A Mastodon of Conflict

...Lighting test for a new take on one of the front-page slides for DDCom (once it's ready to go up).

since tumblr is going to start scraping blogs to train ai be sure to glaze and nightshade your art!! Not only will both of these programs protect your art from being copied but nightshade also poisons any ai that tries to steal it

here is some more info on these tools and where you can download them:

Nightshade: Protecting Copyright (uchicago.edu)

Nightshade: Downloads (uchicago.edu)

Glaze - What is Glaze (uchicago.edu)

So first of all: let me tell everybody how things went with the new glasses.

Briefly: they're brilliant. The new varifocals work way better than earlier versions of them have routinely done. (This is apparently secondary to the way my eyes continue to change shape as I get older. It continues to make me snicker that I'm getting Iess nearsighted as I age. "So," I said to my Eye Lady, "if I can manage to live to, like, a hundred and twenty-five, I'll be twenty-twenty?" She gave me sort of a cockeyed look. "Well... you'll still be astigmatic. As for the rest of it, let's see how things go...") The reading glasses are no good for the computer: they6're genuinely just for reading. ...But this is okay, because the varifocals work fine for computer work. So THAT whole business has turned out more than satisfactorily... and thanks once more, from the bottom of my heart, to all those who helped out. ❤️

And get this. I went out to lunch after picking the new glasses up, and in the middle of lunch found myself paper-outlining a paranormal police procedural trilogy. (headclutch) So that went well. ...And no, I can't tell anybody anything about the plotting on these: it's too soon. But this looks like something of a change of writing voice (and thematic material) for me: darker than usual, maybe a touch grittier. We'll see how this group of works sets itself up as work gets going. (Other works further along in progress are in front of these right now, but that's fine. Giving things time to mature is never a problem.)

Anyway: typically enough, some other unexpected health junk that had been behaving itself during the spring then started kicking up cranky in June and over the last couple of weeks. (eyeroll) I don't want to get into more detail than necessary about this, but it's an outgrowth of the internal problems that have made me give up long-distance travel. It's required a goodish outlay of cash, and has resulted in me falling behind on my rent.

My landlord is being really easygoing about this, but nonetheless I'd very much like to get caught up on this before it gets any worse. (As being behind this way, I'm finding, is increasingly interfering with my work... especially as that's now become so much easier to get to grips with due to the new glasses.)

So it seems to me that this is a good time to repeat the Summer Reading Sale over at Ebooks Direct!

I imagine lots of people here know the drill. Everything's cheap, and the ebook bundles are all being held at their lowest price points for the duration (meaning specifically the "All The Wizardry" bundle, the Middle Kingdoms series bundle, the LGBTQ Pride collection, and the Feline Wizardry bundle—Even our "Give Me Everything You've Got" collection, which is the whole ebook store in one package, has had a bit knocked off.

So could I get folks to reblog this post so that people who might not have caught one of these sales before can do so now if they want to? Please & thank you!

And additionally: for those who're already up to the gunwales in ebooks and don't need any more, but still want to help out with the rent situation—if you'd like instead to drop something into my Ko-Fi, it'd be very welcome. And if you feel like doing this, I thank you very much in advance! 🙂

...So that's the news from Lake Wobegon for the moment. ...Now to slip outside and give the potted plants a potful or so of water as an evening drink. They've been suffering from the (unusual-for-us) local heat wave, there's a wildfire watch on (leading to a ban on selling portable BBQs), and we're also having a ban on watering things with a hose at the moment. (sigh) One thing after another...

...So It SEEMS that my website's been compromised by an injection exploit that shows people fake Cloudflare pages that attempt to entice folks into revealing their personal details to scammers. (This exploit is also sometimes due to other people's [Windows] machines being compromised, but that's not an issue here: I need to be cautious.)

(MOAN)

So. I could spend weeks and WEEKS trying to ferret out the single (doubtless very small, indeed probably teensy) injected file responsible for this bullshit. (But this would likely be fruitless, as I've been running the site for a long while on a much-loved but no-longer-supported theme which is almost certainly now inherently insecure. That's on me.) (MOAN x2)

...Or I could do something much smarter (if indeed quite overdue). To wit:

(a) Duplicate/update the old site page by page, by hand (which frankly it's needed for a while), into a new and much more secure WordPress theme. Then:

(b) Pull the entire old website up by the roots and nuke the server from orbit... (but y'all know this drill).

(Also move my "Out of Ambit" blog to its own domain, which has been on my mind for a while.)

(c) Relocate the DDCom domain to a new ISP (which frankly I've had on my mind for months, and only @petermorwood's loss has kept this from being done months ago).

(d) Once the domain is secure there, install the modernized and tidied website atop it, lock it down, and make sure it's clean and correctly hardened.

(e) Run around the house shrieking with relief.

(f) Collapse.

(sigh) And all that would seem to be so simple! But there's a problem.

A huge portfolio file full of images of books (and TV episodes, and films, and comics, and computer games, etc etc.). And meta for the books (etc etc). (And in many cases, NO meta for the books [etc etc]. That's on me as well.)

