You shouldn't always eat McDonalds

Yes, I know I was just in your inbox last week. I just really wanted to get some links out this month, so here they are.

a thing I have started doing (which you can do too)

This starts with an acknowledgement: my behavior has been conditioned by Amazon. Perhaps you came of age in a time when e-commerce was just a thing, to the point that you just furrowed your brow at the term “e-commerce.” If not, you might remember when Amazon became a thing. You might remember the first time you heard about a book and then just went and ordered it, and a week later it arrived. It was a marvel. Initially, it was a thing that was complementary to the local bookstore, because the local bookstore - even if it was a big box Barnes & Noble or Borders - still didn’t carry every book you might want, so you’d check there first (cuz, obviously, no wait time for delivery), and if your coveted book wasn’t there you’d snag it on Amazon.

And then, at some point, Amazon also became less expensive. And that shifted the prioritization calculus, because if you were buying multiple books you probably weren’t going to start reading all of them at once, so the wait time for delivery was less of a problem (also, that wait time had come down a bit…maybe now it was only 3 or 4 days). So, maybe you’d buy one book at the bookstore to dig into immediately, but you’d go on Amazon to buy the others because the price was right.

And then the Kindle - especially in those early days when seemingly every ebook was only $9.99 - made it possible to have any book right now. Book acquisition became effectively frictionless.

Of course, that only holds if you think of a book as a collection of text & image…and not as a designed object. And the default to the least expensive option is rational only in so far as buying a book is an act of pure capitalism.

Amazon made it easy & cheap. Nothing about that is a new or novel insight. That I somehow continued going to bookstores and using libraries in addition to buying from Amazon at a time when I was both broke and prone to instant gratification is kind of remarkable. What really solidified Amazon at the top of the food chain for me was living in a country where I didn’t have a great bookstore to buy from and couldn’t easily get an Amazon delivery. The e-book became the thing.

It is only very recently that I have remembered that buying a book doesn’t have to be frictionless, and the least expensive option isn’t always the best. The thing I have started doing recently is going to a bookstore, walking up to the counter, and ordering books that they don’t currently have in stock and then returning a couple weeks later - or, as in the case of preorders, a couple months later - to pick the books up.

It is a fantastic experience - and remember, I am very much not the person who loves unpredictable social interactions.

“That book was kind of mind blowing,” the bookseller said to me today when I put in an order for a book, and then he geeked out a little when he realized I was ordering the children’s edition - which he didn’t realize even existed. I told him the next book I wanted. “Is he still alive?” He sarcastically asked about the author. We had a shared moment. It was lovely.

I’m not here to shit on Amazon. Not exactly. There’s actually a lot of reasons to shit on Amazon, but I think of Amazon as a bookseller similarly to how I think of McDonalds as a restaurant. In a pinch, on rare occasions, I get it. It’s not the most unpleasant dining experience, but it’s also not actually a pleasant experience either. Going to the bookstore - especially if it’s a lovingly curated bookstore in an interesting space - is like eating at a proper restaurant, and it can be everything from the hidden gem local spot to fine dining. (OK, yes, with the notable difference that in this analogy you can get the same hamburger at the fast food and the fine dining).

But I do think that Amazon has kind of convinced a lot of us that we need to live off of McDonalds, and I am here to say: we don’t have to, and if you have the time and just a little bit of additional resource, it’s worth it to opt for the nicer experience that is also more humanizing.

/end long digression

some links?

• What happens if you turn off the Lesbian toggle in the game Blobun? Such a clever bit of design. (And yes, I did rush out this links newsletter so quickly after Pursuit of Play because I wanted to get this bit in for Pride, even though I’ve been meaning to share it for months now. Sigh)
• another one for “the kids are alright” file: The Roblox ICE protests.
• Less loaded than the previous two, one of the small pleasures that I share with my oldest child is the subreddit r/itrunsdoom, which is all about people explaining how they got the 1990s classic video game Doom to run on the most unexpected bits of hardware. Our favorite, though I think it just barely counts, is a pregnancy test. Anyway, All of this is just a windup to the fact that the New York Times went in depth recently on the development of Doom and how it enabled the ability to port to so almost any piece of hardware.