Category Archives: Business

Bill

Business, Computer Games, Memoirs, ,
licensed from Adobe Stok

I’m starting to get old. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind getting old. What I do mind is the inevitable. And, honestly, I never thought I’d be ready for it.

Recently, I wrote an article about my roommate in college who passed away. Tom was a good friend of mine, and he was always my greatest advocate.

Bill was also a great friend of mine. But he and I had kind of simmered on our friendship for the only reason that I now lived in Texas, and he lived in California. However, whenever I got the opportunity to travel back to California, he and I returned to our friendship almost as if we had never parted. A short while ago, I received a message that he had passed away, too.

One of my recent plans had been to make it back to California so he and I could hang out again. Now, I don’t have a single reason why I would make the trip. Bill’s no longer there.

So, let me tell you about Bill. He used to work for a bunch of computer gaming companies. When I was working for Maxis (and then EA), he would be working for companies like LucasArts and Microprose. He was an actual pilot, so when those companies were designing flight sims (like Xwing, Tie Fighter and F-15 Eagle) he was always there testing out those types of games.

One of my favorite stories was when he was testing X-Wing, and the producer had told him that it was impossible to destroy the Imperial Star Destroyer that was producing all the enemies in the game, he spent days flying missions against it until he turned off the damage on his own vessel and finally destroyed the Imperial Star Destroyer. After a couple of days, the developers indicated that it was impossible to destroy the Imperial Star Destroyer.

Having felt like he had laid down the law, the developer thought nothing of it as Bill spent days flying endless sorties against the Star Destroyer, and then he destroyed it again. But this time on the hardest level.

The developers, after discussing it amongst themselves, decided to add a readme file on the main disk indicating that “if you destroy the Star Destroyer, you might not be able to finish the game.”

One of my other favorite stories of his exploits was the origin of his ecology degree from UC Berkeley where he had gone to college after his time in the Army as an Army pilot. He was on the original GI Bill, and the way it used to be structured was you could continue your education until you graduated, and then it was over. So, Bill being like Bill was, continued until he was about finished with one degree and then he would change his degree to something else. He did this for a very long time until the Department of the Army sat down with Berkeley, and an offer was made that he could choose several degrees (of his choosing), and they would confer it upon him. So, the ecology degree ended up being one of the ones he chose, just cause it sounded kind of cool.

My other favorite story was one that everyone wished they had done themselves, and it involved the pettiness of a ticket he received from the city that was for several hundred dollars. And add to it that they had sent him a threatening letter if he didn’t pay it immediately.

So Bill took the train to downtown and walked in to pay his bill. And he brought a handful of dollar bills to pay it.

So, the clerk took the money, counted it and determined there were several dollars missing. Bill swore there was an exact amount, so the clerk spent quite a while counting it again. This time, she came up with a different amount, but not the amount that was supposed to be there.

So, this went on for several more rounds until a supervisor came over, grabbed the money and counted it himself. He came up with a number far below the amount required. So he told Bill he’d have to get the proper amount and return.

Bill swore the amount was correct. He’d counted it a bunch of times before coming in.

The boss started counting again, got about a third of the way through and then just shoved the money into a drawer, saying: “Fine. He paid the right amount. Give him a receipt.”

So Bill walked out of their with a happy grin.

Now, these are all stories told to me by Bill over the years, and the one reason I believe him on each story is because he told me these stories over and over, thinking he was telling me them for the first time. So, if they didn’t really happen, at least he believed in them. And that was all I needed.

Bill was one of those people who had brilliant ideas that were completely out of left field. I remember when I had a theory about how gravity was a physical property, not just an action on something else. I thought it was completely original, but the second I told it to Bill, he started analyzing how my theory might actually exist and exactly how we could test it. Unfortunately, neither of us had an actual spacecraft needed to test it, but we discussed it late into the night, throwing theories back and forth.

The point being: A guy with his degree from Berkeley in various disciplines was capable of going toe to toe with a guy with a physics degree from West Point. And his analysis was good.

We’re a couple of months away from the actual release of Starfield, and as much as I long to play it, I really wish it would have come out earlier, because this is the type of game Bill would have loved. And he would have found a way to break it, too, cause that’s what he did.

And no one did it better.

