Managed to screw up my wrist and hand a bit. Hard to type, so I’m using text to speech from my iPhone for this.
Go read the folks on the sidebar, I hope I’ll be better in the next day or two.
Sorry.
Posted from my iPhone.
My friend Stretch sent this as a response to my research post- Some additional search resources you can use to find things!
www.refseek.com – Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org – a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com – access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org – volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.
And if you’re REALLY bored, you can go to this link and hear Lawdog and I get interviewed on BizTV about short stories and anthologies!
Safe or not so?
The technology behind self-driving cars has been around for quite some time. However, its commercialization – from companies offering and operating ride-share services to those selling self-driving cars – is still rather new. One well-known taxi company is Waymo, which, despite its successes, is now under federal investigation due to traffic safety concerns.
So, what do you need to know about this investigation? Is Waymo still considered safe? What about other self-driving cars? Is it time to get in on this trend now, or is it better to wait until this technology improves before stepping into a self-driving vehicle? Here’s what you need to know.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
I don’t know what y’all think, but I’m still leary of ANY self driving software, taxi, Telsa, GM, or anybody else!
Edit-
Intarwebz problem- Go read the folks on the sidebar please.
Posted from my iPhone.
Or how far down the rabbit hole do you go???
TL;DR everyone writes differently! Now that I’ve said that…
I started writing because I hated the perfect characters and how often the weapons were misportrayed (e.g. WRONG). Now I have a reputation for accuracy…sigh
How much research? Well, what are you writing? Alt history? Western? Fantasy? SciFi? Urban Fiction?
Each of those could require some level of research. I’ve been shooting for over 60 years, and an instructor for about 20 years. So I know a good bit, enough to know ‘I’ don’t know what I don’t know. I’ve gone down rabbit holes on guns to make sure I’m accurate, sometimes hours of research on the history or use of a particular weapon.
Alt history? What country, what era, steampunk or realistic? European Hanseatic League? Roman times? You want to talk about rabbit holes, each of those is a massive one! Have you been there? Any idea of how Europeans interact? Videos? etc…
Fantasy? Do you know your fae, your old gods? Who begat whom? Again, what time period?
SciFi? Do you understand math? Can you compute ballistics? Do you understand gravity in space? Orbital mechanics? Are you writing hard SF or Space Opera? Handwavium or reality based?
Urban fiction? Have you lived in a big city? Traveled to cities? Traveled around this or another country? Know the differences between and within cities? Good vs. bad, with all that entails?
Do you have experts you can reach out to? As an example, Jonna Hayden for fabrics vs. historic time period? A doctor if you’re dealing with medical issues? A lawyer? A pilot? A bartender? Whomever can help you make your story better is always good! One of my shorts had forging metal in it, I’d done the ‘book’ research, but lucked into a guy who actually makes things in a real forge and he was an immense help to get those bits I was screwing up correct. Never be afraid to reach out!!!
Now that you’ve done all that research, how much ends up in your book? The western example I used earlier was roughly 6 hours of research, and it ended up a one sentence entry in the book. BUT, I use very sparse descriptions and no info dumps, preferring to let the reader build characters and situations in their heads.
Is the information ‘critical’ to your story? If so, how do you sneak it in? A senior teaching a junior, a flashback, a challenge/response? That is up to you and your style of writing.
Do you ‘have’ to do research? No, you don’t. Should you? I believe so. Regardless of what you write, the more accurate you can make your background and interactions, the better it will be received by readers, especially if they are widely read in that genre.
Lastly, get your ego under control and be willing to accept criticism of your baby! Get alpha and beta readers if you can! You want folks that will honestly critique your work, telling you what they don’t understand or seems to be missing!
We, as authors, ‘know’ what is going on with the story, but those alpha and beta readers don’t, so they WILL find holes where you’ve written past a critical piece of information, changed a character’s name, description, or something really stupid (yes, I’ve done ALL of those)… sigh…
If you’re still here, what did I miss???
Some of y’all will see this…
NEWS FROM THE YEAR 2059
- Ozone created by electric cars now killing millions in the seventh largest country in the world, Mexifornia, formerly known as California.
- White minorities still trying to have English recognized as the third language in the USA.
- Couple petitions court to reinstate heterosexual marriage.
