SoylentNews

I ran across an interesting opinion piece in Vox while going through Google News today. The piece is by Matthew Yglesias. What made me sit up and take notice is that he's on Amazon's side in the Hachette fight.

What's interesting is that his piece got published at all, considering that (as he notes) the newspaper, movie, music, and book publishers are all owned by the same big corporations.

I mostly agree with him, but not about everything. He writes:

In the traditional book purchasing paradigm, when a reader bought a book at the store there were two separate layers of middlemen taking a cut of the cash before money reached the author: a retailer and a publisher. The publisher, in this paradigm, was doing very real work as part of the value-chain. A typed and printed book manuscript looks nothing like a book. Transforming the manuscript into a book and then arranging for it to be shipped in appropriate quantities to physical stores around the country is a non-trivial task. What's more, neither bookstore owners nor authors have any expertise in this field.

Digital publishing is not like that. Transforming a writer's words into a readable e-book product can be done with a combination of software and a minimal amount of training. Book publishers do not have any substantial expertise in software development, but Amazon and its key competitors (Apple, Google, and the B&B/Microsoft partnership) do.

My "manuscripts" are exactly like the printed books. I upload a PDF and they print it.

But publishers aren't just middlemen who only offer publicity, as I've found out from experience. The publisher has editors and proofreaders, and this aspect is (at least for me) the hardest part of writing a book.

What's more, a self-published physical book is far more expensive than a book published by someone like Doubleday. I can get a copy of Andy Weir's The Martian at Barnes and Noble cheaper than I can get a copy of one of my own books from the printer.

He also seems to agree with everyone that physical books will go away. I used to think so, too, but reality changed my mind. I used to think that old fogeys like me were the only ones who prefer dead trees to electrons.

First was my 28 year old daughter, who when she saw the physical copy of Nobots exclaimed "My dad wrote a book. And it's a REAL book!"

Second was sales. Most people read my books for free on my web site, but far more people buy them than download them, and far more download the PDF or single file HTML than the e-book version.

I also discovered that people highly value books that were signed by the author. When a Felbers patron bought a paperback copy of Nobots (I have a box of them in my car's trunk), the first thing he did was ask me to sign it.

How can an author sign an e-book? I do what printmakers do and sign in pencil, because pencil is far harder to fake than ink.

But I agree with him on Amazon vs e-book publishers. E-books from publishers are way, way too expensive, and there's no reason whatever why an e-book should cost fifteen bucks. As he notes, there is almost no cost at all for making another copy of an e-book.

A few weeks ago, Project Censored hit S/N's front page. Its link led to Project Censored's web site, which unfortunately is a mess. It appeared to be one of those incredibly annoying sites with one paragraph per page. I commented that I'd wait until the Illinois Times covered it as they do every year.

It was the cover story and main feature of this week's paper. Unlike almost every other newspaper in the world, you could actually read it without adblock and flashblock without going insane.

It also has news of a union rally against the SJ-R (perhaps with the worst web site on the internet) that's taking place tomorrow. I doubt that will be covered by Gatehouse Media!

I've been waiting for a copy of Mars, Ho! to show up in my snailbox for a couple of weeks. I expected it to come tomorrow.

While I've been waiting I've been working on Random Scribblings. This will be my fattest book yet, since it has the best of my stuff (IMO anyway) for the last almost 20 years, plus a little modern commentary about it. Right now it's weighing in at 90,000 words, more than twice as long as Nobots.

So Mars, Ho! showed up today, a day earlier than expected. Tomorrow I'll be too busy with other things to work on the books, so this was going to be a busy day.

So I check S/N for messages, and discover that S/N really outdid itself today, full of excellent nerdity that makes slashdot look like Guns and ammo magazine or People or something. And on top of that I had mod points.

At this rate I'll never get that book finished!

It was a dark and stormy night.

There was a sexual harasser on the loose.

Somebody who had been learning programming well told her mentor that she was a feminist.

A few hundred miles away there was a great guy who had dated over 20 different women that year alone and was rejected every time and was still a virgin. His married sister had sex on his couch with a man who was not her husband.

