Let It Out

I am so up for it. Would love to help you out in anyway for this podcast

Funny you should mention that...I'm in the process of trying out microphones for the Podcast. I'll keep you all up to date in the next few days.//

However, in the past few years, that love for community has been lost by Microsoft. The closure of customer-to-company community-centric interfaces (that weren't tech support (no disrespect towards the awesome @XboxSupport!)) was a huge blow for Xbox fans. Especially those who really felt like they had a connection to the company they were spending their disposable income on. Similarly, the Xbox Community Developer Program - the program that was essentially created for MyGamerCard and a select few similarly broad-minded community projects - stagnated, with extremely few updates or new data features (despite constant requests), and waning communication as Xbox was not allocating any time to the program.

To make matters worse, while most of us who insisted on playing by the rules (Terms of Use) of the XCDP, others were showing their lack of respect and selfishness by setting up 'screen scraping' mechanisms to gather additional data from the Xbox website that are otherwise unavailable to us. If you've ever been to Xbox.com and noticed how slow it is - they are the reason why. These sites - some of them for-profit corporations - benefit from having the type of information that the rest of us had been asking for, which quickly started eating away at our traffic. Repeated discussions with Microsoft regarding this issue have gone largely unacknowledged (and certainly un-actioned) by anyone beyond my initial contact.

Eventually, the rise of these websites, coupled with the declining advertising ecosystem, pushed my out-of-pocket expenses upwards as advertising alone couldn't maintain the (quite modest, comparatively) monthly hosting fees. Eventually, the decision had to be made to take down the site. It wasn't (and still isn't) a decision I've made lightly; proof of that is the simple fact that I've been running half of my monthly costs out-of-pocket for over a year now. But despite the sadness of having to shut down this part and chapter of my life, there's a part of me is a little relieved that there's a set 'closure' to all of it, rather than infinite abandonment.

But it hasn't been all bad! In fact, as I mentioned, it's been one of the greatest parts of my life so far. I've been able to make wonderful friendships and business acquantances with community members, Xbox Employees, and industry workers. The technical experience I've learned about programming, database design, system architecture and scalability, community management, public relations, advertising (I could go on).... all of that has been invaluable and much of it not easily taught by a book or online. I have gained jobs from that experience, and I've lost those same jobs when my loyalty to MGC came before the tasks I was hired to do. However, I'm currently in a job that I would like to hold onto (assuming my experience doesn't qualify me for any game-industry jobs, which I would certainly consider!), and I simply don't have the resources to maintain the site or bring it back to a respectable state where it could be self-sustainable.

Shitting In The 1940s remixes

WARNING! This might blow your mind.

[youtube]en-4DPaogJA#t=0m31s[/youtube]
About 0:31 in

Now play this.
[youtube]HlKpSYv9-oI&[/youtube]

Maybe. Also your user rating is badass.