Shorthand for Nothing

I was searching for Joey Comeau’s Overqualified the other day on Amazon, and I saw something that caught my eye: a listing for his short story collection, It’s Too Late To Say I’m Sorry. I invite you to click through this link and see if you can spot anything wrong. The Loose Teeth Press link might help in this regard; it certainly enlightened me.

The problem? The Amazon link is selling the book for $115.24. Loose Teeth Press has it for $12.95.

I have seen items go for ridiculously high prices on ebay in the past. Harvey Danger’s original demo tape, for instance, sold for something like $300. But these collector’s items are usually rare. The price is inflated by this rarity, coupled with a demand for the product. This book, in contrast, is easily obtained for about $15, and even if it bears a signature (and this is speaking as a man who values his signatures), it’s certainly not $100 worth of rarity. I bet you could get a signature for the price of a SASE. Personalized, even.

It’s obviously just a cynical attempt to capitalize on the association, of course, and an even more cynical way to capitalize on the fact that sometimes people will buy something that is overpriced just because it is overpriced. Selling a book for ten dollars makes it sound like you can easily get it for ten dollars. Selling it for a hundred makes it sound like some rare volume that you’ll be pained to part with, and went through pains to acquire. That it’s probably used only sweetens the apparent deal: the dog-eared pages and the slightly tattered cover makes it look like you’ve just unearthed some arcane volume. If it has a signature it makes it seem like the ultimate of literary treasures.

Someone will probably snap it up eventually. They’ll might even leave the seller a positive review of how great the book is and how lucky they feel to have found it. The seller has thousands upon thousands of positive reviews, so apparently their racket is working out well for them.

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Something I really hadn’t done since leaving Seattle is play board, card, or tabletop games of any variety. It seemed for a while that the days of Settlers of Catan, Munchkin, and D&D had long since passed. Mostly, they did so unmourned—there are other things to occupy my time. But we actually (finally) played a game of Catan today, and I’d honestly forgotten how much fun it is, cliche as it is to say it.

There’s something to be said for a regular game night, mostly that it’s good fun, and frequently highly amusing. It fulfills all of my desires to be a deranged cackling villain unveiling his master plan once it is probably too late for anyone to do anything about it. You know, except for all those times that people do something unexpected to foil them, which is pretty much always. (Yes, all of my gaming habits ultimately relate back to this deranged cackling villain concept. SHUT UP IT IS QUIRKY AND CHARMING.)

But not tonight! Tonight I won. Probably because two of the people were new and didn’t understand the rules but still.

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I found this article on Twitter.

It was written by one of those old media types who hasn’t quite come to terms with Web 2.0. He probably dearly misses the days of snail mail, when a cell phone was just for emergencies, when if you had a friend you called them or wrote them to keep in touch. Before the days of ambient, user-created updating.

Twitter is an interesting phenomenon. There are a number of people who believe they know exactly what it’s for, and who deride those who use it differently–but really, they’re just being sort of prescriptivist. If I only want to use Twitter to follow my friends, nobody is stopping me. If I want to use it to meet people and dazzle the world with my 140-character wit, that’s fine too. You can use it to network, even, if you want. I’ve come to one real conclusion: as soon as you start saying what you think Twitter is all about, you’re wrong. It’s a communication tool.

And it’s a powerful communications tool, at that. Most people use it, to borrow the term from a friend, ambiently. I check Twitter to see what my friends are doing, as well as a few other people I find interesting. It’s a way to fairly unobtrusively keep people updated–I can learn about my Senator’s activities on the Hill while I’m finding out if anyone is going out to lunch in Cambridge.

The author of the article linked earlier believes there is no meaningful conversation happening on Twitter, that it is people in love with the tool. I think he might be missing the point here. Perhaps that’s what happens when you write for the Daily Beast. But you can’t blame the medium for the way you’re using it. (I recommend TweetDeck, by the way, if you want to follow a bunch of people without actually paying attention to them. Crisis averted.)

