I cannot stress this enough- Build a routine. Build Habits. Wake up every day and get used to being productive, one day at a time. Do this for long enough and eventually you’ll be at your goal without even realising it.
As of July 4th 2018, the Internet as we know it might be dead for good.
The European Parliament is passing a new Copyright Directive. Article 13 #CensorshipMachine will impose widespread censorship of all the content we share online. Art, fanfiction, parodies, remixes, mashups, memes, etc.. Anything that you do not hold the rights over will be taken down.
Article 13 would force all online platforms to police and prevent the uploading of copyrighted content, or make people seek the correct licenses to post that content. Internet platforms hosting large amounts of user-uploaded content must monitor user behaviour and filter their contributions to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
Such filters will be mandatory for platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Instagram, but also much smaller websites.
Last Tuesday (19th June 2018) a group of more than 70 people who have played important roles in building the internet and developing it (Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf,
Jimmy Wales, Mitchell Baker…) into what it is today addressed an open letter to the members of the European Parliament:
“As creators ourselves, we share the concern that there should be a fair distribution of revenues from the online use of copyright works, that benefits creators, publishers, and platforms alike.
But Article 13 is not the right way to achieve this. By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. […] The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial.”
One time I was playing the sims and I wanted to make me and mike but I wanted to make us separately and have us meet. But when I moved into my house, I had this sexy ass neighbor. I figured I could have a fling with him and break it off and get with Mike later but then the neighbors kid got attached to me and I couldn’t just end it when I was so close to his daughter. I really cared about him too.
So the only thing I could do was have it end in tragedy. That way I wouldn’t have to break up with the guy and I could adopt his daughter to stay close to her. He passed away peacefully on fire in the kitchen. Now in previous games, when a kid is taken away by CPS, the next kid you adopt is the same kid. Welp that didn’t carry over into sims 4 so the daughter ended up being taken away and erased from the game by the great sims deity.
I’m a sentimental man, so I kept neighbor mans tombstone around. I’d occasionally chat with his ghost, but he seemed cold to me. I can’t help but thinking he was a bit mad his daughter no longer existed. But this escalated once I started seeing Mike. His ethereal visits became more frequent and more hostile, usually breaking my electronics or creating a mess. But he went overboard when he started the fire.
Being a sim the died in a fire, his ghost had certain abilities specific to his death (setting fires). He got pissed because I kissed Mike so he set my couch on fire that ended up barricading us in the bedroom. Now I couldn’t find the fire alarm in buy mode and I hadn’t had the foresight to predict my spiteful ghost died-in-a-fire ex boyfriend would be an afterlife arsonist to care about it that much so a lot of the house had burned by the time I could get the FD there.
After having almost nothing covered by insurance (thanks Obama), Mike sat me down to have a talk with me. While I couldn’t understand him, I imagine he said “What the fuck you need to deal with your crazy ass ex boyfriend ghost. This never would have happened if you weren’t a thirst little sim bitch and dated me first.”
I approached the grave. It was time to release him. He was waiting for me. He knew this was the end. That after this, there was no coming back from the afterlife. I know he tried to kill me, and he knows I got his daughter deleted, but at that moment, it was just like old times. Telling each other jokes 27 times in a row until he would have sex with me.
We had a final ghostly embrace and he was gone. I sold his tombstone for 300 bucks and bought a microwave.
