Caveat Emptor!

Looks like there's a whole new reason for the buyer to beware (and it's the perfect season for it, too).

There's an outfit called "Alphascript Publishing" that are, among other things, selling a book on MST3k over at Amazon. Sounds good so far, but someone took the time to look at the fine print on the book and discovered that all the material was simply reprinted from Wikipedia.

The first thing that comes to mind is: Is this legal? I'm not quite sure if it is or not, but the fact that there is an article on Alphascript in Wikipedia that spells out what it is doing, I'm guessing Wikipedia doesn't give a flying fig.

I suppose I wouldn't give a flying fig myself if it weren't for the fact that (a) they're doing it very badly and (b) they're charging pretty high prices for these books.

Never mind the questionable veracity of articles on Wikipedia. According to the above sources, these guys didn't even clean up grammatical or font errors before they published. And look at that cover! I mean, other "unofficial guides" manage to give it some art that evokes the subject without violating any copyrighted images. These guys just grabbed a generic image off the NASA website and called it a day. And they have the balls to sell these measly 84 pages of half-assed effort for forty dollars?!?!

It's all very corporate and impersonal. If some MST3k fan had happened upon this Wikipedia loophole and took it upon themselves to put together a volume, they probably would have put forth a lot more work because of their love for the subject. There's no love here; Only greed.

Form when you get sick of your family tomorrow

Online Atari, from the Atari folks themselves (via Metafilter).



C'mon! You know you want to see a square kill ducks with an arrow!

And all without a drop of rum

Once upon a time, Mrs. Mosley (right before she became Mrs. Mosley) and I chose to move into our first our house and get married in the same week. It would seem we haven't learned our lesson, as we are currently moving again during the busy holiday season (and all while taking care of our teething infant).

Suffice to say, it's a busy time for the Mosley transitional household. And to sub for multiple future posts, please enjoy the greatest tap dance routine of all time:

You can actually see the one on the left trying to produce an original thought.

Yeah, nothing gets my librarian outrage up more than small-minded schmucks like these two:


Here is the story (found via the invaluable Metafilter):

Sharon Cook, 57, above left, and Barbara Boisvert, 62, above right, basically colluded to keep the book out of circulation — Cook, who had become disturbed by the book’s imagery, checked it out for a year, meaning no one else could check it out. However, when an 11-year-old girl put it on hold, Cook was unable to continue her delaying tactic — and Boisvert stepped in, removing the hold, and keeping the book out of circulation.

Both were fired for their actions.

Yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out. I love a happy ending.

I was also relieved to read a correction at the top that stated these two were not librarians, but rather "library workers", which makes more sense. Not that there aren't librarians that would pull this kind of crap, but no librarian with any sense of self-respect or duty would.

Feasting on the bones

The slow death of Blockbuster continues unabated. The most recent development is the closing of multiple stores in town and having clearance sales of anything and everything in store (including the shelving).

The pricing of the DVD's are not yet at the levels that it's worth a damn to search (not with Movie Stop around), but the stores are worth investigating for the non-DVD materials. This includes, of all things, quite a few books. I don't know where Blockbuster got them, but they are shipping them to stores and marking them down in order to offload them. I picked this one up last week for four dollars:


Let's see: Alternate realities, inter-dimensional travel and war gamers. Sounds like a party to me. At any rate, they're going to be adding new stuff to sell in the stores weekly until they shut down for good in January, so don't forget to stop in.

Open... and discover!

Presenting my favorite picture of the day (and, no, it's not a cat. Click here to find out what it is):