Jules Jones

julesjones @ 2026-03-08T15:23:00

2026-03-08T15:27:25Z

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.

First week's progress for me:

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Linux Reply Guys

2026-02-14T18:31:39Z

I got a little... peeved.. with Linux Reply Guys on Mastodon. Putting my rant from 1/2/2025 here so I have it to hand for the next time.
https://mendeddrum.org/@JulesJones/113928786877625625

******
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Happy Gauda Prime Day!

2025-12-21T22:37:59Z

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.

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VE Day 80

2025-05-08T22:20:10Z

80 years on, and the numbers of those who remember first hand are dwindling. I listened to the stories of those who were very young then, and thought of my own parents, born during the war. The effects ripple down the years, in things like the phrase "my parents were war babies" used by many in my age group to explain our dislike of food waste.

Lest we forget; for as the King reminded us in a very pointed speech this evening, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and the evidence of that is all too obvious around us.

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Fountain pens at Eastercon meet

2025-04-22T15:46:47Z

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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Back from Eastercon.

2025-04-22T11:10:49Z

Had a great time, even if my assorted medical problems mean I have to pace myself. A con report may or may not be forthcoming - II finished writing up the Worldcon report months ago, and have yet to actually post it. That's one of the jobs for this week - I took the whole week off from work in case I came back with Covid and/or sundry other con cruds.

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Eastercon

2025-04-15T21:18:46Z

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.

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First day of PicoWriMo

2025-03-01T07:25:23Z

It's the first day of the new session of PicoWriMo, a small comm on LiveJournal for those of us who like the idea of a month of community support in achieving writing goals, but aren't up to 50 kwords. I'm sad that I won't be taking part as I'm travelling for most of March, but hoping to get at least something done in the last week if I'm not too jet-lagged.

Alas, the thing I finished last time was the synopsis for a submission package. I had then located an agent who looked like the right agent for me, and prepped the package to submit to them. I discovered that I had to name some books that mine was like as part of the submission process, so will need to actually find and read some m/m/f contemporaries with middle class meets aristocrat. I was about to do that when the world, or at least the US, went to hell in a handbasket. The agent is non-binary and lives in the US...

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All your IP are belong to us.

2025-02-27T06:05:19Z

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.

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Yong Sheng 3013 / Paili 013 vacuum filler fountain pen

2024-08-26T20:10:55Z

I took the the week off after Worldcon earlier this month, and one of the things I did was maintenance on a handful of my fountain pens. This included a Paili 013 vacuum filler. The resulting thread in the #fountain-pens channel on the Anonymous Claire Discord server is under the cut. I also took photos of the dismantling and promised to put them on Dreamwidth. There are no photos of the writing sample, in part because I don't post photos of my handwriting where it could link fannish name with wallet name, but mostly because the thing didn't actually like writing. I don't know how much of that was because I didn't really know how to use a vacuum filler properly - there is a thing where you have to unscrew the blind cap slightly in order to let ink out again when you want to write. But even when I tried that it wouldn't do a lot of writing. From the reviews I've seen there seems to be a quality control issue, and I obviously got one of the duds.

I bought this because I don't have a vacuum filler fountain pen, and I wanted to play with one, and this was a whopping £6 including p&p for one, or even cheaper per pen if you bought three. That's not a lot of money lost if it doesn't work. Alas, it didn't do the writing part of the job, although I did get to play with the filling mechanism. It's a demonstrator and I deliberately bought the clear one rather than one of the coloured transparent ones so that I could watch what it did. That was fun. :-)

This one went in the bin, partly because there was a crack that was probably my doing in the effort to clean it out. At that price I'd definitely consider getting another one in the hope of winning the quality control lottery, but I already have a lot of other cheap pens to play with first.

( Dismantling the pen )
( Commentary on Anonymous Claire )

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Off to Worldcon

2024-08-08T06:29:04Z

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

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Doctor Who

2024-06-23T14:32:53Z

Well, that was very... RTDish.
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bother

2024-02-11T15:24:29Z

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.

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Hello 2024

2024-01-01T23:17:48Z

I don't have a lot to say about 2023, mostly because one of the things to say is that not a lot got recorded in my diary that wasn't about a) medical issues, b) making a note of dates and times that the day job discriminated against me, in case it should be necessary to take them to court about it. I did actually manage to start writing again, even if it was only a revision pass on the first draft of a novel I'd finished just before medical problems made it impossible to write.

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PicoWriMo final report

2023-12-01T23:23:15Z

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.

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And while I'm talking about mystery stationery boxes

2023-11-19T18:53:01Z

Cult Pens mystery goodie bag

So this was being offered a few months ago at £15, or free with an order over a particular value, IIRC £50. I could think of that amount of stuff on my want/need list, along with a couple of "since it's on special...", and one of the reasons the want/need was that long was my not having ordered anything for two years. It supposedly was worth at least IIRC £18 and maybe even more. Wellllll...

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Ooh, shiny... stationery

2023-11-18T11:59:38Z

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.

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latest 5G tweak

2023-10-20T21:17:03Z

Pfizered today. While I was waiting in the pharmacy an elderly gentleman came in and was telling one of the staff all about how he wasn't going to have his Covid vaccine because he'd seen the reports in Parliament about heart problems and excess deaths...

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The latest missionaries are the anti-vaxxers

2023-08-02T22:46:26Z

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.

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Eastercon 2023

2023-04-06T18:11:26Z

Off to Eastercon tomorrow. I got sucked into looking at the relevant tag on my DW - and found something I'd completely forgotten, that I'd been on a Blake's 7 panel with Tanith Lee. I can remember nothing about it, even that it happened at all., although I probably embarrassed myself fangirling. I need to write con reports so that I can remember these things, but somehow they don't seem to happen. I'd better sling a notebook into my suitcase since I'm probably going to spend a fair amount of time in my room hiding from the nasty horrible noise. Which reminds me, I need to sling the earplugs in as well.

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LJ PASSWORDS HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED

2023-01-22T03:45:40Z

Ongoing issues with compromised LiveJournal passwords which are now being used to hack into DreamWidth accounts. If you have ever reused a LiveJournal password elsewhere, go and change it now. (And for good measure I'd change your password at LJ, using something you have never used before and will not use anywhere else.)

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/41571.html

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Another one bites the dust

2022-12-18T22:38:07Z

I shouldn't do this to myself. The demolition work on my former employer is going to be at least two years of slow motion destruction, the building by building dismantling of what once employed thousands of people. But the most iconic piece of plant has toppled now. And I do mean toppled; not the neat folding in on itself of many controlled explosion demolitions, but falling sideways to crash against the ground. Something about watching that video hurt more deeply than if it had just fallen straight down, pancaking as it went. It was an ignominious end to what had once been a giant of its field, full of cutting edge technology.

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Twitter

2022-11-18T08:35:28Z

If / when Twitter goes down, I have a shiny new Mastodon account:

https://mendeddrum.org/@JulesJones

Anyone who wants to leave their social media details in the comments, feel free.

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At the going down of the sun

2022-11-13T23:17:59Z

... 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.

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Covid booster - Moderna - update

2022-10-09T16:48:17Z

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...

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