I know I'm super-late on this one. I just found out. Apparently, this guy rents out his warddrobe to advertise for businesses. We all know it's a great idea. Frankly, I think someone needs to scale this up and get people in all the major cities doing this. Run the (very) rough numbers:

• 365 days in a year at a price ranging from $1-365
• He has sold 360ish days

My Horrible Assumptions

1. He nets an average of $140/day
2. He has to cut out about 25% to Uncle Sam
3. He shelled out around $5,000 in site development and advertising
4. Let's go ahead and take another $5,000 in legal fees

Some horrible math then gives us about $30,000 in "free" income. It's free because all he had to do was wear a bloody shirt and a great many independent professions can spend that time hanging out in public places sneaking a few hours to code, write, draw, etc.

I'm not trying to stomp on his idea or anything. Jason has clearly put a lot of work in to this advertising medium. I really like it, I'm just pointing out how nice of a sidejob this is. It's not a little bit of extra cash, it's a full extra entry-level salary.

I need to find me a gig like this. If he's running days for 2010, I might have to jump on that...

EDIT: He changed the logo for 2010 so the image broke. I permanently fixed it, the new image is now on my server.

Image via Wikipedia

When I read that EA sent out a press kit for Godfather II that included real brass knuckles, I thought to myself: that is ridiculously cool. Apparently, now they're recalling all of them due to questionable legality of the contents. I understand, from one perspective that you can't publically agree with sending out potentially illegal weapons but the other side of me hates the fact that the legal structure constantly prohibits overwhelming acts of coolness. I say you send a nice thank you letter in the return shipping box and keep the knuckles.

EA would like its brass knuckles back, please - Ars Technica

Before I continue, lets make sure we're all on the same page.

Flock is, to rip straight from Tech Crunch: a "social browser" built on top of Mozilla technology. That is to say it's essentially Firefox with some hard coded extensions built in based around social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Now in order to convince suits to give you money for development you usually have to demonstrate some form of revenue model. So how are they making money?

Source: Tech Crunch

Apparently, they generate income by getting a check from search providers for using a certain search provider as a default. Mozilla has a deal with Google while Flock is in bed with Yahoo. Going in to my Google hate and disbelief is for another post but Yahoo?! The company that is barely afloat? IMO, it's only a matter of time before Yahoo either a) downsizes big time, b) gets grabbed by Microsoft, or c) declares bankruptcy and vanishes from the main stage (unlikely).

To add insult to injury, Flock holds less than 10% of the browser market share so they can't be generating that much money from the deal. Mozilla's agreement with Google "works" because they're throwing over 40% of the world's searching to Google.

How are these investors so stupid as to pay $15 million for a set of extensions? Then again, I have a history of being wrong so maybe Flock is the new hotness and we should ignore the moving trend toward standards compliance and OS-level web integration which essentially means that all this accessibility Flock adds will be negated once Facebook is a cloud application that runs their updates through some sort of active desktop?

So the bill failed. I don't expect it to get passed now after such a big loss today. Mr. Smith has to be sitting pretty in his grave right now. Lassiez faire economics at its best. My post-undergraduate life just got all sorts of crappy now. With banks not hiring, consulting and research are the only fields really left to a finance-minded person like myself. Honestly, I've always considered those jobs to be fake jobs -- huge wastes of money. Consulting and research is great and needed but not to the extent of ridiculous 100-200 grand salaries.

This is all a sign, stop traveling the path of a suit and return to your game development fantasies.

This post is more a follow-up to this post: The death of what, now?

Quick Summary: Localization companies (ADV, Funimation, etc.) are complaining about fansubbing ruining their business. That's essentially a lie. People everywhere aren't buying DVDs and other details about the fanbase hint at lower sales.

Essentially, it's come to my attention that Funimation is not evil, all the anime localization companies are just stupid. They are whining that they're foreign cash cow dried up with the expansion of the internet and instead of embracing the fanbase and cutting costs they would rather bitch and moan about the times.

Technically, downloading fansubs is illegal due to copyright laws. Last time I checked, no one gives a damn. Simply put, animation companies in Japan earn next to nothing from airing anime. They make money off the licensing deals. That's right: anime video games, figurines, movie deals, etc. The basic premise is sell the anime to a TV station for just enough in revenue so your lights don't cut off and then pray that there are enough nerds out there who want scantly clad plastic dolls of your anime's female lead.

How does fansubbing fit it? More people are now watching your show -- more people will buy your stupid dolls. Clearly, I'm not one of those people...until you start talking about the anime video games, wallscrolls, or other things not ridiculously pervy.

Honestly, I'm not going to pay $20 for 3 episodes that I could've watched a year (sometimes even two years) ago for free. Especially when part of the cost is unnecessary shoddy voice acting and unwanted frills (half-assed character profiles and other crap they smack on to the DVD).

Fansubs are giving us what we want. Clean fonts, stylized karoke for intros, with all the spiffs of chapter skips just like DVD navigation (in MKVs anyway). They're doing this for free and often within 24 hours of airing in Japan.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in HIGH DEFINITION. DVDs paltry 480p doesn't hold a candle to the 720p (sometimes 1080p) Over-The-Air (OTA) rips often found in Japan. Just like TV over in the states is often in HD, anime airs in HD in Japan.

Essentially, I'm paying a lot more money for a lower quality product. I heard good things about the Gurren Lagaan localization. Start bringing anime over here in HD, faster, and for less and I guarantee you'll see those sales climb again.

There really is no need for these expansive dubbing projects. We have our own after-school cartoons -- it's called Avatar, complete with well-done English voices.

EDIT: Apparently, the previous image had the server blocking image stealing. So I grabbed it from someone else. Yes, I am too lazy to download the images and re-upload them to flickr/photobucket/etc. when I make posts at 1AM or while I'm at work.