I just read a 1992 piece by Niven and Pournelle, extolling the glories of capitalism, and talking about how awesome Columbus was, and suggesting that if only those evil governments like the US government would stop being so annoyingly anti-capitalistic, people would go to space in order to get rich. (Title of essay: “Where Next, […]
Yesterday’s xkcd led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about the history of temperature scales. Some particular things that struck me: It hadn’t occurred to me that standardized temperature scales weren’t invented until around 1700, and thus that before that, there were no standardized numerical representations of temperature. Galileo or someone connected to him invented […]
Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my father’s murder. (For anyone who doesn’t know what happened and wants to know, here’s the writeup that I posted in 2006, on the first anniversary. Content warning for a fairly detailed discussion of his murder, and a brief discussion of his SO Nancy’s suicidal depression.) (…Something that I […]
Time, I think, for another status update about how things are in my life these days. My big news is that the first Constellation Press book, an ebook edition of Samuel R. Delany’s 1979 memoir Heavenly Breakfast, is finally published, available for $4.99 from the Kindle Store and the Apple Books Store. I need to […]
A while back, I posted a chronological list of Le Guin’s major books, mostly put together by my friend Chaos. But lately, I’ve been wanting an expansion of that list that includes the original publication dates of short stories and essays. So here’s a fuller chronological list, ordered by publication year (and alphabetically within a year), […]
This past year, creating the ebook of Heavenly Breakfast and the ebook of Feast of Serendib, I have learned a whole lot about creating ebooks. I hope at some point to write up some of what I’ve learned. But here’s the main thing I’ve learned: Use tools that do all the hard stuff for you. […]
Today was complicated. (Wrote this post late Wednesday night, posted it Thursday morning. In this post, today means Wednesday.) On the one hand, I was super anxious. Higher anxiety levels than I’ve had in a long time. I wouldn’t call it a panic attack exactly, but very very stressful. On the other hand—partly because of […]
Just noticed that it’s been a month since I posted here. I guess that means it’s time for another status-update post. A little less avoidant than last time I posted here. Have made progress on various things; for example, finished the ebook of Mary Anne’s cookbook, and continue to asymptotically approach being done with the […]
Things with me have been a little weird lately. I guess the main thing is that I’m having even stronger avoidance reactions than usual. It seems to me to be pretty clearly an anxiety thing, but most of the time I’m not experiencing it as the usual consciously evident fear/anxiety (though there’s been some of […]
Do you want to download an archive of an entire Yahoo Group? Here’s how. But do it today, because you may not be able to do it this way after tomorrow. Background: Yahoo stores Yahoo Groups messages and files on their servers, but (as I understand it) they’re removing access to those after Saturday the […]
Say that you have your own domain name (like my kith.org). And say that you want to send mail to other people’s Gmail addresses. Sometimes, Gmail may think that legitimate mail from you is spam. (Note that this can happen even if you use G Suite for your mail!) Here’s how to reduce the likelihood […]
Here are the organizations I’m donating to in 2019. (I used to post my list every year, but haven’t managed to post it since 2013.) Much of this is repeated from 2013 (and earlier years), but since that last post I’ve removed nine organizations and added thirty-five others. The list is categorized for ease of […]