Whirlwind Warren

My regular readers may or may not have noticed that, despite my recent vow to update you on my books-read more than once every six weeks, I haven't for a while. That's because I've been working on the same book, Steven Erikson's House of Chains, which I have now finished. Maybe for other people spending two weeks on a book is nothing of note, but for me it is.

And I can't even say the book was dragging. I blame my rereading of Dilbert, to a large extent, but I finished that a week or so ago. It did happen to be just over 1000 pages long, and very dense, with a lot of characters. I would say that it hasn't become my new favourite book in the series, like the last two did, so Memories of Ice is still the best so far. Though Erikson did a great job of taking a minor character from the second book and turning him into a major character in this one, and one of the best-drawn at that. But there's still no definitive sign of an overarching plot. There were hints, and at one point there was some kind of mind-blowing revelation or plot twist in every chapter, but it still looks like every book has its own plot arc(like a season of a modern TV series)without there being one continuing from book to book.

Now I've got a passel of library books. I've had Hitchhiker, a Douglas Adams biography, for a couple of weeks now, and have just started it. Then there's Marie Jakober's Even The Stones and Peter Watts's Behemoth, Part 1: β-max, both of them ordered during Aurora nomination season, but neither of them actual finalists. I have actually not managed to read a single one of the nominees this year--I can't remember the last time this has happened. Though Survival by Julie E. Czerneda has come out in paperback, so I have that available. Given her last few books, though, I'll be voting it second place right below "No Award".

The other library book is Jonathan Strange And Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Perhaps you've heard of it. I've sure been hearing about it all over the bloody place, though I do read Neil Gaiman's blog, and he often mentions it. It's a huge brick of a book--almost a cube, really--but whether it's longer than House of Chains, I don't know.

The Marie Jakober one is due first(apart from Hitchhiker, which is in my parallel nonfiction slot), so I'll be reading it first, and then trying to get the Susanna Clarke done before it's due. Frankly, I'd rather read the Clarke first, but Nicole's started it. I just hope the Jakober isn't too long or slow-moving. The Watts book is, luckily(or unfortunately for Peter Watts), renewable, so it'll get put off until after I've finished the other ones.

I'm still annoyed about the stupid stunt they're pulling on Behemoth. It's something like, supposedly Barnes & Noble isn't stocking hardcovers above a certain price, so suddenly a bunch of novels are getting split in half in hardcover. Except that I haven't seen too many other novels with "Part 1" type titles listed in Locus, so either they're getting more artfully retitled, or they're just picking on Peter Watts specifically.

Something I think the publishing industry is teetering on the verge of collapse, and due for a good old Fourth-Turning shakeup once the generational cycle turns another notch. Maybe that's just sour grapes, or maybe that's accumulating anecdotal evidence that writers get tossed out after they've used up their first couple of chances, because there's always more writers waiting to replace them. Where in the chain of publishorial decision this happens I wouldn't know, but probably between editor and marketing department.

Curse of Meridell

On Neopets, I've been devoting most of my energies to getting a map to the Secret Laboratory.

See, apparently there's a Secret Laboratory, where every day you can put one of your pets under the Lab Ray and it'll mutate into another kind. Now that I've gotten my fourth pet and keep second-guessing which race I should've chosen, I'm ready to see how many different kinds I can turn him into. (I named him "Azpiazu" in anticipation of his fate.) I've heard warnings that you shouldn't do this with your favourite pet, because they can lose levels and hit points and stuff, though I don't know if there's a point of no return(or diminishing returns).

The things is, you need a map to the Secret Laboratory. The map consists of nine pieces, each of which is an item which you have to acquire somehow. Supposedly you can get them through random chance, but I gather the odds of that are slim at best. So I've been buying them. They're 50,000 Neopoints a pop in Neopia's shops, though. I've managed to acquire five of them(as you can see in my gallery, along with my pathetic collection of Neopets key rings--not sure if that'll work if you're not a Neopets member), four of them by purchase and one as a generous gift from a Neofriend(and fellow Cult of Pain member).

Last week, I decided to check the auctions on the Neopets site(because, yes, there are auctions). Imagine my surprise when I saw laboratory map pieces being prices as low as 4000 NP! Admittedly, these ones had some time left in their auctions, but still, it would doubtless end up cheaper than 50,000, right?

So I spent the last few days bidding in auctions, obsessive topping whatever bids were made. I quickly discovered one major flaw in the Neopets auction system. See, when you make a bid, of, say, 5000 NP, it immediately places those Neopoints in "escrow", as it were--that is, it removes them from your total and doesn't give them back until the auction is over. Note that--until the auction is over. Not "until you are outbid". So if you bid in one auction, are outbid, and give up on it, you can't get your bid's NP back until the end of the auction. What kind of lamebrained idea is that? Grumble.

Then I discovered that it didn't seem to matter what you bid during the course of the auction, but near the end of it. The first auctions I bid in were started by people in East Asia, so they ended at 2:00 AM, and I didn't win them. So the next ones I tried were ones that ended in midafternoon. It's hard to tell exactly when they end--on the list, it says ">24 hours", "8-25 hours", "2-8 hours", "30 min-2 hours", or "<30 min". The intent is, I imagine, to eliminate the kind of behaviour where everyone tries to cluster their bids in the last minute. Except that it's easy enough, if you put in a little bit of effort, to figure out when the auction closes. I've never started an auction myself, but it looks like you can set the duration of the auction; still, from looking at the first bid, especially on a high-demand item like secret lab map pieces, it's easy to guess when the auction started, and you can look at the range of durations to see when it's likely to be ending. Then you just refresh the auction's page every minute when you think it's close to crossing into a different duration range(at 2 hours, or 30 minutes, or whatever), and you can pinpoint it fairly accurately.

And that's what I saw. I knew when the auction was going to end, and I was prepared to bid frantically at the last minute, but I wasn't prepared for how people were frantically raising the price so that they wouldn't get outbid by someone who was bidding at the same time. So from 10,000 NP it skyrocketed up into 40,000's, by which point I got disgusted and just gave up. Saving a mere 10,000 NP(which I can earn in a day or two if I play a decent amount of games)didn't seem worth all the hassle and wasted time of trying to out-Hubert a bunch of rabid bidders.

So it just seems like a bad auction model, but it's probably the best you can get on an online site with thousands of people on it at any given time. The main shops on the site are automatically restocked every few minutes, but it's rare to see any of them with any stock, because it gets snapped up almost instantly. I found that frustrating when I first started, but now I work around it. People put things in their own shops, but it's easy to comparison-shop, so prices tend to settle at reasonable levels. But I'll stay away from auctions in the future. They're a fool's game.