Please suggest my next read!

What is your favourite of those I didn’t mention? Maybe I’ll read it next!

It has a single DLC, IIRC. I don’t know about the mobile game, but I’m thinking more along the lines of a Paradox game with hundreds worth of DLC, or Sims 4 with thousands, or GTA 5 with a pay to win currency system. I could be wrong, but it seems like Nintendo would be ignoring a golden goose.

If I can offer a counterpoint, AC isn’t generating revenue from microtransactions and DLC. I predict Nintendo’s launch title will be positioned to generate revenue over the entire life cycle of the console.

I found it when I was reading a lot of Philip Dick and it made me explore other popular sf authors and read some of her other novels. She was one of the greatest. There are so few authors in SF that one could recommend without hesitation.

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I second these and add The Lathe of Heaven. Also, her short stories! The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas especially.

I should have marked this NSFW but it is blurred out and was shown in cable in 1994.

There’s a guy with this stuff all over his van that parks it at the staples, it’s wild

I don’t know. That was a long time ago.

When I was a young man, I worked in the call center of a telecommunications giant. We provided customer support for television, including some technical assistance like helping an elder find the source button on their remote. We had strict QoS rules, and my supervisor told us that this was mandated by the CRTC. We answered most phone calls within 30s, and a hold time over 2m was an emergency. We had screens all over the office where we could watch our queue and, although it was extremely rarely used, a system of overflow call centres to switch on to in the case of a truly wicked rush.

That all went out the window. Now, the job consists of trying to end the call as soon as possible because the new metric is not how long your customer waited to speak to you, but how much of the company’s money they burned wasting its time with their question.

You know why

Stephen Amell wouldn’t even want to stand next to Stephen Amell after that appalling shit.

What kind of rent-seeking on media is ethical? In what situations do you think it is OK to restrict non-destructive copying?

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Why would I talk person to person with reasonable people? Even if they check all your boxes and don’t hate anyone, if they’re not about moving us forward already, why would I be so egotistical as to think I’ll be the one to change that? If pigs want to wallow, let them. I am not the servant of any man, be it a boss or a dumbass.

I should like to spank his little bottom for such childish thinking.

If you look further back, I think you’ll see that films are just returning to a natural length of between 1.5 - 3h that hit an equilibrium by the 1970s. Films with niche appeal or marketed at young crowds maxed out at 90m in the 80s I think due to pressure from theatres and new home video and pay tv markets. A really marketable film needed to be 90m, short for many showings but still have enough room to sell ads when it an on tv at 2h broadcast length.

Many things have changed. Streaming content can be any length and divided however the creator chooses, provided they don’t want a theatrical run for awards purposes. Theatre business is way down, and the cost theatres pay is way up, but more than ever they rely on blockbusters so if an auteur like Reeves wants to do a 6h batman, as long as it sells tickets it’s fine.

The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were long movies that primarily made money from the box office because FFC could push back when studios looked to cut his films. They knew people would see his films because they were good. Today, Christopher Nolan or Jordan Peele have the kind of instant box office/streaming credibility to make long films again, and Hollywood is much more focused on extravagant showstopping spectacle than it was in the 80s and 90s when a lot of more dramatic story-driven films won awards and even made a lot of money, so you see more expensive blockbuster films with huge marketing being action films like marvel, dc, john wick. Some are still 90m, but up to 2h15m isn’t uncommon. I guess what I’m saying is, directors won the right to make long films in the 60s and 70s when people like Hitchcock and Kubrick showed that filmmakers that were artists could also make studios a lot of money. But, the 80s and the 90s cut down the appetite for those sorts of films both by the studios and the public. There were so many pressures that made studios balk at long runtimes. It’s not that people haven’t always had 3h films to make, it’s just that many of them ended up shot as 2h30m films, edited down to 90m for theatrical release, and then put out on DVD at 1h10m with deleted scenes in the extras. It was a wild time.