Media back-step: The Rise of the Paywall
The past few days has seen the start of a massive shake-up in the Australian media industry. Both Fairfax and News Ltd have announced drastic cut-backs in staff, and more eye-catchingly for me, also announced their intentions to set up paywalls around some of their major news sites.
The paywall has been an increasingly popular option for media companies, especially those which have traditionally had popular newspapers, as they attempt to replace the revenue that has and is being lost by people ditching physical newspapers in favour of online-based news websites.
In the past, a website for a newspaper was … Read more →
Every morning for the better part of the last two weeks I have been awake at insane hours watching the European Football Championships. The Euros are probably my favourite international football tournament, as in my opinion the quality of football is of a higher degree than even the World Cup can offer.
Last night was a fairly eventful night. We started off by going to Southbank to see Iron Sky, which strangely enough, Des really wanted to see after hearing good things about it.
I've just finished playing through Mass Effect 3, and I really enjoyed 90% of it. But like almost of the entire internet, the ending was just abysmal. Abysmal writing, abysmal plot, abysmal closure. The ending was such an epic disappointment, and like many others have mentioned, it's mostly counter to what the 2.9 games leading up to it were all about. I'll attempt to write this entry devoid of any big spoilers to the ME3 endings, but no promises if you are spoiler allergic!
In terms of computer and application interfaces (either hardware or software) I'm pretty critical of a lot of 'fashion' or 'trendy' changes that have absolutely no practical improvement, and especially those that are in my opinion completely unpractical. 
Time for my first rant of the year!