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| Sunday, May 27th, 2012 | |
irishwmabroadfd
|
3:31p |
Enemies in the office (Executive PA Magazine, July 2011)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Sadhbhzilla/~3/m0i5cR1n4aI/enemies-in-office-executive-pa-magazine.html This piece on office friendships, workplace bullying and how to cope when good working relationships go bad was an interesting piece to cover. I was only able to include a few of the stories I was told but - from the amount of responses I received to one simple tweet asking for people with experience of office bullying - it certainly appears this is an issue that many people deal with on a day to day basis. You can find the full issue of the magazine on their website where you can see the full piece, or email me if you would like to see more.
 A study by the Workplace
Bullying Institute found that 35% of people have either been or are
being intimidated in their workplace. Sophie* found this out the hard
way when she was promoted over her former friend, Jenny. “Jenny became
not just my enemy but an outright bully. She complained that it wasn't
fair because I'd gotten all these lucky breaks and opportunities. She
couldn’t see that the harder I had worked the luckier I had got.”
Office friendships can make - or break - your
career, so how do you make them work for you? Sadhbh Warren investigates.
 No one wants to be the office wallflower, but
there’s no denying that friendships at work can be a minefield. Just ask Anna*,
an EA who quit her dream role. Her hard-earned promotion became a daily hell
when a former friend turned on her. Harassed for confidential information over
coffee, ostracized from social events and bad-mouthed over the water-cooler,
she ended up leaving her “perfect job” for a fresh start elsewhere.
Anna’s story ended badly, but you can be
professional and still enjoy your co-workers’ company. Genuine friendships are
a career asset and being promoted doesn’t mean leaving your network of friends
behind – provided you have built the right relationship in the first place.
 |
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bobangryflower
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5:29a |
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| Saturday, May 26th, 2012 |
shannon_a
|
9:33p |
Bike Adventure!
Went out for lunch today, as I often do when I'm free on Saturday. It was so nice out (surprisingly so, given predictions of cool and wind) that afterward I decided to keep on biking. Fortunately, I keep sunscreen in my backpack for such emergencies.
I headed straight north, up the Ohlone Greenway. I now know the best way to get around the construction in Albany. Sadly, I discovered that the trail in El Cerrito is under heavy construction too. And, it's not as easy to go around that. I ended up on either on busy streets or hilly streets, which was no good.
When I reached Richmond, I turned west onto the Richmond Greenway, and took that to its end. There's still a discontinuity in downtown Richmond, but I did see a map today that marked that area as "incomplete". So, hopefully, some day ...
At the end of the Richmond Greenway there's this intersection that always feel full of possibilities. To the east you have the Richmond Greenway. To the north you have continuous bike path up through the Wildcat Canyon intersection and beyond that to the landfill. To the west you have Point Richmond and Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline. To the south you have Richmond Inner Harbor.
It was another spur of the moment decision to head out to Point Richmond. I explored the (teeny) town for a bit and even found the Masquers Theatre that Chris & Marie have taken us to a couple of times. I also saw the recently reopened Richmond Plunge, a gigantic indoor pool (though sadly only the outside & the entrance). Then I biked through the tunnel to the Miller-Knox Regional Shoreline, which was my goal.
I love the Shoreline. It reminds me of Ed Levine park, near Milpitas, where I spent many summer days when I was young. There's lake and grass and brownish hills rising all around. But, bonus, unlike Ed Levine you have the Bay to the other side. I read out there for a while (Locke & Key, Volume 2) and biked around the Park. As in Point Richmond proper, I explored a couple of places I hadn't before. First, I went out to the old Ferry Launch, which is mainly falling down pier & railroad track, but still a neat view into the past. Then, past the yacht club, I biked out on a spit that cuts further into the Bay. It's got lots of fancy houses on stilts out over the Bay to either side. Very pretty.
Nice views of San Francisco all around, and a pretty unique view of just one tower of the Golden Gate, peaking out past Angel Island.
I'm pretty sure there's new Bay Trail just beyond the spit, but if so I didn't spot it. I was getting pretty tired, so I wasn't much for exploring any more by that point, in any case. So I biked back up over the hill that protects the area, then took surface roads to Richmond Harbor and from there through the salt marshes, past Point Isabel, and up more of the Bay Trail before cutting inland near Target and rejoining the Greenway past Gilman. It was a pretty standard ride home from there.
