The first game I played for 12 hours straight without noticing what happened. The only real flaw was the crystite strategy that had a "runaway win" nature.
Played this for years before I realized that you get points for making your property contiguous.
I stayed at a bed & breakfast and they gave me free cheesecake after uninstalling Bonzi for them. I just wanted to browse the web faster!
Didn't take much to uninstall malware back then. I probably added years to the useful life of their computer, it ate so much CPU.
I remember trying to remove BB from a PC we had and having a hell of a time doing it. It wasn't just asking it to stop in Programs & Features, I was rooting it out of the registry for hours and if you rebooted without getting all of it, the talons spread.
Why would you assume that? Granted, there is a lot of corporate virtue signalling, and it's existed since time immemorial, but I don't get the sense Lego is necessarily virtue signalling in this case, or at least virtue signalling in a way that isn't genuine. One reason I say this is because it's a family-owned company and really aren't comparable to a corporate giants like Procter & Gamble(which happens to be known for blatant virtue signalling), Coca Cola, or Disney, to name a few.
I don't think it's farfetched for someone in charge at Lego to see value in biodegradable plastic, and there really isn't much of a reason for them not to research into and use biodegradable plastic if it was a viable alternative to whatever they're currently using.
Now, if they were making commercials about biodegradable Legos that don't exist, or "toxic masculinity", or saving the whales, then you could definitely say that Lego is virtue signalling. But I don't see that here.
It sort of is. The last time I saw this story going around, it was that they were swapping out the rubberier non-ABS bits that are almost always green tree elements to some kind of sugarcane-based polyethelene.
As someone who has spent thousands of dollars on Lego, if I see "Biodegradable!" splash on the box I'm going to think twice. I painted my Lego, played with it in water, and I could still give it to my kids in the original condition. We can't know that any new Lego will perform the same way.
I love it, but having tried to build the same thing myself in the past I realized a horrible truth: you can't make comics, even ones that strictly informative, without being able to draw.
If you look at "Understanding Comics" try to picture what parts could be made procedurally. It's a tiny percentage. It looks neat and is eye-catching, but it's hard to add information using comics. When done well, it's amazing - just really hard.
It's more subtle than that. For any given technique used to illustrate a scene, you could come up with a means of automating it, and those means are employed by professional artists on the regular, from rulers to draw straight lines up through 3D modelling software. A lot of finished work will go between the sketchbook and the computer and then back again to iterate on technical elements like proportioning and perspective.
But what you cannot automate is the design work that puts together each of those techniques. You have to decide: how much detail to add? What are the spatial relationships? What will my light values and colors communicate? What shapes and forms should be given emphasis?
And then at the level of storytelling, all the considerations around plotting and characterization; the themes of the story and how scenes develop to express those themes, and how that translates into imagery and the physical description of a character.
Working on commercial art today is much more about these kinds of conceptual distinctions than about the quality of traditional pen-to-paper drafting skills. If you know how to pull out those techniques through automation, you can still get a satisfying result. But getting the "eye" for knowing what is possible still needs training.
I'm guessing most of it. Was giving them $5k / month, turned it off... zero effect. Other than no more traffic from Romanian blogs that were always 404.
Out of our top 10 traffic sources, at least half were fraud from our Google spend. The other half was legit Google searches.
I disagree. I manage a few small (<$10k/month campaigns) and Google is constantly advising bad moves. They recommend networks I’ve repeatedly turned off. They recommend geographic regions where I don’t operate. They recommend keyword combinations that have nothing to do with my site.
The default recommendations from AdWords are always bad for me and always very much more expensive. If I just accepted their recommendations and then their recommendations to up ad spend, I would easily pay 10x.
Maybe google is good for everyone but me. But maybe google just makes recommendations in their interest instead of mine.
Even with close attention, I find that I have to walk the line to not screw up because Google is trying to trick me. I feel similarly about Facebook’s changing privacy stuff. Like it’s me against the firm.
I've never had a consultation with one of Google's reps where the suggestion didn't increase my spend, while giving a worse ROI. At this point, I don't believe it's incompetence, it's systematic malice.
But I wasn't talking about using any of Google's suggestions, by phone or their automated recommendations. I was just referring to simple a/b testing and systematic use of negative keywords and fine-tuning settings.
11pm-5am is universally disabled for all my campaigns for example. My customer base simply isn't awake and buying at these times, because they have jobs. This alone dropped ad spend by 25% while only reducing conversions by 5%.
Not to mention that they repeatingly shows ads that I have taken the time to click "Not interested" on, to which they have answered "We'll try not to show you this ad again."
They either lie or they have just failed badly so far.
So some poor smuck - or rather a wealthy owner of a number of scammy sites - is getting fleeced, month by month, as AdWords keeps insisting on insulting me by suggesting my current family isn't good enough.
Hah! I get way more traffic and conversions by advertising about $150/month through Craigslist. I tried spending that much a day with AdWords, with all the targeting and settings fine tuned to my market, but never reached the quality traffic I get through the classified advertising.
There’s a difference between a campaign with bad quality scores or bad conversion rates with a campaign that basically fails to attract any humans at all while still spending a great deal of money.
The former requires a huge amount of knowledge and talent which is highly valuable. The latter should be able to be taken for granted, but in actuality is the most important thing to guard against.
And our competitors imitated us, and poured even more into it because they didn't have our Google rank and likely didn't understand how to look for bad "traffic". So in a tiny niche of e-commerce Google was taking in at least $30/k a month, probably much more.
If you've been a parent, half in a daze, overtired, seeing insipid Thomas on TV and hoping - or fearing - it will amuse a toddler while you doze, you'll understand. Getting to fight him in a familiar game is a bossfight of a different sort.
Played this for years before I realized that you get points for making your property contiguous.