Jules Jones's Blog

80 years on, and the numbers of those who remember first hand are dwindling. I listened to the stories of those who were very young then, and thought of my own parents, born during the war. The effects ripple down the years, in things like the phrase "my parents were war babies" used by many in my age group to explain our dislike of food waste.

Lest we forget; for as the King reminded us in a very pointed speech this evening, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and the evidence of that is all too obvious around us.

comments

There was a fountain pen meet at Eastercon, at which assorted pens and inks got handed round for people to try out. A couple of mine proved popular, so putting here what I'd brought along with me. The Y1 was already inked, the others were inked at the meet with one of the Diamine samples. If I'd had any sense I'd have done a better job of recording which samples...
(  Details  )

comments

Had a great time, even if my assorted medical problems mean I have to pace myself. A con report may or may not be forthcoming - II finished writing up the Worldcon report months ago, and have yet to actually post it. That's one of the jobs for this week - I took the whole week off from work in case I came back with Covid and/or sundry other con cruds.

comments

Arriving Thursday and leaving Monday, subject to plague, volcanic ash, etc etc. Note that I currently have eyesight problems and can't be relied on to recognise people at any distance. I'm not ignoring anyone. :-)

Not on Twitter anymore. Mastodon is julesjones @mendeddrum.org and I may or may not have managed to install Bluesky on my phone by the time I leave home - if I have it's julesjones

Unlike many of my friends I am not on a panel, so you won't be able to find me by turning up to a panel I am on. You probably won't even find me by turning up to my friends' panels, because much as I would like to go to them I'll have to take regular breaks to rest in my room and will inevitably miss quite a few bits of con I'd like to go to.

comments

It's the first day of the new session of PicoWriMo, a small comm on LiveJournal for those of us who like the idea of a month of community support in achieving writing goals, but aren't up to 50 kwords. I'm sad that I won't be taking part as I'm travelling for most of March, but hoping to get at least something done in the last week if I'm not too jet-lagged.

Alas, the thing I finished last time was the synopsis for a submission package. I had then located an agent who looked like the right agent for me, and prepped the package to submit to them. I discovered that I had to name some books that mine was like as part of the submission process, so will need to actually find and read some m/m/f contemporaries with middle class meets aristocrat. I was about to do that when the world, or at least the US, went to hell in a handbasket. The agent is non-binary and lives in the US...

comments

Opened Notepad and found the raw text file from a thread I posted to Mastodon and Bluesky a while back about Silicon Valley's "all your data are belong to us" attitude. It probably bears reposting here in light of the ongoing IP theft in the service of AI companies profiting off other people's work.


When I say some of my tee shirts are old enough to vote, I'm not just talking about con shirts. Today's from the "slobbing around the house" drawer is "Google Gave Me a Gig" from the launch of GMail on 1 April 2004. I lived in Silicon Valley for a while, and knew people who worked at Google when Google handed out tee shirts to the employees to hand out to their friends as advertising, and the official company motto was still "Don't be evil". :-) And they even believed it...

Back in the day my friends couldn't understand why authors were upset with them about Google's new programme of digitising books that were in copyright and making them freely available. I tried to explain. "But we asked the publishers!" I explained publishers didn't own the rights and couldn't give them permission. They didn't get it. They were all from a "publish or perish" technical/academic background where you pay publishers for the privilege of your learned paper being published in a (hopefully) respected journal. Their mindset simply couldn't encompass the idea of publishers paying authors and not the other way around.

I somewhat snarkily asked when Google was going to publish Google's proprietary software and architecture. Apparently that was different. And this wasn't just self-serving. They really, truly could not understand that most fiction and a lot of non-fiction isn't work-for-hire.

There was also, of course, the problem that a lot of the big publishers had said words to the effect of "Are you ...ing crazy?" But those publishers were just selfish and short-sighted. Because Google wasn't evil, and information wants to be free, and they were doing the human race a great service by making it so. And if it got eyeballs and advertising revenue to google.com then that was only fair in return for their humanitarian service.

And these weren't stereotypical techbros. They were generally very nice people. Just a little... tunnel-visioned.

No, I'm not in the least bit surprised that Google steals every last bit of personal information it can find, and I haven't been for twenty years.

comments

I took the the week off after Worldcon earlier this month, and one of the things I did was maintenance on a handful of my fountain pens. This included a Paili 013 vacuum filler. The resulting thread in the #fountain-pens channel on the Anonymous Claire Discord server is under the cut. I also took photos of the dismantling and promised to put them on Dreamwidth. There are no photos of the writing sample, in part because I don't post photos of my handwriting where it could link fannish name with wallet name, but mostly because the thing didn't actually like writing. I don't know how much of that was because I didn't really know how to use a vacuum filler properly - there is a thing where you have to unscrew the blind cap slightly in order to let ink out again when you want to write. But even when I tried that it wouldn't do a lot of writing. From the reviews I've seen there seems to be a quality control issue, and I obviously got one of the duds.

I bought this because I don't have a vacuum filler fountain pen, and I wanted to play with one, and this was a whopping £6 including p&p for one, or even cheaper per pen if you bought three. That's not a lot of money lost if it doesn't work. Alas, it didn't do the writing part of the job, although I did get to play with the filling mechanism. It's a demonstrator and I deliberately bought the clear one rather than one of the coloured transparent ones so that I could watch what it did. That was fun. :-)

This one went in the bin, partly because there was a crack that was probably my doing in the effort to clean it out. At that price I'd definitely consider getting another one in the hope of winning the quality control lottery, but I already have a lot of other cheap pens to play with first.

(  Dismantling the pen  )
(  Commentary on Anonymous Claire  )

comments

 I'm not on Twitter any more. Mastodon address is julesjones @mendeddrum.org

comments

Well, that was very... RTDish.
(  Read more...  )

comments

 Just had to unsubscribe from someone's account because it was completely overwhelming my feed. It's annoying, because I like the posts, just not three or four of them a day when they're graphic heavy and I only look at my friends page at the weekend. One of the benefits of DW over LJ is that subscription and access are separate things, so I can still give them access to my (rare) locked posts.

comments