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Weekly Linkage: Stockholm Trolls
Um… it’ll make sense as you read. Amanda Hocking’s Blog: Some Things That Need to Be Said – From a successful self-published author: "This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn't writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me." The Very Rich Indie Writer – Novelr – Making People Read – Looking at the example of Amanda Hocking's financial success, will authors of web fiction start to close…
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Weekly Linkage: Passports, Robots, and Monopoly
This week’s internet cruising: No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » Extraordinary Claims – Dust off your scientific hats for this one. Watts does an interesting analysis of the responses to a paper showing statistically significant evidence of precognition. Other folks apparently jumped all over the precog article with some borderline dishonest critiques, which Watts chews on. The “…the fuck…” exercise. « intangible.ca – Hear, hear. "Think of the last time you had to write an About Us page. Or a FAQ. Or craft an elevator pitch. The big challenge is coming up with a clear, engaging, and succinct description of your project." Change in passport language is…
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Weekly Linkage: Google, Politics, and Bees’ Knees
This week’s internet cruising: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post. Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely…
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Happy Bir’day to Me!
Saturday was my bir’day! I’m a ripe young mumble-something years old, and I don’t feel like I’m getting old–I feel like I’m running out of time. Advertising that I didn’t want gifts (hello, getting rid of stuff) meant that the gifts I did get were thoughtful and amazing. A set of writing books covering memoirs, grants, motivation, and fiction–writing techniques. A shorthand manual. Weber and Neal Stephenson books. Amazing and creative fancy-pants yarn (color 12). I picked up yarn for a new project myself on Saturday–an afghan to be finished by Feb 13 and begun after I finish my current afghan. Greg, being Greg, picked a pretty, soft eggplant-colored yarn…
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Chapter 12 of Witches Posted
Happy Friday! I present to you Chapter 12 of the Witches of Ming Ung, “Making Peace“: Hardi scoffed. “Give it up. Give us the antidote. They’ll get you eventually, and another ten thousand people might be dead in the meantime.” His jaw set, but he didn’t say anything. “I’ve got a deal for you…” taunted Hardi. I want to go home and play with my computer now.