The weather is doing that Nevada Springtime Thing where it’s vacillating between hot and cold. This is so rough on me. I’m alive when it’s hot and I’m dead when it’s cold. When it gets hot then warm, my body registers it as cold. Fifty degrees feels totally different depending on whether I’m on the way up or down. Fifty degrees isn’t cold! Unless it was seventy degrees a couple days ago.

I’ve been getting out to walk irregularly, at weird times. Today was the first time I did my regular-ish morning walk like a normal warm day. I think it’s only going to get warmer from here, but you really never know with Nevada.

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I’m trying out a new mass email provider. Being able to contact readers about new books is essential, and mailing lists tend to be the backbone of publishing, no matter how old-timey it feels. I mean, emails? BookTok is all anyone has wanted to talk about for a while. Maybe looping people into Patreon. But just straight emails?

It works for a lot of people quite reliably. It has always *kinda* worked for me. I don’t know if the issue has been writing my emails badly, or my domain being disliked by providers, or if the emails I have just aren’t great quality. I made most of my sell-through on books starting in with freebies. Freebie readers tend to have totally different patterns than those who will buy books at full price.

My new email provider doesn’t seem to have improved anything over my last ones (deliverability, open/click rate), but at least I have one again. I lost the old guy because I didn’t send any emails in way too long. Getting things back together has been…not fabulous.

Anyway, I’ve had no pleasant surprises with this release, but it’s still a release. I’m still always grateful that any number of people read my books at all. Period. It doesn’t feel real?

I’m doing all the stuff I can control, that I’m also willing to do. I’m not going back on Patreon or learning Kickstarter any time soon. I seem to have lost the hunger that used to motivate me to do insane backflips to pull something resembling success out my butt. That’s probably for the best. Learning to temper my rather extreme personality kinda means learning not to care about anything so much.

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Onto reading the news.

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Readers Take Denver (a publishing conference for readers) was such a disaster that it hit mainstream-ish news. Here’s the NYPost calling it the Fyre Festival of Books.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention like this because I’m the hermit kind of author, not the conference kind of author, but enormous anger radiated through the spaces to which I am still tangential.

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The outlook for Tiktok in the USA isn’t good. Our government wants to ban it if the owner doesn’t sell to Americans. ByteDance is suing (The Guardian), but time will tell if that’s effective.

In the meantime, Substack is trying to coax creators over. (Engadget) You know, Substack? With the Nazis? (The Atlantic)

Nowhere is perfect. But I wish we’d have a resurgence in creatives simply self-hosting content. Discoverability is a challenge, but…isn’t it always?

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Various states are arresting student protesting against the attack on Palestine. Quite a few of the students have accepted this. (NPR)

Cornell University doctoral student Momodou Taal was suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian encampment.

“The school has deemed that my activity or my participation on campus is a threat somehow,” Taal said.

Taal was never arrested, but his involvement with a pro-Palestinian team negotiating with Cornell University administrators got him suspended, he said.

He is now in a fairly unique position.Taal is a British student, and a suspension could lead to him losing his international student visa.

“Fundamentally, I risked all that I’ve risked so far for what I believe is a just cause, and that’s the Palestinian cause,” Taal said.

Some teachers are getting arrested along with their students. At that point, it’s turning into a class for everyone involved. (DMagazine)

This isn’t going to be the first generation of students with activist arrest records.

But arrests aren’t even required. An encampment developed on Trinity College, (The Guardian) and the college committed to divesting from Israel. The protesters dispersed peacefully. There are other ways to do this.

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Quanta Magazine talks about intelligence in insects. I also recently linked an article about plants having some kind of intelligence. (NPR)

I’ve always thought there’s likely more consciousness/intelligence in the living world than we’re willing to accept. My assumption is that this is for practical purposes. We’re empathetic, social creatures. If we really believed that everything had some kind of mind — maybe a soul — like we do, would we be able to end those lives as easily? on the scale required to support human civilizations? Is dismissiveness about coping?