- Iran still closed off; physicists estimate it will take at least 100 more years before radioactivity decreases to safe levels.
- France pleads for global help after being taken over by Jamaica. No other country comes forward to help the beleaguered nation!
- The Last Castro finally died at age 112; Cuban cigars can now be imported legally, but President Chelsea Clinton has banned all smoking.
- George Z. Bush says he will run for president in 2060.
- Postal Service raises the price of first-class stamps to $17.89 and reduces mail delivery to Wednesdays only.
- Average weight of Americans drops to 250 lbs. and life expectancy is now at 57.2 yrs.
- 85-year $375.8 billion study: Diet and exercise are the key to weight loss.
- Global cooling blamed for citrus crop failure for a third consecutive year in Mexifornia and Floruba.
- Abortion clinics are now available in every high school in the United States.
- Senate still blocking drilling in ANWR, even though gas is selling for 4532 Pesos per liter and gas stations are only open Tuesdays and Fridays.
- Massachusetts executes the last remaining conservative.
- Supreme Court rules any punishment of criminals violates their civil rights.
- A Couple Finally Achieved Sexual Harmony. They had simultaneous headaches.
- Average NBA player is now eight feet seven inches tall, with only 5 illegitimate children.
- New federal law requires that all assault weapons, i.e.; nail clippers, screwdrivers, fly swatters, and rolled-up newspapers must be registered by January 2060.
- IRS sets the lowest tax rate at 75 percent.
- DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, DNC, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and NPR are still searching for something that will posthumously convict Donald J. Trump.
I love this country. It’s The Government That Scares Me!
From the mouths of babes…
NUDITY
I was driving with my three young children one warm summer evening when a woman in the convertible ahead of us stood up and waved. She was stark naked! As I was reeling from the shock, I heard my 5-year-old shout from the back seat, “Mommy that lady isn’t wearing a seat belt!”
OPINIONS
On the first day of school, a first-grader handed his teacher a note from his mother. It read, ‘The opinions expressed by this child are not necessarily those of his parents…..’
KETCHUP
A woman was trying hard to get the ketchup out of the jar.. During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her 4-year-old daughter to answer the phone….’Mommy can’t come to the phone to talk to you right now, she’s hitting the bottle.
MORE NUDITY
A little boy got lost at the YMCA and found himself in the women’s locker room. When he was spotted, the room burst into shrieks, with ladies grabbing towels and running for cover. The little boy watched in amazement and then asked “What’s the matter, haven’t you ever seen a little boy before?”
POLICE # 1
While taking a routine vandalism report at an elementary school, I was interrupted
by a little girl about 6 years old. Looking up and down at my uniform, she asked, “Are you a policeman?”
“Yes” I answered and continued writing the report.
“My mother said if I ever needed help I should as the policeman. Is that right?” “Why yes, that’s right,” I told her. “Well then…..” she said as she extended her foot toward me, …..”would you please tie my shoe?’
POLICE #2
It was the end of the day when I parked my police van in front of the station. As I gathered my equipment, my K-9 partner, Jake, was barking, and I saw a little boy staring in at me. ‘Is that a dog you got back there?’ he asked.
‘It sure is,’ I replied.
Puzzled, the boy looked at me and then towards the back of the van. Finally he said, ‘What’d he do?’
ELDERLY
While working for an organization that delivers lunches to elderly shut-ins, I use to take my 4 old daughter on my afternoon rounds. She was unfailingly intrigued by the various appliances of old age, particularly the canes, walkers and wheelchairs. One day I found her staring at a pair of false teeth soaking in a glass. I braced myself for the inevitable barrage of questions, she merely turned and whispered, ‘The tooth fairy will never believe this!”
DRESS-UP
A little girl was watching her parents dress for a party. When she saw her dad donning his tuxedo, she warned, “Daddy, you shouldn’t wear that suit.” “And why not, darling?” “You know that it always gives you a headache the next morning.”
DEATH
While walking along the sidewalk in front of his church, our minister heard the intoning of a prayer that nearly made his collar wilt. Apparently, his 5 year old son and his playmates had found a dead robin. Feeling that proper burial should be performed, they had secured a small box and cotton batting, then dug a hole and made ready for the disposal of the deceased. The minister’s son was chosen to say the appropriate prayers and with sonorous dignity intoned his version of what he thought his father always said: ‘Glory be unto the Father, and unto the Son, and into the hole he goes.’(I want this line used at my funeral!)
