Of course, BL isn’t nearly as popular as any of those series were and card collecting fervor doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so stores around me don’t carry them.  So I am left with these two choices: lazily scouring eBay for sellers with fantastic merchandise and 98-100% positive feedback or diligently scouring forums and personal sites for what seems to be a reliable person to trade cards with.  Well, to start out, I have to go with the former so that I actually have cards to trade should I attempt to do the latter.

I recently bought and received a couple of boxes of cards from the same seller.  The seller didn’t do anything wrong, even sent me a notice that the item shipped (same day of payment!).  You would think that would be normal, but I actually don’t get too many ebay shipping notifications, despite having shopped on the site quite a bit.  The only thing I thought wasn’t satisfactory was that the package was registered airmail, yet I received no tracking number for the package so that I could stalk it myself.  Positive feedback for the seller with the awesome BL cards was left, of course, except for the Detailed Seller Ratings.  In my defense, I thought four stars out of five was still positive.  Three stars would be average, four stars is positive, and five stars is exceptionally rare, such as service that you didn’t even expect, isn’t it?

Apparently it doesn’t work that way on eBay, if forums are to be believed.  Sometimes they’re not, but I can’t find statements to the contrary, so I’ll believe them.  Anyway, I always leave four stars if there is wiggle room for the service.  For example, since there isn’t really anything more you can do in the “Communication” section, especially if there isn’t any tracking involved, I will leave five stars for no problems encountered, because I can’t see an exceptionally rare service being borne out of that.

For something such as “Shipping and handing charges”, however, I will usually only leave five stars for free shipping.  In fact, I have considered leaving only three stars for shipping because in my mind, that is still a satisfactory score.  Shipping price was quoted, I paid, nothing more, nothing less; the seller accepted the stated price, nothing more, nothing less.  Nothing extra was done, nothing bad was done.  My five stars are reserved for free shipping because a seller willing to absorb international shipping costs is exceptionally rare.

The cards I ordered came from Japan and in some relatively large boxes, so the shipping was fairly high.  I left four stars because of the simple “wiggle room” rule I live by for ratings.  No, the seller didn’t contact me all distraught or angry or anything and I thought nothing of this for days; it’s quite possible he doesn’t even check or care or sells so much he can’t tell it’s me or is courteously sticking to eBay’s policy of not “harassing” people.

It was my next purchase from a different seller that made me worry.  The form-style thank you notice said that if I intended to leave anything other than a five star rating, to please contact them first.  I had to find out more about this.  Was a four star rating so bad? I still think it’s a great rating.  I would even still buy from people with a three star rating; at least that would mean they are still satisfying their customers.  Supposedly, anyway.  It seems that the rational thinking behind star ratings exists only in my head and not the real world.

So here’s what I gather from the forums: a) the star ratings are not as anonymous as eBay says they are, as it’s evident from the seller’s view which star ratings were left when, even if it doesn’t say which buyer they were left from and b) too many four ratings can cause a buyer to lose the ability to sell.  WTF? Look, this is too much pressure.  I’m not leaving those star ratings anymore and if I had realized I could skip it before, I would have.  I’m shopping, I don’t want to think.  I just want to buy stuff; the hardest thinking I should have to do is simple math, not how I’m affecting what could be the sole income of some poor human being.

Well, eBay, thanks for ruining my great weekend by making me worry about the four star rating I gave.  How about telling people what the stars really mean?

In my head:
5.  Exceptional, rare service.
4.  Great service.
3.  Satisfactory service.
2.  The seller did something wrong.
1. Seller took the money, didn’t send anything or provide any service.

What eBay thinks:
5.  Satisfactory.
4.  Service sucks.
3.  Service sucks.
2.  Service sucks.
1.  Seller is a scam artist.

Part of the starring couple is so girly that he is indistinguishable from a girl unless naked. Okay, haha, yes, all of them seem girly to you non-BL fans; I’ve heard you snickering in the store.  Just imagine how feminine-like they’d have to be in order to make even a fangirl like me consider them girly then.

