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... and in the morning, we will remember them.

It was a beautiful, and unseasonally warm, day at the village cenotaph this morning. We remembered those who had fallen, and those who came home but marked by what they had seen or done or had done to them. Some of them came home in body but not in mind; my mother has a tale of a man known to her family who had been tortured and was no longer in contact with reality, nor ever would be.

Those who served in the Great War have all gone now. The ranks of those who served in the Second World War are dwindling fast. Among those who left us this year was someone who trained in the ATS, who later married a naval officer who had served under fire. It was unsettling when the Queen died a few weeks ago, not least because one of the things she represented was being one of the remaining living links with that time. I sang "God save the King" for the first time this morning. It has been "God save the Queen" for all of my life. Now she is gone, as are so many who served both on the front line and on the home front.

So many soldiers of the Commonwealth; so many countries and so many faiths. Lest we forget the sacrifice they made, for their future and our present. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as we have demonstrated far too often in the decades since.

Note: possibly TMI. :-)

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So worse than the Pfizer was, but still not terrible,

And I get to do it all over again next weekend, when I have my annual flu jab...

Had a bivalent Moderna jab this morning for my autumn Covid booster. The jab itself was barely noticeable. They weren't telling people to sit down for observation afterwards, but I did anyway because I'd felt distinctly wobbly during the observation period the first time round and had to have an extended observation period lying down in a dim room - almost certainly migraine aura after nearly an hour under fluorescent lights, but they weren't taking any chances. This time I had a noticeable slight ache after a few minutes, but this is normal for me because the RSI magnifies any muscle ache. Arm's getting a bit sore now, with accompanying ache in the RSI damaged muscles and tendons down that arm, but not at a level that needs a pain killer. I might take some aspirin anyway as a preventative, because my damaged tendons are likely to hurt quite a bit once the inflammation gets going.

Also getting a lot of typos. Not sure how much of that is the RSI kicking in, and how much mild aura, but I'm glad I took today off work.

I stopped in the charity shop across the road when I got out, and have returned home with £19 worth of craft materials, including a folding work basket that had some wool in it, a boxful of bits and pieces for "take the lot for £10", and a rather nice necklace of big beads that I will probably take apart for beads on a twiddlemuff. I don't actually want all the bits and pieces, but as the person behind the till said, craft people usually have craft friends they can pass the unwanted bits to. They often can't sell individual items, but put a batch of them together in a basket and the job lot will go. He was also telling me that they'd been seeing a lot of younger people looking for craft things, mostly witchy things like embroidery with black cats. The other thing the young people are into is making rugs with cartoon characters, such as detailed reproductions of scenes from the Simpsons, some of which they sell. Knitting books and patterns are selling well. Interesting bit of gossip about some of the effects of lockdown.

For the mill has shut down and it's never coming back.

That's the second time I've seen a former employer fall to the dynamite. It takes time to demolish a mill safely; months, even years. But the destruction started long ago, with investment choices and other choices; some of those choices made by a government hell bent on shovelling as much money to its chums as possible, and if that means bringing down an industry so you can push large government grants for regeneration of a derelict industrial site to your party donors rather than grants to keep the mill afloat through the lean times, well, that's just business, isn't it?

Forgive me if I'm cynical if the promised regeneration ever happens. This is, after all, the government that gave millions to a ferry company with no ferries. There was once a Tory party with a one nation philosophy, an enlightened self-interest that believed that the rich had a duty to the poor, to provide a safety net and make sure nobody fell through it. That too has gone and is never coming back.

Doing one of my spates of cleaning out my inbox by picking a keyword for some newsletter and mass deleting anything from that keyword I don't want to keep, on this occasion CafePress. That often takes me back quite a few years through my inbox, and the keyword picks up more than the newsletter. As usual, I have been reminded of friends and acquaintances from long ago; and have looked up some on the internet to see what has become of them. Some of them have simply moved on to other fandoms or other social media, or in one case being a town councillor in Glasgow. Others haven't posted anywhere I can see for a long time, at least under the name I know them by. Some author websites have gone completely, not even being used as an electronic billboard by some hosting company with the right to the domain name. And I feel a twinge of sadness, because although most of these people were not close friends they were still people I liked, and I will never know what happened to them.

So doing another "hi, still here", so people who only know me on this social media platform know I'm still around and safe.

I never much liked the #prayfor... hashtag on Twitter. It always struck me as bandwagon-jumping and attention-seeking in the wake of a tragedy for many of those using it. I liked it even less five years ago tonight, when terror came to my adopted city once again. I glanced at my computer before going to bed, and saw something trending. I looked at the news and it was clear something bad was happening. When I got up the next morning, it was clear just how bad. 22 people dead.

