Gonzai Gallery

Well, worked my tailfeathers off in the art show yesterday, hanging all of the mail-in art and half the print shop and I have the raw knees, sore quads and achy back to prove it. It was all I did at the con yesterday other than a (very good) dinner. Today was the 'easy' day, with nothing to go up or come down. However, most of the day was either hectic (at one point 5 different people wanted my help at the same time) or completely dead. Thus, I called it a day at 7, helped a friend get registered, and then went up to gaming and squeezed in a couple of games, both of which I won easily. I wasn't surprised I won Ticket to Ride, the other players were not playing wisely, but I was surprised I won Carcassonne over 3 of the local Carc sharks. While I was playing that game, firesign10 happened to pass us in the hallway and by some miracle I recognized her, 'cause we've never met before. We didn't get to talk, though, because one of the Carc players was in a hurry to finish the game. Hopefully tomorrow.

But the big thing today was that before Balticon, I returned the Kindle to the person I bought it from. I did that not because I didn't like it, or because Mom didn't like it, but because...I couldn't register the danged thing with Amazon, which would kind of help for buying books and such. Amazon gave me a 'call customer service' alert, so I did. End result - seems the Kindle had been reported 'lost or stolen' back in December and accordingly, Amazon would not register it unless the person who made that report withdrew it. The person who sold it to me responded in 10 minutes to my e-mail and offered to return my money, so I really lucked out in that regard. We did like what we'd seen of it, so I'll probably wind up getting one somewhere along the line. Just not using Craigslist.

There's one thing about this whole Amazon-Fail thing (which I managed to completely miss owing to not being online all weekend) that no one seems to mention: everyone's complaining that sales rankings have disappeared. Not that the books have disappeared, or aren't available for sale anymore, but that everyone and their cousin can't see whether the book is popular or not. Do people only buy books because everyone else is buying that book? Doesn't anyone ever buy a book because they want to read it? When I go to Amazon, I already know what I want, I'm just price-shopping or looking for something that was too obscure to find locally. I've never once looked at sales rankings intentionally and they're completely irrelevant to me; apparently, I'm alone in that. I'm kinda disappointed in this 'ranking' obsession.