serakit

I've been continuing to pick through lists of literary magazines, since a number of them express openness to all genres (and there's also long history of the literary world publishing speculative and then denying that it's speculative; just look at Handmaid's Tale or anything in "magical realism"). It continues to be another world-- the practice of charging for submissions is apparently incredibly common, always with that "it's not a reading fee, it's just that using Submittable is so expensive so we need to charge a service fee."

Y'all. It does not magically cease being a reading fee if you slap a fancy name on it. You are still making money off your writers. If Submittable is that expensive, take your submissions via email. But don't charge writers and call it a convenience. It's a convenience for you, not the writers, so you should be paying for it. ("Charging for submissions but not paying for publication" is also distressingly common. At that point you're just a vanity press, thank you very much. If all I want is to see my stories out there, I can do that for free right here. Or get a Tumblr or something.)

There were a lot of posts going around about how being published is so much easier than you think because the bench at most literary magazines is just a bunch of mediocre white cis men and there aren't many submissions so it's not that hard to stand out from the pack, therefore submit! And looking at it now I'm like "Well, yes, because who has the money to pay all these submission fees?" It's certainly not anyone from the sort of marginalized background that impacts their ability to have a well-paying day job.

Why am I still doing this? Because I have found a few new markets that are reasonable, and I have some short stories that are a bit too literary (quite heavy on the stylism) for your average SFF magazine to be willing to publish.

As a sidenote, I discussed this with my visual artist coworker and she was shocked that there exists a world where you don't have to regularly pay submission fees, and then she was very interested in how that works. I'm really starting to think this has to do with "commercial" fiction versus "High Art." Even the language is different-- literary magazines give you an "honorarium" and SFF magazines just pay you. There's a lot more direct acknowledgement that yes, the cash is part of the point.

So I ordered a bunch of laptop chargers from eBay. They're "ships from California", which I take to mean they're probably not as snarled up in the current supply chain mess. Normally I try to have one spare one on hand, and then order a new one as soon as I've needed to start using the spare one.

I would like to not break a laptop charger every few months, but I have not yet figured out what I'm doing that causes this-- although I did figure out that I need the straight ones which are slightly more likely to break because they are much less likely, in the process of breaking, to break the laptop's pin. Chargers are replaceable; it's a lot harder to keep spare pins around. And then benign_cremator has to open up my laptop and it's completely out of commission until he has time and the part gets here. Having done it once, we'd both like to avoid having to do it again. So I'm using slightly more fragile chargers.

But why I am ordering a bunch now? Well, if supply chains are going to keep getting worse that's going to make it harder to get them; I want to have more on hand. (Which is to say, once they all arrive, I'm going to keep ordering a new one as the old one breaks-- it's just I'm going to have more than one spare one in the house at any given time in case that ends up taking months.)

I'm also making some effort to build a pantry, although that keeps getting foiled by things like not being able to go grocery shopping because of COVID exposure. (I suppose that would have been worse if I didn't have the half-built pantry to draw from.)

Other prepping: I am going to order a ruggedized cell phone now rather than in several months, which would be fine except that means I have to sit down and try to puzzle out which ones have the ability to run a GPS app-- they tend to focus more on the kinds of sensors you'd want on a job site and less on processing power. It's just I want one that's built to last, which is kind of the major selling point of a ruggedized phone. (And I have a strong desire for a Titan Unihertz-- not the Pocket, which doesn't exist yet, but the original-- because PHYSICAL KEYBOARD but I honestly can't tell if it can run a GPS app or not. The long Reddit analysis of it I found was more focused on whether it had the correct kind of tactile feedback as opposed to various models of Blackberry and apparently the camera is terrible. Which I care much less about.)

So one of the neat things Luna Station Quarterly does is they do author interviews with people who've been in the latest issue for their blog. Mine is up today! You can read it here. I talked a bit more about the genesis of the story and the writing process, and offered a few hints at what might have happened after the story ended.

Hey all! I have another semipro publication to add to my list: my short story "Gentle Ways to Kill a Dragon" is in this month's issue of Luna Station Quarterly.

You can read it for free at the link; I will append content warnings for rape and suicide. This is one of the first stories I wrote once I decided to start taking my career seriously and it's had kind of a long journey to getting published. I'm happy it found a home and that people will see it, because I do rather like it. It was born from my distaste with stories where the character has the big epiphany and finally talks about their trauma and then they're just... fine and completely past it; I wanted to write one where that doesn't happen.

