There’s a Northwest Independent Writers’ Association event going on, so Anna has put two of the Free Court of Seattle works on sale – Faerie Blood, the novel, and “Blood of the Land,” the newest story. This is the series that Bone Walker accompanies as soundtrack, so it’s a good time to get a toe in if you’re on the budget.

And as part of that, I’m putting the digital download of Bone Walker for 40% off, if you use the discount code “niwa” – so if you don’t have the newest album yet? Now is a good time to get it.

Novel and short story details here, Bone Walker the album here, don’t forget “niwa” discount code.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

A couple of days ago, John Scalzi signed a 13-book deal worth 3.4 million dollars. That’s pretty good for somebody that the Sad Puppies like to claim nobody really wants to read, and pretty good for someone the puppies like to say writes only the sorts of things that nobody wants to read. Basically, they’ve been accusing “SJW” writers of driving readers out of fandom, and he’s a really poorly-chosen poster boy.

So that’s pretty funny, but not funny enough yet, because you know white supremacist and oberpuppyführer Vox Day would come up with some way to spin this, right? Of course he would. The thing is, there’s no way to do it which is not unintentionally hilarious, and Vox delivers. Seriously, this is some always-at-war-with-Eurasia spinning, wherein the new line is that Real Men Self-Publish, and that’s what’s Real Writing now, not this multi-million-dollar major-publishing-house bullshit. Self-pub is the only true pub.

NO, REALLY, THAT’S THE NEW PARTY LINE. That’s a We Hunted the Mammoth link, because I’m not in the mood to link to Vox under the best of circumstances, which I suppose really, these are. But there are extensive quotes at the link. Go look, it’s a riot.
 

Confused? Lots more on the Hugo Awards/Sad Puppies mess here.

So I bought a Colonial Raptor sticker that I found for sale online, but it wasn’t the adhere-inside kind, it was the adhere-outside kind, and not vinyl, so I don’t trust it in weather. But I found a place that will make inside-window static-clings for you for like $5 from your own art, so I converted it for that. And also changed the text layout. Anyway, it looks like this now:

I’m not sure that the slightly-offset circles thing reads as entirely intentional but I like it, it adds a hint of extra depth for me. The white parts will be transparent, so I hope the design actually shows up well. If not, eh, it wasn’t exactly a lot of money anyway.

I’ve never spent this much attention on a vehicle before, what is wrong with me? ＼☉～⚆ ／

Bee

Taken on the way home from one of several appointments yesterday. Nothing interesting, unfortunately. So, a flower picture it is. And a bee. Because BEES.

Skellington – one of my fiddlers from Bone Walker – was performing with her band, Pinniped, at Folklife and saw someone watercolour-painting her band at the show.

That artist turned out to be Ellen Eades, who was hammer dulcimer on the same project. They never met in studio, recording their tracks at completely different times, and Skellington only figured it out later, when she went searching for more of Ellen’s art online.

#150 player characters #millions of NPCs

I’ve been looking over music display apps for Android, and right now, I’m really liking MobileSheetsPro. I’ve been testing using the Free version, which is fully-featured but sharply limited on number of songs and playlists and set lists. Does anyone have any other software they’d like to suggest before I dive in?

(BEFORE YOU SAY IT, iPad users: forScore is not available for Android. Which I don’t mind – I’m not thinking of anything I’d want that MobileSheets doesn’t do, it does a lot of things I wouldn’t’ve thought of, and the features list vs. forScore is pretty comparable.)

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I’m already feeling a lot of confirmation about having bought this thing – the ability to have my entire music sheet library around on any gig and the ability to pull it up at any time, even stuff I never play? That’s pretty damn awesome. I’ll be able to have stuff always that I normally just don’t bother hauling around.

That would be the tablet I mentioned earlier.

Does anybody have any suggestions for Bluetooth page-turning pedals? I’m looking at the AirTurn PED at the moment, even though it’s a really new device. It’s small, it has fantastic battery life, it’s silent, it’s listed as supporting MobileSheetsPro, and is a Bluetooth SMART READY device, which means you don’t lose bluetooth sync across power saving mode. I like that part a lot.

One big question is whether this tablet supports SMART READY. But it claims to be Bluetooth 4.0, which means it should support SMART READY intrinsically. I have a question in to support to make sure. The odds are good – SMART READY has been around for a few years now and is pretty core to the 4.0 spec, so I don’t even think you can claim Bluetooth 4 without it.

Anyway, if you have any insights, I’d love to hear ’em! Let me know in comments. Thanks!

The Raptor has this huge cargo area in two-seater mode, larger than that of all but the largest SUVs. It’s also got a three-seat mode, which might actually be useful, as well as four and five (if one person is small) modes. Three-seat mode will be particularly useful for Leannan Sidhe gigs, since that’s usually a three-person band, and we’ll still have quite decent room for cargo in that configuration.

The vehicle comes with a cargo-area tray for all-seats configuration (again, in theory five, really four adults), but you can’t even buy something specifically made for two-seat mode. Even most universal cargo-area liners simply aren’t big enough, which is hilarious – all these SUV toys being too small for my Honda Fit Raptor, lol – but I found a one that was, and stared modifying it.

Pictures below the break…

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I’ve set up a redirect so that mobile users going to the front page from outside the site will, by default, go to the mobile version. But unlike with the blog (where I can’t do this because reasons), you can actually and properly exit to the desktop view – there’s a link at the bottom of the mobile page to do it.

It’s the same mobile version as the one you’d get by default if you went to the blog on mobile, so there’s not really much new. But I didn’t want to have to add a “go to mobile” link on the front page or anything, so this seemed like an adequate solution for now.

Anyway, if you’re curious:

Browser-dependent: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Forced desktop: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/index

Mobile front page: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/mobile-home

That’s not perfect because the mobile front page will be shown as a desktop blog page but with mobile content if you go there from desktop, because again reasons.

Next version won’t do that sort of foolishness, but that can wait a couple of years – I hope!

It’s been a while since I posted a flower picture, so here y’go. This was taken on a hillside above the Oregon coast.

I’ve been reading a lot of Shit People Say to Women Directors, a tumblr blog on the deep and endemic sexism in the US film and television industry. It consists of things said to women trying to work in the industry, as is implied by the label on the tin, and it’s pretty often pretty brutal.

And we all know how bad the sexism is in gaming, and more specifically, the computer gaming industry, which makes me think there ought to be another blog called Shit People Say To Women In Gaming. This anonymous post at The Trenches could be the first entry.

In mid-2011 I applied for a localization testing position in Birmingham, UK. I have 2 years of translation experience and plenty of good references, so I knew my chances were good (I want to be part of the industry and I don’t care which end I get in). I sent in my CV and received an email back on the same day with a date and time for a phone interview. I was through the roof, you have no idea how long I had been trying to get into the industry. …

Interviewer: Look, madam, I will be frank with you, I don’t actually believe you want this job.
Me: (very stunned) No?
Interviewer: No, I don’t believe your interest in the gaming industry is genuine as a woman.

Go read the whole thing, it actually manages to get worse. And keep in mind: this is a testing position, one of the relative refuges for women in software, in recent years. Imagine the odds of getting a callback for a woman in dev.

eta: And this can be the second post.