hm, more space here than I remember
Dodging the year-absent mark, a brain-dump:
- I was helping out at a local record store, counter work and ordering, making use of many years of music arcana and seeing how it applied to actually levering dollars out of wallets, but after a few years of the good financial fight we finally pulled the plug. It's absurd how impossible the music-retail business is right now, especially as a small independent store, especially with Amazon chopping the legs out from under all price points. Pricing at MSRP, we were making about $3 on the average CD, sometimes less. Super-deluxe vinyl editions could be more profitable, but that required people actually wanting to drop $30+ on an album. Nutty. So every order became an agony of new releases versus money tied up in product that wasn't selling fast enough. We circled the drain for a while, then shut it down on Halloween. I don't know that the record store will become extinct, but they're getting awfully rare.
- Bought art last weekend, a combination of serigraph and watercolors that I can stare at for time-erasing stretches. I think it might be the first piece I've ever purchased from someone I didn't know ahead of time; she said it was the first piece she'd ever sold to someone who wasn't family or a friend. Now for the framing; oh, and maybe I should fix a wall so I can hang it somewhere inside the house.
- Jumped back into the RPG world via a Sunday group playing in the Labyrinth Lord framework, mostly, with some detours into other games depending on who shows up. Still working on the actual role playing, and I should never take my unlucky dice hands into a casino, but whee it's fun. (Also expensive when I discover that things like 7-sided dice and Battle Wizards exist.) I see a gaming convention in my future.
Derp, brain empty.
- I was helping out at a local record store, counter work and ordering, making use of many years of music arcana and seeing how it applied to actually levering dollars out of wallets, but after a few years of the good financial fight we finally pulled the plug. It's absurd how impossible the music-retail business is right now, especially as a small independent store, especially with Amazon chopping the legs out from under all price points. Pricing at MSRP, we were making about $3 on the average CD, sometimes less. Super-deluxe vinyl editions could be more profitable, but that required people actually wanting to drop $30+ on an album. Nutty. So every order became an agony of new releases versus money tied up in product that wasn't selling fast enough. We circled the drain for a while, then shut it down on Halloween. I don't know that the record store will become extinct, but they're getting awfully rare.
- Bought art last weekend, a combination of serigraph and watercolors that I can stare at for time-erasing stretches. I think it might be the first piece I've ever purchased from someone I didn't know ahead of time; she said it was the first piece she'd ever sold to someone who wasn't family or a friend. Now for the framing; oh, and maybe I should fix a wall so I can hang it somewhere inside the house.
- Jumped back into the RPG world via a Sunday group playing in the Labyrinth Lord framework, mostly, with some detours into other games depending on who shows up. Still working on the actual role playing, and I should never take my unlucky dice hands into a casino, but whee it's fun. (Also expensive when I discover that things like 7-sided dice and Battle Wizards exist.) I see a gaming convention in my future.
Derp, brain empty.