Ray Cornwall, podcaster, analyst, nerd.
Adams has lost his voice due to a bout with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition where the brain forgets how to speak in a normal voice. You can sing, shout, and speak in public, but normal talking is impossible. There are no documented cases of recovery.
This is an amazing story. Rather than gloat about his recovery, Adams asked his readers to share their greatest moments. It’s a fantastic blog post, and it shouldn’t be missed.
(Thanks to Boing Boing for clueing me in to this.)
We blew up the blog real good, didn’t we? I’d like to thank Omer Kakarca for designing the theme. There is still some work to be done (the logo’s pretty hideous), but I like the new layout, and I hope you do too. Drop a comment if you see any bugs.
From Warren Ellis’s Bad Signal, with his permission:
Sales on the singles are okay, if not great. Sales on the first collection
have apparently been terrific.
We were on such a roll with NEXTWAVE that I was actually into the
idea of doing a second year, which is highly unusual for me and
work-for-hire properties. So Marvel sat down and looked at the numbers,
as they wanted to do a second year too.
What they found was that, at our current sales levels, they could afford
for me to write it, but not for Stuart to draw it. Stuart, as a
Marvel-exclusive artist, commands a fee commensurate with his
astonishing talent. I'm WFH-exclusive too, but they just send me
whisky and loose women and I'm fine. So, basically, I could continue
to write NEXTWAVE, but we'd need to find another artist. This, to me,
was just wrong. I mean, Stuart would obviously be given a far better
job that had actual readers attached to it, but it still seemed a bit like
the numbers were conspiring to fire him for doing his job too well.
Everyone at Marvel pitched in to try and make it work, but the
numbers were just against us.
So NEXTWAVE #12 will be the final issue of the ongoing series.
(To clear up a common misconception: NEXTWAVE was always
pitched as an ongoing series. However, my original intent was to
do 12 and then pass it on to someone else. This got garbled,
somewhere down the chain of communication, and so the first
issue or two got solicited as "part xxx of 12".)
However. The numbers game changes when you posit things in
terms of limited series.
NEXTWAVE #12 will be the last issue of the ongoing series: but
there will be more NEXTWAVE to come, presented as a sequence
of limited series.
This was all worked out some months ago, so I had plenty of time
to work the final NEXTWAVE sequence into a conclusion of sorts.
#11 even features a twelve-page spread that you'll have to buy six
copies of the comic to assemble into its full splendour. Everyone
wishes I'd thought of that eight or nine months ago.
That was the news. Return to your duties.
I could take that copout, you know. 30 in Hexidecimal would work out to 48 in base ten, and I’d have a few extra days, and I could pretend it all worked out.
But I’d be denying one truth that I don’t want to deny- 35/30 worked for me in the most important ways. Sure, I only wrote reviews for half the books, and I got sidetracked the last week and a half with the Essential Luke Cage and the webcomic Narbonic. But I wrote a lot more about comics than I ever have in my life, set up a website to do it, and established a level of self-discipline that every writer needs. And I learned a few weaknesses, and I’m happy about that, because I can’t get better as a writer without that awareness.
I’m going to still review the two Masterworks and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls, and a few of the other books may get a longer review as time goes by. And I’ll do a summary of the other books soon. The summary will come sooner than the rest. And I want to finish everything soon; just because I’m past 30 days doesn’t mean I want this program hanging over my head 30 days from now. Call it 35/60, if you wish.
eBay announced last week that it’s clamping down on pre-order sales on Playstations 3s and Nintendo Wii consoles. Last year, when the Xbox 360 came out, numerous eBay buyers were hurt when they tried to buy consoles through such auctions, only to suffer when sellers couldn’t deliver the product.
This is a responsible move on eBay’s part. No video game reseller can guarantee you a Wii or PS3 at this time. You can pre-order a console from a retailer, but because supply issues are never resolved at a console launch, the retailer can’t guarantee it will be allocated the number of pre-orders it took. And most of the pre-order sales on eBay are actually individuals who made a pre-order at a retailer anyway, so they can’t guarantee the sale. It’s too disruptive a business for eBay, and they outlaw such business with this policy.
"The seller must guarantee that the item will be available for shipping within 30 days from the date of purchase (i.e., the day the listing ends or the date the item is purchased from a store front listing)."
However, since this policy is uniform across the eBay site, I suspect a lot of comics retailers are about to run into trouble with this policy.
There are a number of listings each month on eBay for pre-sales of comics merchandise. Here’s one as an example. This is for Marve Masterworks Avengers volume 6. Marvel is listing the shipping date as December 13, 2006. The auction expires October 19, well before the 30 days that eBay mandates for such auctions. Technically, this auction is not in compliance with eBay’s policy on pre-sale transactions.
But there’s a big difference between this listing and a listing for a console that hasn’t shipped. The retailer is utilizing the Direct Market to secure the Avengers book. He’ll place an order, and Marvel will fulfill it through Diamond Distribution. In fact, Marvel will create as many books as needed to fulfill the needs of Diamond’s retailer customers. Unless the retailer makes an error with his Diamond order or Marvel unexpectedly allocates the Masterwork (and I don’t think they’ve ever allocated such an item), the retailer will easily fulfill this order when the book comes out. And this retailer has done this transaction many times in the past; he’s got a 99.0% positive feedback rating on nearly fourteen thousand transactions. (I’m not endorsing the retailer at all; I’m just rattling off his eBay numbers. I picked this transaction solely because it’s the first one I found.)
Clearly, this sort of transaction shouldn’t be treated in the same way a console pre-order is. But the polciy doesn’t distinguish between the two; it treats both the same, and I suspect at some point comics retailers are going to be punished for the sins of the video game industry.