Some things you shouldn't repeat on Twitter. On my way to work, my bus was passed by two unmarked black cars with blue lights behind the front grill but no sirens, moving very fast indeed. I said nothing about it online that day, because it was very clear where they were going and why, and you don't give terrorists advance warning if you have any common sense or decency.

My office is close enough to the Manchester Arena that we had press cars parked outside over the next few days. Some of my colleagues were delayed coming to work, because their normal route by train or tram or road was blocked. Victoria Station was a major crime scene. We had a constant reminder for days of what had happened. The entire office stood silent at the windows during the remembrance minute a week later. Yes, it's possible to cry silently. Most of us were.

The scars are healing for those who weren't directly affected, although they'll never heal for those who lost loved ones or were injured, and those who were there that night but got away physically unharmed. But we remember. It's what we can do for those who can't heal.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

My professional (for certain values of professional) website is back up. I've even updated it with the somewhat belated news that all five in the original batch of reprints are now up, and also available in paperback, no less!

Amazon's recently started offering a hardback option in KDP, and I am very tempted to play with it, but it would need quite a bit of work, given the price I'd be unlikely to actually sell any, and I don't have the time and spoons at the moment for just messing about with it for fun. Given the setup cost v per page cost, I'm considering whether it would be nice to do omnibus volumes of the Lord and Master and Spindrift duologies, or alternatively put the two short stories in with Lord and Master 2, as Alex did me some covers for the shorts that could be used as dividers within the book.

I think for now the priority should be getting covers and then creating the reprint editions of some of my other Loose Id titles. I don't intend to do all of them; not least because I think Nice Tie could do with some heavy editing before being put back on sale. But I'd like to get the Buildup books and Promises to Keep back out there.

Gorbachev's still alive. I wonder what he thinks about his long hard work on making the world, and Russia, less horrible frightening places to live in being trampled into dust?

My official website is currently returning a database error. Apparently my webhost bought a new server and is having fun bug-hunting. Oh joy. I suppose I could ask him to return it to the old handcoded and handloaded by FTP front page rather than the SQL version, as that still exists behind the Shiny, and indeed still has many pages not yet transferred to the SQL version, which task is how I discovered yesterday that the database version is down. I'm not sure I can be bothered, because it's not as if it gets many hits these days and with any luck it will be fixed sooner than I can remember how to use an FTP client, or indeed where I put my ftp client. One would never think that I used to do this stuff for fun, but that was another country, and besides the wench is dead; or at least not actively writing at the moment.

It's not as if I'm even writing much on my DreamWidth these days. I was going through past entries yesterday, and it's extremely obvious when my brain got fried and I couldn't look at a full size screen anymore. I'm doing a lot better now, but I've got out of the habit of sharing my thoughts in longer form than Twitter, and I don't have any writing related thoughts to share because I'm not currently writing myself and I'm also not keeping up with industry gossip, see "big screens make my brain hurt". But I do have at least one book review written but not yet posted, so I'd better do that next.

I should have written a 2021 retrospective post at the beginning of January. I did in fact mean to do it, but forgot. How unusual.

2021. Year two of a vicious pandemic that had killed over 150,000 of my fellow citizens in total by the end of the year, and yet some of my fellow citizens are still engaging in magical thinking and refusing to entertain the concept that there is something lethal out there that could get them, yes, them, too. Some of them are occasionally on the same bus as me. :-/

I've been vaccinated and boostered. I didn't get symptoms, and avoided getting pinged by the app until nearly the end of the year, and then got pinged twice within about a month, but did my daily testing for a week and tested negative all the way through. I presume I haven't had it yet. I hope not. One of my colleagues has long Covid, and it was obvious to me that there was something wrong even before he told me what it was, because I've known him a long time and I know from personal experience what it feels like to be exhausted and in pain all the time.

I achieved not going to A&E all year, which is a pleasant change. My chronic migraine has slowly improved to the point where I can often go all week without anything more than being a bit tired and the occasional brief dysphasia blip as long as I'm careful about managing triggers and remember to take my meds. Still not up to writing on top of a full time job, but given how little money there is in it if you can't make it a full time job, I'm not missing out on any secondary income stream. I just feel guilty about not completing the short story sequence I'd partly written for NineStar Press when my brain shut down.

The ancient and venerable database at work was finally replaced with its New!Exciting!Modern! replacement that's been coming next autumn for the last three years. Replacement is sucky in interestingly different ways. It is compatible with Windows 10/Office 365, unlike A&V which after the change to Win10 had to be nurse-maided and kept crashing with data loss. However, there is no way to collapse a record display into a summary that is easy to scan down and find and open just the bit you want. You have to read though all the many, many bits of information to try to find the one you want, and it's very easy to lose track. It doesn't lose data when it crashes, and it doesn't so much crash as refuse to talk to the outside world occasionally, but that is about all that can be said in its favour when compared to A&V.

