Ben Paddon

Category: Rants

  • As Someone Who’s Looked At a Thing, You Might Like This Other, Vaguely Relevant Thing

    Amazon just sent me an email. This isn’t unusual – they send me about a dozen of the buggers a day – but this one is a little bit… well, odd.

    There are two problems with this email. The first one, a minor one, is that we didn’t buy our PS3 remote from Amazon. We bought it from a brick-and-mortar Best Buy store the same day we bought our console. I’ve never bought a remote control from Amazon.

    This is dwarfed by a slightly larger question. That being: How in the Hell does a Bluray remote control have any relevance to the game being marketed, besides the fact that they’re both for the PlayStation 3? It makes no ruddy sense at all. It’s like saying, “We see you’ve bought socks from us in the past. Would you like a pedicure?” Yes, they’re both foot-related, but they’re very different things.

    And I’d love a pedicure, although I was sadly born without toenails.

  • In Russia, Ask.com Asks You!

    Last night I was on some website or another when Ask.com’s ridiculous “dancing morons” commercial appeared in a banner ad on the sidebar of the site. I’ve seen this commercial elsewhere, I think it’s dumb, and so I tweeted about it:

    Dear @AskDotCom – your marketing campaign is stupid. Nobody uses you anymore. Just stop, okay? You’re embarrassing yourself.

    Because the tweet was written in a “Dear x” format it got picked up and retweeted by @DearRobot who is, I assume, a robot. I’ve no idea whether @DearRobot helped this get noticed by whoever runs Ask.com’s Twitter presence because I woke up this morning to find this response:

    @DearRobot @BenPaddon – Can you offer any suggestions on we can improve?

    My reply:

    @AskDotCom Not in 140 characters unfortunately.If you have an email address I’d gladly write you a thing.

    And so I was furnished with an email address from someone who’s name I wasn’t entirely sure of, and I wrote the following:

    Hi there. Not sure if your name is Mary Ann, or Mary-Ann, or Maryann, so I’ll go with Mary for now. I think that’s probably the safest bet.

    I’ve thought about Ask.com a lot over the years. Not excessively, of course – I have one of those “life” things that stop me devoting too much time to trivial things like search engines, or which shape of acorn squirrels find the most aesthetically pleasing, or why whenever super villains team up they invariably end up giving themselves a long team name which abbreviates to something like HARM, or DEATH, or SCUM. I mean, they’re just calling attention to themselves. You’d think they’d go with something more pleasing like KITTEN, or FLOWER, or TREACLE. If I found out that there was an organization called SPECTRE I’d probably want to know a bit more about what they’re getting up to. That’s an inherently untrustworthy name, if you ask me. You can get away with a lot more evil if you dress it up a little.

    But anyway.

    I mentioned on Twitter that Ask.com’s marketing campaign, the one with people dancing around pointing at themselves, is ridiculous. Don’t worry, you’re not the only ones doing an ad campaign that looks this foolish – I’m fairly certain I saw a similar commercial on Hulu for a completely different company. All that means, though, is that both Ask.com and another company had this idea thrown at them by a marketing team and then said, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

    There’s the first problem – two companies are doing the same thing. Already any success your”dancing around like a pointing idiot” campaign may experience is marginalized by those other buggers. The commercial starts up and you don’t know which one it is, and so you don’t care. You go off and do other things – make a sandwich, feed the cat, and wait for Heroes to come back on.

    The second problem is that it doesn’t actually tell you what Ask.com actually does. Now I’m sure the answer to that is “Well, people can go to Ask.com and find out for themselves,” but if all you’re doing is showing a bunch of people dancing and then follow that by throwing a URL up on the screen, people aren’t going to be inclined to find out more. For all they know it’s a commercial for dancing lessons.

    Put simply, it’s a silly commercial. It’s painful to watch. I feel sorry for the people who appeared in it (although not too sorry because I know how well commercials pay and I am, frankly, a little jealous that they got paid to dance around for thirty seconds). All that commercial does is bring to mind how great Ask.com used to be. “O, how the mighty have fallen,” I think.

    There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that funny commercials tend to stick in people’s minds more. When I say “funny” I don’t mean “marketing funny” – that is, ideas that marketing people think will be funny but when actually committed to film and shown on network television are actually kind of rubbish – I mean genuinely funny. Genuinely funny commercials written by people with a genuine sense of humour and featuring actors who are capable of genuinely pulling off the joke. have a look at this commercial for John Smiths, a British bitter. Now, this commercial ran in the mid-90s. I was probably ten years old when I saw this commercial. I didn’t drink then and I still don’t drink now, but that commercial is forever lodged in my mind. 14 years later I still remember the joke, and I still remember the name of the bitter being sold.

