🎉 August Queer Romance Club book pick - Dionysus in Wisconsin by EH Lupton 🎉

By a Mastodon author, @pretensesoup, it’s been shortlisted for the 2024 Lamba Literary Award in Gay Romance and the 2024 Midwest Book Award for fantasy.

Available on #Hoopla, #KoboPlus, all ebookstores and perhaps your library, or EH has kindly offered copies if access is difficult for you (DM her if so).

QRC is open to all, read at your own pace over the month and post about it under #QueerRomanceClub and @queerromanceclub — CW for spoilers if going into details but general observations can be open.

No rules: let’s hear reactions, theories, reviews, favourite quotes etc.

Please also feel free to tag EH in to your QRC post this month, and she’s open to Author Q&A so throw your questions her way.

#books #GayRomance @gayromance @bookstodon #BookClub #AuthorsOfMastodon #IndieAuthor

My wife told me to take the spider out instead of killing him.

Went out. Had a few drinks. Nice guy. He's a web designer.

Specialises in debugging.

I #AmReading Herald Petrel by @strangeseawolf, and I’m more or less halfway through. It’s a fun, fast-paced sci-fi story, an easy read even though it deals with some difficult subjects like loss of a loved one, PTSD and death. Check out Strange Seawolf if you don’t know them — they’ve been sharing some fun things about the book ☺️

Publication day again!

A bittersweet moment for me, as this is not only the final volume in my second trilogy but also the last story set in a world, and featuring characters, I've been working with for almost 12 years.

Part of me is glad it's done, and looking forward to new projects. And part is sad to say goodbye to a cast of characters I've come to know so well.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DB8GL9Y3

#writersOfMastodon #bookstodon #SffWriter #writersLife #fantasy #sff #writingCommunity

hi Mastodon! #introduction

Giving a try to Mastodon. Seems like it might be a promising space for #landscapephotography

My name is Anton, and I'm a #photographer. I'm based on the Gold Coast in #Australia. Most of the time I shoot #seascape with occassional #forest, #mountains. I also enjoy #minimalism and #BlackAndWhite.

If you like what you see, feel free to follow me.

A wide ask here so please boost: my grandfather is trying to get rid of an old business computer, and I was wondering whether any vintage computer people might want it. It was purchased for $50k from The Ultimate Corporation in the early 80s. This ran the Pick operating system, and my best guess is the hardware was originally manufactured by GE or Honeywell. It's about the size of a half-rack and currently lives in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. It has sat covered in plastic in a chemical warehouse for the past 35 years. Where do people usually post stuff like this other than here? Thanks!

#RetroComputing

My lovely wife did a cover for my next book: "Sir Lanka Files"

Hoping to publish on August 15th.

More details here: https://shop.farook.org

#Books #IndieAuthor #BookPromo #BookPromotion #ScienceFiction #Humour #Bookstodon #FediBooks #Writing
A book cover titled "Sir Lanka …

macOS by Tutorials 2.0 is now available.

You can buy the book at https://sarahreichelt.gumroad.com/l/oximx

Read more details about the book at https://troz.net/books/macos_tutorials/

If you would like a preview, you can read the introduction, table of contents and chapter 1 at https://troz.net/books/mos_2.0_sample

If you previously bought the book through Kodeco, contact me at books@troz.net for a 50% discount code.

"Find Me Falling" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19862722) is a beautiful movie. It feels very British for some reason, but I guess it's not?

The locations in Cyprus are beautiful, the music is great, and the story is lovely. Well worth watching 🙂

#Movies #English #Netflix

The wife and I played "No Man's Sky" yesterday. It was fun to use the second-controller/co-pilot feature on PS5 and be able to play together even though it was a single-player game. We enjoyed the game a lot more now that both of us could play at the same time — it felt way more engaging 🙂

I realized that I'd last played the game over two years ago but my base was still there. We were able to explore further and start doing a lot more now that both of us are playing. Not because we were exploriing separately — it's a single-player game after all — but because we felt like playing more.

We even got to the first space station, spoke with some aliens, and figured out where the next bit of the game leads us.

I was tempted to start a new game to see if their introductory mission(s) had changed since the last time I played, but really couldn't bring myself to go through the introduction all over again. So we opted to just play on with the current mission.

Looking forward to doing some more gaming today and exploring further 🙂

#Gaming #PS5 #NoMansSky #CoOpPlay

I got my first unsolicited feedback about my novel today and it has made my day (and probably week) 😀

I know that sometimes "unsolicited" is looked upon negatively. But in this case, what I mean is that I didn't ask somebody what they thought of my book. They volunteered the information and let me tell you, I personally am elated when somebody tells me something (whether good or bad) about something I wrote. Because that tells you that it made an impression on them in some way.

I wrote that book about 20 years ago, but so far had not had any direct feedback except for when I asked, or when somebody left. a review on a site. Reviews on a site somewhere that I might not see for years don't have as great an impact, at least for me, as when somebody tells me personally. So, for me, this was a big milestone. And I'm really happy about it 🙂

#Writing #Feedback #IndieAuthor #Reviews

Most of the missing features and minor annoyances about my custom Fedi client are now fixed. So I think it's at the stage where I say, "I'm (mostly) done" ...