Total time out was about 3 and a half hours. Total mileage was 26. I was quite tuckered out from around the salt marshes, so it was a long ride for me. |
| Sunday, May 27th, 2012 |
craigoxbrow
|
12:32a |
Humperdinck was never going to win Eurovision due to the Florin and Guilder voting bloc. Current Mood:  silly |
| Saturday, May 26th, 2012 | |
clawclawpeckrss
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11:17p |
Assembling
http://clawclawpeck.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/assembling/ http://clawclawpeck.wordpress.com/?p=873 Plain and simple, I’m a sucker for supers RPGs.
Thus it was that I grabbed a copy of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game from Margaret Weis Productions and after some time to read and digest it I ran a one-shot today (wherein the heroes faced yet another splinter cell of AIM and their hideous creation U.L.T.R.O.D.O.K). I’d heard that the game takes a different twist on the genre – it is much more narrative-driven than other games I had played. Based on my experimentation with adapting Dogs in the Vineyard to supers a few years back, this was very appealing feature to me. And following Jack’s review of it a couple posts down I had to check it out.
MHR uses dice pools of varying sizes and descriptive Distinctions in place of traditional stats like strength and agility, and on the surface bears a lot of similarity to DitV. It maintains a lot of nice flexibility for players, encouraging them to be creative with what they’re doing and using the mechanics to back that up rather than the other way around. You won’t find pages and pages of detailed rules on how individual powers work in MHR; they’re kind of general and handwavey. There’s no detailed granularity – we don’t get exactly how many tons the Thing can lift or whether he is stronger than Colossus (both have d12 or “Godlike” Strength). For me, that’s fine but I can see where it would rankle some folks.
Beneath the veneer of simplicity though MHR has a *lot* of moving bits. There’s a system of “Plot Points” that players earn and can be spent in a number of ways. There’s a “Doom Pool” of dice used by the GM (or “Watcher”) that works in a similar but not exactly the same fashion and has a lot of caveats to juggle. Each power set can have a handful of different Special Effects that tweak how the dice pool is constructed. And the recovery rules are extremely murky and in a few places I found them wanting (there’s very little way to recover your own damage/Stress but others can do it for you, although if you are badly Stressed it is seemingly incredibly hard for someone to help you recover and far more likely they will do more damage to you). And there is an *art* to manipulating your die pool and results that I don’t completely get yet (I never got it in DitV either, but some of my players almost instinctively did so). So while the game stays in a strongly narrative zone for character powers and abilities, the fiddliness seems pushed down into the actual operational mechanics.
That’s not to say I dislike the game. I found it very difficult to get my brain around how the ruleset worked, so decided to run a one shot to test it out. The game was a lot of fun and a number of the pieces I was having difficulty understanding in the abstract came together nicely in play. It was only one game so I’m not sure I was doing everything right. But everything seemed to hum along and the mechanics didn’t get in the way of us all coming up with some very comic-booky awesome actions. There was fair amount of focus on manipulating the dice pool results that took me out of the immersion from time to time and the randomness of the dice were exceptionally cruel from time to time. I don’t think it was my ideal system but it was solid A+++ would play again.
The highlights for me were
1) being able to have characters of different power levels all at the table together and not having anyone feel overshadowed. In our group we had Thor, Captain America (the Bucky Barnes version), Iron Man, Beast and Elsa Bloodstone (from NextWave). You’d think that Thor and Tony would outshine everyone else in that kind of setup but it really didn’t happen. Perhaps this was a feature of a compressed scale – everybody’s powers range only d6, d8, d10 or d12, a feature that has rankled me in other systems but which worked well here.
2) Assets, Complications, and Scene Distinctions. These all work very much like Aspects in the FATE system – scene distinctions can be part of the scene and used by characters to replace or supplement their own distinctions in dice pools, and assets can be set up by one character to give another some extra “oomph” in a later action. Complications work like an additional damage track; a character can be taken out by a sufficiently high complication tied to them (the example in the rulebook is Colossus bending an iron bar around some goons. He hasn’t pummeled the goons into unconsciousness but they’re done for all intents and purposes).