In the nearby city of Pine Rapids, Iowa, a frustrated trans woman reached her limit of reading about the drivel womyn-born-womyn publish about fields they don't understand. Maybe it was gamergate that made her crack, or maybe it was systemd.

In Derry, Maine, her estranged sister, who had begun living as a man, Maxfield Stanton, three years ago, was accused the day before yesterday of sexually assaulting a mutual friend of a man he had started to develop feelings for.

-=-

Don't worry. I'll tie this all together in scene 24.

I've scrambled my password and email on the green site. I had to use Chrome under Windows! Midori on BodhiLinux wouldn't work! Good riddance to that site.

I've made an account on the blue site just to reserve this username, but I can't figure out how to scramble it quite yet. Maybe I'm just too confused at life at the moment.

I'm now scrambling my password and email here.

It's not you; it's me.

This has been the year from hell, and it's not over yet.

Clearly my knowledge about feminism, or at least those who call themselves feminists, is about 15 years old. Some of it may still be true to a certain degree, but I feel I no longer know what the movement is and my comments earlier today were probably putting blame on the wrong people. Thus, I'm as guilty as the feminists of 15 years ago for what they did to me.

Given enough time, everything changes.

I may be returning, but not with this UID. You won't need to hear any more trans-this cis-that from me, hopefully. I understand that may no longer be an issue for the feminists, so it's no longer an issue for me.

Yet, I'm clearly triggered on a level that indicates PTSD just by the word feminism. I'll be seeking treatment. Things will change, one way or another. Either I end up in a gutter or I get well and go on to die when I'm 90. Either way, the cycle of death and rebirth continues, and afterwards I'll be somebody even more strange who won't even remember being here as gamers and male programmers come under increasing fire for all that we can guess are ulterior motives.

There's a new-age movement of the future for you: mediums who help people trawl through old message boards from the first quarter of the 21st century to attempt to find their previous life.

It's been great.

Goodbye

While I'm waiting for the corrected copy of Mars, Ho! to show up I've been working on another, Random Scribblings. It's a compilation of garbage I've littered the internet with for almost twenty years.

I'm having problems, though. There is a lot of stuff I've written that just doesn't exist any more, like my "Weak End Hell Hole" column I wrote for Arcadia. I can't find Arcadia at archive.org at all and saved none of the columns. There's stuff I could have sworn I'd saved but can't find on my hard drives.

But there's stuff I don't even remember. I do remember that I wrote 17 front page stories at K5 a decade ago, but I don't remember what they all were.

If you've been reading my stuff for years and have a favorite article, let me know and I'll put it in the book. That is, if I can find it.

The first printed copy of Mars, Ho! came a couple of weeks ago, and I've gone through it marking it up five times. This morning I made the changes in the version on my computer and ordered a corrected copy. I'll have it in about ten days.

I'm hopeful I'll be satisfied with it. There were actually few changes and most were minor, like a missing opening quote and end smart single quotes where apostrophes should have been.

The cover was hosed. Damned Microsoft. I'd exported a high resolution cover from GIMP to JPG, and loaded it into Windows Paint since GIMP's handling of text is primitive and frustrating.

What came out of Paint looked fine on the screen, but printed it was a pixellated mess. So I used Lulu's also frustrating cover generator to add the title and author. This one should be okay.

I'm trying hard to get it done in time for Christmas, but I want it to be right. I'm still hopeful.

I had planned on only fans being able to get printed copies, but as Benjie said, "the best laid plans of mice..."

I tried to go to the "private" URL on my phone and got a 404. All the ways I can think of to alleviate this involve too much work and hassle and possible cash outlays. So I guess anybody will be able to get it from my site or at Lulu, but only the eBook will be on Amazon.

Site stats have been fascinating and puzzling me. I'm getting more visitors from Russia than anywhere, and they're coming from Russian language sites. Strange. Quite a few from the Ukraine, as well, they're #3 in the list of countries right behind the US. A few are coming from game sites, and some from porn sites. Weird.

In any case, I guess I'm on vacation for a week or two until the next copy shows up on my porch.

