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This story on Slashgear about net neutrality showed up in Google News this morning. I was appalled.

Not at the story, so far I've only read the first sentence. "Today, President Obama sided with you and I."

What the God damned FUCK?! I don't know what uneducated moron wrote that sentence... wait, I found a byline: Nate Swanner. Nate, you show about a fourth grade reading level. Nate, you uneducated moron, QUIT YOU JOB, go back and get your GED and learn the English language before you present yourself as a "journalist".

And you who run slashgear, have you not thought about just maybe hiring an editor who's spent a semester or two in college?

One more question: how do these rank amateurs wind up in the Google News feed?

Oh, and Nate, for your information, it's "you and ME." Would you say "Today, President Obama sided with I"?

Moron. I hear McDonald's and Wal Mart are hiring.

Before S/N opened, I spent a lot of time commenting at /. Any more, I check messages and read little of /., partly because stories have been showing up at S/N before /. and partly because there are so many more short bus riders at /. Oh, and slashdot's "stupid quotes" annoy the hell out of me.

I hadn't had mod points at /. for years, despite being at karma cap.

So two days ago I had five /. mod points. Today I had fifteen. I guess heavy posters don't get points.

This story takes place in a bar on Mars over a century later than "Mars, Ho!".
        “Joe? Is that you? You're still tending bar? I thought you'd be retired. How you doin', you old rascal?”
        Joe frowned. “Sorry, son, I must be getting old, do I know you? And can I get you a drink?”
        “It's Dave, man. Give me a Knolls lager, draft.”
        “Sorry, Dave, we're sold out of Knolls. We have some Guinness, that's almost as good. But I'm sorry, but I still don't know who you are. Memory ain't as good as it used to be.”
        “Dave Rayfield, Joe. Of course it's been a lot longer for you than me. Yeah, Guinness will do.”
        “Dave Rayfield? I haven't seen him since I was twenty. You his grandson?” he asked, pouring the beer.
        “No, Joe, I'm Dave. Same Dave you knew back then.”
        “But you're so young!”
        “It was the trip. I piloted the science expedition to Grommler while you were throwing rocks from the asteroid belt at Mars.”
        “The terraforming is still going on here. I'm a little old for space hopping. Hell, if I spent any more time traveling through space I'd live forever. But how the hell did you stay a damned kid?”
        “Same way you're not dead at a hundred twenty five. Time dilation. Most Earthians die before they're ninety five, but speed stretches time. You'd be dead by now if you hadn't been a spaceship captain. It's been a hundred years since you've seen me, but it's only been ten years since I've seen you.”
        “So where have you been for the last hundred years?”
        “Ten years to me. We went to Grommler.”
        “Where's that?”
        Dave laughed. It orbits Sirius, but it was the least serious place I've ever seen! Really weird place.”
        “Weird how?”
        “Every way weird goes. First off, there was no fauna at all, not even insects. Only flora, despite having more oxygen than Earth. The geologists said it was because of the CO2 from volcanoes that there could even be any flora.
        “But the weirdest was the plants. We were there for two years, and that's in real time, and every single plant the biologists tested had cannabinoids and other psychoactive components. There were a lot of brush fires because of the wind and lightning, so every time you went outside you got stoned. Hell, some of the guys practically lived outside!”
        “Need another beer?”
        Dave eyed his glass and downed it. “Yeah. Jesus, Joe, things sure changed in the last ten years.”
        “It's been a hundred years since you left, Dave. It only seems like ten to you.”
        “I guess. But you know what, Joe? I'm going to clean up!”
        “What do you mean?”
        Dave pulled out an envelope. “These. Grommlerian tomato seeds. Grommlerian plants have a completely different ordering than our plants, it's something different than DNA and the scientists are still trying to figure it out. But they make seeds like Earth plants.”
        “Tomatoes?”
        “Not really. They look like tomatoes but taste way different, but they taste really good. And they get you really stoned.”
        “Well, okay, you found a reefer planet. When you find a beer planet, let me know.”

I "finished" writing Mars, Ho! early in the summer, and since it became a horror story I was aiming to publish it by Halloween. Well, that didn't happen.

I wanted it to be done by then so it would show up in bookstores by Thanksgiving. I still had hopes of getting it at least for sale on my web site by then, especially since a fan wrote with news he was planning to buy several copies as gifts.

It doesn't look like that will happen, either. I just finished making the changes I'd made in the second printed copy (the first goes to my daughter Patty, the second to Dewey, who stirred the muse) and sent off for a third. It will be a couple weeks before it shows up on my porch, and if there are no more changes, which is doubtful, it would be at least another week before I cleared it for publication.

I'll be lucky if it's for sale this year. I'm frustrated.

Oh, well. I'm not in it for the money, just for the satisfaction of writing novels and actually have people read them. It's a good thing I'm not in it for the money because I'm barely breaking even, after copyright registration, ISBNs, and buying copies, many of which are marked up in pencil, not completely edited, and not for sale.

However, even though I'm not in it for the money, I'm still planning to sell the e-book on Amazon. If I got on their best seller list it would get more people reading, and many might read other of my books from the web site. Mars, Ho!'s HTML and PDF will still be free. Few are downloading the free e-books of the first two books, most are either reading it online or downloading the single HTML file.

Anyway, I guess I'm on vacation again... oh, wait, there's Random Scribblings.

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!

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.