3) the Doom Pool. This is a side pool of dice the Watcher uses both to boost dice pools for the bad guys or to power certain abilities and also as a standing dice pool for environmental effects. If a hero is trying to shore up a falling building or any kind of situation where there’s not a specific character to roll against, the Watcher uses the Doom Pool for opposition. As the game goes on the Doom Pool grows from its paltry starting 2d6 to a size where it poses a real threat. I was a little concerned the game would degenerate into a war of attrition of players vs the Doom Pool, and in some ways it did but it wasn’t long and drawn out and it felt more like a resource than an obstacle.
So yeah, good stuff, looking forward to the next books being published (the Civil War “event” book should be out in pdf in a couple weeks with the hardcopy to follow some time thereafter), largely so I can see more examples of how characters are put together. My plan is to run a one-shot of ICONS soon so I can get a feel for which of the two hits closer to my sweet spot.
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jkahane
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10:49a |
Card and Board Game Friday Night
As noted a couple of blog entries ago, it's a tradition with my gaming groups that the week after CanGames, we play board games. Friday night was no exception to the rule. After my Friday gamers arrived around 7:35 pm, we chatted a bit about stuff over a light tea break, and then got down to playing games. We started off with a set of games of Poo! The Card Game during which everyone got to play as it's set up to be played by between 2 and 8 players. The games lasted about 10-minutes, and were a lot of fun. The goal in Poo! is to inflict sixteen (16) points of poo on your opponents; if everyone else is out of the game, you win. I didn't win any of the three games that we played, with Nick winning the first game over Joanne, Kathy winning the second game over Ellie, and Angela winning the third game over me. Lots of fun that game, with flinging poo everywhere, but the group treated the game more seriously (other than Ellie, of course), and all the bad jokes are found on the game cards! :) The second game of the night was the brother card game to Poo! The Card Game, Nuts! The Card Game. Similar in style and feel to the former, Nuts! The Card Game is set up for between 2 and 6 players, with the victory conditions being the winner is the first player to have a stash of 20 or more points of nuts. Since the maximum number of players for this game was 6, we played four games of this, each lasting about 10 minutes once more. Ellie played in each of the games this time out, and won two of them, beating Kathy the first time and Nick the second time, while in the other two games Tom beat me and Kathy beat Ellie. Lots of fun in this game, and in some ways I actually prefer this one to the previous game. With Ellie all tucked up in my bed around 8:30 pm to 9:00 pm (I can't remember the exact time), the adults turned to another game, longer this time, for the final entertainment of the evening. The Sword and the Stars is a game of galactic Empire building in which one to five players guide the destinies of star-faring races as they expand from star system to star system. Based on SPI's popular Empires of the Middle Ages, The Sword and the Stars simulates the dynamics of an empire that stretches across hundreds of light years. Each player controls the central government of one race; during a year, the race may attempt to expand its range of operation through the creation of a StarGate, defend its system through the construction of a GuardianWeb, improve its technical level, encourage trade, or go on raids of pillage and conquest. Special rules cover the Confederation of Worlds, random events (from advances and failures of technology to the toppling of governments), colonization, and the appearance of alien raiders. The game includes a 17" x 22" map showing one quarter of a spiral galaxy, 56 Year Cards, 400 cardboard playing pieces, rules, and various playing aids. The Friday night players had expressed an interest in the game for some time, and this seemed like a suitable evening to play. Since the game is only meant for five players and there were seven of us, it was decided that I would play with Kathy and that Joanne and Angela would team up to give us all something to do. We played what is called the Galactic Cycle of the game, and the gamers agreed by and large that it was an enjoyable game, though not as simplistic as stuff like Ticket To Ride, The Princes of Machu Picchu, and some of the other board games that they have done over the past few years. That said, David said that he liked the strategy of the game, and was quite fond of how it played. We didn't finish the game, of course, but suffice to say that the Draka were a menace to all the player Empires throughout the game, and several conflicts were fought over strategic star systems. Oh, and raids were...common. :) Had a good evening playing the two card games and the board game with the Friday night group. It's been a while since we did this sort of thing, and I've missed it quite a bit. Nick suggested that perhaps during my birthday month we take one week out of the month and do board games again on the Friday night, and the others thought this was a wonderful idea. Just gotta make sure that the games chosen can also include Ellie until her bed time. Current Mood:  chipper |
shannon_a
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12:17a |
Grimoire Games & Amazon
Finished up a complete draft of my rpg history article on Grimoire Games (and on Dave Hargrave and early RP gaming in the SF Bay Area). It's one that I'm very pleased with, because I think it does a really nice job of shedding a light on what the early RPG hobby looked like, at least on this coast. As I wrote in my intro to the history, it's the first one that I really wished had gone in the book.
