Deals on Things

[Thad]

Diane Duane has a sale on; you can get her entire set of ebooks (the ones she owns, not the licensed stuff) for $44.

I didn't know Duane's name until recently but we've probably all seen her work somewhere or other. She wrote scripts for the original Transformers, MLP, and DuckTales, Star Trek: TNG, Batman: TAS, and Gargoyles, to name a few. And her Tumblr is great.

I can't say as I know her books (Young Wizards, Middle Kingdoms, etc.) but aside from the $44 for the whole shebang price you can buy individual books at half-price if you just want to dip a toe in. All DRM-free.

[Thad]

The first Eighth Doctor brobdingnagian Finish story, Storm Warning, is currently available to download for free (account required). It's not his best but it's perfectly decent, and it's a good one for introducing yourself to companion Charley Pollard before listening to The Chimes at Midnight (which is his best).

[Thad]

Bunch of Star Trek sales on at various places because today's the anniversary of the first airing of The Man Trap.

The 4K Blu-Ray set of the Next Gen movies is at an all-time low price, for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

Okay, those of us.

[Thad]

Oh wow all the Picard merchandise is cheaper than everything else and...well, I can't say as I'm surprised but I am amused.

(I'd probably get the Number One (the pit bull) coffee mug if I didn't already have too goddamn many coffee mugs.)

[Thad]

Humble's got another Doctor Who bundle on. This one's mixed-media, with comics, brobdingnagian Finish plays, and TTRPG sourcebooks.

Heavy on the Tenth Doctor, which is unsurprising giving his impending return (though oddly enough I see a lot of Rose and no Donna), but other eras are represented too.

[Upthorn]

Itch.io has a Games for Gaza bundle, similar to the 2020 Racial Justice and Equality bundle. 256 games for $10. Proceeds going to support Palestine during the current crisis.

[Mongrel]

There's a game in there called Steamed Hams.

[Thad]

They Might Be Giants have a 25% off everything sale at tmbgshop.com. Almanac, a compilation of 19 live songs from the 2004 tour, is free (valid e-mail required, doesn't sign you up for any mailing lists unless you check a box to opt in).

[Thad]

Humble's got an Oni bundle that includes Scott Pilgrim, Tea Dragon, Courtney Crumrin, and Bad Machinery.

Oni's a shitty company, but these are creator-owned books. Up to you who you want to support, or not, and of course you can always max out the charity slider.

[Thad]

Humble's got an Oni bundle that includes Scott Pilgrim, Tea Dragon, Courtney Crumrin, and Bad Machinery.

The quality of the PDFs is quite poor!

I was surprised to see that some of the files are as small as 14MB.

I was actually fairly impressed by how good Scott Pilgrim vol 1 looked for only being 30MB; the JPEG artifacting was really only noticeable in blue-colored panels (eg night scenes). But then I got to vol 2 and...yeah, this looks exactly like I expect a 30MB PDF of a 228-page comic to look.

Humble's really been all over the fucking place in terms of quality. Forever; well before the IGN buyout. (Though the recent Doctor Who bundle is the only example I can think of where they posted shit that was actually incomplete; The Diary of River Song vol 2 was missing a bunch of tracks and an entire episode. They fixed that; they haven't fixed the quality of the Oni PDFs.) I remember Transformers bundles back in the day where you had a choice between files that were, like, 25MB or 2GB, with no sensible in-between choice to be found.

Anyway, again, these are creator-owned books, so if you want to buy the bundle to compensate the creators, I recommend you do that and then go look for torrents at Pirate Bay or wherever.

[Büge]

I understand that Oni Press has been kinda garbage for a few years.

[Thad]

In terms of being a shitty company, or having shitty quality control?

As far as being a shitty company, yeah, we talked about it during the "layoffs" they used to sweep out various inconvenient employees, like POC and PWD, including a couple people we know.

