astramthetaprime
Astram Theta Prime
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Is it Impatience or is it Just Blind Fury?
I'm getting angry at everything lately.
Sudden changes of plans. Getting things done only to be told to do it again in the exact same way. Not being told vital information like it's going to cost nearly $200 to get 2 vaccines because the health department doesn't accept my insurance (while at the same time accepting another kind of insurance, if you accept one you should accept all!)
Being able to write 500 words effortlessly one day and absolutely can't push another word out the same afternoon or the day after, or for several days after.
Going over and over again getting dumped by my therapist, getting angrier every time.
My family situation -- or non-situation, since I've cut ties with them completely.
All goes hand in hand with the anxiety. Being afraid to walk for fear I'll sprain my ankle or fall, being afraid to go down stairs, being afraid to drive anywhere for fear of not seeing someone and having a wreck. Being afraid to say anything to anyone.
I start the new job Monday. I just know I'm going to end up getting there at least an hour early because I'll be afraid I won't get there in time.
What am I doing, thinking I can work anywhere outside of the house? I can't handle being around people.
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🤬👽😡🤬👽😡
Got to my therapist appt just now, girls up front told me I wasn't on the schedule. No open appts until middle of next month.
I'm starting the new job first of the month.
I've been dumped by my therapist with no explanation or warning.
How pathetic do you have to be to get dumped by your therapist?
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Make Hay While The Sun Shines
The newly name-changed Ember Star is now at 38k words. I've written quite a bit today, more so than usual. And as you see above, 91 pages, single-spaced.
Remember that a first draft is not your last word. You can fix it later. Your job with a first draft is to get the story out of your head. Forget about "It's so boring" or "the pacing is shit" or any other consideration. Get the cute jokes on the page, get the long-winded explanations out of your head, whatever you need to do to just keep writing.
You Can Fix It Later.
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What the fark?
Looks at Gen Z kids on YouTube freaking out about how they can't get hired. 👀
Looks at Gen Z kids on YouTube submitting hundreds of applications and resumes and no one even emailing back. 👀
I submitted ... I dunno, maybe half a dozen applications and resumes. I haven't really been trying, I've been chilllaxing here at Tranquility House.
I've been out of work maybe, what, 10 days?
I just accepted a job offer. Full time. $17 / hr. With benefits.
Maybe you kids are trying too hard?
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Taped this to my desk at work so everyone can see it and be aware. I'm not hiding. It's not worth it.
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Signal boosting because books.
UPDATE: Internet Archive has a section for magazines. One of my D&D friends lost his long running Dragon magazine collection, I can replace it with the entire run of the magazine in PDF.
FOR FREE.
Go to Internet Archive, find something you've lost, and praise them like the lions they are!
99 legal sites to download literature
The Classics
Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.
Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.
The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.
Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.
Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.
Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.
Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.
Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.
Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.
The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.
Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.
Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.
Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.
Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.
Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.
Textbooks
If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.
Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.
Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.
KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.
Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.
Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.
MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.
Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.
Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.
Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.
eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.
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Hans Asperger -- yes, the Asperger in "Asperger's Syndrome", now known as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1-- was a Nazi doctor. He wasn't working toward a cure. He was working to determine criteria for who should be killed. Which is why we don't call it Asperger's anymore.
if you're just joining us, george takei is having to educate jk rowling on holocaust denial
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And the Wave Hits
So. Lost my job on Friday. The contract ran out and was not renewed.
It feels good to have some time off, I've been tired. But at the same time, y'know, I'm doing applications again. But thanks to paying off the house and all the rest, I'm not actually in a bad position at the moment. So I'm in a weird lacuna where yeah, Trouble is In The Air but at the same time Imma Taking It Easy.
The Year of the Jackpot has now run to sixteen months. We're in overtime gameplay.
My therapist yesterday encouraged me to try to get published, use this time to work on my writing and associated skills. Which, yeah, I'm always in favor of that. In an academic way, really, so to speak.
