Laughed out loud.
And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.
A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
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Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#12The internet needs more websites like this. This is The Good Internet
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#13The gag with the spine art reminds me of this (video boxed sets of the series Monk): https://trout.me.uk/monk.jpg
Good stuff. In case you missed it, if I’m guessing right (I don’t know the show well), the lead character is obsessive/compulsive and would be wildly irritated if he knew that the videos about his life cannot be neatly displayed on a shelf because the last one’s spine was formatted differently from the others. Why did I need to make this post?
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#14The fact that the website this comes from is "ff8isthe.best" makes this so much better. I love hyper-specific websites. Also, I love documentation on these obscure things from times passed. I'm not sure where else I would have ran into this, but I appreciate the author for writing this kind of thing down.
This was what the Internet made beautiful for a time, international access to hyper-specific deep sites on highly specific topics. Instead we get 9000 identical sites regurgitating the same identical garbage; I want sites where I can enjoy people going into way too much detail about something they feel strongly about, like why steam engines were going to lose to diesel no matter what, because diesel can get traction…
> Instead we get
lots of publishing history in different media tells the story. "Broadcast media" was always suspect from the point of view of artsy, sophisticated and niche circles.. and I do mean circles, because publishing, content creation, and fans are all different people and need each other to make it work. This has been done "well" over and over.. but in the digital realms the incentives and mechanisms are powerful in overwhelming ways. More people than have ever existed in previous eras, are involved now.
Cory Doctorow has plenty of (imperfect) insight into some of these things.. a local bookstore and network of those used to be an answer.. evolution is not over
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#15I love this guy's web site. This is what the internet was really made for, grinding your own personal axe and venting your ancient, slightly obsessive, grudges.
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#16Back when Trolling was an art form.
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#17Nintendo Power magazine had amazing spine art and I can't help but wonder if it inspired the spine art from the article.
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#18Lovely story. Wouldn't call this taunting a hater at all, if I had to guess I would say that the person was happy that the magazine acknowledged him and created an inside joke together with him. This is how you make super fans for your brand. I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way, instead of the sterile corporate happy-speak as if the reply is a way…
> I wish more brands interacted with their audience in this human-like, friendly banter, playful sort of way
And I’m sure brands wish they could do it without fear of being misinterpreted and causing a litany of issues for what amounted to a well meaning joke. No one wants to be the social media person that causes trouble for the company (and thus themselves) for being a bit too friendly to an unreasonable entitled prick.
Heck, I’ve seen it happen (more than once) in a support forum context where someone is a regular and always treated respectfully and helped whenever they ask, but one day the support person is a tad more relaxed (read: less corporate, more open and personal) in their communication and the customer is offended out of left field. Which then becomes stressful for the support person and naturally causes them to clam up in future communications.
Yes, big companies definitely take it too far in their frustratingly sterile I’ll-restate-everything-you-said-and-repeat-your-name-over-and-over direction, but “human-like, friendly banter, playful” is incredibly risky and not worth the stress.
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#19>website url is ff8isthe.best
Name checks out it seems haha
Re: A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater
#20I love this guy's web site. This is what the internet was really made for, grinding your own personal axe and venting your ancient, slightly obsessive, grudges.
Same.
A hard fact to digest is that if you have a website like this, content might not come as often as an audience expects.
Which nowadays doesn't work, as people are content crackheads, quality isn't that important anymore.
This article is just perfectly written, and the image at the end... nobody will read this and regret it later, but it is a story that doesn't happen every single day.