Zagorath

Even then, Audible is a ripoff on a massive scale

The thing is, from a customer perspective, Audible is such a great deal. It’s too good a deal, really. They desperately throw out free or cheap months to people who are trying to quit (offers to get them to stay), or who have quit quite some time ago (offers trying to convince them to return). That’s a great deal for customers.

The problem is that they’re such a massive ripoff to authors. They have some extremely anticompetitive policies that make it difficult to put your audiobooks anywhere else if you want to also be on Audible. And I think they are really harsh towards authors if a reader takes advantage of Audible’s very over-generous returns policy. (No-questions-asked return merely if you say you didn’t like a book, even if you listened to the entire thing.)

I should probably also add that I’m from a country with an especially low rural population. I’m from the state with the highest proportion of rural population, and we have 50% in our capital city alone.

Connections
Puzzle #405
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Someone in my other Connections chat said “If anyone gets purple first your brain is built different”, so I set myself that challenge.

I can see why you’d say that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of the story is the moral ambiguity, we were never supposed to unambiguously side with the husband, but decided for ourselves who to believe. So our conclusions might change with time, but the play’s relevance has only grown.

Samsung. For a bunch of reasons, but I think the main starter of it was when I learnt this story.

Amazon. I don’t think I need to explain why on this site.

Obviously both of these are near impossible to avoid completely. Samsung makes the internals of far more products than they put their name on, and AWS runs a big percentage of the web. But I avoid their store, Prime, and Audible.

It’s a dull show. It’s not a 1/10 show. Not even close. That’s the clear proof that this is about review bombing, not honest feedback.

As for AC: I haven’t played it since Revelations, for the same reasons you provide. It went from being an awesome narrative building up to a big climax, to becoming a vehicle for annual releases, like a historical equivalent to FIFA or COD games.

That said…the game has two leads, one of which is Japanese. And she’s the one that’s actually more “assassin”-like of the two, with Yasuke being more of a direct fighter. Actual Japanese people, when interviewed on the street by one of the haters (in an obvious attempt to get evidence to use for their hate campaign) mostly said “yeah cool, I guess”. If Japanese people being prompted by a hater don’t even hate it, I fail to see why I should. Or why I should trust that the criticism is actually being made in good faith, rather than as a thin veil for “anti-woke” racism.

Well it hasn’t come out yet, but have you seen how angry some people are about Assassin’s Creed Shadows already?

The Last of Us 2 had a pretty infamous review bombing campaign against it based on…I’m not even really clear, to be honest. I know some people were angry that it had a trans woman in it, except that the character they were complaining about was not portrayed as trans.

Or in other media, check the reviews for Star Wars: The Acolyte. Personally I think it’s quite a mid show. It’s not actually very interesting. I’d rate it maybe 5 or 6/10. But because of the lead characters being an Asian man and a black woman, or maybe because a trans woman has a minor role in a couple of episodes, over 50% of the reviews on IMDB are 1 star, and it’s scored 16% on Rotten Tomatoes’ audience score.

Sometimes you get review bombed for shitty business practices.

Sometimes you get review bombed because your game includes a black character.

I’m not sure it’s fair to say that you don’t have to worry about review bombing if you so the right thing.

Oh no. What happened? I’m gonna miss Treevan. They were a great member of the community.

Congrats!