OnlyFans to Block Adult Content

Business, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, , , , ,

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the adult content site OnlyFans has made a decision to ban future content that is adult in nature. Taken on the surface, this seems like a logical step for a company that is trying to appear more mainstream, but after unpacking this story, it appears there’s a lot going on under the surface, and the results may vary and the owls may not be what they seem.

For those who deal with these types of subjects on the surface only, it seems very straight-forward, but if you listen to the responses from those in the industry, the rhetoric ranges from “the sky is falling” to “this doesn’t change anything from the status quo.” However, there are changes coming, and yes, they are going to affect some people more than others. So, exactly how?

Let’s just put it this way: If you’re already a sex worker content creator with a huge following, the change means very little. Most of the traffic for OnlyFans rarely came through the platform itself; people didn’t find content creators by searching the site (the site was never designed to cater to that process). Instead, sex workers who already had a strong following just advertised they were on OnlyFans and then the people who were already interested in their content went there for an easy process to access more of their material. For those types of creators, there are other services available that not only replace OnlyFans, but they were there long before OnlyFans emerged on the scene. So, those content creators will make do and continue to strive as before.

Where this change makes the largest impact is on the newest demographic: Young women who gravitated towards OnlyFans after the emergence of the pandemic. At first, the large swell of creators joining the platform were mostly adult workers who had very little (or no) Internet presence. As their physical, in person business model was drying up due to the fact that men were not as easy to translate into customers while people were dying from Covid-19, much of their “activity” they would normally charge for could now be converted to virtual interactivity that they could then share for monetary rewards. And what they quickly discovered was that because OnlyFans made it possible to build a lucrative following (as the customers weren’t just someone they met on the street who might never return), they now had repeat customers who could access their content at all times without them having to actually physically maintain proximity to their clients in order to provide services and then get paid.

Because this was both lucrative and quick income, it should not surprise anyone that young women who were probably never planning to become sex workers themselves realized that there could be a lot of money to be made if they, too, hung out their shingle in this marketplace. And almost overnight, starting with strippers and cam girls and then leading to moms and repressed librarians, women were actively engaged in selling promiscuous content to horny guys (well, to anyone, but mostly guys).

The one negative that always seemed to be in the background was the stigma of doing sex work, which for naive reasons young woman seemed to believe might never happen. But as their content was on the Internet, and there is no class amongst the people who subscribe to this type of content, they started to become very surprised when their content became widespread, and future aspirations (and that wasn’t sex work) because almost impossible because of the stigma attached to this occupation. Women, with occupations ranging from doctors to school teachers, lost their jobs when their employers found out they were previously sex workers, even though the women would often try to make the argument that selling pictures of themselves naked was not sex work and then disappointed when such protests fell on deaf ears.

There was a very interesting episode involving Kevin Samuels who confronted a group of OnlyFans girls about how they needed to start banking their money soon because the cash cow of OnlyFans was not going to last forever, and those girls treated him like a moron because this Internet celebrity obviously didn’t understand the business world as well as they did. Well, this announcement from OnlyFans just yesterday indicates that he knew exactly what was going to happen, and one can only imagine how panicked these girls must be right now due to such an announcement.

What makes this somewhat tragic is that such an announcement was inevitable. It happened with Paypal, it happened with Tumblr, and it has happened with so many types of business applications that started out by appealing to the sex worker industry just to get their foot in the door before abandoning that demographic and “going legit”. And as tends to happen with most of these companies, that act of going legit will end up being their downfall because they, too, are tainted by the stigma of being a platform for sex, which is why people will avoid it like the plague if they’re not actually attracting the element that made it famous in the first place. Imagine going to an exclusive club because it always had the hottest women and let those women in free (realizing that was going to bring in customers) and then decided “we’re big enough now that we don’t need to do that” and stopped letting attractive women in for free. So they stopped coming. So would their clientele because the reason they go to those clubs is because of the overabundance of attractive women in the first place. And then the business closes.

This is why nightclubs NEVER do that.

So, it will be interesting to see if OnlyFans goes the direction of Myspace as another company takes its place, or if it somehow morphs itself into something sustainable by hosting celebrities and cooking shows. As for the many women who made their future successes contingent on the platform, hopefully they prepared for this future, already were a sex worker to begin with and can compensate by finding incoming from other revenue streams, or bite the bullet and try to re-enter the workplace environment, hoping beyond all prayers that no one ever finds out about their steamy past. In this digital age, the integration of digital technology has become crucial for success in various industries.

