Witcher: Fist Fighting

I’m playing the Witcher “Enhanced Edition” as you might have noticed.  I just figured out how to win every fist fight relatively quickly.  If you’ve played the game, all of these are easy, but here’s an even easier way to win any fistfight: keep clicking both mouse buttons.  That’s it.  The game goes all glitchy and your opponent will never hit you, continue to take damage while sometimes “dodging”, and then go down.  Sometimes the guy you’re fighting will just stand there at the end of the fight and it’ll fade out without you having to wait for that silly prancing.

Auto-Loot

More video games could certainly use an auto-loot feature.  Currently the Witcher is starting to get dreadfully redundant in that I have to endure boring looting after each fun battle before moving on.  If I don’t, the corpses stick around a while and I feel cheated out of … loot.  As if manually looting wasn’t bad enough, in this game you have to double-click the items or drag them to your bag.  The auto-transfer button is nice, but doesn’t work if you can’t take something because that slot is filled (e.g. certain weapons which will only go on your person).

What the Witcher needs is an option to automatically loot everything I can when I, say, right-click the corpse.  Or even better if I just move over it.  A simple animation of the thing(s) flying into my inventory icon in the upper-right would suffice, just as it does for experience points flying to the upper-left.

BlogBone and NSFWurl

Two ideas I want to note before I get absorbed into more sword pirouettes in The Witcher.  Before I continue, I just want to say how much I hate the whole domain parking (also known as domain squatting) business.  It’s a disease of the internet, the world wide web, and it reminds me of herpes commercials: 4 in 5 domains is parked and there is no cure.  The COM domain names of both ideas are taken and frickin’ parked.  This is not unusual, but it’s also not unusual to hear me complaining about it.

Let’s start with NSFWurl which is something that came up when discussing TinyUrl with Jim and Kelsie.  I believe TinyUrl has cornered an odd niche where it performs a service that is a disservice in the long-run.  Link relationships are obscurred (which may be a feature, depending on if you’re Rick Rolling or not) and their site becomes a gateway which is dependent on being up and functional for the URL’s to even work.  In essence they are a thin proxy which means later they could add the ability to frame the URL, serve advertisements, etc.  What I don’t think a lot of people understand is that TinyUrl gets huge ranking boosts from all the people who use it in every corner of the web; Google sees this one domain as being linked from god damned everywhere.  Thus the end point sites suffer the loss of those rankings.

Of course as far as monetization, TinyUrl has none … for now.  As its popularity grows and as it accrues all sorts of dusty links, whether they resolve on the other end or not, they gain more control and incur more server costs.  Sure they can take donations as any ethical non-profit organization seems wont to do, but what happens when the owners decide to move on.  Or when they want to retire and they’re sitting on this untapped gold mine of links and rankings?  Will there be those annoying “Skip this Ad” ads, banners, context ads in frames, video ads, a limited number of click-throughs, end-points having to pay to keep old TinyUrl’s pointing to them?  Okay, enough paranoia, I just wanted to spit that out as a prologue.

NSFWurl takes TinyUrl’s idea and tries to perform a valid service on top of it: namely identifying “Not Safe For Work” links passed amongst friends.  You’d have the option of obscurring the destination URL through an ID or having it simply act as a pass-through by putting the full URL past the domain name: http://nsfwurl.com/www.example.com/funny-shit.html.  In the latter case the user could still get to the URL if the service ever stopped functioning.  There would be a possible check for private viewing, e.g. a page that says “You’re about to view a Not-Safe-For-Work URL.  Continue?” Additionally you could set options to proxy the content to fudge the title for safe minimization (so your task bar doesn’t say something like “Identify the biggest tits”), censor certain images or ad blocks which display psuedo-pornographic crap (common on some “funny video” sites), disable audio, etc.  Another feature in framing/proxying the destination would be inserting a panic key handler so pressing “Escape” for example would make the page instantly disappear.  And finally I’d love the capability to cache the destination in case that site ever goes down, e.g. so the link doesn’t break.  Or even having a way to create a redirect to another URL.  As far as monetization, the initial skip page could have ads and if a submitter has marked a URL to “show publicly” then it would show on the main Digg-like page.

Hmm, nwsurl.com (Not-Work-Safe) is available …  I just think NSFW is more common than NWS.  If I could come up with another name then perhaps I’ll try my hand at having this created.

BlogBone is a WebFront-inspired service whereby you create a site design in XSL and the data comes from one or more blogs and/or RSS feeds.  And I mean all of the data.  You might wonder why not just use some kind of blogging software.  Well this would be a thin service that automatically reads your blog, even if its marked private (e.g. you give it access), and puts that data through XSL to create the static pages which are then published (uploaded) to your desired FTP/S3 server.  Thus it acts as a pass-through which, if it ever goes away, does not leave your data stranded on someone else’s server.

You could have multiple feeds pushed to your XSL for things like links from Delicious, YouTube, etc. and posts from something heavier like WordPress, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, etc.  I’d choose XSL simply because it’s a widely supported standard for which a lot of tools exist.  Whole site templates would be collections of XSL files and default ones would be provided so users can simply say: make a site, here’s my blog, here’s a couple RSS feeds for links, and here’s my publishing site.

Monetization would be two levels.  First, people could pay a relatively small price to have their content hosted on the service and it would support domain-mapping so they can use their own domain.  Having their own domain allows users to later switch away without losing all the link credit they’ve earned.  Second, people using default templates would have an unobtrusive ad block and link-back to the main domain.  Advanced users can easily remove these things in the XSL, but many would hopefully leave them as per goodwill.  I don’t believe in the service forcing those things in the publish stage, even though it could, because it only gives the loyal users more reason to find something else or incentive for trying to get around the system.

Well, there you have it.  A couple decent ideas and now I’m going back to my blade ballet.