when i was younger i had a really bad fear of danny devito when i was going to sleep so my older brother gave me a watch that he set to like 8 hours ahead so that it was always daytime on the watch when i was asleep and he told me it would confuse danny devito and he would think it was daytime and get scared of the sun and leave me alon
Your brother is the best
Who the fuck changed this from vampires to Danny devito
the real question is why I was completely ready to accept that this person had a debilitating childhood fear of Danny Devito
so the cah pride pack has options for buying it “with glitter" and “without glitter” and knowing cards against humanity they just tip like 3 tablespoons of fucking glitter into the pack of cards and send it out
Picture a woman in pop culture. - Largely well known and respected in her field of work by professionals and fans alike. - Has a very recognizable voice. - Married. He also works in the same field. His reputation is enough to rival her own, maybe even more successful than she is. - Once suspected her husband of committing adultery. Sometimes seen as unsupportive, even by fans. His bum ass definitely doesn’t deserve her. - Three children. The oldest is a daughter named after a color (protect her). - T H I C C
man it’s amazing how microsoft managed to completely fuck themselves out of the best position they could possibly have been in in the gaming industry
like, back in 2008, “Xbox” was synonymous with “video games.” you didn’t say “wanna come over and play video games,” you said “wanna come over and play xbox”
then the xbone incident happened and that just fuckin’ flew out the window. like, almost overnight all of their brand recognition and loyalty just dropped. it’s wild.
tbh that’s more a reflection on the consumers than anything
video games is a business where most of the base will ditch you the moment one thing doesn’t happen one minute after it’s said it was supposed to be done
companies may fuck up, but there’s really no loyalty or general logic anymore. it’s just “what’s the most perfect thing I can get at this moment in time” and “if it isn’t 110% perfect, fuck it all”
I feel like you’re underestimating the power of console brand loyalty, as well as how severely Microsoft fucked up with the announcement and launch of the Xbox One. (If anything is a powerful testament to the power of brand loyalty, for instance, it’s the never ending Nintendo apologia even during the low days of the WiiU.)
Deep brand loyalty has been ingrained into videogame culture since the days of the SNES and the Genesis. An entire generation of marketing was built on taking potshots across the road at the other company, trying to make them look bad while making yourself look cool. Things got a bit muddied when the aborted Nintendo+Sony deal resulted in Sony entering the console market on their own in earnest, but the folding of Sega and Nintendo’s refusal to stop doing their own thing (the graphical prowess of the Gamecube was kneecapped by their insistence on using weird proprietary discs based on mini-DVDs) meant that we eventually wound up once again with a heated two-horse race between Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s new Xbox. PS2 had the library advantage, but Xbox had superior hardware and much better online support, not to mention Halo.
The tension between the two only grew stronger in the following generation, where Sony fell into the same trap that Nintendo did (weird proprietary hardware in the form of the Cell Processor that wound up scaring developers away) and lost ground to the Xbox 360, with Nintendo not even pretending to compete on account of going for the grandma audience with the Wii. This left the core console market as a two-sided affair, which is the perfect recipe for an “us versus them” brand war. The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war also factored into a strengthening of the battle lines, as did the general perceived demographics of the consoles. The PS3 was the Japanese anime game device, whereas the Xbox 360 was the American multiplayer shooter platform. You either picked one or the other, and brand loyalty shitposting hit an all-time high, with arguments about consoles exploding or having no games on them.
As much as I love the PS3, there’s no denying that the Xbox 360 was the clear winner in the North American market. The only reasons the PS3 didn’t crash and burn with its disastrous price and lack of library were because it got Metal Gear Solid 4 and because the early Xbox 360s had a catastrophic overheat failure rate, which made the expensive PS3 a slightly more appealing option once word of the overheats got out. By the time Microsoft ironed out the hardware problems, the PS3 had finally gotten more games on it, but it still wasn’t enough to defeat the 360 in terms of sheer popularity. 360 was easier to develop for and had the killer app of Halo 3, and the rest is history.
The Kinect is partially to blame for Xbox’s downfall, but not just for existing. The Kinect circa Xbox 360 wasn’t a massive success, but neither was the PS3′s Move controller+EyeToy setup. It was a case of both companies experimenting with motion controls after the Wii struck gold, but doing it too little and too late. Where the problems hit was when Kinect was included as a mandatory part of the Xbox One. In theory this was a good idea for developers since they could count on the Kinect being part of every unit and thus develop for it more confidently, but this backfired due to the Kinect itself being unpopular with the Xbox’s core demographic and inflating the price of the Xbox One, making it $100 more expensive than it would be without. On its own, this would have been an awkward handicap, but not insurmountable. The biggest shot in the foot for Microsoft was that they paired it with absolutely anti-consumer policies.
