Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine Volume I, Issue XXIV, Year AD MCMXCVI Monday, December 2nd, 1996 ------------------------------------------- 1. Readers' Letters a. Platonic Friendships b. Barney Devil Proof 2. Ten Marketer's Golden Rules 3. The "SENSE" 4. The meaning of life. ------------------------------------------- 1. Readers' Letters A. Platonic Friendships Date sent: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 00:28:28 -0800 From: matt del vecchio Subject: RE: Capital of Nasty, Volume I, Issue XXII, Year AD MCMXCVI To: "'leandro@ifront.com'" Leondro! Letter from me, yes I really am still reading every week! ;) Here is my response to this issue, and to joelogon's article. HAH! After reading this issuse of CoN's guide to platonic friendship, I HAD to reply. That was BEAUTIFUL, if a male may be allowed to say such things...grin. I think we *all* have received those sex--SIX--devastating, earth shattering finger nail biting, beer guzzling words, "I just want to be friends!" The funniest one: >* DO play and replay scenarios in your mind where you come > out and declare your true feelings to her, whereupon you > proceed directly to frenzied yet sensitive, passionate, and > completely fulfilling love-making. >* DO NOT actually attempt this. My problem, right there. Whaddya guys think is worse- having this fun filled platonic relationship from the start, or switching to it (or rather, her decideing she's tired of this flavor and wants another instead, expecting you to instantly purge your system of all those now "unappropiate" feelings for her as quickly as she did)? My phrase of the day- "It's a sellers market." And *they're* the merchants. grin...take it easy. Oh, and I've got a web page now! It's at www.geocities.area51/6660, you're linked in. cya! matt - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B. Barney Devil Proof From: "MarXidad" To: leandro@ifront.com Date sent: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 19:26:56 +0000 Subject: Re: Capital of Nasty, Volume I, Issue XXIII, Illogical! Priority: normal > Barney Devil Proof > Here's an exercise in logic. > The Romans had no letter 'U', and used 'V' instead for > printing, meaning the Roman representation would for > Barney would be: CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR > Extracting the Roman numerals, we have: > CV V L DI V > And their decimal equivalents are: > 100 5 5 50 500 1 5 > Adding those numbers produces: 666. Um, no. Cvte, but if you're doing this in the name of 'logic' you have to include the number N, which is 5000 in Roman Numerals, meaning the numbers add up to 5666, which, if anything is some dumb UNIX port. Yay. MarXidad /_/ / /o / / / / / / / / / / /) / / / _ / \/\ \_/\/\_X/ ------------------------------------------- Okay. The game has been delayed for three years and now its technology is out of date. The Full Motion Video sequences make porno movies look like Best Cinematography Academy Award winners. Programmers are secretly bad-mouthing it on the IRCs. The beta-testers are mysteriously calling in sick a lot. The PC game magazines rated your last six games 92%--collectively. And it's your job to sell the latest nightmare about to lurch out of production to a crowd that's happily playing games from LucasArts, id, Sierra, and Electronic Arts. What do you do? 2. Ten Marketer's Golden Rules by Marco Tabini (mtabini@ifront.com) 1. Words-The Bigger, the Better Always include expressions like "The Ultimate", "Incredible", "Absolutely Amazing" in your ads. Use hyperbolae, maximize everything. That's what makes it a different advertisement. That's what makes you a different advertiser. That's what makes you the "Ultimate Dishwasher!" when you get fired because your ads don't sell the lousy game. 2. Fake Your Technologies Bring your products to life by describing incredible new technological advances your amazing development team conceived and created - without even knowing about them. Inventions like "a new amazing technology to control your character" (i.e. the arrow keys), "an incredible learning technology which makes your opponents tougher and tougher" (the TIC-TAC-TOE algorithm) and "a brand-new, real-time 3D virtual reality rendering engine" (does the name Pacman mean anything to you?). Besides, you can always invent the Incredible Dishwashing Engine Version 1.01. Just move your hands faster on your next job. 3. Give Them Unrealistic Names Curious acronyms always attract people. Thus, be sure to call your latest sound engine D.E.A.F. (Decent Effects Are a Fantasy), or your most recent 3D technology W-F.L.A.T.S. (We Figured too Late [this should have been] A Three-dee Scene). You can also use fancy names like M.O.R.O.N. (Musical Out-of-Reality sOuNds) and R.E.B.E.L.S. (Really Excruciatingly Bad End-Less Songs). And don't forget the S.O.A.P. for your next job. 4. Fake Your Screenshots Always remember to have your "actual" screenshots specially designed for your ads. Use 10:1 resolution changes, multiply the number of colours in your games by a factor of at least ten. Hire three professional animators to create from scratch the excerpts for the video ad--and pay them at least three times the salary of your chief animator. Use all possible techniques--including manual cut and paste and airbrushing--to absolutely fake your pictures. This will be useful when pretending that you still are a marketing manager and you can't send your mother a picture of you over the sink. Be careful not to get any suds on the photo. 