Amazon MP3’s on the Moon: Charging for your content on the Internet.

by Stepto
No Comments

I’m writing this in part because I think it’s important to be transparent about what goes on in deciding you’re going to charge for something over giving it away, and what you set the price at. I’m not saying everyone has to agree with that statement, but I think it only helps new creators who want to self publish to understand what goes into asking people FOR TEH MONEYZ. I’ve had many people ask me about how I came to the price points for my books, or what I have on my site for advertising and why. After a recent review of some non-Microsoft income so that I could speak to lessons learned, I thought it might be a good time to talk about it here.

I’m always a little leery about advertising on my blog, or advertising at all as a matter of fact.  I never wanted the fact that I have a small following of truly nice people who are interested in what I have to say mean that I can feel I should make money off them. Plus Independent of my outside content creation, Microsoft certainly supplies me with a wage for my services.  In general, I’m very lucky to be where I am financially and certainly have no cause to get greedy about anything.

So when I actually sat down to try and figure out the price of my book, or when I bought a new server for my blog and moved to pay a co-lo fee in addition to my home Internet use to handle increased traffic, I had to weigh how much I wanted to provide out of my pocket just for the enjoyment of writing and doing Internet stuff so to speak, and what I would ever have to do with all that if I ever wanted to do something else for a while. In the end I made a decision that I wanted, at a minimum, for everything I was doing as a “hobby” for an audience to pay for itself in the event I was unable to pay for it otherwise.

So there are an associated set of costs to running a blog like mine, which receives a meager but still substantial tens of thousands of visits a day, as well as thinking about growth and time spent maintaining it.  There are other costs in publishing your work and making sure it’s of a quality that earns its price. When you tally it all up It’s not a lot, but there’s one thing I’ve learned in the new world of self-marketing and self-publishing: If you are afraid to analyze your costs against your goals and then ask for compensation against those factors, then congratulations you might as well be a graffiti artist.

Nothing against graffiti artists mind you.  There’s even a business in it I guess, but that’s few and far between and runs the risk of arrest.

I am enough of a capitalist to be ok with the concept of working hard, providing some stuff for free, then charging for the rest. The hardest part of this model is getting over asking people for money in return for what you create. And make no mistake, it’s actually damn hard to get over that.

I look at my blog as a staging area to figure out several things.  First, is the audience interested.  Second, is the content worth something as a starting place for something larger.  Third, does it actually entertain or interest me enough to do it.

Think of my blog as a place where you can almost always find the rough draft, or Cliff Notes versions of most of my writing for free.  To that end, I want the blog to pay for itself, no more. So for the blog I redesigned it recently to both highlight my book (and future books) and I also added an Google Adsense badge.  To further supplement blog costs, which again are rather trivial, I also occasionally link items I have bought via Amazon on Twitter as I am an Amazon Associate.

I’ve made a kind of peace with being an Amazon affiliate because I never advertise something that I didn’t buy or own myself. It brings in just enough typically per month to pay my Co-location fee. I quickly grew irritated and disenchanted with Google Adsense.  The badge never fit right in my page column and it never offered anything that anyone reading my blog would even begin to care about despite my configuring the topics.  Today I replaced it with a solution I LOVE.

Anyone who reads my twitter or the entries here on the blog knows I love music.  Between Zune marketplace, iTunes, and Amazon all offering .MP3 options that are DRM free, I feel comfortable pointing to those locations to purchase music.  Amazon’s Affiliate program allows me to put a badge on my site where I can advertise the last .MP3’s I bought from them.  In affect allowing me to have ad space on my site that is going to be far more relevant to my readers (hopeful) interest, but also allowing me to share great music I love and not feel like I’m shilling or shoving an ad for the latest “weird old trick to slimming your stomach” on people. The new badge off to the side lets you listen to the music as well.

I still need to do some fiddling, as I can either use music I have bought or select categories which would allow me to discover some on my own too. But for now I feel really good about promoting only things I myself purchased, in one of my favorite genres, music.

Setting the price of my book was a similar challenge. I had to rate it against what I thought the quality was for the content, the length in words, different editions, and what other’s were charging for similar content. In the end my goals weren’t to finance a new house or anything off the book.  I knew the topic was niche enough that it was never going to be a New York Times Best Seller ™.  So I settled on a tier of prices: one price for eBook that I felt was within the market range and provided options both DRM and not, and another price for softback and hardback within the same range. I’m not sure I hit it as best I could, but I certainly learned a lot and the pricing was absolutely not a failure. One thing I learned, Kindle is a HUGE sales platform.  I’ve sold more on that platform than any other. Second place was Hardback, and third place was a near tie between softcover and Nook.  Last place?  DRM free PDF.  Who’d a thunk it?