It's time for my semiweekly rant about Friday's episode of Left Right and Center!

Though it's a very specific, very narrow rant this time, since the whole focus was Afghanistan, which I don't know a ton about and therefore can't get too outraged about inaccuracies for. But oh how I hate Elizabeth Bruenig.

Why was I listening to it, you ask, since I've not listened to it because of her before? Well, the right panelist was Megan McArdle and I do like her. I don't often agree with her, but there's always a sense that she came to her positions via actually thinking about them and that she's aware that the reality of governing involves actually building towards something. And she's not shy about where she disagrees with current Republican leadership. (The best weeks are when Megan McArdle and Christine Emba are on together; they work at the same newspaper and play off each other really well.)

Anyway, it's just one very specific moment I want to complain about now: Bruenig using the Afghan Army not fighting the Taliban as an example of Afghanis not loving freedom like we do. Because if they loved freedom they'd have fought. When it was pointed out to her that the Taliban's victory was basically inevitable and they decided they wanted to live to see their families again, she responded in so many words "See, that's not wanting freedom."

And I just... how is this woman still considered left?

Ars Technica has an article about... germ theory denialists.

And yes, sure, looking at the content it seems like it should be the same people who shop at Goop and we've known about their existence for a while, but the Goop people tend to be more New Age. I've interacted with a decent number of the New Age laying-on-of-hands people (because going about in the Wiccan community you can't really avoid meeting these people), and in my experience most of them actually don't deny the existence of germs. They add toxins on, and have very bad theories about the cause of things not obviously caused by germs, like chronic illnesses and cancer, but while they'll go for "naturally antibiotic plants" over "Big Pharma," they admit germs exist. Because you can sell people fancy charged garlic right alongside the toxin cleanses, if people believe both are a thing, and you make more money.

But the outright promotion of germ theory denial as a major subculture is new.

I got a beginner's Linux system administration book out of the library!

...it includes this in the introduction: "We assume you are already familiar with Microsoft Windows servers at a power user level or better. We assume that you are familiar with the terms (and some concepts) necessary to run a small-to-medium-sized Windows Network."

So at that point you're no longer a beginner. Their excuse is essentially "But y'see, you're a beginner at Linux." I'm pretty sure the principles of running a network are not so different from OS to OS that you're starting completely from scratch when learning a new one. And they don't think you are either, because they're assuming you have a lot of transferable knowledge. So not a beginner.

Then again, it also opens the introduction by quoting Linus Torvalds' introductory newsgroup post about Linux from 1991 which apparently included the phrase "when men were men and wrote their own device drivers," which tells you something about their angle right there.

This book is likely headed back to the library and I will skim our shelves for a more sensible one and probably wind up ordering from elsewhere.

Getting Mathfriend to look at the shelf and pull down suspect cookbooks instead of just looking at suspect ones I select yields a great many cookbooks that are definitely suspect on closer examination-- like the Irish cuisine book that appears to have taken all of its recipes from Irish country clubs and therefore looks nothing like what I think of when I think of Irish food. "Roasted Chicken Breasts with Smoked Salmon and Avocado Sauce" isn't... Irish. And it's a bit more dinner-party than I'd ever make myself. The book on Irish pub food looks much better and there are a few recipes in it that are just waiting for me to get the appropriate cut in the meat share. But then that one was acquired by one of the previous occupants of my second apartment, deliberately, and she just never got around to using it and left it behind when she moved out. I liberated a number of cookbooks when we all moved out of that apartment.

In addition to the bizarre Irish country club book, books deaccessioned today include a homemade pickles book which hasn't got anything I can eat, a "party nuts" book (which isn't useful because however associated with praline pecans I might have become, I'm not actually a big nut person-- it's just benign_cremator really loves pecans and praline is good for occasions that don't warrant a full-on pecan pie), the book with the low-fat cottage cheese cheesecake, and a tea book which has very few recipes at all and is mostly a lengthy look at different types of tea.

