Career

More Amazon Licensed Fanfic Coming

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Well it looks like Amazon started something (which Amazon is in the habit of doing), and more license-holders have signed on to their licensed fanfic plan.

Specifically they added Valiant Entertainment, which does not surprise me as Valiant has a fascinating history of ups, downs, morphing, and experiments.

What also is intriguing is this is fiction on comic properties – will Amazon be open to fancomics at some point?

How interesting is this?  Well, I tagged my calendar to help us track what’s up here.  In the areas of licensing, publishing, writing careers, and more this is going to get pretty interesting.

– Steven

How To Work On Career Sustainability

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Sustainability is a big thing to discuss, mostly as we watch a world of changing climate and resourcing issues come about there’s more awareness. It’s probably a few years behind, but its there.

Of course there’s other kinds of sustainability to discuss as well. We learned that an ever-inflating home markets are unsustainable. We’re learning that a blockbuster-driven Hollywood is unsustainable. Seems like a lot of stuff isn’t sustainable and we’re very surprised about that since people have only been warning us for ages.

(Do I sound bitter? I was mistrusting the housing market before it was cool. Oh gods, I’m an Econohipster.)

But out of our various looming disasters, I want to narrow down and discuss a kind of sustainability that we often miss -and that is illustrative of survivability, systems, and having a functional life.

Career sustainability.

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Microsoft’s About-Face on DRM

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Remember how Microsoft’s DRM/Once-a-day Internet connection on XBox had everyone angry?  Well, they’re taking it out.

Of course removing it changes some features:

  • Physically purchased games won’t “follow” the player to other machines (digital content will of course).  You’ll need to take the disk with you.
  • Game sharing with family members is gone.

That tells me one important thing – Microsoft really figured people were going to go for this or accept it, it’s integrated enough into their plans and technology.  I think they were actually surprised (and it seems this will be removed at first login, so they really were planning on this going through).

This is good overall.  Microsoft listened.  I’m hoping that will steer the Xbox towards a better evolution toward the seemingly inevitable living room media machine.

– Steven