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During breakfast, English pronunciation came up (yeah, we tend to have endless discussions early in the morning). This time it was the word ‘adjective’ (Webster has a neat ‘pronunciation’ sound file there too). It’s a word I keep pronouncing the same way as I say ‘objective’ or ‘receptive’, which caused some confusion in the house. I mean, to me it appears that the official pronunciation of the word ‘adjective’ is breaking all rules there are in English language. Oh, and the official English pronunciation of thermometer sucks too.

That said, having been taught ‘British English’, I firmly believe in spelling colour as, well, ‘colour’ and not ‘color’. The difference in spelling can be a daunting task if you’re a programmer(C/C++/Java/Delphi) with firm feet in British English spelling: for some kind of reason, all programming languages assume every programmer is living in the southern portion of North America.

This afternoon, Alfons forwarded a couple of pictures of the Anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam he ran into today (for him that will be yesterday)¹. I ended up making a joke about the possibility of intelligence services monitoring these kind of demonstrations:

Me: Yes, that is one. There’s actually an RFID tag under his bakhara.
Alfons: WTF is a bakhara? You mean like baklava?
Me: I don’t know. I made up that word.

Guess what. Bakhara is actually a place in Afghanistan. And it’s also a MUD (what is a MUD?). If you think of it, the chance of making up unique words is getting smaller by the day, if we assume that (any) language is constantly evolving with the day, or even, by the minute. We still have a long way to go though: Officially English only has around 500,000 words. In case we run out of words, I propose the following ‘fixes’:

• Start charging people for new words. People hate paying for something that they consider to be ‘free’. Heck, privatize the English language! Let it compete with other insignificant languages. Let the market decide which language is going to be the dominant language. And if English becomes too hard to maintain, we can always outsource it.
• Recycle old words (Imagine the word ‘president’ being recycled. Or ‘War’.)
• Expand the alphabet with extra letters or, like the Chinese, introduce ‘logograms’. Of course in the English language we would call them ‘cartoons’.
• Remove vowels from words. Imagine the extra amount of new words! (See also The Internationalist for some words of wisdom).

I suggest we start with the privatizing part. Better yet, let’s call the process of privatizing languages ‘prvtze’.

¹ This was supposed to be a subnote. I’m not going to tell you what I was going to write here.

I have been watching my e-mail accounts closely and I noticed that I’ve been receiving a lot more sapm per day since July 1st. Most of them target my domain registration E-mail’s address. However, noticably, I’ve been receiving e-mails from people for people with gmail addresses that resemble my own. Huh?

The latest fashionable kind of sapm is the one that urges people to buy some stock in some non-existent company: listen, I don’t buy stock, I don’t need pills and foremost, I don’t use E-Bay, Paypal or other online fancy-fairs. So, forget about it. I’m boring and most importantly, I’m poor: If I was rich I wouldn’t be online. I’d be sitting somewhere in the Pacific on a godforgotten island with a typical long name (which translates to ‘Heaven’ nonetheless) and, no, if I don’t know you, don’t expect me to invite you.

That said: If you’re that bored, try organizing your life.

Reading games reviews on the Internet reminds me of the days (way back) when I literally ate car reviews for breakfast. Numbers, average ratings, I was obsessed with averages. However, reviews based on average (numerical) ratings don’t work: take for example this review over at Gamespot for a game called ‘Prey’. Gamespot uses several components that (at the end) result in an ‘average’ rating in a scale from 1 to 10, uh, wait, there’s a ‘catch’:

Our ratings are generated from the component scores that our reviewers assign. That means the overall rating is not a pure average of five component scores–some components are weighted more heavily than others. GameSpot has consistently applied this same rating formula since we started.

So, going back to the ratings of that game, over 5 different components the review assigned 3 7s and 2 8s (on a scale of 10), which according most math should end up with an average rating of 7.4. The question is of course, where exactly did the article’s 7.5 score come from? It must be the graphics!

The catch-all with these kind of ratings is that averages don’t really tell anything. Think of it this way: 10 years ago graphics were a lot less better than today. If 10 years ago, games reviewers gave a game like Pac Man a 10 for graphics, imagine what that number (according a specific scale) would be now. Most likely not 10. I bet that it’s probably a lot more fun playing Pac Man over and over than, lets say, the very game now known as ‘Prey’.

I have a better and alternative rating system: it’s called the ‘Frustration Level’. It’s on a scale of 10 too and for clarity, I decided to use sailing as a metaphor:

• 10 – This game is smooth sailing from A to Z.
• 9 – Smooth sailing. A and B was bad but Z is there.
• 8 – Sailing.
• 7 – Sort of sailing, need to use the spare motor to get this going so once in a while.
• 6 – It’s sailing, but the motor ran out of fuel and there’s a big chance we may need to use the wooden peddles. Whatever.
• 5 – God. Somebody forgot the fuel.
• 4 – OMG. Somebody forgot the fuel and the peddles. Wind is hardly blowing, we’re almost at a standstill. What’s next?
• 3 – OMFG. Sombody forgot the fuel, the peddles and the sails. And this is supposed to be a sailing boat. Ever peddled a boat by hand?
• 2 – Did anybody notice that this boat is leaking?
• 1 – This is not a boat. It’s actually a Sinking Brick. A Shiny Sinking Brick at that.

There’s no need for multiple sub-ratings either: how much you enjoy a game is actually defined by how many times you got frustrated during gameplay. Did you get frustrated too many times? Somebody forgot the fuel!.

The good part of my rating is that if a game has a frustration level of ’10’ (no frustration whatsoever), this doesn’t automatically mean that it’s a good game. That’s not the point of this rating system: if you find that a game sucks, it’s probably because you’re biased. Or lets say it this way, if you think a game sucks then you might just as well put that to words and convince your ‘fan base’ why this game didn’t work.

Afterall, you don’t suck 5.5 on a scale of 10 either, do you?

1. Since I was Alfons introduced me to ‘Eurogamer’, I have always preferred their reviews above the ones produced in the US, because of the highly dry humour displayed by all of the reviewers. While I don’t agree with their ‘point system’ (1= bad, 10 = really good), compare their review of ‘Prey’ with the one above.