I don’t think it’s all about the empathy, though. Colonial cultures and religions just want to think that they are above other things, and that they have a right — nay, the divine obligation — to destroy things that are lesser. That’s probably why the idea of insect and plant intelligence won’t ever get more than fringe traction.

Maybe if science keeps pulling out cool discoveries, like the fact whales seem to have a phonetic language (Smithsonian Mag), attitudes will shift somewhat.

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I feel like I’m always reading about cool archaeological finds in random UK places. (The Guardian) All I get to dig out of my garden is stray cat shit. I’m not jealous, you are.

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Are you sane? Oops, I misspelled that. Are you a sriracha fan? We’re looking forward to a shortage thanks to climate change. (WaPo) Or a “severe drought.” Depends on how you read it.

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There’s an upcoming movie called “Humanist Vampire Seeks Suicidal Person.” The title alone has my attention, but there are more details at The Film Stage.

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Roblox continues intensifying its ad efforts — here with a Netflix team up. (Engadget) Nonetheless, their stock has fallen some twenty percent lately. (Quartz)

Meanwhile, users like my kids are getting increasingly annoyed and disinterested. But maybe Roblox doesn’t care about my kids anyway. They’re starting to age out of Roblox (at thirteen and nine), and games for kids do have a limited lifespan. Maybe Roblox is betting they can catch the next generation of toddlers before they learn to care about being inundated with ads. According to the Quartz ad, daily active users have increased 17% regardless.

Today I hit publish on my first book of 2024, and my first book since 2022 (or 2021? it’s been a while).

It’s all very familiar to me. I did it so many times during the “growth phase” of my career, which spanned seven years or so. The amount of times I did it waned for a couple years, then dropped off entirely.

I began publishing in 2011.

There have been a lot of updates and improvements to general infrastructure since the last time I did it. The process is easier and more streamlined than ever.

Now I need to turn to the next book I’ll be publishing.

More about this later.

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If I allow myself to spend time relaxing, having fun, hanging out with family, and (especially important) babying myself when I’m sick, then I have so much less time to work.

I used to work so much. It’s hard to reconcile how little time I spent on not-work things in the past.

The only way I can get multiple books out in a single year is by making significant cutbacks on other things I’ve come to enjoy.

I used to say that I had a blue collar work ethic, but I really, really don’t have that anymore. I’d just…rather sit around with my kids, playing games, watching John Oliver. Does it matter what I’d rather do? I didn’t used to think so.

I’d also like to get more activism in my time. But the question is…where? How? When? How do people manage to do it all? Does anyone manage to do it all?

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One of my favorite drums to beat is “humans aren’t special/unique relative to other life forms.” In my ongoing adventures of reading what I want to believe into news articles, here we have a case for plants as somewhat intelligent life forms. (NPR)

It’s true that they communicate, react to stimulus, and behave in some ways like more complex animal life. I think it’s worth asking what, if any, impact this idea has on the way we treat plants.

Selfishly, I don’t want it to mean anything because I’m not always good at keeping houseplants alive. I’ve got enough Catholic guilt.

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My offspring remarked upon ads for makeup brand E.L.F. on Roblox (pronouncing it “elf,” like the fantasy creatures). Roblox is working on increasing its value generally. They’re going to be integrating video ads for users over thirteen-years-old. (Variety)

This is the part of the business model where something that used to be awesome gets suckier and more annoying.

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Two extremely cool teenagers have cracked more proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem. (The Guardian) Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson have added to our understanding of 2000-year-old maths.

What did you accomplish this week? I managed to stop wicked terrible heartburn. Once. Yep.

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Remember when there were contaminated eye drops? Somehow the superbug has reached dogs. The weird part is that not all the dogs infected actually used eye drops. There are a lot of questions here. (Ars Technica) I think we need Dr. House.