When the Xbox One was announced, the plan was that it had to be always-online to work, and wouldn’t support used games. Always online is a tall order for some customers (especially those with data caps), and always online with a mandatory camera+microphone device is extra skeezy. The used-games lockout was also very anti-consumer, since it would also potentially prevent you from sharing games with your friends. The real kicker though was when consumers asked about an offline option for the Xbox One, they were told that Microsoft already had a product for people who couldn’t have a constant internet connection: The Xbox 360. They essentially told all their customers to fuck off and stick with the old hardware if they didn’t want to be constantly online. The fact that marketing focused more on TV apps, sports, and media box stuff instead of gaming only further seemed to tell the core gaming audience to piss off.
The sum of all this is that Microsoft was announcing a console that was more expensive than it needed to be to accommodate a peripheral that the core audience didn’t want, all the while seeming to actively antagonize the core gaming audience who would buy it in the first place. That’s enough to give people pause about where their loyalties lie.
The final nail in the coffin was Sony’s response to Microsoft’s tone-deaf announcement. Having been humbled down from their high-horse during the PS3 days and eager to regain ground, the PS4′s announcement was pretty much a direct “take that” at Microsoft. Their console was announced at a price $100 below the Xbox One with no mandatory motion bullshit, and their presentation on how to share games on the PS4 was a simple 3 second demonstration of physically passing the disc from one person to another. There was no used games lockout, no always online bullshit, and no wasting time on sports and TV to the detriment of games. Hardware wasn’t a limitation either, since both the PS4 and Xbox One were based on x86 PC architecture and had more or less comparable specs. Microsoft couldn’t even rely on Halo to move consoles because the IP got handed over to 343 Industries, who proceeded to shit on the lore and alienate Halo fans. It could also be argued that the popularity of multiplayer shooters had given way to what we now know as the Soulsborne genre, and PS4 had Bloodborne as its killer app for added incentive.
As one might expect, the combined effect of Microsoft pushing their audience away and Sony eagerly pulling them in resulted in many people flipping to PS4, leaving Xbox One in the dust. While Microsoft eventually realized the error of their ways and tried to reverse course by axing the Kinect and disabling always-online via a patch (ironic considering you need internet to download a patch in the first place), the damage had already been done and they lost loads of market share.
To add insult to injury, Microsoft since then seems to have been intent on digging their grave even further. While Halo has lost the draw it used to have, Microsoft still had some tantalizing exclusives up its sleeve, such as the Remake and Remaster of the cult hit Phantom Dust, Crackdown 3, Cuphead, and the Platinum-developed Scalebound. Microsoft evidently decided this gave them too much of a chance to recover, so they cancelled the Phantom Dust Remake after sabotaging it with changing goalposts (reports say they cancelled it BEFORE announcing it publicly, which is extra baffling), released the Remaster for free on Windows 10 (probably to get people to upgrade to Windows 10, which was facing its own consumer crisis), released Cuphead on Steam instead of as an Xbox exclusive after a long status of being MIA and presumed cancelled, left Crackdown 3 also MIA, and most terrible of all cancelled Scalebound and ended their partnership with Platinum only to later announce it was un-cancelled and being developed internally by what we can only assume is a much less capable mercenary crew of devs frankensteining together the existing assets into some kind of shambling mess.
The Xbox One’s downfall isn’t just consumers being fickle, impatient, or impossible to please. This is quite possibly an example of full on corporate suicide, where a company completely out of touch with what their core demographic wants proceeds to push that demographic away, and burn any possible bridges back for good measure.
This is an amazing in-depth look at the dive that Microsoft has taken over the past few years, but what baffles me the most (in the best way, I assure you), is the fact that this was pulling the receipts on everything Microsoft fucked up on, to prove the last guy wrong, in a very well-structured and down-to-earth manner that engaged me. Moontouched-moogle just shot out an essay on a whim whereas I can’t do that with a week’s worth of planning.
