Our plan is to publish science fiction and fantasy stories. You can read our planning blog here: https://blog.elegantlich.com/
We spent some time looking into creating an Illinois LLC, but are currently leaning against that idea. It would be a lot of work to get it all done and to keep the paperwork right going forward. And although (in Illinois) it wouldn’t be too terribly expensive, it would still cost a large fraction of the cost of putting out an issue of the magazine. So instead we’re thinking we just won’t call it a business, but rather just a hobby. There are some things we wouldn’t want to do if it’s just a hobby (such as sell stuff), but it’ll save us time, money, and trouble.
Our tentative cover art is by Hermann Paul, who did this woodcut as well:
Normally I want to respond to every report that suggests that cannabis has very few studies backing up its effectiveness to point out, “That’s because doing such a study was illegal for most of the past century.” But this time I’ll just say, “Point to a few approved drugs with ‘real benefits’ that aren’t ‘limited to only a few conditions.'”
A major review finds medical cannabis widely overestimated and potentially risky, with real benefits limited to only a few conditions.
I’m not so sure that there isn’t some hay to be made around insisting that AI firms should be distributing half their profits to the writers whose works they stole to train their models, but I also agree with Cory that it’d be a mistake to do that in a way that broke using the internet to provide citations for dictionaries.
If you’re interested, like I am, in how and why copyright might not be the best tool for helping writers make a living writing, you’ll definitely want to read Cory’s latest at Pluralistic:
The AI copyright fight isn’t being fought to protect your wages – it’s being fought to see whether your lost wages end up in the pockets of a tech boss or a media boss.
My brother @stevendbrewer, (who shared this with me) and I are not AI natives, or even AI immigrants. I guess we’re AI foreigners. Maybe AI refugees.
(My brother warns me “People get offended when you say ‘refugee,'” so I was all, “Ooh! I’ll post that immediately!” He claims to be more an AI refusenik, while suggesting that I’m more AI-curious.)
If you have a podcast, no one can disable it. You can host it anywhere, and if your host makes you stop, you can just get another host and point your URL there. Anyone can listen to it. All they need is a podcast app. Or even just a web browser. No one can stop you from posting episodes, and no one can stop your listeners from listening to them.
But that’s only true if you have a podcast. If you have a YouTube channel instead…. Well, in that case, YouTube can stop you.
It rained yesterday, but not all the time. I was able to get Ashley out in the gaps pretty well. After raining all night, it seemed it was going to rain all morning as well.
I offered Ashley a chance to go out on the patio, and she declined. A bit later, after she indicated that she really wanted to go out. I put on my raincoat and put the leash on her and tried to take her out the front door, but she wasn’t having it. Just a few minutes later, she came and told me she needed to go out, so I tried again, and this time I actually dragged out out the door, into the rain. But No. She went about three feet out the door, then solid turned around and headed right back.
It was a classic case of Ashley wanting to go outside, but not to the outside that actually existed. She wanted me to take her to some other outside.
So I went back to my laptop and my third coffee (twice set aside, but still warm enough) and waited for the rain to let up a little. And it did let up a little, and I got Ashley out then.
We saw an opossum! He was a Very Handsome fellow, with a white face, a naked pink tail, and sleek counter-shading on his body, (I think the sleekness may have come from being very wet.)
Ashley, of course, wanted to play with the possum, and we chased it back and forth (the possum going through the shrubs next to the building, and us going around the shrubs). At some point the possum managed to get out of sight long enough for me to drag Ashley away.
By then the rain had gotten hard again, so Ashley let me take her home, where I did my best to dry her off. But as you can see, my efforts were only partially successful.
There is a flood warning. I’m always a little amused by flood warnings in Central Illinois, because it is so, so flat here. Yes, it is flooding. The little creek is over its banks, sorta. But as soon as it gets over the top of its banks, the water just spreads out. Before it could get high enough to threaten my house (a few feet above creek level), the water would have to flood literally thousands of acres all around us.
I really like summer. I even like the heat, but I especially like long, sunny days. However, even for me, the longest days of summer are kinda. . . . long.
What’s perfect is the day length in, let’s say, July. When the sun rises no later than 6:00 AM, there’s daylight to wake me up when I want to get up. And when the sun sets around 8:00 PM, it gets dark right around the time I’m ready to wind down ahead of getting ready for bed.
As we head on to mid-August, though, although the temperatures are still fine, I’m no longer so happy with the sunrise and sunset times. Today the sun didn’t rise until 6:04, which isn’t much after 6:00, but is a sign of the approaching dark days. Similarly, it’s been a full week since the sun was still up at 8:00 PM—another sign.
This morning I realized that I should refer to these two things—sunrise after 6:00 AM, and sunset before 8:00 PM—as two horsemen of the Darkpocalypse.
Back in the days when I had to work in an office, this mid-August transition would ruin the fall for me. I’d get so wrapped up in dreading the winter, that I couldn’t enjoy the objectively great conditions of the second half of August, all of September, and usually most of October as well. It was very sad to have nearly a quarter of the year ruined that way.
I should probably add a “darkpocalypse” tag, and go back and put them on all my posts about SAD.
Horsemen traditionally travel in groups of four, but if there are two more, I haven’t identified them yet.
One point the opinion piece makes is that the one bright spot in the economy—the stock market—is actually (in line with what I’ve been saying about how the markets and the business news have this all completely wrong) a “severe systemic risk.”
