Black Ops ad: Offensive or Really Bad Research?

This news story is about the ‘controversial’ ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The video shown below depicts a soldier, who served in Afghanistan, on a news show talking about why the Black Ops ad is offensive (which, in my opinion, it’s not) .This story is old but it peaked my interest because of how many facts the guest speaker gets completely wrong! This is almost hilarious because he clearly didn’t take the time to check his facts so he comes off looking like a complete moron.

The first, and biggest, problem is the fact that they keep pressing the fact that the ads tag line is, “anybody can be a solider”, At first glance you see where the guy is coming from, not everyone can be a soldier and war clearly isn’t something to joke about. If you take a closer look at the ad (not shown in its entirety in the video) the tag line instead reads, “There’s a soldier in all of us” which is obviously completely different. You could make an argument against that tag line but I don’t think it’s as big of a deal.

 Another problem I have is the fact that the guest speaker keeps saying that the ad is offensive because the people in the ad are using “real weapons“they are obviously props but I think what he’s saying is that the ad is attempting to replicate a battlefield scenario, but even that’s incorrect as the ad is trying to replicate the game play of Black Ops in a live action setting.

My final complaint is that the speaker mentions the fact that the people in the ad that are carrying ak-47s are behaving like insurgents on an actual battlefield would. I think this I over analyzing it, it’s an ad so it’s trying to sell a product it’s not some random video someone made in their backyard. Not only that but the guy claims he’s watched the ad “over a dozen times” if this was true he would know what the actual tag line was!

In conclusion, the interview was a mess. It’s like having children make rules; there are some coherent rules sprinkled about, but in the end it’s just a complete disaster.     

Zen X-fi2 Review

The ZEN X-fi2 is Creative’s first touch screen MP3 player. If you can look past its flaws it is a really good player that I personally have gotten tons of use out of. The player has a 6 inch resistive touch screen, a video player, image viewer, RSS reader, it supports lossless FLAC audio format, and supports the LUA programming language to create your own apps and games.

The player has a fair amount of sound settings including; bass boost, an equalizer, and the reason for its name; the extreme fidelity options. The x-fi settings are expand and crystallize. The expand setting “fills” the speaker and makes it sound more like a live performance and the crystallizer setting brings back lost audio during the compression process.

The video player is good quality with very little slow down. Videos can also be viewed on a TV with the players AV out support. Images can also be viewed on a TV. The images can be rotated with the built in accelerometer.

The RSS reader is a clunky and rushed feeling feature. You have to hook the player up to a computer subscribe to an RSS feed and save it in the RSS Synchronizer and remove the player, even then the resistive screen makes it hard to scroll through large lists of articles. This brings me to another problem I have. The resistive touch screen takes a while to get used to, once you do get used to it, it’s hard not to accidently go into a file you don’t want to while scrolling through a menu.

Bottom line is the ZEN X-fi2 is a great player but has a few flaws that may deter some potential buyers. I definitely recommend this player. I give the ZEN X-fi2 an 8/10.

Terrorist Cookies?

A man named Trevor Gray was on a flight to Denver on 9/11/11. During the flight he noticed a passenger handed a flight attendant a tin chocolate chip cookies. (the obvious Terrorist cookie of choice)  Nothing seems seriously wrong in this situation but it gets weird, Trevor then notices that the flight attendants are handing out cookies to passengers. He becomes concerned because he thinks the cookies being handed out to passengers, were from the tin, which he thought were poison.

This story is silly in every way possible, it turns out that the person who gave the tin of cookies to the flight attendant was a friend of the person and the cookies being handed out were not actually from the tin.(i guess the airline hands out cookies all the time) Now 9/11 is obviously a very serious thing, but assuming every little thing is some sort of terrorist plot is unhealthy for our society. Its been 10 years since 9/11 and we still can’t calm down and think for a moment. Besides how many terrorist plots have you seen that involve chocolate chip cookies?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhrHaBfRkGc&feature=channel_video_title

My First Post

Hello my name is Nathan. Welcome to my blog, here I will be writing about things in the world I find interesting and give my point of view on the topic. I’m 13 years old and I live in Midwest America.

I have a different point of view on quite a few things, for example I don’t like to identify with a specific group. I don’t do this because identifying with one group but agreeing to another group to some extent is generally frowned upon. I find this silly because it encourages people to be close minded and our society can’t make any progress with a close minded mentality.

I will also talk about a new video game or review some kind of electronic device. I also enjoy researching recent world events or politics. My main goal with this blog is to be able to casually voice my opinion on a topic, event, or product. I don’t intend for this blog to be something taken very seriously by readers, I see it as a way to get my opinion out there and share it with people. I greatly welcome constructive criticism, and feel free to tell me your opinion on a topic as well, it would be greatly appreciated. Another common thing I enjoy doing is seeing what running joke on the internet that will be rammed into the ground for the next year or so or until it gets put on TV, so ya know internet memes. 

So that’s the basic idea of this blog, I’m going to try to post every day if nothing gets in the way.