Apple Addresses Spotify’s Claims

From Apple:

What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it — even going so far as to take these creators to court.

Spotify has every right to determine their own business model, but we feel an obligation to respond when Spotify wraps its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric about who we are, what we’ve built and what we do to support independent developers, musicians, songwriters and creators of all stripes.

Yes, hello, authorities? I’d like to report a murder.

Daaaammmmmnnnnn.

Deathclaw Unchained

Fallout 76 "Deathclaw Maze"

From Destructoid:

Fallout 76 might be a mess, but there’s hope on the horizon with several big DLC drops and of course, a ton of user-created content.

That includes this newest video from YouTube user aswiftkickinthejunk, who created their own death maze to trap players in. The mad man lures people in like the Pied Piper with a wave emote, then swiftly locks them in to be mauled by his pet Deathclaw (which you can tame by way of an endgame skill). Naturally he gets to watch from above like Jigsaw and continues to emote/taunt them.

This is so good.

*goes off to build a deathtrap maze*

Fallout 76 – 100 Days, Roadmap For 2019

From Bethesda:

We’ve just passed 100 days since the launch of Fallout 76!

There’s nothing like the start of something new – for you and for us, and having millions of you join us on this new adventure is humbling for our studio. Thank you for sticking with us as we figure this online experience out together, and we do mean “together.”

…

To that end, we’re excited to announce some of the new free content we’ve been working on for Fallout 76 in 2019.

Thanks again for sticking with us. It’s a privilege to have such passionate and caring fans. We have big plans for 2019 and we’d love to hear your continued feedback on everything we’re doing. We hope you’ll keep sharing your thoughts with us on the forums, Reddit, in videos, and streams. Your voices push us to do better and your support has meant everything to us. We’ll do our best to earn it.

The Fallout series is one of my favorite game series of all time and Fallout 76 is really the only game I’ve been playing lately (sorry for neglecting you, Battlefield V), so I’m super-excited for the new content that’s coming.

The image at the top of this post is me in my C.A.M.P. 🙂

Here’s another one:

I play it on Xbox, and my gamertag is Dr Crankypants. Let’s play!

Sick and struggling in Coal Country

From Binghui Huang at The Morning Call:

The region is a study in contrasts. Cutting across mountains, waterfalls and lakes, it’s as flush with beauty as it is with coal. Houses peek out of the green, tree-lined valleys that spawned famous Americans such as writer John O’Hara, actor Jack Palance, musicians Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and former Vice President Joe Biden. But violence and disaster also mark the rugged terrain — from the massacre of striking Lattimer miners and the hanging of alleged Molly Maguires in the late 1800s, to the tragic breach of the Knox Creek Mine in 1959.

The industry that once defined and supported the people living there has burned out. In its place are poverty, sickness and addiction.

This is the first article in an absolutely fantastic series of articles about the region of PA that I’m from and where we now live (we’re in Tamaqua, a neighboring town of Lansford, which is mentioned heavily in the article).

Things are really, really bleak for a lot of people out here in the sticks and it’s pretty sad.