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Kodak did a brisk business over the holidays with their meme camera, the Charmera, which is tiny enough to fit on a key chain and takes deeply lofi photos, especially in low light. But it cost $30 and as it happens I do need a keychain, so I thought I would try one out and see what I thought.
Inasmuch as every camera must be inaugurated with a picture of a cat, here is the very first photo out of the camera:
And here is a picture of me, with said camera, in my bathroom mirror.
These pictures are pretty terrible! But admittedly they are also inside my house where the lighting is not great. What happens when we go outside?
Nope, still pretty terrible.
Which is to be expected, as this thing comes with a 1.6 megapixel sensor (1440×1080), and the sensor itself is likely the size of a pinhead. You’re not taking pictures with this camera for high fidelity. You’re taking them for glitchy lo-res fun, in as good of lighting as you can get. This also had video, at the same resolution, but you know what, I’m not even going to bother.
In addition to the primary color mode the Charmera has other “fun” modes including ones that add frame and goofy pixel art to your picture, which, you know, okay, why not. You need to bring along your own micro memory card, and it’s a real pain in the ass to get it in, so you will probably never take it out (you can connect it to your computer via USB, which is also how it’s charged), but once it’s in you can take effectively infinite number of pictures because the individual image files are so small.
The UI is not great, the little screen on the back of the camera is too tiny to be of much use, and quite honestly I’m not sure what the use case of this thing is, other than to have it, and possibly give it to an 8-year-old so they can run around taking pictures without running the risk of them damaging anything valuable, like your phone or a real camera.
But, I mean, as long as you know all that going in, yeah, it’s kind of fun. And for $30(ish) bucks, not a huge outlay for trendily pixellated photos. I’ve made worse purchases recently.
— JS
petrapetrarachelmanija
sholiorachelmanija
darkjediqueen posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fan_flashworksosprey_archercaptainawkward_feedAnnouncement: the audience for these has changed, so I’m going to do them once every three or four months instead of monthly. So please come to this January one if you’re interested, there won’t be another until probably April.
24th January, 1pm, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX.
We will be on Level 5 blue side (the upper levels are no longer closed to non-ticket-holders), but I don’t know exactly where on the floor. It will depend on where we can find a table.
I have shoulder length brown hair, and will have my plush Chthulu which looks like this:
Please obey any rules posted in the venue.
The venue has lifts to all floors and accessible toilets. The accessibility map is here:
The food market outside (side away from the river) is pretty good for all sorts of requirements, and you can also bring food from home, or there are lots of cafes on the riverfront.
Other things to bear in mind:
1. Please make sure you respect people’s personal space and their choices about distancing.
2. We have all had a terrible time for the last four years. Sharing your struggles is okay and is part of what the group is for, but we need to be careful not to overwhelm each other or have the conversation be entirely negative. Where I usually draw the line here is that personal struggles are fine to talk about but political rants are discouraged, but I may have to move this line on the day when I see how things go. Don’t worry, I will tell you!
3. Probably lots of us have forgotten how to be around people (most likely me as well), so here is permission to walk away if you need space. Also a reminder that we will all react differently, so be careful to give others space if they need.
Please RSVP if you’re coming so I know whether or not we have enough people. If there’s no uptake I will cancel a couple of days before.
kate DOT towner AT gmail DOT com
smallhobbit posting in fan_flashworkspetrateland where I linked her to someone floating the possibility of discussion questions on fanfiction with the implication that the questions, and responses, would be AI slop.teland's questions:sanguinity's comment threw me bodily to the floor, convulsed with giggles of joy. It's considerably longer than the drabble-and-a-half I wrote and shows an attention to detail I cannot but applaud.sanguinity having good enough taste not to have watched the Star Wars prequels. Gotta deduct points for not reading the deeply silly text.ciexmod posting in pinchhitsconsent_issues_exchangesagerachelmanija
summercomfortwhateverjohnonly_feedThe Academy Is…, one of my favorite bands from this century (and yes, I feel old just typing that out), has recorded their first new album in eighteen years, titled Almost There, and will be putting it out in March. In the meantime, here is the first single from the album, “2005,” which is a paean both to that year and still being around more than 20 years later. Speaking as someone whose debut novel came out in 2005: Feel it.
