RAAAAAGE.
I am so angry right now.
I ordered my Cognitive Psych textbook from Half.com a few days ago. $71, mint condition, seller had like 99% positive feedback or something. Hurray, good deal!
Today I get an email from Half, telling me I've been issued a refund. "Thebookpros" were "regrettably unable to fulfill" my order. To view an explanation, it said, go to the website and click on the transaction. I did -- there was no explanation.
That's fucking uncool. To just be like "Oh, sorry, can't send you your textbook lolz. Why? IDK. Just don't feel like it."
I know I'm getting ridiculously worked up over nothing. It's just really frustrating. And now I'm in my "People are insensitive bastards" mindset, which is not the way I want to be feeling before I go to work. Customers suck enough when I'm NOT in a bad mood. I'm going to be a nightmare today if I don't get it together.
On the subject of things what frustrate me, I just finished reading a pretty terrible book. Which I wouldn't mind, except I spent money on it. I never buy myself books; my mom works at a library, it's kind of pointless. But I was hunger-dazed one day at B&N and impulse-bought "Her Fearful Symmetry," by Audrey Niffenegger, who also wrote "The Time-Traveler's Wife." I really like TTTW, and I was enjoying HFS for a while. You know, it was fun, it kept me engaged, etc.
First of all, I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but only to a certain extent. (Which is one of many reasons that RTD's episode of Doctor Who often bug the hell out of me.) I like to have at least the tiniest bit of logic behind the extraordinary things that are happening in fiction. So in a world apparently otherwise devoid of ghosts, would it be too much to ask to have some kind of theory behind why Elspeth is a ghost trapped in her apartment, but completely conscious and able to communicate?
There was a lot of stuff like that. As you might expect in a story about the supernatural, the author came up against a lot of things that were difficult to explain. So instead of taking the time to come up with some explanation, no matter how flimsy, she just...skimmed over them. To pick a non-supernatural example -- there's this one character, Martin, who has severe OCD but refuses to take medication for it. So his friend Julia devises an elaborate plan to obtain OCD meds and slip them to Martin by saying they're "vitamins."
All the book says is "It was much more complicated than she had anticipated, but Julia did eventually manage to get a prescription for Anafranil."
...Uh...really? We're going to skip over the part where she was apparently able to fake OCD thoroughly enough to fool a doctor into prescribing her a psychoactive medication?
Also, the plot twists were MAD predictable. The first major one was pretty much the exact same twist as in "Triangle," which I read senior year. Oh noes, identical twins switched identities so the woman they thought was their aunt WAS THEIR MOTHER!
And the last thing I have to say is that the book ended up involving a zombie. An honest-to-God zombie. They reanimated a corpse. And the author wasn't even trying to be funny about it. It was an unironic zombie.
Actually, "Ironic Zombie" would be an awesome band name.
So, if you read this book and liked it...can you tell me what I missed? Because ugh.
I ordered my Cognitive Psych textbook from Half.com a few days ago. $71, mint condition, seller had like 99% positive feedback or something. Hurray, good deal!
Today I get an email from Half, telling me I've been issued a refund. "Thebookpros" were "regrettably unable to fulfill" my order. To view an explanation, it said, go to the website and click on the transaction. I did -- there was no explanation.
That's fucking uncool. To just be like "Oh, sorry, can't send you your textbook lolz. Why? IDK. Just don't feel like it."
I know I'm getting ridiculously worked up over nothing. It's just really frustrating. And now I'm in my "People are insensitive bastards" mindset, which is not the way I want to be feeling before I go to work. Customers suck enough when I'm NOT in a bad mood. I'm going to be a nightmare today if I don't get it together.
On the subject of things what frustrate me, I just finished reading a pretty terrible book. Which I wouldn't mind, except I spent money on it. I never buy myself books; my mom works at a library, it's kind of pointless. But I was hunger-dazed one day at B&N and impulse-bought "Her Fearful Symmetry," by Audrey Niffenegger, who also wrote "The Time-Traveler's Wife." I really like TTTW, and I was enjoying HFS for a while. You know, it was fun, it kept me engaged, etc.
First of all, I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but only to a certain extent. (Which is one of many reasons that RTD's episode of Doctor Who often bug the hell out of me.) I like to have at least the tiniest bit of logic behind the extraordinary things that are happening in fiction. So in a world apparently otherwise devoid of ghosts, would it be too much to ask to have some kind of theory behind why Elspeth is a ghost trapped in her apartment, but completely conscious and able to communicate?
There was a lot of stuff like that. As you might expect in a story about the supernatural, the author came up against a lot of things that were difficult to explain. So instead of taking the time to come up with some explanation, no matter how flimsy, she just...skimmed over them. To pick a non-supernatural example -- there's this one character, Martin, who has severe OCD but refuses to take medication for it. So his friend Julia devises an elaborate plan to obtain OCD meds and slip them to Martin by saying they're "vitamins."
All the book says is "It was much more complicated than she had anticipated, but Julia did eventually manage to get a prescription for Anafranil."
...Uh...really? We're going to skip over the part where she was apparently able to fake OCD thoroughly enough to fool a doctor into prescribing her a psychoactive medication?
Also, the plot twists were MAD predictable. The first major one was pretty much the exact same twist as in "Triangle," which I read senior year. Oh noes, identical twins switched identities so the woman they thought was their aunt WAS THEIR MOTHER!
And the last thing I have to say is that the book ended up involving a zombie. An honest-to-God zombie. They reanimated a corpse. And the author wasn't even trying to be funny about it. It was an unironic zombie.
Actually, "Ironic Zombie" would be an awesome band name.
So, if you read this book and liked it...can you tell me what I missed? Because ugh.