With Takashi Tezuka and Shigeru Miyamoto. I guess I can deal with watching this incredible thing.
I’d been AFK all day yesterday – during the Nintendo Digital Event, I know! – and I’m catching up starting right here. In case you were similarly unable to sit and watch streams all day, join me!
PREORDER Super Mario Maker, Amiibo
Here are more characters that, like Wii Fit Trainer, are playable in Super Mario Maker with the corresponding amiibo. In addition, according to the fact sheet, you’ll be able to unlock more characters by “completing 100 Mario Challenge mode.” Hallelujah, maybe a way to see Marth for the 99.99999999999% of Earth’s population without that rare amiibo!
Surprisingly, this is the first game to make me want to collect all these amiibo. Tell me you don’t want to play Super Mario levels with a tiny Isabelle sprite.
Something I just realized: you can play these characters in the game, and you can change the style of the levels to Super Mario 3, World, or New Super Mario Bros… so does Super Mario Maker have different versions of all these character skins too? Is there a 16-bit Isabelle? (edit: these only show up in Super Mario Bros.-style levels; thanks for letting us know about this, RavenWorks!)
PREORDER Super Mario Maker, Amiibo
To save you clicking through, the answer is “No.”
The slightly longer answer is “While I generally object to jumping on a singular writer when talking about a larger issue which I see all over industry commentary columns, if you think that you can look at WicDiv’s sales and think they’re in any way in trouble, you have no business writing an industry commentary column. You simply don’t know enough to be doing this, and in doing so. You are hurting people’s perspective of the industry.”
Jamie and I eye-rolled when we saw the above article, but realised it may be a good opportunity to talk about this stuff, as it happens a lot, for a lot of books. I meant to write it back in may, but I got distracted by working myself to death. However, I appear to have a few minutes spare, and as there’s a lot of comics economics talk going around in the last few days, it strikes me as a good time to throw this into the mix.
I can tell you, this wasn’t a failure or a cause of concern. Every single creator envied Kirkman and Allard.
In the same month, Invincible’s sales were estimated as 13,584.
Maybe that was a cause for concern? It’s basically 2/3rds of Walking Dead. It’s well beneath the line Marvel would cancel a book.
No, it wasn’t a cause for concern. Almost every Image Creator would have also killed for those numbers.
Walking Dead then wasn’t what Walking Dead is now, but it was still the book which set the conversation in terms of what Indie books were capable of. That Kirkman had his name on two books with that level of success made him the go-to example of how to indie comics.
No, I don’t mean “hey, you get to do your own thing and make some money.” I mean “you are doing financially better than you would by doing a WFH book for the big two.”
I’ll give you some really basic rule of thumbs for indie comic commentary:
Anything selling stably over 10k in single issues is a cause for celebration and joy. The creators are almost certainly extremely happy.
If you’re selling over (ooh) 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names.
If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends.
And in a real way, if Phonogram settled around 6k back in 2006, I suspect Jamie and I would have settled into doing it for another 40 or 50 issues.
There’s all manner of exceptions to the above, but if you look at the charts and bear that in mind, you’ll be closer to how the industry looks at those numbers.
None of the above includes digital sales.
None of the above include trades. You throw trades in, and you change everything entirely. A cursory look at hit indie comic numbers reveals that their trades sell much more than Marvel/DC main universe trades, with a few exceptions (There’s a reason why Matt and David’s Hawkeye was such a big thing, and it wasn’t its monthly sales). Let’s bold another sentence.
You cannot do an industry commentary column on indie books without including the impact of trades.
There are books that are selling well beneath 10k and are doing just fine.
All the three sentences I bolded in a block were about making money from the single issues. They do not include any other revenue source, such as trades. If the single issues break even and you make your money in trades, that’s also fine. With a few exceptions, big two comics primarily make their money in single issues. That is one reason why their single issue sales matter so much more.
There’s other reasons why single issue sales need to be higher…
- Overheads. They have more editors staff, etc. What a creator owned book makes, generally speaking, a creator owned book keeps. The overheads are lower.
- Profit targets. Books don’t just need to be profitable. They need to be profitable to a level which has been corporately pre-determined, in a set period of time.
- A relatively low selling book is taking the place of a book which could abstractly sell higher. Why keep a book which sells 18k on the shelf when you could have one which sells more?
All those factors interacting are amongst the reasons why the bar is higher for a monthly audience at the big two.
Equally, it would be a mistake to confuse the audience of a book with its monthly sales. As said above, you would have to include a trades for that, and the trades are not a small thing.
On a personal level, we’ve sold over 50,000 copies of the first WicDiv Trade. Last I looked at Amazon’s stats we were selling about 1000 a month via book shops alone (i.e. not including comic shops, which is usually more.) The orders for 12 were 22k. The initial orders of the second trade are up 33% on the first trade. Realistically, we were hoping to stabilise at around 13k, and we’d have been enormously happy with that, even if we weren’t selling trades. Which we are. WicDiv is a ludicrous success, by far the biggest thing in our entire career. And thanks to everyone’s support in achieving that.
