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Aug. 29th, 2022 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatMother was groggy (most likely a result of pain killers) when I called tonight. No, hasn't passed the kidney stone and is concerned she may need surgery.
Work was...better than Friday at least. BYT was wandering about, but Moscow tells me she's off on vacation either this week or next per the other people in my group. (She tells me nothing.) I talked to my colleagues, not to her. Mainly because I'm annoyed with Breaking Bad and BYT, so am only talking to them when I absolutely have to. I am actually annoyed with all the managers at the moment. (As an aside, I don't deal with authority well. Not helped by the fact that most, if not all the organizations that I've dealt with, have a tendency to promote idiots to management positions. But hey, maybe I'm being too negative?)
Got more information on what went down on Friday - apparently only two people got promoted, and the rest didn't. And the two that did - appear to be doing less work than the others, so the others are, well pissed off.
Two, like me, are kind of trapped, and the other two are eyeing jobs being offered in the org for the next rung up - regardless of where or what they might entail.
I'm numb. I honestly don't feel anything at the moment. I've been told there's a numb stage in grief - so that may be part of it. Or I'm just paralyzed with not caring all that much? Or there's zip I can do about it, but try to be supportive of my co-workers.
I honestly don't know if talking to them about it was the right approach, but at least it cleared the air - tension wise.
Before lawyer took off to Disney World, she sent me the final documents, but they had all these mistakes - that I have to somehow fix in PDF. It's frigging hard to edit a PDF document. (I can do it, but it is hard. Adobe does not make it easy. (pauses to curse software engineers now offense to any who may be reading this). Honestly, I think all these frigging lawyers are more trouble than they are worth. She informed me that she was reachable after 8pm, and I'm like - a) I'm not contacting you on vacation, that's rude (unless you give me no choice like you did in this situation, damn you) and b) I don't work past 4, thank you very much, unless my dumb-ass org decides to pay me for it. (They aren't.)
We got a reminder from the union - that whenever we are out sick (with the exception of COVID) that we need to have our doctor complete the SL8 Form. (This is harder to do than it appears - for one thing, what if you can't get to your doctor? Also, what if it's just a brief stomach flu or flu bug? I do have virtual now - and I could probably get NYU Langone to fill it out for me, and do a virtual if I had to do it. But this in a nutshell, is why I'm seldom out sick. I have to be really ill. And I'll often use a personal day.]
Public Agency's or Government Agency's are true assholes when it comes to sick time, vacations, etc. It's kind of why I do not want all companies to be publicly owned. I'm sorry, the public is just as crazy and greedy and self-absorbed and the private industry.
***
A social media friend, who used to be on DW and then migrated full time to FB, now wants to get into Instagram and TikTok thinking they are better?
(No, the same beast, just different teeth and claws.) All those things are ad-based services, which means they function off of a basic marketing logarithm that's primary purpose is to promote and market brands of advertising. It's kind of anti-connection, pro-gossip, pro-promotion. Which is why I feel like everyone and their cousin is advertising something or other on Twitter, FB, TikTok and Instagram.
Actually, I've no idea why they feel the need to get into Instagram and/or TikTok. I restrained myself from asking. The appeal of both are kind of lost on me. My sisterinlaw, niece, and various church friends/college friends do the same things on Instagram that they do FB, which is post a lot of photos promoting themselves and their activities. My sisinlaw uses Instagram to promote her business and sells clothes.
I feel like it is nothing but ads. I scroll through - and it's basically, friend, ad, friend, ad, ad, ad, friend/ad (the friend is doing an ad), ad..family member/ad...ad ad ad..
And unless it's an ad for a movie - you can't trust the ads. What's advertised is not what is actual.
***
Audible has gotten into the podcast business, or the serialized novel performed by many voice actors, that kind of reminds me of the old style radio plays. Makes me miss my father - he loved radio. He grew up on it.
***
I do not know what to make of these articles..
