opusculus

Re: LJ's latest fail: Should I be doing any f-locked posts while the current thing is up, I'll be disabling comments on LJ. I assume you've all got enough common sense to not repost comments deliberately, but LJ makes it way too easy to do so by accident. Sorry!

Also, a new warning I just heard this morning: if you link Facebook to your account, your real name on Facebook will be posted on your LJ profile. Yeah. ...Seriously, if it weren't for CFUD and all the people who still only use their LJs, I would so be switching entirely to DW right now. If anyone wants to, I totally have account codes!

There was something else I was going to talk about, but I have no idea what. Oh well.

Edit: Oh right! THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION EVERYONE: ( Spoilers for the Curate and his sister storyline in Echo Bazaar )

It's going to be 107 degrees where I am today. I have no air conditioner, and will be in a small semi-enclosed space all day. Shoot me now.

In other news, I was reading this article, and man, it surprised me just how closely this matched my experience. The only thing that this didn't include that I would've expected was that in my experience, powerful people overestimate other powerful people's competence and morals as well. ("They have to have been really competent to get into power in the first place! So it's inconceivable that they could've possibly made a mistake that big." <- actual sentiment expressed. I dotted a lot.)

"Here, we need to meet on this to make a final decision." "Okay, let's meet Tuesday when everyone's here." "Okay." "Oh whoops one of the people's on vacation this week, let's meet next Tuesday." "Okay." "Oh whoops I'll be on a business trip Tuesday, but I'll actually be in the office so let's meet Monday." "IT'S A MIRACLE A MEETING'S BEEN PUSHED UP- I mean okay." "Let's meet in a couple hours right before I leave." "Okay." "Oh whoops one of the people got called to meet with an important customer and it could be two hours." "I KNEW IT AUGH- I mean okay." "Let's do it via conference call tomorrow at 9- I mean 9:30 - I mean 10 while we're driving." "OH YAY FANCY TECHNOLOGY I'M SURE THIS WILL HAVE NO POINTS OF FAILURE- I mean okay." [spends 5 minutes getting the conference call working. Success! EVERYONE IS HERE] "You know, why don't we do this at 2:30 when I'm not driving? Don't call me, I'll call you!" "Okay. I totally believe this will happen at this time. Really."

SIGH.

You know, making a piece of database software where it seems to be impossible to actually input any data (at least judging by my spending 10 minutes poking around and dragging in a random passerby to see if I was overlooking something obvious) is kind of impressive, in a really stupid sort of way.

So I was reading through the latest Anne Rice thing (short version: Anne Rice leaves Catholicism because she can't agree with its leaders), and the thing that really bugged me about the responses to it is that when ranting about her experience with Christianity, she's being criticized for not acknowledging liberal Christianity.

( Musing out loud, mostly )

And yes, I am totally claiming Anne Rice as my Catholic in my religion-influenced vampire works collection. Or I would if I had ever managed to finish Interview with a Vampire, at least. Man, Anne Rice's prose was purple even when she had an editor. I hate to think of what it's like without one.

You know what I suddenly realized I wanted? A charity rating website that solicits input from the people who the charity is trying to help. I mean, all the websites I found for evaluating charities pretty much bases it off the financials, which yeah, weeds out the worst, but doesn't actually say anything about how good they are at helping the people who need it. And that's you know, kinda the point. Does this even exist?

I suppose my first reaction on seeing that shouldn't be lolol.

You know, the sad part about it is that I can totally believe that they don't understand why their sales are disappointing. I genuinely don't think they meant to screw over the customers who bought the first half of Higurashi by jacking up the price of the second half to well over double. I just don't think they have the faintest clue about pricing, didn't sell enough on the first half (because seriously, does anyone think that $40+ on a download-only game is going to work? Especially when everyone knows that it's only half the series?), thought that they had to jack up the price on the second half to recoup their costs, and didn't put enough thought as to what kind of effect raising the price that much would do to the demand.

It doesn't change the fact that, when people buy the first half of a series, they expect that the second half will be priced similarly and that goes into their evaluation of the worth of buying the first half. Therefore, by raising the price of the second half that dramatically, you are screwing over the people who bought first half, and if they bought it that early, they're your most loyal customers most likely to spread your stuff by word of mouth. In bigger markets where people are uninvested, you can survive longer doing that. In a market as small and invested as visual novels? If you do that, you're fucking yourself over.

( Cut because I am apparently incapable of shutting up on how they could've done it better )

There's something about horrible trainwrecks in fiction that keep me reading like nothing else. I picked up Rabbit: Chasing Beth Rider by Ellen Maze because it sounded like an interesting concept. A woman marked by a vampire as all vampires' prey because her best-selling book was accidentally too similar to what the vampires actually are while a cult starts taking over the vampires? Awesome! Unfortunately, this was apparently written as evangelical Christian fiction so...you know, not so awesome in results.

( Cut for length, and probably offense to evangelical Christians on my part and all non-evangelical Christians on the book's part. )

Bah, I'm going to get absolutely nothing done today because everyone I need to talk to is busy or not here. So I might as well catch up on my book list while I can actually remember it, I guess.

Half-World by Hirumi Goto, about a girl who stumbles into...call it a fairyland, I guess. I really liked this by the end, but to be honest I almost gave up repeatedly halfway through because it was such an ugly world. I mean, I got that that was the point, and what she was trying to do, but I still found myself getting squicked repeatedly, and I'm not a huge fan of authors trying to gross me out. I liked the fact that the main character was unapologetically everything we don't expect out of a heroine (fat, Japanese, ugly, poor, no special talents, etc.), and was still completely awesome and capable of heroism. You don't see that enough in fiction, really.

Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill, a book by a retail anthropologist and shopping scientist on malls. Lacked focus and generally kinda sucked, to be honest. I thought his first book was really interesting and have been vaguely meaning to get around to reading this book for years, so this was a disappointment. It was mostly him going with people on trips to the mall and interviewing them interspersed with his research on malls, and never really felt like it had a coherent theme underlying it. Also, he assumed that you'd read his first one at a couple points when it would've taken a few extra sentences to avoid it, which was just clumsy. Mostly, it felt like it needed a lot more editing, a lot less padding, and a lot more material.