All I know is that I won’t be their lifeline. I’m a lot smarter these days than when I was young and stupid.

Youtube and Controversies: Political attitudes, conservatism and the struggle with being non-political

Business, Computer Games, Podcast, Politics, Social Networking, Technology, Television, , , , , , , , , , , ,

For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.

To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.

So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.

This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.

What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).

Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.

I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.

The Depressing Part of Being a Writer

Books, Business, Memoirs, Social Networking, The Deck Const, Writing, , , , , ,

Joshua had a few things he needed to say

There are a lot of writers out there who haven’t been that successful. Yet, they keep on plugging away, convinced that one day it’s all going to work out for them. I’m kind of in that same boat, but unlike the others who never had their chance, my chance came several times…and sort of fizzled away. Let me explain:

Years back, I was shopping my first book. I was in my early twenties, and I had written it while in the Army. It was a really good book called INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. And it was published. Not to great fanfare, but it was published.

So, I started shopping my second novel, LOSER (which would eventually become LEADER OF THE LOSERS). Nothing. Not even a whimper from anyone wanting to sell it. One editor pointed out that perhaps it was the depressing title. Publishers didn’t want to publish books with such a negative title. So, it sat there, forever.

Then I wrote my next novel, the infamous The Armageddon Project, which was a story that took place during the Cold War. Keep in mind, it was written during the Cold War. But at the time, the Cold War was ending, so I quickly rewrote it to match the new events taking place in the world (much of the action takes place in East Germany and Western Russia). And then those regions kept changing, so I kept rewriting it. At some point, the title changed to match the main character (known as “the Unicorn”), so the title became TO TOUCH THE UNICORN. And then a publisher told me that the title was too much like a fantasy novel, but the novel was corporate/government espionage. He also said that it was hard to figure out what exactly the main character’s job was. At the time, I had created the concept of an economic hit man, but the concept was completely unknown in the 1990s, so it just couldn’t catch on. Years later, after Germany and Russia have settled into the republics they are, the story changed massively and is now being rewritten for about the 90th time, and it now takes place in 1991 during the August coup in the former Soviet Union. It’s now called 72 HOURS IN AUGUST, but it’s on the back burner for a rewrite.

Anyway, somewhere around this time, I was starting to make a name for myself as a writer. I had been writing tons of short stories and they were published in a bunch of different magazines. At first, they were published in mostly literary magazines, but then the larger presses started picking them up, and several prominent magazine editors started recognizing my name from previous things I had written. Things were kind of going pretty nice for me back then.

And then one of my novels was bought for publishing by a prestigious book publisher. And then I got an agent who once represented one of the greatest science fiction writers in modern times before he passed away. All was looking great.

And then the publishing company folded. Overnight. Without a single warning.

My agent got into an accident and severely injured her head. She dropped out of the business for a while to recover, and when she did, she seriously didn’t even remember who I was. I gave up trying to re-establish our working relationship.

And then the Internet exploded. Amazon became the biggest thing in independent writing, and the industry changed overnight. If you weren’t already established, you were basically an unknown, and if you were an unknown, you had to now start building a social following in order to even sell a single book. Not being really good at social networking (just has never been my thing), my career kind of just fizzled and died. Sure, I sell a few books here and there, but I might sell more just standing on the corner and asking people to give me a buck for a hand written copy.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m the middle of writing an epic novel series that I suspect might not be read by more people than this blog post. I say this with trepidation because of the amount of time invested in this project. I’ve already spent seven years researching this thing, and I’m about to start putting actual physical work into writing it. Keep in mind that my last two projects took me each half a decade to produce, and my stuffed animals get more attention when they’re pulled over for drunk driving. My previous project took me six years to complete the first book (of a three book project). The research involved was extensive. It was called The Deck Const. Doesn’t matter what it was about because no one’s going to read it any way.

The project before that is probably the one piece of work of which I am most proud. When people talk about a crown achievement in one’s life, that book would probably be mine. It is a humorous novel that tells the story of the last hero of Troy who comes home to found a little civilization called America. It’s called THE AMERIAD, and it was so much work, and it involved so much research. But to someone reading it, one gets the sense that it’s a simple, fun story that seems very familiar. It’s told in Iliad/Odyssey format, and the main character is actually the translator who has interpreted this found epic in the only way the worst translator could possibly ever do. The book was so hard to write, especially in a way that made it feels so natural.