The British rag The Daily Mail has been coming up in Google News with the above linked story.

It is incredibly faulty; it's propaganda. The headline screams "The terrible truth about cannabis: Expert's devastating 20-year study finally demolishes claims that smoking pot is harmless".

In the first place, no drug is harmless. Few things in existence are completely harmless, in fact. Even something necessary for life, like water, can be dangerous. Unlike marijuana, you can actually overdose on water. People have died from drinking too much water, nobody has died from smoking too much pot.

"Is pot harmless?" is not only the wrong question, it's a stupid question. So lets look at this fellow's "20 year study" and at the fellow's credentials.

Is he a neuroscientist? Biochemist? Physician?

No. Wikipedia says that Wayne Denis Hall a psychologist. As such, he's no more qualified to study the dangers of drugs than I am. Lets look at the claims, with the most stupid first, that the Mail repeats..

"If cannabis is not addictive then neither is heroin or alcohol."

This is just not incorrect, it's WRONG and irresponsible. Apparently Professor Hall has never seen an alcoholic going through withdrawal, but I have. It's horrible; the addict goes through not just psychological terror, seeing snakes and spiders on them, it is physically painful and can cause seizures. Withdrawal from heroin or alcohol can be fatal.

Marijuana's "addiction" is psychological only; unlike heroin, alcohol, or coffee, there are no physical withdrawal effects. Marijuana is more like orange juice than alcohol. Get drunk every day for a year and quit and you could die.

Get stoned while drinking orange juice every night, and when it's gone quitting both will be similar, although you'll miss pot more.

If pot is as addictive as heroin, why don't potheads steal to support their habits, like almost all heroin addicts do?

The world has too many drug addicts as it is, and statements like these from a scientist will lead people to believe that heroin and cocaine are as harmless as marijuana.

One in six teenagers who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it

That's likely true. Marijuana is, in fact, dangerous to teens. It has been shown to interrupt the development of the adolescent brain. Kids shouldn't smoke pot, but unfortunately it's easier for a teenager to get pot than it is for an adult. And every pot smoker I know who started as a kid is in poverty. Kids, stay away from it until you're 19 or preferably older.

We can dismiss adolescent pot use, it is obviously harmful.

Cannabis doubles the risk of developing psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia

Yes, there is a correlation between mental illness and all psychoactive drugs, but the causation goes the other way. There were schizophrenic kids in my neighborhood when I grew up, all were obviously batshit insane, and all wound up on drugs later.

One in ten adults who regularly smoke the drug become dependent on it and those who use it are more likely to go on to use harder drugs

Again, the "dependance" is little worse than orange juice and nowhere near as bad as coffee. As to leading to harder drugs, this is the fault of prohibition. "Got any weed, man?"

"No, I'm out. Want some coke?"

This problem goes away with legalization, as Colorado has shown.

Driving after smoking cannabis doubles the risk of a car crash, a risk which increases substantially if the driver has also had a drink

Well, duh. I grin at the "increases substantially if the driver has also had a drink".

I'll also note that unlike drinking, when you're high you don't WANT to drive a car. You're far less likely to get behind the wheel after a couple of joints than after a couple of shots of whiskey.

He also states that taking the drug while pregnant can reduce the weight of a baby, and long-term use raises the risk of cancer, bronchitis and heart attack.

Smoking anything does increase the danger of various lung diseases, but a study a few years ago baffled the researchers who did the study; the results were the opposite of what they expected. They studied four groups of geezers -- long term pot smokers, cigarette smokers, people who smoked both and nonsmokers.

They expected twice the cancers in pot smokers than nonsmokers and twice the cancers in smokers of both than cigarettes alone. However, the data showed that pot smokers actually had fewer cancers than nonsmokers (although statistically insignificant) and smokers of both had half the cancers than those who only smoked cigarettes.

Rather than causing cancer, pot may actually prevent it.

This sort of sensationalist bullshit is why so many people distrust science. This fellow is a psychologist who mostly studies adolescents. Yes, kids and pregnant women shouldn't smoke pot, or anything else. But we should legalize it for adults, partly to keep it out of kids' hands.