* How a Beginning Writer got her Book Published, and it rose to Bestseller Status
Honestly? This is why she got an agent and got published:
"Although Chan had published a few short stories and had worked at Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine that gave her some insight into the process, she had few connections. And she had no platform: She was not a celebrity, had no personal brand and was not on social media. She lived a quiet life in Philadelphia with her husband and her child, whose birth made her recast the book — again."
* Most people who have gotten published successfully - has another source of income, either a spouse supporting them, a trust fund, etc.
* They worked for a trade magazine. And have contacts within the publishing community. [Note people don't read stuff that is unsolicited.]
* Is relatable to the majority of readers or has a target audience. And book fits well within a marketing nitch - which can be easily sold to that audience.
* It is reflective of the writers life or experience.
Also, she states she had no contacts..yet here, in this paragraph: "A mutual acquaintance recommended she email Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, who represents Leni Zumas, the author of “Red Clocks,” a speculative novel about a near-future in which abortion is illegal in the United States. Connecting with Kaffel Simonoff was a “pie in the sky” dream, Chan said, but she sent a query to her, along with 11 other agents."
She says it's a pie in the sky dream? Really? She had a mutual acquaintance who connected her. She didn't do it on her own. I did the same thing with a book once - except the agent loved my writing but disliked my story and book. Also, in this case - she got an agent who represented a book that was similar in themes to the one she wanted to get published. This is luck baby. It's not earned. She wrote a book that fell into a good nitch, that was about a subject that it is hot at the moment.
Many agents effectively serve as an author’s first editor. After Chan signed with Kaffel Simonoff in July 2019, the two began several rounds of revisions to further develop the speculative elements of the plot along with the characters’ emotional arcs.
This is the advantage author's with agents have over those who don't. And there's a lot of abusive agents out there. My Dad had one, who charged him, but did nothing with his books. Writer's without agents, have to pay money to get revisions. And do it themselves. Line Editors - which help with this sort of thing run between $2000-$5000 depending on word counts. This woman was frigging lucky.
Well before a book is released, the manuscript meets its first, and toughest, audience: the acquiring editors at publishing houses.
The most discerning of readers, these editors are the ones who select the books that a publisher will invest in. For months, over lunch and in emails with editors, Kaffel Simonoff seeded her enthusiasm for “The School for Good Mothers” with this audience.
Note that the author didn't just send it to these editors - her agent bought them lunch, emailed them, and built up their interest in the book.
The day of the manuscript’s submission, Chan said, she was “operating almost entirely on adrenaline.” Her husband took her out for a huge lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant, where she waited for updates. “I was bouncing off the walls,” she said.
The news was good. Editors wanted to talk to Chan. They were interested — enough for Kaffel Simonoff to organize an auction.
Some auctions are blind: Publishers are asked to submit their single highest bid without knowing what their competitors are offering. Others have multiple rounds where publishers try to outbid each other, though there is a twist. The winner may not be the highest bidder, but the one whose vision best matches the author’s.
Note we have an auction. The auction means that the bidders pay a lot for this book. But have little left over to look at other books. Also, she has a support network.
“Your role as an acquiring editor is to work quickly,” said Dawn Davis, the former Simon & Schuster editor who ultimately won the auction. She first phoned Chan from the waiting room of her dog’s veterinarian. “I knew it was going to be competitive.”
Even as she was bidding on the manuscript, Davis had to pitch it internally. She had to convince her boss — the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp — to release the money for Chan’s advance against royalties by the time her bid was due to Kaffel Simonoff, just one week after receiving the submission.
This is the reason a lot of writers, mid-list writers, who are doing this for a living - make little money and struggle. Simon & Schuster and Random House can afford to bid high, the mid-list gets squeezed out or gets less of an advance. It's also why the merger between Random House and Simon & Schuster was being fought by the US Government. The agent gets a commission off the auction.
After a book is edited, the acquiring editor becomes its cheerleader at the publishing house and beyond. As a result, losing that editor — the person who believed in the manuscript, who pushed for its purchase and who shared the author’s vision — can be a fatal blow to a book’s chances of success.
