#like how was your first thought paywall instead of make better content

[five-hour-anxiety]

you know you fucked up when the YouTube comments section is completely unified to tell you how badly you fucked up

[yooniesim]

I think one of the things that makes it so hard to find new creators (that are free) is how insular paywall/early access cc creators are. I literally can't remember the last time any of them used their massive platforms to support newer creators and they only seem to reblog content that features their own stuff or other creators they're close with. They are literally only concerned about their "brand" instead of actually participating in the community that provides them with their livelihoods. If you're looking for content, you're going directly to these creators first and maybe you'll look through finds blogs if you're more invested. To a point, I understand that's how popularity works, but they could be doing so much more.

Plus, since the early access model is so popular, I do think there's a push for new creators to switch to that. You get an initial burst of engagement when you first post and then another when your content is free, instead of just posting once and getting what you get. Also, I do think there's an unspoken rule that "early access creator" = "professional". So, if you want to be taken seriously, you'll imitate what the "professionals" are doing.

I'm sorry you're discouraged trying to find new creators. It's actually insane how much damage the popularity of paywalling has done to this community.

Hey nonny, thanks for sending this and also for your sympathy! I agree with everything you said, and I'm just gonna ramble a bit in a semi related way.

I think the point you made about professionalism is especially poignant. Creating cc is less a hobby now and more a setup for your own "business". But in this marketplace, there are no standards or regulation whatsoever- and many people here are just bad at what they do in various ways. It seems as if they either have the aesthetic & business model down, but are terrible to their customers and/or make terrible product, or they make a good product but can't quite grasp how to play the "game" to work the system to its full advantage. Sometimes you get people bad at all of it, yet they still charge. Because the only consistent thing about this community at the moment is that everything absolutely has to have a price, no matter how shitty it is. And there's absolutely zero consequence for being a gigantic douche nozzle.

This is a mostly disconnected side note, but when I think about these creators, it's just unbelievably depressing. I have thought about what it would be like to try early access a few times over the years, and honestly even the thought gave me such a burst of anxiety I immediately dismissed it. Just releasing cc for free is sometimes an anxious feeling for me, I just can't imagine having to base a business around it. The thought of possibly disappointing people and not consistently providing a quality product that is worth their money is a shameful thought for me. I have gotten a few $1 donations to my patreon over the years and even then i feel bad for not being able to create cc for a while because of my mental health, and not being better at cc making in general. And yet there's people that provide the most lazy, shit items I've ever seen without blinking. Stuff they never tested that doesn't work in game, two second conversions, no hat chops, no lods, gigantic poly, etc. They don't even know how to make cc and admit to that but still charge. I think I would die of shame. I'm sitting here thinking about, do they feel guilt over it, in the back of their mind? Does the stress and the anxiety gnaw at them like it does me? Even just uploading to curseforge for me, causes a bit of anxiety, even though no one pays for it directly. But CF is just another tool to be used to most- now people use patreon, but once its unlocked, the download link leads to CF so they can double dip. So it must not be bothersome to them at all. It's difficult for me to wrap my head around.

...I've gotten so far off track, again. Here's the part where I re-read your ask and try to get back on topic lol. Sorry, my mind runs a lot these days.

I'm glad you mentioned the part about how insular paywallers are. But I think there's even more to this than just popularity. They do not break from their circle, except in the very rare case someone new becomes very popular and they want to do a boring collab with them, and even then it seems limited. I'm pretty sure they have a server (or multiple) where they share people's urls for the purposes of chain blocking them. They also, without a doubt, share people's personal info to one another in order to ban their accounts from their patreons (at the very least). I have witnessed this multiple times. There are several doxxing rings besides the ones that were exposed, at least one exclusive to early access creators. They don't allow new people in/trust others easily because of this. This is why I don't trust paywallers as a rule; not because I think custom content should never be monetized under any circumstances, but because the lack of standardization and consequences for privacy violations makes it unsafe.

I've read through your ask again, and it made me think of something else, so bear with me haha. But the point about how you find newer creators, and how some will go to finds blogs. The fact of the matter is that popular finds blogs have the potential to be compromised as well. I have been blocked by mmccworld ever since EA temporarily banned paywalling and I reblogged a post that had a list of people intending to continue paywalling after that, and they happened to be on that list. They were one of the more popular finds blogs in the community, but I obviously won't be reblogged by them like I was in the past. Now, this isn't that relevant anymore since they're definitely not as highly regarded as they once were, but think about tumblr's lack of algorithm & what you said about how people find newer creators. If you aren't reblogged, you aren't found. And it makes me wonder how many other creators are blocked at a finds blog's discretion. I mean, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; you can filter people how you like, for example I don't reblog from paywallers on mine, or known bigots etc. But it's something to think about, and I think is a smaller example of how simblr works. If you don't play the game and fall in line, if you question the wrong person, you won't get exposure. And to most, in our current system, exposure equals money. Of course you're going to toe the line- no one wants to be publicly shamed, or worse, have a drop in potential income.

This has gone on far, far too long, so let me stop lol. But thanks again for sending this and allowing me to ramble in response, nonny... not that you had a choice 🤣

[phantomrose96]

while post plus is, undeniably, going to be an absolutely hilarious mess when it gets out of limited beta and is available to everyone, and i hate to rain on anyone's parade, i have to point out that it won't allow people to paywall their blogs. though i haven't seen it explicitly said, by all indication it will only give people the ability to make premium original posts (so everyone freaking out about ppl monetizing reblogs can chill out).

instead i offer you this: please imagine the absolute shitshow that will happen in fandom the first time someone paywalls their fic. i'm already grabbing popcorn

hahaha, yeah i never honestly thought you'd be able to paywall reblogs since 1) that aint your content to paywall, like, legally and 2) how could that even work, logistically.

Frankly I expect this to completely fizzle out. Most content creators who have monetizable content (I say this as a fic writer but, it's primarily artists) already have a patreon going for early access and exclusive content. So those people aren't about to hop to Tumblr for that.

and also just GETTING attention on tungle dot com is already such an uphill battle. even the free-est, self-promoted-est fics struggle to pull in readers. I'm damn lucky to have carved a niche of some relatively faithful readership but tbh I wouldn't expect to keep more than like 5% of them if I paywalled my stuff. Like bro I post fics for attention and interaction!!! I'm internally begging everyone at all times to read them!!! I'll pay you $5 for a nice comment!! I'm not gonna trade that for a couple dollars!!

What does kinda suck is that, in a better world, "people are paid fairly for the content they put out into the world" would be the norm. Like yo I want content creators to be able to pay their bills. but thats a cultural thing that has way deeper roots and I can't see Tumblr Plus solving any of that any time soon.

[childeapologist]

For the record yes I do believe Post+ is a terrible idea but I have seen some terrible takes as to why it is a bad idea so I just want to clarify some things first. 

Why Post+ is a terrible idea

Tumblr is already held together by elmers glue and scotch tape and they have about ten billion other things they should fix before worrying about expanding monetization

Tumblr already took a huge hit as far as credibility and reputation during the whole porn bots, their removal from the apple store, and the resulting adult content ban incident (that didn’t even solve the porn bot problem) 

Tumblr is also still completely ignoring the portion of this site that is basically just a Nazi echo chamber and maybe they should ban these people first

Tumblr should worry about fixing its site and attacking more problems at the root instead of just putting a band-aid over them, and developing a better reputation among its users first. 

Not reasons Post+ is a terrible idea

Optional paid subscription services so you can support your favorite content creators are inherently a bad thing

The lack of appreciation for content creators is real in some of your takes and it shows how little appreciation some people have for the amount of time that we spend creating things just so that you can like them and not even reblog them. Content creators using platforms like Ko-fi, patreon, and such so that there is an optional way to financially support them should not be stigmatized. Unless this person is literally begging people for donations and subs and being a classist asshole that belongs on Twitch Beggers, there’s nothing wrong with it. 

Tumblr just has other issues they should focus on before trying to add a built in feature like this. Post+ is clearly a poorly thought out strategy that Tumblr is using to try and join YouTube, Twitch, Onlyfans, Facebook, Tik Tok, and all these other places that offer forms of monetization. I don’t know why they would make it cost $9.99 a month instead of just letting the user set a price like Patreon does and $9.99 is way too much and totally deserves to be made fun of and criticized.

But my god, if you’re criticizing content creators in general for using services with a paywall like Patreon or for taking donations via Ko fi you need to just get off the internet and stop consuming content bc you don’t deserve it:) 

[fanfics-with-coffee]

The simple pleasures

Your friend had so kindly set you up on a date with Kuroo Tetsurou, her classmate. And it’s been going great! But after your third date, another friend alerts you to the fact that you may want to check out his twitter... where he advertises his onlyfans. Of course you had to see what was hidden behind the paywall. 

Genre: Smut, smut, oh and did i mention smut? Pairing: Kuroo x reader Kinks: Could probably consider this some voyeurism, mastrubation, oral (both ways), little bit of orgasm denial, little bit of choking, mastrubation instructions for females. Words: 6000

“This was your place right?” The car slowly comes to a stop in front of your house, right between two streetlights. They dimly light up the inside of his car making it easier to see him as he turns his head to look at you, one hand still on the wheel. You couldn’t help but notice the other was placed on his upper leg, leading your eyes to his obviously thick thighs. 

“Yeah, this is still the place! Thanks again, Kuroo.” You quickly look up at his face again while smiling. Even in this light you can see his bright, cat like eyes watching your every move with slight amusement. It made the hairs on the back of your neck stand but you don’t want to make that apparent. You know that showing any sign of weakness would just make his teasing even worse.

He hums and nods his head, unbuckling his belt in one smooth move as he left his own car. You mimic him, climbing out from the warm car and out into the chilly evening air. Leaning back in, you grab your jacket before slamming the door closed. On the other side of the car, Kuroo is rummaging through his backseat, soon emerging with the giant cat plushie he had managed to win you earlier in the evening. You giggle while watching the grin on his face, still surprised by the comical size of the thing. Putting on your jacket while walking, you approach him and are about to take it out of his arms so you could carry it home by yourself. But before you could grab it, he moves it further away from you.

“Eh? You know, I’m not sure I’m ready to leave this guy with you…” He looks at the kitty plushie with a clearly fake sadness, hugging it closer to him. You just cross your arms over your chest and stare at him, a small smile tugging at your lips. Looking back at you, you see him melting a little. “Lemme walk you two to the door at least. So I can say goodbye to him properly.” 

As much as you had rolled your eyes at him, you happily have him follow you to the door. He radiates warmth despite having ditched his leather jacket in the car so you couldn’t help but drift closer to him. Absorbing his warmth before he could leave for today. This had been your third date with the man and each time it was over, you had missed him just a little more. This time had been especially fun since you hung out at the amusement park until just minutes before closing. The plushie had just been the cherry on top of a great day with an amazing guy.

“Well this is it.” You walk up to your door, fishing for your keys in your pocket. Before unlocking it though, you turn on your heel to face him, intending on grabbing Mr. Kitty. He comes strolling up to you, taking his sweet time and not so subtly soaking in your figure all the while. When he comes face to face with you you’re forced to tilt your head back a little so you could get a clear look at him. 

“I guess so.” He does his signature smirk while handing you the oversized plushie, watching you lean back before getting a good grip on it. With two hands now freed, he places one on your hip softly and slowly, keeping an eye on you in case you don’t accept his advances. You don’t shy away from his touch, having gotten used to his hands innocently touching your body throughout the day. What makes you surprised is when he brings his other hand up to cup your cheek. You feel yourself do a sharp inhale, staring into his half lidded eyes. But as he leans in, you do the same, closing your eyes.

The kiss is soft and lasts only a second before he pulls away again. Though it was quick, your whole belly was filled with butterflies fluttering around like crazy. You don’t realize you’re giving him big doe eyes until he has to cover his mouth with the side of his fist to contain a laugh. That’s when you snap out of your awed daze and lightly slap his chest.

“Sorry, sorry. You just looked so cute like that.” He has a shit eating grin while he speaks but does take a small step away from you. “I’ll text you later though so don’t ignore me. Oh and I’ll miss you.” You’re about to start blushing again at his last words until he softly grabs the back of your plushies head and kisses it's forehead. You let out an offended gasp until he laughs and does the same action to you. 

“There we go. Now you can leave.” You give him a teasing grin and he just softly shakes his head, turning to leave you. But not before he gives you a small wave, placing his other hand in his pocket. You watch him walk towards his black car, his silhouette lit up by the car's lights when he unlocks it. Even from this distance you can hear his cheery whistling. Satisfied, you turn around and finally unlock your door.

As soon as your foot hits the floor inside your home, you feel your shoulders relax and you let out a breath. As if in a trance you take off your shoes and jacket, throwing your handbag to the hallway floor with no need for it anymore. Carrying your new plushie with you, you move into your living room and throw it on the couch, your own body following soon after in the darkness. 

You cuddle up to your new found friend, his size perfect to lean on. And having been carried around by Kuroo since he won it, his scent had been rubbed off onto it. That simple fact made you smile like an idiot. You reminded yourself that you had your friend to thank for this since she had been the one to set you two up the first time. So while you move to pull up your phone, you took the time to light one of the floor lamps next to the couch and turn on the TV to fill the silence in the room. And then you sitt there, phone in hand, ready to tell your closest friends about the day you had just had.

You can barely believe your eyes as you read through the screenshot. While you had seen people sharing their onlyfans link you didn’t think anyone you knew would have one. But you shouldn’t judge it too quickly, you knew onlyfans advertised to a wide variety of people, one of them being professional trainers. Kuroo talked about his love for training… so maybe?

Now that your curiosity has been piqued you couldn’t just let it go. Sitting up properly, you type the link into your phone. Onlyfans.com/… domkuroo… That training theory didn’t sound as likely anymore. But you continue, met with the login screen. You go ahead and download the app and create your account, heart in your throat. You only pause when his subscription page popped up, your whole face lighting up by your bright screen.

