Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).

Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.

In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It’s not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can’t sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They’d probably just not work with that author again.)

Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.

So no, authors don’t really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.

In my opinion, as an outside observer, I’d say it is the duty of every patriotic American to mass produce signs that say “THIS COUNTRY IS RUN BY IDIOTS” and post them everywhere.

The way publishing industry has been for a very long time, authors (especially first time ones) don’t get to pick whoever pays the best deal. Just whoever pays the first.

Edit: Also, theoretically, publishers should accommodate author wishes once a publication contract has been made. Actually not unheard of that a publisher would do something cool for their up and coming star. But this? Sloppiness on the publisher’s part, plain and simple.

Why hello! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.

I have the DVD. It’s somewhere in the pile.

I need to one day develop a DVD/BR/book catalogue app to get even vague idea about what exactly is on my shelves and boxes. It has long since gone unmanageable. At least I know what’s my next major project after NaNoWriMo.

[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Ah, this will be the Department of Dunning-Kruger. The workers are idiots who think they are supergeniuses. Led by an idiot who thinks he’s a supergenius.

During Trump’s first term, this was just a metaphor, suggested by random comedians. Now, life will imitate art to its full extent.

For me OneDrive “memories” are from my wallpaper folder or Xbox screenshots.

Google “memories” are food diary photos (on days when my food budget is spent, Google loves to show me photos of the massive pizzas I ate years ago, because it knows) or random sunsets. (Except for that photo collage with cheery music from my grandma’s funeral. Why did it have to do that specifically. Just asking.)

Fun thing, I don’t want to get YouTube Premium because YouTube has a huge bunch of bugs and glitches and crap UI design and since they’re the only service in the niche there’s been no indication they’ll ever fix their shit.

I didn’t care about YouTube Music, so losing ads on stock YouTube apps was literally the only reason I was even considering getting Premium.

But if it doesn’t even do the one job…?

Yup, doesn’t surprise me.

I also have a NAS box that’s out of support. Turned off all of the nifty services and firewalled the shit out of it so it won’t be visible outside the LAN even by accident. Will replace it with a FreeBSD box as soon as I get a new hard drive.

I don’t think I’ve had a single USB-C cable/connector/socket fail yet. Which can’t be said of Micro-USB.

But other than that, meh.

A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)

I mean, every other device with a clock that I have use NTP.

All of the cameras I have do have wifi/bluetooth, but at least as far my Nikon cameras go, last time I tried it using the app reliably on my phone was a bit of a hassle. Ricoh pocket camera was said to have an app but everyone complained how terrible it was so I didn’t even bother to try it. Setting the time manually is just easier for all of the cameras.

The only camera that I have that had a reliable and easy app-based time sync was my GoPro. But then GoPro replaced their old app with this current nonsense. It just straight up doesn’t pair my camera to my phone any more and pushes a subscription thing and I heard them talk about EOLing the camera (“excuse me, how the f do you ‘EOL’ a camera”, asks this Nikon girl with a lens from the 1980s). So I had to figure out how to set the clock manually.

Luckily the only devices I have that need to be manually set to correct time are my cameras. And I set the time on them fairly frequently anyway because the clocks drift by half a minute every few months.

When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.

I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.

Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack

Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)

Good thing about having a 80s/90s station in the region is that they have to dramatically rebrand before they can branch out to more recent decades.