I'm a coward, honestly. Fear of rejection kicks the hell out of perfectly valid skillz and abilities and deprives the world of good quality content. I have no actual concrete reason to believe my work would be rejected, btw. But fear needs no reason, only implication of a reason.
For most of my life I've shoved print-outs into people's hands saying "read this, read this, please!" The vast majority of the time the prints have been put aside with an obviously fake smile "sure, I will" and never another word. They're forgotten, or tossed in the trash after. I don't get feedback, good or bad. Very rarely, I get vague "it was good, it was fine". No specifics. Just ... nothing.
So I stopped trying to get feedback. I don't talk about my stuff, I rarely print anything out, and I don't try to get people to read my stuff. No one wants to know, no one has time. No one cares. I've never seen any evidence that anyone near to me cared. My mother outright hated science-fiction, and the rest of my family either doesn't care or considers genre fiction of any sort to be garbage.
My dad would have read it, and that would have been good enough for me. But, well ... he was dead long before I ever really got started.
So yeah, I write all this stuff, hundreds of thousands of words, and never submit it anywhere or try to get anyone to read it. Because I figure it's not worth it, it's not good enough, and no one cares.
People care about the fanfic, and AO3 is a hothouse environment because people are actively reading ships and fandoms and actively commenting. That's like building one of those zero-tick farming machines in Minecraft, where you've got a dispenser chucking bone meal onto one square of tilled dirt and you've standing there with carrots in one hand and a hoe in the other and it's instant villager food by the ton. In original fiction, in the real-world publishing biz, especially these days where everybody is producing content, it's a mosh pit fight to get eyes on your work. We're all competing for a finite resource, readers' time and attention. Someday when we've got robots doing all the jobs and none of us have to work and money is no object, we'll all have much more time to read. But right now, when we're all trying to survive? No. People read when and as they can, if they can, if they care to.
I come from an era where you had to have perfect copy arranged to very specific margins and double spaced, single-sided pages, your print had to be absolutely perfect or an editor would toss it out without reading the first page. And then they might toss it at the second page when your characters didn't immediately grab his attention. Or at page 30 when they realized your theme was something he didn't agree with. Maybe not so much in sci-fi, we're more open-minded than that thanks to our entire genre being based on differences. But still. Editors were the enemy and you had to work your ass off to convince them your story was worth bothering with.
And now, there doesn't have to be an editor at all. Anyone can print anything whenever wherever. Do everything from cover art to ebook to audiobook to promotion. Or if you can't do it yourself, you can hire other people to do it for you. There's no gatekeeper to convince. And one wonders what that does for quality, because the gatekeepers of old were the arbiters of that.
I don't know precisely where I stand on the subject now.
But I've thought I may teach myself how to do prompts in Midjourney, to do my own cover art. And there's Reedsy.com. And ACX. And my old ebook publisher sent me my latest royalty payment from a book that they published in 2003 and is still selling one or two copies every six months. I made a whole $1.73. Maybe they'd like to take a look at some of my old stuff.
The future isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes it's just as much worry and bad decisions. But it happens nonetheless.
As ever, for you Sir Arthur, with my fondest regards.
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I watch a cool dude on the 'Tube called "City Nerd", he does stuff about urbanism and car-free living. He was doing "most overrated cities" and the last one he mentioned was Oxnard, CA. Y'know, where Ice and Mav bought their first house in my story "The Night Road". Nearly inhaled a bite of Milky Way Bar laughing. The boys bought a house in an overrated, too expensive part of town! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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The Goodbye We Never Had
I don't believe in heaven.
I believe in a country airfield.
A couple hangars, a tiny ATC office, one runway paved with old asphalt, cracks lined with dandelions and clover. On sunny days, the local rich guy and his wife come get their two-seater out and go have brunch somewhere out of state. Maybe the old retired Delta pilot will come pull his Piper out and spend half the day washing it while showing his grandson the controls.
When I die, that's where I'll end up.
The afterlife isn't sunshine and bliss and mindless adoration of some idealized concept. It isn't forever. It isn't eternal. There isn't a heaven.