$15 per month.

It wasn’t a meekly sum but was it worth it to realize what was going? Of course it was. 

Minutes later you’re allowed onto his page and you can physically feel the blood rush to your face. He certainly wasn’t a professional trainer even though you can clearly see he got the body of one. Your eyes are drawn to his profile picture even though it lacks his face. A slanted shot with just his abdomen shown thanks to him raising his black t-shirt. You can see a hint of a grin peeking out from the edge of the picture. Simple but effective. His banner was in similar spirit, three pictures of him shirtless next to each other. Two from the front and one showing off his defined back muscles, all of them with teasing or joking facial expressions. Your eyes were roaming over his pictures, eyes wide open. Three dates and you hadn’t even seen a peek of these swatches of skin but now you kinda felt like you couldn’t wait for it. 

Your phone had already buzzed a couple times, your friends messages popping up as notifications above your screen but you don’t pay them any mind. Already too absorbed in the new found treasure chest of content from one of the hottest men you’ve ever met.

Shifting in your seat, you use a shaky finger to scroll down to the first post. The content was similar to the first pictures you’d seen. Him, shirtless, in what looks to be his bathroom mirror, doing a peace sign and sticking out his tongue. The caption simply read “Don’t wanna go to class tomorrow but alas. But you guys can have a little something before I go to bed early”. Cute…

The small smile that adorns your face fell quickly when you scrolled onto the next post. Another picture but this time he wasn’t using it to show off his abs. Instead you came face to face with his bulge as it pushed against his pants, the same pants he had worn just earlier today. He used his hand to accentuate it, letting it tent between his fingers. You couldn’t help but stare, not just at the bulge but his hands. You had never gotten such a good look at them before, the long fingers with their prominent knuckles and the veins which softly protruded from his skin. You remember how they had felt against your cheek but now you imagined how they’d feel dragging across other parts of your skin. How his softly calloused hand would feel gripping your thigh, slowly and gently dragging further up and inwards… How they’d push down on your hips while his damned teasing tongue was put to better wor—

You caught your own mind wandering and how you had unconsciously pressed your thighs together in anticipation which would ultimately lead nowhere. You lick your dry lips and take a deep breath before looking at the caption. 

“Hate when this happens, any cute kitten willing to help out?” 

It was aloof, casual even. It was infuriating in the best way. You could see the amount of people who had left comments and just shook your head. You had been afraid you’d get discouraged by the whole thing, the thought of Kuroo sharing more than just… his face… had you worried. But now you just felt a sense of pride welling up in you. The way he treats you was much more intimate so there was no doubt in your mind that this little side business wouldn’t have an impact on your romantic relationship. But that also meant that you don’t have a problem enjoying this side of him as well. 

With this newfound confidence you scroll down even further, the sound of the tv just a white noise by now. It was a new format on your screen, a video. It was like a new step, a new hurdle to cross. But unlike earlier, you aren’t as hesitant. Throwing your phone on your couch, face up as you scramble to find a pair of headphones. Luckily it was just to reach over to your table, a pair of flimsy earphones haphazardly laid there. Plugging them in and putting them on, you sit down on your couch again, pulling your plushie closer as you pressed the play button, your teeth chewing softly on your lower lip.

Immersed in the video, you first heard Kuroo’s soft breathing against your ears. The camera was clumsily adjusted until his whole face was in view and he smiled, seemingly looking so it recorded properly. When he had assured himself of that, he laughed quietly and posed, letting his tongue slip past two fingers in a suggestive manner, giving the camera a wink. Your cheeks heat up again at his teasing mannerisms. 

The camera shook a little and suddenly the view switch and you almost gasp. You should’ve suspected it yet when you were face to face with his cock, it still surprised you. In the background you could see glimpses of his laptop, set up with a paused video of it of what must’ve helped him get ready. But you don’t really pay it any mind, much more focused on the center of the screen. His dick was lean and rather big, that’s your guess anyways, based on what could be seen. A vein or two decorated the shaft and a neat tuft of hair was at its base. His hand finally appeared, wasting no time in grasping his own dick. And as his thumb swiped over the tip he let out a shuddering sigh which made you tense up. 

“I remember how much you cuties liked that last video… So I’ll try to remember to talk more.” His voice filled your ears, a light growl in his voice thanks to how quietly he was speaking. “Since my voice obviously made you so horny.” It went down another octave when he spoke this time and he spoke even closer to the mic. He started to get into it, slowly jerking himself off with a steady hand. You couldn’t possibly break away from watching him now, you were too invested at this point. Your own hand had even moved down your bare thigh.

“Hah… Now if you’re gonna jerk someone off like this… Start slow. No— mgh… No stress.” —he moved his thumb over the head, you could clearly hear his voice catch in his throat— “but when you’re alone like this, it’s hard not to get impatient.” The chuckle he had started with unraveled into a throaty groan as he started to speed up his own movements. Pulling on his own member, his breathing sped up and droplets of pre-cum was forming on the tip.

“I’m not going to try and… pull something fancy this time… fuck… Sometimes just a good ol’ handy is enough, you know?” The fact that he could still joke under all this made you kinda impressed. You knew yourself that had you been in a similar position, you wouldn’t be able to make any sense. If he had you against a wall, his fingers playing with your clit as he towered over you. His other hand holding onto your wrists to force you to rely on him for pleasure. No matter how many times he’d ask what you wanted from him, you doubt you would be able to give him a reply that would satisfy. “You’d look so pretty, you know?”

Kuroo’s voice brought you back to reality and back to the video. 

“I would’ve loved to have you here, your cute… pink lips… wrapped around my cock. You’d eagerly suck it, wouldn’t you? Kitten? Ah fuck—” he slowed himself down to a crawl again. His breathing had developed into panting to the point where you could see his abdomen rising and falling. And just below the skin you could see his muscles tens and relax, trying to prolong the inevitable end. He shuddered before speaking again. “Your eyes would just beg me to fuck your face. Ask me to destroy you, use you for my own pleasures. ‘Cus you know I’d happily do the same in return.” 

He picked up his own pace again and you had unconsciously let your hand move to the button on your shorts, playing with it.

“But right now I’d love nothing more than to thread my fingers through your hair and grab it. Hold you right there as I buck my hips into that filthy fucking mouth of yours. Just imagining the sounds are getting me so… fucking close…” The way he said it went straight to your core. He was rambling and it was obvious he was going to cum any second now. You couldn’t help but hold your breath. “You’d be such a good girl and just take it—” With a sudden gasp you saw cum start to shoot from his cock but it only lasted a second until he turned the camera again. 

He had thrown his head back, the camera shaking slightly from his orgasm. His back had clearly arched off whatever he was sitting on and sweat had formed on his exposed chest and collarbone. You could even see how he jerked and twitched as his orgasm overtook him. The scene was almost hotter than the whole process of getting to it. But it didn’t last nearly as long as you had hoped it would. Catching his breath, he let his head fall to the side with a lazy, smug grin. He looked into the camera with half lidded eyes. And then the video ended.

You could barely stand this anymore. What began as a curious look into a side of a date you had never seen is ending up making you more horny than you have been in a long time. Yet you knew you couldn’t stop now just as much as you know you need to take care of yourself.

Thinking it over for just a moment, you decide that it was worth the embarrassment of facing him again after this. You turn off your phone and place it besides you on the couch before jumping up from the couch. It takes you mere seconds to pull off your top and shorts, you even take off your bra for good measure. The soft light from the lamp bounces off your skin and the sudden chill from the loss of clothes makes goosebumps appear up your thighs and arms. But your blood rush soon catches up to you and you feel comfortably warm when you sit back down on your couch. You grab your phone and in one swift motion you throw up your feet on the plush seat next to you. You positioned your gigantic cat to act as a backrest. A pleasant surprise in reaction to this was how Kuroo’s intoxicating smell now enveloped you even further. 

You push your knees together while turning on your phone again, this time fully aware of what to expect when you put in your earphones again. And you aren’t disappointed when you scroll down further, past a couple more pictures in similar fashion to the earlier content. You only stop when you see another play button on your screen. You look at the caption.

“This little thing has been highly requested so since I got some time over and I’m in dire need to release some steam I thought why not? ft. my favorite toy” Well now you have to play it.

“So here’s a little treat for all you lovely ladies.” The video started with a shot of his face and parts of his, once again, bare upper body. He was sitting in the same seat as last time, leaning back and resting his cheek on his fist. “I’ll be honest and say that is the first time I’ve instructed anyone on how to touch themsleves— Mh, wait no,”—he smiled to himself—”it’s the first time I’ve planned out the instructions ahead of time. So if you aren’t satisfied with this video, you’re very welcome to come up with a fitting punishment down in the comments. Sounds fair? ...Good. With that out of the way…” 

“Let’s play.”

Your heart catches in your throat, the daring tone in his voice making you fidgety. But it caught your attention and you were just about ready to do anything this man told you to do, as long as he did it in that deep voice of his. The screen changes and this time he was wearing a pair of black dress pants and his bright red underwear was peeking out from underneath. While restricted, you could still see that he was hard underneath the layers.

“Now I hope you’re prepared yourself, babygirl, because I’m not going to be waiting for you to get undressed. You should know what you were going to end up doing if you’re listening to me right now. So lay back… and spread your legs for me.” You sink down even further in your seat, almost laying down while letting your legs fall open without any resistance. One of your legs hit the couch back but it doesn’t bother you, you know you still have full access to everything you need. He shifted his legs a little, spreading them even more. While doing so, he managed to unbutton his pants and slowly pull the zipper down.

“Good girl. Now use one of your hands and just let it slowly move down your soft belly.” You obediently do as you are told, watching him as he hooked his thumb in his underwear. He probably knew anyone watching would be anticipating this moment so he made sure to take his sweet time pulling them down. You even caught yourself licking your lower lip without thinking when you finally saw the swollen head of his cock. It is almost embarrassing how much he affects you but you are shameless right now. And as his whole length sprung free, bouncing up thanks to it's new found freedom, your eyes follow it. But you aren’t the only one affected by this move, Kuroo groaned quietly when the fabric rubbed against his crotch. He didn’t care enough to take off his garments and instead pulled them down just enough for them to get out of the way. 

“When you get to your sweet spot I want you to just lightly tease your slit with one finger. Don’t press too hard or you’re gonna ruin the whole fun here. And we’re here to have fun aren’t we?” The smile on his face could be heard through his voice. He reached his hand somewhere off screen and when it came back in frame, you could see something liquid and shiny on his fingers. It became obvious what it was when he carefully smeared it over his shaft. He took a sharp intake of air through his teeth before relaxing and letting it out again. “Ah crap… So cold… You girls have it way easier, you get so damn wet on your own.” 

“Speaking of wet, why don’t you finally dip a finger into yourself? And maybe even a second one. Rub them on either side of your clit and that little hole of yours. Don’t touch them though, got it?”—he pauses for a second—”It’s almost funny how quickly you melt for me. How easily you’re following my instructions.” He was calling you out. But you couldn’t help but do as he said, your fingers slipping under your underwear almost too easily. He had begun slowly stroking his own dick in a steady pace while he was talking, once in a while teasing the head like he had done in the earlier video.

“It’s so cute… I love when you listen to me like this. When you trust me enough to let me do this to you. It makes me want to push you down a little, see how much you can take. How much you’ll let me use and abuse you. So rub your clit for me, kitten. Slow circles. Don’t get impatient, I’m not there to stop you today. But maybe that’s good, I could probably keep you in that limbo until you’re crying and begging me to fuck you.” The chuckle he made after was tethering on being evil, as if the thought of your desperate cries was amusing to him. It was kinda hot. 

The comment bounces around in your head, the thought of him pushing you to the edge like that. Maybe he’d do it in the back of his car, the one he took you home in. Parked just outside your house after a date, you two would be crammed into the back. He lifted your legs over his shoulders, the blood rushing to your head from the angle he was holding them up at. Your hands were pushing against the door from the inside, stuck staring at him as he ate you out. Slowly and calculating. He was taking his sweet time with you, his tongue gently circling your bundle of nerves. He was doing it hard enough to make your hips twitch and your mouth whine but not enough to rile you up further than that. If you were starting to zone out too far he’d introduce his fingers to you again. Pushing two inside with ease and fucking you with them until you were raising your hips even further and about to cum. Then he’d pull away fully, leaving you to fall from your high in the matter of seconds. All because he wanted you to watch him properly as he made it all start over again. 

“Rub faster now. I want to see you unravel before me... Now I should probably tell you that I expect that you wait for my permission to cum. It’s important that you do so or I’ll end up having to make a punishment video for you as well. Or maybe that’s more your style.” He could barely even laugh at his own comments anymore. He had been increasing his own pace along with you and the heavy breathing had just kicked into full effect. “Maybe you’re the type to smile while I tie you up. Get excited at the thought of cum denial and pain. At being gagged and fucked raw until you’re sore.”

He spent another moment just jerking off, letting you take care of yourself. All the while he was letting out quiet groans and pleasured sighs which were all clearly picked up by his microphone. 

“And stop.” —He quite suddenly, and almost hesitantly, let go of his own cock— “I told you not to get impatient didn’t I? Now take a deep breath and let’s try that again.” You mindlessly followed, removing your hand from your pussy, a trail of your own wetness connecting your fingers to your pussy lips. But you aren’t happy, you may have listened but you frown at his sudden demand. 

While you were busy pouting, he had reached over to somewhere off screen again. Once you had gotten over your own annoyance you realize what he was holding when his hand came back into frame. You haven’t seen any in real life but you knew what the toy he had mentioned in his caption was now. A translucent pocket pussy. The obscene nature of it would make you blush if you weren't already burning up. 