SCHOOL
A little girl had just finished her first week of school. “I’m just wasting my time” she said to her mother. “I can’t read, I can’t write and they won’t let me talk!”
BIBLE
A little boy opened the big family Bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages. Suddenly, something fell out of the Bible. He picked up the object and looked at it. What he saw was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages.
“Mama, look what I found” the boy called out.
“What have you got there dear?” With astonishment in the young boy’s voice he answered,
“I think it’s Adam’s underwear!”
I don’t write ’em, I just send ’em on recycled electrons… 🙂 Enjoy your week!
Is our ‘friend’, making everything easier… NOT!
From a friend re Cloudflare, so much for personal ‘security’ by using something other than Google or Safari-
If you’re having trouble getting past Cloudflare’s “Are you a Human”
checkbox…
– Using Firefox?
– Have the CanvasBlocker add-on installed?
Cloudflare has just started getting snippy about being fed a false
fingerprint from your browser (that’s what the CanvasBlocker add-on does.)
To get around this, you have to:
– Edit CanvasBlocker’s settings, and turn on the expert settings
– Add to the whitelist line: cloudflare.com
This of course means that Cloudflare will get your true browser
signature, making me wonder who they’re selling or providing that data to.
And Cloudflare DDOS/Anti-bot checks are on so many sites. *deep sigh*
Damned good question…
And then there is this little ‘pearl’ re Google’s cloud-
Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud’s biggest blunders ever: Google’s Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper’s incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn’t happen until May 15.
Full article, HERE from Ars Technica.
So y’all go right ahead and put your stuff on Google, and use that cloud to store your data. It’ll be safe, they said…
In reality, the ‘cloud’ is nothing more than somebody else’s computers somewhere, and you have no idea where…or who has access to it.
The other thing I wonder about with Cloudflare is how they are going to handle VPNs with this new change, since a ‘true’ VPN logs back to a primary site somewhere other than you usually are, so CF ‘may’ alert that you are logging in from an ‘unsafe’ location.
I know that previously, we had issues with the .gov VPNs both due to the hotel’s ‘treatment’ of VPNs (e.g. not allowing connection), or the VPN dumping the connections from a foreign country (considering it a hacking attempt).
Sooooo, if you value your ‘data’, whatever it may be, I’d recommend a local removable hard drive or thumb drive, updated regularly, and a copy of the same off site at another location.
Go read the folks on the sidebar, please! They rite gud!
Or how to grab your readers with those first lines of your stories…
These were collected and shared around a number of years ago, but hold true even today! Note that a number of the authors are women…
DON’T LOOK DOWN – by Jennifer Cruise & Bob Mayer
Lucy Armstrong was standing on the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge when she first spotted the black helicopter coming at her through the sunset.
Based on the rest of her day, that wasn’t’ going to be good.
LOST GIRLS – by Bob Mayer
In the night there is death.
It was one of the first lessons they had taught the Sniper and he had never forgotten it. Night is a common denominator regardless of terrain, enemy, or mission. It will always come with the movement of the planet. He knew how to move unobserved, like a ghost, in daylight, but the night was his special friend.
STARSHIP: MUTINY (STARSHIP BOOK 1) – by Mike Resnick
The ship hung in space, all but motionless, a dull gray in color. There was no rust on it, of course, but it looked like there should have been.
SANTIAGO: A MYTH OF THE FAR FUTURE – by Mike Resnick
There never was a history written about the Inner Frontier, so Black Orpheus took it upon himself to set one to music. His name wasn’t really Orpheus (though he was black). In fact, rumor had it that he had been an aquaculturist back in the Deluros system before he fell in love….
A GATHERING OF WIDOWMAKERS – by Mike Resnick
The two boys looked out through the store window.
“Are you sure it’s him?” asked the first.
“I’ve got his holo on my computer,” said the second. “It’s him, all right. And see that little guy? They say they always travel together.”
“Why would he need any help?”
“Him?” was the reply. “He doesn’t need any help, not now, not ever. Maybe he just wants someone to talk to.”
PRODIGAL SUMMER: A NOVEL – by Barbara Kingsolver
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins
When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.
