Friday, November 02, 2007

CNET articles that sort of piss me off

I hate it when hipsters pretend to be nerds and then write another crappy top 10 lists. This one has the most evil computers from science fiction. Somehow they find it prudent to put crap on there like the computer from Superman 3 or some random villain from Star Trek. At the same time, they forgot such not so minor entries like

- The MCP from Tron
- SHODAN, which makes the AI from Portal look like a kindly baker
- The computer from War Games

And that's all you really need to know to know this list was crap, though as the comments mention, if these guys really knew their stuff we should have seen Wintermute and Neuromancer as well.

I know lists like these in general are stupid to begin with, but they can have some semblance of entertainment when you take the approach of cracked.com, where lists are for completely asinine things. You don't care about who is on it or what the order is, but what ridiculous things they'll come up with. When lists try to get serious or authoratative, that's when it gets really retarded.

Also, an opinion piece on how Blockbuster is going to go bust sooner rather than later. I agree, but when the guy wonders what they could do to improve things, I shake my head. True, Netflix is helping kick their ass. But Hollywood Video doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent as Blockbuster, and they don't seem to be going out of business. The difference? Hollywood Video doesn't treat customers with contempt. I remember walking into one the Tuesday Bioshock released. The result? Stacks of the game to rent. Not one or two copies, but literally 15-20. They have a wide variety of games, well organized, and lots of them. You don't get to keep them as long as Blockbuster, but that's okay. Plus they give you free rentals when you don't come in for a while.

I've never been in a Blockbuster I liked. The games sections are always horribly organized, because no one goes around to see if the kids are messing things up. They don't get new games in immediately, and what they do have never gets more than two copies in. Sometimes you won't be able to tell if a game is actually in because the case behind the display case is for something else. They have miserable stores compared to Hollywood Video, to the point where you don't even want to go there to rent something they probably won't have it. If they just treated their stores a little better, it would surely help. Instead they give the impression that they don't care, and as a result, neither do we.