Briannah Donolo Goes Viral — As We Always Knew She Would

So I came to my blog today to find a lot of views. Was my piece about Amazon negotiations that fascinating?

Nope. (Well okay, it was a bit fascinating, but not that much.) They were searching out young singer Briannah Donolo, a few of whose music videos I’ve put up here, and the group included record company people. What had Briannah done? Sung the hay out of the U.S. and Canadian anthems at a recent Canadiens-Bruins hockey game apparently. (See below.) The performance has gone viral, as in global.

Is my family surprised? Having heard that voice from back when she was a little thing, no. We knew it was only a matter of time. Congrats to Briannah, and for everybody else, enjoy:

 

 

Amazon Gives In

Every few years, giant we’re-selling-parts-of-the-moon-next conglomerate Amazon decides whether it’s going to keep selling books (a mere 7% of its revenues,) and when it decides, so far, that it’s going to do so, it negotiates sales terms contracts with the Big 5 global conglomerates that dominate U.S. publishing, among other presses. (It doesn’t have to negotiate anything with the self-published authors since they agreed to a contract that states that Amazon can change their terms, including the monetary ones, whenever it wants.)

The sales terms do not include just what prices publishers will sell print books to Amazon for or price e-books with Amazon at, but also how much Amazon gets of each sale as its retailer cut, and how much additional monies Amazon gets of each sale in “developmental marketing” fees. Those are the fees that Amazon charges for search rhythm algorithims, search inside this book features, special screen displays, recommendations, etc., that all help books sell on Amazon and make it easy for people to find them. Amazon has been increasing the number of fees it demands the publishers pay to sell with Amazon in the contracts, squeezing the publishers for more revenue to feed its enormous business acquisitions engine. (Amazon gives most of these services away for free to self-pub authors, but it has been adjusting its cut and charging some fees to them.)

This has been particularly hard on small presses, for whom the balance between the costs of doing business with Amazon and making it up in cheap bulk sales they depend on from Amazon is very precarious. But it’s of concern for the big publishers as well, especially because some of the conglomerates also sell other merchandise to/through Amazon and because other retailers and wholesalers are likely to follow Amazon’s lead in charges. So when French-based global conglomerate Hachette entered into negotiations with Amazon this year, it balked at Amazon wanting a higher cut of revenues for marketing fees for e-books and print, as well as tighter control of the e-book market and better terms on print returns refunds (meaning more expenses and shipping costs for Hachette.)

Amazon promptly tried one of its favorite negotiating tactics with any size of publisher — suspending sales on Hachette’s titles, which it claimed were suddenly out of stock at Amazon or didn’t have a buy button anymore altogether, or messing up prices, so that Hachette would cave quickly. But Hachette isn’t as dependent on Amazon sales as some of the other Big 5, and more to the point, they are facing the same need as Amazon to cut costs and squeeze more revenue, so they dug in. Amazon promptly started a media campaign, claiming the dispute was only about e-book prices, that it was trying to decrease the costs to the consumer by making more e-books at the legendary price point of $9.99. This of course ignores that most e-books, including from the Big 5, are priced well below $9.99 already.

Hachette offered a few terse statements that the negotiations were about way more than e-book price points, but otherwise ignored media knattering in favor of confidentiality over the negotiations. That media coverage, as it was back when Amazon tried this tactic on Macmillan a few years ago, was not exactly positive towards Amazon. It got worse when a bunch of authors, some Hachette authors affected by the ban, some just big bestsellers, took to the presses to complain about Amazon’s author punishment negotiation tactic in a business deal that the authors had no say in. Amazon made pie in the sky promises that they knew contractually they and Hachette couldn’t actually do, even if authors and Hachette had been willing, over e-book prices only. But that didn’t change the general view that Amazon was riding roughshod over the book publishing business, especially in the States, which was still reeling from various retail shrinkage in recent years. That e-book sales have flatlined, having reached perhaps their natural share of the market for now, and that online selling of print books has expanded to more vendors, didn’t help Amazon have more leverage.

Ecosystems — We Are All Tied Together

Humans unfortunately in large majority try to reject the idea of ecosystems, even when they learned about them in school. They want to separate out one bit from another, deny the connections and that things that affect the larger land or other humans will affect them in the process. They definitely often want to deny that the natural world knows what it is doing or that we can harm and alter it, and in turn be affected by that. This really fascinating video, “How Wolves Change Rivers,” about the re-introduction of wolves into the national park by the Sustainable Human organization, offers us a fascinating glimpse of those connections and how valuable and critical they are, how they go beyond our expectations of connection.

So if you ever run into somebody who doesn’t understand why we’re bothering to try to save one species of animal or another, and how one species can have a very large impact, point them towards this video. It is well worth your time.

 

 

Gamesplayers Are A Mighty Wave

Once upon a time, a very angry man teamed up with some anti-feminist frothy guys to get revenge on his game-designer ex-girlfriend. They claimed that she had sex with a game reviewer in return for favorable review coverage of her game, and harassed, doxed and death threatened her. The fact that the favorable review coverage never occurred was irrelevant; the charge was meant only to raise questions on the Net. Meanwhile, the frothy guys proceeded to attack with doxing, harassment and death threats other women who had nothing to do with game reviewing or game company PR, and then went after anyone and any website that criticized them for it.

Despite all this, their efforts didn’t draw much media attention outside of the geekosphere until two events occurred. First, the frothy guys confused some Intel marketing folk into withdrawing one of thousands of ad buys from a games website that had been critical of them.* And second, they shut down a talk by an academic in women’s studies at a university by threatening a mass shooting at the event. The bulk of the media coverage from that was negative, depicting the frothy guys as terrorizing women and bigoted. Right wing activists, who used to decry games as violent degeneracy, about-faced and helped push the message that those calling for better diversity and talking about the presentation of women in games were somehow corrupting the gaming industry and engaging in vague, often contradictory conspiracies. (*Update: Intel has now re-bought the ads they pulled a month ago, after getting a clue.)

The saddening thing about this campaign – and it has been an organized campaign — is that its threats and identity theft towards these women are ultimately futile towards its main stated goals. Yes, women have only a toehold in the engineering, tech, animation and gaming industries. But women used to have only a toehold in the fields of medicine, law, education, publishing and laboratory sciences too. The men in those areas used to throw up their hands and suggest that maybe the women were few because they weren’t really suited for those fields, while frantically rolling boulders to try to keep women out and making the atmosphere as toxic as possible for the ones who were there.

Women have always worked in games, despite such barriers, from board and tabletop to educational games, sports, and electronic games from the arcade to the console to the computer networks. And women have always played electronic games, in great numbers, from their earliest days. Currently, they make up half the gaming market and the largest demographic group in the 18-39 age range. Electronic games have always been commercially mainstream, put out by large companies for a global market, and sporting a wealth-load of popular spin-off merchandise and toys, from Pac Man lunch boxes to Pong earrings. 

A Little Goodwill Tonight

From Zander Zon:

 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”