Odd Lots
- Hurricane activity is at a 45-year low, and no major hurricane has achieved landfall on US soil in almost ten years. Tornadoes have been pretty scarce recently as well. Then again, it’s mid-April and snowing like hell outside right now. Two outa three ain’t bad.
- The Food Babe gets her you-know-what handed to her. This, after all, is the woman who said, “There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” Wow. I probably shouldn’t exist, then. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- More evidence that salt isn’t the demon that government guidelines insist that it is. Remember, you can do the experiment on this one, as it applies to yourself: Give up salt for a month and record your blood pressure every day. Then go back on salt and record your blood pressure every day. If your BP doesn’t change significantly, you can pretty much assume that salt isn’t an issue.
- Red meat is not the enemy. And yes, the science is complicated. What science isn’t?
- Crickets are not superfood. Who knew?
- Carol and I have tried this Moscato and found it good.
- Someone pointed out that my Low-Voltage Tubes page on junkbox.com had gotten corrupted. Indeed it had–and I had unknowingly copied that corruption (which was present in my HTML source files)–onto all the backups I have here. So I pulled a trick I had thought about for a long time: I looked up the site on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and checked their images of junkbox.com until I found one with an intact copy of the article. I then just lifted the portion of the file that had gotten corrupt and dropped it into the newest copy of the corrupted file. Fixed.
- Amazon has a new contract with Harper-Collins that gives the publisher full agency; that is, the freedom to set its own prices. Amazon is posting a notice on the sales pages of full-agency titles telling the customer that the publisher has set the price, not Amazon.
- Here’s some actual data crunching of the Sad Puppies phenomenon, along with a good deal of sane and rational analysis. Stop hurling hate, and understand what’s going on. Hating isn’t helping your cause one bit.
- ESR thinks that the real problem dividing SFF right now is literary status envy. The piece goes back to last summer, which was before the whole industry went nuts over Sad Puppies. Worth reading, maybe twice.
- If you’re an SP3 supporter, you can get all kinds of Sad Puppies 3 merchandise at the logo artist’s Cafe Press studio shop.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · food · health · publishing · sf · web · wine
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I don’t read much SF (except rare stuff by some JD guy) so I don’t really have dog in this fight.
But I really like Eric Raymond’s piece. The phrase “transpose this resentment into the key of politics” is worth rolling around in the mind for a while. It has other applications.
It does. ESR is worth reading, and I don’t get to him as often as I should. But then again, time is short these days: I’m trying to re-establish myself in SF.
I’m currently finishing up the ebook edition of The Cunning Blood, which will be sold on Kindle (including KU) for $2.99. I’ll also be releasing Firejammer for the first time once I nail a cover. Ditto my longer short works like “Drumlin Boiler,” “Drumlin Wheel,” “Cold Hands,” and “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman.” The big deal will be in January, when I launch both hardsf.com and *Ten Gentle Opportunities.* Much work to be done before then, but I’m making progress and things are looking good.
Good news indeed. More stf by Duntemann is most welcome.
Many thanks for the vote of confidence. (I’m gonna need it…) And I hope you guys will help spread the word when the material finally hits the streets.
We’ll start our own slate to get you on the 2016 Hugo ballot. I think it should be called “Fluffy White Puppies.” The only criterion for being part of the slate is that you must get along with bichons. 🙂
Enjoy wandering by here. Usually visit on my laptop.
I suppose that you have been following the “Googlegeddon” … where Google will downgrade your site in search results from mobile devices. And your site doesn’t pass their ‘mobile friendly test’, so will be affected.
Since this is a WP site, you might want to consider changing themes. My favorite theme is Mantra, which is fully responsive. Easy customization; you should be able to get your design in place with just a few customizations. I use it for many of my web sites.
And can help, if needed. (This is not a shill for work, but just enjoy your site.)