firehose

Days after T-Mobile introduced its Jump plan for upgrading smartphones, AT&T is jumping into the fray with an installment plan to let customers upgrade their devices annually. Starting July 26, AT&T Next will let customers buy a new smartphone or tablet once per year with no down payment. Customers can trade in their phones after 12 months or pay for 20 months and then keep the device.

As on T-Mobile, AT&T's upgrade program comes with strings attached. The cost of the plan ranges from $15 to $50 a month depending on the cost of the device — unlike T-Mobile, which charges a flat $10 fee for Jump. A Samsung Galaxy 4 on AT&T Next would cost $32 a month in addition to the cost of the customer's voice and data plan, for example. If you cancel your wireless plan while you're on the installment plan, AT&T will bill you for the remaining balance on the device. But the offer applies to AT&T's entire lineup, and could make regular upgrades more affordable for customers who can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars up front for a new device.

People who enter the program will essentially be making two payments on their phones

Whether it makes sense to try Next depends on how often you upgrade, how much cash you typically have on hand, and how good you feel about a rolling commitment to AT&T. People who enter the program will essentially be making two payments on their phones: one for the original subsidy on the device, and one to finance their next device. It's also worth noting that AT&T used to let all of its customers upgrade after 12 months with a new two-year agreement, no installment plan required. For a subset of AT&T customers, the Next program could make upgrading a bit easier in the short term — even as it makes the cost of phone ownership more expensive over the long term.

Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine's delayed Xbox Live Arcade release "unquestionably hurt" its sales, founder of Pocketwatch Games, Andy Schatz, wrote on Reddit post, saying he was disappointed by sales on the console.

"I was never depending on the Xbox being our primary revenue generator, but I was very disappointed in Xbox sales nonetheless," Schatz wrote. "We put a ton of effort porting the game, and to have that effort be largely wasted was really disappointing. OTOH, I don't think the demo was particularly strong... so it could be that the game wouldn't have done better on Xbox even if it had a simultaneous launch (though IMO it would have performed at least twice as well). We had to submit two patches, and luckily they had already relaxed the charges for that process about a month prior."

According to Schatz, the game's publisher Majesco "buffered" Pocketwatch from Microsoft during the game's patching process, writing that whatever complaints he has is best kept himself, Majesco and Microsoft and that he doesn't "feel like it's a good idea to piss in the pool."

The Xbox Live Arcade version of Monaco was due alongside the Steam release on April 24. Unfortunately, the console version was delayed a day before its launch when Pocketwatch discovered a bug that disconnected four-player matches. Scatz delayed the game's release on the console stating that he'd "rather have disappointed fans than upset fans." A second fix was required before it was released on Xbox Live Arcade on May 10.

Regarding Microsoft's Xbox One, the developer said it felt like Microsoft was at first trying to "force ‘the future' on us, with all the up and downsides of digital distribution."

"That may be the path we're going down, but for the moment, consumers like options, and hate always-on DRM," he wrote. "Monaco has no real DRM (except that it uses steamworks to power the online multiplayer, so you have to have an account to play... but you don't even have to actually own it in your steam library to play... so yeah, no drm).

"While I understand wanting to protect against the potential for massive piracy, but for someone selling relatively cheaply (15$) and for someone at my scale, DRM can really only do harm (so long as people continue to value the idea of rewarding developers for games they like)."

Pocketwatch released the Mac version of Monaco on Steam earlier this month, alongside Steam Workshop and level editor support dubbed "The Mole's Workshop," which allows gamers to create custom Monaco missions and maps and share them with friends. For more information about Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, be sure to read our review and our feature on Pocketwatch Games.

University Ave. overpass looking west on Monday July 15 at approximately 1:00 p.m. Photo: Tracey Taylor

Publisher Deep Silver announced the cast of presidential superhero sandbox action game Saints Row 4 today, revealing a list of voice acting talent both familiar and fresh to the series. Notably, the game will feature the voice acting talent of Keith David, Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Van Dam, Michael Dorn, Terry Crews and other golden throats.

Voice actor Nolan North, a regular presence in the ear of video game players, will join Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Robin Atkin Downes, Diane Michelle, Kenn Michael and Sumalee Montano as the vocal options available to the player when they customize the President in Saints Row 4.

The rest of the cast and their respective roles follow.

• Keith David - As himself
• Danielle Nicolet - Shaundi
• Jennifer Jules Hart - Shaundi #2
• Natalie Lander - Kinzie Kensington
• Terry Crews - Benjamin King
• JB Blanc - Zinyak/Phillipe Loren
• Michael Dorn - Maero
• Neil Patrick Harris - DJ Veteran Child
• Yuri Lowenthal - Matt Miller
• Arif Kinchen - Pierce Washington
• Tim Thomerson - Cyrus Temple
• Mike Carlucci - Zach
• Rob Van Dam - Bobby
• Rebecca Riedy - Asha Odekar
• Andrew Bowen - Josh Birk/NyteBlayde
• Michael Yurchak - CID
• TC Carson - Big Tony
• Ursula Taherian - Tanya
• Ogie Banks - Warren Williams

Members of the Saints Row 4 cast will make an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con later this week. Keith David, Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Yuri Lowenthal and JB Blanc will join Steve Jaros, studio creative director at developer Volition, for a panel at Comic-Con. The Saints Row 4 panel will take place Saturday, July 20 at 6:30 p.m. PT in room 7AB and will be moderated by Aubrey Norris, the dangerously excitable director of marketing and PR at Deep Silver.