This one was slightly exhausting to write because the written record of the company was so scant. I only managed to turn up three Dave Hargrave "interviews"; fortunately two of them were extensive bios in Different Worlds. The third was part of a semi-hit-piece in New West magazine which Greg S. was kind enough to put me onto. I'm aware of one more notable article by Hargrave, in super small-press Abyss #17, from Ragnarok Press. I'd still like to somehow get a copy of that article, but for now I'm content.
Despite the scant primary sources from Hargrave, I was able to get some pretty extensive help from Marc S. (on Arduin and the second edition) and Donald R. (on the early bay area gaming culture), so that was part of what made the article come out pretty good. Greg S., Steve P., and others helped too.! But it was still a lot more work than just reading a pile of interviews and design notes. The article will show up in two parts in my Designers & Dragons column on 6/4 and 7/9. If you subscribe to the RSS, you should see new articles as they appear.
Amazon is the other company on my mind this evening, for they sadly disappointed me. We'd ordered The Amazing Race Season 4 from them, as they've started pressing on-demand DVDs, and we're happy to finally get to see the old seasons of a reality show we like.
Unfortunately, when we sat down to watch this newest DVD this evening, as a start-of-the-holiday-weekend treat (and also a treat for Kimberly who is sick), we discovered that our 3-DVD set had shipped in a 1-DVD box (indeed, with 1 DVD!). Kimberly called up Amazon and after talking to a somewhat clueless but very helpful service rep, got them to send us a new (hopefully complete) set of the DVD which is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. I have to give that credit as very good customer support.
Well, we can at least watch this first DVD, we decided. So we turned it on ... and found the DVD almost unwatchable, getting all pixelated and skipping several seconds at a time ... constantly.
So that's strike two for Amazon's DVD on Demands program. Mind you, we've got the two previous seasons by this method without problem (though the DVDs occasionally got a little pixelated, showing off perhaps a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time setup). But, if this was my first experience, it would probably be my last as well. |
| Friday, May 25th, 2012 |
ectropy
|
9:40p |
Regrets
What do you regret in your life? Current Mood:  curious |
montecook
|
5:19p |
A Couple of Quick Follow-Ups
A Couple of Quick Follow-UpsIn regard to my last two blog posts, I have a couple of things to add or clarify. 1. On Crowdfunding: Although my post was really about being a contributor to crowdfunded projects, and not a creator, I will say that I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I am so in favor of crowdfunding as a means to launch creative projects, and so certain that I'll be launching my own crowdfunded project in the next few months, I'm already consciously kicking "it" forward.
2. On Character Creation: It was not my intention to imply that people who like hours spent creating the perfect character were in the wrong. I just think that it's also valid to want to do it a different way. Most current games cater to people who love detailed character creation, and I think it would likely be a mistake to launch a game without doing so. I am interested, however, in exploring ways to do both--provide for in-depth chargen, and also provide for both low-intensity (simple) chargen and no-intensity (pregen) chargen. |
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forbeck_feed
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9:08p |
Reddit AMA on Sunday
http://www.forbeck.com/2012/05/25/reddit-ama-on-sunday/ http://www.forbeck.com/?p=3901 This Sunday, May 27, I’ll be taking part in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. The thread should be up in the RPG section early Sunday afternoon. Just jump in and start shooting out questions, and I’ll stop by to answer them in between writing sprints on the Leverage novel I’m writing.
I’ve never done one of these before, but they look like a lot of fun. Thanks to Fred Hicks for pointing me toward this and to Daniel Mckenna for showing me the ropes and getting this set up.