So I hope this is a little informative about what someone who has a day job thinks about when setting about how I am going to limit the financial impact to my family of my crazy Internet things. These are the things you think about when you are striking out as the Internet equivalent of a street vendor.

For my part sure I’d love to have hit the big money, no whammies jackpot between my blog and my book.  Who wouldn’t?  But I’m happy that people enjoy the blog and the book, and in the end throw enough coins my way to make sure I can keep doing it.  And it’s important to note that this model works for me because, again I am fortunate enough to have a day job.  The model can easily change when you make the big leap to leave that behind and focus on this type of thing full time.  In the end however, I’m happy the way things have turned out so far.

Thanks guys.  I really do appreciate it.

Amazon MP3’s on the Moon: Charging for your content on the Internet.

by Stepto
No Comments

I’m writing this in part because I think it’s important to be transparent about what goes on in deciding you’re going to charge for something over giving it away, and what you set the price at. I’m not saying everyone has to agree with that statement, but I think it only helps new creators who want to self publish to understand what goes into asking people FOR TEH MONEYZ. I’ve had many people ask me about how I came to the price points for my books, or what I have on my site for advertising and why. After a recent review of some non-Microsoft income so that I could speak to lessons learned, I thought it might be a good time to talk about it here.

I’m always a little leery about advertising on my blog, or advertising at all as a matter of fact.  I never wanted the fact that I have a small following of truly nice people who are interested in what I have to say mean that I can feel I should make money off them. Plus Independent of my outside content creation, Microsoft certainly supplies me with a wage for my services.  In general, I’m very lucky to be where I am financially and certainly have no cause to get greedy about anything.

So when I actually sat down to try and figure out the price of my book, or when I bought a new server for my blog and moved to pay a co-lo fee in addition to my home Internet use to handle increased traffic, I had to weigh how much I wanted to provide out of my pocket just for the enjoyment of writing and doing Internet stuff so to speak, and what I would ever have to do with all that if I ever wanted to do something else for a while. In the end I made a decision that I wanted, at a minimum, for everything I was doing as a “hobby” for an audience to pay for itself in the event I was unable to pay for it otherwise.

So there are an associated set of costs to running a blog like mine, which receives a meager but still substantial tens of thousands of visits a day, as well as thinking about growth and time spent maintaining it.  There are other costs in publishing your work and making sure it’s of a quality that earns its price. When you tally it all up It’s not a lot, but there’s one thing I’ve learned in the new world of self-marketing and self-publishing: If you are afraid to analyze your costs against your goals and then ask for compensation against those factors, then congratulations you might as well be a graffiti artist.

Nothing against graffiti artists mind you.  There’s even a business in it I guess, but that’s few and far between and runs the risk of arrest.

I am enough of a capitalist to be ok with the concept of working hard, providing some stuff for free, then charging for the rest. The hardest part of this model is getting over asking people for money in return for what you create. And make no mistake, it’s actually damn hard to get over that.

I look at my blog as a staging area to figure out several things.  First, is the audience interested.  Second, is the content worth something as a starting place for something larger.  Third, does it actually entertain or interest me enough to do it.

Think of my blog as a place where you can almost always find the rough draft, or Cliff Notes versions of most of my writing for free.  To that end, I want the blog to pay for itself, no more. So for the blog I redesigned it recently to both highlight my book (and future books) and I also added an Google Adsense badge.  To further supplement blog costs, which again are rather trivial, I also occasionally link items I have bought via Amazon on Twitter as I am an Amazon Associate.

I’ve made a kind of peace with being an Amazon affiliate because I never advertise something that I didn’t buy or own myself. It brings in just enough typically per month to pay my Co-location fee. I quickly grew irritated and disenchanted with Google Adsense.  The badge never fit right in my page column and it never offered anything that anyone reading my blog would even begin to care about despite my configuring the topics.  Today I replaced it with a solution I LOVE.

Anyone who reads my twitter or the entries here on the blog knows I love music.  Between Zune marketplace, iTunes, and Amazon all offering .MP3 options that are DRM free, I feel comfortable pointing to those locations to purchase music.  Amazon’s Affiliate program allows me to put a badge on my site where I can advertise the last .MP3’s I bought from them.  In affect allowing me to have ad space on my site that is going to be far more relevant to my readers (hopeful) interest, but also allowing me to share great music I love and not feel like I’m shilling or shoving an ad for the latest “weird old trick to slimming your stomach” on people. The new badge off to the side lets you listen to the music as well.

