Amazon's April Kindle Sales

One of the nice things about a new month is new sales from Amazon.

Marvel 1602: Neil Gaiman makes comics and does a great job of them. This is a popular tale of his looking at how the Marvel Universe would be in the long ago past. So popular it even had a sequel. $3.99

All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday's X-Men : So Marvel didn't eliminate their previous history and destroy all that continuity like DC did with 52 during their 'Now' phase. They did bring the original five X-Men to present times though. $3.99.

New Avengers Vol 1: Breakout: Written by the same guy! This is where we got characters like Luke Cage taking a more central role in the Marvel Universe as well as Spider Man on the Avengers and the 'reintroduction' of the Sentry. This runs for $1.99 so is even a better deal.

Runaways Vol 1: Another comic series! One of the problems I have with Marvel comics, hell, comics in general these days, is that they are so tied into the various events. Runaways, and Young Avengers at first, were relatively isolated and very well written. Good stuff if you want teen angst in your heroes. Also at the low end of $1.99

Today's deal?

Axe Cop Vol 1. Dark Horse is not afraid to publish the weird and humorous. $1.99

Ask, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer Behavior: Okay, this one is weird because it's not really Amazon's daily deal, it's O'reily's daily deal, but Amazon is matching price on it. I'm always looking at stuff about analysis so it's up my alley even though it's $9.99 but that's half off it's regular electronic price, which itself, is more expensive than buying the physical paperback from Amazon. Ah pricing versus electronic books. Bad companies.

Did anyone see anything else worth picking up that I missed? Thankfully I've got a month to pick up a few of those as I intend to head to Adepticon this weekend and won't be picking up any of those, except that last one, today.

Kindle Daily Deals: Any takers for the big sale?

I try to keep tabs on the Kindle Daily deals for stuff that I might be interested in terms of role playing games and that feeble effort I take at actually doing some work at my job or keeping my personal interest up to date, or vaguely up to date.

Imagine my surprise today when I saw that there were a ton of things on the daily deal that I bought even though some of the prices did not say daily deal to me. I think there's something like 500+ books, not counting the regular four sections of the daily deal, one of which I also bought.

The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford Handbooks) while the e-book version is still like $25 bones or something along those lines, it covers a pretty generous scope of history and it is now mine.

Data Science for Business: What you need to know about data mining and data-analytic thinking over at work I work with a lot of charts, a lot of Excel, a lot of Access, some SQL and reams of data. I'm better at asking questions of processes and how decisions are made, in my opinion mind you, so everytime I see something about what goes into making hard data decisions I buy it. This one is just under $7.50 so it's still a good deal higher than I like to see for a 'daily deal' but...

Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills something like $3.50 and I'm always interested in these types of books just for the 'creative' side of things. 

Windows PowerShell Cookbook: The Complete Guide to Scripting Microsoft's Command Shell again, while I'm not a programmer by any means, I'm not afraid to mess with the internals of a PC and well, I've learned a few skills here and there that have been helpful in say, boot time.

There were a couple of other programming books I bought, but those were more for reference. I find that if you have an actual programming problem that the internet is full of some very smart people willing to help you work through the problems and that the computer books themselves are more like, "here's a sandbox of what can be done but we're going to tell you how to do it in ways people actually working would never do." But that's just my personal experience with those types of books.

In terms of my game? Shot down today. I live in Chicago. My mom's doctor for her foot is way out in like the edges of Skokie near Mount Prospect. It's raining like hell. Her appointment was over an hour, which was very good in terms of time taken. Usually it's two to three. Barely gave me any time to work on COl Buchanan's second book ,Stands A Shadow.

But on the way back and since, it's been raining nonstop. Several almost accidents along the way so now that I'm home, the chances of me leaving the house again? Especially when I haven't eaten dinner? Especially when the GM called ahead to let us know that another player was bailing already? Yeah, not the first out and the GM already has a backup plan.

For me, I think I'm going to cook one of those over saturated with sodium Jewel pizza's and read some more of Stands A Shadow and wait for that Oxford book to download.

Hope everyone else has some happy gaming!

Let me know if you found anything worth while on the deal. I was surprised by how many things I wanted purely for reference and had to reign myself in before I spent a whole check on stuff I'm only going to use vaguely.

Kindle Daily Deal for Cyber Monday is Pretty Sweet

My favored price pint of $2.99 is on for a lot of books by authors whose work I've enjoyed but due to spacial constraints, have rid myself of. The e-formats, assuming Amazon doesn't freak out and die or some other weird bats from space attack, provides me a quick way of renewing my ownership of some Barbara Hambly and some Robert R. McCammon, including Swan Song, the book a lot of people recommend when someone says they enjoy Stephen King's The Stand.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of books on sale this Cyber Monday and hey, unlike a lot of sales on Black Friday, you don't have to wait in line, don't have to wait for a lightning deal that will probably sell out before you can click it, and don't have to get pepper sprayed in the face by a woman looking to score a cheap X-Box.