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I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to design book covers. It's an excellent free open source program that has three weaknesses -- its menu structure is completely illogical (but can be gotten used to), I can't find a full spectrum palette, and its text handling is so poor as to be useless.

I have a workaround for the bad text. Open a word processor that will output a PDF file, choose your typeface and size, choose the text's color and write the text. Save it as a PDF and GIMP will open it as an image in as high a resolution you need. Just make the background transparent, situate it over your graphic, and merge the layers.

Speaking of books, I made a Mars, Ho! YouTube video. Yes, there is a pussy in it.

Cixin Liu explains it in his 'Dark Forest'. This has turned into the best book I've read in years - and I still have the third book in the trilogy to read.

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Cixin-Liu-ebook/dp/B00R13OYU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1440699211&sr=1-1&keywords=cixin+liu+dark+forest

One year in as of today and still averaging over ~10K hits of the hashtag on slow days. Dead? The gaming press and SJWs should be so lucky. Gamers, we just don't quit until we win.

sic semper umbilicus

I've become accustomed to that "only x submissions in the queue" thingy. This morning, I stumbled across a story that seems worthy of discussion here, so I looked to see how many stories are in the queue. Ooops - it's gone!

Apparently, that bit of information disappears when the queue is deemed to be "full".

https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/03/31/0829226

So, it's Women's Equality Day. Lot of you probably think about this time I'd be busting out with a sexist rant. Hate to disappoint but I'm all about equality. Actual equality though not this bullshit third-gen feminist version of equality where they think equality means special treatment for their tragic victimhood.

No, equality always has and always will mean equal treatment. Every single time. No exceptions for past mistreatment. No white-knighting up if someone with tits comes crying on your shoulder that people are mean to her just because she calls them misogynists, shitlords, tools of the patriarchy, etc...

In fact, no calling yourself a feminist period. If you do it as a woman it's saying you feel your entire gender has been victimized and should be given special treatment because it is incapable of taking care of itself. If you do it as a man you're saying an entire gender is in need of your protection.

You either treat a woman as if she's an adult and as capable of taking care of her own shit as you are, or you don't. There is no "yes, but" to it. Equal treatment or sexism, there are no other choices.

I slapped a Mars, Ho! video up on YouTube. You can see it here.No, there's no nudity.

I've spent the last three days working to fix the ePubs and AZW3s of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I had just ran it through Calibre and did a quick check, noting that the table of contents didn't display anything.

It took a lot of research and learning to fix the ToC, and while doing so discovered something even worse - some of the illustrations were covering up the text. Damn!

Trying to figure out the ToC I tried several things. One was installing the Write2epub extension to Open Office.

It really sucked, especially with this book. It had some ugly sans-serif typeface, and there were huge swaths large and bolded that I never told it to do. And there was still no table of contents.

While googling and reading and finding out that e'books were mostly based on HTML5, XML and a few other things, I got a little disheartened. This was going to take forever, because I had a lot I had to learn.

I ran across Google's e'book editor "Sigil" and installed it. I have no idea if it's any good, because there's no documentation and I can't make heads or tails out of it.

So I went back to Calibre and studied it some more, educated a little but not much by the internet, and saw a long string with an "and" in it, "h1 and h2" and recognised this from HTML and the rest of the garbage from programming for thirty years. Stupid Calibre was telling it to make everything part of the table!

It took a bit of trial and error to get the right parenthesis and brackets in the right spots that the conversion wouldn't crash with an error, but I finally got a working table of contents.

Now to address the obscured text. That took quite a bit of head scratching as well.

I finally just decided to make the input make the output behave, rather than trying to tweak the output itself. What finally worked was to load the offending images in GIMP and add a white space where it was covering the text. That worked.

So if you've already downloaded one of the e'books, you should delete them and download the new version.

ePub

AZW3

I think I'll take the day off tomorrow.

I just uploaded the last item in "Yesterday's Tomorrows", a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction," Hugo Gernsback. In his essay, written in 1926, he describes the year 1976. Those of you who believe the guys who say the singularity is near or that death will be conquered within your lifetime should read it.

Futurists! Where in the hell is my flying car? Why are there no bases on the moon, like the futurists said in the 1960s we'd have by now? Why did no one see digital photography coming? Or phones in your pockets? Or the internet?

Gernsback sold electronic components, some of which he designed himself, yet didn't seem to understand "electricity, the mysterious fluid." He thought we'd be able to control the weather with it, and even more nonsensical things. He seemed steeped in the cult of Tesla, who had promised wireless delivery of electricity.

Coincidentally, Soylent News just mentioned a story about transplanting porcine hearts into humans, and the company's co-founder is a futurist. Of course, I left a comment about futurists.

I go into it in detail about futurism both in the book's foreword and the introduction to the Gernsback essay.

It turned into a beautiful thing. It's full of illustrations, plus photos of the authors and covers of the magazines the stories were printed in. It has the first use of the word "astronaut", the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is said to have ushered in the "golden age of science fiction, A.E. van Vogt's first published science fiction, a few other firsts, and five stories that are printed from cleaned up scans of the magazines. There are biographies of all the writers in the book.

I usually encourage folks to read the stories online or check a copy out from their local library, but not this time. The printed book is head and shoulders better than the electronic versions.

There are stories by Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R. Jones, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, Jerome Bixby, and a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction" Hugo Gernsback.

It will be a little while before the HTML version is available, since they're not done yet, but I'll post them as I finish them. Meanwhile, there is a PDF, an ePub, and an AZW3 posted for free download.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

I'm still using Firefox, and I have it on my (new) Android phone as well as my home Linux system.

A couple of days ago, Firefox updated itself on my phone, and now it renders pages differently, and less well, in my opinion. It may just be a coincidence. Maybe soylentews.org has changed?

Up until the upgrade, it used to render the main text area in stories and the comment threads below to fill the width of the screen automatically, and the text would wrap at the screen edges. I like this, because the (useful/interesting) text is automatically the most prominent and is given all the screen area. Also, zooming would make the text larger, and would still wrap it at the edges if the screen, so you could still read everything without scrolling left and right continually.

Now, the whole page takes the whole width of the screen, and you have to manually zoom to the text, and it doesn't wrap, because you're zooming the whole pages, borders, menus and all, not just the interesting stuff.

Have I missed something? Is there a setting in the browser?

In general in the last few years as shallow but wide screens have become the norm, we pages are generally designed to a certain fixed width. Gone are the days when you could resize your browser window and the text would reflow to fit your personal preference.

I read better in relatively narrow vertical columns. I was once told that this is most natural, and one of the reasons that traditional newspapers printed in columns. It's tiring and easy to get lost reading very long horizontal lines.

And those of us who like to use our window managers to have multiple windows tiled and overlapping on our multiple desktops do not like to have to maximise a browser window or to take up 80% of the screen just to render a fixed-width web page.

And web pages these days are all L A R G E F O N T S, W H I T E S P A C E , A N I M A T I O N S, V I D E O S A N D F L O A T I N G P O P O V E R M E N U S A N D C A N C E L B U T T O N S.

Bah!

Update: It appears that Firefox has an option to make the text larger which solves the immediate problem with rendering this site.