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Jack Dorsey has left the board of the Millennial retirement home social media. Instead, he wants to go suck some of Elon’s musk. He calls TSFKA Twitter “freedom tech,” and it mostly occurs to me how little the word “freedom” has meant throughout my life.

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Chicago’s Field Museum is displaying a super important, super cool fossil. (Smithsonian Mag) Archaeopteryx shows signs of feathers in its surrounding slab, providing supporting evidence for evolution.

I recently encountered modern-day Archaeopteryx in the form of extremely angry Canadian geese. The whole “fight or flight” response in these geese appears to be entirely “fight.” We gave them space, hoping they would wander elsewhere, but instead they stood their ground and hissed at us. Monsters! Dinosaur monsters!

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Chris Pine shows deference for “Princess Diaries 2,” (Variety) which is responsible for his career as an actor. He was overdrawn on his bank account when they offered him $65,000 to be the love interest for Princess Mia.

Thanks to this, we have now had many adorable movies featuring Chris Pine, who seems generally chill and cool and always willing to do genre work (especially in support of women).

I’m trying to be more organized about my work time — that is to say, I want to work similar “business hours” to my spouse (Monday – Friday) and take the weekends off as much as possible.

I completely burned out a few years back, and then 2020 threw me for a big loop. The mess of mental health I’ve been wading through means I went months at a time without doing organized work. I did plenty of things. Drawing, crocheting, even writing — but not with the pressure of finishing anything. And I could go whole days doing nothing at all.

Now I am sober-sober, I want to organize my time and make use of my healing brain.

It’s hard taking weekends off. I *want* to take them off, mind. I have learned the benefits of wasting time on video games quite well. But I just don’t feel good mentally. Unless I manage to leave the house to do stuff (which isn’t always possible), boredom rats eat away at my mood. I still don’t have the energy (or desire) to spend all weekend cleaning, though my house needs it. My body is too sore to always go out on long walks, too.

I don’t know how I’m going to handle this in the long term, but right now I’m doing some Egregious stuff on weekends to keep the boredom rats at bay.

So here we are with another SRF. I didn’t have lots of recent news I wanted to share, so I went back into my link archives to some older posts from the last few months.

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ChatGPT takes 15x the electricity of a traditional web search. (Quartz) Depending on complexity of the query, every 5-50 prompts is the equivalent of pouring a 16oz bottle of water out on the ground. Some experts say it’s higher than that on average for all generative AI technology. (Bluesky)

Considering this technology is being put in Windows to run constantly, and it looks like Apple will be doing something similar, we’re looking at a ridiculous drain on ecological resources.

No joke…I had a nightmare after I read these statistics. It was the style of a Star Trek episode. We were a civilization the Federation found after we were already gone, wiped out by our use of technology destroying our own planet. It’s an extremely typical Star Trek plot, actually. No coincidence it reminds me of our situation. We’ve been rushing toward “futuretech” for a while, looking at profits before stopping to ask questions about safety, and Star Trek has been trying to reflect that back toward ourselves for generations.

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Smithsonian Mag says snakes passed a modified self-awareness test, using scent rather than mirrors as we do with other life. This study is “suggesting snakes are more cognitively complex” than we previously thought. I’ve got some real sci-fi/fantasy hippie ideas about consciousness, self-awareness, and animals (which is to say, I think that we’re all not so different), so this just reinforces what I already want to believe.

Speaking of snakes, we might find that robots built like snakes are the best way to explore other worlds. (Ars Technica)

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We recently lost Chance Perdomo to a motorcycle accident. Gen V will not be recasting his character as they begin production on season 2. (Variety)

This is the right move, though I expect it demands a full rewrite of whatever they planned for season 2 and onward. His character was integral to the show — second main character after Marie.

Although shows in the Boysverse don’t shy from death, these are stylized, edgy comic book shows. It’s hard to imagine how they’ll handle the loss of someone real. I’m sure it will be respectful; I just can’t guess.