That’s the dilemma I find myself in as I finish up the last stages of research to begin constructing my Arthurian epic. And part of me wonders if my time might better be spent playing a video game instead.

The Avatar Returns to the World of Britannia (An Early Review of Shroud of the Avatar after its official release)

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It’s amazing how this game looks so much like a visual from my every day life.

For the longest time, I was holding out on playing Shroud of the Avatar. Which is kind of strange, considering the fact that I’m exactly the type of player the game has been looking for. You see, I grew up as a programmer and gamer while playing every Ultima game ever made. If you follow the natural evolution of that series of computer games, it eventually leads directly to Shroud of the Avatar. The chances of me not playing this game were slightly lower than zero percent. Yet, it took me a number of years of the game being in development for me to finally decide to sign on. I guess that probably needs a bit of unpacking. So, let’s unpack.

As I mentioned, in the early days of computer games, Richard Garriott developed a series of games that ran under the IP of “Ultima”. It was a series of roleplaying games where you played a warrior, a mage or some semblance of fantasy classes and unlocked the secrets of the world before facing down against some huge big bad guy (or girl) and then saved all of the land. A review:

Ultima 1: You fought against an evil wizard named Mondain. But Mondain had a secret student and lover. This takes place on Sosaria.

Ultima 2: His lover’s name was Minax. You then have to defeat her. But she and Mondain secretly had a kid. Of course they did. This takes place on Earth through all sorts of time periods.

Ultima 3: The kid was kind of weird, in that Cylon kind of way. You, as expected, had to defeat him. This takes place on Sosaria.

Ultima 4: Gets weird and colorized. You spend the entire game becoming the ultimate character, an avatar. This introduces the virtues and eventually becomes the foundation for all of the Ultimas. This introduces Britannia.

Ultima 5: A bad lord under British gets corrupted by the shadowlords and basically takes over Britannia. You gotta stop him and them. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 6: A bunch of gargoyles get involved, creating a plot about immigration and enforcement. Or something like that. You act as an example and make everyone happy again. Much merriment is involved. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 7: Probably the best of the single player games. Takes place in Britannia and introduces the Guardian, who is a kind of twisted version of enlightenment. He sticks around for two more games. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 8: You get taken to some other place and do some stuff. To be honest, never really got into this game as I got stuck on the dock in the early part of the game, couldn’t figure out how to get out, and then just decided to play another game instead.

Ultima 9: Game becomes first person. Much more interesting world (still Britannia) but seems kind of lonely as the new perspective seems to eliminate a lot of npcs you’d normally meet. It’s the final encounter with the Guardian. Involves a Captain Kirk mind meld sort of conclusion, but should have been expected.

Ultima Online: Garriott brings the series to an online environment by making the argument that when Mondain was around, he split a shard into multiple pieces, each of which was another copy of Britannia (meaning you were on a different server). Game has lasted over twenty years now, even though Garriott has been divorced from it for most of that time.

Shroud of the Avatar: This is the eventual successor to the franchise, even though the understanding is that Electronic Arts still owns the rights to the Ultima name. It’s been pretty much understood that EA has no idea how to actually allow a franchise to breathe, so fortunately Garriott has given new life into what was once a very original idea.

So, what is Shroud supposed to be like? Well, it released officially on March 27th of this year, although it’s been in extended beta for a number of years now. Several times during the beta, the world was reset, so people had to start over, but the current beta that was playing through was allowed to survive and on March 27th, the game went from idea to actual release. Much rejoicing was had. Not much change, however, occurred. Okay, some change happened, but it was mostly patched kinds of changes without much of an impact on what was happening with the world itself.

But the story itself argues that the avatar has returned to Britannia (or Novia, or whatever land this is supposed to be now). A bunch of comets have caused problems, and there appears to be some kind of “evil” that may be under the surface. But for the most part, other than a couple of dragons wandering around and a ton of bad guys, pirates and thieves, not much seems to be going on in the lands. There are extensive player owned towns and an appearance here and there of Lord British (Richard Garriott’s character), but like Ultima Online before, the one thing sort of missing appears to be a general purpose behind what’s going on in the adventure. It might be there under the surface, but it’s not obvious enough to someone just starting the game. For the most part, when starting the game, you’re told that the Oracle (kind of like a benevolent-sounding Guardian from before) wants you to somehow unite the concepts of love, truth and courage (which were the foundations of the original eight virtues). As for why, I’m still trying to figure that out. And what happens after that, still kind of confused. I’m going to be really disappointed if we discover after all of this preparing and adventuring that we were really trying to figure out where Lord British left his car keys.

