Some Potpourri Before Leap Day

 A couple of little tidbits to cram into one entry:

You probably haven't noticed yet but on the list of links below the header is a new section for Virtual Voice Audiobooks.  Since Amazon doesn't make a convenient link to share, I decided to make my own.  

First I did the Eric Filler ones on that blog.  I brought up my Eric Filler author page and sorted by "audiobooks" and then I put the titles and links onto a list.  And since it just brought them up pretty randomly I sorted out the series--as many as I had.

Then I realized that Amazon's stupid buggy software hadn't just brought up audiobooks; some of the links were Kinde books!  Which would be fine if all the Kindles had audiobooks, but they don't so some of them were linking to books that didn't even have an audiobook!

So because Amazon's dumb software can't handle a simple filter job that some giant mainframe using punch cards in the 1960s probably could have handled, I had to go through and audit the list and make a bunch of changes.  Then go through it again and catch a couple more.  Hopefully now it's finally right.

It was easier to do with the PT Dilloway ones because there weren't nearly as many.  I threw the Patrick Dilloway books on that list too.  All of the books are $3.99 or $1.99 if you have the eBook already.

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I've talked a couple of times about the Movie House app.  It was an app on my Roku where if you watch their crappy movies and TV shows you get credit towards a $5 gift card to Amazon or Vudu.  Then they added a daily spin where you got extra points.  At first after 5 spins you got a free gift card.  Then later they downgraded that to 50% towards a gift card.  Then 40%.

It was pretty awesome for a while as I got hundreds of dollars in gift cards for doing relatively little.  I mean, I hardly ever watched the actual content and I set an alarm on my phone to do the spin once a day.  I think it was a good deal and y'all slept on it.  Sucks for you.

But now it's over.  First without saying anything they downgraded the wheel again so instead of getting 40% you get...another spin.  And of course that extra spin is rigged so you'll usually get 5%.  So basically it's going from 40% to 5%.  The only good thing is the bonus would kick in after 4 days instead of 5 but still not an improvement.

When I finally did get 100%, which took almost twice as long as it used to, there were only Vudu gift cards.  I mean sure I could use that to rent some movie, though most of the newer ones are $6 or more so I'd still have to spend money.  But really, I don't care about Vudu.  I can't buy stuff I need with that.  So fuck it.  I'm done.

(And Vudu gift cards suck.  The one I got for $5 I saw Across the Spider-Verse on sale to buy for $5 so I'll just use it on that, right?  Nope, it's only for rentals.  OK, so it's $2.99 to rent and I haven't seen it yet, so fine I'll just do that.  I should have $2 left, right?  I mean that's how every other gift card works.  Nope, the rest of the amount just vaporized.  So, yeah, fuck Vudu.)

Like I've said before, the failure of this should go into a business textbook for college students.  There were so many things they did that were just dumb and so many things mishandled that I'm shocked it took this long for them to implode.

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Last December my Amazon Vine account was terminated.  Not just that but they terminated my "community" account so all of my reviews (non-Vine and Vine) for over 20 years was deleted just like that.  When I emailed them I got a really lame explanation that then basically just said, "WE HAVE SPOKEN!!!" and then they just ignored any other emails.

A problem I found out a few days later when I looked in my Spam folder is the night that they suspended my account there were like 37 emails saying I had reported a review as fake.  The thing is, all of these emails were made when I was asleep, so how could I have done that?  Unfortunately the emails don't say what reviews were reported as fake, though I suspect they were my own reviews, because why else would my account be suspended?  But of course no one wonders why I would be reporting on myself.  Nope, just destroy my account.  Then refuse to answer any questions.

When I email their "community help" I just got ignored.  I went online to talk to drones and was told all they can do is email the "community help team."  So, what, this "community team" is some autonomous entity that doesn't answer to anyone?  It really doesn't make sense.  It's especially annoying because this was a lot of suspicious activity on my account.  It would be really nice if they took that seriously.  At one point since I'd tried emailing them a few times with the whole list, I sent each one separately.  They of course ignored all 37 emails.  It's utterly ridiculous.

At this point I'm less concerned about getting my account back than figuring out what the hell happened to it.  It seems really shady.

And it got even shadier when I read a review on Goodreads where my longtime Amazon friend Ethan Cooper said he had the same thing happen to him.  Amazon deleted all but one of his reviews--including those on my books--because of "fake reviews."  Which is utter bullshit.  Maybe Coop was a little easy on my books for instance and maybe I was a little easy on his, but it wasn't fake.  What's wrong with some authors knowing each other and reviewing each other's books?  I'm sure Stephen King never reviews any books for authors he knows, right?  Yeah, I'm sure.

Now I'm wondering who else they went after in their latest purge.  They have overcompensated before to combat "fake" reviews with their Gestapo tactics.  It's still pretty ridiculous that they don't have any kind of due process for this to prevent people from losing their accounts for no real reason.  Meanwhile I'm sure there are plenty of actual fake reviews they haven't done anything about.