I'm jealous you got to read Blood Music in high school. Though Chrysalids was also great and turned me into a long time sci-fi fan. Despite the horribly hypocritical ending.
Haha! I started up DS3 DLC once a lot time ago, and I was rusty from having not played in a while. I got invaded in less than a minute, got whacked, quit the game and never went back. Sometimes I'm just not in the mood for self-flagellation. DS2 DLC almost did me in, but I'm glad I pushed through there.
Crosscode. It's not required, but they do encourage you to race against NPCs in the puzzle-heavy dungeons. I thought I had finally won one when the boss of the dungeon smoked me three times, and then I got mocked for being the last out of the dungeon. Also, I'm 27 hours in, and the plot that everyone raves about has gone absolutely nowhere. I put the game down a few months back and haven't gone back. Maybe I'll pick it up again since it seems a lot of people love something about it, but aside from some interesting combat, I wasn't feeling it at all.
YouTube and Street Fighter tournaments. The instant one is over, BOOM, "How XXXX won XXXX tournment!!" videos are everywhere. Or, the top comment on a video is "Great Job XXXX!" It sucks when you never have a chance to watch these things live.
You can't absolve "us" of all the responsibility. We wouldn't be in this situation if the masses weren't so easy to manipulate into supporting corruption. The vast majority of us would take the quick-and-easy-yet-destructive path over the long-and-hard-productive one most of the time. Remove those 100-or-whatever by violent revolution tomorrow, and someone else will rise to the top of the stink heap the next day. Real change requires sacrifice at all levels of society.
I have an XBox 360 controller lying around that still works great. I have a couple DS4s that still work great even though the rubber started coming off the analog sticks. The one Dualsense I bought crapped out after a single year of moderate use.
I pay Distrokid ~$20 a year to distribute my music to a lot of streaming services, but I do not pay individual streaming services. I never really expected much return. I wasn't disappointed! Haha!
My daughter was watching Bluey the other day, and Bingo wanted some "Pavlova". I immediately thought it was some reference to them all being dogs and Pavlov.
Nope. Turns out it's actually a dessert named after a Russian ballerina that originated in either New Zealand or Australia in the early 20th century.
Maybe some kind of increasing scale for revenue depending on larger numbers of listens.
My break down by track is pretty inconsistent, too. I've got a single track with over a million listen that made me 36 cents. My most popular track has over 4M listens, and it's responsible for half that $45. Distrokid doesn't say which streaming service that revenue comes from, either. Some pay more than others, I imagine.
I have to wonder about the logistics. He can't be running them on his own single Internet connection. Or could VPNs handle it so it would appear his listens are coming from all over the world? $10M is a lot of money. How long did it take to amass that?
Me? Honestly, I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person, and what music is AI generated, but really, there's so much music out there of wildly varying quality thanks to accessibility of production tools these days, it probably is literally impossible to tell the difference anymore.
A little bit, for sure. Tempered harshly by the fact I've spent thousands of hours and thousands of units of cash on a hobby that paid me back $45. Good thing I don't do it for the money!
It mostly holds up. The ending though... It's a product of its time.