Oh, Gawker. With your publishing Adrian Chen’s piece bitching about tech news being boring, all you do is bleat about the kind of thing you do: tech news churn. You use the news about the Facebook iPad app as an example of unexciting news, along with the follow-ups about Facebook blocking the app. Yeah: yawn. Except that iPad users the world over are HUGELY FUCKING EXCITED about the app, and so that news wasn’t boring to them. The follow-ups? Yeah, well, that’s tech blogging, isn’t it? Post often, post crap and hope enough eyes end up on the ads. Rinse. Repeat.

Perhaps if more sites were a little more demanding about their stories, a bit choosier about what they published, rather than firing tons of noise into the digital ether, journos writing phenomenally boring tech news pieces wouldn’t be moaning about tech news being so phenomenally boring. After all, it’s not like tech itself is boring. I’m sitting here right now surrounded by GADGETS FROM THE FUCKING FUTURE. I am firing my words directly into people’s eyes, via the magic of the internet. Tech right now is fucking amazing. And any writer who thinks otherwise needs to consider if they’re in the right job; and anyone who thinks they’re churning out tech news that isn’t exciting, or that tech news in general is dull: do a better job.

If you like games, nip over to Humble Indie Bundle and splash out some cash (how much is up to you) on the five available games, knowing that you’re supporting indie devs and charity. That’s like some kind of karma rainbow dolphin.

But how much you splash out might have something to do with the platform you’re running. At the time of writing, from about 90,000 purchases, about 60 per cent were from Windows users, with the remaining 40 split evenly between Linux and Mac. Interestingly, though, that smaller number of Linux users has raised almost as much for charity as the Windows crowd, due to higher average purchase prices. Donation averages right now are:

• Average Windows: $3.83
• Average Mac: $6.15
• Average Linux: $10.79

Conclusions to draw from this: Linux users, despite advocating ‘free’ seem perfectly happy to splash out money on a good cause and for great indie software; Mac users pay a bit above the average, presumably due to being trained to do so after years of high-quality shareware; and Windows users are, relatively speaking, a wee bit tight-fisted, perhaps suggesting that any ‘app store’ on that platform will see an even faster ‘race to the bottom’ than what we’ve seen on the Mac App Store and Apple’s iOS store.

Update: World of Goo’s ‘pay what you want’ sale ended up with similar patterns. (Hat-tip: Bruce Phillips.)

I’m not exactly Stephen Fry on Twitter. At the time of writing, my main @craiggrannell account has about 1700 followers, and I get one or two new ones daily. Therefore, it’s easy for me to check every new follower, in case they’re someone interesting. One of today’s most certainly is: Tim Langdell, or rather, Edge Games, his nom-de-plume in the videogames industry. Yup, he signed up at @edgegames and currently appears to be following me, someone who retweeted the most recent article I wrote about his interesting take on his court cases, and precisely one other person. ‘Yay.’

Anyway, he provides some exciting extra insight into his thinking about current events, including the following gem:

Bobby Bearing 2 is finally on AppStore! (as EDGEBobby2 since the full name wouldn’t fit into 12 Chrs for a good fit name)

The bizarre name of his new game is something I and other people have raised, wondering if it was to be used during appeal, in order to say “hey, look, I am still using this Edge name and Mobigame were big, fat liars”; as it turns out, he’s now hugely in love with Mobigame, and everything he’s done for years was down to EVIL FUTURE PUBLISHING:

Since we’re now free of restrictions and requirements on us by Future, we’re now heartily promoting Mobigame’s games. They rock!

Mobigame’s response to this has been a whisker away from telling Langdell to get stuffed, and the EDGEBobby2 thing makes no sense either. I assume he’s suggesting 12 characters is a “good fit name” for the iOS home screen, but I have games that happily have 15 characters, which, by stunning coincidence, is the number of characters in ‘Bobby Bearing 2’. Additionally, you can name things differently on the App Store and the iOS home screen, and so there’s literally no reason why the App Store displays EDGEBobby2 as the name of Langdell’s new game.

Anyone still following the story might also be interested to see the new and stripped-down Edge Games website, where Langdell now pitches himself as an ‘indie games developer publisher’ rather than selling a ton of games across multiple platforms. Now there’s merely EDGEBobby2/Bobby Bearing 2, an ‘advert’ for Mobigame that Mobigame doesn’t want there, a curious statement that Future’s Publishing’s Edge trademark for its newsletter and website is still under licence from Langdell, and the usual pile of trademark and copyright notices.

So, Langdell’s down but not out, and he still claims everything that happened wasn’t down to him and that we’ve not heard Edge’s side of the story (aside from the many times he’s written to websites to tell his side of the story). In fact, he just emailed me out of the blue, providing the entire release sent to Eurogamer, and stated:

Also, do you think David Papazian is aware that Edge still owns registered trademarks for EDGE in the US and UK? And common law rights elsewhere worldwide? We were puzzled by the DCMA reference for two reasons (i) a DCMA is surely for copyright and David has written to us to say there is no copyright infringement, (ii) if he got confused and meant trademark infringement then obviously Edge is not infringing its own trademark, even if David also owns Edge registrations.

I guess if you want to untangle the mess directly, you can pop over to @edgegames and quiz Langdell yourself; as for me, I’m thoroughly bored of this entire situation now, and so this will be the last thing I ever write about Langdell on this blog.

Strong sales largely rely on balancing price, profits and demand. Make something too cheap and your revenue will be high (if demand is also high), but you won’t make much profit. Make something too expensive and your profit-per-unit could be high, but you also risk killing demand.

It’s with this thought in mind that I wonder why Vue Cinemas prices food and drink the way it does. It’s not the only chain guilty of gouging a captive audience, but it’s shocking how far the company has gone in recent years. In my local cinema, the ‘value’ meal that comprises a regular popcorn and drink now costs an astonishing eight pounds (roughly the cost of an adult ticket). The chain, naturally, provides a bucket of each product, in order to try and give you the perception of value (i.e. “Wow, that was expensive, but they sure give you a lot!”), but I wonder if people are starting to see through the bullshit.

Of late, it’s increasingly common to see entire audiences without any refreshments at all, bar the odd bottle of overpriced water. It’s clear that the modern cinema is pricing itself out of its own captive market. Additionally, people are being increasingly careful about diet, and so “enough Coke to drown in” doesn’t look as appealing as it perhaps once did.

One curiosity at Vue, though, is its kiddy combo (first noticed by Mrs. G). You get a smallish drink, a smallish amount of popcorn and a candy of some kind. On closer inspection, the amount of popcorn you get still exceeds what you’d find in three small bags in a supermarket multipack, and the candy is typically a ‘fun size’ Milky Way. The cost, though, is—relatively speaking—not too bad: under three quid. What I wonder is why Vue and other chains aren’t recognising that adults en masse would almost certainly buy more smaller portions if they were offered and available for a reasonable price, and the subsequent increase in sales would offset people avoiding the ridiculous ‘value’ meals currently sold.

In the meantime, I’ll continue buying the odd kiddie combo. I don’t have a kid myself, but it’s the only option that’s not totally taking the piss from a pricing standpoint and that isn’t akin to snarfing down enough salt to kill a movie-monster slug and enough sugar to make your teeth explode.

Charlie Brooker for The Guardian:

If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don’t clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you’re going to replace the word “expert” with “guesser” and the word “speculate” with “guess”, so it’ll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they’re actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works.

This refers to the recent and terrible events in Norway, but also happens to be relevant for an awful lot of news coverage these days.