SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
No good story ever started with someone eating a salad
It was some time last year that someone on Facebook posted a graphic that said "Beer: because no good story ever started with someone eating a salad." There are a lot of them to be found in Google Images.
So I decided to write a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, although parts of the story do take place in a bar. How good is it?
Magazines like F&SF get a thousand submissions a month, and each bi-monthly issue only has half a dozen stories. Only the very best get printed, and almost all rejection slips are form letters that all say pretty much the same thing, no matter what magazine.
Out of over a hundred rejections, I've only gotten two that were not form letters. The first was actually the first story I ever submitted, "Voyage to Earth". A junior editor (or perhaps slush reader) wrote back saying that it was a good story and well written, but the beginning didn't grab her.
The story I'm posting tomorrow, "The Naked Truth" garnered a personalized rejection from Charles Finlay, F&SF's Editor in Chief! He wrote a very encouraging letter saying that the idea of a murder mystery on Mars intrigued him and it was well written, but he didn't like the ending.
It was very nearly in F&SF. That means it isn't just a good story that starts with someone eating a salad, but a VERY good story.
I'm putting magazine submissions on hiatus until I finish "Voyage to Earth and Other Stories". I want to publish it next year, some magazines hang on to stories for a really long time ("Dewey's War" was in Analog's slush pile for six months, Tor has had "The Exhibit" since December) and if they publish one, I won't be able to publish it for a couple of years.
I have five finished stories you haven't read, three of which nobody has. I'll probably post one every couple of weeks until I run out of them. I've been working on one story, "The Pirate" (which I may rename) for a couple of months. Writing's been hard since I smoked my last cigarette last New Year's Eve.
What were they thinking?
I didn't know how much storage my "new" tablet has (hadn't looked, it's eight gigs) but reading the manual that I had to google to find (It's second-hand) I saw that it would take a 30 gig SD card, what they're calling single inline memory modules (SIMMs) these days. I decided to get one at Walgreens when I got beer.
It was a 32 GB SIMM (MicroSD, whatever) so I made sure to keep the receipt in case it wouldn't work in the tablet, but installing it was easy.
I can't say the same about getting it out of the retail packaging! It took half an hour and I was afraid of breaking the chip getting it out.
When I booted the tablet, it reported that it had installed it and reported 32 GB. That's two gigs more than the size of the part of my music collection I actually listen to. So I connected to my network drive with the same file manager II use on the phone, copied the folder holding the music, and pasted into the SD card. It took several hours.
When it was done, it informed me that third party apps didn't have permission to write to the SD card! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT?? So I googled, and it said that Android 4 was the reason -- except my phone is running 4 and it had no problem writing to the simm.
The tablet has a built-in file manager that will access the SD, but can't access the network drive. I started copying a few at a time... and had a thought. I wondered if that 32 gig SD would work in the phone?
It does. So right now my phone's copying music from the network so I gan get it in the tablet. Good thing the physical chip is so easy to install and remove. I have a 12 gig chip in the phone, I think I'll get another 32 gig for the phone. Maybe bigger, I'll have to google to see what it can hold. I'll give the phone chip away.
But why would they have had a restriction like that?? Anyone have a clue for me?
Trump Won't Endorse Paul Ryan, But His VP Will
Ever since Trump went toe-to-toe with the parents of a dead Muslim veteran, the Republican Party has been in crisis mode.
Pence breaks with Trump, endorses Ryan
Pence: Trump 'strongly encouraged me to endorse Paul Ryan'
Paul Ryan is expected to win, so as irritating as the Trump non-endorsement may be to Party leaders, it might have a limited shelf life.
This fact is also amusing:
The GOP's Donald Trump freak-out
A GOP source told CNN's Dana Bash that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus was especially frustrated because Paul Ryan and Priebus, both from Wisconsin, are very close. The source said Trump refusing to endorse Ryan in his re-election primary was "personal" especially since Priebus has "taken on a lot of water" for Trump. "He takes this very personally," said the source. Priebus "does want to show his support" for Ryan, a source tells CNN.
The chairman has been the main point of contact between Trump and the Republican Party, on which the billionaire has been relying heavily since he lacks the political infrastructure of a conventional political candidate. Priebus, who was said by the source to be incredibly upset with Trump's behavior, had expressed his disappointment and frustration to several leading members of Trump's entourage, the source said.
