Matthew Hurst

Turns out writing short stories is addictive. Just finish this next one and then I’ll get back to my official WIP. I really will. I promise. #writingcommunity #iamwriting

Just finished a pretty close-to-done first draft of a the thing I’ve got earmarked for Emerald City Ghosts ghost story mag. Still going to leave it at least overnight to catch the inevitable typos and other cludginess. #writingcommunity #writing

Got my first short story acceptance today. First one I wrote too (although after 40 years of writing other things for a living, I’d like to think I have some idea what I’m doing…). Will brag about it more when I know the date it’s coming out, etc. #writingcommunity #writing #shortstory #horror

Someone explain to me what’s so great about a bunch of celeb wannabes LARPing Agatha Christie? #TheTraitors #RealityTV

Beware of the German shepherd. Not a dog. An actual German shepherd.

Sometimes I’m just in the wrong mood when I listen to a musician for the first time, so I like to go back and listen again months later. I just tried #Coldplay again, and still nope. I’m sure #chrismartin is a lovely man, but his music is still shit and bland. #musicsky

Sometimes music journalism really doesn’t help itself, does it, Rootsworld: “their music is characterized by the two of them harmonizing vocally while accompanying themselves on a metre-long 42-string Estonian zither known as a kannel, closely related to the Finnish kantele.” #musicsky

I say ‘thing’ because it’s a serial, and yet… more than just a bunch of chapters delivered to a schedule. There’ll be collateral, or assets, or whatever we want to call them, but they’re also very much part of the story and not random bits of ‘worldbuilding’. If I was the sort of person who used the term ‘leaning in’, I’d say it was leaning in to Substack’s very soul.

I’ll be uploading some bit of things to set it up between now and November, and more as I go along.

Sign up here at fupperynewsletter.substack.com (all free, natch), and check out my existing writing on stubsackfiction.substack,com

Genuine question for indie authors as I’m thinking about an ‘author’s newsletter’. Not to be rude, but it would surprise me if anyone gave a fig about my ‘process’. Do you get much traction for posts about how you’ve had a great/terrible/random week’s writing?

I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my dualbooting laptop with my data in its own partition, so LibreOffice on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux are accessing the same files. Then I want those files from that partition to sync to the cloud, whether I’m using Linux or Windows.

Not feeding AI, and keeping my stuff private in general would be great, but at this point I’m ready to settle for ‘Just Works’ which seems to be beyond the abilities of any cloud services.

Here’s my experience:

• OneDrive: takes over Windows and doesn’t have proper sync on Linux
• iCloud: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app
• Google: uses weird strings of characters for filenames in Linux to work with them, and this screws up access from other systems. Also, it’s Google.
• @pCloud : in Linux, doesn’t automount, and when it does mount, frequently doubles up. Flakey integration with file managers.
• Filen: flakiness in general and similar mounting problems. Plus the company doesn’t seem the stablest.
• Mega: persistently duplicating files by uploading them from both Linux and Windows, effectively halving my available space and introducing syncing issues. Their support is currently being slow and obtuse.
• Dropbox: horrendously expensive
• Box: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app

I want to use Linux, because it’s a Good Thing, but it seems to be the weak link here. If I didn’t use Linux, then OneDrive, iCloud, Google and Box would be fine. Probably the others too.

And no, not gonna self host or spend ages tweaking bash scripts on Linux. That sounds like even more of a nightmare.

#Linux

It is a dead parrot.

The other thing that’s putting me off Linux at the moment is the flakey cloud services. Theoretically, Ubuntu’s Network package should make it seamless with the big ones like Google but it does weird shit with filenames in practice, and seems inconsistent with offline access. I’ve tried pCloud, Filen and MEGA and they all have some combination of not mounting, not unmounting, duplicating mounts, costing stupid amounts, and seeming a bit flakey as a company.

I just want something I can set up and forget about. I don’t have the time, nerdy fanaticism or patience to mess around with scripts, rsync and rclone, and from what I’ve seen they need regular tending too. For the same reason, I’m not selfhosting.

Whereas on Windows (and Mac, when I used one), OneDrive, Google, iCloud, Box, and MEGA (and many others) Just Work and integrate seamlessly.

Yes I know MS, Google, Apple et al put obstacles in the way of small developers, and open source by its nature is full of plucky fighter for Free As In Speech And Beer - but still. I don’t want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync in the command line to get it to work.

Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the less exploitative sounding ‘colleague’ does not make this woman my colleague. I do not work with her. #asda #uk #TimesRadio

Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity

Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many ways the free-est country in the world flip into authoritarian Fascism in a few months. It’s going to change everything in the same way the fall of Communism did.

I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for synching mostly documents and photos across devices, and as an offsite backup. Not scraping for AI would be good, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What I definitely need is synching and mounting automatically. I mostly work on Win11 or Linux Mint laptop but being able to get at documents sometimes on my iPad and occasionally on my iPhone would be useful.

Currently, I’m using …

• Google Drive (100g) - works smoothly across Windows and iOS but flakey on Linux. Plus it’s, you know, Google.
• iCloud (50g) - Great on my iOS devices, integrates okay with Win 11, but clunky to the point of useless on Linux.

I also have an old legacy Box account.

I’ve tried pCloud but found it flakey in terms of mounting problems, and slow to update at times. It’s also a bit small and new which worries me when it comes to data security.

I’ve used OneDrive through employers in the past, but it seemed two chunky and corporate for my liking, and at one point it just didn’t have synching between devices. You had to reupload another file. I think they’ve got over that now but still not keen.

Currently giving Mega a trial because it looks to be best integrated across the various OSes.

Anyone have Thoughts?

Just finished the vomit draft of quick side-project short story that was only going to be a couple of thousand words then back to the main gig. Quick side project is currently 9500 words. Anyhow, put it away for a week then I’ll come back to do some rewriting. #writingcommunity #amwriting

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

As a recidivist 80s nerd who spent high school in what we were pleased to call ‘the computer room’, I’m loving Halt And Catch Fire on ITV. It’s a fictionalised version of microcomputers in the 80s where people invent the internet on Commodre 64s.

Breaking news: the new head of MI6 (C) got started with spying when she was given the Usborne KnowHow Book Of Spycraft. I too have this book and memorised it as a kid. When is it my turn to be C?

Trump’s been outplayed by Putin, Netanyahu and every other world leader because he’s all ego and bluster and not very bright. All he has left is lying to his base