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Hanlon’s Razor In one form: “Never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by mistake or stupidity.” What is particularly curious about this philosophical adage is the common attribution to Robert J. Hanlon, who submitted it for a 1980 joke book edited by Arthur Bloch. Mr. Hanlon was a computer programmer who has since passed away. It’s also been attributed to Robert Heinlein, Napoleon Bonaparte, David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. But it most commonly appears as Hanlon’s Razor, a joke submitted by a computer programmer. It is a sentiment worth remembering, even given the context of the inclusion in a joke book. |
| It appears Mr Hanlon added (or was first recorded to have added) the "or stupidity" rider to an already common saying. I think it makes the saying better, FWIW. |
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Too Much to Ask? I have a bit of a pet peeve; a minor frustration. Okay, fine. Sometimes it makes me angry. Put yourself in my shoes, maybe you have even been in these shoes. You work on a story for a submission to a publisher, anthology, journal, or -zine. Spend time editing, revising and polishing. Then closely review their submission requirements on format, font, word count, etc. You formulate a cover letter in your email or submission portal and add as the last sentence. Please acknowledge receipt when you have a moment. Some of them have robot responses. Thanks for your submission. No problem. Some of them take a few days and respond. Thanks for your submission. No problem. A few of them never acknowledge receipt. A week later you send a kind request for acknowledgement. and Silence . . . Problem? Is it too much to ask? |
| I think I get around 5% personalised, 80% auto-response, and 15% no response. I will say that adding that line at the bottom can be a red flag to some publishers (from conversations with them), so, in my opinion, I'd not bother. if they respond, great, if not, and you never hear from them, add them do the personal "Avoid" list. Mine is more than 30 publishers long, but I've been at this for a very long time... |
The Fool Reveals Himself I have a pattern that disappointingly repeats. I never see it coming, but I know what underlies it. An arrogance that I deny is there. My most recent experience involved my quiet observation of my silly WDC colleagues chasing the animations for the seven-day streaks for logon, review, blog, forum, and newsfeed. The Story Master was getting them to dance like puppets. Curiosity got to me, so I did the five items the other day, just to see what it took. I found new and interesting corners of WDC that I had not been. I've done it a few more times. I might not chase after the animations, but I realized again, it was me who was the fool. The five-by-seven streak is a creative and fun way to increase participation beyond just the newsfeed. Meanwhile, I await my next encounter with the fool in the mirror. |
WDC Ten Commandments Not exactly, but they could or should be.
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| These are common aspirational standards for collaborative teams in the workplace or classroom. They were abstracted from the research on both what makes such teams effective and what makes them ineffective. The same research generally shows that diverse collaborative teams exhibiting these kinds of interactions perform better than homogeneous teams AND better than any single individual member, no matter how skillful that member might be. While a group on WDC isn't exactly a collaborative team, I think these still are pretty good aspirational goals. |
| S 🤦 - I've had the same experience. But WDC proper isn't a collaborative team, it's just a place where it's possible to FORM a collaborative team. I think that's the point here--everyone posting to the Veteran's Forum is part of a team wishing to honor veterans and military service. Given that shared aspirational goal, these seem to be reasonable aspirational standards for interacting with each other. |
Listen to Editors, Reviewers, Beta Readers, and Yourself One thing a writer learns after gaining some experience and as the skin thickens to feedback. Listen to every criticism and suggestion you get and be thankful. All of the big steps I have made in improving my storytelling have come from reviewers, beta readers, and editors. As you get even more experienced you also learn they are not always right. Same as you, they are imperfect. I recently got some feedback for suggested edits. I noticed it was all grammatical and in spoken dialog. Most people don’t speak with proper grammar, and these characters in particular did not. So listen, be thankful, but don’t ignore your own opinion. |
Quickest Rejection in Publishing History Usually within a few days it’s nice to get an acknowledge email for a submission. Assurance that the submission didn’t disappear into the ether of the internet. Yesterday, I got a same day email for a submission, but hours later. Not a robot message. It started with ‘I am impressed’ but then explained why my story wasn’t right for their anthology. Left me wondering what they were impressed about. Barely enough time to enter it into my submission tracking table. |
NanoWriMo No Mo Did you see the announcement that NanoWriMo is shutting down? I never participated, it felt gimmicky to me. Apparently one of the sponsors was predatory and there were other issues causing it to collapse from within. Thoughts and experiences? |
| Nothing stopping anyone from doing NaNo without the website. I've done the challenge three times, with only minimal involvement with their official site (mostly just to paste my work in to verify the word count, which is superfluous since most word processors do that anyway). |
