March | 2010 | The Fluffshack

No, I have not played C&C4 yet, though I will soon.

And no, this is not a post analysing in detail the gameplay, estetics, production quality, storyline, etc of the various C&C incarnations and how they have gone to shit since EA toolk over Westwood and then abolished it.

Instead, I am going to simply demonstrate something that very nearly and very completely encapsulates the difference between C&C during Westwood en C&C during EA.

The Installation of the game.

See here first of all, the DOS installer for C&C1

Then see here the DOS installer for Red Alert 1

Now lets look at what we get with C&C3 installer:

Its not even in English, i dont even get to choose the language.

EA, FUCK. YOU.

Below is my response to the last episode of the metatalks podcast, hosted by my friends Alachia en Jeppy.
You should listed to the episode first if you want to understand the context of my comment below.

http://metatalks.blogspot.com/2010/03/metatalks-3-meta-layers.html

Comment thread: http://www.google.com/buzz/alachia.me/Gf4wkaPdDo7/Metatalks-3-Meta-Layers

Listened to the episode this afternoon while cleaning. Funnily enough just this morning I read this: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/ which deals rather nicely with exactly the same topic.

What Alachia didn’t mention in podcast but knows is that I in fact maintain 3 blogs now that deal with the different aspects of me. The last one being very important that it not intermingle with my other identity, whereas the first 2 I have no issue with them kinda cross-connecting in some ways. So my first 2 blogs, the tech blog (thefluffyadmin.net), and the me/geek blog (jemimus.net), are designed with the potential audience in mind, so that “audience”, doesn’t have to be bored to tears with the other part. Its a basic secmentation of my 2 major interest spheres.

The third blog is rather more secret and disconnected in every way I can think of, and also is built around a completely fictional identity. And that blog is not really for an audience (though in the beginning I thought it could be), but more as a sounding board for my own thoughts on that particular side of me. Its far more personal than my “me/geek” blog at jemimus.net could ever be. Which I feel is a little unfortunate, because there is a middle ground that I would like to cover between those 2 blogs that I can’t currently.

For example, my parents will read jemimus.net because its connected to Twitter, and Twitter appears in their MSN. But I don’t really want to go into my darker emotional states on there, because of those 2 people, along with some others like potential collegues. While I am sure most of my other friends really wouldn’t mind at all if I shared some more of the emotional stuff there. Feeling the need to express myself there in that way, I have even considered disconnecting my parents MSN from my Twitter feed, or otherwise not connecting my blog posts to Twitter. Sure its still all public, and they can just google my site if they wanted to, but I know most of them wouldn’t, its just on the margins of their internet periphery.

Maybe a 4th blog is in order? lol. I go back to what Alachia and I discussed on Wowcast once, where I mentioned that what you really want is 1 single identity platform, so you can far more closely control who gets to see what exactly. Some posts visible only to annonymous, others other visible to “Friends list 1”, where that list would consist of verifiable identities coming from either a locally registered account, or remote identity silo’s like Facebook, Google and Twitter. This can be done right now, but I have yet to see the right implementation of this in, say, a WordPress plugin.