An Experiment
I'm considering an experiment on the various social networks. I've noticed that some folks seem awfully concerned with demonstrating that their chosen social network is better than all the other social networks. I've seen loads of Google+ folks explaining why it's so much better than Facebook. I've seen Twitter folks crowing over their claimed superiority. And I've seen the same thing on Facebook and even LinkedIn.
So I'm think of posting the following to each one and gauging the responses:
When I see folks arguing about how their chosen social network is better than the others, it makes me conclude that it probably isn't.
Might be interesting. Might just be ignored.
After I posted this, I found a neat comparison:
Why I Can't Talk About My Favorite Beverage In Polite Company Anymore
Sarcasm
Sarcasm! You love it! I love it! Everyone loves it!
Am I being sarcastic above? It's hard to tell. It's usually pretty obvious when someone is being sarcastic in person or on video. But sarcasm can be difficult to determine in printed form. Is there a solution? I've seen a few attempts:
Sarcasm Font
This sarcasm font was the first attempt I saw in this area. It's basically a back-slanted font. I like it, but I'd like it better if it was something you could apply to any old font instead of being a font, in this case, Arial. Plus, it's not something you can use online. Everyone would need a copy of the font.
Percontation Point
A recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic listed a percontation point (backwards question mark) as a symbol for sarcasm. Note that it's not Zach's invention. Its usage goes back to the 1580s. (This does not change the fact that Zach is the most talented man on the Internet.)
This idea is fairly usable. The character is available via unicode. But there are two problems with it:
- It won't work in plain text applications.
- It loses any underlying emphasis. In other words, there's no way to delineate between sarcastically asking a question and sarcastically making a statement, as the percontation point replaces the period, question mark, or exclamation point.
SarcMark
Here's an alternative end-of-line punctuation called the SarcMark. It looks pretty much like a curled up exclamation point. It suffers from the all of the problems listed for both of the above solutions, plus it's just plain ugly.
The Perfect Solution
So, what to do? Luckily, I have a solution.
You know how folks mark emphasized text by surrounding it with asterisks? Well, let's do the same thing for sarcasm, only we'll use tildes. Why tildes? Here's why:
- They're available in plain text applications.
- They're rarely used.
- Bracketing the text allows you to keep meaningful end-of-sentence punctuation.
- They resemble a wry smile.
~It's a perfect solution!~
Now Playing
You might have just noticed the song playlist over there on the left. For the longest time, I had a home-brewed solution
to the problem of posting whatever was playing.
My solution
consisted of a PHP script running in the background which would call AppleScript to poll iTunes every 30 seconds or so and extract the band and song name. If it had changed since the previous polling, it would post the info. At first, I posted this to a Twitter feed. (SexyNuns,
which is no longer active.)
Later, I hacked the code to instead ship the info up to this server, where it would be inserted at the top of the posts.
The sucky thing was that it meant I always had to remember to run the script. And the functionality was very limited.
So, one day, I did a quick search for alternatives and found Now Playing, which is a plug-in for iTunes. It actually counts as an iTunes visualizer. When the song changes, it creates a nice XML file with the information. The XML file can optionally include the last however many songs.
If that weren't enough, Now Playing also tries to find the song on Amazon and provides links to the album art. Nice!
And then it can do several things with the information. You can FTP it up to a server, as I'm doing here. Or, you can have it post the info to Facebook or Twitter.
The guy who wrote it also provides a nice chunk of PHP code that'll parse the XML and create basically the layout you see to the left. (Although I modified it to make older song choices have smaller album art.)
All in all, a sweet chunk of functionality and well worth the asking price of $15.
Total Loser!
Did you completely fail at NaNoWriMo last year? Me, too! I didn't even get a novella out of it!
So, as with last year, I've modified the Winner graphic to be appropriate for my situation. Feel free to use it yourself!
In Defense of eBook Pricing
In my previous post, I wrote about how eBooks are simply better than printed books. You may not agree with me, of course, but then you would simply be wrong.
I have several pet peeves. A major one is when people complain that an eBook costs the same, or even more, than the same book in a printed format. There's this big expectation, nay, demand, that eBooks should be cheaper than printed books. Way cheaper.
And, frankly, I don't understand this expectation. I understand the desire. I'd like for the things I want to buy to be cheaper, too. But I don't expect cheaper eBooks.
Why? Well, two reasons. One is that I don't think that the savings is really all that great.
From what I've read, the major costs are in the production of the content, rather than the physical manifestation of that content. In other words, paying the author to write it, paying the editor to edit it, paying the designer to design it, and paying the publicist to publicize it.
Yeah, printing books costs time and money, but so does hosting large-scale redundant computer systems. So does bandwidth.
And let us not forget the spectre of piracy. I have no idea how many book sales are lost due to the ease of copying eBooks. But, certainly, there must be some loss.
So, I think expecting some big discount due to the elimination of printing costs is unreasonable, based on the amount of actual savings. But that's not the real reason. Here's the real reason:
Let that soak in a second. Now, true, prices are linked to costs in that if you drop your prices below your cost, you're gong to lose money. But what I'm talking about is the other side of the coin.
