i’ve gotten back into playing my switch with a lethal combo of stardew valley/animal crossing: new horizons again and i must admit… i’m digging my nails into my palms to stop myself from starting a stardew valley AU lmao. and like! in the past i’ve threatened to do a new horizons AU, but that’s specifically because I like the whimsy of the setup—moving to a new location that is it’s own little world, independent of any outside influence, where all your relationships come from your neighbours. a tiny little idealistic land for you and you alone, that’s filled with strange and wonderful things (the ghoul in the sewers, for stardew. the ghost that wanders around your island at night, for new horizons. there’s falling stars and mermaid shows and sly little salesmen who sell stolen art and things you can build for yourself, or trade for with pearls or batwings or seashells). i just!!! isn’t that the appeal of both of these games? that you don’t have to sit at a computer (ironically) day after day, or scrub out the walk-in freezer that hasn’t malfunctioned and is now defrosting, or serve assholes that last used their manners when their mothers still wiped their mouths after eating. instead you do things like… shake trees for fruit. grow flowers. grow vegetables. chop trees for wood, dig up stones. you get some cows for milk. you craft things and sell them. you catch bugs. you go down into the mines where you’re startled by walking skeletons or little slimes. sometimes you still deal with assholes, i guess—but they grow to love you. you banish the Big Bad Supermarket from town. You buy weird one-off items from the only store-keepers on the island. there are night markets and open-air concerts and celebrations of a new community centre, a new bridge.
i’ve been merging the sdv/ac:nh examples because at the heart of it, what i think i want out of a AU like this is the escapism of being uprooted, and settling down somewhere enclosed, that has everything—and everyone—you need. sunshine and rain and lightning and the ocean, snow, green things and smooth wood underneath your hands and the tiny threat of something darker (a witch’s hut where you can turn children into doves, abandoned mines full of monsters, mossy skeletons abandoned amid patches of flowers)—but ultimately, the promise of magic. just beyond the farm’s fences. washing up on the shore in the blue-green dawn. hidden in a wizard’s tower on the outskirts of town. flitting about and waiting for the only person who can see it: you, you, you.
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barnes and noble has been raising the prices of everything and further pushing for their premium membership option (which they raised the price of by 60 percent this year!) and then when they have big sales events, they're less than what they used to be.
last year at this time you could get one of their leather-bound book annex tomes for $12.50 (without a member discount) because of the 50 percent off all hardcover sales. but they raised the price of those tomes from 25 bucks to 30, and they decreased the sale from 50 percent off all hardcovers to 1/3rd off. so that same book that was $12.50 at last year's end-of-year sale is now 20 bucks. and that's supposed to be savings enough to induce me to walk into one of their stores this week?
i'm sorry but b&n has just gotten so greedy, even though their business has only been doing better and better in previous years. they do not have to be raising prices like they have been, and they can damn well afford to have the same savings events they used to. if you went to one of those hardcover sales a year or two ago, even if you lived in a less populated area like i do, you had never seen a b&n so busy in your life. things were flying off the shelves. they WERE making bank.
and as a company they've only been growing and growing (as much as the publishing industry has been, in recent years). but there are so many other ways to buy books. CHEAPER ways to buy books. MORE SUSTAINABLE ways to buy books. and since books and booksellers are doing really well right now, i don't see why barnes and noble is getting so greedy when they don't have to be. i dont like new shiny books that much. people buy books for the content, ultimately. sometimes we as consumers might make the choice that a new shiny book is worth paying a bit more for, but not that much. barnes and noble has just been demanding more and more of their customers' money for less and less benefit.
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