The accent tile has got to be completely dry before I can put a tile above it, or it crushes the mesh and shoves them together.
The accent tile is not dry. It’ll take another hour before I’m comfortable.
My mortar is not going to last another hour, and I’m out of mortar. As it is 8 PM on a Sunday, I cannot acquire more mortar at this time.
Which means it’s going to take ANOTHER GODDAMN DAY TO GET MY TILE DONE.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHH.
(There’s a weird optical illusion on the left side of the image, where it looks like some of the tiles are either totally the wrong size or cut in weird places. Not the case. it’s the reflection of the grout lines on the tile on the side facing the shower faucet.)
The house is clean, at least to the extent that if strangers enter it they would not wonder how we live here and still maintain our basic humanity. I can live with that.
Got this in the mail yesterday. Fascinatingly, it was sent to Luther Siler— who, remember, isn’t a real person– at my actual physical address. The number of organizations that can pair his name with my address are… limited. And I am not happy with them.
This is page 3 of a three-page letter; I’m not going to bother reproducing the first two. If you happen to get this in the mail, you should throw it the hell away.
Before we start, the first page is a fake check for $601. Their “Ultimate Publishing Package” costs $1600, meaning that with their “discount” you’re only spending nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars of your money– before they make you a single dime, and as we’ll see it’s going to be more than that anyway.
Let’s walk through this “offer” bit by bit, shall we?
100 Printed Copies of Your Book. This is the meat of the offer, because printed copies of books are expensive. A thousand dollars divided by a hundred copies is only $10 each! Except paperbacks generally cost $7-8 to buy, and… oh, wait, if you look at the description, this is assuming your book is only fifty pages long, and books longer than that will incur additional costs. Skylights was about 450 pages; most genre novels nowadays are in the 300 range at least. I’m guessing by the time the additional charges are added in for your $10, 50-page book, you’re only getting 20-25 of them if you don’t cough up more money. Why am I assuming that the rest of their services wouldn’t cost money? Because most of them don’t. Note that there is no mention of shipping cost, which I have no doubt will be passed on to you. Continue on:
Cover Design. Okay, this can be expensive, I’ll admit. But they include no examples of their work, and I’m guessing that it’s going to be shoddy based on the rest of the flyer.
Interior Page Layout. Not actually that hard, and takes an hour.
ISBN Number with Bar Code. If you’re buying ISBNs in small batches, they can be expensive– I spent $295 for a batch of 10. Left out of this is that this organization is probably buying them in batches of 1000 or 10,000 at significantly lower cost– and that it lists them as your publisher, since they own the ISBN. Bar code registration is, like, $15.
Library of Congress Control Number. Free.
Publicity Kit. Costs some money, but not much; note that no information about paper quality or color is given, and note that this shit is just mailed to you, probably charging you for shipping in the process. I don’t know who the hell I might mail five hundred goddamn postcards to about my book, and the types of people who use this sort of service are not likely to be doing in-store signings where they might pass out bookmarks.
One National Press Release. Note that you write the press release, and that that’s all it is– just a press release, which compels no one to write about your shitty little book. I looked up costs at PRWeb, and for one person buying one “Standard” press release is $159. I am certain that their costs are substantially cheaper.
Author Website (Plus One Year’s Hosting). This is especially hilarious; they’ll set up a WordPress site for you! Wow! That’s free! And a year of hosting at GoDaddy will run you next to nothing, especially since they’re probably registering an impossibly specific domain name that no one wants. Note that they don’t promise a .com site; just a “custom URL.”
Online Bookstore Set-up. They’ll “list” your book on their site, pay you 80% of sales, and charge you $9.95 a month to maintain a fucking link. So the minimum cost of this “Ultimate Publishing Package” just went from $999 to $1118.40, assuming your “book” is only fifty goddamn pages long. This is pretty clearly a POD outfit, so there is literally nothing being stored in their “warehouse.”
The Square (credit card reader system for smartphones.) Is free! Go ahead, sign up for one here.
