"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." - John Kenneth Galbraith

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This is for my No. 1 fan blah blah: Yah 有性格

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My cell phone rang in the church and everyone looked at me.
I answered it and someone told me to turn it off.
I told them it was god and he was furiously angered at them, and he would smite them with his holy fist.
I proceeded to scream "Repent!" at the top of my voice.
long story short, I dont have to go to church anymore

[Editor's note in response to a query: No, I did not actually do this.]

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Oikono and friends were bored enough to engage in some Cosplay.

Luckily, unlike the sort that Singaporeans are so fond of, this did not come off as grotesque (maybe the sepia-toned photos have something to do with that).

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Florence Foster Jenkins

"Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–26 November 1944) was an American soprano who became famous for her complete lack of singing ability...

From her recordings, it is apparent that Jenkins had little sense of pitch and rhythm, quite a limited range, and was barely capable of sustaining a note. Her accompanist can be heard making adjustments to compensate for her tempo variations and rhythmic mistakes. Nonetheless, she became tremendously popular in her unconventional way. Her audiences apparently loved her for the amusement she provided rather than her musical ability. Critics often described her work in a backhanded way that may have served to pique public curiosity.

Despite her patent lack of ability, Jenkins was firmly convinced of her greatness. She compared herself favourably to the renowned sopranos Frieda Hempel and Luisa Tetrazzini, and dismissed the laughter which often came from the audience during her performances as coming from her rivals consumed by "professional jealousy". She was aware of her critics, however, saying "People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing.""

Available on Amazon.com: The Glory (????) of the Human Voice

It has rave reviews: "One day, when I entered my second semester of theory at the University of Pennsylvania, our instructor was playing a CD. This was not out of character, for he always greeted our entrance with some sort of music to accompany our "settling in" conversations. However, this time, instead of people chattering, we were actually paying attention. Spellbound, we heard the absolutely marvelous vocal massacre that was being perpetrated, and reveled in its glorious awful highs and lows.

When I finally managed to buy the CD for myself and put it on a party I attended, the same thing happened, followed by a massive explosion of laughter."

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Unintelligent Design

"Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety...

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined."

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Singapore girls - a challenge to love: STAR

"This has prompted a newspaper reader to urge her well-educated peers to revisit some the traditional feminine traits.

Her letter followed reports that more Singaporeans, including young professional males, were turning abroad for brides.

She said she had worked in Vietnam and found the girls there feminine, their speech melodious.

“They work hard without complaining, carrying loads of cloth and vegetables in the market stalls and food places. Simple, gentle and hardworking, it's hard not to fall in love with them,” she added.

As for the Malaysian ladies, she finds them “neither loud nor argumentative, (but) pander to the boys' needs. Not as doormats, but as cheerful assistants, who see it as their obligation to help their men without expecting anything in return.

“Not that they are stupid - oh, no, the Malaysian girls I know are smart and hardworking, with careers of their own.

“But when it comes to matters of the heart, they play the docile, giggly girlfriend with as much aplomb as their Vietnamese counterparts. Again, it's easy to see where their attraction lies.”"

How disgusting.

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On the placing of Out Of Print (OOP) gamebooks on the web (ala Home of the Underdogs, which interestingly enough is run by a female. A female into both computer games and gamebooks - that's something you almost never see!):

RE: Re: The Underdogs. The truth about copyright.

A: Dear xxx,

Your bashing on the underdogs site is being mostly unnecessary, and, despite legalist quotations, inaccurate:


1. Piracy implicates an intention to deceive so as to illegally distribute (in any imaginable format). The Underdogs site is public and notorious, it is not in a p2p network or in a private ftp server, it is announced as what it is, a portal which provides people with information, materials and (in some cases only) stuff which qualifies as "abandonware". Gamebooks fall quite close to the sphere of 8-bit and pre-Pentium era computer games.

2. Related to 1., the administrator is quite easy to reach and has no qualms about retiring any download with the holders of either intellectual property rights or distribution copyright (you forgot to note in your well documented mail that they are not the same thing. As a professional writer myself I have great respect for intellectual property, but I know distribution and editorial copyright for what it is, piracy with a letter of marque). He also links to sites where the original games can be bought, either in their original form or in those "compilations" which came into fashion a few years ago.

3. Check the gamebooks listed. Your apocalyptic comment on how e-distribution destroys hopes of publishing houses taking interest in a relaunch does not take into account things like: ICE's Middle-Earth Quest gamebooks. As you may know, ICE lost Tolkien Entreprises' license to publish Middle Earth gaming materials. Part of that license loss came out apparently for the fact of them having published gamebooks (TE does not accept the publishing of new Middle Earth fiction, and a gamebook to them was more book than game). So ICE's books are actually "abandonware". Same for stuff like "Crystal Maze". Can you give me the name of a publisher which would ever consider relaunching a gamebook based on a tv quiz show from the 80s??? You can apply the same stuff to Knightmare.

