Well, Bethesda screwed up. And they are not idiots, so they knew that they were going to screw up, and yet they shipped a raw-ass product, and now people customers are pissed.

Let me preface this by saying that I love Bethesda. I still play Skyrim modded to high heaven, and I've put more hours into games by Bethesda than into games by any other company. I know they can do their jobs well, so it's not like they published this unplayable junk because they couldn't do better–they decided to release an untested mess.

I think there can be two reasons that can motivate someone to publish a product that is obviously not ready for public consumption. The main one is an urgent need for money, as in they were facing lay-offs because of a poorly implemented business model. Bethesda isn't like EA: they don't publish a thousand separately-priced DLCs and packages to create a constant stream of money. So when they publish, say, Skyrim, they need to be confident that the money from it will tide them over until they publish another game. It's risky, and we as players need to give companies that use Bethesda's model some leeway, because sometimes they will be overly optimistic and get starved for cash, and there is very little that can be done about that.

Had no idea how much my Amazon ads were getting served to readers of vampire and shifter fantasy romance. Gods, I should have gotten to throwing out all those marketing keywords much sooner.

Some people must have been very confused when they clicked on my book expecting sizzling romance and erotica from cover to cover.

Let's talk about the argument that life has diversity without a narrative reason, so it's obvious that all fiction should have diversity of race, sex, and gender.

The problem here is the assumption that good fiction reflects reality–all fiction needs in order to be effective is to be more stimulating and fun than everyday life. Ever recorded a conversation at a dining room table? It would be full of repetitions, mumbling, and pointless agreement. Good dialog is confrontational, succinct, and indirect. Ever tried to record your Tuesday and make it into a novel?

The writer's job is to distill something commonplace into an experience for the reader. And to do this, the writer needs to have a reason for every word they put on the page.

Social networks aren’t here to take care of your wellbeing.

Moreover, a well-adjusted customer is useless, because that person balances internet presence against everything else in their lives, and so doesn’t spend hours refreshing the page. Everyone knows this, and yet we act as if we don’t.

A service I use, Roll20, recently shit on its customers. To be more specific, one of the founders did this. A customer got banned, complained, and Nolan handled that complaint with a series of messages that got more and more aggressive. The customer then deleted his Roll20 account, wrote a post on the /r/dnd subreddit , and unleashed a wave of condemnation and unsubscribing that Roll20 had never seen before.

And it’s clear to me from the way this was handled that Nolan cares about the product he helps make and about how that product reflects on him, but that he views his customers (or this one at least) as something that he needs to tolerate to keep doing his work.

Seth Godin, a marketing professional I deeply respect, teaches that the only irreplaceable thing a company has is its relationship with the customers. You can outsource, automate or buy anything, but thinking about other humans, considering their desires, wellbeing, and future—this is what makes and breaks businesses in the 21st century.