(From the left) Bill O'Reilly, Kirsten Powers, and Kate Obenshain. (Fox News)

While spouting a series of lies, Bill O’Reilly whined recently on Fox News that women in Texas are providing what he considers insufficient reasons for getting an abortion. The exchange between him and Fox’s official fake feminist Kirsten Powers went like this:

Powers shot back: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

“Yeah!” O’Reilly jabbed. “For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!’”

“Yeah,” Powers said. “For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

To hear O’Reilly and Powers talk, one would think that in order to get a safe, legal abortion under the standards set out by Roe v Wade, one has to go in and provide a “reason” that you “deserve” this abortion, and some kind of authority figure determines if it’s good enough before you get an abortion—their only concern is that women are supposedly not giving good enough reasons. Obviously, these two pundits know better and are just being dishonest with the viewers, but that they are engaging in this rhetoric in the first place speaks to a serious problem in how abortion is discussed in this country.

Abortion is often framed as a mercy bestowed upon a woman who has committed the “crime” of having had sex. Mercy is something that someone else grants you, however, and not something you can simply decide for yourself that you deserve. That’s what people are stabbing at when they say they don’t want women to use abortion “as birth control.” The fear is that a woman might get an abortion without feeling remorseful or may, gasp, even feel like she’s entitled to it without having to apologize or grovel. Basically, people are uneasy with leaving the decision of whether or not an abortion is deserved to the woman seeking it herself. What a lot of people in the gray area between pro- and anti-choice want is for women to have to justify themselves in order to get abortions, even if it’s something as simple as making women feel ashamed of themselves for what they supposedly did wrong.

The problem with that, beyond the inherent sexism of it, is that there’s no real legal way to make women justify themselves, besides maybe making them sign a piece of paper that says, “I’m sorry I was a naughty girl who had sex. Can I please have my abortion now?” Roe v Wade sets things like time limits and Planned Parenthood v Casey says that there can be no “undue burden” to access, but the court decisions that shape abortion law don’t speak to “good” vs. “bad” reasons to have abortions, and for good reason. Abortion is medical treatment. It goes against basic medical ethics to require a patient to argue their moral worth before they are permitted access to health care they require.

The confusion between how ordinary people talk about abortion in terms of deserving-ness and how the law handles abortion, as a matter of rights, is why so much polling data on abortion is bunk. Gallup is notoriously bad on this front, showing that somehow half of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but a majority still want abortion to be legal. In other words, a lot of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but disagree with the “pro-life,” i.e. anti-choice movement about abortion access. I believe that speaks to a longing a lot of people have for women to be able to access abortion, but only if they provide a good reason for it. Of course, there’s no legal way to determine the difference between a good and a bad reason, to separate the “good girls” who just “made a mistake” from those deemed unrepentant sluts.

That is the legal reality, but the anti-choice movement knows that they gain ground when they can appeal to the mushy middle’s desire to make abortion available, but only if you somehow have proved yourself worthy of mercy for your supposed sins. Restrictions like waiting periods and mandatory ultrasound shaming rituals are sold to the public as ways to make the woman seeking abortion “earn” it by inducing shame—forcing her to feel bad about what she supposedly did, basically a time out in the corner for the naughty girls. In reality, they instead attack access, adding time and expense to the abortion. Instead of separating the good girls from the sluts, they are more likely to separate those who are privileged enough to be able to afford both the expense and the time off and those who can’t.

This is also why anti-choicers like to talk  about women “regretting” abortion. The underlying narrative, aimed at the mushy middle: Abortion is clearly too easy to get. Women are impetuously rushing into it, only to realize later that they were bad girls who didn’t pay enough for their sins. We need to make it harder to get, so that only the truly deserving, those who feel remorse, can get it. The idea is to shift focus to reasons and to get people thinking about those who have “good” ones vs. those who supposedly do not.

Unfortunately, I fear that pro-choicers may be making this problem worse by our rhetoric. Every time anti-choicers try to restrict abortion, we trot out women who’ve had abortions to put a face on the situation. It’s a good idea, but as Jessica Grose of XX Factor writes, the women in these stories almost always feel the need to justify their abortions, to explain that they are deserving—which in turn implies that others are not.

First-person abortion stories in major publications are almost always about “appropriate” abortions. Shrouded in mournful tones, regretting the baby that couldn’t be, reflecting on that upsetting choice. But this is such a narrow way of looking at an experience that a third of women in America have. Most people who get abortions aren’t teenagers or terminating unviable babies. Six in 10 women who get abortions are already mothers, and 3 in 10 women have two or more children. The abortion rate is highest among women in their 20s. And there is a range of emotions that women feel when they’re getting what is essentially a medical procedure. Some feel relief, some feel nothing, others even feel joy.

Pro-choicers definitely don’t mean it this way! Most of us believe that women are entitled to abortions if they want them, and you don’t need to have to provide your reasons for the rest of us to judge. But it’s inescapable: If you trot out your sob story to convince people you deserved your abortion, you end up implying, even if accidentally, that some women don’t deserve theirs. When both pro- and anti-choice people are forever debating what is and isn’t an acceptable reason to have an abortion, it shouldn’t be surprising that the people in the middle think that’s what this debate is about.

Because of this, I have to sign off on Grose’s suggestion: Tell your abortion stories, but don’t try to justify yourself! We need to get the message out that, as with every other medical intervention out there, pre-viability abortions don’t need to be earned. You don’t need to be a “good girl” who is full of remorse. The woman who slept with 30 guys and accidentally got pregnant because she foolishly took her chances without a condom deserves her abortion just as much as the loving mother of two who has discovered a fetal defect incompatible with life. We believe this to be true, and we can only start convincing the public that it’s true if we start talking about this belief more straightforwardly.