While the thread’s in the RPG section, feel free to ask about my books, 12 for ’12, or whatever else you like. As they say, it’s Ask Me Anything. |
mizkit
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9:36p |
my boring life
Apparently my life is sufficently boring that I can’t think of anything to blog about. I have to draw winners for the BYD contest, but since I already blew my first deadline on that and there’s a long weekend coming up in America, I think I’ll wait until next week.
In the meantime, random things:
I believe this is very much the sort of thing the phrase “Oh, snap!” was invented for: Back to back questions presented to Robert Downey Jr and Scarlett Johansson.
*laughs* My wallet died, so I found an old one I knew I had lying around. It has Sarah/![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) shadowhwk‘s work phone # ca 2001, a 1999 bank receipt, a photo of me & Ted from 1997, a 1994 pic of my sister, & the crowning glory, the thing that made me actually laugh out loud because it was so unexpected, an early 90s photo of the unrequited high school Love Of My Life. *laughs & laughs*
Speaking of pictures, this is probably the most awesome one I’ve seen this week. MIB-Avengers mashup FTW!
I believe I have got all the ducks in a row for launching ORIGINS next Friday. Having re-read the stories, I feel that the ORSSP patrons got their money’s worth, and that so too will the people buying it as an e-book. *waits impatiently for Friday next*
(x-posted from the essential kit) |
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pennyarcaderss
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8:05p |
News Post: Disruptive Technology
http://penny-arcade.com/2012/05/25/disruptive-technology
Tycho: Whenever we come up with something dumb, something that’s supposed to be a joke like the game in the strip, a lot of times it starts to grow on me. I don’t know! I think there’s a lot of headroom there. I do have a Kickstarter problem, though, and it may require a technology a sophisticated as Gabriel’s to bring this irresistible drive to its conclusion. Part of it is that… yeah. Right? Arimaa is cool, and a beautiful set that honors Arimaa is wanty, that is to say, it generates want. I think that I could elaborate |
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makinglight
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3:04p |
"Felony Interference with a Business Model"
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013973.html Fox, CBS, and NBC have sued DISH Networks over its "Auto Hopper" feature, which allows viewers to auto-skip commercials in programs they record.
What's wonderful isn't that the TV networks are claiming that skipping commercials is "copyright infringement." I mean, that's insane, but no, there's more. The networks are also claiming that if you record a bunch of shows intending to skip the commercials...and then, the next day, you watch the commercials anyway...you're guilty of "copyright infringement" anyway, because you intended to skip the commercials back when you recorded the shows. They're arguing that this supposed "infringement" (which is, of course, not actually infringement) inheres in the intent.
It goes without saying that the word "copyright" is here being used in ways that would be utterly unrecognizable to the people who originally devised the concept. Beyond that, this is Because-We-Say-So legal reasoning of the purest, most flamboyant kind.
The problem isn't that these loopy arguments are going to win in this particular case. The problem is that the entertainment conglomerates have the resources to keep doing this kind of thing nearly forever, endlessly wearing away at the legal system and at our notions of what's just and unjust.
Pretty much the same way the energy conglomerates have nearly unlimited resources to keep propping up the notion that there's a "controversy" over whether we're undergoing anthropogenic global climate change.
The problem is that in order to spur economic development, we created a class of human organizations that are sociopathic. Our army of killer robots has made it clear: they work for themselves, not for us, and they will break the world. |
jkahane
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3:32p |
CanGames 2012 Final Thoughts
Here's some final thoughts on the CanGames, 2012 convention. You can read the post on CanGames 2012, Day 3 by following the link. This journal entry won't be all that long, but there are a few pictures, so the post is behind the cut. ( Final Thoughts on CanGames 2012 )And that's it. The final post about this year's CanGames gaming convention in Ottawa. Hope everyone enjoyed these four journal entries about the convention, and please remember that comments are welcome. :) Current Mood:  accomplished |
jkahane
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3:03p |
Friday Night Gaming - Board Games
Came home from work about twenty minutes ago. Absolutely scorching heat out there. I've been sitting here for around fifteen minutes, writing up the basic final overview of this year's CanGames, and should be posting that up within the next half hour to forty-five minutes. In the meantime, got the Friday gaming group coming out to play this evening. As is the tradition with me every year right after CanGames, the following weekend always consists of playing board games, and tonight will be no exception. We're going play some hands of Poo! The Card Game and Nuts! The Card Game. Since these are very short games, afterwards the plan is to play a 2- to 4-hour board game of some sort, with all kinds of options on the table. (But not Ticket to Ride, as the Friday night gamers have had enough of that game for now!) Looking forward to see what game we play tonight. Current Mood:  amused |
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jonnynexusfeed
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4:57p |
Just How Can SpaceX Design And Operate Rockets So Cheaply?