The combat mechanics are pretty decent and quite extensive, if one takes the time and effort to learn them. The game can be played on a simplistic level, but there are decks involved in the combat skills, so you can start to develop some really complicated types of maneuvers. There is also quite a bit of involvement with the crafting system as well.

The player housing is pretty awesome as well. As this was a huge part of Ultima Online, I would have been shocked if this was not the case. It’s a bit expensive, but judging from the conversations on the official boards, there may be some effort to make the land choices a bit more achievable for the common player. I’ll admit I’ve probably spent way more money than I should have playing this game, but I’m not the typical player; I do stupid things like that. Most people are generally a lot smarter than I am when it comes to that sort of stuff.

Where the game really needs to grow is in attracting players to run around in that world. They’ve done the one right thing by offering a free access sort of pass to players exploring the game, but a lot more needs to be done to get those same players to want to stay. Right now, the initial price to play the game after visiting is $40. That’s the price of a general AAA game that’s just been released. Although that price can sometimes go up to about $50, the $40 price tag is still pretty close to what people generally remember paying for a newly released PC game. And yes, the game was just released, but it is still showing a lot of early growing pains that may take many months to fix. Those are the kinds of problems people are going to see when visiting the game for free, so this might make it really difficult to translate into full members of the game itself. As long as housing is costing people over $100 in real money, people are probably going to avoid this game like the plague. Add to that the majority of the negative feedback for the game has been about the price of transactions in the game, and you have a recipe for why this might be a difficult sell.

One other problem that hasn’t been addressed all that well is another positive feature of the game: The single player game built within the game itself. You don’t have to play the game online. You can actually start the game as a single player and enjoy pretty much the same world. Without other people. The obvious negative to that is no one else is playing with you, but the positives are numerous, including three npcs that become your partners and experience the world with you, so you’re not always under powered by being alone. But like I said, they haven’t given this avenue enough attention because there are some blatantly missing things, such as player owned towns. On the surface that makes sense, but in reality, those player owned towns are often used for reasons other than housing. A lot of the connections to other zones come from linkage people have made tying numerous towns together (like carriages, balloons and boats). If no player owned towns exist, those connections just don’t exist. Which means there are islands throughout the game that have no ability to be reached because no player connection was made beforehand. So, it’s just eye candy real estate in the game where you can never visit.

As I said before, it’s easy to come up with things to complain about in pretty much any game. It’s no different in this one. Which bothers me a lot because there’s so much strong potential with the game. There are times when it can be a lot of fun. We just need to find better ways to get more people to experience that fun without the costly aftertaste.

Overall, it has a lot of potential but can easily defeat itself by letting these types of problems fester longer than they need to. Unfortunately, online devs are historically really slow at addressing these kinds of things, or in addressing them at all. And once the game starts to go in the down direction, the spiral doesn’t end until the game is gone or a shadow of its original self.

The Problems of a Young People’s Movement

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Recently, there’s been a lot of attention being paid to a group of high school students who were survivors of a horrific gun attack in Florida. While they’re not the first students to suffer from such a crappy situation, what made this tragedy even more significant was that the students didn’t remain the backdrop of the event but have now taken front stage and are literally the movement itself.

This has resulted in a number of unexpected outcomes. First, the “usual” response of “this isn’t the time” to discuss gun violence was completely drowned out by the survivors themselves who refused to allow pro-NRA pundits to dictate the terms of the conversation. And the opposite side, the political operatives who have been screaming into the wind for decades about gun violence, were also taken a bit by surprise because as much as they have wanted to do so, they’re not dictating the message but having to listen alongside everyone else who is seeing this dynamic group of young people demand and focus attention.

And this is part of the problem that I fear because as Mancur Olson pointed out in “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” (1965) and reinforced by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” (1977), getting a movement started is a lot easier than sustaining one over time. The reasons are varied, but there’s both a free rider problem (people think others will do the work for them so they sit out the movement, convinced someone else will take up the slack) and an age problem, which I’ll talk about it a moment here.

