Journal of No. 118

 Ebay is changing the Matrix again. The main thing is paying sellers directly to bank accounts and avoiding Paypal (and Paypal fees). But they are raising the 'Final Value Fee', i.e. their take of your sale price(*). And despite claims of lower fees for all, they don't provide a side by side comparison. Which seems suspicious, so allow me.

I googled this page from searching for fees in 2019. I don't see 2019 in the document, but it looks roughly accurate.
And this is the new announcement.

OLD:

Most categories, including Music > Records, eBay Motors > Parts & Accessories, and eBay Motors > Automotive Tools & Supplies. For vehicles, see our Motors fees.	First 200 listings free per month, then $0.35 per listing	10.2% (maximum fee $750 per item)
Books DVDs & Movies Music (except Records category)		12.2% (maximum fee $750 per item)

New:

Most categories, including Music > Records, eBay Motors > Parts & Accessories, and eBay Motors > Automotive Tools & Supplies. For vehicles, see our Motors fees.	First 250 listings free per month, then $0.35 per listing	12.55% on total amount of the sale up to $7,500 calculated per item 2.35% on the portion of the sale over $7,500
Books DVDs & Movies Music (except Records category)		14.55% on total amount of the sale up to $7,500 calculated per item 2.35% on the portion of the sale over $7,500

But wait, there's more.
Old: Final value fee
New: Final value fee % + $0.30 per order


And more:
Old: The total amount of the sale includes the item price, and any shipping and handling charges. Sales tax isn't included in the calculation.

New: The total amount of the sale includes the item price, any handling charges, the shipping service the buyer selects, sales tax, and any other applicable fees.

Finally, the current Paypal charge is  2.9% on the total plus a 30 cent non-refundable fee.

So the fastest comparison is to say going from 10.2% to 12.55% is a rise of 2.35%, but the paypal fee was 2.9%, so you're saving a little money on each transaction.

But, if you live in a high tax state, and I do, that inclusion of sales tax in the price is significant. I will also point out it is fucking bullshit. As is the existing inclusion of shipping charges.

Current LA County sales tax is 10.25%. If we take 10% for simplicity, we can compare the fees on an item of, say, $100 (including shipping (which again somewhat rudely is subject to sales tax)).

Old:
FVF is 10.2% of $100 or $10.20. 
Paypal fee is 2.9% of $100 + $0.30 or $3.20
Total = $13.40

New:
FVF is 12.55% of $110 (with the tax) + $0.30 = $14.11

$0.71 cents more. If you live in some part of CA at the base sales tax of 7.25%, the increase is about $0.35.

I think if your local sales tax is 4.5%, then it comes out about even. If your local tax is higher than that, the new plan is worse, and vice versa.

Stuff on ebay

Kinda interesting that the four books (from an estate sale a while back) are from four different specialty science fiction presses: Gnome Press, Fantasy Press, Prime Press, and Shasta Publishing.

Another find from the estate sale trove, this book from Gnome Press is a lot more successful than Address: Centauri. The main idea is sort of an inverse of the Prime Directive from Star Trek. When new civilizations gain spaceflight, there are two alternatives... either they make peace with the galactic sodality, or they have to be wiped out. Our Hero of the Star Fleet makes some sociological experiments to try to alter the ethical systems of pre-spaceflight systems, so that they will be friendly when the time comes. The novel is ginned together from a handful of short stories. The first section is strongest, as the idea is laid out and tested. The rest futzes around as the author gets paid by the word.

You can buy it, and or a couple other books I picked up, on ebay. But not The Moon Pool, because someone Bought It Now just a few hours after I listed it.

A couple scores from that estate sale the other week.

Who Goes There? is a collection of John Campbell stories (alas I don't have the dust jacket) from Shasta Press, one of the many boutique SF presses that sprouted up in the shadow of Arkham House, but didn't stay the course as well.

The titular story is notable, as it provides the bridge that connects Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" to John Carpenter's The Thing. Carpenter's film hews close enough to it that it's hard for me not to see the film in my eyes. Spoiler Alert! As in the film, Blair figures things out and decides to protect the world by destroying the magnetos in the airplanes. The film maybe has a stronger angle in that Blair is alone in his self-sacrifice. But the book's take is also interesting. One of the pilots goes out and comes back and says something along the lines of, "I didn't trust a biologist to do it right, so I destroyed the spares." Fatalistic Depression Era fucks!

All fairly good stories, though creaky with age, and a certain amount of "I, a man, must solve this problem with my man brain and my man science." Although the revelation and denouement is a little unbelievable, I did like the feel and mood of the first three quarters of "Dead Knowledge". As a spoileriffic (and less positive) link has it: "Three human star travelers have arrived at a new world 27 light years from earth, only to find that it once harbored intelligent, highly developed, humanoid civilization that is now dead. And, curiously, it's long dead residents have their bodies well preserved & they all apparently committed suicide!!"

The eerie sense of a dead world comes across nicely in Campbell's prose.

---

The Dolphins' Bell, by Anne McCaffrey

Set on Pern in the early days of human colonization, this short story tells of the evacuation of the Southern Continent, as dolphineers communicate with their dolphins to transport some of the material across the sea. And there's a love story. Um, between humans. It's sort of a by-the-numbers competent infilling of a lacuna in Pern history.

But the book itself is a lovely affair, published by Wildside Press with full art borders, and a couple full page illos by Pat Morrissey. Signed by McCaffrey. #386/400.



So.... it may be off to ebay with this one. Fortunately, I still have the signed Dragonsinger that I got at WorldCon, passing through a gauntlet of chaff from Prime and others.