But Chan was fortunate. The project was reassigned to Marysue Rucci, a Simon & Schuster editor who had read the book alongside Davis and shared her passion for it. Rucci personally mailed galleys to independent booksellers and journalists with notes saying, “‘I think this will appeal to you,’” she said.
When BookExpo America, an annual trade show, went online for the second year in spring 2021, Rucci and Chan appeared on a virtual panel.
“Marysue had a wall of my galleys behind her,” Chan said. “She said, ‘I’m in it to win it!’”
The Publishing House basically markets and sells your book for you. They go do all the leg work. Chan had to do very little in that regard. Midlist writers, sci-fi writers, genre writers - have to do so much more.
Because there are hundreds of new books competing for readers in any given month, it can be hard for a title to break through the noise.
But celebrity book clubs still have the power to move books en masse. In 2021, 10 of the 15 debut novels on The Times’s best-seller list were book club selections by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager or Good Morning America.
Chan’s publicist, Anne Tate Pearce, had given the book to one of Bush Hager’s producers at the “Today” show in March 2021. Bush Hager devoured it on vacation.
“I was so engrossed in this world, which felt like nothing I’d ever read before,” Bush Hager said. “And as a mom, I could totally relate with many of the feelings.”
The celebrity book club - got it, because a) the publicist, not Chan, her publicist, gave the book to the Today Show. b) they found a woman who would connect with it, a "mom" read it and it was a book about "motherhood".
Chan’s book was already a LibraryReads and Indie Next selection — lists of upcoming books to watch chosen by librarians and by independent book store owners.
Because it got into those selections - by her publicist and the marketing arm of the publishing house. The librarians didn't just choose it nor did the book store owners, it was pressed in their hands, and they were subtly persuaded to do so.
Meanwhile, the team at Simon & Schuster was still waiting on the early reviews in trade publications: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal. Getting top billing there — being “starred” — can impact reviews and coverage at glossy magazines and newspapers.
All four reviews came back starred.
What they aren't telling us, is these reviews are bought by the publishers. How do I know? Because when I tried to get them to review my book - I discovered there's a fee for their review, also that they will only review books from publishing houses. It's a marketing ploy.
. Photo shoots moved from studios to snowy yards. Instead of traveling to New York for her appearance on the “Today” show, Chan filmed the segment remotely. Her husband, a documentary filmmaker, rigged a lighting setup to tape it at home.
See, support network.
Still, TV commercials, print ads, and influencer content placed by Simon & Schuster’s marketing department ran as scheduled, and the book made headlines when Jessica Chastain’s production company announced plans to adapt it.
Chan got on social media, where she engaged with readers and fellow authors who connected with the novel. On Twitter, she learned from an English professor at the College of William & Mary that her book inspired a course on “bad mothers in literature.”
Dear God, look at the marketing effort behind this book. Publishing houses who bid a ton on a book - will devout an entire marketing campaign to it. The writer is even coached on how to participate and what to say. They have print, ads, and they have trained social media influencers involved.
She added: “I’d like people to know that it’s possible for a debut author in her 40s, a woman of color, a mom, who led a quiet life offline with no brand building whatsoever to have this experience.”
Eh, no. You had a book that fit into a marketing nitch, then got the full-court press on brand building out of the box. This is not weird. They did it with Harper Lee, they've done it with countless others. And hello, you are married to a documentary film maker. You have connections in the glamour biz.
This was a weird article. All the way through the facts kind of undercut the woman's - look I can do it, you can do it too, it's possible niavetee. Can she really be this unselfaware?
Sigh. Sometimes I wish we could all just write and share our stories and books and ignore these annoying distributors entirely. Actually we can. It's called non-traditional or self-publishing. Thank you, Internet and in particular agencies such as Amazon for making it possible to ignore the traditional distribution channels - and potentially drive them out of business. Tee Hee. Also, kind of makes me route for the Government to squash the S&S and Random/Penguine merger.
*
"The Justice Department has already reviewed the documents it seized from Mar-a-Lago.
