Rant 550 / Reasonably

I've lost another champion courser! Argh!

It was worth it though. I lost it in the battle against the Nord King. 80+ men versus 300+ and won. I managed to stay up for 4-5 rounds before finally getting KOed and had to let my men fight on their own for another 3 rounds. Most of the casualties on my side went down in those last fights.

Unfortunately the king escaped. The good thing was the insane experience (12k I believe) and my Renown shot up to 700 from about 450.

In short, I exchanged 30 good highly trained soldiers and a 12k-denar champion courser for 250 Renown points and a whole lot of experience points.

Not a bad trade really.

It wasn't the king who gave me trouble. Oh no, he was downed by my lance at first contact. It was his huge army that was scary. I expected myself to win but in a pyrrhic victory. I guess I wasn't very far off. Lost almost half my army, lots of them Mamlukes.

Magically, my Swadian Knights remained at over 20. It's like they can't die. Maybe I should just focus on them. Then again, I noticed most of the kills were by my Mamlukes. Hmm...












I was checking on the publication status of A Dance of Dragons on Opentrolley.com when I saw that they are having a sale for all members paying with DBS/POSB credit and debit cards. So I immediately decided to buy it now before I leave next week.

Too bad A Dance of Dragons isn't out yet. Chaosbound is still in hardcover. Fortunately after quite a bit of scanning through the various lists by Amazon.com members, I was able to find enough books to make it worth the deliveryman's time. I usually buy about 150-200SGD worth of books, twice a year.

Or so I thought. After checking my order history on Opentrolley, it seems I've been buying only once a year since 2008, the year I started using this website. I definitely joined it that year because I mentioned it in a rant in this blog when I first found it. Time is running faster than I thought.

Another thing is that my range isn't 150-200SGD, but around 200. My impression of my expenditure must be outdated because I am very sure I used to buy only 150SGD worth of books back when I was still using Acmamall.com.

Anyway the newer series by Terry Brooks, the Genesis of Shannara, really interested me. I had read both his Word and Void series and all his Shannara books. This trilogy is the bridge between the two. That's like how Isaac Asimov connected his Foundation series to his Robot series.

This time I'm going to try a new author, Gene Wolfe. Ordered the books which are supposedly his best works, which are the Shadow and Claw, Sword and Citadel and the Urth of the New Sun.

The last book that really deserve a mention in the list is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. I don't know why but the description on Amazon just made me want to buy it so much. Now I really have to admit I'm a zombie fan.

I was very disappointed with the payment process at Opentrolley though. Apparently they did something to the payment pages since I last bought something from them and it made it incompatible with the Firefox browser.

Three times I entered the credit card information and three times the browser crashed after I hit "Submit". Frustrated, I tried the same on IE and voila, everything done smoothly. They could have stated on their front page that IE is required. Now I'm worried that I'm going to be billed 4 times the price. That's an extra 600 bucks!

Of course, I checked my email between each attempt and I received no payment notification before my final try on IE. Now I'm reasonably sure that I'm not going to be overcharged.

But only reasonably.

Yes, I emailed them. If it didn't concern money I wouldn't have bothered. But 600 bucks is a large sum for an issue this small.