realtime

The Crack Up

Days Well Spent

There are a million ways to fill a day. Endless choices etching the boundaries and contents of our lives. Not to overdo the philosophy on a beautiful, sunny Sunday, but Of course ultimately these are the things that make us happy and give our lives meaning.

I have a reputation — unfortunate, but honestly earned — for being dour and unsatisfied, but really, I’m in love with the world. My frustration has to do with the impossibility of doing everything I want to do (sometimes, I admit, due to my own fears and weaknesses, which is harder yet). I genuinely envy anyone who has that powerful singlemindedness, any kind of overriding passion that feels inevitable, inescapable.

Maybe it’s a “grass is greener” syndrome, and maybe not, but so it goes. I can’t inhabit anyone else’s mind, so I must be at peace with my own.

Today I’ll read a book front to back, in the sun, and drown in it. I’ll feel wrung out and inspired and powerful in a way nothing else can confer. I’ll feel a twinge of regret over the laundry and dishes and bills to be paid, but silence it with the conviction of happiness.

This is how I make the choices I never regret.

Good Job DC Comics

Admittedly, I’m not seriously into comics, but I know Vertigo. I know it publishes a lot of titles that are well respected and probably a lot more that are likely to be in the future. Titles that people would want to find out about, right? And buy.

People like me, actually. So I go forth:

As an imprint of DC comics, the URL there — www.dccomics.com/vertigo/ — is logical enough to just guess at, but in this case, I didn’t. If you search the Googles for Vertigo Comics, it’s the first link that shows up, as it should be, I suppose. But clicking it then takes you to the busted page above.

The truth is, I only searched for Vertigo’s home page in the first place because the Google search results for the comic in question contained no links whatsoever to any resource owned or controlled by the publisher. I just wanted to find out if I could get the comic through any of the iPad comic apps. Instead:

Reviews : Yes.

3rd party sellers : Yes.

Torrents for illegal scans : Yes.

I was shocked that Google had fallen so low as to fail to index the right sites properly, but it turns out that it’s not Google’s fault at all. No SEO guru in the world can make Google index a page that doesn’t even exist.

So all I can really say to DC Comics is to keep up the good work, and be sure to raise hell over piracy, rail against all those things competing for readers’ time and bemoan the death of your industry. You lost a sale today — probably an ongoing sale, at that — and deprived one of your artists of a sale as well. Sorry.

Post Script: HOW CAN AN ENTIRE COMPANY BE IN FUCKING BETA!? You can’t be a major company and slap BETA on the logo for your website because you didn’t get around to finishing it. Pure laziness.

Grocery Breakdown

This is gonna be kind of a quick post, mostly for myself for future accountability.

I went to Whole Foods yesterday as I”m finally done getting my apartment more or less in order and I’m ready to start cooking again and eating out a lot less. Like, almost never. Also, I’ve been trying to eat less meat for a while now and I thought it might be neat to do some math and figure out how well I did in terms of focusing on produce.

This is a little inaccurate because some things include their packaging, but I’m gonna not obsess about that factor… I think it’s small.

So the numbers look like this:

…..Produce…………………… 23.02 lbs

…..Dairy / Egg……………….. 3.63 lbs

…..Meat / Fish……………….. 2.81 lbs

No matter how much meat I eliminate, I don’t see myself ever going egg / dairy free for sure, but for the purposes of this breakdown, I figured I’d break it out.

Graphically, that works out like this :

Which feels like what I want it to be… largely produce (and of that, almost all fruit and veggies, though I did include my mixed nuts in that segment), almost entirely unprocessed, and with animal products making up a small percentage. I didn’t get milk this week, and if I do, that’ll skew the weight calculation substantially towards dairy, but I don’t really use much milk and probably wont unless I start making delicious Japanese milk bread. Probably better I don’t get milk :)

Oh, since I had the data anyway, I grabbed overall cost per pound : $4.04. Maybe this is useful and maybe not, but I’d love it if all food came with this metric!

Language, man…

I was aware of verlan, but didn’t know this craziness…

“Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included into the Petit Larousse[2] and a doubly “verlanised” version was rendered necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu”

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan

Some (more) thoughts on books…

I’ve been reorganizing my apartment lately, and that means, in large part, reorganizing my books. My books and bookshelves for sure comprise the most significant definition to the (quite limited, of course) space in my apartment. I like being surrounded by books, and that’s reason enough for my reticence to purchase ebooks in any real quantity.