The government said in a court filing today that it set aside documents it had taken from Donald Trump’s Florida residence that could potentially be covered by attorney-client privilege."
"The disclosure, which came days after the former president’s lawyers pressed a federal judge to appoint an outside expert to review the materials, could make their efforts unnecessary. The Justice Department also said it was actively conducting a deeper “classification review” of the intelligence implications of Trump’s retention of the documents.
What was initially an effort to retrieve classified national security documents has turned into one of the most challenging and potentially explosive criminal investigations in recent memory. Trump’s team is scrambling to find a defense."
Here's the article: Trump Document Inquiry Poses Unparalleled Tests for US Justice Department
I don't know what to make of this. Best not to think about it too much, eh?
Best thing that could happen is if Trump died of a heart attack tomorrow.
Work was...better than Friday at least. BYT was wandering about, but Moscow tells me she's off on vacation either this week or next per the other people in my group. (She tells me nothing.) I talked to my colleagues, not to her. Mainly because I'm annoyed with Breaking Bad and BYT, so am only talking to them when I absolutely have to. I am actually annoyed with all the managers at the moment. (As an aside, I don't deal with authority well. Not helped by the fact that most, if not all the organizations that I've dealt with, have a tendency to promote idiots to management positions. But hey, maybe I'm being too negative?)
Got more information on what went down on Friday - apparently only two people got promoted, and the rest didn't. And the two that did - appear to be doing less work than the others, so the others are, well pissed off.
Two, like me, are kind of trapped, and the other two are eyeing jobs being offered in the org for the next rung up - regardless of where or what they might entail.
I'm numb. I honestly don't feel anything at the moment. I've been told there's a numb stage in grief - so that may be part of it. Or I'm just paralyzed with not caring all that much? Or there's zip I can do about it, but try to be supportive of my co-workers.
I honestly don't know if talking to them about it was the right approach, but at least it cleared the air - tension wise.
Before lawyer took off to Disney World, she sent me the final documents, but they had all these mistakes - that I have to somehow fix in PDF. It's frigging hard to edit a PDF document. (I can do it, but it is hard. Adobe does not make it easy. (pauses to curse software engineers now offense to any who may be reading this). Honestly, I think all these frigging lawyers are more trouble than they are worth. She informed me that she was reachable after 8pm, and I'm like - a) I'm not contacting you on vacation, that's rude (unless you give me no choice like you did in this situation, damn you) and b) I don't work past 4, thank you very much, unless my dumb-ass org decides to pay me for it. (They aren't.)
We got a reminder from the union - that whenever we are out sick (with the exception of COVID) that we need to have our doctor complete the SL8 Form. (This is harder to do than it appears - for one thing, what if you can't get to your doctor? Also, what if it's just a brief stomach flu or flu bug? I do have virtual now - and I could probably get NYU Langone to fill it out for me, and do a virtual if I had to do it. But this in a nutshell, is why I'm seldom out sick. I have to be really ill. And I'll often use a personal day.]
Public Agency's or Government Agency's are true assholes when it comes to sick time, vacations, etc. It's kind of why I do not want all companies to be publicly owned. I'm sorry, the public is just as crazy and greedy and self-absorbed and the private industry.
***
A social media friend, who used to be on DW and then migrated full time to FB, now wants to get into Instagram and TikTok thinking they are better?
(No, the same beast, just different teeth and claws.) All those things are ad-based services, which means they function off of a basic marketing logarithm that's primary purpose is to promote and market brands of advertising. It's kind of anti-connection, pro-gossip, pro-promotion. Which is why I feel like everyone and their cousin is advertising something or other on Twitter, FB, TikTok and Instagram.
Actually, I've no idea why they feel the need to get into Instagram and/or TikTok. I restrained myself from asking. The appeal of both are kind of lost on me. My sisterinlaw, niece, and various church friends/college friends do the same things on Instagram that they do FB, which is post a lot of photos promoting themselves and their activities. My sisinlaw uses Instagram to promote her business and sells clothes.