    I doubt that anyone will remember Ask.com’s dancy pointy commercial in even a year’s time. And, dancing aside, there’s nothing about Ask.com’s branding that really stands out… which leads me onto my next point.

    There are some people who feel that Ask.com lost its way when it ditched P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” character as its mascot. I’m not one of those people. I can, to a point, see why Ask.com would let the character go. When the only reason people are going onto the website is to ask in the question “Are you gay?” you have to wonder if the character has retained its value. Plus the licensing probably wasn’t cheap either, unless it was, in which case ignore this last sentence.

    Dropping Jeeves was by no means a bad decision, but it did mean that Ask.com has lost a human face. Granted, it’s a cartoon human face, but it’s a face all the same. Jeeves is back in the UK, and if American users specifically go to AskJeeves.com they’ll be greeted once again by the fat-faced butler, but the current CG rendering of the character lacks the charm of the original stylized drawing from the late 90s/early 2000s. It doesn’t have any life, or soul, or what have you. Now the company, and by extension the website, just feels like another Big Company. Indeed, there was a time when asking Jeeves “are you gay?” was met with the response “I prefer the term ‘jovial’” but that doesn’t happen anymore. There’s no human element to Ask.com. There’s nothing friendly about the site.

    Google has somehow managed to retain that feeling of “We’re just like you!” because… well, I suppose because they’re big and bright and colourful and they interact with their users and have given us nice things like GMail and Google Wave and they have, above all else, kept things simple. And their marketing! Their Google Chrome commercials are inspired. Google’s philosophy seems to be “Let’s make things that could be useful to people, and the money will probably come afterwards.”

    What can we gleam from this? Well, insofar as the internet is concerned, going in with an attitude of “How can we make money?” probably won’t work. The best thing to do is to go in with an attitude of “What do people need?” The answer to that question probably isn’t “a search engine”, because there’s tons of the buggers about. There’s a reason Microsoft has had so many failed search engine attempts – there’s no demand for one. There’s no gap in the market.

    The trick, then, becomes finding something that internet users don’t even know they want yet. And I’m afraid I can’t help you with that, because if I knew what that was I would be a millionaire by now.

    I hope this has been of some help to you, although it probably hasn’t. Nevertheless it was fun to write.

    Regards,
    ~Ben

    So that’s it. I’m no consultant – and I think it probably shows – but when someone asks me how they can improve I’ll bloody-well tell ’em.

  • I’ll Give You My Telescope, Anything, Please Glod Don’t Tell Anyone

    This blog entry runs the risk of becoming somewhat of a self-indulgent Pity Party, so you don’t have to read it. I feel I need to vent, and this blog is a convenient place to do so and so I shall put it to use. There’s every chance I’ll wake up in the morning, remember I’ve written this blog post, go…

    ARGH

    …and then delete it, or make it private. That said, it’s here while it’s here. So enjoy it, or whatever.

    Every now and then my brain gets caught in a logic loop. The problem goes something like this: I worry that there is something seriously wrong with me on a psychological level – some wonderful, terrible mental illness which accounts for my erratic behaviour, my emotional nature, my desire to be the central focus of attention, and all manner of other personality problems. I worry about this for a while, and then I decide I’m probably just being paranoid and I dismiss it. At that point I begin to worry: maybe my dismissing of the thought is preventing me from getting actual, proper help for what may well be a proper, actual condition. My usual response there is to dismiss that as me overthinking the matter and being overly paranoid. Then I worry that dismissing the notion is me denying a problem I have with paranoia coupled with the potential mental problem I might have, and I start to get anxious. Then I dismiss all of it as rubbish, and I wonder if maybe dismissing any of it was in fact the smart thing to do.

    Usually I can stop my thought process from wandering too far down this path and I can catch myself before I get too caught up in it and find myself sitting on the bed, staring out into nothing, terrified that whichever decision I make about this whole “my brain is broken” nonsense is the wrong one. Occasionally I don’t, and I wind up doing just that. Even when I’m able to break free of it and go about living my life as if I were a normal, sensible, contributing member of society (ha!) it still floats around the surface of my brain for a few days afterwards, and generally that can leave me feeling rather low.

    I had someone suggest to me a few years ago that I might be Bipolar. I’m fairly confident that I’m not. I’ve something of an interest in neurological disorders and I don’t personally believe I fit the description of a classic Bipolarity. That said, I’e always felt a kinship with Stephen Fry. If you don’t know who Fry is then that probably means you’re American, but to summarize he’s a writer, actor, playwright and poet. You’ve probably seen him in Bones as Dr. Gordon Wyatt M.D., or in Jeeves and Wooster as the titular butler. Possibly you remember him as the Qur’an-owning television chat show host from the 2006 movie adaptation of V for Vendetta.  I’ve just spent far too much time explaining who he is. Long story short, he is the gem of the British Isles, and a rarity; a glowing, charismatic, intelligent man who is at the same time accessible to and admired by the general public. He is an inspiration of mine and something of an idol. He is the man I hope to be when I reach my 50s.