The idea that there’s articles being written which try and frame discussion of indie comics like this - and it’s an approach which is picked up by comment threads - is entirely counter to the reality of the comics industry.
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Courtney
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Courtney
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Y'all…I’m so tired, can we send her somewhere? Anywhere?
I officially hate Raven.
Raven!!! Raven!!! Girl what the fuck??
Lol she’s punishing us for not buying her 4 flop albums
…. she makes music?
^ Point proven.
this isnt even funny anymore
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Courtney
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Cleopatra’s Underwater Palace, Egypt
I still don’t get why no one is LOSING THEIR FUCKING SHIT OVER THIS FIND
iT SURVIVED THE EARTHQUAKE THAT LEVELED THE REST OF THE CITY IN 365 A.D.
CLEOPATRA’S FUCKING PALACE
WITH INTACT FUCKING STATUARY
NOT TO MENTION THE REST OF THE FUCKING ENTIRE GODDAMN ISLAND OF ANTIRRHODOS INCLUDING THE ANCIENT PORT OF ALEXANDRIA
AND THEY’RE GONNA BUILD A MOTHERFUCKING UNDERWATER MUSEUM
UNDERWATER. MUSEUM.
can I be a mermaid tour guide there or some shit, you don’t even have to pay me i will just live there forever oh my fucking god
i better be alive when this museum is up and running
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Jeb Bush, who announced his candidacy today, said in 1995 that he wanted to reinstate “public condemnation” to prevent people—like single moms—from “irresponsible conduct.“ When asked about those comments a week ago, he said his views haven’t changed.
Check out how he and other presidential hopefuls feel about women’s issues: ppact.io/2016-Chart
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| My spouse: king of the shitpost |
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Kalief Browder served for three years in Riker's Island without ever being convicted of a crime.
Carlos Montero is in Riker's now and has served seven years there without ever being convicted.
But then, on another a level of outrageous injustice all by itself, is Jerry Hartfield. When I first learned of his story earlier today, I thought I was mistaken or was somehow misreading the facts. I wasn't.
His conviction for murder was overturned all the way back in 1980. He was never retried.
Guess what, a full 35 years later (that's over 12,500 days), Jerry Hartfield, without being formally convicted of a crime, remains in a Texas prison.
In June, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, with a great deal of prodding from the federal courts, confirmed that Hartfield was currently in custody for no good reason—under penalty of no "conviction or sentence," the state judges ruled. And yet he still has not been released. Instead, prosecutors intend to retry him and are fighting to keep him in prison pending that retrial. What kind of trial? A trial at which there is likely to be precious little physical evidence against the defendant because, his attorneys say, it may have been lost over time.In times past, I've declared that our justice system is broken. It isn't broken. It's operating exactly how it intends to operate.Facing a retrial he could win, Hartfield says he is entitled to get help now, today, because his constitutional right to a speedy trial has long since been violated. If the Sixth Amendment means anything anymore, the defense says, it means that the state must try a man at some point before he has spent a third of a century behind bars for no legitimate reason. He should be immediately released from custody, they say, even if prosecutors want to re-try him for a murder they say he committed in 1977.
Jerry Hartfield must be released immediately and this country, which could never fully repay him, must do some serious soul searching, then blow up our justice system and start over from scratch. This can't happen.
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IN CASE YOU HAVENT HEARD YET
!!!!! MUST READ !!!!!!
Dominican Republic to be ‘Socially Cleaned’ of all Hatians/Dark Skinned Dominicans in two days
In two days about a quarter of a million people will be made stateless. They will have no homes, no passports, and no civil rights. There are several reasons for this, but the primary reason is racism.
At issue is a ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic to strip away the citizenship of several generations of Dominicans:
According to the decision, Dominicans born after 1929 to parents who are not of Dominican ancestry are to have their citizenship revoked. The ruling affects an estimated 250,000 Dominican people of Haitian descent, including many who have had no personal connection with Haiti for several generations.
Dominican Republic has always had a longstanding hatred towards Haiti for years but what they’re doing is literally taking anyone who’s family lineage cannot be traced back to 1929, and putting them on a one-way bus back to Haiti, whether they were born in the DR or not. They don’t care.
The US State Department has denounced the Dominican government for this plan, and pointed out that it is a gross violation of human rights according to the U.N. charter.
Below are 5 things you need to know about what is happening in the Dominican Republic:
- The DR government has revoked the citizenship of more than 100,000 Dominicans born in the country of Haitian parents.
- Many of the Dominican-born Haitians facing the looming threat of deportation have never visited Haiti or know anyone there.
- The criteria the government will use in deciding who is to be bussed out of the country is “dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features.”
- The DR government claims to have established a legalization process for Dominican-Haitians wishing to remain in the country, but the system is close-to-impossible, according to sources on the ground.
