Personal Dork Assistant

Macropayment > Micropayment

So a random (albeit slightly influential) artist is selling his latest web-comic for 25 cents. Micropayment systems is a solution without a problem (or is it a problem without a solution?), since most web content is pretty worthless anyway, and by pricing your content that low, you're running awfully close to that worthless threshold, at least perception-wise. Frankly, anything worth 25 cents can probably be sold for a buck, as Apple is trying to do with music. It's all about upsells and value-adds, as demonstrated by the Penny Arcade guys. Almost $1K for a pencil sketch? That's a lot of quarters. Sure, the PA boys present themselves as above marketing hype, etc., but there's some savvy selling in their auction announcement blurb:

Penny Arcade is going to the San Diego Comic-con this month and we need some green to grease the travel wheels. So I have decided to auction off an original drawing of the entire PA crew. If this sort of thing interests you at all I highly encourage you to bid as the next auction probably won't be for a long time. It's a pencil drawing on bristol board and I'll be happy to sign it to whoever the lucky winner is. I'll also stick it in an envelope and mail it to wherever you live along with a cool Penny Arcade sticker.

So they appeal to altruism ("help to send poor starving artists to San Diego!"), fairness ("let the free-market auction decide on the fair price, bid high bid often!"), scarcity ("it's a once in a kinda-longtime opportunity!"), and a personal touch ("I'll lick the envelope with my own personal tongue"). Hey, it works. And I might even go to the Comic Con now, even though comics is about the last geek hobby that I've never got into. Well, there's always anime, although I can't stand manga in English. I'm not virulently anti-dub when it comes to anime, but if I do decide to start in on manga, I'll definitely stick with the Chinese translations. Parsing the Asian cultural context in English is just too much of a cognitive dissonance for me. Besides, the Chinese books are a third the price of the US versions (depending on currency fluctuations, stupid strong dollar policy). $10 for an English (slim, black-and-white) volume is ridiculous considering even a short series can easily go a dozen books.

Anyway, I'd probably get a Cardboard Tube Samurai shirt, because I used to play that (non-video!) game when I was little. I can't decide if the new design is politically-incorrect-chic or if it's ignorant racist bullshit like the Abercrombie and Fitch fiasco. The fact that they're pasty video-game nerds doesn't work in their favor here.