Lost Treasures and Other Random Musings

I've been poking around Half Price books this month, both selling and buying.  Being a cheapskate on a very tight budget, I naturally gravitate to the Clearance section.  Here, items already being sold for half (or less) of their original retail value are dumped for one, two, three bucks maximum.  Books, puzzles, DVDs, computer games... There is nothing inherently wrong about any of these items.  Some, as in the games, are not even necessarily used.  It's just that nobody else seems to want them.  If they make it to the Clearance bin, even Half Price Books doesn't want them anymore.

My latest game purchase from this area was a little game called Space Colony for the PC. (Yes, I only play PC games.  The kinds of games I like - RPGs, strategy/sim/city-builders, and such - just don't translate to consoles without significant dumbing down, plus it makes it that much more difficult to find mods to enhance gameplay.) I remember seeing it when it first came out, and I never could justify the price.  For three bucks, though, I figured it was worth a try.  Couldn't possibly be a bigger disappointment than some games I paid full price for.
Upon opening the box, I was greeted with my first pleasant surprise: a game manual.  An honest-to-goodness paper game manual.  Game manuals are a lost art.  A good game manual not only explains how to play the game, but sets the stage for the playing experience.  I remember many drives home from the computer store, sitting in the back seat with a new game, reading the manual.  Every page made me more and more eager to load the game.  My personal favorite manual ever was the Arcanum manual, but then Arcanum is my favorite RPG of all time.  These days, you're lucky if you get a slip of paper telling you how to load the game, or even a PDF file on the disk.  Nobody seems to care anymore about creating an atmosphere, setting the stage, whetting the appetite.  Space Colony's manual might not have been as thick as Arcanum's, but it succeeded in a way that sterile PDF files and random slips of paper cannot.  It made me turn the pages. It made me eager to explore the game.  It made me laugh, and anticipate more laughs once I booted up the game itself.  It also made me remember the simple joy of reading about a game, the glorious anticipation that a good game manual creates which even the most cleverly-designed box advertizing simply can't do.
When I finally booted the game up, I wasn't disappointed.  The humor evident in the manual shone through bright and clear.  I've just begun playing, and I'm still learning, but I'm already enjoying it.  No, it's no rival to Arcanum, but it's not trying to be.  It is, however, just plain fun.  It blends shades of classic city-builders with bits of The Sims; keeping the colonists, each with a clear personality, happy is just as important as defending the base from alien attacks and generating wealth.  Sadly, the critics panned it (as they seem to pan anything that's not Grand Theft Auto or another first-person-shooter), so the odds of a Space Colony II are essentially nonexistent.  But, for me, it made a nice little treasure.

On my most recent visit to the Half Price Books clearance shelves, I snagged a couple older-but-popular titles from the sci-fi/fantasy rack, books I've been meaning to read but haven't had the budget to buy new.  One of these was Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom For Sale - Sold!, the first of his Landover series.  The premise - a man buying a magic kingdom through a high-end catalog - intrigued me, and I told myself I'd buy it if I ever found it cheap enough.  It was on the shelf for a buck, which even my cheapest cheapskate gene agreed was indeed "cheap enough." When I got it to the car and flipped through it, though, I realized it had a secret.  On the title page in front was a signature.  A personalized signature, to the previous owner, from Terry Brooks.
I've only ever gotten a personalized signature once.  It was early last year, at a local con, when Naomi Novik (author of the wonderful Temeraire series) was in town.  I didn't even mean for it to be personalized, but she saw my name on my con ID badge and personalized them anyway.  She even spelled my name right, which is something of a feat.  I probably should've said something like everyone else did - how much I loved her series, how much I enjoyed the characters, how I'd sell my soul in a heartbeat if doing so would give me her incredible luck and writing skills - but I figured the very fact that I'd purchased a con ticket, bought her books, and stood in line for roughly half an hour for her to deface them with a pen said everything I could think to say, only more eloquently and without my pesky speech impediment.
At some point, in 1994, somebody also purchased a book.  Perhaps they were at a convention, as I was, and bought a ticket as well.  Or perhaps they were at a local bookstore.  They held in their hands a story they loved, written by a person they admired, and they were getting a chance - perhaps their only chance - to meet that person... more, to be acknowledged by that person, if only for half a minute of their time.  They waited in line, I suspect, perhaps at least as long as the one I stood in, the anticipation and illogical nervousness building with every step forward.  And at last, when they walked away, they bore with them much more than ink besmirching a book.  They bore that experience, that moment of joy, of seeing the person who produced a world they so loved to lose themselves in live.  Whenever they opened that book, they would remember that moment, and it would make the story that much more special.
How did it end up in Half Price Books, being offloaded in the clearance section with other books nobody seems to care about anymore?  Was there some great upheaval that made such treasures expendable?  Did the book get lent to a friend and somehow never found its way home?  Did the original owner pass away?  Or did life just carry them in a different direction, the meaning behind that moment fading as new interests beckoned them forward?
I bought that book for a dollar the other day.  Whatever happened to the memory, or the person who bore it, I cannot say, though I can't help but wonder.

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In other minor news, I made a pleasant discovery.  Thanks to Mom's electric brick (a.k.a. the dying notebook she was given as a gift), I learned that my flash drive is malware free! (We figured the computer is on its way to Silicon Heaven anyway, so there was no harm in plugging in the flash drive even if it was infected.) So I don't need to reset on my stories, after all!  Of course, now I've lost my excuse to not press forward... unless, of course, I find something else to keep me from writing.  Like coming up with long, pointless blog ramblings on work nights.