There's just a chance to say a proper goodbye.
Heaven, such as it is, isn't a reward. Being rewarded for living a "good" life makes it transactional. It cheapens it. You've bought something. You checked off a series of boxes to get a prize.
It's a place for passing through. It's a way and a place to balance all your life's scales. It's a place where the things you're owed get repaid. The things you yourself owe to others are brought to account. Explanations, apologies, farewells. The last notes. The reasons why. These are things that can't be bought or sold or compelled. These are things that can only be said, one person to another, in a place where there can be only truth, in a time where debts can be repaid in safety and peace.
The only thing I expect out of my so-called "virtuous" life is that country airfield. A little blue and white Cesna. My dad checking flaps and the rudder and tail. An open sky, a sunny day. The goodbye we never had.
youtube
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8 Days on the Way to Forever
I paid off the house a week ago yesterday.
I just finished doing my taxes for the year. Getting money back, which is bitterly amusing given this time last year I would have killed for what little I'm getting back this year. This time last year the only treasure I had was the madness of creativity that was my IceMav fic, pouring out of me like silver and gold.
I've been calling 2023 "The Year of the Jackpot", a reference to a Heinlein story. It truly was my personal year of the jackpot. Stood up for myself in January and walked off a job, unemployed for 4 months, IceMav hitting like a speeding truck. Then the dinky job at the grocery store that didn't pay enough to pay all my bills. Then Mom having the stroke, getting the job I have now, Mom in the hospital, Mom dying. Mortgage forebearance. Car problems. Family problems. My old friends. Trying and mostly failing to write Pathfinder. And now in little more than 13 months I've gone from penniless to owning this fortress of solitude around me now.
The incomparable beauty of Loreena McKinnett's "Mystic's Dream" is playing to me now. I've been cast out from all this turmoil onto a cold and soaking shoreline, in shock, staring down at the stones and sand beneath me as they stream with tattered foam. The salt of tears, the taste of fear. Waiting for the next roaring wave to drown me once more. I can hear it in the near distance. I start to crawl.
It's a gray dawn. But it's still the day, no matter the hidden sun.
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I was writing fanfic based on Styx's "Kilroy Was Here" album 40 years ago. And Star Wars fic 25 years ago. So yeah. There were probably people writing fic in hieroglyphics in Egypt thousands of years ago and now we think it was their myths.
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How about a story where the hero realizes that the villain has the capacity to change and for once, instead of convincing them to turn themself in and take responsibility for their crimes, understands that prison is the absolute worst environment in which to heal from trauma and make positive changes to one's relationship with society. The hero keeps the villain out of prison but then realizes they are now responsible for babysitting an unredeemed villain, what a monumental task they've taken on. In a moment of righteous anger, they lament the lack of non harmful options at their disposal. Prison will make them worse, but otherwise how can the hero ensure they do no more harm?
This is the hero's villain origin story.
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polyamory would have saved them
#i just want to point out bradley is wearing socks with sandals#this has been your daily autistic detail alert#why did i see this and nothing else
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They are already selling data to midjourney, and it's very likely your work is already being used to train their models because you have to OPT OUT of this, not opt in. Very scummy of them to roll this out unannounced.
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-- laughs uproariously, ending on a bitter note.
Autism culture is older generations blaming your inability to read analog clocks on you being gen z. While in reality people have been trying to teach you how to read analog clocks since you were 5. It just doesn't compute in your mind
.
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The Rays of Dawn
Sitting here at my computer on a Friday night in February, listening to Tracy Chapman's Fast Car ... and bursting into tears at " ... buy a big house and live in the suburbs ..."
I am in the process of putting large amounts of money into one account so that I can wire transfer it to my mortgage company.
To pay off my house.
By March 20th, I will never again fear losing this house I built, this house I sweated blood and endured abuse to earn. I will never fear homelessness again.
I made a promise to myself that I would die here. Alone, in my own home. And now I will.
I'm going to finish Pathfinder.
I am going to survive.
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