No Comic Day! + 3 Digressions

[newnumber6]

Even though I hardly ever buy comics any more (I may go back to New Mutants once it pulls out of a crossover, but if the new creative team and rumored cast changes don't thrill me, it gets dropped too. I want to read a book about the New Mutants. I might be a little flexible about the case, but I don't think I want to read "Nate Grey, X-Man, and Several New Mutants Characters" and I fear that's what it's going to turn into. The X-Universe has too many messiahlike characters as it is... but I digress...), the muscle memory is strong, and so when I do want to go to a trip to look for books or need to buy something downtown, I go on Comic Day.

This time I had to pick up a gift card for an upcoming birthday. But along the way, I did the usual stop at the new and used bookstores, and came away with quite a haul.

I got:
At the big chain bookstore:
Matter, by Iain M. Banks (hardcover... which I don't like, but it was in the discount bin, and sometimes, what can you do... speaking of... I'd probably buy a lot more books new, and undiscounted, if they'd release them in normal, not-oversized, paperback format without having to make me wait a gazillion years. I mean, right now most books you can buy in e-book format... but I don't want that. I want an actual book. But I want a small, portable, easy to hold book that doesn't overly clutter up my shelves. Why do you still insist on only selling huge, overpriced books for the first two years of a book's release? It's bad enough that you're making only the less convenient formats available first, but you're also charging a ridiculous amount for it? No wonder I'm willing to wait... and once I'm willing to wait, I'm not longer excited, why not be willing to wait just a little bit longer until I can find it in a used bookstore or discount bin, or a smaller local bookstore rather than a big chain? I keep hearing about how bookstores are losing money and closing, and I'm no expert, but maybe, just maybe, part of it's because they're not offering what people WANT, they're offering what they think maximizes their profits, and they're using old models and standards without questioning them. Uh oh, there I go digressing again. But I promise, just one more before the post's done)

At various used bookstores:
The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay (book one of The Fionivar Tapestry, I'm not normally one for fantasy but I wanted to give this a try because it has modern (and Canadian) people transported to the fantasy world... that's not a digression)
Designated Targets by John Birmingham (book two of The Axis of Time trilogy, about an aircraft carrier group from 2034 transported back in time to WWII and altering history)
The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (the 3rd and 4th book in the series started by Old Man's War)
Collapsium by Will McCarthy
The Puppet-Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (a classic I've never gotten around to reading)
Engineman by Eric Brown

I also got: Batman: Arkham Asylum for the XBox360. Stopped in at future shop and it was only $15 bucks (and not used), so I figured it was about time. Sooner or later I will want to be Batman. (The one big obstacle to me having more games is that I really hate switching out disks. Given how much HD space they really should let you play from console without having the disk in at all. Yes, I know there's a piracy concern, but the Xbox is pretty locked up, there are surely ways to make it so that only one console can have it running at any given time, at least to a degree of security that you couldn't break without already being having the resources to be able to just copy disks if you wanted to... but there I go, digressing again. Last one, I promise...).

Now, considering there's one hardcover and an oversized trade paperback, plus 6 paperbacks, and one hardcover I was reading for my ordinary reading of the day (still need to do an official Book Foo post soon, but again, not today), that was a pretty heavy load by the time I was done.

Comments

[occamsnailfile.livejournal.com]

Collapsium is pretty neat, I read that from the library last year. Batman: AA is also pretty neat, and a good buy for $15.

The 360 can be modded to allow pirate disks to play and many other shenanigans. It's sort of semi-legal since you are totally allowed to mod your own hardware, but MS will ban you from Live immediately for doing so if they detect it. There're varying stories of how successful that detection is.

None of that is an argument for why you can't just play without the disk and I mostly just say control-freakery on the part of the industry.

[fiddlersgreen.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of astonished that there isn't yet the equivalent of, say, Steam (or the iTunes App Store, for that matter) for consoles, honestly. It's clearly a model that makes a lot of people a lot of money.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Well, depending on how strictly you define "equivalent" (since Steam's pretty flexible, where once you buy it you can install it on any computer you own, etc), I believe there is, at least for X-box. You can buy games just over X-Box Live. You don't get a disk or the instructions, but you have it on your HD. However, that doesn't seem to change the situation whereby you require the disk in the X-box to play a game that you bought as a disc.

At least, every time I've tried. Maybe it's a game-by-game decision, where some games will let you install to HD and not require a disc in, but all my games, although you can install to HD (to make it speed up loading), it still demands you have the disc to play it.

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I play too much Live (still play L4D2 like crazy) that I wouldn't want to risk permanently losing access, even with, in this case, 100% entirely ethical motivations (I don't want to do anything nefarious or share disks, I'm just lazy, I don't like getting up to change it, find the proper case, put the old game in it, take the new one out, put it in, etc... sometimes I JUST want to press a button and go to a new game!)... I just mean they, MS, should find some way to make it doable, because anybody who really wants to do it for negative reasons pretty much already can (well, except for the people who could were they not also lazy like me).

As for the Collapsium: I keep seeing the sequel, the Wellstone, in the used bookstore, reading the back, saying, "oh, this looks like it could be kind of interesting", and then realizing it's a sequel. So I made a note to look for the first one and finally found it. Seems to be roughly up my alley readingwise anyway.