“Let’s finish this, eh?”—he cleared his throat before speaking again—”Take a finger and slowly start fucking yourself with it. Use two if one doesn’t suffice. And well if you have a dildo, I’m sure you know what to do with it. Oh but please... don’t imagine it’s me fucking you.” The sarcasm dripping from his voice would’ve annoyed you if you weren’t in the position you were in now. Because right now, you would love nothing more than for him to fuck your brains out. But like he told you to, you can only do it slowly for now. He seemed to keep that in mind as well when he pushed his dick into the toy, slowly letting it take him to the hilt.

“Because I’m certainly not imagining that this is you right now. Slowly pushing yourself down onto my cock, moaning like a bitch in heat. And then back up again just to let yourself  slide back down. Over… and over… getting faster each time. Hah...I’d help you of course, I’d grab your ass and set the pace.” He was quickening his own pace in time with his talking and you followed suit without being instructed to do so. You are getting too invested in the fantasy, his words turning into vivid images in your head.

You could almost feel his dick pounding into you, filling you. And how his big hands fit on your hips. You could remember how it felt when he did so earlier while he kissed you. But the kiss you were imagining now was much more sinful. Tongues intertwined in open mouth kisses, only broken by your own moans. The sound of skin hitting skin was clear in your head, the pacing matching your own fingers thrust. He wasn’t soft or careful like he had been with you during the day, behind closed doors he was rough and raw. No longer afraid to leave marks of his fingers on your hips or a red handprint on your ass. It exhilarated you, how calculated yet reckless each move he made on you was. 

“Fuck yourself, just like you— F-fuck… like you think I’d fuck you. And now a little faster than that, I don’t think you really understand just how badly I need you right now, kitten.” You can barely even think for yourself anymore, you don’t need to. You have a faraway look in your eyes while staring at the screen, watching him pump himself with the toy. Strings of lube connecting his skin and the silicone together with each thrust, the sound perfectly mimicking that of skin against skin. Even the clothes he had pulled down didn’t go unstained, making the scene even more pornographic. 

His erratic thrusts were a clear indication of how close he was getting again. The grip on his toy was growing tighter too and you wish you could feel how desperate he was. He would grab a fistful of your hair close to your scalp and pull, forcing your head back and breaking your open mouthed kisses. His need to claim you as his too great, manifesting in the licks and bites he made along your neck and collarbone. The sweet pain of creating a hickey mixed with his powerful thrusts into you was overwhelming.

“I’m s-so close…” You told him in your head, your hands mentally grabbing at his shoulders to keep yourself steady. 

“I… Hah… mgh-!..I know you’re getting there, babygirl. Let me count you down… I don’t care how you fucking do it, but I need you to cum on 5. Can you do that for me?” He asked and you nodded vigorously, your back arching off the couch. You didn’t care that he couldn’t hear you, you replied like a good girl should. “G-good.”

“5”

You closed your eyes, too overwhelmed by his, or rather your own, actions. But in your mind he was counting you down, a dangerous grin on his face when he looked up at you above him. He had purposely slowed himself down to make sure you could last the whole time without cumming. 

“4”

He let go of your hair, instead moving his hand to hold it around your throat loosely. Meeting his eyes it was as if they were glowing in the low light, watching your rapidly rising and falling chest. His other hand was firmly placed on your hip, helping you bounce on his dick. Your hands holding his shoulders were grabbing on harder.

“3”

The number left his lips and he started to speed up your movements, the wet slapping sound getting louder. Your moaning was starting to match those you hear in pornos, sweet and needy. His own voice sounds strained when he speaks again.

“2, you’re doing so well, pretty girl”

There was a small smile on your lips at his words but it was interrupted by his thumb pressing down on your clit. It started rubbing the nerves frantically, no longer concerned by how long you were supposed to last. He trusted that you could hold yourself. 

“1”

You were chasing your release, eagerly fucking yourself on his dick. He sped up his thumb as it was working on you while he happily watched yourself lose your mind thanks to purely his voice and your own need to please him. 

“Fuck! Cum for me—!”

You can’t see him cum, but you swear you can feel it. And as you do, your own orgasm comes washing over you like a tidal wave, hitting your hard and fast. Your whole body tensed up and you pushed your thighs together, curling up instinctively. The whole room was warm and your panting mixed in with the murmurs of the people on the TV. You rubbed your clit slowly, riding out your own high in a daze, lips parted while you twitch. 

Kuroo’s heavy breathing finally registers in your brain and you focus on the video again. He had flipped the camera to his face again and you were glad he did. He looked pretty fucked up himself, a similarly dazed look in his eyes while he recouped. But when he wetted his own lips, he seemed to regain control and energy enough to laugh at himself.

“Ho-o-oly crap, well that wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t sure how much I would enjoy that but I’m not gonna lie, that was really good.” —he stretched his neck muscles, tilting his head from side to side—”I’m gonna need to go lie down a bit and drink some water… You do the same, stay hydrated. And uh, right, comment underneath if you enjoyed this or if I need to make a… punishment video. But anyways, I’ll catch you guys later. Heh..” 

With a final smile, the video ends and you are left alone in your home. But you don’t feel alone, you are honestly still exhilarated. Maybe it was because you just came but maybe it was because you now had a hint of what to expect if you and Kuroo got serious and you loved it. The fact that you so easily obeyed everything a guy who didn’t even know you were watching said to you was a sign of the confidence he had with every command he told you to follow. And you loved that about him.

But what now? You knew of this side of him, should you bring it up? Or act like nothing had happened, as hard as that would be.

You let the thought simmer in your head as you get up, grabbing your clothes from the floor on the way to clean yourself up in the bathroom. You make quick work of it, tired from the whole experience. But as you splash some water in your face, you hear a notification go off on your phone. Curious, you look at the locked screen.

“Onlyfans: Domkuroo just posted something! Be the first to check it out!”

Your stomach does a flip as you read the banner and without thinking, you unlock your phone to check the new post.

Another picture post, this time he was in his car. The lights were turned on in it which lit up the photo, giving it a yellow tint. It was of his crotch, the zipper of his black pants pulled down and his white boxer briefs were clearly tented and pushing against the fabric. It couldn’t be anything other than a hard on being displayed. 

It made your breath catch in your throat as you realize the implications of the post. Your suspicions were confirmed once you read the caption.

“I blame her and her soft lips for this. Can’t get it outta my head.”

You can’t ignore this. It took you mere seconds to find his number in your phone and while still riding your confidence high, you call him. It beeps twice before you hear him pick up.

“Hey, y/n. Isn’t it a bit late, what’s up?” His voice was breathy and a little quiet, it reminds you of the way he sounds in his videos. Maybe you interrupted him while he was—? No… But the thought makes you blush.

You had to take a deep breath before you responded to him, going over what you wanted to say once more in your head before speaking.

“I’ll happily take the blame for your situation, Kuroo.” You feigned confidence but your heart feels like it was going to beat out your chest. Now he just needs to understand what you meant, but you doubted you had to worry.

“Huh—? Oh.”—His voice went down an octave when he spoke again—”Oh, is that so? Well why don’t I come pick you up again so you can take responsibility for this, kitten?” Despite how teasing he sounds, you can see a grin form on your own face in the mirror at the suggestion.

“Pick me up in 30.”

“Got it.”

[repentantsky]

6 Times Nintendo Asked for Too Much Money, for Too Little in Return, on Switch, or Despite It

I’m critical of anyone who I think is ripping people off, and Nintendo, sadly, espeically since it’s games don’t drop in price, has done that a lot. That’s not to say Sony and Microsoft have never done it before, but since the Direct was an egregious reminder of how they mishandle business, I thought now was as good a time as any to remind people, they kind of have a history. 

6.  Charging over $100, for a remake’s full content

Now, I will say, in most cases a remake can go full price. If it’s ground up like a remake should be, and adds extra features or content to sweeten the deal, that’s fair play, however, locking content behind a paywall is cheap. Enter Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia. While the base game was just full price, which was 40 bucks on the 3DS, it cost far more to unlock all of it’s extra content. A $25 dollar Amiibo combo back, which unlocked special content, and a $50 dollar season pass, which was mostly just new dungeons and weapons, brought the total to $115 dollars for all it’s content. Hey, I get it, DLC is a thing, but a season pass that costs more than the base game, is just a shitty thing to do. Nintendo even went so far as to alter how they added it up, to make it seem cheaper than it was. To make matters worse, they did all this while giving out free content like crazy on Nintendo Switch games, kind of telling everyone who wasn’t an early adopter of the system, to screw off. It was also the first real screw ball thing they did after Satoru Iwata-San had passed away. Talk about a spit in the face. 

5. Overcharging for MicroSD’s.

One of the major problems of the Switch, is that it has too little space for all the games Nintendo wants you to buy on it, and to be fair, that we also want to buy on it. While most first party titles are pretty small in terms of what they require from the Switch, it has a massive 3rd party library as well, and how does Nintendo handle that, by charging double for what anyone could get for MicroSD’s that do exactly what the Nintendo branded ones do. I mean, seriously, imagine paying 100 bucks for 256GB of space, when you could pay 50. Be careful about that though, some MicroSD’s couldn’t be formatted, which would mean you couldn’t you them on the Switch. While that seems to have calmed down more over the years, it still happened at the time, and it still sucked. Overcharging because your name is on a product, is shameful, and screw everyone that does it, Nintendo included. 

4. Charging for Nintendo Online. 

I get it, Microsoft and Sony do it, and I hate that as well, but at least in return, you can get some actually decent games, and better deals on products, espeically with PSN for the latter, and come on, Game Pass is worth it no matter who you are. Nintendo though, even though it’s cheaper, has thus far refused to release any games past SNES era, a large portion of games released on Nintendo Online are cheap 3rd party rip-off’s of first party Nintendo games, and it really doesn’t appear like Nintendo plans to make the service truly worth it any time soon. As much as I love Nintendo, it’s really hard to justify paying for an online service that nets you so little, but alas, here we are. 

3. New Super Bros U Deluxe 

Yeah, a full price port of a game is never a good idea, and this whole list could have been made of them. Instead, I’m only going to include a few, but this one might be the worst. I mean, Super Mario Bros U is a great game, but it’s not worth full price just because it got ported. There’s not that much content there, even with the added Luigi U content inspired by the year of Luigi. It’s a hard sell trying to convince a logical person that the same 4 hour game, with an extra hour to hour and a half of content, which is just levels you already played as Mario, is a good buy, because it isn’t. I don’t know what Nintendo was thinking with this port, and it’s sad to see it, but alas, like all Nintendo games, it’s still full price on their store.

2. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

I will put it on record that I love Tokyo Mirage Sessions, it’s a somewhat more light-hearted game than the it’s source material, at least from Atlus’ end, but that doesn’t make it bad at all, in fact it’s great. However, it kinda failed on the Wii U, quickly leaving store shelves and never being heard from again until it’s Switch version was announced. It’s still a great game on the Switch, but either Nintendo got greedy, or Atlus let them, and a game that basically a commercial failure, came out at full price same as before, and that was easily a deterrent for many, as it should be. Selling a port of a game that flopped on a system that flopped, isn’t exactly a good consumer move, and yet, it’s exactly what happened. 

 1. Asking you to pay more for Miitopia

Look, I get that there is certain difference between playing a game on a handheld, and playing it on your 4K TV if you have one, and I’ll admit the idea of play Miitopia on my 4K display is both appealing and hilarious, but it’s just a port. It’s not a remaster, it’s a port. And for that extra 10 bucks we get what, a horse and some makeup? How people can justify that is beyond me. The “Oh I didn’t play it on 3DS so this will be my first time buying it” is an excuse to hide behind because your love of Nintendo is too strong. If don’t call out a company for it’s bad practices, or buy into those practices, they are only going to do worse, and if this list isn’t proof of that, that I don’t know what to tell you. Charging more for a port than an original release is shady though. 

And that’s my list, did I miss anything you think was too much on the Nintendo Switch? Let me know in the comments below, reblog this post if it interested you, feel free to leave a note, and hey, if you think I’m biased against Nintendo, just look at the photo I post that’s coming directly after this goes live. Have a good freaking day/night whatever your time zone’s got you on.  

[shenlongshao]

GG Strive: Highlights pt.1

Hi hi!^_^ This post will be about my thoughts and reactions to the info from the GG Strive livestream and from the website. I decided to split this into parts because I’ll be going into detail. I’ll start with the general news. The first is the release date of Guilty Gear Strive for PS4, PS5, and Steam(PC) is officially announced! Yay! Details about the versions can be seen from this link.

https://www.guiltygear.com/ggst/en/wordpress/wp-content/themes/ggst/img/buynow/ggst_sku_rev.pdf With what’s known and shown about the GG Strive so far, the standard version will include. -  5 Battle stages(not including the 2 areas within each one from wall breaks. If including those, then it adds up to 15 stages) - The usually expected content like Story Mode, Training Mode, Online Matches, etc.(and possibly whatever new modes) -  The amount of playable characters at launch will be 15. And...

Here we go, lol. XD  This is a huge no-no for me because it’s heavily inspired by the monetization practice from many mobile App games and/or MMOs(Massive Multiplayer Online). Things like

- Continuously release content whether it’s story-related, cosmetics, etc. that players pay for.

- Purposefully implement an in-game problem so the player gets impatient or feels compelled to buy the solution. (An example is limited storage space in an MMO, so he/she has to buy more space) - Have premium type service that provides a list of benefits for a while until you have to renew the service or buy a new one; each varying in price.

- Purposefully lock certain features behind a paywall, advertise the locked content to the player via pop-ups in the game, etc.  For mobile and MMO games, it makes sense because there’s so many of them that are free to play. For example, players don’t have to pay for episodes of an MMO’s story or stages, etc. They just pay for extra things like pets, costumes, etc. that may benefit the gameplay. Since there’s so much competition in these genres, some will give a better value and pricing than others. Games like MMOs are designed to go on forever like the Energizer Bunny, XD. However, it’s an issue when fighting games do it because  - They’re not free to play - The environments of fighting games aren’t expansive, open worlds that players can pick up various items and have Raids(large groups fighting a boss for equipment).