But the dilemma is, whatever it is they're doing now, they've still got a solid back catalogue of creator-owned books. Bryan Lee O'Malley probably doesn't need your money, but most creators aren't Bryan Lee O'Malley. I won't say "boycott Oni" without some caveats -- by all means boycott their licensed books like Rick & Morty, but the sense I got from the fired editors was that they don't want people boycotting the creators they worked with.

(And of course the other sad fact is that most publishers are pretty bad in one way or another. The brobdingnagian Two pretty much don't do creator-owned books at all anymore; Dynamite's run by C*micsg*te shitheels; Dark Horse protected Scott Allie for decades; Image and IDW...well, they seem like they're probably better than the rest but I'm sure they've got problems of their own.)

[Thad]

Humble's got a Scalzi bundle on.

I thought Redshirts was pretty good. Haven't read any of the others but I hear good things about Old Man's War and Kaiju Preservation Society.

[hngkong]

I enjoy the Old Man's War series.

[Thad]

Various Doctor Who deals on, what with tonight's premier. Humble's got a comics bundle; there are a hell of a lot of them and I haven't read them all but Paul Cornell wrote a few and the ones I've read of his are pretty good. I don't think I've read any of Al Ewing's Who comics but he's been doing some good stuff over at Marvel. Oh, and for $25 you can get the comic they gave away for free last Saturday. Hooray?

Also, if you don't mind buying physical media or giving your money to Amazon, there are a bunch of Doctor Who Blu-Ray sets on sale right now, including the increasingly inaccurately-named Complete David Tennant Collection for $16 and various classic Doctor season sets for under $30.

[Thad]

Annual 50% off Criterion sale is on at Barnes and Noble.

[Thad]

Le Guin bundle. Fucking Kobo/Adobe DRM again, and weirdly all the Earthsea stuff is at the $18 tier instead of having, like, the first book at the $1 tier like they usually do.

I've never actually read any of her fiction and I've been meaning to give it a look for decades. I've read enough of her essays that I really like her, I just never made the jump.

[Thad]

For those of you still into physical media, Shout Factory has a pretty good sale on. I grabbed the first couple volumes of Sesame Street: Old School and the steelbook edition of Army of Darkness; that got me to $50 and free shipping.

(Weirdly, I've never owned Army of Darkness. It's had like a million different releases but this one's got the theatrical cut in 4K and the director's and international cuts in HD. I've never seen the international cut but I'm interested in checking it out; sounds like it's got some of the extended scenes from the director's cut but keeps the S-Mart ending from the theatrical cut. Sounds like it's probably the version the TV edit is based on? I always thought the TV edit was the strongest version of the movie despite the weird bleeps (on at least one occasion they bleep Ash's name because presumably whoever was in charge of the edit (1) thought they said "ass" and (2) didn't know you can say "ass" on TV) and a couple of weaker alternate takes like "I'm not that good" instead of "Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.")

[Thad]

They Might Be Giants' 2018 album [My Murdered Remains](https://tmbgshop.com/collections/all/pr ... s-download) is free through tomorrow. Valid e-mail required.

[Thad]

Dragonlance bundle has nearly all the mainline Weis/Hickman books* plus the Heroes and Preludes series by various other authors.

I haven't read all of these but I've read nearly half of them (12 out of 26, by my count). I enjoyed the heck out of them when I was a teenager. Did not care for any of the Fifth Age stuff (everything that takes place after Dragons of Summer Flame). I think the only Fifth Age books in this bundle are the War of Souls Trilogy, my opinions on which are best filed under "don't get me started" and which are, unfortunately and bafflingly, the $1 tier. For some reason the entry-point books are at the $18 tier.

I'd also be remiss if I mentioned Dragonlance without also mentioning the Chronicles of Dragonlance podcast, where Shivam Bhatt and our own Jonathon Howard (falselogic) are reading through the entire series. (They're up to the second book, so...they've got a ways to go.)

* anthology The Second Generation is missing, which seems like a "whoopsie" since it sets up all the major characters and plot points for Dragons of Summer Flame -- which, contrary to its title and placement on the bundle page, should definitely not be read immediately after Dragons of Spring Dawning.