Please excuse me, but I'm inebriated. Blame typos on beer and reefer, without which this story probably wouldn't have been written.
        “Wild Bill! Damn, what a surprise! Why didn't you call?”
        “Because then it wouldn't have been a surprise! Give me a Newcastle, I haven't had a beer in nine months! How've you been, you old pirate killer?”
        “I'm doing great, just graduated business school two months ago. The bar is doing real good, and Destiny and her team have almost finished building that new kind of telescope. You sure you want Newcastle?”
        “Huh? Your Newcastle went bad?”
        “Here, you old asshole, have one of mine on the house,” John said, pouring from a tapper to a beer mug. “Tell me what you think. There's nothing wrong with my Newcastle stock but I'll bet you won't want Newcastle after you try this.”
        Bill eyed the mug warily. “Import?” He took a sip. “Pretty good!” He took another sip. “You were right! This is some damned good beer. What country was it imported from?”
        “Mars, you asshole. I built a microbrewery here. At least, it started as a microbrewery, it's a lot bigger now. Hell, I'm exporting it to Earth.”
        “What? Bullshit, you're full of shit, you old bulshitter. Come on, you can't bullshit a bullshitter. After shipping it would cost ten times what Newcastle cost!”
        “Yep, just like Newcastle is ten times what Captain Hooker's cost here.”
        “Forgswaggle!”
        “Young man!” an old woman at the other end of the bar admonished, “Watch your fucking language, asshole!”
        Bill turned red as a beet. “Oh shit, I'm sorry, Ma'am, I didn't see you down there, I thought just John and me was here.”
        “Well, just watch it, dickhead.”
        “Yes ma'am.” He turned back to John.
        “But who in the hell is buying it?”
        “Who do you think? People who eat pork.”
        “Damn, you must be doing good. What's with that giant framed picture of a guy in an eigtheenth century pirate costume with a parrot on his shoulder and playing a guitar?”
        “It's a photo of an old blues guy centuries ago, John Lee Hooker, with the pirate stuff added in a computer.”
        “Your last run. The one with all them damned pirates. Now I get it. Damn, that was pretty scary. I didn't think I'd make it back to Mars. At least, until the fleet reached me. You were pretty far ahead...”
        “Well, DUH, you were on batteries.”
        “Yeah, the pirates showed up right when the fleet did. I thought I'd get boarded. Scared the fognart out of me!”
        “YOUNG MAN!!!”
        “Oops, shit, I forgot. I'm sorry, maam.”
        “Spew shit out of your mouth again, young man, and I'm kicking your God damned ass.”
        “Sorry, ma'am.”
        “Fuck you.”
        He turned back to John, his red face a little less red. “Hey, sell me a half dozen kegs. I have to go back to Saturn and that's a long damned way.”
        “Sorry, Bill, I ain't gonna do it.”
        “What?? What the fuck, John?”
        “Sorry, Bill, but I lost too many friends already, damn them fucking pirates. I almost lost Gus thanks to my stupidity and I'll be damned if I'm going to be responsible for your dying. I ain't got enough friends to lose any more, especially you.”
        “John, what in the blagsphorth are...”
        “YOUNG MAN!!!”
        “Oops, fuck, I'm sorry, maam. I keep forgetting.”
        “Just watch your fucking mouth, boy.”
        “Yes, maam. John, what the FUCK are you talking about?”
        “I'm talking about Gus. I almost killed him!”
        “Gus? Blagforth...”
        “YOUNG MAN! I'm not listening to this garbage!” The old woman stomped out.
        “Blagforth forgnart, Bill, that's one of my best patrons, spends a fortune getting blagforthfaced in here.”
        “Gee, John, I don't want to cause you any lost business...”
        “Garp that old crant,” John said. “It's a fognarth fucking bar. If she don't want to hear vulgar language she can drink somewhere else.”
        “Why won't you sell me that beer?”
        “I told you, because of Gus. I almost killed him.”
        “What the fognarth are you talking about?”
        “Gus came through about six months ago or so. I hadn't seen him in a long damned time, he hadn't had any Martian runs. Anyway, he wanted beer, Loved my Captain Hooker's Pale Ale...”
        “What am I drinking?”
        “Lager. Anyway, he wanted fifteen barrels. I didn't think nothing of it, but he was drunk on his approach to Mars and the God damned pirates, as few as there are left, almost got him. I almost killed Gus and I'll be damned if I'm going to kill you!”
        “Fognarth blagsphorth, John, you fucking asshole. Yeah, you shouldn't have sold beer to Gus. Shit, that asshole is an alcoholic. What the fucking blagsphorth is wrong with you, asshole? Jesus, John. You're a fucking moron.”
        “Well, garp, I guess you're not Gus. Okay, I'll sell you the garping beer, motherfucker. But God damned fognarth, you better not garping die!”