    He’s also Bipolar, and in 2006 filmed the documentary “The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive” talking about his own experiences with Bipolarity and interviewing other Bipolar celebrity figures such as Carrie Fisher (oh, you know who she is) and Robbie Williams (the British musician, not the hairy comedian – you’re thinking of Robin Williams). I’ve watched this documentary a couple of times on YouTube and just tonight downloaded the whole thing to sit and watch on a proper television tomorrow.

    Every time I watch this documentary it shreds my insides. It leaves me devastated, frightened. It scares me, it makes me worry, and it usually leaves me stuck in that paranoia/anxiety feedback loop I mentioned earlier. In fact I haven’t watched it in well over a year and a half for that very reason. But spurred on by a recent… looping, I feel I have to watch it again. I don’t know why.

    I’d love to know exactly why my head is wired up the way it is. I’d love to know what makes me tick. I doubt I’m Bipolar – I know I’m not, in fact – but for some reason I feel that if I learn more about Bipolarity, if I can understand it better, then perhaps I can understand what’s wrong with me. I’m sure there’s a logical hole in there somewhere.

    Sometimes I am so scared of the way my brain functions. But, and I feel this is important, I do my best to ensure it doesn’t get in the way of experiencing new things and achieving my ambitions. It’s rare for me  to feel as weak and pathetic as I do tonight.

  • More Evony Ridiculousness

    Apparently their “Play unnoticeably” campaign wasn’t going so well, because today I saw…

    evony1

    …and…

    evony2

    …on the same page. Oh, Evony. How low will you sink?

  • Console Yourself

    I bought the novelization of Batman & Robin recently, and I’m reading it at a fairly steady pace. I’ll likely do a write-up on it soonish, but first I thought I’d talk about something that’s been on my mind the last few days: games consoles.

    We have, in our house, One Of Everything. A Wii, a PS3, and an Xbox 360. Generally wind up falling into a particular pattern when we’re buying games – we tend to buy games the 360 version of games with a multiplayer emphasis (e.g. Street Fighter IV or Rock Band), the PS3 version of singleplayer games (e.g. Batman: Arkham Asylum or Ghostbusters), and the Wii version if it’s a family game (e.g…. well, virtually every Wii game out there). I’ve been playing through Arkham Asylum and Ghostbusters on the PS3 recently and I came to a startling conclusion: I don’t like the console.

    We’ve had our PS3 now for two years and we’ve bought, I think, about ten games for it in total. Most of those games I haven’t even finished. Most of those games I’ve traded in. Right now my PlayStation games library consists of the aforementioned singleplayer games, the quite brilliant LittleBigPlanet, and BioShock – a game I bought on the cheap because the PC version stopped working when I upgraded my graphics card (although it started working again when I installed Windows 7). Then there are, I think, about eight or nine PS2 games. My most recent games purchase for the console was Rayman 3, which is a good few years old.

    Don’t get me wrong, the PS3 is a solid system, but I can’t help but feel something is missing from the PlayStation 3 experience – the social aspect.

    It’s weird because four or five years ago it wouldn’t have even mattered to me, but the Xbox 360 has spoilt me. It has. The console has an absolutely perfect social side. It’s all wonderfully put together and nicely balanced and I know what I’m doing with it. The PS3, though, feels like the social stuff was slapped in at the last minute. That may be because it sort of was – player-to-player voice chat outside of specific games was only recently added to the console in a firmware update, and even then the base console doesn’t come with a free headset like the 360 does. What’s more, the advantages of the PlayStation 3’s online capabilities – free online play and a built-in wireless receiver – soon melt away when you discover that there’s no bugger playing the game you’re playing.

    Perhaps most perplexing is that I miss this social aspect even in the singleplayer games I’m playing. I miss being able to bring up a list of players and see what they’re playing, what they’re up to, how they’re doing. I miss being able to compare my scores against my friends because, haha, none of my friends own a PS3 and so my Friends List is remarkably small, consisting mainly of JjAR and a handful of people I met on a forum I seldom visit anymore. Every time I boot up my PS3, I find myself wondering what my Xbox 360 friends are doing.

    So I don’t think I shall be buying any more games for the PS3, save for console exclusives like Uncharted 2 and the inevitable follow-up to LittleBigPlanet. It just isn’t worth it.