- Main stories in fighting games aren’t constantly updated. It has predetermined scenarios with only a selected few deemed important while other characters are treated as an afterthought. There’s no sidequests that give special focus to a character, etc; just a quick Arcade Mode and a brief ending.

- Too many fighting games have the bad habit of making mainstay characters since their debut into paid DLC. Despite how heavily monetized MMOs are, one thing they don’t do is suddenly making you pay for something that was previously free in a new update or version of the game.

- Season Passes in fighting games is basically a premium service like you would see in MMOs. For example, here’s a link of the premium pack from Phantasy Star Online 2, a very popular MMORPG. http://www.bumped.org/psublog/pso2-jp-premium-set-perks/ Both Season Passes and Premium Packs have a similar concept. But premium packs/services in MMOs at least have some extra benefits etc. to the game along with the extended storage space, etc. Some of them actually do give a good deal.  Whenever a company announces a Season Pass 1 way before the game comes out, what they’re really saying is “this is a list of content we’re blocking you from until you pay”. So the character roster in GG Strive isn’t the real base one, 15 is what you’re “allowed” to play along with the other things on the list. It’s the same with other games like Granblue Fantasy Versus., 11 was the amount of characters you were allowed to play while the real base roster, which was 16, was blocked behind a paywall. Season Passes aren’t really giving benefits. -The last part is there’s not really compelling goodies yet to justify the pricing from the different editions of GG Strive. For example, you get a “special colors” of Sol and Ky if you pre-order the game.

I really like it,  but to me it isn’t worth preordering the game. A better preorder bonus would be have Sol and Ky in their original GGX costume with some new moves. I think there’s a better way to do it  instead of just “gimme your money!” XD - Season Passes should really not exist anymore in fighting games. But if it must exist, I would prefer it being a one-time buy where you don’t need to keep buying upcoming DLC characters, but you still need to buy individual colors separately. - Other 3D fighting games like Mortal Kombat 11 have done this, but GG Strive should put actual costumes as payable DLC and not just different colors. Costumes like the characters’ original look, holiday and seasonal themed outfits, etc. The pricing should be $3. - Characters that haven’t consistently appeared or were only NPCs should be DLC. An example would be Raymond/Judgment from GG Judgment since he only appeared once in a game or Gabriel since he’s NPC, but story relevant to the series. Mainstay characters like Baiken, Johnny, Dizzy, etc. shouldn’t be paid DLC unless there’s a special version of them like an EX or Gold version, etc. - Give some of the stages weather and night/day cycle effects. For example, make the ruins area have random occurrences of rain and at night. Make some stages from previous GG games paid DLC with the breakable wall mechanic. For example, like the cemetery stage from GG Isuka. - If extra parts of the story are now going be a paid feature(I hope it isn’t, though), then bring back the aspect of alternate endings. Have the extra stories be truly focused on the character a player picked and have it be interactive with multiple choice, able to choose what battle to participate in, etc. Not just a generic, 10 minute Arcade Mode with 2 cutscenes XD - For other editions like Ultimate, etc., it would be nice to have extra goodies like the hard-to-find GG source material in the past to be available and bundled with the game. Things like high quality statue figurines, accessories like coats replica of the characters’, etc. would be worth getting the Deluxe or Ultimate edition. - People who get the Standard edition should also have access to the Open Beta and also PC players too.  But how it is now and how it may go doesn’t look good....this doesn’t mean, “boycott this game! HATE AND DELETE!” XD I just don’t like it when game franchises I like fall into the trap of bad business practices to make more money, especially when it doesn’t need to be. It’s why I included some examples of what I think would be better options that would be more reasonable.  The “Smell of the Game” is a little stinky! XD Please stay tuned for part 2 of my highlights!

[bbq-hawks-wings]

Art reposting etiquette

I see art theft happen a lot, and whether or not it's true or has just been happening more frequently in the circles I follow I can't help but at least feel like it's becoming more and more of a problem.

To be clear, "reposting" is downloading art from a website that you did not make or own, and uploading it as a separate post, regardless of where and how it's presented - with notable exception of header and profile pictures assuming they are not trying to imitate the artist. Not all art theft is reposting, but all improper reposting is art theft.

As cut and dry as "stop art theft it's bad, don't repost art" posts make it sound, there are several benevolent reasons people may want to repost such as:

Believing they are spreading the artist's influence around the internet

Adding intrigue or a visual aid to a fanfiction

Sharing some neat art they thought was really cool

Just to name a few

Assuming the best in people, these are not necessarily bad reasons and DON'T MAKE PEOPLE BAD, but many often don't understand there's a dark side to the reposting issue.

People who may want more art may be unable to find the original creator

People may not realize that the artist makes rent with the very artwork you're enjoying and they may be looking at stolen premium content meant to put food on the table

People take art and further edit it so that it becomes even harder to trace back to the original

Malicious websites and bots find popular fanart and illegally use it to produce bootleg merch. This has a double-whammy effect when someone sees the merch IRL when out and about and wants it because it's cool art of their favorite character but don't realize the artist is actively being robbed.

Reposting art makes it harder for the artist to track down the thief and take legal action as well as actively funnels traffic away from their business. By and large it should always be assumed that reposting for any reason is damaging to the artist's wellbeing; and frankly, if you don't care you're actively hurting someone, it makes you the asshole, not me for calling you out.

But, that isn't to say reposting is NEVER allowed, but ONLY UNDER EXTREMELY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES. That's the point of this post.

Before you can decide if you should even attempt to repost art, check these things first:

If it says directly on the art "do not repost" don't waste your time. They are not going to make an exception for you.

Check to see if the art is already on the platform you're planning to upload to (especially here on Tumblr). Often, artists make it a point to put their work in very specific locations for their own reasons. They may not want their work on your website at all and you need to respect that.

Gain the artist's explicit permission after explaining where you want to repost their work, which work you want to repost, and why with how you plan to credit them. If you gain permission, keep a copy of the conversation for your own protection. If you do not gain permission, don't repost at all.

If you gain permission to repost art, these things are an absolute necessity:

Mention of the artist's name

THEIR main platform of choice

link to the original piece used

It would likely look something like this:

Artwork uploaded with express permission by @[artist] on [website], found here - (hyperlinked to original piece)

Bonus information to include:

Additional social media handles of the artist

Link to the artist's Patreon and/or Ko-Fi if available

Link to artist's store if available

Hyperlinking the image itself so other users can just click it to find the work/artist

Remember reposting should be about the artist, NOT YOU. You didn't create the work, and even if you supported them via Patreon it still doesn't belong to you, nor are you entitled to it. A commission you personally paid for is the only piece of work of that artist's creation you are ever entitled to unless otherwise stated in a contract when you bought it.

To continue to cover my bases I'm going to address some stances that may pop up about the issue:

"I didn't know reposting was that bad!"

It's okay. That's why I made this post. In general, as a supportive fan and consumer you should try to learn how artists are rewarded for their work on different platforms. YouTube is different from Instagram is different from Facebook is different from Tumblr. Learn which best ways to support your favorite artists in the ways that are most beneficial to them, even if all they ask for is respect and a little appreciation. And do take down any art you may have reposted. It can continue to do damage by remaining up, but removing it almost always mitigates any future harm and genuinely helps. Now you know better and can be better moving forward!

"I can't get ahold of the artist for permission."

Don't repost it then. Remember, at the end of the day reposting is only good for the reposter in fake internet points or actual money/intellectual property stolen but always tangibly hurts the artist. It sucks, but they have a right to determine where and how their hard work is displayed.

"Whatever, I'll do what I want. Lol"

Enjoy your takedown. Hey, artists, did you know you can find each website's terms of service and figure out how to submit a report with the offending post and user, and they're usually good about getting it down within days?! Look for "misappropriation" that's your ticket! 😊

But seriously, repeat offenders can get permanently banned from sites and even sued for actual real-world money and damages over your precious fake internet points. It actually pays to not be an ass!

"But I just want to support the artist and reposting is so easy!"

You know what's even easier?

It's literally only one or two clicks to support the artist or tell them how much you love their work! Most other platforms make supporting content creators just as easy, and some platforms even PAY the creators based on them or enable them to grasp opportunities to be paid!

"But I don't want to bog down my followers with a huge reblog dump of one person's stuff."

Put it in queue to space it out, then.

"I don't have money to support the artist so I repost instead to give them exposure."

Time and time again it's been proven that reposting actively funnels money AWAY from them. You don't have to monetarily support them with much. Buy one thing from their store or give them $1 on Ko-Fi. If you can't even do that, tell them you love their stuff and shout to the rooftops where someone else can pay them; but don't make it harder for them to get paid. Too many artists "die of exposure."

"Why do you even care?"

I AM an artist. I currently support artists with real money monthly because I love their work. I only ever make money off my own art on commissions, and that relies on people being able to find me. I'm not even the one supporting my two children, husband, pet, and medical expenses with only this option to pay for it, and you bet your butt I still would be pissed if I ever found out my art had been misappropriated. Some people do this to SURVIVE and I want to see that those who do have as little unnecessary struggle with it as possible.

"It's fanart/fan content put on the internet for free I can do whatever I want with it!"

At least in North America the law says you can't. Did you know that the way laws are currently written, if someone takes a picture of you and finds a way to make money off that photo they don't owe you a dime? They hold the copyright to it. When art is displayed publicly, that copyright is not surrendered and is automatically afforded to the artist by virtue of it being their specific expression and work. By being their work, they can actually sue you for stealing their property.

Ask Disney, they're really good at it.

And to close this out I want to say one more thing: the internet has changed a LOT in the time I started browsing from the early 2000's. Rules are different, cultures are different, and for younger people especially you may not understand how some have had to (and still do) fight tooth and nail over this internet space and still make it.

If you didn't know all this, THAT'S OKAY! You're learning, and the internet is more or less a wild west right now. That means it's equal opportunity to be a killing field or a place we can lift up and support each other. Reposting is just one corner of the bad things that can come of it, but now you know how to help and even start reversing the damage.

Learn about how people who upload free content make money. When you find misappropriated work, report them to the site and try to inform the artist - don't even acknowledge the thief, just slap a ticket on them and move on. Teach others how and why reposting is bad and what they can do to help.

If you love free content, show respect and protect it. Otherwise, artists will have to put it behind a paywall and that content you loved will disappear over time. Respect will get you a much greater return than entitlement.

[jewelwriter]

CNT:  Pokemon Pokewrongs.

Disclaimer: "Cardboard, Notebook, Toilet" is a personal countdown based on my own thoughts and measurements.  Please do not consider this as the list of all lists.  Also to let people know.  This is a smaller countdown as to not be as intrusive and get to the main ones that can be considered the best of the best in a certain manner.  If you have your own countdown of sorts, please post it up down below.  Thank you and enjoy the writing.

When things are going to be poop, it's clear that you need a way to let out what it is because it isn't healthy to keep it in.  And with as big a game series as Pokemon... yea..there's a lot to get out.

With this list I'm calling out three personal ones that I feel should have been kept in the series to not only make it an easier time for people to keep their pokemon going for years to come, but also give more faith into a series that was direly needed it.

Welcome ladies and gentlemen. You've found a wild Jewelwriter.

And this is the CNT of the things that I think Pokemon has done wrong.  Or as I’ll call them.  Pokewrongs!

Cardboard:  Game to Game Transport. Pokemon Bank and the successor, Pokemon Home.  I don't mind them but...

THEY didn't need to happen if we could transfer Pokemon from 1 game to another.  This is in a way a cash pull when we had a BETTER way to get our Pokemon in previous games without a transfer box system that can allow you to move Pokemon up from Gens of the past to the future.  It's a problem and while now not as much as big a problem as the others on the list, it is still annoying, especially when the Pokemon is more likely not to be shown in the newer games.  And one shouldn't get started on knowing when the last time a certain Pokemon got any credit outside of the gen the were seen in.

Notebook:  Obtaining Pokemon one-hundred fifty-one.

THIS is getting highly close to raiding EA’s turf.  Tell me, if you think Amiibo are loot boxes then this will make hose look like country fair toys in comparison.  Introducing the Pokeball Plus toy.  What does it do?

It works in pairs of the Switch... with one game.  As a controller with a few inset buttons and a ball-like design, it feels like a Pokeball.  That you 'throw' to help you catch the Pokemon.  And it holds a Pokemon within it.

It also holds the mythical Pokemon Mew.  A Pokemon that has helped draw the game into fame.  So what is the cost of not only getting a controller but also a mythical Pokemon?

[Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QhtpJcydYA

Yea.  Nearly a full game (or is one in some discount magic) and it's barely used in one game...maybe two if at all.  This is paywall guarding at it's best.  Even the Amiibos are better valued than such a waste of a potential item or a Mythical Pokemon.  I could get 4 full-priced Amiibo for the same cost of that with Tax!

(Dishonored Mention) For people that know my stance of Pokemon, I would have put this on the Toilet Paper slot instead but it was too easy of an obvious fail to miss.  If anything I'll say this now: IF I need to replace this with another then I would put it here.  And that's... bringing Back the Battle styles like Triple Battles, Contests, and more.  Yea.  Pokemon has more uses than one.  But the thing is the games don't give you more than 1 try at them and it saddened me to see this happen but what can be considered toilet paper is a harsher hit than this.

Toilet Paper:  The lack of all Pokemon to be promised in every game.  (#BBND) People knew this was coming and I can get it out of me in here.  Seriously, the data and size could be no excuse for it.  The other excuses have been blown out of the water too.  Allow me to show a few.

