Some of you may remember that a while back I decided to use Barnes and Noble for my book links instead of Amazon.com, because I was annoyed with Amazon's disclosure of its own-site purchase policy.

Well, today I'm rescinding that, just because the annoyance has now outweighed the importance of the principle. Barnes and Noble works well for some things, it delivers to New York faster, and has a better range and reliability of textbooks. But its user interface is worse, the prices are generally higher, and most importantly, they have fewer cover images for their books. On the other hand, Amazon's web services still crash the site much of the time.

So from here on in, I'm using whicher I feel is more useful to myself or my readers. For instance, here's a book that was mentioned in my Crim Law class today, which I'll probably get from the library here. The Mask of Sanity discusses the psycopathic personality, a topic in our class today. I've used the Barnes and Noble link for this because they have it in stock and have a cover image.

On the other hand, I've used Amazon to highlight the latest bit of relaxation I've done, an anime series titled Serial Experiments Lain. Kim's Video may not have the greatest collection of Japanese movies--and I've pretty much exhausted it--but they do have a strong selection of anime. If you were disappointed by the fact that The Matrix Trilogy had great effects but didn't say anything very interesting about the relationship between a real and virtual reality, this might be the series for you. It's short, eclectic, doesn't answer all the questions it raises, but certainly provides food for thought. If you're trying to practice your Japanese, it's pretty good because (a) it doesn't have a lot of slang, but (b) the language is pretty complex and challenging, especially if you don't cheat and turn on the subtitles.