Of course, now I start looking around for another app to work on 😛

There are plenty of candidates since there are several apps I did for my wife that are currently in #Swift and since I'm moving away from #Swift, it might be good to convert them to #Flutter.

But what I keep coming back to is a new #Writing app 🙂

I use Scrivener for writing and I love it. It's very useful for keeping all the informattion about a story together. But I want a few things that are missing from Scrivener. Is it worth creating a whole new app for those? I don't know ... but I'm looking at options right now and trying to decide.

#Coding #Writing #Scrivener #Apps

I should be editing a chapter of my second novel before the day starts ... but today is one of those days I just don't feel it.

Started editing, but then I switched over to fixing an issue in my Fedi client to allow better replies/posts.

And then I decided to do some posts on here - nnything but actually do the editing I should be doing 😛

#Writing #IndieAuthor #Procrastination

Apparently, "No Man's Sky" has had a major visual update. That game has been getting updates for years now and each one seems to add something new.

I haven't played in a while. I like the concept of the game, but I generally don't like games that the wife and I can't play together. If one of us is just twiddling their thumbs and watching the other play, it doens't seem so much fun 🙂

But that was before we discovered the PS5 co-pilot feature. That allows both of us to take turns at a game without having to actually pass the controller over. Both controllers are active and it's still a single-player game, but either one of us can take over as neeed. Now we enjoy the single-player games we own a lot more.

Not that we've had a lot of time recently for gaming, but I'm hoping to give "No Man's Sky" a try over the weekend with the wife. Let's see how it goes ...

#Gaming #PS5 #NoMansSky

A friend from school whom I'd contacted long ago on FB suddenly accepted my friend request.

I check their FB feed and the top post looked rather suspicious, a phone screenshot showing an SMS message saying that they'd had a large amount of money deposited to their account from bitcoin mining.

I couldn't resist. I messaged them 😛

Within the hour, I get a response back and one of the first things they did (even though I had not heard from them in over 40 years) was to send me the same phone screenshot and tell me that their life was good and they got a lot of money.

I was now fairly sure that their account was hacked. Especially since the way they wrote didn't sound like a Sri Lankan, but more like somebody from a different part of the world 😛

I congratulated them on the money and asked about some fake friends (just names at random). They were non-committal but immediately told me about some personal stuff and sent me more images (gathered from their FB photo album, I assume) to convince me.

Then they start pushing me again about bitcoin and whether I'd be interested.

I ask them what class we were in back at school. He says that it's so long ago and that they can't remember. This is definitely not true since I can remember and I'd just talked to two other school friends a couple of days ago, who also remembered.

So I say, "I think you are a scammer and not my friend X".

They say, "You can believe what you want but I leave you with this" and send me another photo from the guy's FB album.

I contacted a mutual friend in Sri Lanka (since I had no way to contact him directly) and asked him to check with the other friend. And yes, his FB account is hacked.

Not that this needs to be said, but people who contact you on social media might not be who they claim to be. Always verify. Even when it seems totally legit — unlike in this particular case 😀

And if somebody tells you that they have a great way for you to make money with little/no effort ... but you need to pay them something first to do so, be very, very wary 🤔

#Scams #SocialMedia #LifeTheseDays #Facebook

Does anyone have a recruiter or agency they can recommend for iOS work (1099 or W2)? The job market is absolutely terrible and I'm still looking.

#iOSDev #FediHire #jobsearch

When life gives you lemons, most people make lemonade – but when life gives Normal Kint a dog he hates, he serves it up to a Martian with a side of intergalactic chaos. Join the misadventures of Earth's most reluctant pooch hunter.

50% off at SmashWords - https://t.co/tvGASsc4Fy

Other options: https://shop.farook.org

#ScienceFiction #Humour #Bookstodon #FediBooks #IndieAuthor

I've been made redundant from my job, effective tomorrow.

So... if you know anyone who's in need of a bioinformatician to work remotely on small bioinformatics projects, please let me know.

Affinity has a sale on till the 15th of August which is well worth it if you're interested 🙂
https://affinity.serif.com

I have no affiliation to them but I bought two of the Affinity apps back in 2016 or 2017 and I think it might have cost something like $50 and I received updates for all those years for the $50 I paid.

Didn't update to the V2 apps because I had stopped doing anything significantly graphics related for years. Just started working on some artwork and took a look and I could upgrade to their universal suite (all their apps for all supported platforms — macOS, Windows, and iPadOS) for around $65. I did since that seemed like a great deal 🙂

I have not been disappointed so far. Still loving working with their apps to create graphics and artwork. Will post some samples soon ... (possibly).

Now that I've finisehd my second novel and can put off starting on editing till tomorrow, I am going to do some coding today 🙂

I've wanted to add favourites and bookmarks lists to my Flutter Fedi client and I also discovered a bug wtih really long threads and showing the entire thread. Sounds like enough stuff to keep me occupied for today 😛

#CodingLife #WritingLife