The first problem is not easily overcome. People organize because of personal motivations, and they quite often are faced with the belief that they’re climbing a mountain that has no footing. When they realize there’s a group of others with similar goals, they become motivated and feel the sense of belonging that makes them put themselves out there for hopes of a solution. What can often happen is that solidarity may actually lead to a limited success because their opposition is also overwhelmed by the numbers gathered in such a short amount of time. So, they go home, armed with the knowledge that they succeeded. But they don’t often get everything they wanted, so when they take to the streets again to achieve the rest, they find that a fraction of their comrades appear the second time around due to that pesky free rider problem.

Which brings me to the second problem: age. One of the advantages of the current movement is also its biggest liability: Children eventually stop being children. Right now, young high school students are rallied around the idea of wanting to fix things for the youth of America. But there’s a time stamp on how effective they are going to be because of the fact that once they stop being high school students and are then perceived to be adults, their message practically disappears overnight. People tend to care when children are affected, but when those children grow up into adulthood, it’s amazing how society quickly turns their backs on those same people.

Which means, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen really soon. The NRA, conservatives and those who like the status quo are very, very good at kicking cans down the road. This is kind of the origin of the phrase “thoughts and prayers”. The term “thoughts and prayers” has only recently been debunked to reveal it means “we’re not going to do anything about this now, so all we’re willing to do is pretend we’re thinking about it, but we’re not.” Historically, they’ve been really good at ignoring huge calamities with infamous responses of “now’s not the time” and all sorts of other bags of wind, knee jerk reactions. Therefore, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen during the next few weeks, or at least before the next atrocious event occurs because once the next geographically named event occurs, Florida will be yesterday’s news, and those who want to do nothing will breathe a sign of relief that they never actually had to do anything to make things better.

Why Twitter Should Be Seen As A Complete Failure

Business, Relationships, Social Networking, , , , ,

Joshua had a few things he needed to say

As much as it saddens me to say this, I’m more and more convinced every day that Twitter has failed as the communication vehicle it originally set out to be. You see, the original idea for Twitter was that it was going to create an atmosphere where people could communicate with lots of people AND as a result, give those people an opportunity to communicate back. Whereas television, radio and rallies tended to present one sided conversations, Twitter was going to offer the opportunity for the channel to go back and forth. Granted, it would be mostly pointed out from the person being followed, but that feedback was an essential part of the dynamic.

Fast-forward a few years, and what we have is a social networking system that has become mostly one-sided. For an absurd example, but one that points out the problem first-hand, look at the account of Kim Kardashian West. She has 58.4 million followers. But more significantly, she follows exactly 131 people. While she does retweet people from time to time, the chances of actually getting a specific reply from her are about as likely as getting a date with Taylor Swift (translation: not likely). If you look at the most retweeted account, that of our current president, it’s interesting to note that he is followed by 47 million and only follows 45 accounts. If you look through some of the most popular accounts on Twitter, you see something very similar to just that.

What this means is that Twitter is not a communication process but a megaphone for people who are popular entities already. Some entrepreneur still needs to invent the process for people to actually have a voice in conversation with others, but Twitter is not it. If you look at the average account, people tend to have at most 100 followers and generally follow a few more than that.

The moral to this story is that quite often people follow the individuals they respect because they wish to interact with that person. But Twitter doesn’t really make that a part of its process, even though it often acts like that’s exactly what is supposed to happen. An example is a celebrity like William Shatner who has 2.57 million followers, follows about 500 and generally has somewhat of an adversarial relationship with anyone who would like to converse with him.

That’s not to say that there aren’t those who don’t communicate with their fans. I’ve followed Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi from Star Trek the Next Generation) for some time now, and she’s very friendly to her fan base. From time to time, she responds directly to things people say to her. But to be honest, she’s a rarity, whereas most celebrities treat it as a segment of their entourage that they allow tiny morsels of information.

Unfortunately, it’s all we got right now, but it’s so inferior to what I really wish it could be. So, that’s for someone else to invent and bring to the masses. I’ll wait.