Expert Consultation and Personal Project Manager. They have a phone line; you can call a dude. They have a curious definition of “unlimited basis,” too, since I’m pretty certain if I need my Personal Project Manager at three in the morning he ain’t gonna answer the phone.
Fuck these folks, and I seriously want to have a word with whoever sold them my address. If you get mail from them, throw it away. They’re assholes.
So I wanted, for no good reason, to Tweet a particular line from a particular song, and I couldn’t quite piece together the words. When one of the words in a song sounds like “mack-a-dang-dang,” and your ears are old and getting bad like mine are, you look them up.
So I tried to look them up. Finding words to songs has never actually been difficult; this is among the easier Google searches in the world. However, for some reason, when the artist’s name is Lyrics Born, finding the lyrics to his song suddenly gets real complicated, especially when the song is called Knock Knock and there are a bunch of songs by that name already. Note that I still can’t actually find the lyrics anywhere– I have found a few videos and several places to stream the song, but not the actual lyrics. Even my usual lyrics sites, usually on the top in the Google searches, have failed me.
(Resist the urge to be a smartass and find them; that’s not the point.)
Anyway, here’s what I thought I was hearing:
The name is Lyrics Born, AKA mackadangdang
Live from the 0-1-5 doing my thang thang
Silly, right? Sure. LB has some impressively complicated songs, “Knock Knock” isn’t one of them. It was running through my head and I wanted to Tweet it. But I could not make “mackadangdang” turn into a phrase I understood. But it sounded pretty clear, right?
What the hell; I googled “mackadangdang.” A few minutes and some spelling variations led me to this:
You would think this would end the story, with me sheepishly realizing I was officially and irrevocably an Old and that there were words that The Kidz were using that I knew nothing of.
No.
Instead of Tweeting the silly line from the silly song that was in my head and giving my followers an essentially meaningless Tweet to skip over and not read, I Tweeted this:
Wait, “maka-dang-dang” is an actual slang term? GOD I’M OLD. @lyricsborn
For months, an individual or individuals has been using anonymous, untraceable burner accounts to post gifs of violent pornography in the discussion section of stories on Jezebel. The images arrive in a barrage, and the only way to get rid of them from the website is if a staffer individually dismisses the comments and manually bans the commenter. But because IP addresses aren’t recorded on burner accounts, literally nothing is stopping this individual or individuals from immediately signing up for another, and posting another wave of violent images (and then bragging about it on 4chan in conversations staffers here have followed, which we’re not linking to here because fuck that garbage). This weekend, the user or users have escalated to gory images of bloody injuries emblazoned with the Jezebel logo. It’s like playing whack-a-mole with a sociopathic Hydra.
This complaint was ridiculed in some circles. No, I won’t link them. The ridicule seemed to be based on the propositions that (1) it’s silly to think that Gawker should be responsible for what some third-party troll is doing to its employees, and (2) it’s silly to be upset by that sort of thing….
I have been at work before 7:15 AM every day this week.
Last night, I was up well past midnight monitoring events in Ferguson, MO on Twitter and trying not to let the grief and rage make me lose my goddamn mind.
I have things to say about this. I’m going to try to not say them here.
The night before, I deliberately woke myself up at 3:00 in the morning so that I could go outside and watch for meteors. I saw a few, but not really enough to make up at 3 AM a bright idea.
I have not written a word of fiction in weeks and have not been in bed at a reasonable hour in… well, a while.
I am fixing both of those things tonight if it kills me.
In this post, I discussed the findings of a scientifically incontrovertible study (of myself) on the factors which influenced me when buying a self-published book.
The findings surprised me (which surprised me, because I was surveying myself). I found that I knew what made me buy a self-published book when it was in front of me, but not what put that book in front of me, unless I was browsing by genre (e.g. today I feel like reading a romance set in Ulaanbaatar: therefore I will now search specifically for such a story).
It was still hard to know what put those books in front of my eyes in order to buy them; to quote one of the commenters on that post – this is the thorny issue of “discoverability”. How will we find these books in the first place?
So I did the unthinkable, and asked some other people…
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