"You played the same game for 20 years and you didn't complain until now":  It's because despite the issues I at least complained of them and yet knew from gen 3 to 7... 5 generations, had ALL the Pokemon in them.  All the sprites were done.  FUDGE, even today the creatures were future-proofed and are on a better system even with the limited range of motions.  The excuse is bs

"You'll buy it anyhow.  Stop whining, entitled brat": First, I got pride to NOT buy trash, just like you got pride to buy garbage.  But I am not going to not just vote with my coin, but WILL vote with my voice so they know what fails are being done.  It's people that say only money talks are how we end up with stuff like EA and the like and the thing is I do watch what I'm doing.  (By the way... a little side note:  I'd rather buy TMS#FE even if it's 'censored' because it's got more content.)  As for whining, no...it's criticism, the kind that has been held back since gen 7's start and at times gens 6's misadventures.  Unlike Savij, shouts to him, I saw gen 6 as the best when it comes to gameplay feel (though the story is a clear step backward) and would like to go back to that with more POLISH!  By the way, how the world is one entitled when they are buying a product?  Really, you are confusing the idea of Buy/Sell and the like.

I'll drop one last one here.

"Things Change":  ... Yes, they do.  They do change.  Sometimes it is for the better and would be a good thing.  Which in this case is usually the Pokemon.  But other times there's a bad change.  Such as a focus on graphical power, showing off that they are able to do something others could do for years and not live up to the standards that were just to be true to themselves.  If we aren't careful and ask for a Better change, then we'll end up with more than just Mew locked in a Pokeball.  More than Missing out on finding and taking on god itself.  We'll be missing out... on having a choice of what Pokemon we want; on having a legacy be kept from a friend or a battling star; on having a choice on going beyond what the developers want to limit when battle rules already were made.  It kind of sickens me that people want less and are encouraging for it too.

But of course, that's my thoughts.  Speak up on what you think should be here.

And remember... the quality of the product is up to the individual!  My toilet paper might be your gold.

[lacquerware]

Mega Man should stop presenting its flaws as indispensable features

When I was fifteen, I learned to play the song Malagueña on the piano. It was a laborious project; the culmination of nine years of piano lessons under the tutelage of Mrs. Diane Miller, and the main event for her upcoming student showcase.

This arrangement of the piece was a seven-pager, and somewhere around page four was a problem phrase I kept playing wrong, a rapid two-handed run up the keyboard with tricky fingering. I got to a point where I could play flawlessly up to that phrase, only to flub the phrase every time. Each time I flubbed it, my teacher would stop me and send me back to page 2. “You have to perfect that phrase,” she would say, “so try it again, but first play the preceding two pages, so it’s no longer fresh in your mind by the time you get to it again.” Alas, this would result in more flubs, and after three flubs in a row she would send me back to the beginning of the entire piece. “You’re still not getting it,” she’d say. “So I think we should run through the stuff you’ve already mastered one more time.” I would glance at her, trying to read her intent, and she would stare back at me, bug-eyed and malevolent.

The above story is false,because Mrs. Miller was a kind, intelligent, and non-insane person. Like all people of that description, she understood that you don’t work out a problem area by indiscriminately repeating ALL PRACTICE. When you get one problem wrong on a math quiz, you don’t review the entire textbook. You don’t work on your free throws by drilling layups and then also free throws. You can’t learn to poach an egg by toasting English fucking muffins all day. To suggest otherwise is an act of hostility.

Mega Manhas always carried this hostility. The game dishes out its challenges in neat little screen-sized units, but penalizes your failures with gratuitous setbacks, often requiring you to replay entire stages from the beginning. This makes learning inordinately tedious. You have to retread every yard for every yard gained.

I guess this is a relic of the arcade age, when games were designed with the express intent of punishing players—unless they paid up. Indeed, most of Mega Man’s NES contemporaries inherited this same feature in the form of finite lives and scarce checkpoints, but it never made much sense on home consoles. You could argue that it prolonged the lifespan of each game, but that only held true for the masochists who continued to tolerate this torturous system rather than reallocate all that wasted time to more fruitful pursuits like, I dunno, learning to play piano or poach an egg.

I’ve always liked Mega Man, but it was already starting to feel like a tired concept as early as Mega Man IV. I was about eight years old by then, and starting to catch on that they were running out of boss motifs. Pharaoh Man felt like a red flag.

Mega Man has since proliferated into a multi-faceted franchise spanning more than 120 titles and three decades (and for the record, I’ve played through almost all of them), but it’s never really dispensed with its ancient baggage. Mega Man X brought new visual flare while diversifying the core action; Mega Man Zero imbued the series canon with new consequence and cool factor; Mega Man ZX fused the classic gameplay with the Metroidvania template; but all of these spin-offs continued to punish, punish, punish, to gatekeep their content from the series’ own consumers to no certain end.

When Capcom revealed Mega Man 9, I was momentarily taken with the nostalgia of it, but quickly lost interest when I realized that Capcom had no intent of evolving the series’ concepts, even in basic quality-of-life ways. Lives and weapon energy were still pointlessly commodified, checkpoints sadistically scarce. They’d even removed what few innovations the series had seen to date, such as the slide and the charge shot. Nor did the roster of Robot Masters appear any more inspired than the cast of rejects that had turned me off five installments prior. Capcom had had seventeen years to think about it and all they’d come up with were lame analogs of pastbosses, like Tornado Man and Magma Man. It’s like they thought they hadto retread the same shit beat for beat or people would get confused. Even their ace, Splash Woman, was just another in a long line of water-themed bosses.

Mega Man 10 as a follow-up was downright depressing. Strike Man, Pump Man, and Chill Man are what you get when you realize yesterday was the deadline and all you’ve got is a pen and a cocktail napkin. I can’t fathom that a bunch of game designers sat around brainstorming ideas for Mega Man fucking 10 and someone was like, “Hmm, what about an ice-themed boss.”

Now we have Mega Man 11, the long-awaited, belligerently-demanded revival of the MM franchise after some eight years of dormancy. After playing the demo, I find myself wondering why. Why are we here? Why is Mega Man 11 Capcom’s answer after saying no to Mega Man for eight years? It’s the SAME.

Yes, it looks and sounds nicer and there’re a couple new mechanics—which are themselves comically uninspired takes on the ancient tropes of bullet time* and Devil Trigger—but I’m mystified at how unchanged the formula still is after eight years of seemingly adamant dismissal of the entire franchise, let alone the thirty-one years they could’ve been critically examining it. Do they realize that other developers have been building on this genre since the eighties?

*Weird side note: The tutorial for Mega Man’s new “Speed Gear” ability explains that the gear makes you “move so fast that everything else seems slow,” but in practice Mega Man moves just as slowly as everything else. So it’s not Mega Man who’s moving fast, it’s. . . the player?  

Punishment as “Difficulty”

In the Block Man (lol) stage of the demo, there’s a section where you have to jump and slide through elaborate platforms as they scroll toward you, an insta-kill grinding device nipping at your heels all the while. The third platform has very peculiar collision detection, such that your head bonks against the empty space you’re supposed to jump through, seemingly rendering the challenge impossible. This is several screens into the stage but still prior to the first checkpoint (on Normal mode), so every time this platform killed me, I had to start the entire stage over. After about fifteen tries, I discovered that the collision doesn’t trigger if you’re holding left as you make the jump—an illogical thing to do unless you’ve died so many times you’ve run out of other ideas. By the time I cracked this idiosyncrasy, I’d already spent close to an hour replaying the preceding screens over and over for no reason. Why is this still a thing? This is punishment, not difficulty. It contributes to the challenge only in that it makes the experience less fun, “challenging” your resolve to continue playing. Think of all the origami you could be learning. All the old ladies you could be helping cross streets.

The Mega Man games are quite clever in the way they parse out the platforming and shooting in little bite-sized units. Each screen is essentially an action puzzle for you to solve. It would be so logical for each screen break to be a checkpoint, because each screen break isa checkpoint—the start of the next challenge. Games like Super Meat Boy do this, meting (meating?) out their challenges in bite-sized, infinitely repeatable increments. Nobody accuses Super Meat Boy of being too easy because it doesn’t make you repeat the shit you’ve already completed when you fail at the current task. If you wantthat kind of punishment, no one’s stopping you from resetting the game.

Mega Man 11 adds a “Casual” mode which increases the number of checkpoints, but it’s still annoying to me that the more punishing model is treated as the norm while the more logical distribution of checkpoints is treated as a concession. Soulsplayers will tell me to “git gud,” but that’s why I led with the piano analogy. I got damn good at Malagueña, and I still had time left over to do my homework and play video games.

Special Weapons

Using your Special Weapons in Mega Man games is like spending the money you might need to pay rent on stuff you could be getting for free through your well-connected friend Dave. The trial-and-error pairing of the right weapon and the right boss is such an integral part of Mega Man’s progression that any other use of anyspecial weapon becomes a high-risk gamble—unless, of course, you just Google the answers.

I understand the need to impose limits on the more powerful weapons, but games have figured out countless better ways to do this in the thirty-one years since Mega Man 1. Cool-down times. Cool-down meters. Recovery proportional to damage inflicted. Recovery proportional to damage received. Recovery by way of skillful attack, à laMetal Gear Rising. Enemy fire absorption à la Alien Soldier and Radiant Silvergun. Ranger X on the Sega Genesis had solar-powered special weapons; why not steal that idea for this game’s allegedly solar-powered protagonist?

Instead, even in its eleventh installment in two-thousand-goddamn-eighteen, Mega Man still employs an RNG-based item drop system. Replenishing your meter is as simple and menial as finding an enemy spawn point and brainlessly standing and shooting until an enemy happens to drop the energy you need. Don’t forget to cycle over to the gun you want to replenish, or else the battery is wasted, as if Mega Man just eats it by mistake.*

*Later games in the series introduced the Energy Balancer, a purchasable item which automatically refills the weapon that needs refilling even if you don’t have it selected. Why is that a thing you have to buy? Why put a fundamental improvement to the game behind a paywall, virtual or otherwise?

Meanwhile, MM11still employs the same bizarre meter continuity between deaths as past installments. Each death means repeating sections of the stage without reacquiring any previously spent meter, effectively creating a difficulty vortex—the harder this game is, the harder it gets. There was a ruthlessly capitalistic logic to this in the arcade days,but the Mega Man series has never been coin-operated (with a few obscure exceptions). It hasnevermade sense that, often, the best strategy is to voluntarily leap to your death over and over to force a Game Over, just to restart with a full weapon meter as an alternative to the tedium of refilling it manually or facing the boss without it. What is the explanation for this meter continuity in the first place? Are we supposed to think Mega Man is repeatedly exploding and materializing but he can’t materialize a few extra shots from his bubble gun while he’s at it? There’s a multi-faceted idiocy to this whole system.

Rush

Capcom ought to take a long, hard look at Rush, Mega Man’s transforming robot dog companion. It’s hard to believe the same guy who invented a fully autonomous solar-powered robot boy couldn’t design a dog-shaped spring that runs on renewable energy. Special weapons are one thing, but why does Rush have an exhaustible meter? He’s a fucking spring. It makes no sense as a narrative detail nor as an element of game design. What exactly are the designers trying to limit? Your ability to spam high jumps? The logistics of the Rush Coil already do that; you have to set him up like a lawn ornament and he peaces out after a single bound. He’s unspammable, even with a full bar. To begin with, there are rarely that many useful opportunities to use the Rush Coil within a single stage, and energy power-ups are infinite as long as you’re willing to endure the chore of finding them, so it’s not as though the game is challenging you to budget your resources—it’s just discouraging you from searching for those meaningful jump opportunities in the first place. It’s driving you to Google.

Bosses

The Robot Masters have always received special star treatment in the Mega Man games but rarely been very interesting as boss fights. You know the deal: dodge the dizzying hail of projectiles in an empty square room while desperately scrambling to land enough hits with the weakness weapon before you die. Considering all the fanfare these bosses get (mug shot, intro screen, and now reveal trailers), most of them feel kind of interchangeable. Most of them have nearly identical silhouettes and shoot functionally redundant projectiles in superficially different shapes. Every gun is a Lucky Charms marshmallow.

The boss fights actually do seem a little more interesting in Mega Man 11—Block Man in particular stands out with his mid-fight transformation into a hulking colossus. I’d hoped to see more of this in future Mega Mans—fights that evolve and really set each Robot Master apart as a distinct embodiment of its corresponding motif—so maybe they’re onto something this time. Still, it’s a little ridiculous that this game has yet another fire boss, electricity boss, cold boss, and bomb boss. Why are we still here?

Before the mob comes for me, I want to stress that there’s always been lots to love about Mega Man, and I’m glad Capcom is investing in the IP again. I just hope this is the start of a long-term effort to reevaluate and improve the series, not another short-sighted extension of a tired status quo.

[weeklygamereview]

Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] and fundamental failure

     How do you judge a free-to-play mobile RPG? The kind with stamina timers, premium currency, and a "gashapon" that randomly dispenses characters and weapons? If you expect hours of uninterrupted play requiring dextrous, precise inputs, you're better off with a console game. But not even most portable console games can give you a satisfying play session within a lunch break, and most every mobile game can.

     Although they're all intimately tied to a predatory monetization model, there's something special about a perpetual game on your phone. I hold fond memories of when Terra Battle or Tales of the Rays supplemented my life with structured play and planted a hobbyistic fervor in my mind with their clever, streamlined battle systems. There were post-launch story chapters and limited time events to frequently test my mettle, and when I just wanted to unwind, I was able to grind with easy content that didn't require my full attention. Despite some bursts of compulsive play and frustration with unlucky pulls, I felt I had mutualistic relationships with them.

    My time spent with Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] on Android, however, was largely parasitic. It neither provides stimulating enough combat to fully engross nor allows for the relaxing, hands-off play of an idle game. So, KHUX fails to provide the base pleasures of free-to-play mobile RPGs.

This game was first known as Kingdom Hearts χ[chi] on browser and originally for mobile as Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, changing to its current name with a new co-op mode so unremarkable I neglect to mention it elsewhere in this review.