- Even though currently the deportation of Dominic-Haitians persists as only a possibility, all evidence points to it happening.
#StayWoke
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“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (via lilyinthelibrary)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Turbo Boost Switcher is a little application for Mac computers that allows to enable and/or disable the Turbo Boost feature.
It installs a precompiled kernel extension (32 or 64 bits depending on your system) that updates the Turbo Boost MSR register, so It will ask for your admin password when using it.
It’s installed on your Mac status bar and allows you to:
- Visually know if Turbo Boost is enabled or disabled at any time.
- Enable / Disable Turbo Boost manually.
- Configure it to disable Turbo Boost automatically at launch.
- Enable / Disable Turbo Boost automatically (only on Pro version)
- Check your CPU temp and fan speed.
- Set it to open at login.
- Automatically restore Turbo Boost on exit.
Via Marco Arment.
Litenin is a very light and shockingly fast feed reader.
Litenin doesn’t display a feed item’s description, which makes it a bit too light for me, but it’s well worth a look if you tend to use RSS to skim headlines, opening browser tabs as you go.
During periods of chronic stress, we often up our caffeine consumption. This works better than you might expect—the increase can reduce some of the negative effects of long-term stress, including depression and memory deterioration. In a new study published in PNAS, researchers dug further into this finding, examining the signaling networks that caffeine influences within the brain. One of the proteins they identify is a potential treatment target for the symptoms of long-term stress.
Chronic unpredictable stress alters neural circuits in the hippocampus. It dampens mood, reduces memory performance, and increases an individual’s susceptibility to depression. The researchers studied this phenomenon in mice by exposing them to chronic, unpredictable, long-term stress in a variety of forms: cage-tilting, damp sawdust, predator sounds, placement in an empty cage, switching cages, and inversion of day/night light cycles. Just like humans experiencing chronic stress, the mice showed weight loss and memory deterioration. The mice also demonstrated helplessness and loss of interest in stimuli, which are markers of depression in mice.
After being chronically stressed, the mice were exposed to caffeine in their drinking water. As expected, caffeine reduced the mice’s depressive symptoms. Additionally, it improved the memory impairment in these mice, measured via recall of maze-based problem solving and object displacement.
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Megan Geuss
Nest's Maxime Veron said that Nest has become better at reducing "nuisance alarms."
9 more images in gallery
SAN FRANCISCO—Nest, the Google subsidiary devoted to home automation, announced a refresh to its product line Wednesday, which includes a second-generation smoke detector, a unified Nest app, and the rebranded Dropcam, now called "Nest Cam."
In a press event held in an art gallery, company reps touted the new Nest Protect smoke detector ($99/£89/€119), which features new dual-wavelength sensors that can detect "fast and slow moving fires" and can also distinguish between steam and smoke.
"We're really good at reducing nuisance alarms," Nest head of marketing Maxime Veron told assembled media, pointing out the new ability to disable the alarm from a smartphone. "When you burn toast, the last thing you want is the smoke alarm to yell at you."
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At long last, more than three years after launch, there is an official Raspberry Pi case. In keeping with Raspberry Pi's aspirational remit of bringing affordable computing to the masses, the official case costs just £6 (or $8.60 in the US). The case, rather fittingly, features a rather dashing white-and-raspberry colour scheme.
Ever since the release of the Model A and B in 2012, and the follow-up releases of the Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2, there has always been one rather obvious omission from the product stack: an official case. Because the Raspberry Pi is designed for a range of uses, from DIY maker machinations to low-cost educational computing, it never really made sense to provide one official case. Instead, the Foundation encouraged people and third-party vendors to make and/or sell their own cases. We've seen some wonderful cases over the years, include cases made of 3D-printed plastic, Lego bricks, and even hand-crafted wood.
But now, designed in partnership with Kinneir Dufort, there's an official case for the Raspberry Pi 2 (and Model B+, which shares the same form factor). The case is made of injection moulded plastic and comes in four parts: a raspberry-coloured main chassis, and then three clip-on panels (two for the sides and one that goes on top). You can remove some or all of the white panels, depending on how much of the underlying electronics you want to reveal. The panel nearest the GPIO pins is solid and will need to be removed if you want to use it.
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Look out bullshit peddlers , the robot fact-checkers are coming to get you. Researchers at Indiana University have developed an automated system for checking claims made online. And while it’s not the first such system, it’s definitely a sign that automated fact-checking might soon become mainstream.
firehoseWORD OF THE CENTURY
OregonLive.com |
Olive Garden brings food truck to Boston's Little Italy, Italian restaurants unhappy ... OregonLive.com Food for Thought is a weekly roundup of agriculture, food science and neat food-related articles. Unlimited disdain: Olive Garden has finally jumped on the food truck craze. The Italian-inspired chain restaurant loaded up a decked-out truck with its new ... and more » |