I still need to do some fiddling, as I can either use music I have bought or select categories which would allow me to discover some on my own too. But for now I feel really good about promoting only things I myself purchased, in one of my favorite genres, music.

Setting the price of my book was a similar challenge. I had to rate it against what I thought the quality was for the content, the length in words, different editions, and what other’s were charging for similar content. In the end my goals weren’t to finance a new house or anything off the book.  I knew the topic was niche enough that it was never going to be a New York Times Best Seller ™.  So I settled on a tier of prices: one price for eBook that I felt was within the market range and provided options both DRM and not, and another price for softback and hardback within the same range. I’m not sure I hit it as best I could, but I certainly learned a lot and the pricing was absolutely not a failure. One thing I learned, Kindle is a HUGE sales platform.  I’ve sold more on that platform than any other. Second place was Hardback, and third place was a near tie between softcover and Nook.  Last place?  DRM free PDF.  Who’d a thunk it?

So I hope this is a little informative about what someone who has a day job thinks about when setting about how I am going to limit the financial impact to my family of my crazy Internet things. These are the things you think about when you are striking out as the Internet equivalent of a street vendor.

For my part sure I’d love to have hit the big money, no whammies jackpot between my blog and my book.  Who wouldn’t?  But I’m happy that people enjoy the blog and the book, and in the end throw enough coins my way to make sure I can keep doing it.  And it’s important to note that this model works for me because, again I am fortunate enough to have a day job.  The model can easily change when you make the big leap to leave that behind and focus on this type of thing full time.  In the end however, I’m happy the way things have turned out so far.

Thanks guys.  I really do appreciate it.

When All the Fools Rush In: Part 2

by Stepto
No Comments

Following the great heart rending that was my April fools joke for my brothers, in true spirit of the event, they both bided their time and enacted their revenge according to their own timetable.

After you pull off a good (or in my case especially traumatic) April Fool’s joke, you have to be on your guard for a while.  I spent the next few weeks walking on eggshells around the house.  I was careful when I came home from school, tested every door carefully before I opened it. I used the restroom looking over my shoulder all the time, and showered with the door locked and bolted. Over time, as we all do, I lowered my guard.  I figured in the end that my brothers had decided to get me on the next April Fools.  Well, let them try. I was already thinking about how I would get them first.

One late September day I was reading comics in my room after school.  Slowly, I drifted into a nap. My middle brother Scott burst into my room.

“Jamie!” he yelled, calling me by my family nickname since my middle name was James, “Maggie’s gotten out we can’t find her!”

Now, since we had gotten Maggie this had become a common occurrence.  The townhome we lived in had a small back yard but she had become a ninja at darting out the front door or back gate when you opened it. It weirdly makes sense since she was a stray when my youngest brother Jeff found her. Her escapes usually resulted in no end of angst on his part until we found her.  He had been too young to really get attached to the previous dog Angus. But he loved Maggie more than a a young boy loves the first stray he brings home and gets to keep.

Speaking of Jeff, I trudged down the stairs to find him practically hysterical. It was dusk, and Maggie had never gotten out this late before.  He kept babbling about 18 wheelers coming down the street in the middle of the night and hitting her.  I rolled my eyes, irritated at the drama and that I’d been roused from a late teenage nap.

I never took naps as an adult like I did when I was a high school teenager.  Jesus, does anyone?

For some reason I had become pretty adept at finding Maggie and getting her to come home. My mom passed by in a hurry and told me they were taking the back to search, I needed to take the front.  She also asked if I had remembered to shut the back gate when I came home.  It’d become a reflex with me, but I hesitated a moment as I tried to remember precisely. This of course indicated guilt, if not at least a teenage disregard for Important Family Things ™ like remembering the dog liked to escape and was important to my brother.

“Find the dog.” My mother growled.

I went out the front door and began calling for Maggie.  The street we lived on was called Timberleaf, and was a long befittingly tree-lined street with townhomes all along each side.  With no break in between the buildings this meant the street was basically divided in quarter mile sections, which is why it was usually easy to find Maggie.  She didn’t a whole lot of places to escape to. It was either up the street, or down the street.  The same went for the alleyway in the back.

For over an hour I trudged up and down the road calling her name. “Maggie!  Maggie!”