    Battles are turn-based, and each of your attacks is derived from a medal (the primary gashapon item) slotted into your keyblade. You can tap on the screen to attack a single target, swipe the screen for a weaker attack that hits all foes, or swipe a medal to activate its special attack (they're officially named special attacks) requiring the use of a resource gauge called... "gauge." These always deal damage and may heal, grant buffs and debuffs, restore gauge, or grant ailments. Whenever you attack, the current medal rotates out to the next one until you've used each once.

    Now, streamlining gets a bad rap. It's often associated with dumbing down instead of refinement. But there are so many mobile games that take advantage of their simplicity to make accessible depth. Just look at Puzzle & Dragon, the mobile puzzle RPG that requires thought and skill surpassing many of its pure action puzzler peers. In its case, shrinking the game board and allowing the free movement of pieces makes it easier to read a board WHILE offering superior board manipulation than the average match 3 (meaning more combos that you meant to make and less that come by chance). That's successful streamlining.

    The medal system, unfortunately, doesn't use its simplicity for such an end. Each of your 3-7 medals must be activated one after the other in clockwise order starting with the first; your sequence of attacks is predetermined for every fight once you enter a stage. There's no dexterity or timing required for inputs. Ailments (largely useless) and enemy attack patterns are the only sources of randomization within combat, so there is no risk/reward dynamic.... and no choice. You either have enough gauge for a special attack or you don't. You either came with enough damage and healing to last or you didn't.

    Though there's something resembling insight in the 1 Turn Triumph mechanic. You normally regain gauge piecemeal from damage dealt, but a 1 Turn Triumphs allow you to gain back multiple counts of gauge as long as you defeat enemies in a single turn. This requires consideration of enemy and medal attributes (red beats green beats blue) and damage distribution (single target or AoE). Clearing all enemies in a single turn is the most common requirement for objectives, optional achievements that grant currencies for character progression and the gashapon. Normally, you regain enough gauge to use special attacks at every opportunity, so you have to get a feel for how much damage you need to take out enemy formations in 1 turn, which will help you grind up enough gauge to defeat the stage boss.

Sometimes, the same objective is repeated... within the same mission. Why?

    The battle design is self aware of where mobile RPGs most disappoint; they can't make stages significantly challenging to complete without seeming to have a paywall, but if it's too easy, hardcore players will become disinterested. The game attempts to address this by assigning three objectives to each stage. These might require you to defeat all enemies in 1 turn, defeat bosses in a certain number of turns, or restrict which medals you may use to on attribute. So, allowing bad players to clear stages effortlessly while offering optional objectives accommodates everyone! Hooray! The game is designed, even at high levels, around players arranging their medals in the correct sequence before stages start instead of expecting them to think turn-by-turn. I find this to be a legitimate design decision for mobile (and console RPGs like Final Fantasy XII, for that matter). I hate it, but I respect it; it lets you take a laid-back approach to character management before battle and enjoy the results of your fine-tuned set-up.

    Unfortunately, the game doesn't let you play effortlessly thanks to the lack of a true auto-battle. There's an auto setting that uses special abilities for you, of course, but it doesn't move you throughout the stage. You must navigate environments and encounter foes by laboriously sliding your finger across the screen—not with a virtual joystick, but across your entire screen.

    There are mobile games that get away without auto-battle. For example, Fate Grand Order doesn't have basic attacks, and its skills are cooldown based or can expend variable amounts of meter for increased damage. A simple auto-battle routine couldn't easily tell whether you want to charge limit breaks, gain critical stars, burst down enemies, or activate unique character skills; the game is too complicated for it. Puzzle & Dragon wouldn't make sense with one in the same way an auto-play option wouldn't make sense for Bejeweled. But these two games are much more demanding, one for optimal order sequencing and the other with its puzzle board. You know, actively, traditionally-for-a-video-game engaging.

    There's so little to this game's combat in the first place that I find it excruciating to manually navigate through its environments. They're expertly illustrated. Beautiful, even! But they work against the mindless, chill grind the battle system is meant to facilitate. The novelty of their beauty fades as you're forced to balance your phone in one hand and scrub dramatically across your entire widescreen phone to go from left to right and back again (how I wish it had a virtual joystick so I could play with one hand!). By the way, you have to touch and hold at the far edges of the screen to reach full speed. There’s an option to tap at a location, but the player character will vary its running speed depending on the distance away. It’s always a pain to perform movement, which doesn’t even factor into combat itself and often takes up more time than battle within a stage.

Keep in mind you have to scrub through this entire map dozens of stages in a row to clear the most common objective (defeat all enemies in 1 turn) at this scale:

     If you're not used to playing mobile games, this might sound like a ridiculous complaint. But when the core combat is just an excuse to grind and make numbers go up, a shallow vessel to deliver the Good Chemical, it wears you down. Like, imagine if Cookie Clicker lacked store items that automatically produced cookies. KHUX is that kind of contradiction, a game designed to be passive that demands your attention in irritating, frequent pulses, an inconvenient hand cramp of a game.

    There are more ways to play, extra mechanics, a baffling pet system... I won't go into everything the game has to offer, but know that they provide no depth to combat or medal management, merely complication. But I want to go over the main means of progression in the game: Guilt.

    You level up medals to increase their power. You level up medals by fusing them together, losing all medals used to level the other. Their maximum level increases as their rarity increases. You can increases their rarity rank with materials you can grind for in daily objectives. I'll assume you understand how this kind of system works. Yet the game won't settle for this tried-and-true progression loop. It introduced the Guilt system.

    So, every time you fuse identical medals together, the remaining one gets an orb (yes, it's just called an orb). The medals MUST be identical in both name and rarity. If the medal has any orbs, those are transferred to the base medal. If a 6* rarity medal (the rarest and most powerful rarity) gets all its orbs filled plus one, it rolls for a Guilt value. The Guilt value bestows a random percent bonus to damage up to 150%. Guilt value on the rarest of medals can range from 70% to 150%. What happens if you're unlucky and roll a 70%? Well, better go to the gashapon and pray for a copy! Even then, you might get a 71% and wasted a powerful medal. Good job!

    The community encourages players to Guilt medals that drop freely through the story. This is the optimal sequencing of medal fusion to Guilt one of these medals:

        You need to, at minimum, 39 medals of the same name at different quantities for each rarity, AND all of the medals required to increase their rarity, AND all of the medals to level them up. If you don't do it in this exact sequence, you're wasting dozens of material medals and hours of time. It's absolutely absurd.

    The game, of course, severely limits the amount of medals you can carry unless you pay with the premium currency. Even the joy of 10x gashapon rolls were tainted by the hidden tax of inventory expansion. Collecting medals should be fun. Collecting medals is what makes you want to spend money. Collecting and arranging medals is all the game is, really. And it's always accompanied with grueling, tedious inventory management that does nothing but stress me out!

    I haven't even gotten to the power balance of medals. In short: it's whackadoodle. After making so much effort to Guilt my common 1* Stitch medals, I got lucky as a F2P player and rolled Illustrated Xion (EX). A single use of the medal buffs your damage with itself and all other medals by over 200% for multiple turns, refills more gauges than it takes to spend, and consequently breaks the majority of content over its knee. I never once, ONCE, in the entirety of the main story, had to manually choose which special abilities to activate to conserve gauge. And I had to manually move my character all the while, find an enemy, wait for the elaborate attack animations to cease, and start again. I stopped caring about clearing objectives; I was powerful enough to clear all of the story's content without bothering.

     Other games use cost systems to prevent the abuse of rare medals at early player level, only allowing the use of one or two of the rarest kind of character or weapon. Due to a variety of factors involving the pace of progression, this did not factor in at all. Even without using all of my most powerful medals at once, Illustrated Xion (EX) was enough to utterly break what was meant to be a pacey, early-player experience. I ruined the game by getting a favorable gashapon roll. This is a fundamental failure in the design of randomized collectibles in a game I haven’t seen since the early days of mobile gaming. This has been solved for years.

   By the way: I only started playing to see where the story would go. The community has reached a consensus that the plot only begins to develop significantly after stage 350, months and months after release. I would say it actually picks up in the early 300s, but by the time I got to the good parts, I was too bored out of my gourd to continue despite being greatly intrigued.

     The game has built its entire postgame around the use of medals like Illustrated Xion (EX) that make all previous game content trivial. Half a year after introducing the first medal of this type, Illustrated Kairi (EX), there is now a permanent budget gashapon that has a paltry chances to drop these buff medals as a way to allow the unluckiest of players access to postgame. But I'll tell you: the postgame isn't worth it. It's a skilless test of how lucky you are or how irresponsibly you spend money. And if you can access it, your medals are too strong to enjoy any other content. There are no objectives asking you to bringing low-rarity medals to otherwise increase challenge. There is a Proud Mode variant for many story stages, but these have such strict restrictions that I could barely clear any of them (the most common of which restricts special attack use to medals that have been Guilted AND have a Guilt value exceeding a certain amount, which isn't nearly as hard as it is expensive). Even verifiable trash like Fire Emblem clone Phantom of the Kill has objectives requiring low-rarity characters to provide some bracing challenges.

    In conclusion, Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross] fails to provide what I seek from a mobile game on a basic level: relaxation or engagement. It fails to relax me thanks to its hand-cramping map navigation and the oppressive inventory management. It fails to engage with its battle system because it's designed to be largely effortless and relaxing. It is a frustrating waste of time as a time waster.

[queezleposts]

OB64′s Flawed Progression System, Other Issues (as of initial PTS)

 So, I have quite a few thoughts to put together as of OB64 now that I’ve played a bit of it in PTS. Here’s a link to the patch notes for those interested.

The Progression System

So I’ve tried out the PTS and played there for a bit. Of course by “playing” I mean the majority of my time has been spent opening radiant chests trying to level the cards I want to no avail, much to my frustration.

Before I start though, a little discussion of the progression system I joined paladins with, and how we ended up with the preceding essence system.

Before the essence system (and legendary cards) the only currencies that existed were gold and crystals. Gold could be earned through gameplay and ranking whereas crystals could only be earned as a login bonus given that it was a premium currency. Gold could be used to purchase both champions and deck cards. If you played the game enough, and leveled up the champions you already owned, you could pick and choose which loadout cards you bought. Yes you could purchase radiant chests but the progression system was entirely untethered to rng mechanics. The player could pick however they progressed. This is why I started playing paladins in the first place; its in game progression system could be progressed through WITHOUT relying on loot boxes or paying a single cent.

Now the problem at the time was that there wasn’t a lot of content yet (this was also before mastery rewards for individual champions were added or even weekly or daily quests - we had FWOTD) so many veteran players were sitting on piles of unused gold. Sure there were other issues too, but this was the one most discussed in the community. One of the fixes to this situation - and yes, the devs mentioned this as one of the issues they wished to fix with this update - was the essence system. A new currency was introduced called “essence” which was specifically only for purchasing cards. The biggest complaint with this new system was in its initial state progression was solely tied to the rng mechanics of the radiant chests. There was no way to pick and choose which champion’s loadout you wished to progress! They responded quickly and fixed this, but the initial issue of veteran players simply sitting on piles of gold was now simply well...picked up and moved somewhere else. Now they were sitting on piles of essence instead.

This is what you saw a lot of people complaining about essence as it currently exists, and why people LIKE the removal of essence in the proposed OB64 system. They simply weren’t using it, and the gold problem could have just been fixed by adding more options to buy with gold (such as the aforementioned mastery rewards). The biggest problem with the new system is that we’re back to what the biggest issue was with the initial state of the essence system - it is tied inherently to rng mechanics and the radiant chests. I have opened what must be HUNDREDS of radiant chests in the PTS, all using specific legendary keys, and I still don’t have the cards leveled up that I want. It effectively takes away player choice, and disconnects progression from a feeling of something that is you know, earned. Connecting your progression to loot box systems in general is just bad form; we all saw the outrage when a similar system was put through with Battlefront II which was also as it happens a full price game.

Even with the addition of specific champion chests as mastery rewards, it is still, at its core a progression system based on rng mechanics. I didn’t like it with the initial release of the essence system and I don’t like it now. This is literally the same discussion that we had back then.

Now, if they stick with the reworking of the card point system that accompanies this, they need to give us avenues to acquire our card levels through straight purchase. Sure we have all the cards unlocked, but that’s a moot point when it is now THEIR LEVELS that are locked behind a rng paywall.

And that’s the thing; you could argue that all cards being unlocked is just smoke and mirrors. If each level of the card existed as a “separate” card and not a level on your current card, the effect is pretty much the same. It’s just in terms of presentation now.

If they keep our current point based card system but also want to create a more even playing field, a better solution might just be to have all legendary cards unlocked instead; leave deck cards as purchases one can decide on, but the initial legendary card that decides your playstyle BY ITSELF is unlocked. At the very least, it would be a much more simple fix. The fact of the matter is, as long as Hi Rez continues to push an rng progression system, it’s just not going to work. Build a progression system untethered to rng and base your monetization more around cosmetics and you’ll see a lot less complaint.

Casual (Quickplay) Versus Ranked

Now, as to making it so that everyone in casual plays with cards up to level five and everyone in ranked plays with cards only at level three, I do not like the artificial divide this creates between the two modes. If this is to go through, the only way you will be able to have a truly balanced game without having pressure to win will be customs. In my honest opinion, it should be the other way around.

If you wish to play a more zany arcade style game, it should be an option in customs but NOT in casual or “quick play” queue. All it does is create an artificial incentive to play ranked; you shouldn’t feel like you HAVE to play ranked to get a decent balanced game! You play ranked to CHALLENGE yourself. And not everybody wants that! Some people just want a chill balanced game without anything particularly “out” there.

