The other night, I discovered a completely weird Apple image-display bug: Apple Mail and Preview and Quick Look are displaying at least some images with noticeably reduced color saturation. Details: The designer who’s designing a book cover for me had sent me a JPG image as an email attachment. I looked at the image in […]
“A Nebraska mother who helped her teenage daughter obtain abortion pills to end her pregnancy [at 29 weeks] and later disposed of the fetus’ remains was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday” (Quoted from a Forbes article.) This situation has apparently been in the news for over a year now, but I hadn’t […]
In early 2022, Jason Sanford published the results of his survey about genre magazines. I found the last two sections of the summary especially interesting: freeform responses to the questions “What could genre magazines and podcasts do to make you financially support them?” and “Any closing thoughts you'd like to share about SF/F magazines?” Some […]
Recent spam subject line: “10 Reasons Why Your Dog Ignores Your Commands” I didn’t read the email, but here’s what I assume it said: You don’t have a dog. Your commands are illegal, and your dog knows not to obey illegal commands. Your dog is an anarchist, and doesn’t believe in hierarchies. Your dog just […]
I watched the movie Red, White & Royal Blue last night, and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a romcom. Sweet and funny and a bit larger-than-life, with no particular uncertainty about how it’s going to turn out. But I enjoy that sort of thing when it’s done well, as it is here. (Content warning for […]
Yesterday, on the way to see a friend, I saw a sign that said “Peaches” and a couple of other kinds of fruit; clearly a fruit stand. So on the way home, I stopped there. A long narrow driveway led past rows of trees; at the end of the driveway, there were a couple of […]
Here’s an update on my hearing-aid insurance situation. Short version: It turns out that my insurance fully covers the expensive hearing aids that I want to get (yay!), so my last couple days of intermittently fretting about this were unnecessary. (As usual, of course, this situation underscores some of the problems with our healthcare system. […]
There’s an extremely common telephone situation that I feel like we ought to have a technological solution for by now: A customer and a customer service agent are talking on the phone together. Then something goes wrong, and the call gets disconnected. (This can happen for any of half a dozen reasons, most especially when […]
The other day, Simply Piano added a chords-only version of Maroon 5’s song “Memories.” So I played the chords along with their recording of the song, and something sounded really familiar about that sequence of chords. I thought about it for a while, and hummed it, and then realized: it’s the same chord progression as […]
Short version: I had a hearing test and a hearing-aid consultation yesterday; they both went fine; I hope to be getting hearing aids in November. My overall impression is that the process of getting hearing aids is (a) super slow, (b) super expensive, and (c) hard to get information about. At least at PAMF. Long […]
A couple months ago, I noticed that for the past six years, a big part of my WordPress website (the section labeled “Hodgepodge”) had consisted of a placeholder page containing a paragraph of lorem ipsum text. Ever since then, I’ve been transferring everything over from my old static pages to WordPress. I’ve now finished doing […]
Disclaimer: I’m not involved with this year’s Hugo Awards or Packet, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on behind the scenes; I’m just a Worldcon member who wants to read the works in the Packet. Part of the Hugo Packet is now available, for members of this year’s Worldcon. (If you’re not a […]