People seem to think that if a manufacturer of something is able to cut their costs, then they should also cut their prices to match. Well, they certainly can, if they think it'll gain them a competitive advantage.
But buyers shouldn't expect a price cut based on lessened costs. Price is based on what the market will bear, not on what it costs to make something plus some pre-determined profit margin.
There's always this idea that sellers should
lower prices when their costs go down. Why? If I'm clever enough to develop a better product at a lower cost, why shouldn't I pocket that extra cash? Why should I have to pass it on?
Believe me, I'm no Libertarian. But I don't understand why there's this automatic reaction that a decrease in costs must be passed on to customers.
Another realm in which this expectation arises is with Apple computers. You'll always find folks complaining about Apple's large profit margin. It's usually tied in with some hardware cost comparison with PC components. But, dammit, Apple melds Unix with a darn nice UI and packages it up in slick looking hardware. That whole package is worth more that the cost of the parts lumped together. There's nothing wrong with Apple charging a premium for that value, regardless of their underlying costs. And there's nothing wrong with people choosing to pay a premium for that value, either.
Of course, the funny thing in all this is that if everyone has the expectation of lower prices for eBooks, then that does indeed become what the market can bear. But that's different than having an a priori expectation of such a price drop.
I don't feel bad for one damn minute when I pay the same price for an eBook. Sure, I would like it cheaper. I would like the printed book cheaper, too. There's no particular reason I should expect the eBook to be cheaper.
In Defense of eBooks
This is part one of a two-part post. The second part is about eBook pricing and how people who expect, nay demand, that eBooks be cheaper than printed books are simply wrong in that expectation, nay demand. And part of that argument is that eBooks are better than printed books. So this post is about how eBooks are indeed better.
Advantages
1) Customized. I can pick my font. I can pick my font size. I can pick my margins. And I can pick my line spacing. On some platforms, I can also pick text and background colors.
2) User interface.
Turning pages is a pain. Yeah, it's not so bad if the book is middling-sized, with thick pages, cradled in your lap while you sit in a wing-backed chair in front of a fire with a cu of tea on the table next to you.
But, when you're lying on your back in bed, with a heavy hard-backed book, with thin pages, it's a major pain to turn pages without fumbling the whole thing and smacking yourself in the face.
With an eBook reader, it's a click of a button, or a tap on the edge of a screen, or a swipe across a screen. And that's not an exclusive choice. My Nook let's me turn the page in any of those methods.
And I can have multiple bookmarks, with needing scraps of paper or dog-eared pages.
And I can make notes without damaging the book itself.
3) Instant gratification.
You don't have to go to the bookstore to buy eBooks. You don't even have to leave your bed. You can buy them right on the device while you're laying in bed, or anywhere you have the proper connectivity.
4) Multiple platforms.
You can read eBooks on multiple platforms. Even if you take DRM into account, you have multiple options. (See below for more on DRM.) For my Nook-based eBooks, I can also read them on a Mac or PC, on an iPad, and on pretty much any smartphone, including both iPhones and Android phones. There are Nook eBook reading apps on all of these. And if I strip off the DRM, I can convert them for a Kindle, as well as use them in any number of eBook reading apps.
Yeah, I can even print them out.
5) Multiple Copies
Even with DRM, my eBooks are safely stored in multiple locations. At the very minimum, there's the encrypted copy on my Nook, plus a copy at Barnes & Noble. (Plus whatever redundant copies they keep. Which is likely tons.) And if I've pulled down a copy to my smartphone, well then I have a copy there, too.
I got into an argument online with a guy once. I was listing the advantages of eBooks and he took issue with my claim that eBooks are safer. He was equating the eBook reader itself with the eBooks, thinking that if the device broke, the books were gone. But that's not how it works. If your eReader breaks, you can buy a new one, log into your account, and all your eBooks are back. It's like songs and your iPod.
Meanwhile, he thought his physical books were safe and sound in his bookcases. I truly hope he never suffers a house fire or flood.
Note that you can make multiple back-ups of your eBooks even if you leave the DRM intact. The DRM doesn't keep you from making copies. It just prevents you from reading the copies with someone else's device.
And, once you've stripped off the DRM, eBooks are just another file that you can save multiple copies of wherever you please. For my eBooks, I have the encrypted copies on my Nook and at B&N. But then I strip off the DRM and save a nice clean copy on the extra memory card I have in my Nook. And on my computer hard drive. And on my back-ups on my external drives. And on the extra memory card in my wife's Nook. And in my Dropbox account, for easy access on my phone. And maybe on my phone itself, too. My house could burn to the ground and a flood could then wash away the ruins, and I would still have copies of my eBooks.
They're safer. If you think they aren't, you're not thinking clearly.
