Your Daily Question: Best Expenditure of Money?

About a week ago, I bought the soundtrack to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  iTunes informs me that I have listened to it thirty times since then.
My wife’s getting weary of the emo re-envisioning of our seventh President, but every time I play it, I think: it’s getting cheaper.  I paid ten bucks for it on iTunes, and with thirty repetitions my cost-per-listen is down to thirty-three cents a song.  Heck, if you count the individual songs, I’m down to two cents per playing.
Compare this to my media waste of $9.99 for Cat Stevens’ latest album, which I think I listened to twice.  At best.  Or, worse, the DVD for Charlie Wilson’s War, which I paid $5 for and haven’t even taken it out of the packaging.
Judged on a cost-per-listening basis, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a great bargain! In time, I’ll get the cost of that whole thing down to a thin dime per playing. That’s so much better than videogames I’ve paid $60 for and barely played.  I paid little, I maximized my experience.
So I wonder: on a cost-per-listening basis, what is my best media bargain?  What have I paid the least for, and listened/watched/played the most?
My first instinct was to say “Rock Band!” because I have probably spent literally a month solid playing that over the years – but then you consider all the plastic instruments and bonus tracks I’ve purchased, and suddenly Rock Band is a hobby that probably costs me $1 every time I step up to play it – worthwhile, certainly, but no bargain.  Likewise, I’ve seen Star Wars at least a hundred times, but fifty of those were in the theater, and the rest of the showings were split between three separate DVD/VHS releases – again, satisfying, but pricey.
Queuing iTunes, I see my most-played track (70 times) is Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacey’s Mom,” and I know for a fact my “most listened-to album” on iTunes oscillates between their “Welcome Interstate Managers” (a pure pop gem) and the soundtrack to Avenue Q (foul and surprisingly clever).  So is that my best media bargain?
Well, in modern terms, yes.  But back in the day, I paid $3.99 for a cassette tape of Def Leppard’s “Pyromania,” which as a teenager I listened to constantly, constantly, to the point where that music is engraved in my marrow.  That was the first album I identified with as me, and cassette tapes lasted a long damn time, so I think that price is probably somewhere in the range of half-a-cent per playing.  That’s my best media bargain.  (That, or George Carlin’s “Class Clown” on cassette.  Or, possibly, “Red Dwarf,” which I used to play every night in lonely houses to give myself some noise to drift off to sleep to.)
So.  With this in mind, I ask: What is your greatest media bargain?  What did you pay low and utilize the most? 
(And if the answer is “I Bittorrented it,” well, good for your cheapness, bad for actually recompensing the people who helped make the thing you love.  So we’ll leave out the illegal merchandise for now.  Though technically, things like Radioheads’ maybe-free albums do muddy the mix…)

The Care And Feeding Of Ferretts

I’ll be attending WorldCon in Reno next week, and – as with every convention I attend solo – I’m terrified.
See, if my wife is there, she makes me look good by making the introductions, shoving me into crowds, and otherwise serving as the social lubricant in my sticky New England gears.  But if I’m alone, I seize up.
I have a real issue with bothering people I don’t know that well – “that well” as defined by “would be considered damn near best friends under any circumstances” – and I’m convinced they never remember me, so even at a convention where I “know” a lot of people I often wind up sitting in the corner, waiting to be recognized.  It usually doesn’t end well.
Once invited into the circle, I’m friendly and gregarious, which is in some ways more of a problem; since they’ve seen me merrily chatting away with people earlier in the day, they assume my isolation must be me, purposely wanting some down time.  No, what’s happened is that I’ve become separated from the people I knew, and am alone again, stalking a social experience.  So I sit in the corner making puppydog eyes at everyone who walks by, and then there I am, feeling like the biggest loser in the world.
This happens at every convention.  Every damn one.  Even the really good cons have these moments of “Lord, you are a sad and asocial little bugger, aren’t you?”
So.  If you’re attending Reno WorldCon, let me know now!  I’d love to see you.  We’ll exchange cell phone numbers, text a little, hopefully hook up for a meal.  And if you should see me at WorldCon and I’m sitting alone, feel free to sit down and talk to me – remind me of your name, I’m great with faces but often get lost between people’s three or four online identities – and I will be cheerful.
I love people.  I’m just not convinced they love me.
 

