Rackabones.

[reddragdiva]

• Amazon has started acting like a monopoly.

• One day I will use this captcha.

• Melbourne readers: this eldritch horror has returned from the deep. (note: DO NOT RENT THIS HOUSE. It's cheap for a reason.)

Home from work today owing to plant bukkake facial sodomy. SEND MORE STEROIDS.

arkady and Freda and back. Freda took her first steps in Wales! And Arkady got it on cameraphone video!

Madam caught another pigeon! Thankfully without rings on its legs. I still have to retrieve its head.

Comments

[sneerpout.livejournal.com]

What's up with the house?

[reddragdiva]

I can only describe it as having negative feng shui. If a dragon lived in it it would burn it down. Every few years they redecorate it, advertise at a high rent, no-one takes it, they lower the rent, no-one takes it, they advertise directly for students and dolescum. It then slowly degrades, as some share houses do, until it's filled with bottom-feeding social predators and junkies. They get evicted and the cycle recommences.

[sneerpout.livejournal.com]

Lovely!

[reddragdiva]

Last cycle (mid-1998), I went with the friends who were looking at it (all of whom have LJs, of course) - they were in fact the house I'd just moved out of (to shack up with my then-girlfriend) and a fourth person. I hated the place on sight. White walls, grey office carpet. I could not imagine humans living here. They worked very hard to make it livable; it beat them. I think it's been empty for a year or so.

[richgoth.livejournal.com]

haha...I once travelled to melbourne to clean that house ;-)

[faithais.livejournal.com]

congrats on freda's first steps. i suppose you will be busy trying to move all the decorations and stuff she CAN reach now to the upper shelves;) still cute;)

are you coming to our party on the 21st? please??:)

hugs

faith

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Don't lose any sleep over the Amazon situation. What's conveniently left out of the Ann Crispin story is that the cut isn't affecting real publishers: it's only hitting POD publishers who were using Amazon as free advertising. I'm not saying that Amazon handled it well, but the idea here is that any publisher currently missing the "Buy it now" button could get it back...if they're willing to ship copies of the book to Amazon for its warehouse. Since the PODs aren't willing to do this and face having the books returned due to a lack of sales, they're throwing tantrums. (To be honest, a pox on all their houses. Amazon and the PODs are both demonstrating the reasons why I'm actively cheering the collapse of the publishing industry in the US, if only because I'm waiting for all of these wankers to realize finally that they've had an insanely overwrought idea of their value in the marketplace and in contemporary society in general.)

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

On the nose... Amazon and POD publication are overlapping concepts and Amazon finally figured out that the "partnership" wasn't doing them a damned bit of good. The POD people need to be hooking in with organizations like wowio.com so that they can sell nice dead-tree editions of things that people have downloaded and started reading.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

In some ways, Amazon and PODs remind me of the ongoing relationship between comic shop owners and gamers. Every time I've seen a comic shop that gave space in the back for gamers of any sort, it was an absolute nightmare, where the gamers made a horrible racket, left a horrible mess, stole everything in sight, and gave back nothing compared to the cost of giving them the space. However, when they're told that they're no longer welcome because there's no return in giving them the space, the gamers invariably throw tantrums about how they'll never do business again with a place that's so gamer-unfriendly. Lo and behold, they're back in a week, still buying comics and crap, solely so they can continue to whine about the unfairness of it all.

(The other aspect that the POD people don't want to hear is that Amazon has to pay real money, in listings, listing maintenance, and management of forums, to carry those PODs, many of which might actually sell a copy in our lifetimes. I've seen far too many examples of the sort of shit that is being swept up in the "it's unfair to PODs" category, and Amazon is effectively being expected to use its customers as slushreaders, because none of these books would ever have seen the outside of a slushpile at a real publishing house. Everyone in publishing is sure that their books are worthy of purchase, but they can't be bothered to buy copies of other authors' books, so why should they expect someone else to buy theirs?)

Crispin has always been sentimental about people at the lower levels of wannabedom

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

But the reality is that the places that make large orders can put undue pressure on small presses. And whatever one thinks of small presses, they can do things that major publishers can't make money on and are frequently simply trying to break even on the books they do (POD publisher and vanity publisher being another issue.

The major publisher have deep enough pockets to afford returns before payment (the classical independent bookstore relationship with small presses was to pay for the books in 30 days and then send the books back for return six months to a year later. The small press could use the float until time to return the principal. The big places like Borders and Barnes and Noble would make large orders but return the books a month later without ever paying the invoice. This put at least one small press distributor out of business (people will write books for free and even publish them for free, but nobody wants to print, inventory, or distribute them for free particularly except perhaps online).

Re: Crispin has always been sentimental about people at the lower levels of wannabedom

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't remind me about the big chain store situation: I've worked for at least two magazines that died specifically because B&N put in a ginormous order for copies, the publisher went broke trying to fill that order, and then the company returned piles of copies to the distributor a month later and expected credit. I know for a fact that Borders pays its bills whenever it damn well feels like it, and that smaller publishers can't afford the lawsuits necessary to force Borders to pay its bills.

This is why I'm keeping a nice happy deathwatch on Borders, because the only thing funnier to me than watching an incompetently run company detonate as spectacularly as Borders plans to do is listening to the whining of the employees who willfully ignored the innumerable warnings and only now realize that they could be unemployed by Labor Day. These are going to be followed by the whinings from Crispin's buddies at SFWA, who will cry themselves to sleep every night about how they've just lost another venue for their doing readings and signings of their latest POD POS. The world needs another Absolutely Fabulous/Farscape slashfic novel, doesn't it?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Bukkake, that's the word I've been trying to remember all week. Yes. PLANT BUKKAKE DO NOT WANT etc etc.

Y hallo thar, play.com of wonderful cheapness.

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

the landlord is only interested in maximum of 4 tenants who will stay at the property for full duration of the lease.

*snerk*

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

Oh - and they might have more success in finding tenants if they get the address right. It's on Alexandra Parade, not Alexander.

[reddragdiva]

And if the location map didn't lie. Note also the 20-minute total viewing window.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

That's standard these days. In fact, it's more than you usually get - 15 minute inspections are the norm for rental properties.

[guerillamagilla.livejournal.com]

Since when is $600pw cheap - wtf!

[hauntedunix.livejournal.com]

Since £450 a week (930 AUD) was acceptable for a 2 bed 2 bath apartment?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

New carpet... and $240/wk more expensive. Still trying to say that it's six bedrooms tho'.. Not really... and they have the location completely wrong..

It was a damn good venue for cocktail parties, tho'..

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

It's Jika Jika. Noooooooooo...