I saw an ad for a comic that looked pretty cool, I think on Crimson Dark. (No links because I’m tired and Google exists.) So I click through, and it’s available as a free ebook download. Okay, the price is right, let’s do it. I need to add to cart. Fine. To check out, I have to register with “non-anonymous” email, credit card, or a scan of my driver’s license. Um, no and no, what the fuck is wrong with you people? So I enter my email. Except it turns out that “non-anonymous” means “not Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.” Well, I don’t use AOL, and I forgot what my Comcast email is, much less the password, so that leaves my website. Now, I have a mirror of my old email from the last site, shadow@brimzero.net. Don’t bother writing that down, it only redirects to my Gmail. Now I have to wait for them to “evaluate my domain” or some such. So in all likelyhood a Wowio employee will be looking at brimzero.net, trying to determine… something. Perhaps that I’m not allowing any Tom, Dick and Harry to have a brimzero.net email address. Or that brimzero.net isn’t an “anonymous” email service that I’m using. (If it is, I’m getting ripped off. I don’t pay for Google’s hosting, for chrissakes!)

So the point is that Wowio is a fucking broken service. Whoever runs it is an idiot. Nick Schley is a fucking fool for using this service, particularly to distribute a free comic over the internet. (If only he could secure a location, or “site” as it were, on the web, and use this “web site” to allow people to read his comic without hassle.)

On the other hand, the cover looks fucking amazing, the concept of Wowio still intrigues me, and most importantly each of Schley’s books is free, so I’m gonna try and get this thing working, even if it means giving them my credit card number with the promise that they won’t actually charge anything to it. I’ve done that deal with much shadier entities in the past.

…

Oh, dude, they have Lullaby on there, I have to make this work now. But I want to know how, exactly, the creators make money when I can’t find anything that isn’t being given away. I’m not complaining, but this doesn’t seem like it’s gonna cover expenses, much less put money in authors’ pockets. (Edit: Ads in the books. I can live with that.)

…

Well, I broke down and gave them my credit card number, and it took maybe ten seconds, but now I have to answer a survey, and there’s no “Manual Labor” under Job Type. There’s all this shit that’s similar, but not what I do, why can’t they just stick to “burger flipper,” “suit and tie,” “criminal,” “grunt,” and “managment,” the five true job types? Ah well, it’s not important, it’s just a survey.

…

That was actually pretty painless. As this has turned into a log of what I’m doing, I’ve now filled up the five downloads I’m allowed per day, let’s see if it actually works now… Okay, I’m getting an email with download instructions. I fucking hate that, but it’s otherwise pretty intuitive. And not 30 seconds later, I have the email, and the link is to a simple, human-readable URL, so I could conceivably just bookmark this page whenever I download. Jury’s still out on the actual ebooks, though…

…

PDFs. I hate PDF, but they’ve grown on me now that I use Foxit, so we’ll see… (Goddamn this post is fucking interminable.) Well, either my roomate is eating up all my bandwidth or their server is just slow, but it’s still a respectable 100kbps. The PDF is fairly high quality, and I now see the logic behind the download email, as the PDF file has “registered to Devin Goodman” displayed in a few spots. And thank god Foxit has a Save As command, because I forgot that I had the “Open With” button checked in Firefox. God this is getting boring. Ah well, I’m done. Apart from the pain in the ass registration, Wowio is pretty nice, so check that shit out I guess. This is probably really disjointed, but will serve as a constant reminder as to why I shouldn’t be allowed to do anything while tired.