Wait, are Amazon literally going to pay people to write fan fiction? Is this real life or am I dreaming?!
Oh, my God, it’s real.
This is brilliant. Like, seriously, genius. Not only will the original author of the work’s world get a cut, but the fan fiction authors get an okay percentage of the sales as well, so EVERYONE benefits from it. This is far and away better than the previous model where fans would write fan fiction, but NO ONE got paid for any of it. Now, fans get to express their creativity and love for their favorite franchises, while allowing the author and themselves to get paid in the process! GENIUS.
I backed the Oculus Rift project on KickStarter last year. The team were promising an order of magnitude improvement in head mounted virtual reality goggles, along with very low latency head tracking.
A couple of weeks ago my Oculus Rift developer kit arrived…
A review by one of the folks sums it up perfectly:
“What worries me about Yahoo! buying Tumblr is how it would choose to incorporate the website into its email and homepage features. One of the reasons why Tumblr is so unique is because it’s a niche market. By adding more users who don’t fit into this niche, it would make it more difficult for communities to develop within Tumblr, and Tumblr would have to change to accommodate these new users. Tumblr as a website is not the kind that you can sign up for in a day and be on your way. It is a website crafted so that you can immediately post but must spend several weeks, sometimes even months, to build a community. With new users who would not be willing to spend time growing a community, Tumblr would have to be changed, which would alienate its current users. Those users have spent time and effort to make Tumblr what it is today, and they are the ones who spend time on the website daily. A user who is checking onto Tumblr because it’s attached to their homepage is not going to be as strong of a user nor as dedicated. By changing the website to suit this new user, you would lose the strong users while building an undedicated usership.
To any website that would think of buying Tumblr, they must understand that it is a website that cannot be changed to make it more user friendly to a casual blogger. I think that many Tumblr users would be less worried about a buy-out if they were promised that their communities and ways of using Tumblr would not be changed. No one is going to mind Yahoo! buying the website and gaining a few extra million dollars per year from the minimal advertising; what we will be upset with is if a company like Yahoo! then changes the website to increase casual users and decrease dedicated users. Yahoo! would gain nothing by losing this “cool” group of bloggers in an age group they so desperately want to reach, so they must cater to these individuals by leaving the website exactly as is.” - houseoftombombadil
As much as is does sound like a load of bullshit for someone to buy Tumblr, it’s a possibility. I Personally think it should stay independent and I hope David Karp keeps a hold of it like his own child. Or we make enough noise to where such major changes (if bought) will not happen. I would hate to see Tumblr turned into an advertising dump.
We’re not a ‘hip fad group’ to be marketed to. I hate the fact that’s all we look like to businesses in the end.
Tumblr feels that Yahoo’s $1.1 billion offer as “too low” and view it as “only a first offer”, according to sources close to to acquisition talks. Yahoo may have to significantly increase the offer to close the deal. An acquisition by some tech giant is likely in the cards for Tumblr, though, as sources say the company only has a few months of cash runway left. […] Tumblr employees have been told that the company only has enough funds to operate for a few more months, as its costs far exceed the limited revenue it earns. […] The money’s not coming in fast enough to support its expenses […] Employees were recently told not to be concerned, though, because the company is expecting to be bought.
This news makes me really uneasy. It seems Tumblr is on its last legs and an acquisition from another corporation is imminent. I may have to think about importing my “Tumblelog” into another blogging platform. I may go the self-hosted route like I used to years ago, and use the WordPress blogging software on my own server. WordPress has an import tool that works fine with Tumblr blogs.
I’m gonna miss this place. The community features are the best part. But if another company gets ahold of Tumblr, they will surely ruin it, just like what happened with Posterous.com when it was acquired by Twitter. In fact, Twitter seems like the most likely candidate for buying out Tumblr, since it would eliminate their only microblogging rival!
Well…it seems this is goodbye, fellow Tumblerers. :(
My Friend Richard:
So, Robert! You hear about the new pokemon?
Robert (Me):
Yeah, they look ABSOL-lutely amazing!
Richard:
Ugh, but all those nostalgiaf**s ruin it for us, making the whole fanbase look GHASTLY.
Robert:
I know, right? I wish those fans weren't so LOUDRED about everything new. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's TRUBBISH.
Richard:
Yeah... but unfortunately those people will never stop complaining. I think it's ODDISH, I mean, if you don't like new pokemon, don't look at 'em. It's not like you have to play the new games.
