On A Time Delay, Subscriptions Are Here!
Hey, readers. You may find another post injected prior to this one; we lost our digital mail service for about 2 weeks. There's a handwritten post that's being transcribed by my editor. Sorry about the out of sequence dance, but as they say here, "Dis prison."
A year ago, in the EARLY days of Concertina Wired, I had mentioned a subscription service was coming soon to us.
That one never became available to us here in Florida, so we never got prices, contents, etc.
But while our mail services were out from the end of April to a few days ago, they teased again with a subscription service coming soon for games and music.
We lot are skeptical here, and for good reason. We'll hear something is coming, then it seemingly never does. I held out that it might actually happen, because this time, they under-promised: services coming soon, details when it happens, not before is all the detail we got.
On the 15th of May, ...the services were 'launched' according to a banner that directed us to a Subscriptions tab.
... That didn't exist.
I had written a support ticket about a different issue just a couple days prior and actually got a real answer super fast, so I wrote a ticket to ask if this was something coming soon to us here in Florida.
Not six hours later (warp speed in prison), the Subscriptions tab appeared! Closed my ticket, I did, because now I can explo--
- Jayel took 13 points sticker shock damage!
Ow. I can see the prices, and so, too, should you.
Music
We can subscribe to Securus' music catalogue in two tiers.
Silver tier gives us "10,000,000+ songs"; Gold gives us "20,000,000+".
For $12.99 or $17.99 a month, they lay it open for us to manually key in our PINs for each and every song we would like to hear for a 30 day period.
Each time we key our PIN and confirm it, anything we were listening to is interrupted by
"I'm Danny, and this is Do-Overs With Danny."
(process repeats for each track on an album we might listen to...)
Okay, I can outlast Danny. What's in the catalogue?
"... your phone to talk to your mom--"
No, Danny, it is not (you insensitive clod).
What is in there is... well, a lot of repeated albums: The same album, but titled in several languages.
There's a "Comedy/Spoken Word" category... with spoken comedy in German, and plenty of spoken religious content.
I found a nice album whose title I can't even share with you: our keyboards are locked to Latin alphabetical characters, and unfairly limited to just a few accented characters. The album is named in Japanese, and we can't copy and paste that from anywhere.
You're just going to be asked to trust me when I say it's a smooth, jazzy album for a calm evening in infinite night time count.
Yes. I ended up spending $13 to try the music subscription -- money I would rather have spent on food and hygiene products, but I'm not an atonal monster; despite my hearing losses, I actually enjoy music. I enjoyed listening to Hospital Records, particularly artists like London Elektricity, Polaris, Degs, Keeno, and Whiney; we can fault the Forza Horizon series for this. I also enjoy the lo-fi, vaporwave, and chillout genres. :)
I have the better part of a month to go dig through the catalog here, writing down some names on paper to make notes, since I can't even copy-paste the names here.
Games
I would be remiss to not mention the three-tiered setup that comprises the game subscription system.
These are...
- Bronze
- Silver
- Gold
And these come in 7-, 14-, and 30-day runs.
Bronze ($2.39 for 7 days; $5.99 for 30 days) contains 50 games, which do not have a change cycle. Securus tells us the games have a $50+ value if purchased individually.
That made me laugh!
So, least expensive game is $1.98. Most expensive is $4.48.
They could've tried to sell the value better by saying the bundle's worth $100+, which is still truth in advertising, but now you make me wonder how much these games cost to other prisoners in other states...
Then again... hold that thought.
Silver ($4.79 / $11.99) adds 50 more "upgraded" games to the package, which also doesn't purportedly change. So we have ~100 games...
But the bulk of them are GPI Software Development titles! Yes, they strike again, hahaha!
The Gold tier, which weighs in at a whopping $7.19 for 7 days or $23.99 for 30 days gets the entirety of Silver and Bronze's titles, plus 50 Premium Titles that change on a regular basis. In there, I saw titles like Tesla Vs. Lovecraft, Age of Dungeon, Om Nom: Run, and Rocatjumpurr.
Of note: when you uninstall ANY game on these tablets, you lose your save files. We don't have anything that will back up our save files, so you're encouraged to keep the subscription active if you don't play games super fast, or just buy the title to skip the subscription hassle.
Access may be limited by facility; suck it up.
Of course, whenever we're in lockdown, or when our internet connection fails for weeks at a time, we're not compensated for our loss of access to a service we've paid for.
Imagine for a moment that you've done a one week rental of an auto to drive around town. Days 1 and 2, the auto is fine; you're following the fueling or charging rules, taking good care as if it were your own auto at home.
Day 3, the auto won't start or run. It just makes a clucking noise as if it were filled with chickens.
In your world, the rental company would apologize for the issue, give you access to another auto, maybe even comp a day as a gesture of good will.
If your world operated under our rules, you're stuck with the chickenmobile, tough teacup. Oh, and you still better return it on time.
That's how our subscription services run here.
What a rip.
So, as I sit, listening to music, I can only hope we don't end up on an arbitrary lockdown, or have network outages like the one that ate 33% of my newsstand subscription.
Surely, there's a better way to do this, huh?
Thanks for reading. :)