Current mood:	awake
Current music:	Garbage -- "Shut Your Mouth"

are you good people, bad people? guess it doesn't matter, people ....
I will be in New York from December 26th to January 6th. A couple of those days are earmarked for foxfour, and some of course for my parents, but if you're around there, we should hang out.

...

Sudden Poll! Have you had carpal tunnel syndrome, or do you feel nerve damage in your arms and hands?
(vague attempt at control questions: how old are you, and what's your profession?)

Lately I've been feeling definite nerve damage all down my arms, to the elbows. I will be taking Steps (I intend to switch to the Dvorak keyset, for instance, and do my level best to watch my posture), and if you can recommend any such Steps, I'd appreciate it. I have a doctor's appointment soon to hopefully get a referral and then some "official" advice, but with my friend set, I bet I know a lot of people who're already dealing with this.

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Monogamy / Polyamory as Kink!

A while back I wrote a post about polyamory as a sexual orientation that drew some very perceptive comments. eisa in particular made some really good notes about why it's dangerous to set the precedent of thinking about poly as a sexual orientation (and indeed, the dangers of our societal conception of sexual orientations in general).

Anyway, a conversation I had at a party a couple nights ago -- one of my friends saying how utterly bewildered he is by one of my boyfriend's weird monogamous tendencies, and me saying, "Maybe this'll be easier if you just consider monogamy a kink" -- makes me think that really, it will be easier if I say that to people I talk to about this. I agree that there are inherent issues with defining these things as unchangeable orientations. But considering that pretty much everyone I know sees "kinks" as acceptable and seems to believe that it just doesn't matter whether they're chosen or not, they're still acceptable, I think it'll actually be useful for me to throw down this card from now on.

For instance:

Polyamorous person: I don't get it. How can he possibly be so unreasonably jealous about his mate's obvious, but harmless, attraction to another man?
Me: It's a kink.

Monogamous person: I don't get it. Why do my poly friends think their crazy-ass relationships can work out when I've seen so much spectacular bad fallout?
Me: It's a kink.

It wouldn't work with people who didn't think kink was fine, but I suspect that it will help in the conversations that I tend to have, and it might help those of my friends who are still wrapping their heads around these things.

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Bookstore Speculations

There's an inherent contradiction in the way we do things at Bookstore Y. The books there are priced mainly from Internet prices, under the assumption that those prices represent what the world is generally willing to pay for a given book. In fact, we often significantly undercut those prices. Which is fine, if you assume that everyone who looks at a given book is seeking that book, specifically. But the thing is that we not only don't have a full inventory (not even close to a full inventory) -- and therefore can't necessarily tell people if we do have a certain book or not -- but we also discourage people from looking for a certain book, because we're a "browsing" kind of store. Unfortunately, people who're just browsing through a shelf and come upon a book they think they might want usually aren't pleased if they find that the book is valuable and we're selling it at a bargain price of "high".

I mean, hey, I'm just a random employee, what do I know. But this contradiction bugs me, because I feel like it makes the store inefficient. Either we should have a super-duper complete inventory and bill ourselves as the kind of place where you might find that one book you've been looking for, or we should price books based more on how much a vaguely interested person is going to want to pay for them than a person seeking that book, specifically. This way, people come in and are told that not only are we unlikely to have the book they really want, but we're likely to charge as if every book we have is the book they want.

The current model seems to work surprisingly well, though, so maybe I'm imagining problems. A dude came in Friday who was really excited that we happened to have a limited run full-colour German book on guns from World War II; he was thrilled with our price. Plus, a fair amount of the fraction of our stock we do inventory sells on the Internet, to people also thrilled to get that bargain. I guess people come to used bookstores looking for obscure treasures a lot, so our strategy isn't bad, and teh Intarweb does help. It's just sort of weird getting used to this after Bookstore X, whose price lookups seem to make very little difference to what 95% of its books cost, and which gets lots of excited generalists who buy tons of $5-10 books about topics they'd never get into if they didn't happen to be in a big ol' dilettante-y place.

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Delicious Advertising

(I don't get why this one's called the Escape Artist; doesn't seem very escapey to me.)

I read a Wired article recently about how current advertising is doomed and the future of advertising depends on finding ways to insert ads in YouTube streams, and the like. I'm not sure about this. In fact, I'm starting to suspect that the future of advertising will be radically different from its current incarnation, in that it will no longer involve as many ads placed in areas where people will see them while doing something else. For instance, commercials have always been basically a new incarnation of text ads in newspapers, which were just put there hoping people would spot them while reading the news, right?

With a participatory, user-controlled medium like the Internet, that's a hard model to keep. Popup ads are aggressive enough, for instance, to still catch our attention ... but they've only encouraged people to design popup-blockers. So what I think is going to happen to advertising -- and this is the sort of thing I'd start a company to do, if I were, you know, into that -- is that it's going to start depending on making adverts that are intrinsically interesting, like the above quiz. Advertising icons are already kind of ends in themselves; isn't there merchandise and stuff for the GEICO Gecko? Advertising companies will -- or should -- start designing ads that appeal on their own power, because they're just so damn clever or witty or pretty that people want to see them. Maybe ads will even start getting respect as an art form, after a while. Advertising corporations will make their own movies! Commercial artists will no longer be selling our their morals! It'll be cool.

PS. After my last entry, I did spend another few minutes with that book (sue me), and found:

"Escape Literature"
Anthony Hecht

Higgledy-piggledy
Baron von Munchausen
Hot for hyperbole
Said, "Listen, babe,

"What's with this nebishe
Verisimilitude?
Give me the Burroughs Boys,
William and Abe!"

Apparently Munchausen thought Abe Burrows and William Burroughs spelled their surnames the same way, as he was unfamiliar with English. I love this show.