I've wound up, in weeding, making the distinction of "books I acquired on purpose" and "books I did not acquire on purpose." Now, the ones that weren't on purpose are still usually ones I purchased, but they were at a library sale where books were a dollar and I was trying really hard to build my cookbook collection. Or I found them in a Little Free Library. Or liberated what was left behind after roommates moved out. The ones that were acquired on purpose I sought out deliberately, them or something like them. Sometimes acquisition was still serendipitous, but I was looking for Specific Thing when I bought them. Sentimental value is a third category-- I will likely never use Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, but it was my mother's, so I keep it.

And then you get books like Cooking with Mr. Latte, which is less a cookbook than Sex and the City with food instead of shoes (with Mr. Latte being the Mr. Big equivalent, though Mr. Latte is much better at... any sort of human interaction... than Big), but it amuses me.

Mathfriend is suspicious of my "make your own mass-produced treats like hostess cupcakes" book (he spent a while trying to figure out what "Chikn in a Biskit" was), and I'm less attached to it now that we've established I can eat a lot of the things I was trying to figure out how to replace (and in general as my ability to create my own sweets has improved, mass-produced sweets have gotten less attractive), but I'm still going to try it first. That was one of the most on-purpose books in my collection.

We did try the cheesecake recipe from Wintersweet. I don't know how it tastes yet because you have to chill them for eight hours and before I do that I want the baking dish cool enough that I'm not worried about it exploding from thermal stress because stupid pyrex. I did finally acquire cake flour and superfine sugar-- Wegman's came through-- so I can now begin to contemplate recipes from Baking by Flavor. And I lost my white whole wheat flour to pantry moths. This does not appear to have spread to anything else, the contaminated flour has been removed from the house entirely, and tomorrow I must away to TAGS for more plastic containers.

Meanwhile, what I am eating tonight? Ramen with frozen spinach and frozen homemade meatballs. This is why I have ramen and meatballs-- because when you've spent a few hours making a cheesecake who wants to go make dinner?

Hey, look, I'm in a charity anthology!

Totally Tubular Terrors: A Collection of 1980s Themed Horror Tales which you can purchase here on Amazon.

The genesis of this anthology is kind of a funny story. Remember the probably-a-scam anthology advertising its expensive workshops in its rejection letter that I was complaining about a while back? A bunch of us in some of the locally-based horror writers' organizations realized we had a bunch of stories, written by people who we all know can write well, all on one very specific theme.

So we decided we'd put together a self-published anthology (Jenna Moquin took charge of organizing the practical parts and we are all very grateful to her) and donate the proceeds to charity.

It is, as you can see from the title, 1980s themed horror stories. Mine is a particularly librarian nightmare, featuring a librarian walking through a burned-out library and having to deal with... well, you'll see what she has to deal with. Things haunt dead stacks, I'm just saying.

Left, Right, and Center has changed up the panel again and so I'm back to listening to it. And they've currently got Megan McArdle, who is my favorite of their regular rotation of Republicans-- she's the only one who can consistently make me go "Yes, that is a point someone should consider." I don't often agree with her proposed solutions to these things, but I think about the points she raises.

And I do listen to this show because I want the weekly reminder that there are a lot of opinions in the country, many of which are people who don't agree with me.

That said, the show is fast shaping up into one that generally does badly on science. Hardly unusual for journalism-- even actual science journalism often gets science very, very wrong-- but it is a scientific fact that vaccines do not make the risk profile of COVID into something similar to the flu, which the center panelist (the center!) claimed in so many words in this week's episode. The correct policy response to the risk profile of COVID is a reasonable thing to debate (I tend to support stronger restrictions than anyone on the panel does) and thinking we should just pay the costs as a society of straight-up returning to normal is... well, terrible, but it's a political opinion... but it's disingenuous to base that on false descriptions of the science, especially with delta. And saying just blanket saying vaccines make it safe for kids to return to school and people saying otherwise is just hysteria is also ignoring a number of objective scientific facts-- kids can't be vaccinated yet and we know even vaccinated people can spread delta, so how, exactly, do you think vaccines are a silver bullet here?

If you want to make an argument that the risks of lost school are worse than the risks of COVID, well, there've been a number of people making that argument-- some of them even using actual research into mitigation strategies--but you need to acknowledge the base-level science and start from the correct premises.

"We're not seeing a lot of deaths from delta" is also disingenuous, because deaths are a lagging indicator. If there's no spike in a couple of months, then you can say it's not causing a ton of increased deaths.