Robert:
"OH! THEY'VE RUINED MY PRECIOUS MEWTWO!" No. They didn't. They gave him an alternate form that you don't have to use, ever. Shiz like that is ONIX-ceptible.
Richard:
Yeah! SAWK it to 'em!
Robert:
Maybe we should stop, these puns are getting a tad FARFETCH'D.
Richard:
Eh, AUDINO, I don't mind keepin' 'em up.
Robert:
*PSYDUCK* Fine. Hmm...
Richard:
Wait... what?
Robert:
You broke the pattern! What was that about?
What are you guys’ thoughts about this? Since I’m an NVIDIA Nsider, I’ve been given the opportunity to pre-order one of these before the general public. Debating whether I should get it or not. It’s certainly interesting. With stuff like SHIELD, the Wikipad, the Ouya and GameStik, and other such devices, Android is really starting to look like a good gaming platform to me. I think there’s potential there.
If anything, I hope all these new devices coming out get game developers to start making games for the Android platform with actual gaming controllers in mind, instead of just the touch-screen phone games so prevalent today.
Heck, I may end up getting this thing instead of the smartphone I was saving for. It’s an Android device, has all the bells and whistles you’d expect, sans the phone, of course.
May be neat to code a “Hello, World” just to prove I could do Android development if I ever felt assed to do so. XD
All these Android gaming devices starting to come out this year…and just today, this leaked:
Very interesting times we live in, Google actually creating an API for devs to use across Android devices specifically for video games.
I think it’s really cool the SHIELD has an HDMI out port. That means I could connect it to my HDTV and play games on the big screen. Wondering why Ouya, Gamestik, etc. even exist when devices like SHIELD already do what they do and so much more.
$350 seems like a steep price at first glance, but knowing the hardware this thing is rockin’, that price is spot-on what I would expect. Cheaper than any tablet or smartphone — in fact, it’s the same price as Apple’s iPod Touch! This thing could easily be an iPod Touch killer; I could see that.
I’ve been wanting an Android Device for a while now, I may just jump on this thing.
So, what do you guys think about the NVIDIA SHIELD?
Animal Crossing is a series about doing whatever you want, with a few loose goals put in place if you choose to pursue them. It’s one of the least punishing series ever made. One of the few times you might feel anything unpleasant in the series is if you try to cheat by hitting reset, presumably to undo an in-game “mistake” like failing to catch a cool fish or having a bad interaction with a talking penguin…
“But maybe it was too perfect, as according to the latest entry of Iwata Asks, Mr. Resetti’s chastising was enough to bring some players to tears, presumably out of guilt. That led the developers to make him an optional in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. They also changed the underlying goal of the game from paying off rent to Tom Nook to improving the town as its new mayor.”
Seriously…? UGH. The rent thing though, it was such a good motivator. And Resetti causing people to go into TEARS…out of GUILT? REALLY?!
I do have to say, that messing with Resetti was a BLAST when I was playing Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I didn’t even know he was there for the 90% of the time that I played the game, but that ONE time I accidentally quit without saving after five minutes of, “I wonder what the animals in my town are up to right now,” curiosity…man…that was FUN. I kept resetting on purpose over and over again right after that, and he said completely different things each time.
There was this one time that scared the crap outta me though, when he threatened to delete my save data because I was being an ass (not his exact words, of course, but that’s ultimately what it amounted to), and I was like, “Yeah, right, let’s see you try, buddy.” So I reset it again, and when I went back into the main menu and started from my save, the screen went blank and stayed that way for a bit, and I’m like, “No way…” and then a message popped up saying my save data was deleted, I was like, “no way…No way! NO WAY!! NOOO FREAAKIIINNG WAAAAYYY!!!”
Doods, I’m serious, my heart sank, I was like, “I did not just lose hundreds of hours worth of data…this can’t be happening…it can’t be…” I was totally freaking out. Then the screen goes to outside my house and Mr. Resetti pops up and laughs in my face like, “Scared ya, huh? Next time, it’ll be for real!”
Man…that is probably — literally — the most terrifying moment of my video gaming career. No game has EVER come close to that as far as scaring me, not even games whose sole PURPOSE was to scare the player. It’s hilarious to think that Nintendo would pull a wicked prank like that, but they did, and my gosh, I NEVER reset that game again after that. I know nothing would probably happen from it, but I was too afraid to try. :P