Also if you want to preorder the album and merch, they have a shop.
— JS
osprey_archerbadly_knitted posting in fan_flashworksbadly_knitted
maevedarcy posting in pinchhitsholly_poly rachelmanija
philomythaosprey_archerlittlerhymes and I have embarked on a Year of Sail, starting with C. S. Forester’s Mr. Midshipman Hornblower!littlerhymes, “These are good but they AREN’T slashy, the internet lied to me.” littlerhymes commanded.brightly_burning posting in pinchhitssummercomfortwhateverjohnonly_feed
Our solar system has eight major planets, nine if you believe that Pluto Was Wronged. It also has literally thousands of minor planets, which are also colloquially known as asteroids, many of which reside in the “asteroid belt” between Jupiter and Mars. I learned some time ago that the International Astronomical Union, through its Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature, will give some of these minor planets, usually designated by number, an actual name. What kinds of names? Sometimes of geographical locations, sometimes of observatories, sometimes of fictional characters like Spock or Sherlock Holmes, sometimes of scientists (or their family members), and sometimes, just sometimes, they’re named after science fiction authors.
Like minor planet 52692 (1998 FO8), henceforth to be known as “Johnscalzi”:
This little space potato is a Main Belt Asteroid whose orbit is comfortably between Jupiter and Mars, has a diameter of about 10.7 kilometers, and has a “year” of about 5 years, 8 months and 10 days. If I start the clock on a ScalziYear today, it’ll be New ScalziYear’s Day on September 22, 2031. Plan ahead! If you want to look for Johnscalzi, the link above will tell you where it is, more or less, on any given day, but at 10km across and an absolute magnitude of 12.19 (i.e., really really really dim), don’t expect to find it in your binoculars or home telescope. Just know that it there, cruising along in space, doing its little space potato-y thing.
How do I feel about this? My dudes, dudettes and dudeites, I am so unbelievably stoked about this I can’t even tell you. It’s not an exaggeration to say this was something of a life goal, but not a goal that was in my control in any significant way. I suppose it might be possible to buy one’s way into having an asteroid named for you, but I don’t know how to do that, and I wouldn’t even if I did. How much cooler to be tapped on the shoulder by the International Astronomical Union, and to be told, here is a space potato with your name. I can die happier now than I could have a day ago. To be clear, I don’t plan to die anytime soon. But when I do, if they’re shooting remains into space that point, now they will have a place to aim me at.
Also cool: The name of the asteroid that’s in the catalogue next to mine. We geeked out about it on the phone just now. We’re Space Potato Pals!
Anyway, this is how my day is going. It’s pretty great. Highlight of the year so far, for sure.
— JS
rachelmanijawintermod posting in pinchhitswintertime_woes_exchange, an exchange for unhappy endingspetrasanguinity.Bush is too late to the beach to stop the firing squad.
Bonus Bush point-of-view on the beach scene.
sholiowhateverjohnonly_feed
In the current iteration of Whatever, the archive here goes back to March 2002, which is a time before all but one of my books (The Rough Guide to Money Online, now out of print and deeply outdated). That is nearly 24 years of writing here on a nearly daily basis, and millions of words, to go along with the millions of words that are in my other books and novels, all but three of which are still in print (the other two out of print books: The Rough Guide to the Universe and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, both also out of date). Between this site and the books, there will be no lack of verbiage for people who are interested in me to go by; I will not die a mystery to history.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial part of my writing life which is no longer as easily accessible. Going from most recent to most distant, there are first the out of print books, the rights to which I own and which I might even put online at some point, but haven’t because doing so is a pain in the ass. I’d have to work from either old PDFs or scan everything in, and the effort required versus the value of the text is not there for me. You might find some of these on pirate sites, and inasmuch as I’m not doing anything with them at the moment, you’re welcome to them if you find them there (that said, don’t link to any of them in the comments, please).