Oh, and one more thing:

Twitter is useful for building networks of followers–as the writer of the article mentions, Lance Armstrong is building cancer awareness. But let’s remember one thing. If Twitter were not already being used for building networks of communication–if people didn’t use it to inform the world they were excited or had a bad day or to find out their friends are hungry or tired or need help with something–it would never be useful for that sort of thing.

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This afternoon I had lunch with a number of people I hadn’t seen since early December of 2008, as well as a few people I didn’t know. There was something curiously settling about seeing them again, though most of them were people I could at best call long-term acquaintances. In a way I feel like somehow this was a return to normalcy–the winter break is over, life can continue again.

As is often the case with such exchanges, there was almost no comment on the fact that I hadn’t seen a number of them for over a month. Things just continued more or less as they were, to the point that when someone commented on the fact that she hadn’t seen me since I had cut my hair I was actually surprised.

Information Superhighway 4 is coming up soon. Somehow this ridiculous monthly party has become normalcy for me. It’s amazing, but at the same time it reminds me that I’m a part of a legitimate culture here, and not just a bubble isolated from reality. There’s a critical mass. It may have been a bubble once, but it’s too big for that now. This is the sort of thing that comforts me when I wonder if I’m just tricking myself.

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Things like this annoy me a great deal.

Let me start by saying that I believe everyone deserves fair treatment, that I acknowledge that sexism/racism/etc are still a huge problem and are sticky issues we need to address. That said, I detest how most such movements handle things–namely by complaining loudly and at length about it, and accusing people of being actively, deliberately sexist. (The speaker in question acknowledged that this was not the case–but seriously, don’t cause a scene about it. YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.)

The blog to which I just linked, though–oh, the whinging sense of entitlement going on there. The self-righteous “you didn’t have any women on any panels and this is because of Sexism” tone. There is nothing about this sort of thing I approve of.

If you’re going to advocate civil rights, which you should, could you be kind enough not to act all petulant about it? Patience and understanding go a long way towards making people approve of your cause rather than doing what I’m doing right now, which is casually dismissing you as a waste of my time. When you take up a cause you become its ambassador. There are lots of people working towards feminism etc. who are perfectly decent individuals and are doing a lot of good things–but it’s much easier to remember someone who is whiny and demanding about it. That sticks with you.

As an aside: in the little microcosm of internet culture I live in here in Boston, the male-female ratio is kind of ridiculous. Sure, there are girls, and many of them are just as geeky as the rest of us, but there’s just not as many of them. Sometimes instead of insisting that it is Simply Wrong, perhaps it’s worth pausing to consider why, exactly, this might be the case in the first place. If nothing else, maybe once you’ve done this you will stop acting as if it’s the worst crime against humanity ever committed.

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Well, that was an adventure. It was my first time in New York; I didn’t do anything too touristy but I was not disappointed. There are diners, there are things open late at night, there are cheap food places open late at night, there are coffee shops where I can sit for four or five hours reading Sarah Vowell. The streets are on a grid. The subway system kind of makes sense.

I mean, seriously, where does that go wrong?

ROFLThing was good times. There is not much else to add, except that the afterparty took place in a loud club with annoying club music and REALLY FUCKING EXPENSIVE DRINKS so it was something of a let-down (especially after the initial, if brief, belief that drinks were free). It was also too loud for conversation, and I’m not much for dancing at the best of times–especially not when I am carrying my bag around because there is also a two dollar coat/bag check.

Still, a successful weekend all told. Good conversations, good speakers, good liveblogging. Hurray.

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HELLO TIME FOR MORE as soon as something starts happening!!! Jumps etc.

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Okay now it is time for more liveblogging. I appreciate that I don’t really know what is going on. So, after the jump, PART TWO.

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Getting in late on account of not being able to find a place to sit down and plug in but PROBLEM RECTIFIED, so please to click through, after the jump.

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