I was watching "Ebert at the Movies" or whatever that show is called (and by the way, I don't know if I like the Roeper fellow or not) and they mentioned MovieLens which is a research project at the University of Minnesota. Looks like it takes people's ratings of movies they've seen and compares it with ratings that other people have submitted and then makes recommendations of what movies you'd probably like to see (even giving a 1-5 star rating for appropriateness).

So I go there, create an account, and start rating movies. The problem is what scale to use? In general just about every movie I "like", "don't like", or "like a lot", but the majority are in the "like" category. They suggest "good", "recommended", "must see" and a couple of other descriptive words or phrases. But just about every movie comes out as three or four stars, so the recommendations, although giving me a list of movies, all came out as 3-1/2 or four stars.

This points out a general problem of subjective scoring when you score-as-you- go, there could be somthing down the line that is way worse or way better than anything scored before then. And then what do you do? Go back and re-score or just hit the ceiling (or floor) and make this great (or abysmal) movie the same as a not so great (or so bad) movie? Maybe Amazon.com has a conceptually easier way to go about it. They recommend movies that other people have also bought along with your movies. Pure marketing, but the inklings of a good idea...

I just saw the Diablo II commercial and my thought is "what's the point?" The Final Fantasy commercials also have the same problem: they don't show the actual game. The months spent making the cool CGI animations for these commercials seem like a waste to me. They misrepresent the game, not even showing anything about the graphics or gameplay. Pure marketing, and rather annoying.

There was a point a couple of years ago when I saw these kinds of commercials and print ads and thought that the graphics were really good. Once you see the game though and realize that the photorealistic graphics are just the cut scenes or rendered drawings, it's rather disappointing. Game play is what's important in any case, but I don't like being fooled by the advertisements or box packaging...

I'm just being a bit irrational, but the shocking lack of basic spelling or grammar of people on the Internet is rather shameful. I don't expect much from foreigners, but when Germans write better English than we do it's rather sad. Partly it's laziness, lack of care; mostly it's that normally I wouldn't be reading other people's writings in every day life. Since the Internet is very text-based, the little shortcomings in our writing skills are pointed out again and again. It just points out the US's woeful state of its primary education system. I make mistakes too, and now that I'm starting to at least reread my journal entries I'm catching many mistakes, and probably missing a few. If everybody did that it would cut down mistakes by an order of magnitute and at least not make everybody on the Internet look like a bunch of morons.

My mind thinks so fast and I write so slowly. Sometimes I start writing a thought, change it two or three times, then go back and finish the sentence. Sometimes that works out fine, sometimes I miss a glue word or two and it comes out disjointed. These are my personal thoughts in any case so it's not as if I care what other people think. But if I'm going to complain about something I should at least make an effort not to be in the category "part of the problem".