 1995, Game Zero features the first daily coverage of a gaming trade show on the web. With commentaries by the Game Zero staff and other prominent guest writers known from [[Internet Relay Chat|IRC]] and Newsgroup postings.

* March 13, 1995 the first video gaming web comic premiers on the internet. “The Plastic Valley Report” (later renamed to “[[Polymer City Chronicles|The Polymer City Chronicles]]”) featured political type commentary on the video game industry.

* May 13, 1995, first “Women of E3” photo spread on the web.

* June, 1995, first site to regularly publish video footage of new and up-coming games. Videos featured distinct gameplay demonstrations (examples being video featuring a 10-second drift in Ridge Racer, or a high value combo in Killer Instinct).

* August 2, 1995, featured in the “NCSA: What’s New” list of sites on the web.

* August 19, 1995, first gaming website to feature promotional contests for site visitors. Notable contests were for a copy of Killer Instinct on the SNES (runner-ups got baseball caps), Street Fighter Alpha, Mortal Kombat 3 and others. Contests initially consisted of trivia/drawings, and were later changed to clue-based skill puzzles in order to allow Canadian readers to participate, as by this time over 25% of visitors e-mailing the magazine with questions were from Canada.

* August, 1995, first site to publish a leaked photo of the then Nintendo “Ultra 64” motherboard.

* August, 1995, a deal is reached with Catapult Entertainment, Inc. for Game Zero to become the primary source for news content on the [[XBAND|X-Band]] service. Summarized news items are updated weekly on the service. X-Band communications on up-coming events, and competition rankings are featured on the Game Zero web site. Game Zero staff formally handled gaming news related e-mails from X-Band subscribers.

* November, 1995, is the first to present photos from the 1995 Space World debut of the Nintendo 64 days after the event, preceding the Nintendo.com web site to press by several weeks.

* February, 1996, web guide “I-Way” magazine (a print and on-line publication) ranks Game Zero as #9 out of the 25 best “Game Sites” on the internet, beating out other notable entries “New Type Gaming” (#14), “Games Domain” (#19), and Nintendo (#25).

* March, 1996, becomes the first gaming magazine to establish a mirror site in Europe to both ease load on the primary site based in the U.S., and provide higher speed page loads for visitors from overseas. At the time this was a real issue as general network speeds between the US and Europe were terribly slow, and the only major European based news sources were Happy Puppy and Games Domain (which itself eventually launched a U.S. mirror site to reduce its cross Atlantic traffic).

* April 8, 1996, becomes the first video game magazine to feature free web based video games. ==References==

{{refs}} ==External links==

* [http://www.gamezero.com/ Game Zero magazine] {{DEFAULTSORT:Game Zero Magazine}}

[[:Category:Publications established in 1992]]

[[:Category:Video game magazines]]

[[:Category:Defunct magazines of the United States]]

[[:Category:American video game magazines]] {{videogame-mag-stub}} Comments Off on Former Wikipedia Game Zero Magazine article page April 30, 2016 Reviews: Freedom Wars (Vita) Freedom Wars was a game I had specifically ignored for a long time when it was launched because everything I saw about it in promotional materials led me to believe it was primary an online, multi-player experience. I don’t do MMOs. But then a couple of months back I found myself suddenly reading some retrospectives about the title and also learned that it had an achievable by mere mortals Platinum trophy status. Both of these bits of info peeked my interest and shortly after that I ended up with the game so I decided I’d give it a shot. I am so glad I did. I’ve been looking for a Phantasy Star fix since playing Conception II and many times had almost broken down and picked up my PSP to get the job done. Freedom Wars totally did the trick. Imagine my surprise when I booted the game and discovered that it was actually a single-player story. Short of a couple of really bad grind points the game progressed nicely. Play control was tight and NPC AI satisfying. The graphics where console grade. Granted the story was a little confusing at points and when you get to the credits you’re left feeling like something more is coming in the story… and that’s when the final stages become available. Unfortunately those final stages don’t resolve the story and it is unlikely there will be a sequel since the creative mind behind the game left the studio to move onto other projects. Online multi-player is certainly a part of the experience of this game though and some co-op gaming is required to get your last couple of trophies, but it’s never required to actually complete the game. On the note of online, I’m glad I checked it out. I found a pretty friendly community who are happy show you the ropes and take turns on grind missions “For the Greater Good!” Comments Off on Reviews: Freedom Wars (Vita) Older Posts »