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Posts Tagged ‘#365Ways’

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”

— H.G. Wells

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Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

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Funny how something can play a big role in your life without you knowing all the details behind it. 

My childhood bookshelves were filled with science fiction and fantasy, and a lot of those books were published by Del Rey

I’m not sure I knew what was behind the publishing house name, or that it was a she, or that she was instrumental in promoting speculative fiction that did not feature hobbits or Conan. Reading through the list of Del Rey books is a walk through some of the classics. The Sword of Shannara, the reissued The Princess Bride, Foster, Heinlein, Hambly, Clarke, McCaffrey, Anthony and many more. 

The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due

In publishing, the people who work behind the scenes rarely get their due. But on Oct. 1, 2024, at least, one industry pioneer got the limelight. On that day, PBS aired “Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal,” the first episode of its new documentary series “Renegades,” which highlights little-known historical figures with disabilities.

A woman with dwarfism, Judy-Lynn del Rey was best known for founding Del Rey Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint that turned fantasy in particular into a major publishing category.

Read the article or watch the PBS episode for more of the work she did to move this form of fiction into the mainstream. 

Here’s the episode:

(Also, as a somewhat related aside, how did I never have a Star Wars Intergalactic Passport?!)

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Photo by Vita Maksymets on Unsplash

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Don’t Forget

“Don’t forget to tell these special people in your life just how special they are to you.”

— Bob Ross

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Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

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A few thoughts on AI from one of the leading sci-fi writers of the day.

Scalzi on Film: Hollywood Totally Lied to Us About AI: Why Cinematic Cyborgs Are So Much Smarter Than What We Have in the Real World

Behold! Science has caught up to fiction, and the age of Artificial Intelligence, long promised by science fiction in film, literature, and video games, is here! And in this golden age…tech companies expend vast amounts of energy to create search engine assistants trained on partially or fully stolen data, who tell us it’s okay to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, and chatbots who “hallucinate” answers to queries, i.e. confabulate bullshit based on a statistical regression to the textual mean. Our “AI,” as it turns out, is less intelligent than a chicken, even if it has a better vocabulary.

Will the technology continue to change? Certainly, and with rapidity. Will it move more concretely from “applied statistics” to a more humanized “artificial intelligence”? We shall see!

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Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

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Write. There is no substitute…But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here.

The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot…it’s effort and practice. Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.

— Rebecca Solnit

So write bad stuff. Good stuff too, just try not to worry too much about which is which.

Just keep going.

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Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

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A fall Saturday with a side of free fiction, sounds like fun to me!

Who Walks With You by Premee Mohamed

With her glasses knocked off and, presumably, buried alongside her, it takes a while to realize what she’s looking at. Ah: light entering not through the usual place (the roof, which is transparent) but somewhere else (the wall, which is supposed to be opaque).

That’s right. She remembers now. The outside came in.

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Photo by Kevin Lanceplaine on Unsplash

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“That thing that gives you butterflies, that lights you up. That world you see when you close your eyes. Chase that.”

— Eddie Pinero

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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…but it doesn’t have to be boring. 

(This also reminds me of a clock I would love to make: 365 Knitting Clock by Siren Elise Wihelmsen)

Slow, but so cool!

Here’s to bringing inventive creativity to even the most ordinary of tasks!

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Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

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Stretched out in bed as morning rays usher in the day, it helps to remember that

today’s weather

the world’s weather

what to write

note: look up major volcanic eruptions in the modern era

if the cat moved two inches to the right I could breathe

bills

donations

bills

ouch, why do my feet hurt

location of the Golden Spike

the garage is a mess

write write

the neighbor cut down the milkweed before it went to seed

odds of a power outage this winter

dinner

breakfast

a certain Tuesday in November and

what comes next

write write write

should have bought more than two boxes of Girl Guide cookies

but at least they’re mint

work work work work work

doesn’t matter

yet, just

Now.

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Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

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I just upgraded to Safari 18 on my Mac and ran into a problem. Under most circumstances at the moment, it’s not possible to drag and drop the URL icon to a folder, desktop, or document.

This is deeply annoying. It’s a function I use for work. All. The. Time.

Yes, you can drag the URL and get a link with gobbledygook as the identifier.

— example link, no page header included: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255802563?sortBy=rank

(Good luck remembering what that link is for, especially when it’s snuggled up to several dozen of its friends.)

But if you want a normal link with the page header hot linked, like, you know, every person ever, you may be out of luck.

— what I’d rather have: safari 18 lost the ability to drag URL to… – Apple Community

The drag-and-drop method works sometimes, if you only have one window open and haven’t clicked on any links, or you drag sideways while muttering imprecations incantations, or hit the command button before (but not during) the actual click, or you’ve sacrificed a venti latte double mocha with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles to the IT gods, but otherwise not so much.

If I’d known about this I would have waited to update. If I could roll back I would. Maybe you won’t have the same problem, but maybe you will. Here’s hoping you can learn from my mistake.

I look forward to a fix.

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Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

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