It was the simplest of pranks, and the most effective.  As the minutes passed and the sun went down I began to get more and more worried.  Had I left the gate open?  It never took this long to find her, was she hurt? Each time I passed our house calling her name, I could have simply looked in the front window and discovered the prank.  There, with my two brothers, barking her head off trying to get my attention because she could hear me calling her, was Maggie.  They watched me trudge up and down the street before I heard her muffled barking as I neared the house for the 15th time.

Oh thank God, I thought, but I mistook the muffled barking for distance. So two more times I walked further up the street trying to pinpoint it before absentmindedly glancing at the house to see my grinning brothers and mother and the ecstatic Maggie, who just couldn’t wait to answer my calls.

I stood dumbstruck. They found her and didn’t tell me? I thought.  Then it  hit me.

In retrospect, they spent 2 minutes to set me up for over an hour, while I had spent an hour setting my brothers up for 2 minutes.

Well played.  Well played indeed.

This Happened Once Before.

by Stepto
No Comments

Today I opened up my mail to find an automated red light camera had apparently accused me of making a right turn on a clear red light (and a Do Not Walk on the pedestrian sign) without making a full and complete stop. Shortly thereafter I made two ill advised tweets on the Twitter tubes that would profoundly affect my future.

You never know when these things will come and bite you in the ass.  For those of us in the, shall we say older Internet generation, we don’t worry too much.  I’m 38.  I know not to say something on the Internet that will get me in serious trouble in my life.  We often act with grave concern at the careless actions of the young today, posting their goat rodeo parties online for future employers to see. But how was I to know the repercussions of a careless Twitter post decades in the future?

Tonight I made the following two regrettable tweets, read from the bottom up:

hodgman

The reference was to what many of us have always assumed would be John Hodgman’s eventual takeover of the planet Earth. I had just typed the upper tweet with the self satisfaction that only a writer who thinks they have written something funny and harmless and clever can feel when the first time traveler assassins kicked in the kitchen back door.

Remington, our youngest Golden Retriever, reacted in typical household dog protector style.  He jumped the first attacker and began licking him on the face to say hello.  Unaccustomed to actual affection, and the splendid lifestyle that early second decade humans were used to living, the first assassin was momentarily bewitched, while the second one screamed at him “Remember your training, they said this would happen!”  The first killer struggled with his Apple iDe-knowledge gun, which Remington had decided was a chew toy, while the second looked on in shock that we had working furniture and an actual roof.

Coolly, I reached for the cold unopened can of Dr. Pepper I was just about to enjoy.  The first assassin broke himself free of Remington’s playful grip and stood just as I wound up my arm to throw.  He looked at me in shock seconds before his demise.

“Real Dr. Pepper?  Not SynthaPepper?” he said just before the can hit his shooting arm and his weapon discharged right in his face.  The second assassin looked on in fear, surrounded by an alien pre-hodgman world of affluent suburbia that he could not comprehend. “Everything I have been told is a lie,” he mumbled.

Remington whined threateningly with love as he approached the interloper from the side. The killer paled.

“Please,” the assassin said, “Please, we had no choice.”

Remington smiled and panted, excited that this new stranger was about to play some ball. The opportunity was obvious as I reached for my next weapon.

“CHOOSE THIS” I yelled as I threw the jar of Jiff peanut butter at the hapless thug, again striking his firing arm and his weapon discharged in his face.  Before his body hit the floor the next two assassins arrived.

These were different.  Smarter, and dressed in the robes of the high order of the Hodgmans. But upon emerging from the time portal both were distracted by Rochelle’s voice, asking me “Did you just throw my peanut butter at that guy?”

She was answered only by the new assassins training both their weapons on her as one said “A useless life is an early death.”

Rochelle hates a lot of things, but none more than ridiculously stupid quotes from the works of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Before I could even blink, another time portal flashed and two men appeared without weapons, while Rochelle was standing over the broken bodies of the other two assassins.  “I’m sorry,” she said looking down at her handiwork, “was I too Goethe for you?”

“Hi there, please no worries.  We’re just here to clean up the mess and apologize” the first of the two said.  Remington ran forward to say hello but both men shrieked in fear and backed away. “Remington!” I shouted, “Be bad!”

He stopped immediately and growled.  The two men relaxed. 

