Brandice Says

"Why Some E-Books Cost More Than the Hardcover" - Nathan Bransford, Author

This is a really good explanation, but ultimately I don’t really care why ebooks sometimes cost more. They shouldn’t, and more often than not I won’t purchase a book at all if the pricing is set up that way. I’ve opted out of reading at least three books in the past month because I just will not pay more for a digital copy and the pricing idiocy makes me so irritated that I won’t read the hard copy simply on principle.

The publishing world is changing. Publishers can get on board with where things are heading and deal with the loss, or they can find themselves extinct. That’s my personal prediction. The consumer doesn’t care that you used to make a lot more money. They just want a book in a convenient form at a price they deem reasonable. End of story.

Minimum Wage and the Prices of Comics

Let’s get right into it. In 2010, the US Federal Minimum Wage was $7.25 per hour. Figuring a 36 hour work week (factoring in unpaid lunches), it meant that someone working a minimum wage job was earning $261.00 per week before paying any taxes. In 2010, the average cover price for a typical 32 page superhero comic was $2.99 (1). In other words, to purchase ONE comic would cost 1.15% of someone’s weekly income. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it represents one of the highest price points in the history of comics. I’ll show this more concretely as we go forward, but for now I wanted to compare that to another key benchmark in the history of comics: the publishing of Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. This is especially timely since the Fantastic Four just celebrated their 50th anniversary. FF #1 was cover priced at 10 cents US. The US Federal Minimum Wage in 1961 was $1.15 per hour and, figuring the same 36 hour work week, a person would have earned $41.40 per week. To purchase the first issue of Fanastic Four, a person working minimum wage would have spent only 0.24% of their pay cheque. That is a stunning difference in price. To put this even more plainly: it represents a 379.2% increase in the price in relation to minimum wage from 1961 to 2010.

REALLY great write up about the price of comics.

On Keeping a Logbook

(Click above to read the full article)

It’s not a diary or a journal. It’s a book of lists. The lists are simple facts.

Why not just keep a diary?

For one thing, I’m lazy. It’s easier to just list the events of the day than to craft them into a prose narrative. Any time I’ve tried to keep a journal, I ran out of steam pretty quick.

But more importantly, keeping a simple list of who/what/where means I write down events that seem mundane at the time, but later on help paint a better portrait of the day, or even become more significant over time. By “sticking to the facts” I don’t pre-judge what was important or what wasn’t, I just write it down.

Best of all, limiting each day to one page and breaking it down into a list instead of prose makes it easier for me to scan through it later, and get a real feel for the passing of time as I flip the pages.

This is exactly why I love doing my Moleskine logbook. I love to go back and look at the full picture of what my week was like. It’s so low maintenance, and if I get a day or two behind with it, I can easily catch up by looking at my Twitter logs for little snippets of where I was. I really love this personal record keeping. :) It’s my favorite project that I started this year and I’m actually sticking with it this time around.

Love, Work, and Friends: Can You Have It All (Quiet: The Blog)

sundownsocialwork:

You Want a Social Life, With Friends

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

—by Kenneth Koch

…

The conventional wisdom is that you can’t do it all. But he said you can. Just not all at once.

I find this really interesting… Do you think that you can have the ultimate job, the perfect marriage, and a great friend dynamic, all simultaneously? I believe there’s a lot of truth to the idea that you can’t have all three of those things without one of the three suffering.

Odds are, if you’re throwing yourself fully into a truly rewarding and challenging job, and you come home and devote yourself fully to your wife/husband, then your friends might be missing you, and likewise with any other possible combination.

The good thing is, you can still be a pretty content human being with a little imbalance in certain areas. Different areas need a different amount of attention at different points in our lives, and I think that’s okay.

5 Tips For Finding Work You Love - Quiet, The Blog

1. Pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You only envy those who have what you desire.

2. Ask yourself what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not.

3. Pay attention to the work you gravitate to.

4. What makes you cry? This one comes courtesy of Steve Pavlina, over at Personal Development for Smart People. He advises that you sit down with a blank sheet of paper, ask yourself what your life purpose is, and keep writing down answers until you come to the one that makes you cry.

When I looked at these four criteria/questions, what I’m already doing fits perfectly. I’m definitely doing both creative and professional work that I love, or at least work that the current Me loves, and I’m pretty content with that. :)

Are you?

Shameful Gender Discrimination at UC Davis Veterinary School

“Women should not be discriminated against, punished, or shamed for their decision to reproduce. No matter how “intensive and lock-step” the curriculum is.”

Well said, indeed. Cripes. What a poorly handled situation.

Ugly underwear can ruin your day - USA Today

Don’t forget to put on your sexiest underwear today. It could change the day. ;)

Jokes aside, I feel kind of frumpy and boring when I have my oldest, rattiest underwear on, and I feel awesome when I’m wearing favorite, best-fitting pair. Feeling good in the clothes you’re wearing in general is seriously such a boost.

New Lives for 'Dead' Suburban Malls

Failed malls offer an unparalleled opportunity to bring services to suburban neighborhoods, Ms. Dunham-Jones says. “The idea is to demolish a dead mall and build the downtown area a suburb never had,” she said. “Three or four stories of apartments above the retail on the ground floor, providing an option where people can walk to most of their daily needs. And they have more opportunities for social interaction. They get a more urban lifestyle, but in a familiar place.

This is an AMAZING idea that I really hope succeeds. This is the perfect environment for an aging community, and the possibilities are endless!

Jared Lee Loughner may plead insanity. How do mental health workers figure out whether someone is crazy?

To prove insanity in court, defense attorneys must demonstrate that their client’s mental illness prevented him from understanding the wrongness of his criminal undertaking at the time of the offense. (This standard is stricter than merely showing the defendant generally cannot not tell right from wrong.) They must also show a clear connection between the defendant’s delusions and the crime he committed. So, for example, a paranoid schizophrenic shoplifter who burgles a melon because he’s hungry probably won’t get off the hook. But a similar shoplifter who steals the melon because he believes the melon will neutralize a chip the CIA planted in his brain probably will. To evaluate whether a defendant was legally insane at the time of the crime, psychologists and psychiatrists interview him and examine “collateral information”—such as the defendant’s arrest warrant, medical records, and criminal history. They also conduct interviews with spouses, friends, and coworkers. In the case of Loughner, collateral evidence would probably include the letters and online message-board postings he’s believed to have written and the YouTube videos that have been attributed to him.

Good description. Good article on how these things work.

Steve Jobs' liver transplant: Did he game the system?

I hear you, Steve. We’re all pulling for you. It’s your life and your family. But that liver wasn’t yours. Somebody died to make it available. And other people who aren’t billionaires may have died on waiting lists so you could have it. What was your cancer situation when you got the transplant? Has the cancer returned? You owe us some answers.

This article is HORRIBLE. No, Steve Jobs does not owe “us” answers about his medical treatment, his past transplant history, or anything else. He may owe those answers to his doctors or some other medical professionals, or someone doing an actual INVESTIGATION, but he does NOT owe those answers to the American public. The details a person’s medical care aren’t just free game because that person is a noted public figure.

The American people are not always entitled to devour every aspect of a public figure’s life just because our nation is constantly frantic to know everything about everyone. What the fuck.

Supporting a child showing the first signs of mental illness (Boston Globe)

Early intervention and treatment is CRUCIAL during a first psychotic episode. It can mean a world of difference in the long term and there are a lot of areas around the country developing programs to support patients having their first psychotic episode and educate families and loved ones about how to help ensure a newly mentally ill person has the best chance possible at a functional life.