Nastiness

Porno publisher Larry Flynt recently spewed out a nasty photoshop of pundit S E Cupp. It's a despicable act, but I couldn't figure out why a sociopath would do such a thing. She's a great writer, but she isn't especially prominent. Larry the F doesn't do things that he doesn't think will profit him in some way.

Then it hit me. Playboy has a been slowly sinking for a while. Penthouse is a mere shadow of its 'glory'. Hustler must be taking some hits finally and he's flailing.

Why the difference in declines? The college dorms were wired years ago. But high speed Internet is only now coming to America's trailer parks.

That's gotta hurt.

Laws of the Internet

I think I need to propose a variant of the utterly NSFW and infamous Rule 34. The variant is as follows: If there's a holiday for it, then there is a liturgy for it as well (link is SFW).

And for the record, I'd pay good money to hear that 'Gloria' sung.

Reflections on E-Publishing

I've been downloading a lot of free e-published books. Project Gutenberg, for those few who are not familiar with it, is a god send to the frugal reader. At this point they have an amazing assortment of out of copyright texts, ranging from text books to novels to poetry and any sort of non-fiction imaginable.

I've also bought a few e-books. I'm not averse to paying authors for their content. Quite the opposite. I'm just frugal and impoverished right now.

What I've noticed are the price points for e-books. Some very savvy people give books away for free. This makes perfect sense when you realize that the very first book of a very popular science fiction series (Honor Harrington) is part of the give away. I'm told drug dealers use a very similar marketing ploy quite successfully. An enormous number of works at Amazon have the firts chapter free for the same reason.

Amazon has a great many short stories for sale at $.99. That price point also covers out of copyright books that someone has taken the trouble of tweaking into a modern format, with linkable tables of content and such. This is perfect for those who can not tolerate typos as well as those who wish to sample the more modern authors.

The next price points are $1.99 and $2.99. I'm inclined to think that the latter represents savvy self published authors. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a fair number of works at $2.99. She has some bundled works at $4.99 as well.

I think the pricing here is brilliant. $2.99 is low enough for impulse purchasing. You read the first chapter, like what you've read and plunk down the dough for the rest of the story. Once you've finished enjoying it, you track down her other works and buy them as well. The dollar amounts are small enough that you can spend without thinking too hard, classic impulse buys.

Ms Rusch's big publishing house stories are priced at $9.99 and up. She set the prices on the other stuff. Her publisher set that price. I think the publishers are missing the point here. We all know the cost of an ebook is nominal compared to a hard cover or a trade paperback. The price is such that few people will buy on a whim. The market for such books is limited to people who are already interested in that story and have no other option to read it.

At that price point, people will look for it at the library or used rather than pay full retail. There are some pretty clever people in publishing, but I think they are missing the point here. E-publishing offers the opportunity to turn the long tail of the back list into a profit centre. Only one publisher, Baen, has really embraced the change. It's no accident that Baen is small house that is largely independent. Most of the big publishers are subsidiaries of much larger firms and as such are extremely conservative.

That might hurt them.

As for what prompted the above, several people have recommended John Donnelly's Gold by Brian Noggle. It looks interesting. It's also priced at $9.99 at Amazon, so I'm not going to be reading it for a while.

Uncharitable Semi Rant

Like half of America, I have a Facebook account. Also like most of those on Facebook, I use it to keep track of extended family and old college chums. It's a nice way to mark milestones in acquaintances' lives. I don't anything of real significance there and it doesn't link to any vital or financial information. Hack my Facebook account and you can see the exact same pictures you could see before you hacked my account.

Today I received something from Facebook that surprised me no end. A group I joined back in the dawn of time was spamming my email account with banal Facebook messages. I thought I joined them as a mailing list, although it is possible that I joined them on Facebook when I first signed up.

Here's the rant. Why on earth would someone resurrect a group that had been dead and buried for over two years? We all lost interest more than two years ago (one of the glories of most social media is you can look at the dates on messages). Until Monday, the last message on the group was from early 2009. Most of the messages were from early 2008.

The same people who spammed the group into banal oblivion and howled down any real meaningful discussion back in 2007-2008 were spamming each other again. It's very much like those zombies movies where you think the good guys have killed all the zombies, they've buried them for good and a skeletal hand reaches up from the ground and grabs a foot.

Let the dead stay dead, I say. If you miss the old crowd so much, why not start a new group? Then you can spam each other as much as you like.

Me, I quit the group, again. And set Gmail to mark all the messages received as spam. I'm also exploring ways to set my Facebook settings to 'dull', 'bland' or 'unexciting'.

The Internet- News Traveling At The Speed of Light

An Australian newspaper has apparently discovered the secret formula for Coca Cola.

Which was published in the Atlanta Constitution back in 1979. And has been reprinted since in other media, including the book Big Secrets by William Poundstone (published 1985).

Not to mention every soft drink manufacturer has a cola flavour, some of which are indistinguishable from 'The Real Thing'.

Everything Makes Sense Now

pi x 1337% = 42.

Much becomes clear now.

The Gentle Art of Disagreement

From StandFirm:

A poster named BabyBlue: "Oh yes he is our friend, Matt."

The rejoinder by Matt Kennedy: " Hi bb, oh no he’s not"

This struck me as the entire Internet summed into two lines.