I had some things happen that I could have done without happening, most of which are in locked posts, and most of which are more or less fixable. The one that wasn't was the sudden death of Pol, a friend I've known from Pratchett fandom for over twenty years. I'm still having the occasional "not going to do in-person Eastercon this year, won't get to see my friends for another year...oh" moment.

So not a great year, all in all, but there were a few better things than 2020, which is not saying a lot.

Book sale! Smashwords are running a promotion, so my self-published reprint ebooks are 75% off or free there until the end of New Year's Day. I've also reduced the prices by the same amount everywhere else except Amazon, because Amazon won't let me sell for under 99c. Prices in US$ are as follows:

Smashwords - apparently the retail price is the same in the catalogue itself but the discount shows up in the basket. If not, ask me and I'll generate a coupon code. Lots of other authors are also in the sale. Dolphin Dreams is $1.24, Lord and Master 1 is 99c, and the others are free.

Everwhere else except Amazon, same as Smashwords. At Amazon they're 99c each. Important - this does not include my books published by someone else, and it doesn't include the print books (which are already nearly at the minimum Amazon allows).

This Books2Read link will take you to a page where you you'll find links to lots of places where you can buy the books. https://books2read.com/rl/WpYnqG (Some of those are affiliate links.)

My SmashWords profile is at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JulesJonesWriter?ref=JulesJonesWriter and on Amazon it's https://amzn.to/33R9Crz

I have had an overly exciting week and did not reach "say Merry Christmas to DreamWidth" on my To Do List. :-) Off now to do some even more urgent things that did not happen on the day...

It's forty years tonight since Blake's 7 fans got an early Christmas present...

I and many of my friends can remember *exactly* what we were doing in the early evening 40 years ago today. :-) Thank you, Chris Boucher, for one of the most memorable pieces of television ever shown in the UK.

So this weekend my computer offered to upgrade itself to Windows 11. I let it go ahead, because there shouldn't be anything left on my current laptop that requires much swearing and effort to get to work with newer iterations (the shift from XP to 8 was... interesting).

Not entirely convinced so far. Some of this is just a matter of getting used to it, but so far there's one change that is seriously annoying. I'm used to right-clicking on the tool bar to get a menu that allows me to go to the desktop with one more click. That doesn't work any more. Off to Edge to find out how to fix this. It turns out that one is now expected to use a tiny bit of tool bar at the far right. Yes, it may be a single click rather than two. It's also a lot harder to hit with the mouse, at least if you have flaky hands.

Don't like the new start menu, since it's lost the ability to put shortcuts into named groups. I found that extremely useful, and am sad to see it go, but at least the "you will lose this facility" list before you click "accept" warned about this. I've gone and deleted various apps that I Do Not Want. I am an Old and do not want TikTok, FaceBook, and Instagram. I've deleted Amazon Prime, mostly to avoid temptation, and Disney because I'm not likely to want it, even if it isn't on the "fire and sword" list.

I expect it will have found new and exciting ways to annoy me, because it's Windows. But so far it doesn't seem to have broken anything badly.

Had my Covid booster on Thursday - Pfizer for me, which is what I had for the original two jabs. I was a bit wobbly afterwards, but um, yes, needle phobic... My arm was tender for a couple of days, started improving yesterday, and this morning I can tell I've had a jab but it's almost gone. I did feel a little cold a couple of times, and there was an episode where I suddenly became very tired over the course of two or three minutes, but in general it's been a typical post-vaccine feeling a little washed out if I thought about it. I could have gone to work if I'd had to, although I'd booked a couple of days leave just in case. Biggest problem for me is that any tenderness and swelling in that area always aggravates my RSI, which is the actual reason I'm glad I wasn't going in to work. That lymph node has come up again, even if not as enthusiastically as the first time, so presumably that's going to be an ongoing feature of this vaccine.

Overall, I've felt a lot worse after a bad session at the dentist. This is not a flippant comparison; I often have to sit in the waiting room for half an hour to an hour afterwards because a full dose of anaesthetic can make me very wobbly.

I first discovered Jay Hulme's writing through his Twitter threads detailing his love of church architecture. He would tell the story of his visit to a church, using beautiful language and beautiful photography - small churches, large churches, obscure ones, world-famous ones. He pointed out tiny details and explored some areas that are normally not accessible to the public. He is a professional poet, and that shone through.

When he started his exploration of church buildings, he was an atheist. More than that, as a young trans man he didn't feel that there was a place for him in a church as a member rather than engaging with a love affair with the building. That changed one day. He realised that somewhere along the way he had started believing, and that there were churches and ministers and congregations that did not think he was too queer, too poor, too odd, for a place with them.