I feel like it is nothing but ads. I scroll through - and it's basically, friend, ad, friend, ad, ad, ad, friend/ad (the friend is doing an ad), ad..family member/ad...ad ad ad..
And unless it's an ad for a movie - you can't trust the ads. What's advertised is not what is actual.
***
Audible has gotten into the podcast business, or the serialized novel performed by many voice actors, that kind of reminds me of the old style radio plays. Makes me miss my father - he loved radio. He grew up on it.
***
I do not know what to make of these articles..
* How a Beginning Writer got her Book Published, and it rose to Bestseller Status
Honestly? This is why she got an agent and got published:
"Although Chan had published a few short stories and had worked at Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine that gave her some insight into the process, she had few connections. And she had no platform: She was not a celebrity, had no personal brand and was not on social media. She lived a quiet life in Philadelphia with her husband and her child, whose birth made her recast the book — again."
* Most people who have gotten published successfully - has another source of income, either a spouse supporting them, a trust fund, etc.
* They worked for a trade magazine. And have contacts within the publishing community. [Note people don't read stuff that is unsolicited.]
* Is relatable to the majority of readers or has a target audience. And book fits well within a marketing nitch - which can be easily sold to that audience.
* It is reflective of the writers life or experience.
Also, she states she had no contacts..yet here, in this paragraph: "A mutual acquaintance recommended she email Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, who represents Leni Zumas, the author of “Red Clocks,” a speculative novel about a near-future in which abortion is illegal in the United States. Connecting with Kaffel Simonoff was a “pie in the sky” dream, Chan said, but she sent a query to her, along with 11 other agents."
She says it's a pie in the sky dream? Really? She had a mutual acquaintance who connected her. She didn't do it on her own. I did the same thing with a book once - except the agent loved my writing but disliked my story and book. Also, in this case - she got an agent who represented a book that was similar in themes to the one she wanted to get published. This is luck baby. It's not earned. She wrote a book that fell into a good nitch, that was about a subject that it is hot at the moment.
Many agents effectively serve as an author’s first editor. After Chan signed with Kaffel Simonoff in July 2019, the two began several rounds of revisions to further develop the speculative elements of the plot along with the characters’ emotional arcs.
This is the advantage author's with agents have over those who don't. And there's a lot of abusive agents out there. My Dad had one, who charged him, but did nothing with his books. Writer's without agents, have to pay money to get revisions. And do it themselves. Line Editors - which help with this sort of thing run between $2000-$5000 depending on word counts. This woman was frigging lucky.
Well before a book is released, the manuscript meets its first, and toughest, audience: the acquiring editors at publishing houses.
The most discerning of readers, these editors are the ones who select the books that a publisher will invest in. For months, over lunch and in emails with editors, Kaffel Simonoff seeded her enthusiasm for “The School for Good Mothers” with this audience.
Note that the author didn't just send it to these editors - her agent bought them lunch, emailed them, and built up their interest in the book.
The day of the manuscript’s submission, Chan said, she was “operating almost entirely on adrenaline.” Her husband took her out for a huge lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant, where she waited for updates. “I was bouncing off the walls,” she said.
The news was good. Editors wanted to talk to Chan. They were interested — enough for Kaffel Simonoff to organize an auction.
Some auctions are blind: Publishers are asked to submit their single highest bid without knowing what their competitors are offering. Others have multiple rounds where publishers try to outbid each other, though there is a twist. The winner may not be the highest bidder, but the one whose vision best matches the author’s.
Note we have an auction. The auction means that the bidders pay a lot for this book. But have little left over to look at other books. Also, she has a support network.
“Your role as an acquiring editor is to work quickly,” said Dawn Davis, the former Simon & Schuster editor who ultimately won the auction. She first phoned Chan from the waiting room of her dog’s veterinarian. “I knew it was going to be competitive.”
Even as she was bidding on the manuscript, Davis had to pitch it internally. She had to convince her boss — the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp — to release the money for Chan’s advance against royalties by the time her bid was due to Kaffel Simonoff, just one week after receiving the submission.