| Yeah. I closed my NaNo WriMo official account before Nano 2024 because of the various issues they had been having. I enjoyed collecting winner shirts (I have 6), but I couldn't be a part of the drama anymore. Besides, it's one less place to update my word count. I always do the Write-a-Thon on WDC, so updating the official NaNo site was just extra work. I never got into the community or did much with it besides update my word count and buy stuff from their store, so it's not a big loss for me. |
Sept 10 2024 I noticed today that according to the WDC visit counter I did not visit WDC on SEP 10 2024. I think that is in error. I parachute in twice a day sometimes more. It’s a habit. Not an addiction mind you, just a rigid habit. I would have remembered. Of course I would have remembered. Anyone remember seeing something of me on the site that day? Surely someone can vouch. It could happen to you next. A false broken streak. Search your archives! Find the evidence to vindicate me. |
Football (Trigger Warning: Sports Taboo and National Pride) Several years ago, a former colleague of mine, British, asked me why American men faired so poorly in ‘football’. By which he was speaking of ‘soccer’. He is a good natured, sensitive and intelligent fellow, but a tad bit sarcastic in this comment. We were living in the Middle East and it was Spring, there was a lot of TV coverage of US College and Professional Basketball Championships. This wasn’t the first time he made the observation and I was prepared with some statistics about ‘football’. First, I explained that for generations, America’s best young male athletes chose basketball, American football, and baseball. Track and field was more popular than ‘soccer’. That is changing in recent years. I asked him, why British men faired so poorly in soccer? He stared at me with a questioning look. Well, only something like 30% of premier league players are from the UK. 1 UK FIFA World Cup Championship in 1966 and last UK Soccer Olympic gold was in 1912. I added with my own sarcastic tone. Sorry for any offense. But Spring is back and basketball championships always bring back this memory. Yeah, I know soccer is the most popular game in the world and is played everywhere. That’s because poor people can’t afford expensive gear. Sorry, again. |
| I find soccer as boring as a lettuce sandwich with the crusts cut off. I had this argument with someone here because of my own sports of choice. He claimed that soccer was the best sport because it was the most popular. And, yes, it is the most played sport in the world because all you literally need is something to use as a ball. I countered with popularity does not mean good. He said what else could it mean? At the time, the Twilight books were at their peak, so I said that, in his opinion, Twilight was the greatest book ever written, McDonalds was the greatest food ever made and 'White Christmas' was the greatest song ever recorded, because they were the most popular at the time. He got flustered and said I was comparing apples with oranges; I asked why; he said because sport was different; I asked why; he got more flustered. Now, amongst that group of friends, we call it McSoccer, and he stopped hanging out with us about 15 years ago. As for sports (and sports science was my first degree before I went to physics, where I majored in biomechanics). Most complex - gymnastics. Uses most muscles in the body - gymnastics, swimming, decathlon. Uses most different skills - pentathlon. Ball sport most endurance heavy - Australian Rules football. Greatest distance travelled in a hoop sport over the course of a high level game - centre in netball. Fastest ball travel - jai-alai. And that's just my memory kicking in. Note: no soccer. Sorry... Fooootboool. |
Book Launch Anthology launched by Burial Books yesterday, including my story Silent Servants. Was in the top one hundred Amazon for Horror Anthologies.
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Absurdity of US Customary Units First of all, they aren’t American at all. It’s basically the British Imperial System, but Americans didn’t want anything to do with anything Imperial after the Revolution. To make it more absurd, the British themselves adopted the metric system in 1967. The US stuck with a system the Brits mostly abandoned. Maybe the United States is just part of a big bloc, you might think. Liberia, and Myanmar are the only countries that do not officially use the metric system. The system itself is arcane with peculiar subdivisions 12 inches = 1 foot 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches 1 mile = 5280 feet= 1760 yards 1 pound = 16 ounces Freezing point water 32 degrees F (standard atmosphere pressure) Boiling point water 212 degrees F (standard atmosphere pressure) For the metric system you only have to understand multiples of ten: kilo, centi, milli 1 meter = 100 centi-meter = 1000 milli-meter 1 kilogram = 1000 gram 1000 milligram = 1 gram Freezing point of water 0 degrees celsius (standard atmosphere) Boiling point of water 100 degrees Celsius (standard atmosphere) Reason for this. American bureaucracy and a sense of self-importance. People will protest, saying that it’s the cost of conversion. What about the cost of constantly converting when doing business with the rest of the world? Could converrting the rest of the world to US units be the next thing on the President's agenda? Brought to you by the Cultural Sensitivity Department of Taboo Publishing Services |
| Base-12 is a much more useful system than base-10 for timekeeping. It originated with, if I recall correctly, the Sumerians, who used base-12 in part because 12 has more divisors than 10, and they hadn't quite figured out fractions. (Actually they kind of used base 60, which is just 12*5.) Ever wondered why eleven is eleven and not oneteen? Twelve isn't twoteen? It's a remnant of base-12 counting. Hence the 24-hour day subdivided into two groups of 12. This is also related to the 360 degree circle. As there are just over 365 days in a solar year, they rounded that to a nice even 360, and partied on the other 5 days. This became the basis for our angular measurements. 360 is also evenly divisible by 30 (roughly the length of a month). Another oddity: the US adopted decimal currency early on, but kept the inconsistent Imperial measurements. In contrast, the UK kept their shillings, pence, farthings, and pounds (currency not weight) until the late 1960s before finally converting to decimal pounds. Now, I'm a big fan of SI units and would rather use them for mass, length, volume, etc. Except for timekeeping. The French tried to decimalize that, and failed miserably, but succeeded wildly in creating SI. |