I followed his Twitter feed for the church porn. The queer Christian poetry that started appearing some months later was an unexpected joy. Having found faith, he started exploring it - a few months before Covid changed the world. The result was queer Christian poetry that spoke of believing in the time of plague, in a time when churches were closed for the safety of all. But God isn't confined to stone and brick. Jay's poetry is a stunningly beautiful reminder of that.

Now the poems have been collected into a book. I'm straight and cis and still it speaks to me about God, so intensely that I cannot manage more than three or four poems at a time without weeping. There are poems about God being everywhere you need to find Them, from garden to nightclub to a late-night taxi. There are love letters to cathedrals, including my own dearest love, Durham. There is sadness and joy. There is affirmation that God loves all that She has made, not just those people who came out of the mould He picks up most often. There is a joke that had me laughing out loud. There are questions and occasional answers about "God, why?"

I don't understand all of these poems. I may never understand some. But I feel all of them, every single one.

I love this book.

Publisher's website: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786223937/the-backwater-sermons

Other shops: https://books2read.com/u/b5oVgO

Allie Brosh has written two books (so far), which I'm reviewing together. I love them. They're somewhat hyperbolic versions of stories originating from her real life, told in the form of comics. Most of them are funny, some of them are not, and a few give a deep insight into the mechanisms of a mind grappling with nightmares.

Allie Brosh - Hyperbole and a Half

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Allie Brosh - Solutions and other problems

( Read more... )

Got this year's flu shot done on Thursday. I've been having it for the last 20 years, so until this year I was on a 56k modem that needed a landline, just with the occasional refresh of the wiring to make sure it was still working. I'm still getting it as a belt and braces thing alongside this year's shiny new 4G but I can't want to get my next armful of mRNA and my update from the 4G model to 5G.

The healthcare assistant said the jab hadn't been as bad for her this year, and I'm finding the same. I always get a tender arm and tiredness for a few days afterwards, but while I can tell that I've had a jab it's quite a bit less tender than usual. Still glad I had yesterday off, though - as usual, I could have dragged myself into work, but would have preferred not to. But even in the Before Time - I often had flu in years when I hadn't been vaccinated, and flu is not just a bad cold. There was the year I had flu three times (there's a reason why the jab has 3 or 4 strains in it), there was the year it took everyone at work weeks to recover and it was often followed by an opportunistic bacterial infection, there was the year I nearly couldn't get on a plane to make it home to see a dying family member, and I'll take the tender arm and tiredness for a few days, thank you very much.

So once again not only have I not written anything here for months, I have not read anything here for at least two weeks. It is perhaps a measure of my life that I can measure how long it's been since I last read my DreamWidth feed by the last Oglaf comic I remember having already seen.

There are various and sundry reasons for this, not least the ever-present medical issues that mean work generally occupies almost all of my capacity for staring at a full size screen. I realised last month that one of the reasons I'd fallen so badly behind on my email was that I used to skim it for triage on the bus, which I have not done since the free WiFi on the bus went away. I have therefore finally given in and bought a data plan, only 7 years after getting a smartphone. Only one month for the moment just to see how much I use. The answer to this appears to be "not much because I have forgotten about the concept of getting my portable internet out while I'm on the bus". I have actually bought a data block a couple of times in the past, but that was for special occasions, usually of the unpleasant kind. Sadly, one of them was the aftermath of a terrorist attack, when I thought it might be a good idea to have internet available while I was on the move. I never used it, and was very glad not to have occasion to.

What I've been doing on the bus instead during the last year is reading work-safe blogs, because I also have a work phone and if I'm required to carry the wretched thing around with me I'm going to use the corporate data plan. (In theory I have a Kobo; in practice it's not getting used very much.) Alas, DreamWidth is not terribly mobile-friendly, and even if it was I'm not putting any of my personal stuff anywhere near the corporate data plan ever. My employer does not need to know my taste in porn, and does not need to know my passwords, and (rightfully) has access to anything I do on corporate systems. It's very unlikely anyone would actually want to do so, but do not put anything on there that you wouldn't want to be read out in court.

I've got three books to log sitting on my desk, along with four balls of yarn to be photographed and logged on Seizures-R-Us. Since they've been sitting there for over a month, good luck with that.

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Jules Jones

Yog's Law: Money flows towards the author

At the going down of the sun

Covid booster - Moderna - update

5G antenna refurbished

But there's no smoke at all coming out of the stack

Still failing to post

22 bees

Anzac Day, 2022

The website's back, and writing thoughts

That little unpleasantness

I'd like to have my website back, please

2021

book sale

a somewhat belated Merry Christmas

Happy Gauda Prime Day!

Windows 11

Booster done

Book review: Jay Hulme -The Backwater Sermons

Book review: Allie Brosh, 1) Hyperbole and a Half, 2) Solutions and Other Problems.

And flu shot done

Still here

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May 2025

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Yog's Law: Money flows *towards* the author