Hurrah! Finishing 2025 with another story accepted. Started writing stories this year, wrote 4, published 4. Thank you @pulpasylum.bsky.social, Macabre Magazine, Freedom Fiction and Kaidanki podcast. Freedom Fiction is here, the rest hit the streets next year. #horror #reading #thriller #amwriting
Another story finds a publisher - a ghost story with an eccentric old musician, North Norfolk, and old recording tech. I mean vastly hugely mindboggling old. You might thing it’s a long way back to a DX7, but that’s just peanuts to this tech. More as I get it. #writingcommunity #horror #horrorsky
Little writing prompt left on our front lawn one morning…
Beware of the German shepherd. Not a dog. An actual German shepherd.
It is a dead parrot.
So this was the other Saturday. Both car and dude are normal size, but my iPhone did weird things.
I used to be a local journalist in East Anglia, UK, and I thought the whole Byline network was a really good idea - a model for funding grassroots, often investigative reporting, holding local councils to account, etc.
According to their website:
“We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in East Anglia and beyond.
East Anglia Bylines is a trading brand of Bylines Networks Limited which is separate to, but allied with, Byline Times.”
However, this was on their East Anglia Bylines BlueSky account this morning. (pic also attached).
And their website is full of similar slop: https://eastangliabylines.co.uk
It’s Reach PLC style indiscriminate ‘bung it out everywhere for social media clicks’. Much as I hate the orange manchild, this has nothing in particular to do with East Anglia, or what Byline was set up to do.
Have they been taken over? Are there VCs starting to tighten their financial leash? What’s going on? Have they been hacked?
On the lake
Got some CDs
I’m spending far too much time recently figuring out my best options for writing apps across a bunch of platforms, and having finally been forced to tabulate my findings for my own benefit, though I might as well stick them as a blogpost.
Table below, for the impatient, but for the more patient, some context:
I’m mostly Apple-based (iPhone, iPad, Mac Mini) but for the next few months a lot of my writing and other work type things will be on a Chromebook, for various reasons. (Old basic iPad with a Logitech keyboard just about scrapes by as an emergency pseudo-laptop, but only just).
Getting a Macbook would make compatibility a lot simpler but I can’t really justify one when a Chromebook does everything I need for a quarter of the price, if I can live with some minor complications.
I have no strong views about OSes/open sourceness/proprietary software, but Windows seems to be going through an awful phase at the moment, so I’d rather avoid it. Similarly, I’m a bit cautious about anything corporate American because who knows what’s going to happen there. I’m not fanatically anxious about AI, but it would be nice to avoid being scraped and intruded on if I can.
I’m generally able to get online but I want to be able to be able to work offline if necessary.
So I looked at what my options were, and these are them. Obviously there are other criteria but these are the important ones to me. Judgements are subjective, of course.
In the unlikely event anyone reads this, I’d welcome your thoughts.
Snowy, innit.
When I log into iCloud in Chrome I get a weird serif font in Reminders. On the other iCloud account, same browser, literally logging out of one account and into another, I get the right design. I’ve cleared the cache, logged in and out, and the wrong font has persisted for months. Thoughts?
I asked it to collate contact names from public websites like LinkedIn and employee profile pages. But it can’t use that dataset. It can make up researchers, departments and institutions and only admit it when you point this out.
I’m only getting scared of AI when it stops recommending I buy a Very Expensive Thing because I just bought an identical one.