Notices by Steven Hoefer (troublewithwords@wandering.shop)

Well, that was a terrifying read.

Suni and Butch talk about thrusters going out as they approach the space station.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/

Catch-22 but Yossarian's just trying to log into a website.

Speech-to-text is converting all mentions of "cow's milk" to "cosmic" and this is very good.

A glove has blown in front of your door. It is a rather nice left glove. It's not your size, and its a bit dirty from its mysterious travels.

What would you do with it?

Would you try to reunite it with its pair? If so, how?

My dad when I was a kid: "Don't do anything that would prevent you from becoming President or a priest."

Me, 2025: *dead stare*

I have not retooted
the toot
that had
an image

and which
you were probably
hoping
I'd share

Forgive me
it was excellent
except it had
no image description.

@mattl Didn't expect to find those there. Thank you.

Anyone want to give me a job where I can be proud of doing the work you ask me to do, I'll respect the people I work with, and they'll respect me?

I can learn pretty much anything you need me to do, and do it well. Touching words and computers are my forte, but I've done everything from audio/video production to illustration and construction.

At this point I will work cheap if you hit the points above. Ideally 20-30 hours a week.

#getHired #fediHire

Since 1996 I've done work for Microsoft, Marvel, Sega, Sony, Lucasfilm, and many, many more I've forgotten.

I can't do that work anymore. It's destroying my soul. I'm literally happier doing gig work getting less than minimum wage than I would be working for any of the above.

I'm looking for a small group of good people for whom I can solve real problems for for a bit of money.

Is the groundhog not happy any other day?

#WritersCoffeeClub Jan 30: "Do secondary characters sometimes get promoted to main characters?"

Not officially, but it does help to think of every character as the main character of their particular story, even if that's not the primary story I'm telling.

I remain a big fan of RSS.
If you're unable to cut yourself off from news, consider consuming it through an RSS reader. It won't give precedence to the most hyped/outrageous/most visited/most sponsored news. It's all just in the order it was published, all articles look pretty much the same.

A kindness you can do for other folks on this network of people is to add a content wrapper (CW) to your agitation and rage. A lot of folks are dancing around the edge of panic, about the state of the world today. It would be particularly ironic if it was a comrade that cracked them lose into terror and despair.

It should be C,S,V, not CSV.

@squishymage42 Excellent point! For folks who are comfortable with git and want to know how they might make a nicely formatted ebook, or non-technical folks who want a decent manual of style, the section “For People Wanting to Produce A New Ebook” at the link below has all the resources.

https://standardebooks.org/contribute

Standard Ebooks dropped a bunch of beautifully formatted books newly in the public domain today.

Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” and “The Dain Curse” defined hard-boiled detectives. But also Agatha Christie, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Mahatma Gandhi…

(Standard Ebooks is Project Gutenberg with editing and typesetting. They also have an RSS feed for new releases!)

https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2025

@RikerGoogling Beneficent Cumberscrunge played the titular character in the British mystery crime drama television series Spurlock Helms.

UK-related followers:

There's a person from Oxford University pronouncing "alumni" as "ee-loo-min-nai" and I feel like I'm being pranked. Is this an acceptable pronunciation?

(Latin speakers need not apply, H and I had a long talk about that.)

Still playing with https://novelwriter.io/

It's more for people who write Markdown in plan text instead of WYSIWYG, but has the lifesaving Scrivener-style of breaking big works up into small documents. (After writing a book this way you'll never want to write one in Word again.)

I'll try to post a better review later, but I've had trouble getting spell check to work. And it's so freeing! No red underlines, just write, don't look back!

I don't need graphics better than Halflife 2.

Put that energy into making more games, more interesting games, more polished games, more experiments. More games that you can play with less computing.

Less fleets of artists working on pixel perfect blades of grass that can only be seen on a 80" TV from 2 feet away, if you pause and squint. There's no fun in making it, it doesn't add to the world, its just exists to sell the new hardware. PS3 is just as fun as PS5.