• Let me recommend a thoughtful blog on the issues of writing and publishing, which is remarkable for having one of the most civil and intelligent comment sections I've ever run across. (In recent years I'm reading blog comments less and less, because they're mostly content-free tribal hatred.)
• Maybe the Ralpha Dogs had a hand in this: Making tunable ( Read more... )

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Really. You can't. Lord knows, we tried. But Dash just keeps trying to pee on the furniture, and if we hadn't discovered Pants for Dogs, the ottoman (at very least) would now be a total loss.

So I have to grin a rather sour grin to see people suggesting ( Read more... )

• This may explain a certain amount of the drama coming out of the anti-Puppies camp...or, for that matter, a great deal of modern politics: Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD). (Thanks to Adam Baldwin for the link.)
• OMG! Global warming may mean stronger weed! (That makes it all better, right?) Colorado's on it.
• BitTorrent recently released Bleep, a ( Read more... )

• I'm less sure of this than the author, but it's something to think about: Apple may not always rule; look at IBM.
• Researchers who were testing Android apps to see what-all they ( Read more... )

Yes, I've been scarce in recent weeks, but bear with me: I'm off doing something difficult but important, which I'll tell you about later.

Although it's been going on now for three years, I hadn't ever ( Read more... )

• Hurricane activity is at a 45-year low, and no major hurricane has achieved landfall on US soil in almost ten years. Tornadoes have been pretty scarce recently as well. Then again, it's mid-April and snowing like hell outside right now. Two outa three ain't bad.
• The Food Babe gets her you-know-what handed to her. This, after all, is the woman who ( Read more... )

(This series began here.)

I held back Part 5 of this series because the Hugo nomination finalists were announced yesterday, and I wanted to see whether the Sad Puppies (and a separate but related slate, Rabid Puppies) would make their mark on the ballot. The answer is, egad: What a broom does.

But I'll get back to that.

First I wanted to mention a ( Read more... )

• 2014 was a lousy year for adult fiction and nonfiction sales both. SF was down 7%; fantasy down 13%; computer books down 12%. To sell anything at all, you need to be chasing all those bookish kids who are supposedly all off somewhere playing computer games. Or something.
• A "fix-up" in the SFF universe is a novel constructed out of shorter works, ( Read more... )

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