Remaining Unknown in a Viral World: Popularity, ASMR and Celebrity Status

Books, Business, Computer Games, Memoirs, News, Podcast, Politics, Relationships, Self-Publishing, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , ,

Earlier today, I was examining the statistics on my website and realized that I have about 1.5 million hits on my site since I started it. That appears to be a lot, but then I started to think to myself that not a lot of people comment on it or send me messages based off of my web site (or its blog). So, this tells me that I seem to get a lot of traffic but apparently nothing seems to be going on with it. And yes, that opens up a lot of thought on a subject I’ll probably take up at another time (what do to with traffic when it gets to your site, as I don’t seem to be doing a whole of good with that area).

Last night, I was watching the latest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is still one of my favorite police procedural types of shows. And in this episode, an Instagram star hooked up with a MMA fighter and was raped, but it turns out the whole thing had been set up by a young woman who was a follower of both of their Instagram feeds. The prosecutor mentioned that a motive for the set up was that the Instgram model had tens of thousands of followers, the MMA fighter had 2 million, and the young, geek girl had 6. Therefore, this was vengeance against the two well known Instagram stars from someone who felt that she had an important voice but no one was listening to her.

That resonated quite a bit with me because I think a lot of us who aren’t big stars often feel the same way. Not that we’re about to set up someone famous like the plot line of this story, but at the same time the realization that there are people who are seriously famous for a sex tape, or for just looking good in pictures, can be a hard thing to face when one is trying really hard to become known as well, but doesn’t  have that advantage those pseudo celebrities have.

Recently, I’ve been following a bunch of ASMR artists who I find to be very good at their craft. In case you’re not familiar with ASMR, it stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which according to Wikipedia is “is a term used for an experience characterised by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia.” And even with that definition, you’d be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many news agencies just don’t understand it, which you can see when they start to make statements that suggest watching President Trump gives “ASMR tingles” or when some celebrity posts a Youtube of her just staring at the screen and the media goes ga ga over her “ASMR video.”

In reality, ASMR is difficult to achieve and very few artists succeed at it. There’s a reason that there are a few very popular ASMR artists out there, and almost none of them are celebrities known for other things.

Which brings me back to my original subject, and that’s that viral popularity has a bad habit of creating an atmosphere that wasn’t intended in the first place. For those not completely familiar with ASMR, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of thinking ASMR is nothing but people whispering and making sounds with inanimate objects. And that’s because a lot of it comes from doing exactly that. But it also comes from a stronger understanding of how those actions can trigger the audience into feeling something more than just simple reactions. As a result, quite a few artists sometimes push the envelope and create what I’ve started to characterize as PG-13 ASMR. What I mean by that is ASMR that is designed to arouse rather than “tingle”, and for those not initiated in what ASMR, it can be very easy to mistake one for the other.

This happens quite often because the models who do ASMR are almost always attractive. Both male and female ASMR artists are generally above average in attractiveness and in their social tools for attracting others. This should be expected because this is a video environment where an unattractive artist is going to be avoided or ignored, and an attractive one is going to cause people to click the image being presented on the Youtube reception screen. This often resonates in the comments section of their videos where the anonymous nature of the Internet can cause trolling behavior you’d expect in a darkened strip club environment. To make matters worse, a number of ASMR artists chase the elusive crown of traffic and subscriptions (people subscribe to their personal channels), which leads to a revenue stream from Youtube. This causes the perpetrators of the more adult environment to keep pushing the adult envelope and the non-sexual artists to feel the need to participate because of loss of viewer clicks.

Youtube has somewhat cracked down on this phenomenon, but has done so with broad strokes that hurts mostly the non-sexual artists because they demonetize mostly based on viewer feedback, and the business has become somewhat cutthroat with an almost mob mentality towards those who are actually trying to comply and do the right thing. As usual, those are the ones who suffer the most, whereas the ones who are crossing the line are rewarded because none of their fans are ever going to turn them in for breaking any of the rules.

Which kind of brings me full circle in what I was originally talking about, and that’s the problem of trying to achieve any level of popularity in a bread and circuses environment where controversy, sex and violence are the things that attract the largest audience. How does the unknown artist achieve notoriety in a mostly celebrity driven world? In a free market mentality, one would think that the quality rises to the top and everything else remains at the bottom. But that’s rarely the case. Quite often, celebrity status is more than enough to create buzz so that its products remain at the top and everything else is left grasping for scraps. As a writer, I find this problem emblematic in the field because some really bad celebrity fiction gets serious attention when it’s not very good and it’s written by people who have about twenty years before they’ll actually ever write anything significant (if they were to work on it full time and not just in between movies or photo shoots). But the people who put in the work in hopes of one day becoming discovered may do so their entire lives and never get a nibble beyond a table scrap thrown their way.