  • A Step In The Slightly-Less-Wrong Direction

    I know this isn’t quite as awful as their “Oh look, boobies” ad, but…

    evony

    Really? That’s their draw? “Play unnoticeably”?

  • io9 post list of top 100 scifi shows, have big ugly face that’s as dumb as a butt

    io9, the scifi & fantasy blog owned by Gawker Media, have taken time from their busy schedule of Googling for pornographic Futurama fan-art to post a “Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Shows Of All Time” list. I happen to side with Mil Millington on the subject of “lists as journalism” – namely, it’s bollocks – and their list is more reprehensible than comprehensive. Let’s take a look at some of the items on that list, shall we?

    (more…)

  • We’re All Flawed, and We’re All Brilliant

    I read the UK government’s ePetitions website, and I do so as a hobby.

    But, Sir… started life as a hobby. Friend and fellow Jump Leads writer Andrew I both followed the RSS feed for the ePetition site in Google Reader and we’d often share the more ludicrous petitions with each other. The idea hit one one day that rather than just pointing them out to each other like children passing notes around class, why not collate them in a blog for everyone to see?

    Since then reading through the petitions has changed for me. It’s no longer a way to kill time. It’s almost a job. It’s something I enjoy doing a lot because, in all honesty, everybody likes to make fun of stupid people. Recently, however, it began to sit uncomfortably with me. “How on earth,” I’d ask myself, “Can there be this many stupid people living and working in the UK?”

    Indeed, idiocy is all around us. Here in the US we have to deal with morons like Orly Taitz and the Birthers, and the Healthcare Reform nuts who believe that Obama is going to send “death panels” to their grandparents’ houses to shoot them in the head. Or whatever. Indeed, there is a public perception amongst the rest of the world that America is full of mindless, gormless, overweight neanderthals who barely have enough power in their minuscule pea-brains to recall even the simplest of PIN numbers. Y’know what? I’ve lived here for over two years and I think that I’ve personally encountered more morons in the UK than I have in the US. The problem, really, is that the American morons get more news coverage – well when a country elects a complete and utter bollock-brain like Bush twice, they’re bound to get weird looks.

    British citizens like to look down on America, as though it were a less intelligent nation. But the simple truth is this: “Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere.” The UK is not full of… actually, Americans, you should take note of this as well. The UK is not full of tea-drinking, wine-sniffing, witticism-spouting intellectuals who gather around a fine wooden table to discuss Matters of Great Importance. Not everybody there knows what a bidet is. Many of them have never even seen the inside of a Parlour, nor looked through the single lens of a monocle. The UK isn’t full of anything. What it has, just like any other country, is its fair share of smart people and its fair share of morons.

    The balance has always seemed off-kilter, and this is usually because idiots are louder. America has its Town Hall meetings where ignorant, gun-toating Beckites shout idiocies and moronisms at elected officials because they’re terrified that their healthcare system might be improved, and the UK has the Government ePetitions site and the BBC’s Have Your Say pages where our own special breed of idiot can shout more or less the same stupid comments either directly at the government or the internet in general (incidentally if you want to see real lunacy in action I’d suggest you check out spEak You’re bRanes, which does for the Have Your Say comments what we do for the ePetitions). This sort of halfwit has existed since long before our time. We’ve had idiots for decades. Centuries. Millennia. The only difference now is that they’ve been handed a worldwide platform for their mad ravings. Used to be you just stood on a street corner and told people that we should bring back Crucifixion. Now you can get on television and tell an entire nation, or  jump online and tell the world.

    Reading the ePetitions site might be enough to drive a lesser man into a pit of cynicism, depression, and a sort of general bitterness for the human race as a whole. Despite my bitter ranting in the last couple of paragraphs I feel I have to make it clear, I don’t despair for the state of the human race. I don’t lay awake at night wondering what’s become of us. I may well have a deeply-routed antipathy for the willfully ignorant, but that is not a label that can be applied to humanity as a whole. Me? I love the human race. We’re fantastic! How can you not love a world were an overworked, underpaid supermarket soda monkey does this with his spare time? Or where a lover sends his other half bits of card to tell her how much he loves her?

    People – cynical, jaded people in particular – seem to forget that just as human beings are capable of great stupidity and horror, so are we capable of remarkable intellect and acts of incredible kindness. For every Charles Manson there is a Danny Wallace, for every Fred Phelps there is a John Lennon (which logically means there’s also a Yoko Ono, but let’s not think about that).

    You can’t ignore that there is so much bad that goes on in the world – the media makes sure of that – but you mustn’t forget that there’s a lot of good going on as well.