WHY DID I WRITE ALL THESE BOOKS! [ETC ETC]*

(And anybody who says "Probably it seemed like a good idea at the time" will be thrown out of the [virtual] house forthwith and will get no dessert.)

(headclutch)

The problem with structuring a website like this is that when you have a longish career significant portions of which occurred before the Web and social media really got started, your readerships / viewerships are likely to be very segmented (maybe we'd now say "silo'd") and probably don't know about each other. The Trek readers may know nothing about the YA fiction. The YA readership may not know about the adult SF. The animation viewers may know nothing about the live action TV and miniseries work. The comics readership may know nothing about the computer games. Etc etc. (If I had a nickel for every time I'd heard a variant on "I only knew you wrote [n], I had no idea you also wrote [n+1]!", I'd have, well, a whole lot of nickels.)

So all you can do in the main home website is show everybody all the work, tag it (so it can be filtered by interest) as well as you can... and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, this is just the books... and LOOK at all this shit. And these are just the first twelve. Besides devising the template for the pages that pop up when you click on one of these, this has taken me ALL. FECKING. DAY. For just these.

There are another... (I can hardly bear to count) sort of fifty. ...Or maybe more! I may have missed some. Because, frankly, after fifty novels I kind of stopped counting.

(eyeroll) I can't wait to be done with these. (And then there's the short fiction. And the media properties: the film, the tv, the audio...)

...Argh. I need wine.

And three or four more weeks in July....

(PS, for those curious: all the header fonts are variants of Cormorant: usually Cormorant SC, sometimes [as in the site logo] Cormorant Unicase.)

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

I really like the multiverse addon. Must look into that… :)

ETA for those who have no idea what I’m talking about: There are some very nice reviews of the book out there that deal with this issue in varying levels of detail. Being a lazy creature, I’ll cut-&-paste from one that quotes the basics verbatim:

Harb [Tanzer, head of Ship’s Recreation] had programmed the table’s games computer so that a player could vanish desired pieces from the cubic, for a period of his own determination, and have them reappear later—if desired, in any other spot made possible by a legal move. Pieces “timed out” in this fashion could appear behind the other player’s lines and wreak havoc there. But this innovation had not merely expanded the usual course of play. It had also completely changed the paradigm in which chess was usually played. Suddenly the game was no longer about anticipating the opponent’s moves and thwarting them—or not merely about that. It was now also a matter of anticipating a whole strategy from the very start: a matter of estimating with great accuracy where an opponent would be in fifteen or twenty moves, and getting one’s pieces there to ambush him—while also fooling the opponent as to where one’s own weak and strong areas would be at that time.

Tags passing peer review, gonna share.

Who do you think makes professional quality fanart and fanfic? People who've been practicing it for ten, fifteen, twenty years!

Or even people who've been practicing it for thirty, forty or fifty!!!!!

example: Diane Duane. Currently in her seventies. Star Trek fangirl since the original run. Goddess-level Ascended Fan who has created official tie-in works in more forms of media than pretty much anyone else alive, possibly even Rodenberry himself because they didn't have audiobooks or video games when he was with us. Writer of Spock's World, The Wounded Sky, Doctor's Orders in TOS. Co-writer of TNG script Where no one has gone before, and writer of the tie-in novel Dark Mirror among others. Writer of a half-dozen Star Trek Comics. She has adapted her own work for audio, has written for the Star Trek manga series, has written short Trek fiction for anthologies, and plotted and wrote the video game Star Trek: the Kobayashi Alternative.

In other fandoms, she was a personal friend of Terry Pratchett himself. As a scriptwriter, she's also worked in fandoms like Scooby-Doo, Transformers, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, Batman: The Animated Series, Spiderman: Unlimited (and a trilogy of tie-in novels still in print) and Barbie: Fairytopia. ...And that's just cherry-picking her imdb page.

While she can't give out specific details due to Obvious Reasons, she's still active in the Sherlock BBC fandom - and there's a specific subset of her fans who love guessing which of the legendary fanfics might be her work (I am not one of them, BTW, as it is None Of My Business. I'm old-school that way).

Fandom is not for teenagers. Fandom is for everyone of good heart and enthusiasm for a good (or even bad! No judgement!) story.

ty for the name @androbutchninja , but here it is! I was going through it through the majority of spring, so this spring cleaning sale is now a pride month sale!

Once a year, I rotate out a bunch of prints that are older (not representative of current designs), unpopular, or just kinda stale. I update the inventory numbers to reflect what I got on hand and when they're gone they're gone!

Everything on this list is 20% off, here's what's leaving the shop:

Keep writing (8 remaining)

Friends, Mutuals, Countrymen (4 remaining)

I have love in me (9 remaining)

everyone wants to build... (11 remaining)

The Cephalopod's Prayer (5 remaining)

Fanfiction Moment: oh/OH (28 remaining)

Yikes: 3 variations. (10 book of hours style, 7 book of kells style, 3 woodcut style remaining)

Turbo Illegal (4 remaining)

Own a Musket for Self Defense (12 remaining)

prints left:

oh/Oh: 11

meeting at the pride parade