Since I can't do anything about the new book until the printed copy arrives this coming week I decided to work on a couple I've been thinking about.

One is a yet untitled tome that will be a compilation of short science fiction stories. Since I only have five so far, this one will be a while.

The other is a compilation of articles and stuff I've posted on the internet, and there's a LOT of it. The trouble is, I can't find much of it. I probably could if I could remember the articles' names. There were about 20 that hit K5's front page way back when it mattered, but I can only think of a few.

I'll probably have to visit archive.org to find anything from mcgrew.info.

It's working title has been "Random Scribblings" for a while, but I may call it "Garbage I've littered the internet with".

I thought of my old Quake site I'd kept on CD; some of my oldest stuff. I'd put the whole thing on this little notebook, thinking about progress because there wasn't a desktop computer anywhere when it was live that could have held the whole thing; I had a huge site.

I got sucked into my own old web site! Crazy humor, even wilder than I am today. We were all wilder then, though.

I had a running gag called the "Ticket to Nowhere". It was a web site contest. What you had to do to enter was to have a Quake or gaming site I knew about that laid dormant for a while. The last one to update their site won. The prize was a first class no expense paid Ticket to Nowhere!

I started pasting them into an Oo document, and hell, there's 10,000 words pasted already and it doesn't have everything, just the funniest stuff and it's only a few months worth of postings out of 4 or 5 years (I started it in 1998 and abandoned it in 2002, but 1998 was sparse and the last year I kept the ticket myself).

It might wind up being a book itself.

While I was sucked into my own damned stuff I'd forgotten about, I was reminded of a couple of other sites I contributed to, and if any of that is discoverable at all, it won't be easy to find. I may not even find it at archive.org; there is no trace of "Kneel" Harriot's "Yello, There!" except for one page I mirrored on my site that archive.org kept.

We had been fans of each other's sites, while neither of us knew the other was a fan until I posted something about his site on mine. He was British, and I love crazy British humour even if they spell it funny. We exchanged many an email. Unfortunately not only did his site pass away, he did, too. The last email I got from him he was in a wheelchair, and had been suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) for years. It finally got him.

It was another of his sites that I posted to (after much begging from him; it seemed everyone wanted to post my stuff). I ran a weekly column called "The Weak End Hell Hole". I doubt any of them still exist anywhere, and I'll bet there was some good stuff there.

The idea that when something's on the internet it's there forever is complete bullshit. The internet DOES forget.

I got an email this morning from a fellow who wanted a link to buy a printed copy of Mars, Ho! In it, he said he wanted to buy copies as gifts, so now I'm chomping at the bit even more wanting to get it out -- CHRISTMAS PRESENTS!

There is as yet no link, which won't exist until I publish. I have no idea what it will be, as it won't be on my site. But this sort of thing makes my day, and it happens almost daily. If you were modded up this morning, thank yourself. That email put me in such a good mood I didn't issue a single downmod, and I usually give out one or two.

It's a good thing I didn't have points yesterday, visits to the dentist never puts anyone in a good mood.

But Wednesday was even better than today. As I got a beer, someone was reading the bar copy of Nobots (I wrote part of it there) and chuckling. I took my beer out to the beer garden, and one fellow was raving about both my books to another fellow, and eagerly asked me when the next one will be out.

This is one of the most emotionally rewarding things I've ever done. I love you folks!