http://jonnynexus.com/2012/05/25/just-how-can-spacex-design-and-operate-rockets-so-cheaply/ http://jonnynexus.com/?p=1231 This afternoon, a SpaceX Dragon capsule docked to the International Space Station, having been launched into orbit earlier in the week by SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rocket, which is powered by SpaceX’s own Merlin engines. This is a historic achievement. SpaceX had already become the non-governmental organisation to launch a vehicle into space, and then return it to the Earth, following a successful test flight last year. Now they have added a second milestone; that of being the first non-government organisation to dock a spacecraft with a space station.
And they’ve done this far more cheaply than NASA could have done:
Thus, the predicted the cost to develop the Falcon 9 if done by NASA would have been between $1.7 billion and $4.0 billion.
SpaceX has publicly indicated that the development cost for Falcon 9 launch vehicle was approximately $300 million. Additionally, approximately $90 million was spent developing the Falcon 1 launch vehicle which did contribute to some extent to the Falcon 9, for a total of $390 million. NASA has verified these costs.
[link]
To put that in context: the entire development of the Falcon series of launch vehicles has cost significantly less than the cost of a single shuttle launch.
SpaceX was founded by PayPal billionaire Elon Musk with the stated aim of using the streamlined and agile approach taken by modern high-tech start-up companies to design, build and operate launch vehicles and spacecraft far more cheaply than all previous efforts. A lot of people said it couldn’t be done; it’s starting to look like they might have been wrong.
And while watching the NASA TV feed that I had up on a corner of my screen this afternoon, I think I spotted a rather nice clue that perhaps throws just a little light on how they might have done it. The TV feed was switching between shots of the Dragon, taken from the ISS, shots of NASA mission control at Houston, which is charge of the American portion of the ISS, and shots of SpaceX’s mission control at Hawthorne, California, which was in charge of the Dragon. I grabbed a few quick screenshots.
This is the NASA control room.
It’s what you’d expect from a space agency’s mission control room. Something that features custom desks, looks like it belongs in the lair of a James Bond villain, and probably cost several tens of millions of dollars to create.
This is the SpaceX control room.
It’s just a room, with office desks and chairs, and LCD monitors. Says it all, really.
And just to celebrate the occasion, here’s a shot of Dragon floating alongside the ISS.
It’s awesome. I cannot stress highly enough just how impressed I am with what the guys at SpaceX have done. In just a few years they’ve designed and built, from scratch, not only the rocket that launched the dragon, but the engines that power it, plus the dragon capsule itself, a vehicle that’s capable of atmospheric re-entry and will, some years down the line, carry astronauts.
It’s an incredible achievement. |
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forbeck_feed
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2:00p |
Why Do Ebooks Sometimes Cost More?
http://www.forbeck.com/2012/05/25/why-do-ebooks-sometimes-cost-more/ http://www.forbeck.com/?p=3896 It seems crazy, but sometimes you can find ebooks on Amazon and other online stores for more than you’d pay for the hardcover. Case in point: I Am A Pole (And So Can You!), the new kids’ book by Stephen Colbert. As I write this, the price for the ebook is $9.99, yet you can grab the hardcover for $9.59.
So why is that?
It’s because the two editions of the book are sold in different ways. The hardcover is sold on the standard wholesale model used with most physical goods. The publisher sets a suggested price ($15.99, in this case), but then sells it to distributors or retailers at a substantial discount, often around 50% off.
That means a company like Amazon pays roughly $8 for that book and can then sell it at whatever price it likes. In this case, it wants to move a lot of the book, so it cuts its price to $9.59. It only makes $1.59 for each book, but it supposedly makes up for that by selling lots more books.