5. Design Impossible Packages Pyramids, cylinders, spheres, hexaflexagons, and all of the n-dimensional shapes that the mad scientist in your package design department can think of will make everybody happy: distributors, who won't know how to stack them; resellers, who won't know how to put them on the shelves without avoiding the "domino effect" (your package falling over another and starting a chain reaction that ultimately causes the game shop to collapse into a black hole); and 3 year-old players, who will certainly appreciate the opportunity of using your package's sharp angles to harm themselves in the most irreversible ways. Or you. 6.Lie Without Remorse About The Release Date Tell magazines that the game will be out for Christmas (without actually saying that it will be Christmas, A.D. 2013). Late products always give the impression of huge workloads and accurate refinement behind them. Lie without remorse. Nobody will blame you. When asked about the cause of the delay, answer evasively with "We have been experiencing slight trouble (half of the cast died and you had to shoot all video again, programmers are on strike because you are ridiculizing their work [see rules 3 and 4], the only things ready to go are the name and the packaging {see Rule #5}, and you can't show the latter), but I am positive about a speed up in the production process." Tell people the release date is imminent right after the production staff showed you a dummy puppet wandering around the screen with the intelligence of a worm. Or of a dishwasher. 7. Release Demos Of Your Games Ten Months Before It's Done And Then Get Upset With The Production Staff Because It Causes So Many Crashes That The Operating System Is Getting Annoyed With It And When The User Tries To Run It Answers With A "Are You Nuts?" Dialogue Box Need I say more? 8. Be As Cryptic As Possible About Your Game The less people know about it, the more they will talk about it. Will it be a new Quake clone? Or will it be a new platform game, Mario Bros. style? As long as they don't know that it is a CGA Doom clone that runs slow on a dual-Pentium PRO 200 (see the article Game Labels We Really Need), you can still hope to sell a couple of copies. One to your mother, so that you can demonstrate that you still are in marketing. The other to your employer. And one for the restaurant's owner, of course. 9. Advertise In The Right Magazines You are the creative department. You decide where to put your ads. No matter if the guys in production complain about their "creation" being advertised in Gardening Today or Wood Carpentry Digest. They can't understand. However, some of them can be fired. But that's another story. 10. Get Another Job I heard lately that restaurants are offering good job opportunities. Guess what job? -Marco Tabini is a programmer, who contributes to Gamesmania in many capacities. He is the proud owner of a dishwashing machine that gets out those really tough, baked-on food particles. The machine used to be the Marketing Manager for a now-defunct software development firm. ------------------------------------------- 3. The "SENSE" by Peter Sprokkelenburg (psprokk@wiznet.ca) I started my new job last week and man has it been great. I believe I've found a new out look on life. Everyone there really like to joke and kid around I feel like I'm in the school we all wish we HAD attended. On the 27th (of November) all the people from CS (Customer Support) had a monthly get together and drinks were paid for by the head of department (beer!). It was great sitting around a feel as if this was something that I was suppost to have done from the day I was born (as if!). One of my friends Mo had invited a very good friend of his, Jackie. Mo and I got to talking about childhood and different other experiences, only to realize that we were in the same place at the same time for aobut 12 of 15 events that we attended. Anyway... Jackie is older then I am and very down to earth and has a very strong character and sense of who she is. We started talking and I got this overwhelming sense that I knew her from somewhere else. I was so strange I felt like I could talk and she would understand exactly what I was saying. It was so werid and I don't even know how to begin to describe it. It like asking someone who was in (or saw) a car accident to explain what they felt at the time. I'm going to talk to Mo and ask him more about her because now it is beginning to bug the hell out of me. I thought that it might have been something like infatuation but I have no really love feelings for her as a girlfriend more as a sister. As I write this I'm still trying to sort this out. I talked to a friend of mine who is a tarot card reader and kind of a psychic and had this stund look when she saw me. She asked me "Did you meet someone you use to know, a long time ago?" I said I didn't know. She said that I look like I meet some I knew that was taken away from me. I told her to slow down a bit and asked if she ment someone from a past life. Quite firmly she replied "Yes". I left feeling even more confused then before and now it's starting to bug the fuck out of me. I do believe that we are all here for a purpose and whether or not there is some connection amid all... who's to say there isn't? We can believe anything, and I never did but this is one of those things that can change you for good. I hope that I know where to draw the line... ------------------------------------------- 4. The meaning of life. by Bennett Kwan (janus@io.org) After eating, do amphibians have to wait one hour before getting out of the water? How can there be self-help *groups*? If white wine goes with fish, do white grapes go with sushi? If a mute swears, does his mother make him wash his hands with soap? If someone has a mid-life crisis while playing hide & seek, does he automatically lose because he can't find himself? If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation? Instead of talking to your plants, if you yelled at them would they still grow, but only to be troubled and insecure? Is there another word for synonym? Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do practice? Just before someone gets nervous, do they experience cocoons in their stomach? When sign makers go on strike, is anything written on their picket signs? When you open a new bag of cotton balls, is the top one meant to be thrown away? When your pet bird sees you reading the newspaper, does he wonder why you're just sitting there, staring at carpeting? Where do forest rangers go to get away from it all? Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food? Why do they report power outages on TV? Why are builders afraid to have a 13th floor but book publishers aren't afraid to have a Chapter 11? If knees were backwards, what would chairs look like? If you lick the air, does it get wet? --Bennett Kwan is a student at UofToronto and suffers from the typical lost mind that can be identified by the uncontrollable giggle and the "need-for-sleep" eyes. -------------------------------------------