Theory dork.

Miriam and Alyssa suggest we all admit to the first order we ever placed with Amazon.  I comply more out of curiosity than a deep need to run with the cool kids.  Needless to say, the two items Amazon shipped me in 2000 tell you everything you need to know to understand who I was a decade ago.

Comments

[John Emerson]

"What Liberal Media", believe it or not. I paid the new hardbound price for it too (it goes for $4 now). Back in those days I paid attention to optimistic mainstream guys like Alterman.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465001769/ref=oss_product

[Ahistoricality]

3 B5 novels. Not sure what that says about me except that I couldn't get them locally.

[P.T. Smith]

Hah! Haunted by Palahnuik and McEwan's Child in Time. In general, it appears 2005 was dominated by comic books and things Joss Whedon was involved in.

I did not know you could even do this.

[RCheli]

In '99, my first order was the Spit on a Stranger EP by Pavement and The Onion book, Our Dumb Century.

I was just too cool for school.

[JPool]

My first order, part way throu my first year of grad school, was a used copy of this. To be honest, I'm not sure that I've ever read it all the way through. The next order was this, which is a little more theory-dorktacular (OK, not entirely; I'm a historian, afterall).

[Adam Roberts]

The comments thread on that Hardt and Negri vol. is like a Socratic dialogue doubling as a primer in recent Marxist theory. (Plato: H&N cannot escape an Althusserian double-bind and will only drive readers away rrom Marx. Socrates: this books sucks! It's horid!)

[GeoX]

September 27, 1998. Did I take it seriously? Um...yes and no. Am I slightly less flaky these days? See previous answer.

[SEK]

We all had our Anton Wilson phase, GeoX. There's no shame in it.

[NickS]

I looked at this the other day.

Apparently I was slow to use Amazon. My memory is that half.com was a better source for most of the books I was interested in and, at that point, I was resisting creating accounts at too many vendors.

My first orders where in 2002, and were a couple of new gaming books that were 30% off at Amazon. In 2002 and 2003 I ordered the Transhuman Space core book, the d20 Monster Manual (I cringe slightly to see that) and the GURPS 4E Core books.

[NickS]

I forgot one, I also ordered Girls Can Tell by Spoon.

Also, something is messed up in their database, because looking at my order history I see one order that has the following summary information:

# Recipient: NickS
# Shipping Speed: Two-Day Shipping
# Order Total: $-688,229,647.04

[NickS]

Looking in even more detail, I see that this is the line that is causing the total to be off:

Estimated Tax: $-688,229,693.47

You would think that, since I was in the same state as Amazon, they would have been able to calculate the tax more accurately than that.

[SEK]

You know, now that I'm looking at it, my history's not quite accurate either. For example:

That wasn't me, officer. You must have me confused with someone else. (This isn't me not owning up to having a copy of Dianetics, either. I never purchased the book, no matter what Amazon insists.)

[John Emerson]

Just pay the tax and shut up, Nick. We all have to make some sacrifices.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I remember that I asked Amazon to delete my purchase history when they announced that they were changing their privacy policy and considering it business information that could be sold. They refused to. So I think I settled for deleting my account, even though my history was still in their database.

Years later, in 2005, I was momentarily cash-poor and another family member wanted a router, so I signed up again to get one cheaply. My first purchase after that was Adam's book _Stone_.

[Innogen]

haha--*so* theory dork. First year at UCI--and my first order? N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Levinas, The Inhuman, Derrida, The Post Card (you were in that seminar too, right?)

[SEK]

you were in that seminar too, right?

That'd be Schwab's, right? I remember that seminar, if not distinctly, at the very least well. It's what actually turned a budding Deleuzian against "the project of theory," as she called it.

[Jon H]

1996 - two books about writing compilers.

[Fritz]

May 24, 1998: Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by H.S. Thompson

[Bob Reed]

Buffy & "Empire", eh? A pretty eclectic mix, about what I might expect from you...

Me? Two extremely dry texts, 1 on Patial Diff EQs and another on PDEs in Hilbert Space. But I jazzed the order up with a few music CD's such as Louis Armostrong, The Birds, Muddy Waters, and a couple of Terrence Hill movies-the "Trinity" twin pack and "My name is Nobody".

[alkau]

SEK I believe you did buy that book. I think you gave it as a gift to either your dad or your brother, since, it is in my house. Ask dad when you see him.