It’s an overcomplication that just feels to the average player like its throwing balance out the window in order to force you to play ranked. And that’s the thing; if you want a balanced game you feel forced now under this system. You shouldn’t feel forced! You should legitimately want to play ranked; and no customs isn’t a good bandaid. Not only do you need to organize enough friends or people to fill two teams but they need to be at a similar point in their playtime or skill level as well! That’s just not a simple task for most people. It’s more complication than there needs to be!

My other point I would make is that having your ranked and casual mode be similar in terms of actual gameplay is more likely to make ranked an inviting option than to not. It allows people to test out and try new things in casual at their own pace, and then play them in ranked when they’re confident enough. Here’s the thing; not everyone playing ranked is playing it because they want to play in esports or even want to have that esports mentality; simply put a lot just play it for challenge alone, the in game rewards, the draft system, or to get an idea for how they’re improving at the core game itself. Sure having different draft systems is fine because it doesn’t really CHANGE how you play the actual game itself. Having different card point values DOES.

Making your CORE CASUAL (quickplay) mode “arcadey” instead of relegating “arcadey” to customs or a separate “arcade” queue in the casual options muddies the waters much to much. I simply can’t find myself liking it; but this change is inherently tied to the new card point system, and they’d have to definitely think about reworking it if they wish to make such changes.

What I Like

On to a happier subject; I actually do enjoy quite a few of the new legendaries added, and got to try a few of them at the very least in the shooting range or against bots. Quite a few of them are interesting and give some of the champions some much needed options.

The art side of the update looks fantastic, and I particularly like the change to the new match lobby presentation. Thank you for allowing Fernando to wink at me again. Snowman bomb king looks great, and I’m glad that angelic seris was created eventually despite not winning the community skin poll voting anyway.

“Magistrate’s Archives” map looks AMAZING and I love it to bits.

VIP system changes look interesting and definitely add something cool for those that opt in or otherwise.

Even though this technically isn’t supposed to ship with this patch the concept of “special quests” that unlock different champions backstory is also really cool and I’m looking forward to that.

But, the main thrust of my criticisms remain. In its current state, I don’t feel like the game would be moving in a good direction if what exists in the PTS is pushed through without some big changes.

[suzanneshannon]

The Thirteenth Fourth

Well boy howdy. The 13th birthday of CSS-Tricks has rolled around. A proper teenager now, howabouthat? I always take the opportunity to do a bit of a state of the union address at this time, so let’s get to it!

Design

Technically, we’re still on v17 of the site design. This was the first design that I hired first-class help to do, and I’m still loving it, so I haven’t had much of an itch to do massive changes to it. Although it is quite different¹ today than it was on launch day.

For example…

The search experience is totally different, as it is powered by Jetpack’s Instant Search now.

The Almanac pages (e.g. background-blend-mode) have an additional sidebar that helps you navigate between pages

I re-did the typography using Hoefler&Co. Sentinel and Ringside. The monospace font code snippets are in Operator Mono and the logo has long-been Gotham Rounded, so it feels like one big happy family of typefaces.

Maybe next year we’ll do something different again. My list is starting to grow for some behind-the-scenes tech stuff I wanna re-jigger, and sometimes that goes hand in hand with redesign work.

Closed Forums

The forums on this site have been a mental weight on me for literally years. Earlier this year I finally turned them off. They are still there, and probably always will be (so the URLs are maintained), but nobody can post new threads or replies.

It was a painful move. Even as I did it, there was still some regular daily activity there and I’m sure it didn’t feel good to those people to have a place they have invested time in shut down. Here’s why I did it:

Nobody here, including me, checked in on the forums with any regularity. Unmoderated public forums on the internet are not acceptable to me.

The spam volume was going up. There were periods where most posts, even after the automatic spam blocking I get from Akismet, where spam that required manual removal. Even if we had a dedicated forums employee, that’s no fun, and since we didn’t, it was just a random job for me and I don’t need a time sink like that.

The forums represent a certain level of technical debt. They need to be updated. Their design needs to be functional in the context of this site. At one point I ripped out all custom styles and left it be the default theme, which was a good step toward reducing technical debt, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

I can handle some work and some technical debt, of course. But when you combine those things with the fact that the forums don’t contribute much to what I consider to be the success of the site. They don’t exactly drive page views or advertising demand. There isn’t really money to hire help specifically for the forums. But that’s a small part of it. I want this site to help people. I think we can do that best if we focus on publishing with as little divided attention as possible. I think there are places on the internet that are better for forum-like discourse.

Now that they’ve been off a number of months, I can report that the lifting of the mental weight feels very good to me and there has been little if any major negatives.

Social

Here’s another mental weight I lifted: I stopped hand-managing the Twitter account (@css). I still think it’s good that we have a Twitter account (and that we have that cool handle), but I just don’t spend any time on it directly like I used to.

In the past, I’d queue up special articles with commentary and graphics and stuff and make sure the days were full with a spread of what I thought would be interesting tweets about web design and development. That’s fine and all, but it began to feel like a job without a paycheck.

We don’t get (or seem to drive) a lot of traffic from Twitter. Google Analytics shows social media accounts for less than 1% of our traffic. Investing time in “growing” Twitter just doesn’t have enough of an upside for me. Not to mention the obvious: Twitter can be terribly toxic and mentally draining.

So now, all our posts to Twitter are automated through the Jetpack social media connection (we really use Jetpack for tons of stuff). We hit publish on the site and the article is auto-tweeted. So if you use Twitter like an RSS feed of sorts (just show me the news!), you got it.

The result? Our follower count goes up at the same rate it always did. Engagement there is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What a relief. Do ten times less work for the same benefit.

When I have the urge to share a link with commentary I use the same system we’ve always had here: I write it up as a link blog post instead. Now we’re getting even more benefit: long-term content building, which is good for the thing that we actually have on our side: SEO.

Someday we could improve things by hand-writing the auto-tweet text with a bit more joie de vivre, crediting the author more clearly, and, #stretchgoal, a custom or fancy-generated social media graphic.

Opened Up Design Possibilities

One aspect of this site that I’ve been happy with is the opportunity to do custom design on content. Here are some examples of that infrastructure.

On any given blog post, we can pick a template. Some of those templates are very specific. For example, my essay The Great Divide is a template all to itself.

In the code base, I have a PHP template and a CSS file that are entirely dedicated to that post. I think that’s a fine way to handle a post you want to give extra attention to, although the existence of those two files is a bit of technical debt.

I learned something in the creation of that particular essay: what I really need to open up the art direction/design possibility on a post is a simple, stripped-down template to start from. So that’s what we call a “Fancy Post” now, another template choice for any particular post. Fancy Posts have a hero image and a centered column for the content of the post. From there, we can use custom CSS to style things right within WordPress itself.

For example, my recent post on DX is styled as a Fancy Post with Custom CSS applied right within the block editor.

The Block Editor itself is a huge deal for us. That was one of my goals for the year, and we’ve really exceeded how far we’d get with it. I think writing and editing posts in the block editor is a million miles ahead of the old editor.

The hardest challenge was (and still is really) getting the block transforms set up for legacy content. But once you have the power to build and customize blocks, that alone opens up a ton of design possibility within posts that is too big of a pain in the butt and too heavy on technical debt otherwise.

Another door we opened for design possibilities is a classic one: using categories. A sort of freebie you get in WordPress is the ability to create templates for all sorts of things that just sort of automatically work if they are named correctly. So for example I have a file called category-2019-end-of-year-thoughts.php and that fully gives me control over making landing pages for groups of posts, like our end-of-year thoughts homepage. Not to mention our “Guide Collection” pages which are another way to programmatically build collections of pages.

That’s a lot of tools to do custom work with, and I’m really happy with that. It feels like we’ve given ourselves lots of potential with these tools, and only started taking advantage of it.

Speaking of which, another aspect of custom design we have available is the new book format…

eCommerce

We’re using WooCommerce here on the site now again. I just got done singing the praises of the Block Editor and how useful that has been… WooCommerce is in the same boat. I feel like I’m getting all this powerful functionality with very little effort, at a low cost, and with little technical debt. It makes me very happy to have this site on WordPress and using so much of suite of functionality that offers.

So for one thing, I can sell products with it, and we have products now! Lynn Fisher designed a poster for our CSS Flexbox guide and designed a poster for our CSS Grid guide, which you can now buy and ship anywhere in the world for $25 each. Look, with the Block Editor I can put a block for a poster right here in this post:

CSS Flexbox Poster

Find yourself constantly looking up the properties and values for CSS flexbox? Why not pin this beautiful poster up to the wall of your office so you can just glance over at it?

$25.00

Shop now

Another thing we’re using WooCommerce for is to sell our new book, The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I. If we actually made it into a proper eBook format, WooCommerce could absolutely deliver those files digitally to you, but we haven’t done that yet. We’ve take another path, which is publishing the book as chapters here on the site behind a membership paywall we’re calling MVP supporters. The book is just one of the benefits of that.

WooCommerce helps:

Build a membership system and sell memberships. Membership can lock certain pages to members-only as has programmatic hooks I can use for things like removing ads.

Sell subscriptions to those memberships, with recurring billing.

Sell one-off products

And I’m just scratching the surface of course. WooCommerce can do anything eCommerce wise.

Analytics

They are fine. Ha! That’s how much I worry about our general site analytics. I like to check in on them from time to time to make sure we’re not tanking or anything scary, but we never are (knock on wood). We’re in the vicinity of 8m page views a month, and year-over-year traffic is a bit of a dance.

Sponsors

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

That’s what I have to say to all our sponsors. We’re so damn lucky to work with a lineup of sponsors that I wholeheartedly endorse as well as literally use their products. We have different sponsors all the time, but these are the biggest and those who have been with us the longest.

Automattic: Thanks for building great software for the WordPress ecosystem. This site is made possible by a heaping helping of that software.

Netlify: Thanks for bringing the Jamstack world to life. I’m also a big fan of this way of building websites, and think that Jamstack should be the foundation for most websites. Beyond that, you’ve redefined modern developer experience.

Flywheel: Thank you for hosting this website, being a high-quality host I can trust and who has been helpful to me countless times. This is what high-quality WordPress hosting looks like.

Frontend Masters: Thank you for being an education partner that does things right and helps me have the best possible answer for people when they are searching a more structured formal education about doing web work: go try Frontend Masters.

If you’re trying to reach front-end developers with your products, that’s literally how I make a living and can help.

My Other Projects

CodePen is no spring chicken either, being over 8 years old itself. I repeat myself a lot with this particular aspect of talking about CodePen: we’ve got a ton of ideas, a ton of work to do, and we can’t wait to show you the CodePen of tomorrow. 2020 for CodePen has been a lot different than the last 2-3 years of CodePen. Some technical choices we’ve made have been starting to pay off. The team is vibing very well and absolutely tearing through work faster than I would have thought possible a few years ago, and we haven’t even unlocked some of the biggest doors yet. I know that’s vague, but we talk in more detail about stuff on CodePen Radio.

ShopTalk, as ever, is going strong. That’s 420 episodes this week, friends. Dave has me convinced that our format as it is, is good. We aren’t an instruction manual. You don’t listen to any particular episode because we’re going to teach you some specific subject that we’ve explicitly listed out. It’s more like water cooler talk between real world developers who develop totally different things in totally different situations, but agree on more than we disagree. We might evolve what ShopTalk show is over time, but this format will live on because there is value in discussion in this format.

Life

My wife Miranda and I are still in Bend, Oregon and our Daughter Ruby is two and a half. She’s taking a nap and I’m looking at the monitor as I type.

We have the virus here like everywhere else. It’s sad to think that we’re this far into it and our local hospital is pleading with people to be careful this holiday weekend because they are very near capacity and can’t take much more. Here’s hoping we can get past this painful period. Stay safe and stay cool, friends, thanks for reading.

I always feel bad when I make design changes away from an actual professional designer’s work. Is the site design better today than Kylie‘s original? Uhm probably not (sorry for wrecking it Kylie!), but sometimes I just have an itch to fiddle with things and give things a fresh look. But the biggest driver of change is the evolving needs of the site and my desire to manage things with as little technical debt as possible, and sometimes simplifying design things helps me get there.

The post The Thirteenth Fourth appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The Thirteenth Fourth published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[williamlwolf89]

How the Medium Partner Program Can Make You Rich (Slowly)

Some writers are earning thousands in passive income every month with the Medium Partner Program.

Why not you too?

Whether you’re looking to write full-time, or you just want an extra writing gig on the side, this post will teach you everything you need to get started with the Medium Partner Program.

Let’s get started with a quick overview…

What is Medium?

Launched in 2012 by Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Blogger, Medium is an ad-free blogging and publishing platform — open and free to anyone (provided you follow the rules).

If Twitter is fast food eaten in your car, then Medium is a slow meal enjoyed at a table full of scientists, business leaders, poets, and social commentators.

Do you need to be some high-falutin expert to publish on Medium?

Not at all.

But you will need to bring your “A” game.

How Medium Works

Non-members are limited to reading 3 free stories each month. The rest fall behind a paywall.

To read more Medium stories, the subscription fee is $5 per month or $50 per year, giving you unlimited access and a few other perks.

Readers engage with articles by:

Highlighting passages

Clapping (similar to likes)

Commenting

Writing On Medium

Medium’s clean interface is a writer’s dream.

Its simple design minimizes distractions and keeps you focused on writing.

And it’s super easy to insert and format images.

Medium allows you to browse an extensive library of free Unsplash images right there on the page (attribution is automatically placed in a caption below).

Want to add a great quote?

You have two options: block or pull-quotes.

Or you can embed a podcast, YouTube clip, or tweet.

And when your post is all shiny and ready for the world?

Add a meta-description

Include 5 topic tags

Let Medium know you want to get paid for your work

Hit publish!

How Do You Make Money with Medium?

You make money writing on Medium through Medium’s Partner Program.

It’s free to join, and the process is straightforward (details below).

Then it’s time to write (a lot).