When The Robot Uprising Hits, I Know I'll Be A Cult Figure

Ever wonder what my most popular piece of writing was?  Here it is.  It’s a short-short anecdote about how Gini and I thought the third episode of Sherlock was extremely slow-paced, until we realized that a background process was playing the video at about 75% speed.
Spambots fucking love this piece. I get three, four comments a day on it, mostly about prostitutes: “prostitutki moskva on layn.”  I clear them out overnight and come back to the applause of more spambots, happily commenting away.
I’ve considered locking this entry, but I’m actually curious to see how far it’ll go.  For the past three months, it’s like clockwork: I wake up, and the spambots have commented on my Sherlock post.  I’m not sure why they’ve settled on this piece, when there are so many others to choose from, but there you have it: spambots love Steven Moffat.
It’s good to know that the robots love me.  Maybe when the Singularity hits and the ad-bots rule us all, I can be their poet laureate.  Or a comedian.  Or whatever floats their boat about this entry, I don’t know.

New Story! "My Father's Wounds," at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My latest story is live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies – have a sample of the opening, why don’tcha?

Father carries the knife, because I asked him to—but he keeps turning to look at me, earnestly, as if he hopes I’ll take it back.

 It’s hard to believe he knows I’ll stab him with that knife. Even harder to believe he’s eager for me to do it. But that’s my father; he thinks the world of his precious daughter. He’s thin yet unbowed in his ascetic gray Blacksmith robes as he leads me up through a cold forest to the Anvil.

It doesn’t matter whether my father will live once I stab him. That’s not the point. The point is all the questions that no one thinks to ask after we’ve healed their fathers, their soldiers, their daughters. Nobody questions our magic, except for us, the loyal priests and priestesses of Aelana.
We can’t stop asking. We can’t sleep for asking.

The origins of this story are either mildly embarrassing or total nerd cred, depending on how you look at it, since it stemmed from a question I had about D&D – how do those first-level priests learn how to Cure Light Wounds, anyway? Do they just stab each other and hope for the best? And I wrote a story that wound up answering questions not only about that question, but as to why a cleric who can cure wounds can’t mend a country.
I really like the ending on this one.  I hope you will too.
 

"Please Don't"

I have a friend who is in the process of coming out as poly to her family.  This is a brave, brave thing to do.
However, the initial reactions have been so traditional that I feel like I’m watching a script from a movie – “This isn’t a good time to stress out people with this sort of thing.”  (Hint: It never will be.)  “Will they be at the family gatherings?” (Please don’t bring them.)  “Can’t you just talk about this later?”
Gay or straight or poly or kinky, here’s the underlying tone to these types of familial responses to “I want to tell you about the person(s) I love”:
This isn’t a real relationship.  So it should be easy for you to act as though it doesn’t exist.
You see this type of response all the time, whether it’s that they’re embarrassed that you have a gay lover or they’re embarrassed that you have a low-class husband or they’re embarrassed that you have another partner on top of your current partner.
But the real motivation behind almost all of these responses is this: the person you’re dating is so unworthy of our respect that deep down, even you must know that you’re just fooling around to piss us off.  Stop grabbing for attention and find someone who you’re serious about, and then we’ll let you sit down with the big kids.
The reaction to this sort of thing is inevitably family guilt – your grandmother is in fragile health, your dad is stressed about his job, your sister’s about to have a baby.  Why are you bringing this up now?  And it’s quite natural to feel that terror of Oh my God I’m bothering people let’s wait let’s wait.
It can help, however, to think about what they’re really asking you to acknowledge. Look at your partner. Look inside your heart. Take their hand, and feel that joy when you realize you’re linked with them.
Does that feel fake?  Does that feel any less real than the relationships they’re in right now? Can you look your partner in the eye, those beautiful eyes, and tell them that what you have isn’t as worthy as the “officially” sanctioned partnerships of your family?
If you can’t, then maybe it’s time to look at what your family’s really trying to sell you on.  And to deny that.