Hee hee.

Thanks to the lovely aeire, I know that Elf Only Inn is up and running again - and apparently has been for a couple months.

elissa_carey, you may get a kick out of this strip. :)

Also, pink tank!

Also also, for wondergecko: Where's Voldo?

Argh.

1. Find Silent Hill on eBay for a reasonable price.
2. Bid on the auction.
3. Win the auction.
4. Send payment in good faith.
5. The seller has lied to you and has no intention of sending the game. Plus, eBay has suspended his account for suspected fraud.

>_

Also,

demiurgent, my inability to stop listening to this song is entirely your fault. Or, at least, I'm going to blame it on you, because I'd never heard of Warren Zevon before you brought him up.

iTunes, etc.

So I downloaded and installed iTunes today, and set up my store account. Already I've downloaded $13 worth of music. That's one 11-song album and two free-floating songs. All of it's Warren Zevon - The Wind, "Lawyers, Guns, and Money", and "Mutineer".

Let's stop a minute and compare. iTunes has charged me $13 ($12.97, really) for thirteen songs. For $15 ($14.99, really), eMusic is willing to give me 65 songs over the next month - eleven of which are Warren Zevon's The Wind album. (I really should have checked eMusic before I downloaded from iTunes. iTunes may offer 99 cents a song, but if you get all 65 tracks per month from eMusic, that's a little over 23 cents a song.) That's not taking into account the 50 free downloads (over a two-week span) that I'd get if I were a new subscriber. (I'm not, so I don't get that privilege.)

In addition, eMusic lets me download MP3s - something which iTunes does not do. (iTunes uses the proprietary .m4p "MPEG-4 Protected" format, meaning that I not only had to upgrade WinAmp but download a plugin in order to get WinAmp to play the music that I just paid for. In addition, my MiniDisc player doesn't support M4P files, meaning that if I wanted to, say, listen to "Mutineer" in the car, I wouldn't be able to.)

Conclusion? I really shouldn't have spent my money at iTunes, and in the future, I'll probably use it only if I can't find a song legally anywhere else. Anybody looking for a music download system should probably check out eMusic first.

(Now, this is me talking as a consumer. I don't know how much of that $15 a month gets back to the artists as compared to Apple's buck-a-track, but to be honest, there'd have to be a pretty big disparity for it to change my opinion.)