Robert Waltz  - Curiously, SI units units came up in yesterday's post by Damon Nomad   on Quantum Day. He used electrovolts to calculate the value of Planck's constant, not Joules which is the standard SI unit. |
| Robert Waltz - I think another reason for the 12 hour day (and base 12 arithmetic) by the Sumerians is that they knew how to divide a circle into twelve equal parts using a compass and straightedge. THus, they could make sundials, for example. See https://opentextbc.ca/patterndevelopment/chapter/divide-a-circle-into-12-equal-p... for how to divide a circle into 12 equal parts. |
Where are the Fireworks, Cake and Balloons? April 14 is World Quantum Day. Yes, one month after PI day, 3.14. For those who say no, no only USA uses m,d,year. Not true, and check the internet! It’s World Quantum Day and the internet is never wrong. Why 4.14? Think…Come on. Energy of a photon related to its frequency. Yes, E=hv… Planck’s constant h, 4.14, the rounded first digits of the constant: 4.1356677×10−15 eV⋅s. Let the party begin. |
| Not a physcist, but isn't the energy of a photon more commonly measured in Joules per second than electronvolts per second? Using Joules, Planck's constant is roughly 6.63 ( 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅Hz−1). That would make Quantum Day 6/6, since it can't be 6/62. Different units give different candidates...exposing a different kind of uncertainty principle. |
Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  - quite correct, I can only guess the ‘Quantumist’ wanted a one month bump in notoriety from PI day. |
Roll the Credits I’ve noticed some interesting things with television series credits. First, the order of things, Generally the beginning credits are the lead actors and the series creator. What a title, creator. The order of the actors? Alphabetical? Is it in their contract? The closing credits are more interesting. Again, the order is interesting. Lots of producers, and different types of producers. Writers, editors. The number of people on the screen at one time an apparent measure of their ego, I meant to say importance. Then the screen gets filled with a dizzying array of names and titles, and they move so fast only a mother or father would spot the name of a son or daughter who was the location coordinator or Boom Operator Post by Damon Nomad Omnipotent Sage |
| I always look for the Foley artists. Seriously, my biggest complaint with streaming channels is that they rush through or skip the credits to get to the next in queue. The credits are very important. I insist on reading them. The most important people in Hollywood and television - without whom movies and TV shows could not be made - are never famous, but they can be found in the credits. |
| I pretty sure, at least for actors, the positioning of names in the credits is contractual and negotiated by their agent. It has little to do with the actor's ego. The kind of billing and the positioning are signals of the actor's relative status. The opening credits for Cheers are an example. The two stars are Shelly Long and Ted Danson, and they got joint top billing, i.e., are the first names shown on on the opening credits. They are on the same screen, but offset in a particular way. Shelly long is in the upper RIGHT of the screeen and Ted Danson is in the LOWER LEFT. So, reading top-to-bottom, Shelly Long is first. But, reading left-to-right, Ted Danson is first. This kind of credit is common and signals they have *equal* top billing. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB0nC3BkzPk Another coveted posistion is the LAST actor credited on the screen roll. In the Cheers roll above, it's George Wendt, but that *could* be alphabetical. On the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the series actors were in the *closing* credits with no actor credits in the opening roll. Well, except Mary's name is in the shows TITLE. Anyway, in the closing credits, Cloris Leachman is listed last as a "special guest star," even though she's a series regular. She was a distinguished actress who eventually won an Oscar in 1972, and she was already better known than any of the other supporting actors. Her agent almost certainly negotiated that position for her since it signals she's "more significant" than the other supporting actors. She eventually also won an Emmy for her role on MTM. There's an example of the MTM closing credits here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o3aWul6D9Y |
| Max Griffin 🏳️🌈 - I can't recall the precise details, but there's a story about a difficult agent trying to get his client's name listed in the credits after an "and", only to be told that if he didn't pack it in, it wouldn't be an "and", it'd be a "but". |
A Submission Misunderstanding Bubba was proud to tell people he was a writer. Pretty amazing since he hadn’t even graduated high school. Been posting stories on the internet for a month and now he was ready for the big time. He submitted a story for an anthology. He looked the word up. He was excited to see an email response the next day. Dear Bubba, We have received your submission for our new Horror anthology. Please never submit to us again. It is riddled with grammar and punctuation errors. There is no discernible plot and the dialog is simply horrible. Bubba quickly replied, Sorry thought it wuz a horrible anthology not horror. |
Come On WDC An old man, sitting on the sidewalk holding a sign ‘will work for food’. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration. Follow me. "Note: Follow Me and I'll Follow You Do you..." |
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