Is it all for naught?
A knowledgeable Republican source told CNN Tuesday that some of Trump's campaign staff -- even campaign chairman Paul Manafort -- "feel like they are wasting their time," given their boss's recent comments. But Manafort insisted to CNN Wednesaday that isn't true and any frustration centers on the media.
Well. that mess is cleaned up.
It was a bigger mess than I thought. Yesterday's Tomorrows looked fine on an e-reader on the computer, but when I bought that tablet I discovered it was really messed up in MobiSystems' Universal Book Reader (UB Reader). Not only was the table of contents hosed, but there were no indents on paragraph beginnings, and it was an ugly sans serif font rather than the Gentium Book Basic in the printed volumes and HTML (at least on a computer with that font installed, if not it falls back to Times New Roman).
It was, of course, from my own ignorance, both of e-books in general and Calibre in particular. I never had any interest in e-books, because you paid for something you didn't own. If I buy a book I can give it away or sell it, it's a physical thing. Not so with e-books, and the e-books usually cost as much as the paperback.
But since I was giving books away I needed to learn about them. I wish I'd bought a tablet a long time ago. At any rate, I finally got all of them straightened out. At least, I think I have, except I can'tseem to get the cover to show in the Kindle version of Mars, Ho!, and I'm still checking out the epubs in the Nook app.
There's still a few minor annoyances in Yesterday's Tomorrows. Images that are supposed to fill the page don't on a tablet. I experimented with changing the page size to 12x20 in Open Office and scaling the images, but it came out the same. Maybe I need to raise the resolution?
Reading the HTML on a phone gives no serifs. It appears that Android devices are almost devoid of fonts, from what I've googled about it. Time Magazine seems to somehow have a Times font. I'll get it eventually.
Meanwhile, I documented the steps needed with Calibre. I'll need it, since I likely won't be using that program until next year when I finish Voyage to Earth and Other Stories.
Los Angeles Gang Tour Puts A Twist On Drive-Bys
Los Angeles Gang Tour Puts A Twist On Drive-Bys
2010 article I found for crutchy on IRC.
Nvidia Announces Pascal-based NVIDIA Titan X
NVIDIA Announces “NVIDIA Titan X” Video Card: $1200, Available August 2nd
Move Over GTX 1080, There’s A New Titan X In Town
Meaningless for anybody who doesn't want the general compute features. It's $200 more expensive than its predecessor, probably to avoid cannibalizing sales of more expensive Pascal GPUs intended for businesses.
Peter Thiel at the RNC
The billion-dollar RNC question: What is Peter Thiel doing there?
Fun for everyone.
Seagate 10 TB Helium-Filled HDDs for Consumers
Not a big enough deal to get an article. Prices start at $460-$535, significantly more than 8 TB drives which can be bought for $200 on sale.
Seagate Announces 10TB Consumer HDD Lineup With Five Year Warranty
Seagate's New 'Guardian Series' Portfolio Brings 10TB Helium HDDs to Consumers
Melania Trump Copies Michelle Obama Speech About Hard Work
Online identity (ies)
It should come as no surprise that Runaway might have multiple identities. Among other things, I have a "whistleblower" identity. That personna has been around for awhile, contained within a Virtual Machine. He is rarely turned on, he has very few contacts, doesn't browse randomly around the web. only connects via VPN, uses a very secure browser. Very secure.
Tonight, he did a search online - and was greeted with a popup, suggesting that he check his settings.
Oh-oh. I've obviuosly done something WRONG!!
My secretive self isn't going to share any real details about his mistake(s). Suffice to say that I overlooked something that Edward Snowden addressed in one of his interviews.
If you need to be, or even if you only want to be, secure online, you need to revisit ALL of your security settings now and then. Keep in mind that companies might be bought and sold, that TOS may change, and privacy policies might change. Changing privacy policies contributed to my own little screw up.
I'm not really worried about anyone tying together certain online identities, but I know that I did slip up. Each and every slip up makes it easier for the opposition.
At any rate, it's time to retire that personna. It's probably not a good idea to maintain the same secret personna for more than a few months anyway. Or, even a few weeks, if you're playing high stakes games like Snowden.