6) Small Runs and Self-Publishing
While I'm not at all convinced that publishing novel-sized works as eBooks is all that much cheaper than making printed versions, it is true that the bar to publication is lowered when dealing with eBooks. Basically, it becomes much easier to publish novellas and even individual short stories. One of my favorite authors, John Scalzi, has been taking advantage of this by publishing short stories and novellas. In the print world, he would either need to bundle a bunch together into a short story collection, or find some anthology to be a part of. With eBooks, he can simply publish them.
It helps that he's been extremely proactive in building an online fan base. Without that, I doubt it would work well.
eBooks also open the door to affordable self-publishing. No longer do you have to go to a vanity press and buy some minimum number of copies of your own book. Instead, you can put them directly on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
But, wait, you say, what about your claims in the other post about printing costs not being the main cost of books?
Well, it's true. You can self-publish on the cheap. But without professional editing, design, and publicity, you'll probably not sell many books. So, eBooks aren't a panacea for the woes of self-publishing. But they sure beat having stacks of your printed book cluttering up your garage.
All that said, I have bought some self-published fiction and found it to be pretty darn good.
And, actually, printed self-publishing on an on-demand basis has been around for awhile now.
Disadvantages
1) Digital Rights Management (DRM)
What's DRM? It's copy protection, of a sort.
It's true, commercial eBooks usually come with DRM slathered on top, limiting you to reading the book only on one vendor's readers and apps.
But, really, how different is that then a printed book? Yeah, you can rip apart a printed book and Xerox each page. But, man, how tedious!
On the other hand, once you've finished reading a printed book, you can lend it, sell it, or give it away. Can't easily do that with a DRM-encumbered eBook. (True, Nooks have a lending feature, but it's hardly worth mentioning.)
Frankly, you should be ripping the DRM off your eBooks anyway. It's not hard to do, certainly easier than photocopying a printed book.
2) Aesthetics
Yes, there are aesthetics involved in printed books. There's the feel in your hands. There's the smell of the paper. There's the joy of wandering through a bookstore.
And eBooks miss out on that. But, let's be clear here, the aesthetics are secondary. The content of the book is primary. It's like drinking good tea. It's nice if you're drinking it from a fine china cup. It may even enhance the tea. But the tea is the main thing. Not the cup.
Additionally, eBooks have aesthetics all their own, different, to be sure, but not intrinsically better or worse. The text is ultra crisp. The background soothingly neutral. The back of my Nook feels good in my hand, with a contoured back made of some pleasant material. The page-turn buttons click satisfyingly, although they're a little stiff for my tastes.
Sticking with printed books based on the aesthetics is a bit like saying you're sticking with vinyl. Or maybe it's more like refusing to buy a modern car because you really like tailfins.
3) Gifts
Okay, I'll admit it, I miss giving physical books as gifts. It just doesn't feel the same to give an eBook gift certificate, or even to gift a specific book.
But you know what the problem is? It's not with eBooks; it's with me. I still value a physical representation more than a virtual one, although, as I've detailed above, that's a mistaken view. But, hey, I'm only human. And old.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, eBook are just better. So there! Nyah nyah nyah!
(Have I mentioned that you can still read my 2010 NaNoWriMo Failure Novella for free?)
Iowa Nice
And, let us not forget that Cresco is the Birthplace of Genius.
Let's Bowl
When you think of Minnesota and TV, of what do you think?
The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Well, okay, it was a brilliant show, set in Minnesota, but it's not actually a product of Minnesota. (And, please, don't say Coach
or I swear I will come over there and slap some taste into you.)
Mystery Science Theater 3000? Yes, a fine show, one that I started watching before you. Yes, before you. I am so incredibly fucking cool that I watched the very first episode on KTMA, called in after the show and left a message, and had my message played on the next show. (Not the second episode, which was shown immediately after the first. I mean the next time the show was on. So, that would be episode 3, which I can't find on YouTube. But I do know that the clip with my message is online somewhere, I just don't remember where anymore. If you find it, I'm the guy screaming for more.)
But, while MST3K was certainly made in Minnesota, it didn't really have a Minnesota vibe.
If you want a TV show that was both made in Minnesota and feels like Minnesota, then what you want is Let's Bowl. It's a competitive bowling show where two folks with a beef meet each other on the alley of justice to battle for victory.
It's really weird and funny and half-assed. It features local bands, too. Some, like Soul Asylum, of which you probably know. Others, like Manplanet, you probably don't, but should. Occasionally, local restaurants will cater the crowd. Alas, as with most things of demented genius, it didn't last long, a mere two seasons.
I have a few episodes on VHS, which I transfered to DVD. And you can order get most of the episodes on DVD from this one guy online. (He has the blessing of the show's creators.)
But, really, are you going to shell out money for some niche show simply because I recommended it?
Wait! Don't answer that! Because you can now watch it online for free! The DVD guy put most of the episodes online to stream or download. And they're free, although you should kick a buck or two his way to help defray bandwidth costs.
There! Don't say I never did nuthin' for ya!
Carmelite Nuns
Carmelite Nuns: Not as tasty as I was hoping for.
