Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).

Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.

In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It’s not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can’t sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They’d probably just not work with that author again.)

Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.

So no, authors don’t really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.

In my opinion, as an outside observer, I’d say it is the duty of every patriotic American to mass produce signs that say “THIS COUNTRY IS RUN BY IDIOTS” and post them everywhere.

Also some sites ask for email addresses.

I give them my .fi address.

The sites then go “did you mean .fr?”

And I’m like “No actually I’m in Finland. It’s a whole different country. Don’t get me wrong, I love the French, great country. I love our EU brothers and sisters and enbypals. Just don’t buy a nuclear reactor from them.”

The way publishing industry has been for a very long time, authors (especially first time ones) don’t get to pick whoever pays the best deal. Just whoever pays the first.

Edit: Also, theoretically, publishers should accommodate author wishes once a publication contract has been made. Actually not unheard of that a publisher would do something cool for their up and coming star. But this? Sloppiness on the publisher’s part, plain and simple.

I’m in Finland and it’s always mildly weird when these country lists have “Aland Islands” right in the top. I’m not entirely sure in which circumstances the folks from Åland even pick that option. But, I mean, it’s an autonomous region, they do have the right to mildly confuse the people who collect user statistics.

(There was also that one incident when some Google product wasn’t available in EU as a whole due to regulations that had to be sorted out, but it was somehow available in Åland because Google did an oopsie.)

Anyone remember the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover?

“I don’t know what this ‘microservice’ nonsense is, I’m gonna remove it”

“…Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system”

“Ur fired lol”

…Expect more of that.

ACAB (All Cops Are Ballooning)

Why hello! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.

I have the DVD. It’s somewhere in the pile.

I need to one day develop a DVD/BR/book catalogue app to get even vague idea about what exactly is on my shelves and boxes. It has long since gone unmanageable. At least I know what’s my next major project after NaNoWriMo.

[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn’t have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven’t played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Ah, this will be the Department of Dunning-Kruger. The workers are idiots who think they are supergeniuses. Led by an idiot who thinks he’s a supergenius.

During Trump’s first term, this was just a metaphor, suggested by random comedians. Now, life will imitate art to its full extent.

I’m an enthusiast amateur photographer with nice DSLR and a few mirrorless cameras. And I shoot a lot on automatic. It’s fine. Semiauto and manual is usually only needed if you have specific ideas about exposure.

Also you can fix soooo many mistakes in the post. When people tell me their cellphone photos look naff, I tell them to just try levels / curves / white balance tools, and those are in every photo editor. Will help a lot.

I post photos online, and despite the fact that the platforms (Tumblr, and I think Pixelfed too?) scrub exif data, I do it manually anyway.

Pro tip:

exiftool -overwrite_original -All= file.jpg

For me OneDrive “memories” are from my wallpaper folder or Xbox screenshots.

Google “memories” are food diary photos (on days when my food budget is spent, Google loves to show me photos of the massive pizzas I ate years ago, because it knows) or random sunsets. (Except for that photo collage with cheery music from my grandma’s funeral. Why did it have to do that specifically. Just asking.)

Fun thing, I don’t want to get YouTube Premium because YouTube has a huge bunch of bugs and glitches and crap UI design and since they’re the only service in the niche there’s been no indication they’ll ever fix their shit.

I didn’t care about YouTube Music, so losing ads on stock YouTube apps was literally the only reason I was even considering getting Premium.

But if it doesn’t even do the one job…?

Yup, doesn’t surprise me.

I also have a NAS box that’s out of support. Turned off all of the nifty services and firewalled the shit out of it so it won’t be visible outside the LAN even by accident. Will replace it with a FreeBSD box as soon as I get a new hard drive.

I don’t think I’ve had a single USB-C cable/connector/socket fail yet. Which can’t be said of Micro-USB.

But other than that, meh.

Does PDF actually allow some objects to be invisible on screen but visible on print? Because that’d be cool.

It’s 2225. Archaeologists discover yet another long forgotten university library storage facility. Inside, they find stacks of Elsevier journals that have never been opened. They then find puzzling coffee stains that somehow appear to be result of the printing process, and conclude that the cultural significance of these markings was probably lost to the ages.

I tried to reupload the full 600 DPI scan but lemmy.world decided to start coughing - though I don’t think uploading it at higher quality is worth it, as the 2000px wide version is already pretty representative of the original.

I think the full PNG is already of printable quality. If you really need it in PDF format for some purpose or other, I recommend just grabbing the PNG and converting it. I may see later if I can convert the 600DPI scan to PDF though.