“John Hodgman sends his regards and apologies for the misunderstanding.” The men said in unison, “This has become quite an embarrassment in the future, you see you end up freezing the bodies and using them as evidence later.  It very much undermines the great overlord’s plans for total domination. We’re here to ensure no more teams are sent to kill you, and we need to take these…um…pieces of evidence back.”

In a flash they were gone, the only record of their being here was a can of Dr. Pepper and a jar of Jiff peanut butter both lying on the floor.

“You were twittering clever nerd jokes about the future again weren’t you?” Rochelle said.

I won’t even get into the next two hours of time travelers from the Xboxitarian 2024 election committee.

When All the Fools Rush In: Part 1

by Stepto
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I’ve made no secret of my hatred of April Fools day.  I hate it.  I hate it more than Joanie would grow up to secretly loathe Chachi after ten years of sullen marriage, nurtured resentment and missed opportunities.  I hate it more than Yukon Cornelious would grow to hate his baleful addiction to peppermint as he lay dying from peppermint poisoning in “The Mint Julep” hotel in Las Vegas, tended in the end only by a prostitute with a heart of gold as his last remaining friend.  I hate it more than when someone says “Van Halen with Sammy Hagar wasn’t *that* bad.”

In short, I hate April Fool’s with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns in champagne supernova, cooking inside a microwave of the gods set on high, locked inside a car sitting in the universe equivalent of a black interior Chevy nova in the Texas summer heat.

I want to make clear the reason why.  For a period of about 36 hours as the wave of April Fools rolls over the world from Sydney to LA, the Internet as a means of distributing information becomes useless.  I mean completely useless. 

As useless as a metaphor without an.

Pranks however, I am fond of.

I’m by no means a master prankster or anything of the sort.  In fact, I enjoy being fooled just as much as fooling as long as the joke was well done enough. But as this past April Fool’s day came by and I was nurturing my hate now that the Internet is around* I reflected a bit on some pranks both at my hand and against me. Two stuck out in my mind, both from my childhood.  And I remember them vividly.

I have two younger brothers, Jeff and Scott. If I have not been clear about the fact they are awesome and I love them muchly, let me do that right now. Scott resides in the rarified air of HighAtopAMountainNearTheSky in Colorado where he brews beer and walks among the Elk.  My youngest brother Jeff frolics with his dog DeeOhGee** in our home town of Dallas, works in the restaurant business, and we can always be counted on to be txt’ing each other during major NASA events.

When we were children, I was into comics and they were into baseball cards.  Thus began my first major April Fool’s prank. 

I blame the baseball card thing squarely on my father and my Uncle Mark.  On my father’s side of the family there was an intense love of Baseball.  It’s to this day never really gone away. My cousins delight in the knocking about of the base balls and the running of the bases against the bad guys in the fields of out.  I never got it.  Oh sure, my first piece of sports equipment was a beautiful leather Wilson baseball glove.  My father taught me to oil it and take care of it.  He taught me to never keep my eye off that strangely stitched ball whether I was fielding, pitching, or batting with the part of the game that is called the bat.  I learned these things and I remember them today, much like most people learn Algebra.

Baseball is interesting to me in one singular respect.  It is a game of stats.  You can replay any baseball game in your head if you know the stats by innings.  Other than that I find it crushingly boring.  I refer to the late great George Carlin, who said that you could make Baseball 10000% more interesting by randomly placing landmines in the outfield, and if the pitcher hits the batter with the ball the batter is out.

My brothers however, found a way to embrace Baseball I never could: Baseball Cards. The most entertaining night in modern Baseball history, besides the time he delivered one metric manhandling to that moron batter who charged him on the mound, was the night the great Nolan Ryan pitched his monumental 5000th strike out.  Up high in the stands was my uncle Mark, with a run of the mill camera.  And he managed to take the only authenticated photo of the actual moment.  He caught, in one photo, the pitch the swing AND the scoreboard. Thus began my uncle’s journey into Texas Rangers baseball fame, and my brothers’ love affair of baseball cards.

They started collecting them incessantly.  With my uncle’s guidance and tips from my father, they began spending all their allowance money and birthday and Christmas requests on cards.  Boxed sets of Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer suddenly filled their shared room.  Flip books of rares were created.  They became consumed. They had to have two boxes of every year.  One sealed and one to plumb for those cards worth the most and most in need of protection.  You people who think the card game Magic inspired card preservation obsessiveness are obviously people who never knew a baseball card collector.  All of that shit came directly out of baseball card collecting, just without any actual use of the cards other than looking at them and having to throw away pounds and pounds of gum so dry and brittle I’m convinced the balsawood industry was actually making it.