This is the reason a lot of writers, mid-list writers, who are doing this for a living - make little money and struggle. Simon & Schuster and Random House can afford to bid high, the mid-list gets squeezed out or gets less of an advance. It's also why the merger between Random House and Simon & Schuster was being fought by the US Government. The agent gets a commission off the auction.
After a book is edited, the acquiring editor becomes its cheerleader at the publishing house and beyond. As a result, losing that editor — the person who believed in the manuscript, who pushed for its purchase and who shared the author’s vision — can be a fatal blow to a book’s chances of success.
But Chan was fortunate. The project was reassigned to Marysue Rucci, a Simon & Schuster editor who had read the book alongside Davis and shared her passion for it. Rucci personally mailed galleys to independent booksellers and journalists with notes saying, “‘I think this will appeal to you,’” she said.
When BookExpo America, an annual trade show, went online for the second year in spring 2021, Rucci and Chan appeared on a virtual panel.
“Marysue had a wall of my galleys behind her,” Chan said. “She said, ‘I’m in it to win it!’”
The Publishing House basically markets and sells your book for you. They go do all the leg work. Chan had to do very little in that regard. Midlist writers, sci-fi writers, genre writers - have to do so much more.
Because there are hundreds of new books competing for readers in any given month, it can be hard for a title to break through the noise.
But celebrity book clubs still have the power to move books en masse. In 2021, 10 of the 15 debut novels on The Times’s best-seller list were book club selections by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager or Good Morning America.
Chan’s publicist, Anne Tate Pearce, had given the book to one of Bush Hager’s producers at the “Today” show in March 2021. Bush Hager devoured it on vacation.
“I was so engrossed in this world, which felt like nothing I’d ever read before,” Bush Hager said. “And as a mom, I could totally relate with many of the feelings.”
The celebrity book club - got it, because a) the publicist, not Chan, her publicist, gave the book to the Today Show. b) they found a woman who would connect with it, a "mom" read it and it was a book about "motherhood".
Chan’s book was already a LibraryReads and Indie Next selection — lists of upcoming books to watch chosen by librarians and by independent book store owners.
Because it got into those selections - by her publicist and the marketing arm of the publishing house. The librarians didn't just choose it nor did the book store owners, it was pressed in their hands, and they were subtly persuaded to do so.
Meanwhile, the team at Simon & Schuster was still waiting on the early reviews in trade publications: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal. Getting top billing there — being “starred” — can impact reviews and coverage at glossy magazines and newspapers.
All four reviews came back starred.
What they aren't telling us, is these reviews are bought by the publishers. How do I know? Because when I tried to get them to review my book - I discovered there's a fee for their review, also that they will only review books from publishing houses. It's a marketing ploy.
. Photo shoots moved from studios to snowy yards. Instead of traveling to New York for her appearance on the “Today” show, Chan filmed the segment remotely. Her husband, a documentary filmmaker, rigged a lighting setup to tape it at home.
See, support network.
Still, TV commercials, print ads, and influencer content placed by Simon & Schuster’s marketing department ran as scheduled, and the book made headlines when Jessica Chastain’s production company announced plans to adapt it.
Chan got on social media, where she engaged with readers and fellow authors who connected with the novel. On Twitter, she learned from an English professor at the College of William & Mary that her book inspired a course on “bad mothers in literature.”
Dear God, look at the marketing effort behind this book. Publishing houses who bid a ton on a book - will devout an entire marketing campaign to it. The writer is even coached on how to participate and what to say. They have print, ads, and they have trained social media influencers involved.
She added: “I’d like people to know that it’s possible for a debut author in her 40s, a woman of color, a mom, who led a quiet life offline with no brand building whatsoever to have this experience.”
Eh, no. You had a book that fit into a marketing nitch, then got the full-court press on brand building out of the box. This is not weird. They did it with Harper Lee, they've done it with countless others. And hello, you are married to a documentary film maker. You have connections in the glamour biz.
This was a weird article. All the way through the facts kind of undercut the woman's - look I can do it, you can do it too, it's possible niavetee. Can she really be this unselfaware?
