{"id":370,"date":"2003-08-27T12:54:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-27T12:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/08\/bad-feelings-some-help-regarding-bone-rick-cook\/"},"modified":"2003-08-27T12:54:00","modified_gmt":"2003-08-27T12:54:00","slug":"bad-feelings-some-help-regarding-bone-rick-cook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2003\/08\/bad-feelings-some-help-regarding-bone-rick-cook\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Feelings. Some help regarding Bone. Rick Cook."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more Bad feelings--><br \/>\nBad feeling#1: My Wish List keeps getting bigger. Everytime I strike off two items from the List, ten more arise &#8211;  seemingly from nowhere ( er&#8230;. amazon and eBay and Best Book stall and&#8230;) &#8211; and proceed to attach themselves firmly to my rather intricate priority-algorighm-based Queue. In doing so, they also manage to make mincemeat out of the aforementioned algorithm. A hasty reassignment of priorities becomes inevitable. One fine day, I find two more items in the List that correspond to priority level=HIGH and accordingly mark them, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I see ten more&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>*sigh* I believe the picture is clear.<\/p>\n<p>Bad Feeling#2: Lately the rate at which entries are being struck off my Wish List is disturbing. This would, in any other circumstances, be A Very Good Thing. But from Bad feeling#1 above, this also implies that &#8211; duh &#8211; the List keeps increasing by eight entries everytime I strike something off.  I feel like a black hole. (Yeah, it&#8217;s &#8220;black&#8221; with an L, not without)  Everything I want, I seem to find. <\/p>\n<p>Case in point: This Saturday, I didn&#8217;t have anything to do. Just came to the office and decided to check up on (for no reandom reason) Jeff Smith&#8217;s <i>Bone<\/i> resources on the &#8216;net. Went to Amazon, checked out what Trade Paperbacks were available, also checked out listings on eBay. Nothing special in mind, just checking up on a beloved comic ( I read only two Bone comics so far, and it lives up to all expectations)<\/p>\n<p>In the evening, some of us decide to go for a movie, and after getting the tickets, I bring up the idea of hanging about at Abids for some panipuri. No problemo, off we went. And I popped into MR Books for a dekko.<\/p>\n<p>Gasp! THREE Bone trades for sale. The only saving grace, (to me) was that they were priced <i>very<\/i> competitively at five hundred rupees each.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, the Wishlist had to be updated too. I found these books there &#8211; George Lucas: A BIography by John Baxter. Bladerunner:The Making of the Movie. Eoin Colfer &#8211; The Wishlist ( ironic? ) in Hardcover. TH White &#8211; The Sword in the Stone. Patricia Highsmith &#8211; The First Three Ripley novels in glorious hardcover. Rick Cook &#8211; The Wizardry Cursed. <\/p>\n<p>Four of these &#8211; The Lucas book, White, Cook and Highsmith, I already bought. I even finished <i>The Sword In The Stone<\/i> in one night. It was really a fun read. ( Sometimes, I think I should ditch white-read reads, and go for boring ones that make me snore in five minutes. I am really feeling sleepy now, only because I could not put that book down last night)<\/p>\n<p>Now, the major question on my mind is: do I go ahead and buy the <i>Bone<\/i> books? Or do I wait for a future eBay stroke of luck? I wanted to read those books. They are supposed to be very good. More information about Bone <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rambles.net\/bone_omc99.html\">here<\/a>. And <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/Area51\/Station\/4354\/b_intro.htm\">here<\/a>. And <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theonionavclub.com\/avclub3620\/avfeature_3620.html\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/enterprise.mathematik.uni-essen.de\/~bastian\/Bone.html\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcj.com\/3_online\/w_review_bone.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The pros: Good books. Definitive part of comic collection. Lesser items on Wishlist if I buy this. Don&#8217;t think I would get TPBs at cheaper price in India, especially in the near future. If <i>I<\/i> don&#8217;t buy them, some crazy kid with a rich father will!!!! <\/p>\n<p>The cons: I usually prefer original comics, rather than TPBs. Chances that I might buy them, as in, the whole series, on eBay someday. Too high a price for a second-hand bookstore. The Hypothesis of Indian Comic-book Instability states that I might see it tomorrow, or in two days, or in two months at a Lifestyle sale for 50 rupees each.<\/p>\n<p>To buy or not to buy? Time&#8217;s running out! So&#8217;s my control.<\/p>\n<p>Go ahead, convince me. Please!<\/p>\n<p>Addendum: Anybody who&#8217;s into computers and fantasy and things Pratchettian and Gaimanish should make it a point to read Rick Cook&#8217;s <i>Wizardry<\/i> series. I had bought the first book on a whim ( I liked the cover blurb) at a book sale, and it was really funny&#8230;.The basic premise is this &#8211; a master programmer from our world is kidnapped by a Wizard into a magical dimension, only the old fellow croaks before he can tell Wiz Grumwalt <i>why<\/i> he has been summoned. And after being on the run from Dark Critters( who want to kill him only because he&#8217;s been summoned by the dead Wizard), with an errant (and extremely beautiful) Hedge-witch, Wiz decides to take things in his own hands. What happens next? Aah! Head <a href=\"http:\/\/baen.com\/library\/rcook.htm\">here<\/a> for two books in the series that are available online.<\/p>\n<p>On a similar note, Carl Hiassen&#8217;s <i>Skin-Tight<\/i> is probably the only book where you&#8217;ll find a guy getting his eye poked out by his wife&#8217;s recently-silicon-enhanced nipple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}