One More Time Around Might Do It

Scott McCloud is arguing in favor of micropayments again, responding to that Clay Shirky anti-micropayments screed that was making the rounds last week. Ahh, I don't know. We haven't really had micropayments yet, but I haven't had good experiences with minipayment schemes like PayPal. I generally appreciate McCloud's work, so I probably ought to sign up for the snake oil he's peddling. I imagine his "Right Number" is worth the full $3, given the minimal chance of the rest of the pay content being worth anything to me, personally.

[Pardon me while I go sign up for BitPass and work my way through the thicket]

Ugh, I'm back. "the Right Number" crashed in the middle of the story. For a second, while looking at the BitPass offerings, I was thinking that there might be something else I'd actually give a damn about, but it turned out that Electric Sheep hadn't actually done a third Apocamon segment, but re-priced the second from free to cheap. Meh.

Now, here's the challenging part: I managed to get even PayPal to work for a single transaction session. It was the second transaction session where PayPal refused to let me into my account and continues to refuse even to this day. [Wankers!] Hrm. BitPass admits that I still exist; it passes the "PayPal sucks" test. Well, we'll give it some time, and hope that something worthwhile comes along to spend the extra $2.65 left in my "account". The approval process is a tad annoying, but McCloud's forced-tutorial "flash browsing" thing was even more irritating, and you have to go through it every time you look at the comic.

The comic itself? Intentionally cold, alienating, nauseating, and borderline autistic. I guess that's the intention. It's a queasy intention, though. Plays to McCloud's worst mannerist habits, if you ask me.

Oh, yeah. via Crazy Kimchi