Anyway, what I’ve been thinking lately, more than anything else, is how much I dislike the Mass Market Paperback format. These have never really been my favorite, and particularly when the book starts pushing 400-500 pages they really start to become less pleasant. Given my genre tastes, I have more than a few of these fat little books, some that push up to 700, 800 or more pages, and as much as I still prefer paper to pixels, these suckers have to lean back and hold each other tightly to avoid falling over that precipice.

I’m also not a huge fan of hardbacks, except for books that I just really love, or if the edition itself has some additional aesthetic value. The truth is that my favorite format for books is what I’m pretty sure they call Trade Paperback, though it should be noted that there seem to be few hard and fast rules about the specific dimensions of these books, much as is the case for hardbacks¹. Still, they tend to be somewhere around 9” x 6”, which feels better to me. They’re often — though not always — printed on better paper than your MM edition too.

So this leads me to a compromise position I’m going to just go ahead and put forth, for the time being, without any deep analysis of the business implications and focus on what I think would make me happy…

1. Discontinue Mass Market editions entirely (or nearly so). The Mass Market paperback owes it’s existence primarily to people’s desire to have a lightweight, portable and less intrinsically valuable (and therefore also inexpensive) book to carry around with them. Sound familiar? These are precisely the arguments in favor of ebook adoption at present. The eBook is the new mass market.

2. Make the primary physical edition of a book a higher grade Trade Paperback. Something that would be towards the high end of current TPBs in terms of materials, cover art, and finish. These will cost somewhat more than current TPBs, but still less than a current new-release hardback.

3. Print hardback editions in much lower volumes, as a premium product for people who care more about the benefits a hard-bound volume provides. They’ll cost somewhat more than current hardbacks due to lower volumes² and better materials, art, and perhaps other “value added” type perks, but that’s ok, because the people who want that stuff will happily pay for it.

4. Maybe the more important thing to me, is to find some way to offer a package deal, or a credit towards alternate editions. I would take more risks on books I’m not totally sure about in advance if I could buy a cheap eBook edition, and know that if i end up falling in love with it, I can buy a physical copy at 1/2 price (or reduced by 1/2 of the price of the eBook, or some such arrangement).

I have several higher level concerns about eBooks that have to do with DRM, the quality of the displays, the quality and qualities of the software³ and the social implications of short-lived digital file formats as compared to pressed wood pulp and ink, but the above would make a huge impact on shifting my feelings on the matter.

I’m not a representative consumer, I suppose, and it’s highly possible that even high volume purchasers like myself actually represent a negligible percentage of industry profits, so making me happy doesn’t really count for much. That said, with the exception of number 4, which would have to be analyzed more carefully, I can’t see that any of these suggestions would lose the industry money, and I suspect that transitioning away from bajillions of Mass Market Paperbacks would be a financial benefit, not to mention an ecological one. That it also alleviates Kerry Benton’s prickly aesthetics can only be considered a bonus.

Usability Failures - The “I really am sorry your business is screwed, but this isn’t helping.” edition

So I want to read an article on the NY Times site this morning.  It doesn’t probably matter which, but for the record it was this one — http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09payroll.html?_r=1&hp — about the new stimulus package.  

So I open it up on my iPad only to be presented by a fully intrusive full page overlay advertisement for some stupid iPad app I don’t care about.  But that’s not really the issue honestly…  I know it’s hard for newspapers these days, and if my having to spend that second to close an ad is helping them at all, well, fine, I can live with that.  It’s still ugly (the page loads first of course, and only then does the ad pop up, re-scale, and present itself, which is atrocious and unnecessary even if you do, as I have, accept the ad’s existence) but we’ll live.

No, the failure is that the ad’s close target in the upper right corner lies directly over the “Register” link on the underlying page.  That’s already kind of a shady way to target people that may tap twice or something, but it’s actually worse…  the touch actually passes THROUGH the close target and onto the link!

What this means, in practice, is that there is actually no way to close the ad manually and get to the article at all.  Trying to do so just opens up the registration page.

If the target had said “Register to avoid ads like this!”, well, fine.  If there hadn’t been a close target at all and they had made it clear that the ad would just go away after a bit, also fine.  But this kind of nonsense makes me want to chuck my iPad across the room and also never give the damn Times another iota of my attention.  

You’re suffering and I get that, but you’re not going to trick or annoy me into paying for your product.  Make your product excellent and presentation better and entice me to pay for it.  There are reasons I pay for The Economist and not the NY Times these days and this sort of reader punishing design is among them.