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In other news, I also won a nice auction of three Dunsany books from the 1920s. A first of Chronicles of Rodriguez, and reprints of The King of Elfland's Daughter, and Time and the Gods, all by Putnam in signed numbered editions (signed by both the Baron and Sidney Sime). It looks like all ten plates (and frontispiece) in Time and the Gods are signed by Sime.

A bidder with 0 feedback won two of my videogame auctions. During the auction, he cancelled a $90 bid on one of them, which is not a problem, other that it shows that he doesn't know what he's doing. After winning the two auctions -- he made several bids on that item, and only retracted one of them -- here are a selection of his messages over the next 6 days, each line a separate message.

I told uto cancel them
Im sorry but i dont want them i all hmhave them i for got to tell u i been so busy working sorry
U can sell them ti tge next person
I ma pay u for this next friday ok thanks
Cancel it mistakes rong system

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At this point I cancel both auctions. Unfortunately, the bidder has to confirm the cancellation (to confirm that he hasn't paid money).

---

I told u next friday u blinde
Next friday
Friday. Ok
Cancel the shit

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I started the cancellation process. You have to confirm it.

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I did i check with paypal its ok

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You have to confirm it on ebay. Check your messages From Ebay.

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U have to do it i check

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So I spent ten minutes on the phone with a nice gentleman at an Indian call-center, who seems to have sorted things out for me. Although he said that he was going to send a message to the bidder to explain the process, and that the bidder would have to confirm, I suspect he (mercifully) made the cancellation happen by fiat, because they were cancelled by the time I got off the phone and refreshed my account.

Some weeks back, I think therrin started a thread about SF/noir detective fiction, and I recalled George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails and its sequels. The Wiki page mentioned a detail of which I was unaware: "Effinger started work on a fourth Audran novel, Word of Night, but died before that work was completed. The existing chapters of Word of Night are now available in the posthumously published Budayeen Nights, along with some other Budayeen and non-Budayeen short stories."

And so, a little ebaying, and here I am with an ex-library copy of the Golden Gryphon edition of Budayeen Nights. The foreword and story introductions are provided by Barbara Hambly, and they are (in addition to being useful and insightful) occasionally uncomfortably frank about his problems with alcohol and drugs, which he used to combat the physical and mental pain in his life. In volume 2 of things I didn't know, Hambly and Effinger were briefly married near the end of his life.

Despite that depressing lead-in, it's still delightful to hang out with Marîd again in his usual haunts, in and around the events of the existing novels, and also in one story set long after those events. Other stories don't feature Marîd, but are clearly in the same world, including the Nebula and Hugo winning "Schrödinger's Kitten" (which struck me as being merely great, rather than award-sweeping) and "King of the Cyber Rifles," which has more to offer than just the cleverness of the title.

"The City on the Sand" from 1973 is less interesting as a story than as a look into the proto-Budayeen, inhabited by proto-Budayeen characters and Effinger's stand-in, Sandor Courane. It helps to draw the line from what Effinger was up to in the 70s to When Gravity Fails. And the other bookend is a peek into the unfinished fourth novel, with what counts as a short story to set things in motion.

I had the great fortune to meet Effinger briefly, and express my admiration for his work, when I was a lowly gofer, helping out at the 1996 Nebula Awards, which were held at the Queen Mary. And while we're name dropping, Barbara Hambly was kind enough to come to the very first EnigmaCon back in 1987.

Buy my shit!

The item with the most sentimental attachment is by far the 3-DVD Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. But now I have it on Blu-Ray, so now's your chance. Some CDs, a few books, including the Radium Terrors, which you should not buy from me, because it is a bad book. Bad.

Remember when I put together a little syndicate to try to win HPL's long-thought-lost essay on astrology commissioned by Houdini that might have once formed part of the never completed Cancer of Superstition? Naturally, I've always wondered what happened, and though there were vague rumors, now we know...

The MS is being sold off page by page on ebay.

ASSHOLE! FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE NUTS!

Mom is a big Lucille Ball fan. So I've occasionally poked around ebay looking for an autograph to get her for her birthday or Xmaholisolstizaah. Usually there are some crummy repro 8x10s and some expensive cancelled checks that look as snazzy as a cancelled check.

And then I found this. A bit pricey, but pretty awesome.

For the link-o-phobes, it's a program menu for FDR's Birthday Ball in 1944 for the benefit of the National Foundations for Infantile Paralysis, which FDR founded in 1938. It's now known as the March of Dimes.

Anyway, Lucy has signed it, as have

actors Walter Pidgeon & Brian Donlevy

John Russell Young – Chairman of the Birthday Ball Committee, member of the Board of Commissioners of Washington, DC.

Fleet Admiral William Leahy – At the time, he was the highest ranking member of the US military.

Brigadier General Albert Lyman Cox – The kind of guy who can't escape getting into the same biz as his father, a Confederate general. Cox went through Harvard Law, was elected to the House, and then appointed to the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Then in 1916, he resigned in order to serve in World War I. In 1938, he became commanding general of the National Guard in the District of Columbia.

The ebay listing then mentions 'and others'.

I managed to identify the two others:

Jose Iturbi - Spanish conductor, harpsichordist and pianist, also starring (as himself) in a few films, including Anchors Aweigh.

And the big find:
( Read more... )

My stuff.

It's delightful that a broken PS3 is worth $45. Still no bids on the Bradbury, though there is a silent watcher. Essentialsaltes' Law demands that Uncharted 3 will go up "a lot" [if you need a better prediction, it will go for more than Arkham City]. And some of the Loebs and other classical texts have watchers, so I'm hoping some bids will show up.