Total Conversion Mod's

As per the presentation in class on Tuesday made me reflect on a a mod I used to play back in my middle school days. THe modding community is a very niche group as well, work very long and hard on there games, especially for no pay. Just the satisfaction that they will get from them, and others, playing their game.

Heres a trailer for Battlefield 1942, an original game by Electronic Arts(EA).


Now here is a Total Modification of the game, with a new theme, the Iraq War. This drew a very large audience.


Desert Combat ended up winning FilePlanet's Best New Mod of 2004 for Desert Combat Final, FilePlanet's Best Mod of 2004, GameSpy's 2003 PC Modification of the Year, FilePlanet's Best New Mod for 2002.
THere were also 17 other mods of this game ranging from Star Wars, to Vietnam. The Vietnam game was also very succesful and EA developped Battlefield: Vietnam. As you can see this was almost a decade ago and the modding community is still very much apart of the PC online gaming commmunity as well as beginning to become of the console systems as well.

Blogger David Portnoy Profile: Is This Really Boston's Next Media Mogul?

Barstoolsports.com Owner David Portnoy

One of my favorite blogs, barstoolsports.com(Motto: "By The Common Man for the Common Man") owner is just an average guy from Massachusetts who created a blog a few years ago mainly focused around funny but weird issues in American society, New England professional sports teams, and girls.
As his blog has grown so has his followers. This enabled blogger Dave Portnoy to eventually create a shop for his blog with funny t-shirts of relevant sports teams that many people will actually buy and wear to events. Barstool sports has also events and theme'd parties at bars in Boston or New York City.
Through the years,Portnoy has created an empire of blogs dedicated to his ideals. Since they started originally in Boston, it has ventured to the likes of New York and now there is a barstool blog for women called stool-la-la.
It is interesting to see the background of a normal man like Portnoy with a similar education as ours take a blog so far to create a vast revenue stream and to be recognized anywhere he goes.
Maybe the next great blogger will come from our New Media class....who knows.

The Kid From Brooklyn

One of the only Vlogs I've truly ever followed is the likes of an old man called "The Kid From Brooklyn". His Vlogs consist mostly of ranting, screaming, cursing, and some racism of an old man kind of questioning why the world is changing through different little stories and examples. I saw one and thought it was very funny because he reminded me a lot of my Grandfather, and have been subscribed ever since. It has many conventions of a Vlog, since hes always in the same room, wearing the same hat, same glasses, screaming the tagline at the end, "THINK ABOUT ITTTT"

Enjoy...
Warning: If you are offended by foul language, this video isn't for you.

Should the WikiLeaks founder be brought up on criminal/Terrorist charges?

Julian Assange, Founder of WikiLeaks

Sarah Palin just also stated that she believes that founder Julian Assange
"He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders?"


They are debating whether the Espionage Act applies, and to whom, according to this official, who spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Other charges also might be possible, including theft of government property or receipt of stolen government property.
Rep. Peter King of New York(From a Long Island town by me) called for Assange to be charged under the Espionage Act and asked whether WikiLeaks can be designated a terrorist organization.
But Assange has portrayed himself as a crusading journalist: He told ABC News by e-mail that his latest batch of State Department documents would expose "lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil." He told Time magazine he targets only "organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior."

The cables were obtained, via WikiLeaks, by the New York Times, the Guardian of Britain, Der Spiegel of Germany, Le Monde of France and El Pais of Spain.

What do you think? Is WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, should Assange be tried as a terrorist, or is he just a news journalist doing this job?

National Unfriend Day by Jimmy Kimmel

On a recent Jimmy Kimmell, he made a call to the world to promote November 17, 2010 National UnFriend Day [NUD] as a new holiday he hopes will inspire Facebook users to unfriend the social networking contacts that aren't real friends.
Facebook was once the social networking site we chose over MySpace to connect with our real friends; but over the years, many of us have accumulated dozens, if not hundreds, of Facebook friends that are, in fact, not actually our friends.
Kimmel believes there are 5 reasons:
Some of the "unfriending" logic being preached on the internet today?

1. They're your mom

2. You don't actually know them

3. You've hidden them on your newsfeed because their status updates are too annoying

4. They send you invite after invite after invite to everything from quizzes and games to lame charity cause parties

5. You were friends in high school ... and haven't spoken since

Maybe Jimmy Kimmel is getting to a point of how out of control friending is on SNS sites. The promotion of facebook being an aspect to a national holiday is interesting because its showing how far facebook has come in the past few years.

Cyber Bullying

With the world of online social network sites comes new issues. Cyber bullying is one of these new issues that that is being addressed by social institutions such as all different levels of school from elementary through high school, even college. More and more people will take their problems and feelings towards others on social network sites such as Facebook or MySpace.
Ive recently seen and increased amount of advertisements against cyber bullying, making people aware of it, and trying to prevent it. The problem is users using social network sites to belittle others to a larger audience that would normally know or see. It is very embarassing to the individual. They obviously would not want information making fun of them posted, replicated, and the persistency that the comment will be online forever, with others commenting as well. Just a few months ago, a girl committed suicide due to cyber bullying. It is continuing to become a larger issue in America and Im sure we'll see more and more ad's calling for the prevention of cyber bullying.

Ad Council And National Crime Prevention Council Launch New Cybe - Celebrity bloopers here

Death on Social Networks

Deaths of users on websites such as Facebook are new problems in social networking sites. What does Facebook do when a user passes away? This is a difficult issue on social network sites. In the beginning of Facebook, most of the users death were tragic because there was a younger generation on Facebook. Now it is changing as more people come online, there is now an older age group on Facebook of users who will die of natural causes. Though a user may die in real life, their Facebook page will live on forever, leaving families and friends an of online somewhat interactive memorial, where users can view old pictures and comment on their wall about missing them or a story to them. It is very weird to look at Facebooks of those who pass away. The memorializing of deceased users on facebook began in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting. Facebook memorialized those users that passed away, as well as many people devote status's to family and friends in difficult times.