I regarded this with some amusement in my own private bedroom as I bagged my latest Detective Comics issue in Mylar with an acid free cardboard back.  You know, something actually important.

Soon, Jeff found a stray puppy.  It was some retriever-esque mutt wandering the neighborhood with no collar and way too young to be lost. He brought it home, and my mother named it Maggie.  Maggie features very prominently in the next several hundred words.

Maggie was prone to chew, as most puppies are, and she was an absolute delight.  Our long time family dog, a toy poodle named Angus that lived to be 17, had just been put down.  So the arrival of a fresh young playful dog was just what we needed. My brothers, obsessed over their cards, would often leave them out in their bedroom after pouring over them like deluded fools. But they knew to close the door.

After Maggie had established a reputation for shredding, having going through a couple of pillows and several books,  I sat in my room one late March night carefully cataloging my pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths comics from the post ones, and realized the ultimate April Fools prank.  Being older I had a bit more spending money than they did of course.  My epiphany was that while my joke was *technically* mean spirited, it would result in a net benefit for my brothers.

The next day I went to a local card store and bought as many single packs as I could afford.  I split it up amongst the card makers.  I ran home and opened each pack carefully.  Using one of my brothers’ many price guides I separated out any rares or potential rares (rookies).  I munched on balsawood textured gum I carefully indexed each card out of each pack. In an initial purchase of about 60 cards I netted about 5 rares and another 5 potential rares. Another pass yielded another 2 rares and 30 cards, giving me 90 cards for my prank. Again munching on balsagum I carefully planned for April first.  I shredded all the common cards  by hand.  In the end I basically had baseball card confetti. As April first approached I purchased the exact same card holders and flipbooks my brothers had.  I tore them apart as well, a bit more haphazardly this time and in larger chunks.

When the big day arrived I waited until my brothers were downstairs together and put my plan into action.  I locked Maggie in my room. I quickly took their flipbooks and boxes of cards into my mother’s room.  I carefully and rapidly soaked the baseball card confetti in water and spread it all over their room, dropping the torn flipbooks as I went.  Within just a few minutes their room looked like a puppy sized, baseball card eating tornado had gone through it.  Mischief managed, I moved Maggie into their room and closed the door.  I wandered downstairs and said “Hey has anyone seen Maggie? I have not seen her in like an hour”

My brothers had already seen the anger in the house at Maggie chewing up various things and sensed danger.  They looked up from their perch on the couch as I turned in perfect slow motion timing and said “Ohhhhh mannnnn I hope sheeeeee isnt innnnnnn yourrrrrrrrr roooooooooom”

You could almost see the John Hughes’ dolly back zoom-in effect as they realized what might have happened.  They ran upstairs with me in close pursuit.  As they opened their door, time stopped.  There was the palpable sound of an old vinyl record scratch. Two things happened at once.

Maggie had already had a field day with the torn up useless cards so she was on top of one of their beds, her mouth coated in paper fragments and busily chewing up a fake torn flipbook I had put in there. She looked up at my brothers with that happy tongue lagging grin that only a retriever breed can manage, you know the one that says “ARE YOU AS HAPPY AS I AM RIGHT NOW?” The illusion was more perfect than I could have hoped for.  She looked for all intents and dark purposes as if for the past hour she had systematically destroyed everything my brothers held dear.

The second thing that happened is that both my brothers souls’ rent asunder in front of me and I had to physically prevent them from murdering, then eating the puppy.

And that part was tough because holy crap they really wanted to kill that dog.

The dog of course, thought this was play time, being happy to finally tear up shit that was ok to tear up.  So I entered some type of matrix like battle where a situation of my own creation resulted in my trying to shield an attacking and playful puppy from my two brothers. Imagine an anime sequence where I had to actually fight my brothers with swords and laser beams coming out of their eyes, while the puppy turned into some type of pokemon, all over a situation I had created. It took many many minutes of screaming and yelling and fisticuffs to let them know it was all a joke. In the end the handing them their collections safe and sound helped.

And the handing over of rares and potential rares they didn’t otherwise have helped.

But.  They didn’t forget.  Oh no they didn’t.  And Maggie would be the instrument of their revenge.  But being smart, and being related to me, they knew to wait.  They knew to bide. (cont)

 

 

*SERIOUSLY GUYS I FUCKING HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I oh is that a graham cracker, why thank you, *munch munch*.  SERIOUSLY I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT.

** Get it?  *nudge*  Get it?