Ebooks, however, work on the agency model, which is what the music industry uses too. The publisher sets the price for the ebook, and the retailers have to then sell it at that price. Since there’s no physical product to ship, the retailer doesn’t take any risks in carrying the ebook — not even the negligible risks involves with carrying returnable books — so the publisher only gives the retailer an agent’s cut of 30% of the price.
In the case of Colbert’s book, the publisher gets $7 for the ebook rather than $8 for the hardcover, and Amazon takes $2.99 profit instead of $1.59. Even though the publisher makes less money on the ebook, most of them would rather go with the agency model to ensure that retailers don’t discount the ebook so heavily that it destroys their hardcopy sales. In cases like this, it’s just worked a little too well.
Of course, the Department of Justice just filed a lawsuit against the Big Six publishers for allegedly colluding with Apple to force the agency model on its ebook retailers. This means the agency model might go away soon, at least for a while, and we’ll go back to the wholesale model for ebooks too.
It’s a little insane to sell two editions of essentially the same product — at least in the minds of many readers — in two different ways. Moving everything over to one model or the other would solve that, but it’s likely to get more confusing in the short run as some of the publishers ditch the agency model while others fight to keep it. |
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forbeck_feed
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1:45p |
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grognardia_rss
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11:30a |
Open Friday: "Niche" Games
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-friday-niche-games.html Last night I had the chance to play my first session of Dungeon Crawl Classics (I'll talk about it at greater length tomorrow) and I had a blast. As I said then, DCC RPG is a game that really won me over, despite my initial skepticism, because it was clearly not written to be a mass market crowd pleaser. That is, it's not a "generic" fantasy game, but instead comes with all sorts of mechanical, esthetic, and gaming cultural (e.g. the coolness of Zocchi dice) assumptions that not every gamer is going to share -- and indeed many will actively dislike. Despite, I think DCC RPG is a great game. Indeed, I think much of its greatness comes from the very fact that it was designed with a niche audience in mind rather than a broad one. So, my question for today is this: what is your favorite "niche RPG?" By this, I mean a game designed for a small, specific audience that understands and appreciates its quirkiness in a way that a mass audience never could. |
jkahane
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10:39a |
Bleary Eyed Worker
Sitting here at work this morning, very tired and extremely sore. The weather stayed quite warm overnight last night, and I didn't get a lot of sleep, tossing and turning most of the night, and feeling soaked to my skin. To make matters worse, the ache and pain in the left foot due to the broken toes and now the work that was done at the footcare clinic yesterday on what turned out to be a hangnail kept the level of foot pain at a decent level most of the night, though my back pain was somewhat reduced for a change. So I was up before the alarm went off, feeling like I had slept for maybe an hour in the last 36 hours or so (hey, that's just the way it felt), and am just feeling tired as I sit here at work and try to focus on the job at hand. Current Mood:  blah |
jkahane
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8:21a |
Happy Towel Day!
Just want to wish everyone a Happy Towel Day! While it is a celebration of the life of Douglas Adams and all that good stuff, there is a message in there as well for everyone, even if one doesn't see it. So do something towel-ish today, and celebrate all things Hitchhiker. :) Current Mood:  awake |
robin_d_laws
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9:30a |
Attn LJ Readers: Feed Switch Reminder
 Ever since I switched to blogspot as my main blogging headquarters last summer, I’ve been manually mirroring posts here to LJ. In an effort to pare annoying tasks from my morning routine, I’ll no longer be doing this. If you still want to read me on LJ (as opposed to the main site, or by following me on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+), I have set up an LJ feed of the blogspot content, which you can subscribe to here.
If you want me to notice your comments, please make them on any of the above platforms.
To make sure everyone who needs to see this announcement catches it, I’ll be repeating it periodically over the next week or so. Apologies in advance for the redundancy. |
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pennyarcaderss
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9:29a |
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officialgaiman
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4:16a |
Quick Useful Sandman Slipcase post
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html posted by Neil
A hasty post... There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)
( Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.) DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase. According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/) (The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)  |
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dorktowerfeed
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5:01a |
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