It’s too mature for me. By mature, I don’t mean there’s too much sex; the atmosphere of it is too adult.  I can’t feel the all-encompassing, fantastical love that I’m looking for when I read this genre, just the melancholy of life.  Est Em’s works, Let Dai by Sooyeon Won, and possibly Dining Bar Akira by Tomoko Yamashita (based on a quick flip at the store, I’m leaning towards “too mature”, but I’m still contemplating it) are a few examples.

That all being said, I’m not saying I wouldn’t read any of those things; I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to own any of it.  If I bought one not knowing what I was getting into, I’d probably sell it after reading and finding out.  I’d be disappointed, but more so that I spent the money to buy it and made shelf space for it rather than actually having read it.  After all, if I picked it myself, there must be at least a little something I liked in it and I am easily entertained.  If I bought everything that entertained me, however, I’d be more than broke and probably wouldn’t have any empty space left.

I am about to make a not-so-vague comment about the end of the Boys Love graphic novel, which is the same as the end of the Boys Love movie, so if you’d like to not be able to guess the end of either the manga or the movie, you shouldn’t continue reading this post.

Is everyone that would like to be gone, gone?  Last chance~

I always tell my friends I don’t mind angsty, depressing stories as long as the end is happy because all the suffering the characters endured to get to their happy end just makes the ending that much happier.  Well, Boys Love was pretty angsty and depressing and they don’t get the happy ending that makes everything okay.  Also, the best friend glares too much.  Yes, he’s insane, I get it; he is not, however, a supervillain in a campy superhero show.  So why am I still keeping this graphic novel?  The art’s not bad and it has that fantastical, all-encompassing love I require of all my for-keeps BL.

Hrm…would it have been simpler just to say my requirements are art that I like and unreal love?  I do, however, own a few BL graphic novels that have art I’m not that fond of.  Also, just because it claims to be BL and has fantastical, all-encompassing love doesn’t mean there isn’t an extremely feminine guy as part of that fantastical, all-encompassing love.  I guess the long-winded way of explaining it was the best after all.

For just a few golden days, however, I thought maybe my favorite bookstore was finally going to make a device I currently crave.  Sure, with just the sparse information in that post, the supposed e-reading device could have turned out the worst of the bunch when it finally came about, but I was expecting a lot out of it.  After all, Borders has some great technological touches, such as the coupon text codes (before the service was “temporarily suspended”), e-mailed coupons (which B&N has, too), a way to track loyalty points and apply them to purchases in which people forgot their cards (which I think I saw at Best Buy or a similar store)…on second thought, the technological touches aren’t so great after all, but I still expected a lot out of it just for being my favorite bookstore.

Then nook came along, looking cute, shunning the need for connection software, and equipped with a user-replaceable battery.  My “I kind of sort of want an e-reader” attitude turned into an “omg nook is awesome and someday I will have it” attitude.  That “someday” was supposed to translate into “whenever nook 2 comes out and original nook gets a price drop”, but that’s now changed to “whenever a NYC B&N has it in stock”.

I still can’t think of a way that it enhances my hobbies enough to be worth $260, but just the fact that it exists prompts me to think about the little ways an e-reader can help, such as not worrying about overdue library books, being able to comfortably read those horribly thick learning books on the subway, and being able to search for a specific word or phrase rather than physically scanning the book with my own eyes and wasting precious reading time.  Yes, I thought about all those things two weeks ago, too, but every time I’ve thought of those little perks since then, my nook desire heightens considerably.  Please plateau so that I can be normal again.

Amateurishly analyzing myself again, this desire is probably also due to the fact that I can’t have one and people always want what they can’t have.  It’s not being sold in stores yet, there is no announcement about exactly when it will be sold in stores, and the expected ship date for any nooks ordered today is the first of February.

Well, since I can’t have a nook just yet, the only other way I can squelch this desire is to get the next best thing, which for now is Kindle 2.  In some ways it is better:  it has a browser, it reads Mobipocket, and DMP has some BL out in Kindle format.  In some ways, it is the same:  no connection software needed, natively reads about the same amount of file types, although not the same file types.  In some ways, it is worse:  battery is not user-replaceable (well, it can be, with some work) and needs a bit of adjusting in order to make it read library books.