4. For the other stuff, well, most of the books were issued by publishing houses which dwindled, disappeared, merged, etc. Also by authors who have moved to greener pastures (out of necessity or choice). Like you, they can ask their materials to be removed, if they consider that their IP is being jeopardized.

5. You don't curb yourself for a second to see if there's nothing to be said about the fact that it is standard policy now to make most non-best-seller and non-classic books OOP as fast as possible. Gamebooks are a minority affair. You cannot go to most national libraries or documentalist centers and ask for a whole collection of Lone Wolf 1-28. That somebody takes the time and effort to make available at least an e-copy guarantees that the work is not lost in the midst of time. Fine, gamebooks are not the Epic of Gilgamesh or a Shakespeare sonnet, but the idea of books, any kind of books, being lost in the mists of time in the 21st century is still appalling.

6. On that respect, I do not see publishing houses taking steps and measures to keep their back inventories, even if it's just a pre-publishing draft, an archive copy or a .pdf. Excepting in a few companies of the gaming world and of academic writing, "print on demand services" or at least e-book services for "oldies" are a rarity. Some good exceptions are ICE, which provides .pdfs for old Rolemaster, the Time Machine gamebooks, available as an e-book purchase, and the D&D ElectronicSoftwareDownloads. But that would not be the case with defunct companies, or even with reckless ones. I had a small degreen of involvement with WotC's ESD project (to make the whole of pre 3e D&D stuff available as pdf) and it was dreadful how they had to call for collectors and fans to contribute their copies of old stuff, because TSR and subsequently WotC did not manage to keep a whole archive of their publications.

7. That means that a company can hold the rights of a book which is not even in their archives, files or possession anymore, only on contractual documents. That is tantamount with speculating with real estate by buying buildings, make no investment and let them collapse. Speculation and irresponsibility with one's property when it affects the common interest (like a publisher sitting idle on OOP books) is basically a crime.

8. Back to 3. That a book is available in electronic format does not imply that somebody continues interested in getting a copy. I have been enjoying project aon, plus some stuff from underdogs, but that has not prevented me from investing quite a bit over a thousand dollars in OOP gamebooks. Even after getting access to LW 13-15 (and prospectively many more titles), Greystar, the whole Blood Sword, Falcon, Golden Dragon and Dragon Warriors RPG, I have purchased copies of those books through ebay, antiquarian bookstores or online OOP book services. I like having copies of 80s gamebooks and RPG supplements, and no amount of .pdfs is going to change me. Another thing is if I cannot access a single book of a series, just because it is clearly overpriced in OOP (within reason, some old gamebooks are expensive, but some dealers are just insane) or just unavailable at any price for months of years. I see a good service to be able to download a copy, continue the storyline or use RPG info even if my collection stays incomplete.

9. Without sites like underdogs I would not have a clear picture of some series. If I am going to spend over $50 in a paperback book, I want to know if I really like it. You cannot flip through pages of Bloodsword or Fabled Lands in a bookstore, you cannot risk putting just $6 in a book you may not like, as it is hard to find most titles for cover price. So, for the OOP, to have an e-copy accessible is quite a necessity. collectors will always want to buy. They also want to see what they're buying.

10. As for reprints. I wonder if there's not a vast majority of people who have e-copies of FL, Bloodsword, LW, whatever, and, regardless, would be willing (or even longing) to buy the series from a publisher who reprinted them! The "feel" of a gamebook is something quite hard to capture in a pdf, or even in a lettersized printout! The problem comes when you start thinking if the reprints are worth it. I was quite thrilled by the news of wizardbooks reprinting FF till I saw it materialize: besides a hefty price, even for a paperback, the original covers (I don't know if for copyright issues with illustrators or for some insane marketing persuasion) were dropped and some flashy gaudy, bad taste new ones included; books which had maps in the original omitted them in the reprints, and you can buy an original in mint-near mint state for half the price of the reprint! They did not, and I don't believe they are, reprint the "rares" (think of Curse of the Mummy or Revenge of the Vampire, which can reach 3-figure prices).

