The Web Site

I have to work on the last day of the month, so I’m trying to get a little bit ahead of myself on the Nano novel just in case. Unfortunately, the words were not cooperating today; I’m ahead, but not as much as I want to be.

Maybe I should go work on a quilt or two to clear my head. It’s been a crazy week; I think I deserve it.

Anyway, I was playing with the dog the other day, and it occurred to me that we somehow managed to raise a completely skeptical dog. Vita’s willing to play with you, even though she knows - or suspects - you are not being entirely honest with her when you do. (I’m not going to run up the stairs after the ball, because that just means you’re trying to get a head start on me when we’re playing hide and seek.)

She’s skeptical, but not cynical: even thought it’s true that we’re not always one hundred percent truthful with her, we’re truthful - and sincere - enough to make it worth her while to play with us. If she were cynical, she’d just run off with the ball and play with it by herself every single time.

Anyway, that’s sort of a roundabout way of explaining why I haven’t participated in any of the online discussions about the soft launch of the new Breyer web site on Monday. I’m a skeptic, not a cynic. But I also know better than to toss a ball into an arena full of cynics.

(Another grating thing: if I have to read one more post by hobbyists asking about the remaining issues on the JAH subscriptions, I swear I’m going to go outside and violently break something. People who regularly drop hundreds of dollars on a single model, whinging about twenty dollars worth of subscription fees? Talk to the hoof!)

Yeah, Reeves is not handling the launch as well as they should have; I’m surprised that it took them until this evening to finally send out an e-mail notification about it, and nothing at all on their Facebook page yet, as far as I can tell. (NOTE: I don’t "do" Facebook.)

I’ll just assume they did this "soft" launch as a way of working out the bugs with the early adopters in time for whatever they have planned for Black Friday/Cyber Monday (the web special Nokota, I presume?)

As for the web site itself, s’alright. It’s a little too cluttered for my taste, but I’m a design minimalist at heart. I’d rather they started out simpler, and scaled up, rather than hit us with that level of complexity early on. You know, show us they have mastered basic math before hitting the trigonometry textbook.

The Collector’s Club has turned out to be just an online JAH/forum/online store special access subscription type thing. Eh, whatever. Not crazy about the fee, but it’s not any different than paying for a subscription to a magazine or online forum. During the signup process they asked for an online ID, which I’m assuming means that they really are planning on implementing some sort of discussion forum in the future. (That ought to be …interesting.)

The only other thing I signed up for was the Vintage Club, since that’s my natural inclination. A lot of hobbyists are extremely concerned that the models that they’d be "forced" to buy through the program will be unsellable turkeys, but honestly, I am not that concerned. I’m going to assume that they’re going to stick with fairly "safe" (pre-1965) vintage molds and colors for their first offerings, and they’ll be asking for input from subscribers for the subsequent rounds.

If I had the money and the space, I would have signed up for the Premier Club, too, but I don’t, so I didn’t. Simple as that. I was a little concerned about the undefined piece counts on what’s essentially a Connoisseur Club, too, though if the quality holds up, the piece count would be moot.