Tycho Seems to Have Figured it Out

To quote from Wednesday's Penny Arcade Newspost:

...when people pre-order Haze from EB Games in Canada, and then trade it back within a week, they'll be refunded the entire purchase price of the game - in store credit. It seems nonsensical at first, but that transformation of your money into the tokenized, internal currency is the key. They're virtually guaranteed to sell that traded in copy - only a week old - at their typical grasping rate. Even if the game isn't traded in, they still secured a preorder, one of each store's rated metrics. That game will now travel through the company's intestinal tract, sold and resold, until the disc is too scored to play - at this point, they will offer to sell you a Game Doctor scratch repair kit. Their deepest fear - what literally keeps them up at night - is that you won't trade your games in. They appear to have cracked the code.

It's another sleazy-sounding money making scheme from Gamestop (which owns EB, of course), but this time, at least they're doing the customer a favor at the same time. Despite the fact that they're basically the drug dealers of the electronic entertainment field, I still feel okay going there, because one of my dearest friends is a manager, and I like to support my friends. It's kinda like my thing about not going to Walmart before 10PM.

Don't worry, I still love you, Alex.

Blogging: A Philosophical Inquiry

See how much smarter things sound when you use words like inquiry? Denotatively, it's no different than if I had just written "question", but connotatively, it's like I've paid thousands of dollars over the past five years for education or something! (I realize that the taxpayers of the great State of Oklahoma footed most of the bill- a fact for which I am grateful, but you get the point.) Speaking of $10 words, "denotatively" is one, but isn't bullshit, like "inquiry". I can't think of a single instance at the moment where "inquiry" couldn't be replaced with a much simpler synonym, but as far as I know, "denotatively" would need a big ol' string of words to get its point across otherwise. Interestingly enough, the Firefox spellcheck doesn't like it. Now, it has no problem with "denotative," but as soon as you turn it into an adverb, here come the angry red underlines of you're-wrongness.

But, to the topic at hand:

I wonder, is it important to you, my readership (which as far as I can tell, numbers anywhere from two to five), for these posts to actually say anything? So far as I can tell, when I'm not telling sarcastic jokes or ranting about politics, most of the time I'm just writing to hear myself talk, so to speak. Do you care? Does anybody read these posts? Sometimes, I don't see how they could really be that entertaining to anybody, but you know, stranger things have happened. Now, I doubt that anything about this blog will changed based on your feedback, but I am a little curious. Doesn't that make you feel loved, my numerous readers?

Heh, my digressing paragraph at the beginning was longer than the main point of the post. Can you digress from nothing? I mean, if the digression was right at the beginning, you haven't really strayed from anything, because there's nothing to stray from. Eh, I suppose you're digressing from the title. There you go.

Perhaps I should reorganize and rethink this post...no, screw that. I'm awesome.