THE RED QUEEN by Philippa Gregory
The light of the open sky is brilliant after the darkness of the inner rooms. I blink and hear the roar of many voices. But this is not my army calling for me, this whisper growing to a rumble is not their roar of attack, the drumming of their swords on shields. The rippling noise of linen in the wind is not my embroidered angels and lilies against the sky, but cursed English standards in the triumphant May breeze. This is a different sort of roar from our bellowed hymns, this is a howl of people hungry for death: my death.
DARK TASTE OF RAPTURE by Gena Showalter
Two men stood in the middle of a shadowed, barren field. Both were human. One was tall, muscled, with dark hair and a busted-up face. His syn-cotton shirt was torn, his jeans dirty, and his boots scuffed. There were telltale weapon bulges under his arms, at the wrists, and at his ankles.
Clearly, he was the bodyguard.
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? by Phillip K. Dick
A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised–it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice–he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again.
“You set your Penfied too weak,” he said to her. “I’ll reset it and you’ll be awake and–“
“Keep your hand off my settings.” Her voice held bitter sharpness. “I don’t want to be awake.”
Those opening lines apply to ANY story length you’re writing- Short, novella, novel…
The ultimate flash fiction, IMHO, is the six word story- ‘For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.’
Attributed to Ernest Hemingway, there are others that say it is even older, HERE.
In any case, look for how to hook those readers! Especially today, with all the competition out there, those first words ARE important, not only to you the writer, but to grab that reader and bring them into your story!
Apparently, Virginia is paralleling Texas in dumping DEI in universities!
Two public universities in Virginia have scrapped their planned diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements after a review by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) administration.
Virginia Commonwealth University and George Mason University canceled their plans to implement DEI-oriented classes as a requirement for undergraduate studies after Youngkin raised concerns about “core curriculum mandates that are a thinly veiled attempt to incorporate the progressive Left’s groupthink.”
Full article, HERE from Washington Examiner.
Gov Youngkin, much like Gov Abbott, is NOT a fan of DEI, and was voted in by the pissed off parents in VA after the debacles in Loudoun, Fairfax, and some other school systems in VA over school board vs. parents over education of their children.
And they aren’t the only ones- “Lawmakers in more than a dozen red states have either passed or proposed sweeping* higher education reform packages curtailing DEI initiatives. Florida banned state funding for DEI programs. Texas banned DEI offices outright. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed an executive order in December that prohibited funding DEI initiatives not just at universities but within all state agencies.”
When you try to shove people into ‘identity’ boxes based on race, sex, or anything else never ends well for anyone. As anybody who has been in the military will tell you, veterans don’t care what ethnicity etc. someone is, their relationships are based on trust and people doing their jobs. Why? Because lives depend on folks doing those jobs and doing them well!
I think after the last couple of years, more and more people are beginning to think that way, not just in red states, but around the entire country!
Your thoughts???
Welp, this administration continues to PROVE they can spend money on… stuff…
- The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law earmarked $7.5 billion for EV charging, with $5 billion allocated to states, but the slow rollout has resulted in just 7 charging stations.
- Higher standards for new EV chargers, including 97% operational reliability, 150kW power, and proximity to highways, have contributed to the slow progress, along with permitting challenges and power demands.
- Concerns have been raised by lawmakers and experts about mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and the lack of experience among state transportation agencies in deploying EV charging infrastructure.
Full article, HERE. From Oil Price monthly.
We used to have a saying in the R&D world about ‘vapor ware’…
It looked good on paper, and in all those powerpoint presentations, and ‘worked’ in a lab environment (maybe)…
But when it hit the real world…if it ever did, it usually failed spectacularly! Of course it was never the fault of the provider, but it was those stupid sailors that (insert excuse here).
As far as I know, ‘we’ never blew anywhere near that much money on even the worst failures we had!!!
The basic ‘problem’, IMHO, is that the rules keep changing faster than the states can adapt, nobody is looking at how long, how much it will cost, and who will provide the power required for these stations everywhere.
And the only ones that have successfully deployed ANY stations have all been private companies, with proprietary systems.
As far as I know, there is no ‘overarching plan, standardization, or a designated point of contact that actually knows what is going on. I just wonder how much the ‘cost overruns’ are going to be?
And manufacturers are pulling back on building EVs… This just gets better and better…