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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

N.b. since this is filled to the brim with my own opinion and reactions it doesn't suit being submitted as a story, great for a journal entry though :)

Syriza (a Greek acronym of what would be something like “The Coalition of the Radical Left” in English) is the main and largest party in the current coalition government in Greece. With a name like that (and lots and lots of ideology that I'm rather allergic to XD) I wasn't enthusiastic when they won the Greek election, I thought they would be like so many others who describe themselves in the same manner (there are always exceptions though, I know that).

But my misgivings have been put to shame! Time and time again they've obviously done their best to protect and champion the interests of Greece against the so-called “austerity” dictated by the EU and other scum like the IMF. “Austerity” which only ever seems to target those who are already living sparse and austere lives. “Austerity” which shrinks the economy as those most likely to spend any money they have on essential goods get even less money to spend. “Austerity” which continues to regress any remnants of national sovereignty into iron clad bureaucracy at the beck and call of the constantly manipulating and transnational “free actors” of “global commerce” (warning shadows of the steadfastly approaching horrors of TTIP and TPP).

It also helped put me at ease when I discovered that the tiny party I would be most likely to vote for if I was Greek was part of the government coalition. That party would be the “new/alternative right” ANEL or “Independent Greeks”.

Now RT reports that the Greek government has taken it even further towards actual democracy and announced a referendum to be held for people to vote in favor or against the debt deal that is being offered to Greece. The Greek people will instruct the Greek government as is appropriate in any democracy.

Thank you Greece, thank you Syriza, and thank you ANEL, your sensibility is shining one of the few lights and perhaps one of the brightest in a rather dismally dark and depressing world, may you continue down this path ♥

That's all I really wanted to say.

TS;RM! (Too Short; Rant More!)

Yeah I need to get this off my chest.

• First:

  Although certainly a central topic those who think the US civil war /as a war/ was about the emancipation of slaves rather than a war over secession and declaration of independence are as ignorant or malicious as those who think the second world war was fought on account of rescuing jews and other holocaust victims rather than a war fought to liberate invaded countries and territory.

  The victims of both are the ones that ought to be the most offended over such examples of blatant rewriting of history aimed solely at falsely glorifying the victors and endowing them with attributes they never had. The history and even more so the history of the victims (slaves, jews, slavic people, homosexuals, the seriously ill, the debilitated, anyone who stuck their neck out etc.) is being reduced to a lie.

• Second:

  The US attempts at removal of the use of the confederate flag (which belongs to everyone living in the states that tried to break free from the US) is an example of cultural theft equal to that of the (continued) nazi appropriation and gross abuse of pan-germanic and pagan symbols like sun-wheels (like swastikas) and runes (which belongs to everyone in non-roman Europe in particular but also humanity in general).

• Third:

  Unfortunate and wasteful as it is the US and NATO is now clearly first and foremost fascist just as the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact was fascist and as the Third Reich and Axis powers were fascist and that's true no matter how offensive it might feel feels to Germans (few of them complain, denial is rare), Russians (some of them complain, denial is still somewhat common), or Usians (almost everyone will complain, denial is “truth”).

To me it is as if during the last 16 years the world has lost between 200 and 300 years of progress paid for in blood and suffering by billions of humans. But of course that's not the case: it probably wasn't widespread in the first place and “everyone” just rode on the coattails of a few of the less idiotic humans having a somewhat brief period of actual influence and power. Well that era is done and gone that's for sure :C

I just sent off for the fifth and, I hope, last pre-publication copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I was sure it would be finished a month ago, but there were problems printing it due to some of the illustrations being too high of a resolution. It took a month to get the fourth printed.

I can't decide whether or not to assign an ISBN to it, since the book may not be legal in all countries. What do you think? I only have three or four left, and a block of ten is $250. Should I use one? The only country besides the US that has bought my books was Great Britain, and very few there although the web site gets visits from all over the world.

I'm pretty sure I'll never sell a book in Australia, because they're crazy expensive down there; tariffs, probably.

Oh, if you want to read the copy of Huckleberry Finn at my site, better hurry because when I post Yesterday's Tomorrows I'll have to take the Twain book down to make space. It will be back up this fall when I renew my URL and upgrade my hosting level. When it's back up I'll have a version that's easy to read on a phone.

This is a test story which contains a variety of 1-, 2-, and 3-octet UTF-8 chars. The purpose is to see how well the e-mailing of stories handles these characters. These chars were entered directly (actually, cut-and-paste) as opposed to being entered as decimal/hex/named character entities.

The following is taken from: "3. UTF-8 definition" in: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629 [ietf.org]

    Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
       (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
    --------------------+---------------------------------------------
    0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
    0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
    0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

peugen 0x40 0x7f 0x0140 0x017f 0x0700 0x073f 0x0800 0x083f | peu2utf8 > bleh.txt
cat bleh.txt

@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmno
pqrstuvwxyz{|}~�

ŀŁłŃńŅņŇňʼnŊŋŌōŎŏ
ŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŜŝŞş
ŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮů
ŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžſ

܀܁܂܃܄܅܆܇܈܉܊܋܌܍܎܏
ܐܑܒܓܔܕܖܗܘܙܚܛܜܝܞܟ
ܠܡܢܣܤܥܦܧܨܩܪܫܬܭܮܯ

ࠀࠁࠂࠃࠄࠅࠆࠇࠈࠉࠊࠋࠌࠍࠎࠏ
ࠐࠑࠒࠓࠔࠕࠚ
ࠤࠥࠦࠧࠨ࠮࠯
࠰࠱࠲࠳࠴࠵࠶࠷࠸࠹࠺࠻࠼࠽࠾࠿

---
That was one block of 1-octet UTF-8 chars; two blocks of 2-octet UTF-8 chars, and one block of 3-octet chars, submitted as 'plain old text'

Here it is the first of June in 2015, and our dev team has been working long and hard to get the foundation code to this site upgraded to handle newer versions of perl and apache. I lent a hand with QA duties and can attest that this was no small feat. Many *many* thanks to NCommander and Paulej72!

And, this acts as a test that the journal code is still working. Please let me know if you cannot see it! ;)

fwswgwergwe