LastFm turning into Pandora...

Looks like LastFm, my favorite internet radio for discovering new and interesting music, is now going the same crummy path as Pandora, and limiting the number of times you can skip tracks. Blah - it never used to be like that before, and now suddenly you can apparently only skip 6 tracks and hour. I'm used to skipping FAR MORE than that in an hour...

Why can’t I skip more than six times in an hour?
When you listen to Last.fm radio, there is a limit on the number of times you can skip tracks on each station. It’s a requirement of our licensing agreements that allow us to stream music legally.

If you ban a track, this also counts as a skip, because the banned track is skipped. If you ban a track when you have already reached your skip limit, the track will be banned as normal, but it will continue playing to the end.

If you find that you’re skipping a lot of tracks, you might want to try re-tuning to a different station, or try a multi artist or multi tag station.

Blah, I say. So now I have to use the Pandora method of having about 100 existing stations and when I burn out one station with 6 skips, move on to another. It works, but it's an obnoxious work-around. LastFm, believe it or not, there is actually a LOT OF BAD MUSIC out there that rightly deserves to be banned/skipped. Just listen to the 'chillwave' station for any amount of time and figure this out. Or the 'Neighborhood' option, which seems to pick the most strange and bizarre selections (for some reason the other day, LastFm fed me a death metal track called 'I'm proud of my demon'... Oh yeah, that fits with my music preferences...)

LastFm is far from perfect. The comments alone, and racy avatars, are enough to make this qualify for the K9 internet filter, plus users have no ability to block any of that. Same with radio selections: I'd be happy if there was a way to block any new music that contained the f-bomb anywhere in the title/album, but instead, if you go exploring new and different music there's no telling what you'll get.

Spotify has some potential, although the feed of new, random music isn't as good as LastFm. I like Spotify in that you can listen to the entirety of some very good albums, and just have to sit through a couple idiotic commericals. If LastFm makes more crummy changes like this, I'm going to give Spotify a lot more listening.

Frustrations with Avengers Alliance

Blasted Facebook has me hooked on the awful Avengers Alliance game. It's quite entertaining, if not perfect. Here are a few frustrating details of the game I've observed so far, that I'm going to vent about to myself:

The lousy gift-giving
Why can you only give one gift at a time per person? This used to be considerably higher, and now you can only give one gift at a time? Bah, me no like.

Freebie gold earning that doesn't work
Most of the things I try to sign up for, like surveys or email distributions, that supposedly offer free gold, either don't work, or they tell me I'm ineligible in my area. Bah!

The ridiculously-overpriced characters
I suppose this is part of the "sales and marketing" department, but making Captain America and Spiderman the most ridiculously overpriced characters is frustrating, when if you play as a freeloader like me and you don't waste the money buying gold, then you're left with cheapie characters are "Sue Storm." Bah.

Pointless prizes when visiting other friend's maps
You can add friends in the game and visit their cities, but when you click on various buildings for prizes, many of them are completely lame like "30 silver coins", which, when you're near level 30 in the game, is mostly worthless when most of your expenses are in the tens of thousands of silver coins. Suggestion: upgrade the prizes when visiting friend's screens when your character has leveled up.

Language and Innuendo
Come on Marvel, you're owned by Disney now. Keep the language clean in the between-battle dialog. Nick Fury is a grizzled old vet, I know, but you can mind his language a little.

It's also telling to me that Marvel has to capitalize on the more virtuous of the heroes for a game like this. For instance, where are the 'X-Statix' characters? Oh yeah, that book was awful, and all of the characters morally debase, so they get left out in place of more lovably characters like "Nightcrawler" who, although he sounds like an earth worm, at least was a character with more virtue than the Punisher (another Marvel character left out of this game.)

If you are looking for a good time-wasting avenue that requires wasting time that should be used for more productive endeavors, then check out Avengers Alliance. Yeah, it can be played well as a free-loader, but you will only be able to play for limited windows of time at once (limited energy) which is probably better, or I'd waste the whole day playing...