So, the question is: Is there a balance, or is it just not worth the effort? I’m kind of on the cusp of this myself, as I’ve been writing for most of my entire life, creating computer games that were popular but too early for the industry to ever recognize, wrote music back in the day when such music was seen as too experimental, and any number of other creative tasks that have fumbled, fizzled or just never took off. People keep saying “Just keep at it and your day will come”, but part of me wonders if it’s just a crap shoot and my time might better be spent catching up on the latest season of The Walking Dead.

Bob Jenkins, middle manager at a Wyoming Applebee’s, is being closely watched as last male executive not accused of sexual harassment

Business, Relationships, , ,

Today, according to inside sources, Bob Jenkins, a tenured, two-year manager at an Applebee’s in Wyoming, is being closely monitored to make sure that no sexual harassment claims are made against him. As he is the last semi-senior executive of any corporation in America who has not yet been implicated on charges of lewd and inappropriate behavior towards any female member of his staff, Mr. Jenkins is being closely watched to make sure that he does not succumb to natural male tendencies.

Server Rebecca Dallison of the Applebee’s stated: “Not once has Bob attempted to fondle me, corner me in the back room alone, or stick his tongue down my throat while handling every day normal assignments. He hasn’t ever followed me to my car and made me feel completely uncomfortable in any way, shape or form.”

This newspaper was going to continue following this story, but our executives have all been implicated and fired for sexual harassment situations, leaving Dorothy, a junior reporter who has never covered a story on her own, left to man the store until appropriate personnel can be located in the future.

 

This Time, I’m Not So Upset By Netflix’s Price Increase

Business, Television, , , , , , , ,

This is Felicia Day. She’s not involved in this story but she deserves more attention in this day and age

The last couple of times Netflix decided to raise its prices, I was a vocal advocate against it and a denouncer of all things Netflix. The first time, Netflix decided to cut a line between its new streaming services and its CDs by mail programs, effectively charging you twice as much if you wanted to keep both, which originally were the same service. I quit Netflix then.

Then Netflix started to get better again, and its CEO stopped being an asshole to his customers. Yeah, an asshole. He treated his customers as cattle and sheep, and that’s why I quit that first time. Somewhere down the line, someone told him to shut his stupid face, and he started to act like his customers actually were people. So I was good. There is also great news on how much does Kyle Richards make per episode.

And then Netflix decided to raise prices again, and it did it in a way that eased the increases into being. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t feel like I was being treated like livestock, so I generally went along with it.

Now, Netflix has decided it is going to raise its prices again. For me, it’s about a dollar more, and adding in taxes and the weird math that these companies do, it will probably end up being closer to $1.50 to $2.00 more. Yeah, that never makes me happy, but we live in a corporate economy that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about people, so I’ve come to accept it.

Netflix is struggling against a bunch of different companies that are trying really hard to muscle in on the streaming giant. However, I don’t really see the other companies as young upstarts or forces of good trying to bring quality and good prices to my door. Many of these are owned by huge corporate enterprises that are known for foot in the door strategies where they beat out the competition and then raise the prices once they’ve secured a beach head as the only game left in town.

Netflix has been a solid service for me. It pulses higher and lower sometimes based on its content, but it’s generally upfront about what it’s doing. I dumped Hulu last year after it kept losing one show after another and then tried to play it off as “we’re solidifying our offerings,” whatever that means. Amazon is cool, but I see it as an extra benefit to Prime membership because it doesn’t really offer a whole lot of content, and the majority of its content is stuff I would never watch anyway. I tried DirectTV Now, and let’s just say that I’m now in the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and I’m a stupid moron that doesn’t deserve to continue making choices for himself” mode. My only other real choices are buying television shows directly from iTunes (which is massively expensive), cable (which I have but rarely offers me a selection of things to watch at a moment unless I was lucky enough to remember to dvr a specific show at a specific time), or staring longingly at my blank television screen (which after 1999 should no longer have been one’s only option).

So, I’m okay with Netflix having to charge a little extra. It’s still affordable to me, but if it rises another time after this, I’ll probably dump it and treat all streaming services as a failed experiment that couldn’t live up to its promises in the wake of the realization that media companies are really only into profiting rather than providing services.