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I've been following with great interest and great concern the news about the murder of Dee Whigham, a known transgender. She was stabbed 119 times, and her throat was slashed. It's become clear to me that transgenders cannot defend themselves. How, then, can they defend our great country? After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. God bless!

There Was a Ceooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
David Erik Nelson
July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction

I finally caught up on my reading, and the latest F&SF magazine has the best novella I've read in a long time. It will be on sale until September 4.

When I first started reading it, the thought occurred to me that the author was trying to cash in on last year's bogus controversy about black writers not being published (how would an editor know?), and perhaps he was, but it's a great story none the less. It starts out in Detroit with a black locksmith with four years of architectural training under his belt, and a large white man who is slightly retarded. They work for a real estate agent, who has just bought the house. Their jobs are to check it out.

Before they get close, they're hassled by the cops, with the locksmith in handcuffs until he shows his certification as a locksmith and his license for "burglar tools". The cops leave, the locksmith picks the lock, and his training tells him the door is installed backwards.

He steps inside and falls out the back door. I thought then that it was a remake of an old Heinlein story, especially after several such attempts, but it wasn't anything like that at all. They call the boss, who comes out and sees the oddities himself, and curses. He gives the locksmith a silver key.

Later, having met a foreign toourist who complained that there's nothing interesting to photograph, offers to show her the house. He uses the key--and the door opens from the other side. They go in, and it really starts getting wierd. Books by authors who didn't write them, like a memoir of William Shatner written in Esperanto, and the fact that outside the windows isn't Detroit. And a sneaker with a foot still in it.

Not to give too much awy, it involves superior creatures from... another dimention? I was two thirds of the way through it before I could see it was science fiction.

I plan on nominating it for a Hugo next year. It's well worth the cost of the magazine.

Now, I'm beginning to burn in my new laptop, and am starting to set up the software on it. This process is proving not quite as trivial as I hoped it would be, the main problem being the Galago's HiDPI display. It seems that a lot of applications make assumptions about screen sizes that break stuff. The next major application that suffers from problems due to the high screen resolution is Emacs. I enabled desktop scaling in System Settings > General, and that manages to fix almost all the important apps, but it does something unexpected with Emacs. With desktop scaling on, Emacs expands to fill nearly the entire screen, saying that its window geometry is only 80x20. Attempts to set Emacs' window geometry manually to something reasonable via the -geometry command line switch, or in .emacs set-frame-size or in default-frame-alist doesn't help. Either results in a smaller Emacs window briefly appearing before the window again explodes to an irritatingly large size. This had me stumped for a while, until I realised that it had something to do with desktop scaling. Turning off desktop scaling results in a reasonably-sized window. Eventually, some judicious searches turned up this link, and I found a useful workaround by adding env GDK_SCALE= to the launcher command. Most standard apps are okay, but some others need special settings to be usable on HiDPI displays.

Pale Moon also seems to be only partially scaled. Many display elements such as scroll bars, checkboxes, etc are very small, but I can live with that for now. Gimp and Inkscape both still have very small buttons that didn't properly scale. As I install more and more apps it seems far too many of them seem to make the assumption that the display isn't going to be much more than about 1280×720. This should change with time but right now is a bit of a pain.

Thanks to an aunt of mine heading to the USA for a little while, I managed to order a System76 Galago Pro, which is a sweet piece of hardware as far as that goes, and though it was a bit dear, I think it was pretty much worth every penny. It's light (1.8 kg) and fast and the hardware feels solid. I'm now in the process of transferring all of my files from my old laptop to it. My only complaint was that it came preinstalled with Ubuntu 16.04, and it defaulted to Unity. I would have been satisfied to try it again after a few years of Linux Mint, but for one very idiotic thing: the Galago Pro has a very high resolution screen (3200 × 1800, higher resolution than even a Retina Display MacBook), and as such, all of the text is ridiculously small. 11 point text on a 13.3" screen with such a high resolution is essentially impossible to read without strain for a guy like me in his early forties. I could not find any option whatsoever to increase it beyond the accessibility option for "large fonts" which perhaps increased the size of the text by 25%. Still too small. Luckily, there was a way to install the Cinnamon desktop environment on this thing and thank goodness Cinnamon had some sensible defaults for font sizes. Now the high resolution screen really shines. The text is as clear and crisp as a well-printed book. That was the only serious complaint I had with what is otherwise an amazing piece of gear.

A Forbes' contributor says that the "US Newspapers' Problems Come From Their Former Monopoly, Not The Duopoly Of Facebook And Google."

That is only a part of the problem. There are far larger ones.

First, the prices of their newspapers. The skinny little State Journal-Register costs a full dollar and has very little news you won't find in other outlets. The Illinois Times prints theirs free, making money from advertising alone, and it is superior to the incredibly poor SJ-R.

But mostly it's how abysmal their web sites are. Know why I'm not reading your ads? No, not AdBlock; it isn't installed. It's because I've read the article in less time than the incredibly bloated web page loads and far faster than the even more bloated ads load. By the time the ads finish loading, I've already closed the tab. The St Louis Post-Dispatch is abysmal with loading; a full thirty seconds, then it goes blank, and takes another full minute, and every article is like that! They, and almost every other paper, badly need a competent webmaster. Except for extremely long or graphics-laden pages, the damned thing should load in seconds. Hire someone competent, who actually knows HTML and doesn't have to resort to one of those stupid programs that take your 5k of text and turn it into a 5 meg page. Today's sites load slower on high speed internet than back in the 33k dialup days.

Then there's "click to read more" after only half a paragraph is displayed. What in the hell is wrong with those morons? They expect me to subscribe to this garbage and actually PAY for it after annoying me?? STUPIDITY!

Then there are so many stupid pages that render in a six point typeface, gray on white, on a tablet that when you zoom, the ads completely cover the text! With morons like that working for your paper you expect me to believe anything you've written? The science rags are the worst about this, but Newsweek isn't any better. Zoom the page and the stupid social media bullshit covers the text!

Look, morons, nobody goes to your stupid site because it's got a "cool" interface, they go to find out what's happening in the world, and you seem to work hardest at making that as difficult as possible. And you expect me to PAY you for that? How fucking stupid can a person be?

Then there's the quality problem. Two decades ago I rarely saw a typo and never a grammatical error, these days few articles are error-free. You idiots expect me to PAY for that unprofessional garbage?

No, the newspapers are dying from blood loss, caused by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Fire the idiots and you might start making money again! Of course, if you're the publisher, that means you have to fire yourselves, because you're the most moronic at all!

Friends, I totally killed it with my performance in Warsaw! Terrific, terrific editorial in the WSJ! They say I'm like Pope Benedict XVI! The Pope who resigned. Said I'm defined. I haven't even been lifting and they said that. So chuffed! Read it on my blog➡️ 45.wh.gov/gSYLnz

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So, NPR is calling for revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound "patriotic". Your implications are clear.

In case anyone's been wondering why a hefty plurality if not an outright majority of the stories pushed over the weekend and the first couple days of the week came from yours truly, it's because I hopped on my cavalry bear, rode all over the country, and beat all the Editors except martyb (who I saved for last and only had to threaten into submission) upside the head with a double-barrel chainsaw.

Or it's because I saw there was pretty much nothing except partisan hack jobs and bloody stupid garbage that I sincerely hope the Eds never publish in the submission queue and quickly subbed everything remotely interesting that I found in my feed reader.

Believe whichever amuses you the most.

I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN! Fraud News Network. #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

Looks like we let the story queue run completely dry last night for about 3.5 hours. Feel free to give the Eds some good-natured ribbing over it here.