Jules Jones

It's PicoWriMo time. :-)I missed the first couple of days, because the comm is on LiveJournal and the RSS feed to DreamWidth has broken at some point in the last few weeks, so I didn't know it was on this month until a friend mentioned it. It's a small comm for people who like the idea of NaNoWriMo (RIP), but can't do 50k in a month. People set their own target, and share their progress, so we get the community support for something that's manageable for us.

A happy Gauda Prime Day to all who celebrate. :-) Let us raise a glass to toast Chris Boucher, the man who made this day in 1981 one that many of us will never forget.

There was a fountain pen meet at Eastercon, at which assorted pens and inks got handed round for people to try out. A couple of mine proved popular, so putting here what I'd brought along with me. The Y1 was already inked, the others were inked at the meet with one of the Diamine samples. If I'd had any sense I'd have done a better job of recording which samples...
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Arriving Thursday and leaving Monday, subject to plague, volcanic ash, etc etc. Note that I currently have eyesight problems and can't be relied on to recognise people at any distance. I'm not ignoring anyone. :-)

Not on Twitter anymore. Mastodon is julesjones@mendeddrum.org and I may or may not have managed to install Bluesky on my phone by the time I leave home - if I have it's julesjones

Unlike many of my friends I am not on a panel, so you won't be able to find me by turning up to a panel I am on. You probably won't even find me by turning up to my friends' panels, because much as I would like to go to them I'll have to take regular breaks to rest in my room and will inevitably miss quite a few bits of con I'd like to go to.

Opened Notepad and found the raw text file from a thread I posted to Mastodon and Bluesky a while back about Silicon Valley's "all your data are belong to us" attitude. It probably bears reposting here in light of the ongoing IP theft in the service of AI companies profiting off other people's work.


When I say some of my tee shirts are old enough to vote, I'm not just talking about con shirts. Today's from the "slobbing around the house" drawer is "Google Gave Me a Gig" from the launch of GMail on 1 April 2004. I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, and knew people who worked at Google when Google handed out tee shirts to the employees to hand out to their friends as advertising, and the official company motto was still "Don't be evil". :-) And they even believed it...

Back in the day my friends couldn't understand why authors were upset with them about Google's new programme of digitising books that were in copyright and making them freely available. I tried to explain. "But we asked the publishers!" I explained publishers didn't own the rights and couldn't give them permission. They didn't get it. They were all from a "publish or perish" technical/academic background where you pay publishers for the privilege of your learned paper being published in a (hopefully) respected journal. Their mindset simply couldn't encompass the idea of publishers paying authors and not the other way around.

I somewhat snarkily asked when Google was going to publish Google's proprietary software and architecture. Apparently that was different. And this wasn't just self-serving. They really, truly could not understand that most fiction and a lot of non-fiction isn't work-for-hire.

There was also, of course, the problem that a lot of the big publishers had said words to the effect of "Are you ...ing crazy?" But those publishers were just selfish and short-sighted. Because Google wasn't evil, and information wants to be free, and they were doing the human race a great service by making it so. And if it got eyeballs and advertising revenue to google.com then that was only fair in return for their humanitarian service.

And these weren't stereotypical techbros. They were generally very nice people. Just a little... tunnel-visioned.

No, I'm not in the least bit surprised that Google steals every last bit of personal information it can find, and I haven't been for twenty years.

 I'm not on Twitter any more. Mastodon address is julesjones@mendeddrum.org

 Just had to unsubscribe from someone's account because it was completely overwhelming my feed. It's annoying, because I like the posts, just not three or four of them a day when they're graphic heavy and I only look at my friends page at the weekend. One of the benefits of DW over LJ is that subscription and access are separate things, so I can still give them access to my (rare) locked posts.

There's a comm on LJ for people who like the idea of NaNoWriMo, but know that for whatever reason it's not practical to do 50 kwords in a month. Hence Pico instead of NaNo, where you get the benefit of the daily goal and company on the way, but on a writing project that targets what you can or want to do. Several times I've done the the "300 words a day" target from Sir Pterry's advice on how to write a novel without being intimidated by the idea of writing 100,000 words. I did 100 words a day at a point where that really was all I could do, but at least it helped me get it done. I've done "get x pages of my website updated". It's useful for all sorts of things. For this November, here's my comment from the wrap-up post at the comm:


So my month of Pico:
— Started getting back into using Scrivener, which may make life a lot easier with a couple of projects that were on the go just before I got too ill to write and hold down a day job at the same time.
— Got a novel draft into Scrivener.
— Went through most of it checking the timeline, and checked and tweaked inconsistencies in the setting that were the result of the thing turning into a novel.
— Got a good idea of what bits I still need to fill in from scenes that are currently only sketches (and found there were fewer of those than I thought).
— Failed to check in every day because I was so busy with the above. Sorry I didn't get around to commenting on other people's progress. I had a good excuse, honest.

Pretty successful for me, because it's really helped me start writing again after several years of finding it too difficult. Thank you, Wiseheart, for steering the comm.

I should post more often to reassure people that I'm still alive. In lieu of actual content, have last night's live microblogging on Mastodon of my unpacking a box of stationery shinies. The rascafarians may well want more detailed stationery porn than this, but it is mostly tastefully hidden behind a cut for the rest of you.

So, the shinies. I treated myself to a £50 mystery box from Cult Pens. It's allegedly guaranteed to have contents worth at least double that, although a lot of their prices are significantly higher than from other firms - it's just that they have a vast array under one roof. It's also a gamble on whether any of the contents are what you want. I'm pleased to say that I did actually get £40 of stuff I would either buy at some point or would have to tell myself I don't need any more of.

Every so often I grumble on Mastodon about the noisier missionaries on Market Street as I walk to the bus station. Tonight's nuisances were a little more problematic. They weren't loud, but they had a lot of posters about different people who had supposedly been harmed or killed by the Covid vaccine, and asking frantically when the next mutation was planned for. More worryingly a few people were stopping to talk to them, and as far as I could see not for mockery purposes.