Matthew Hurst

Environment Canada has Very Precise knowledge of snow

I just watched the BBC Celebrity one, and it was laced with celebs getting emotional and saying how cruel and emotional it was (they were paid UKP40k each btw), but you know - it’s just a game. A wildly camp game. With a huge production crew around them. And lest we forget, nobody gets killed. They get given a piece of paper, saying ‘your work here is done’ and they go home to their families. Nobody is being kind, nobody has anything to feel guilty about. These are people who perform on TV for a living performing on TV to be paid. With (mostly) their mates.

And it’s not about the psychology. Anyone with ten minutes attention to the study of human interactions knows we’re terrible at spotting liars. There no interactions we don’t see. Nobody has enough information to make any judgements about anything.

It’s all entirely arbitrary. The hysteria reminds me of the ancient Noel Edmonds ‘game’ show, Deal Or No Deal, with its bullshit about odds. There were no odds. Every single round was a straight 50/50 guess.

I understand that isolating a bunch of people in a house can result in those people getting some kind of group hysteria but let’s not overstate it: the Stanford Prison Experiment was largely fake, let’s remember. But FFS, this was a silly, camp game show. Calling it cruel, stewing in manufactured ‘guilt’, or pretending it offers some kind of psychological insight is just TV’s usual self aggrandisement.

Good audiobook, terrible reader. So far she’s mispronounced antipodean, MI6 (as M16, twice), frequent, Grosvenor and idyll. Does nobody check this stuff? #bookstodon #booksky

Little writing prompt left on our front lawn one morning…

Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great questions. 2. We know you just mean ‘ohhhh pick me, I can answer that one’. 3. It’s patronising. Just answer the question. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Projection ‘tells’ #764: One of Trump’s favourite superlatives is ‘like you wouldn’t believe’. No, OrangeToddler, we would not believe.

I had a ghost story idea cycling in France during the hottest summer there for years. I finished it a couple of years later in Canada during the coldest winter for years. Now it’s going to be on the www.kaidankaistories.com podcast next spring. Expect updates #writing #iamwriting

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?