That’s because you make money based on how much time paying Medium members spend reading your articles each month.

You won’t make any direct income from non-members unless they become paying members within 30 days of reading your work.

According to Medium’s blog, “If last month a member spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your story, you will receive 10% of their share.”

Earnings are deposited via Stripe into your bank account around the 8th of each month, and you can see daily updates in your dashboard.

How Much Does Medium Pay Per Clap?

Medium moved away from factoring claps into writer’s payouts in October of 2019.

Instead, they decided that reading time is a better measure of reader engagement and appreciation.

However, claps are stats that do factor into how well your story ranks, which gives your article more opportunities to be read (and for you to get paid).

How Much Can You Earn From Medium?

In 2019, Medium paid more than $6 million to over 30,000 writers.

Wow!

According to their September 2019 update, a top writer earned $30,638.81 that month.

And in November 2019, a single story earned $7,384.22.

That’s a lot of dough, right?

But now for the buzzkill…

The vast majority of Medium writers make less than $100 per month. In fact, only 7% to 9% of writers earn more than that.

Ouch.

That’s because your results will depend on factors like skill, commitment, existing assets (email list, social media following), timing, and, yes, luck.

But don’t despair — making money on Medium is doable for real people like you and me:

After months of hard work, freelance writer Zita Fontaine started earning over $1,000 monthly in November of 2019.

Megan Holstein made over $10K last year — breaking the $1K mark in December 2019.

Shaunta Grimes, author of Viral Nation, reported earning over $1,000 per week.

Brian Rowe, editor of The Partnered Pen, hit the $1K monthly mark last year.

If they did it, so can you.

How Do You Join the Medium Partner Program?

It’s simple.

I’ll walk you through all the steps to sign up for:

A Medium account (super easy)

The Medium Partner Program (a little more involved)

Although you do need a Medium account, you’re not required to have a Medium membership (with the monthly/annual membership fee) to sign up (although it’s nice to give back to other writers on the platform, if you can swing it).

Set Up Your Medium Account

Creating your free Medium account only takes a few minutes:

Go to Medium’s homepage (medium.com) and click “Get started.”

Log in using Facebook, Google, or another email address.

Go to your inbox and click the link to confirm your email.

Complete your account setup by entering your name (pen names are allowed), and click “Create account.”

That’s all there is to it!

Now you can sign up for the partner program…

Join The Medium Partner Program

Joining Medium’s Partner Program requires a few more steps (and more information), but it’s nothing you can’t handle. Here’s what you do:

Click on the profile image icon in the upper right corner of your screen, and click “Medium Partner Program” in the drop-down menu.

You’ll be taken to a page promoting the partner program. Click “Join the Medium Partner Program” when you’re ready.

You’ll then be asked to agree to the terms of service. Give them a quick read and then check the box.

Next you’ll be asked to select either the Stripe Express or Stripe Standard account.

Note: If your country isn’t served by Stripe, you won’t be able to get paid through the partner program.

If you don’t have a Stripe account, you can sign up for an Express account through Medium.

Be ready to provide them with details like:

Legal name

Business address

Business phone number

Type of business: Individual, sole proprietor, or single-membership LLC

Business website

Routing number

Bank account number

Also, you should know that if you set up a Stripe Express account through Medium, you won’t be able to connect that Stripe account to any other services. If you plan on using Stripe for other facets of your business, it probably makes sense to set up a Standard account instead.

If you already have a Stripe account, select “Stripe Standard account,” and then click “Set up payments on Stripe.”

You’ll be taken to the page shown below. Click “Sign in” in the upper right corner.

Two buttons will appear. Click on “Connect my Stripe account.”

Then sign into your account.

Congratulations! You’re on a roll. Why not take care of some tax documentation while you’re at it?

You don’t have to enter your tax info now, but you need to fill it out to get paid.

Fill Out Tax Forms (So You Can Get Paid)

Want to get this tax stuff out of the way?

Great.

Keep in mind, your tax forms may differ from those shown here:

If you’re not already on the Taxpayer information page, go here to enter your info.

Choose the appropriate tax form and click “Complete Form.” This page will help you decide which to choose.

Note: Most US Citizens will use a W9 (confirm with your accountant). The W-8BEN and W-8BEN-E forms are for non-resident aliens.

This is the W9 form:

And that’s it!

Remember, you forfeit earnings if you don’t submit tax info within 180 days after the Sunday of your first week earning.

Get. It. Done.

12 Tips for Earning Real Passive Income with the Medium Partner Program

You’re well on your way to earning your first buck on Medium.

But, if you want to make real cash, you must learn how to make the partner program work for you.

Let’s look at some strategies other writers are leveraging to succeed:

1. Write your best content

Success on Medium requires your best work.

Content should be informative, original, engaging, well thought out, and free of typos and grammatical errors.

It should be aesthetically pleasing, with great images and good formatting.

Never plagiarize, and always give credit and links where appropriate. And make sure you deliver on the promise of your headline.

2. Craft great headlines

Do yourself a favor and write at least a dozen headlines for every post.

Good headlines get clicks. And clicks lead to reads (and pay).

Great headlines should:

Generate curiosity (don’t go “full clickbait,” Medium doesn’t like it)

Elicit emotion

Leverage number psychology

Contain power words

Demonstrate a clear benefit to the reader

Feature a keyword (especially if you’re trying to rank in search engines)

3. Produce consistently and prolifically

According to an analysis conducted by The Startup, writers who earned the most were consistent publishers.

Why?

Because, as your audience grows and your content is increasingly found, read, and shared, your earnings compound over time.

Some of the most successful earners post multiple times per week, and have been doing so for months or years.

By writing more, you will:

Build skills

Increase your chances of writing a winner

Gain clarity about what works

Quality always trumps quantity, so don’t publish half-baked material just so you can stick to a schedule.

4. Please Medium’s curators

If you meet Medium’s curation standards, there’s a chance the Medium editors will promote your content across their platform (including their email list), giving your story tons of exposure.

Medium recently suggested these articles in my inbox:

Articles deemed exceptional are featured on Medium’s front page (cha-ching!).

Even if you don’t get curated (often you won’t), your post will still be eligible for earning through the partner program. You just won’t get nearly as much traffic.

5. Optimize for search engines

Medium has millions of readers.

That doesn’t guarantee your post will get the attention it deserves. And having your posts rank well in search engines will drive tons of views (and more income).

This strategy requires keyword research and a basic understanding of SEO principles.

Make sure your post includes:

A great headline that includes the keyword

Alt-tags for images

Proper header tags: H1, H2, H3

Custom URL

Customized meta description

6. Engage the community

Medium is a place for people to gather around ideas.

From the beginning, you should build relationships by leaving thoughtful comments on other writer’s stories.

Follow writers you like.

Mention and link to them in your articles when appropriate.

And if someone takes the time to leave a legitimate comment on your post, make sure you reply.

7. Leverage your connections

Give your Medium articles a boost by sharing them with your email list, in Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, and on other social media platforms.

But remember, the connection goes both ways.

Connect your social accounts to Medium to gain new followers. Link out to your blog in your Medium bio.

And don’t forget to link to your Medium posts from other articles you write, either on Medium or other places (like your blog).

8. Publish with publications

Medium’s top publications are followed by hundreds of thousands of readers.

Writing for them can dramatically increase your reach.

And there are thousands of publications on a wide range of topics that you can submit your work to.

To submit your work, go to their Medium page and click on “Write For Us” or “Contribute.”

9. Go long, but no fluff

According to Medium’s Data Lab, the optimal length post takes 7 minutes to read (that’s approximately 1,600 words).

But remember, quality always trumps length.

The more time readers spend on your posts, the more you get paid. But, just making content longer isn’t enough. If you can’t hold readers’ interest past the first paragraph, it doesn’t matter how long your post is.

10. Profit from popularity

Where attention goes, money flows.

Study successful Medium writers and their stories. What’s working?

Write about popular subjects, like:

Tech

Entrepreneurship

News

Culture

Productivity

Marketing

Artificial Intelligence

Business

Design

Love

And many more

Popular topics have large pools of readers. And that means more exposure for your work.

The bigger the pond, the more fish you can catch.

11. Add layers of interest

Yes, write about popular topics.

But don’t be a clone.

Draw upon what you know — areas of expertise or things you have some deep interest in or connection to.

What unique perspective can you bring?

Dare to be different:

Provide some historical context

Take them on a journey through your senses

Write about real people in real life situations

Be vulnerable and humanize a topic

Add color with personality

Elicit emotion

Go big on research and data

Take a contrarian stance

Give them a glimpse into a hidden world

12. Lead your reader

Tell readers what to do next by giving them actionable advice.

Providing them with some amazing insight or new perspective is great, but what do they do with it?

How can they go out and put it into practice today?

Have the courage to not only share ideas, but also lead with them.

The Medium Partner Program Pays

Can you make serious coin on Medium?

You know it.

It won’t happen overnight (for most of us, anyway).

But that’s okay!

Every piece of content you write is an asset — an investment that will compound your earnings over time. That means your articles will keep working for you, even while you’re out there hustling for other paid writing gigs!

And that’s really the key here.

Plan on writing a lot over a significant period of time. Plan on learning and pivoting. And always plan on failing along your path to success.

Why not start that first article today?

Happy writing!

The post How the Medium Partner Program Can Make You Rich (Slowly) appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from SEO and SM Tips https://smartblogger.com/medium-partner-program/

[fullregalia]

gonna sit right down and write myself a newsletter.

In the “Things Happen” section of Friday’s Money Stuff, the last link was a meta one, leading to an essay about living in a time of peak newsletter.

At first, I was just going to tweet about how I thought it was meta. But then I wanted to follow it up with some actual opinions, and instead of tweeting it, I decided to try and form a cohesive essay, because I think the monetized newsletter boom is indicative of the media’s larger identity/consolidation crisis, reflecting not only internet culture, but also the financial instability of the sector. So here’s a completely unsolicited take about it all on this blob because I need to shout my opinions into the void, and don’t have any subscribers!

My love affair with the newsletter probably started back in 2013 with Today in Tabs, which I still miss dearly. (My love affair with email began, well, duh.) I came to Tabs because I was Extremely Online while working at the Guggenheim and NYC Media Twitter has always been my default Twitter. [Side note: I believe the dynamics of NYC Media Twitter is fodder for an “On Smarm” style analysis, but that is not for me to write. For many years I basically unfollowed all of the NYC Media Twitter people and I was much happier. Now I only follow the nice, smart, and funny ones. They--to borrow a phrase from a bespectacled ghoul--make life worth living... along with all the Potato Head Blues, of course.] Tabs was funny and became a daily talking point on Media Twitter, but Rusty Foster clearly got burnt out on it, and who could blame him. 

I think it also became such a big thing because it filled the void that the waning independent blogs, or toxic comments sections and 140 character dispatches couldn’t; pithy and personal, you felt like you were interacting privately with your friend. For those of us who do not produce content for a living, or who aren���t really a part of the twitter conversation, blogs aren't dead. (TBH though I’m bearish that Tyler Cowen is right about that.) I post exclusively superfluous takes here, which exist in a vacuum. And if there’s one rule of nature we can all agree on, it is that content providers abhor a vacuum! In the intervening years, so many more newsletters have popped up, either by freelance writers or through formal media companies, realizing that with paywalls and the noise of twitter, a direct-to-consumer model might work more effectively. 

The dynamic of audience and author interaction has changed over the years as social media encourages writers to be a brand and build a following. Steady staff jobs are fewer and farther between, and even with increasing union protections, the idea of a side gig newsletter holds appeal, especially if you already have a list. Whenever I listen to the Longform podcast, I am most interested in hearing journalists talk about how the sausage gets made (Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Helen Rosner have been candid about the financial aspects of their work.) I think that the newsletter provides the freedom of personal voice as an area to experiment or workshop ideas more informally, combined with the protection of email as a medium. A person has to subscribe (or even pay) to receive your newsletter and while they can email you to lodge a complaint, it doesn’t immediately have to devolve into an ad hominem canoe. (This is the internet though, no one is safe!)

Twitter certainly encourages dialogue for better or--usually--worse, but I rarely use it for more than putting unsolicited observations into the void (eg. thrilling, effete stuff: “I like John Coltrane,” or, “clouds good today”). Then there’s the problem of time and monetization. As Jia Tolentino recently wrote about the attention economy: “For journalists, Twitter, in particular, functions as an increasingly familiar form of contemporary labor: paid in exposure, pitched as fun.” We only have so much bandwidth. Newsletters like DealBook Briefing (New York Times, free) or Five Things to Start Your Day (Bloomberg, free) not only give you a digestible take, but also do it free of charge while the websites have a paywall--though “free” isn’t really free since of course the newsletters link you to enough articles to hit your monthly limit in one day.

And here’s where we get to the “time is a flat circle” part of my spiel: I think the natural conclusion of the newsletter boom is that it started indie, is getting mainstream, but will prove possibly unsustainable and will eventually become absorbed by major companies, consolidated into the old form of media. If you do derive your income and have an audience a newsletter is great.... but not everyone can afford to subscribe to 10 different newsletters for $5 a month. Similarly to the streaming platforms all basically becoming cable (truly, who among us is like HBO Max run me over with a truck!!!!), I think that newsletters will just become, well, another property in the portfolio of the few remaining blue-chip digital publications, looking increasingly like a digital magazine. (Let’s save the podcast economy essay for later.)

Aside from my unsolicited media landscape take, on a personal note, I keep on doing this modest blog for an audience of one because I work in publishing, am still too online for my own good, and it’s an outlet to brainstorm and share the writing of others that I think is superlative (when I’m not writing about baked goods). I will, of course, continue to subscribe to myriad newsletters, and try to support the journalists who I actually interact with in the real world. Perhaps we will all weather this content storm together and come out on the other side with some antitrust policy. At least we can vent about it out here in the meantime. The internet, boy, I don’t know.