Sigh. Sometimes I wish we could all just write and share our stories and books and ignore these annoying distributors entirely. Actually we can. It's called non-traditional or self-publishing. Thank you, Internet and in particular agencies such as Amazon for making it possible to ignore the traditional distribution channels - and potentially drive them out of business. Tee Hee. Also, kind of makes me route for the Government to squash the S&S and Random/Penguine merger.
*
"The Justice Department has already reviewed the documents it seized from Mar-a-Lago.
The government said in a court filing today that it set aside documents it had taken from Donald Trump’s Florida residence that could potentially be covered by attorney-client privilege."
"The disclosure, which came days after the former president’s lawyers pressed a federal judge to appoint an outside expert to review the materials, could make their efforts unnecessary. The Justice Department also said it was actively conducting a deeper “classification review” of the intelligence implications of Trump’s retention of the documents.
What was initially an effort to retrieve classified national security documents has turned into one of the most challenging and potentially explosive criminal investigations in recent memory. Trump’s team is scrambling to find a defense."
Here's the article: Trump Document Inquiry Poses Unparalleled Tests for US Justice Department
I don't know what to make of this. Best not to think about it too much, eh?
Best thing that could happen is if Trump died of a heart attack tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 07:06 am (UTC)And yeah, I agree, I wish Trump would either drop dead or become so senile that he clearly couldn’t run.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 10:40 pm (UTC)I also discovered that you can make it so you just see the folks you are following.
It is however making me want to vacation in the Maldive Islands or Bali, which is kind of annoying. (I can't afford either at the moment.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 10:48 pm (UTC)I get very confused on them. They go by the marketing logarithms - most commented on, or most liked or most popular gets on top. It's a popularity contest. So the more people who comment or like a post, the more likely you will see it. And since negative advertising or negative posts get the most attention - you end up with those, or you get the ones in which folks are promoting stuff people want.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 09:05 am (UTC)Just possibly 'few connections' means something like 'did not do glossy MFA course' or 'move in toney literary circles' but it's still disingenuous if she was actually working in publishing and Knew People! I guess this is to make a 'relatable' pitch for publicity purposes: I am a bit reminded of hoohah over the Richard III film which is apparently either omitting or distorting the role of professional archaeologists in Leicester to make it a 'little person/dedicated amateur triumphs' simplistic narrative.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 10:34 pm (UTC)And it's amusing because the facts kind of undercut their intent. Oh look, I got published without knowing anyone - eh, no, you did. And you were in the publishing industry.
I hadn't heard about the Richard III film - is this a new one? The only one I know about is the one that Ian McKellan did ages ago, when I still cared and actually went out of my way to see Shakespeare.
ETA: Thank you on behalf of my Mom. She's currently scheduled to go for surgery next week to get the stone exploded, crushed or broken down, assuming it doesn't pass in the next five days. She has to go off asprin and any blood thinners. Our cousin told her not to fret over it.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-30 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 03:39 am (UTC)hee! I 100% agree about Adobe - pdfs are THE WORST to work with :D
no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-31 11:39 pm (UTC)Don't get me started on inserting images or choosing *fonts* inside pdfs!
EDIT: even supposedly "supported" stuff like fillable forms - the form fields are never consistent in terms of how to "pick" a value from a list - like filling in checkboxes or radio buttons. ahahahah omg the last time I did that I nearly pulled all my hair out!
no subject
Date: 2022-09-01 02:25 am (UTC)I suck at coding. I can do rudimentary HTML, but beyond that, nada. And no patience for it. So I tried the workarounds that do not involve coding at all.
Recently? I was trying to swipe in a new document in the middle of the file, finally gave up.
The fillable forms are the worst. If you don't click right on the check box or radio button, it won't check the box.
I am not a fan of PDF's. Although they are more user friendly that they used to be. I remember when we couldn't edit them, and had to scan the damn things every time, also they were illegible half the time - like dirty fax.
Now? We can export them into word and excel, pdf word and excel, and edit the damn things. That's progress.