A Good Sign Your Strategy Isn’t Working

Prospective investors should take note of the Timothy Plan funds’ records: Its Large/Mid-Cap Growth is down 39 percent so far this year (that’s ahead of 85 percent of large-company growth funds), and it has lost an average of 5 percent annually over the past five years. That return lags behind roughly 30 percent of its peers. Timothy’s Conservative Growth fund, which is about 40 percent bonds, is down 33 percent this year, and has lost an annualized 2 percent over the past five years.

via Faith-Based Fund Shuns Video-Game Stocks – Yahoo! News.

Probably should write a bit more about this one, but I found it rather funny.  Fallout 3 and Bioshock both scored very high on the “evil meter” (and in reviewers opinions regarding their quality as games), although GTA IV took the top spot (in the evil meter, not the review one).

The problem here is illustrated on the cover of the fear-mongering pdf, and that problem is bad parenting.  Kids shouldn’t be reading “American Psycho” and neither should they be playing games where they can virtually kill and get laid with reckless abandon (although Fable 2 does include an STD counter that one can get to move quickly by having un-protected sex with prostitutes).

This is a parenting issue.  And I’m somewhat worried that a few folks with too much time on their hands and money in their pockets want to make it a censorship one.

Meet Me At the Social Club

GigaOM

Here’s a small sign of larger changes in the game industry: I got word today from Rockstar Games that April’s Grand Theft Auto 4, the latest installment in their huge (if controversial) thugs-in-the-sandbox franchise, will launch with a “Social Club” (open April 15), a site where gamers can track their game scores and achievements against other players.

Anyone with an Xbox Gamertag or PlayStation Network ID can sign up, which means the site will incorporate data from both Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 players; most interestingly, it’ll come with an “LCPD Police Blotter,” which will dynamically display “aggregated data of millions of connected players — showing the most dangerous areas of town, most commonly used weapons and more.”

You know I’m going to be all over that shizzit. The L1V3 channel will be an import form of communication in the near future.