11. That's what makes Mr. xxx's email a bit suspicious to my ear. Call me paranoid, but he sounds a lot like the anti-Warlock scans rants of Mr. Dave Holt some time ago. A certain desire to blur out the "old world" of gamebooks from the picture, so there's no life outside Wizard Books and the "official sites". I have on my nightstand a copy of "The Pickup Artist" by Terry Bisson, an interesting novel on a future where government destroys "old" art and books to make room for the new ones. I don't know if that's the schema of things, but given the oddjob efforts by wizardbooks, I wonder if all this copywriting rant is not covering a fear of competence, the competence that comes from just paying an educated visit to underdogs, but also to abebooks, ebay or any other marketplace and see the plethora of gamebooks of varying quality which can be acquired and enjoyed. If the fledging gamebook industry of now fears the competence of the past, probably it is just because the effort now is being half-hearted, competence in writing and art was never a bad thing.


A: A couple more notes

>Surely the main point is that if a product is available free on the
>Internet, there is no incentive for a publisher to pick up the out
>of print book and publish it.

Surely the main point is that a publisher is insulting buyer's intelligence by overcharging the product he is selling.


Let's see. The recipe to make a book:


1) get an author with an idea, or commission it, you get a manuscript. But oh, now most publishers only take computer-formatted documents. How much is that? Jon will know too. You get a small percentage of the sales. If you are an obscure author, like me, like Jon Sutherland, like most gamebook writers, normally you get an advance on that, which can go from a few hundred to a few thousand. The publisher's percentage is always quite higher than the author's (normally something like 10/90 or under). That has been like that since Egyptian papyri.

2) Get paper and ink. You know about globalization? Taking wood from the Amazon and manufacturing paper in Asia (I saw 3 paper manufacturers close in my -European- country just because of that), prices have gone down from the more expensive materials (and less abusive) 30 years ago?

3) Edit and format. You have to pay a proofreader for that. But check how many contracts force the author to self-proofread, and how many unemployed MAs and BAs get to work as proofreader for big publishing house courtesy of ultra-nice and fair temp-job agencies. See their salaries and cry.

4) Make the 1st draft. only that drafts are not drafts anymore. they are pdf documents. Maybe some people in the list have not even known those printing machines with metal letters and signs where you had to compose each page by hand. Now you need a computer and some professional book-editing software, something like Acrobat pro. OK, you need some investment in that equipment, and in those big professional printers, but then, it's a far cheaper process than traditional printing. Plus maintenance costs of a computerized printing mainframe are far lower than those of printing presses.

5) Continue with the whole print run.

6) Bookbinding. See 2. The rule of cheap plastic materials, for binding, covers and so on, lowers prices even more.

7) Distribution and marketing, you can say oil prices raise, but only recently. Wages go down. Production of commercials, ads, poster sings, etc, is cheaper now as per 4.

So, the question is, excepting for 1), which is fixed in screwing the author as much as the publisher can, everything seems to have dropped:

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN BOOK PRICES GO DOWN?

No, they raise every year, just wonder, do they pay the author better? No friends, I can assure you. Do they use better quality materials?? As cheap as you can go, a paperback now crumbles as good as it did in the 70s. Well, law is, prices never drop, they always raise. And the cash flows into the publishers' pockets. Publishers which, in turn, are fewer and fewer, as small companies tend to be absorbed by larger editorial and media holdings, which makes production even cheaper.

So, what happens if you don't buy a book because you have a bootleg?


Authors and workers don't get less money. They already almost verge on minimum salary levels, and slavery is illegal excepting in certain countries where maybe they make paper and covers for a few big media companies. Companies won't stop publishing, and they won't stop not taking risks. If somebody does not resuscitate an OOP, it is not because it circulates the internet. You could also say that they don't publish it because you can buy it for one buck at a used bookstore or check it out from the public library, and I hope Jon Sutherland does not hate used bookstores and public libraries. That book-burning thing is sooo 30s. It is because they don't want to take risks and don't see a commercial exit (something ok for somebody who is doing business). Check E.R.Burroughs or Clark Ashton Smith for good examples of scifi authors which were (partly) public domain and, nevertheless, have been published again because of certain market conditions which caught the eye of publishers. If you get a photocopy or scan of a book you cannot afford, cannot find because you live in Antartica or in my home town, or you just want to give a try but feel half-hearted about introducing into your library, you're taking a small percentage from a huge money-making cushion most publishers of commercial literature surround themselves with, normally at the expense of the author, the workers and the material providers. That cushion does include in fact a careful monitoring of self-competence. Print runs these days are shorter than a few decades ago. It is very useful to turn books into seasonal items, so that you always have to go for the new one and not for the backlist, therefore assuring that any new launch, regardless of its literary quality, is a success. No wonder some countries have high VAT for books, with luxury tax levels equal to those applied to furs, gold and designer's clothing. If books are seen like a fashion article and not like a necessity for humans' wellbeing.

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