Unless I see a Kindle 2 for $100, though, I’m still waiting for nook.  I love shopping at Amazon because they are cheaper than B&N without having to pay $25 a year for membership, but the company is rather ebil, not allowing Mobipocket PID’s to be used on a Kindle when they own Mobipocket, forcing people to only buy content provided by Amazon or content that is already DRM-free and could have been side loaded by any user in the first place.  At least with a nook, I can read library books without worrying that some firmware update will break that feature.  I’m a little worried that something similar to what is hopefully a glitch on Sony readers will happen, though.  Hopefully this will either be a non-issue with nook or the fact that I don’t use Overdrive and just download directly from NYPL makes it a non-issue.

Not that I think B&N is totally non-ebil; I’m actually a little jealous because there are so many of them that they overpower the presence of Borders, despite Borders’s free membership program with frequent 30% off coupons and Borders Bucks.  I don’t remember B&N ever sending me a coupon for more than 25% off when I was a member nor do I recall anything akin to the Borders Bucks program.

So in short, I’m whining because:  I can’t get a nook before February, B&N is more popular than Borders, and Amazon is ebil for not letting their Kindle read DRMed Mobipocket books, despite it actually being feasible since someone made a python script that will let it do so.

The ballpark release date for the first wave of Nook is tomorrow/today, which raises my desire for this non-ebil device significantly.  It connects via USB as mass storage!  Okay, so I’m probably the only one that really sees this as an exciting feature, but after finding a lot of good reading apps for eBiLpod and then having to pass on them because they required wi-fi to upload the files I wanted to read to somewhere else first and then to eBiLpod, it’s thrilling to think of being able to just get my files from my computer to my device.  Wi-fi should be a supplemental feature, not a required one.

Going totally off the topic of Nook for a moment, the lack of simple features, such as USB transfer of files for ebil apps and being able to save and view offline webpages on eBiLdevice is one of the newer reasons I hate Apple.

Back to Nook, I can’t justify spending $260 since it’s not something I need nor does it enhance my hobbies.  Yes, reading is a hobby of mine, but unless I borrow 10+ books every time I go to the library (I don’t…anymore), it’s not that big of an improvement.  If all the major publishers of BL started releasing their graphic novels as e-books (proprietary Kindle format doesn’t count, DMP), then I might give up the money because I’ve run out of shelf space several times and had to reorganize, but for now I’ll wait for the price to go down to something more fitting of a person who mostly just borrows all her reading material from the library and has bought maybe two non-graphic novels in the past five years.

Nook alternatives I’ve considered:

eBookwise 1150–Rejected because I suspect it doesn’t look as paper-like as the newer e-readers.

Aluratek Libre–Same as above, except replace “newer” with “more expensive”.

Analyzing myself in a faux psychological way, it probably all goes way back to when iTunes was bundled with Quick Time and would take up most of my tiny hard drive’s space with its lengthy, many megabyte install.  Then I’d have to do a lengthy, many megabyte uninstall just to get my hard drive space back.

Some time later, the Shuffle came out and the iPod was hyped almost more than I could bear.  ”Oh, I don’t need to see the screen anyway, this is a brilliant idea!”  Hey, I don’t disagree on that point; a player that does away with non-essential features for a cheaper price, great.  However, it wasn’t really a cheaper price.  Other players from other companies offered the same capacity and same size with a screen and for the same price.  So really, people were paying the same amount of money for less features, yet still calling it great.

Coming around to present times, iTunes has gone DRM-free, yet I still can’t purchase music without having to install the behemoth that is iTunes, whether I use an iPod or not.  Yes, behemoth.  Compared to the tiny, unobtrusive thing Amazon makes me install, iTunes is Godzilla.  Sure, iTunes does things, such as actually play music, but I already have a program that plays music just fine and doesn’t take minutes to open on an old laptop.

It’s for all that, plus a few miscellaneous reasons, that I call it ebil and I can’t bring myself to say that I actually like the iPod Touch, even though the custom skinned thing you see up there belongs to me.  In fact, I refuse to even acknowledge I own one.  It’s not an iPod; it’s an eBiLpod!

By the way, the whole point of this post was really just to show off the skin that I custom ordered from GelaSkins; the rant is a bonus.  Consider the cute case under eBiLpod from Smile Recipe a second bonus.