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Director Jane Schroenbaum describes filmmaking as “angry sex between art and commerce,” (Variety) which is such a great quote. I kinda think successful publishing demands the same.

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I don’t always post Space News on here, but I always tag the articles to share with my space-focused kiddo. It seems worth doing a quick roundup of recent articles.

Ars Technica talks about SpaceX refueling starships in low Earth orbit. I’ve been repeatedly reassured that SpaceX has very little to do with Elon Musk, and we can trust them more than any other commercial space providers, but the very idea of such complex operations associated with them makes me nervous.

Issues with the heat shield, among others, need to be addressed before the crewed Artemis 2 mission is ready. (Quartz) The uncrewed Artemis I tests failed spectacularly. Apparently the safety report wasn’t very helpful, though. (Ars Technica) Artemis 3 is a completely different issue. We’re counting eggs before we hatched Artemis 2 and hoping we can use it to have Starship and Orion dock in low Earth orbit (Ars Technica). I do love the ambition, honestly.

We have a Mars rover in a great spot to search for alien life. (The Conversation via Quartz) Perseverance is collecting samples, and we hope to figure out how to go get them soon.

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I don’t think a lot about national parks in America. I’m a computer nerd. I like going outdoors sometimes, but when I say sometimes, I mean I did it several times a few summers ago, and then about once or twice a year on average otherwise. I’ve heard about how our large uninhabited parks are special to America. It didn’t occur to me that many of the parks we cherish were not uninhabited starting out, and what America did to make them the way they are. (Collectors Weekly)

This is a substantial, interesting read.

Today, the foundational myth of America’s National Parks revolves around the heroic preservation of “pristine wilderness,” places supposedly devoid of human inhabitants that were saved in an unaltered state for future generations. This is obviously a falsehood: Places like Yosemite were already home to thriving communities that had long cherished—and changed—the environment around them. […]

Though the National Park Service prevented wholesale industrialization, they still packaged the wilderness for consumption, creating a scenic, pre-historical fantasy surrounded by roads and tourist accommodations, all designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation. More than a century later, the United States has done little to acknowledge the government-led genocide of native populations, as well as the continued hardships they face because of the many bad-faith treaties enacted by the U.S. government. This story is an elemental part of our National Park system, the great outdoor museum of the American landscape, but the myth continues to outweigh the truth. How did the National Park Service evict Yosemite’s indigenous communities and erase their history, and can it come to terms with this troubling legacy today?

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Discover Magazine shares details of Bronze Age Must Farm, once placed on platforms over an English river.

The wooden community only lasted about a year before burning down. But apparently it was a lush, pleasant year. We know this because the remains sunk into the mud, which then preserved the details. The University of Cambridge has recovered tons of artifacts. It’s all really cool to look at.

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I don’t sit well with labels generally. One of my favorite things to say is, “Humans invent taxonomy. Humans were made by nature, which knows nothing about taxonomy.”

Well, turns out that humans don’t know *that* much about taxonomy, either. We don’t have a single unified taxonomy that encompasses all life on earth. Undark talks about a fight within the scientific community about rectifying this.

Garnett and Christidis proposed tidying things by creating a universal set of rules for classifying all life on Earth and assigning governance to a single organization: the International Union of Biological Sciences, a nonprofit comprising international science associations.

The notion of imposed authority enraged taxonomists, a fastidious bunch who even Garnett concedes are the opposite of anarchists. In the most prominent rebuttal, 184 people from the global taxonomy community warned in the journal PLOS Biology that the proposed bureaucracy was not only unnecessary and counterproductive, but also a threat to scientific freedom. Such governance would result in “science losing its soul,” wrote a smaller group of Brazilian and French scientists in another journal, raising the specter of Joseph Stalin and his political rejection of established science in the early 20th century.

It sounds like a real nerd fight. I love nerd fights.