Prior to that is the text of Whatever from between September 13, 1998 and March 26, 2002. This was an era where the Whatever was made from hand-rolled HTML rather than typed into dedicated blogging software (first Movable Type, then WordPress). Being hand-rolled meant that it was not easy to just transfer the text over; I would have had to cut and paste a couple thousand entries. Prior to the advent of Whatever there was an even earlier version of the site going back to March of 1998, which is when I secured the Scalzi.com domain and put up a static site, with columns and movie reviews from my newspaper days, new essays I wrote for the site, a couple of book proposals, and some extremely Web 1.0 site design.
None of this material is on the site proper anymore, but it’s still around after a fashion. One, I have a digital archive of it, duplicated in several places to ward off accidental deletion, and also it’s on the Internet Archive site (along with more recent iterations of this site), because I am not adverse to having the site archived in this way, and also because I personally find it convenient — if there’s something from this era I want to look at, it’s easier for me to look for it via the Internet Archive than my own archives. Among other things, the Internet Archive has maintained the architecture of the old site as well as the content of it. The Internet Archive is robust and useful but only gives the illusion of permanence; it could go away at any point. This is why I also have my own digital archive.
(The Internet Archive is also currently the only easy way to find anything I ever wrote on the former Twitter, as I permanently deleted my presence there, including all my tweets. I did, of course, download my own archive of tweets and have multiply saved it.)
Prior to this is my professional work up until I started being a full-time novelist: Work I did for AOL and other web sites, including columns at AMC, MediaOne and my own videogame review site, GameDad, and before then the columns, features and movie reviews I did for the Fresno Bee between September 1991 and March 1996. Again, I have my own digital archives of what I wrote, and the Internet Archive can help you resurrect at least some of this material if you know how to look for it. But much of it no longer available online, due to link rot, revamped web sites, or, in the case of the AOL stuff, originally having been in a walled garden that no longer exists in any event.
For a long time I suspected that the stuff I wrote for the Fresno Bee would never be available online unless I put it there myself, but as it turns out, there’s a site, Newspapers.com, which will allow you to access at least scanned (and sometimes OCR’d) versions of my reviews and columns. I found out about this, weirdly enough, because some of my Fresno Bee movie reviews started being quoted at Rotten Tomatoes. Not the full reviews, just quotes, alas. I may get a subscription to this site just to download all my movie reviews at some point. That will be a project.
We have dug down far enough that now we come to the material that is, truly, not available in any way, shape or form online: Writing from high school and college, which includes but is not limited to, music reviews and columns for the Chicago Maroon, my college newspaper, and my first attempts at short stories from high school. The picture at the head of this essay is of the actual physical archive of much of this stuff. It does not include the big-ass book I have that compiles all the copies of the Chicago Maroon for the 1989-90 academic year, when I was the editor-in-chief of the paper; that’s on a shelf on the other side of the room. Yes, if there’s ever a fire in my office, all of this writing is likely to go up in smoke.
I may at some point scan some or all of this stuff, but I’m pretty confident that almost none of it, save for what I had already put up in the previous iteration of the site, is going to be seen by the public at large. Why? Well, one, at the ages of 14 to 21, I wasn’t that good of a writer. Indeed, there is a real and serious upgrade in my writing skills that happened in 1998, because between ’96 and ’98, I spent a lot of my time being an editor, and much of that time was telling other people how to tweak their writing to make it better. It meant when I looked at my own writing previous to that point, I was very much “who told this jackass he could write” about it. The word to use for my writing in high school in particular is “precocious,” which is to say, showing talent but not a lot of discipline or control.
Two, and again particularly in my high school writing, some of it I’m ashamed of. In more than one of my short stories from the high school era, I made being gay a punchline, not because I was virulently homophobic at the time, but because I was a kid and uncritically absorbed the general 1980s societal attitudes concerning gay and lesbian folks. That explanation doesn’t excuse it, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. Also, being an ignorant kid in the 80s would not mitigate actual pain and harm posting those stories would have on people here in 2026. So they will stay on their shelf and not online.
I’ll note that wisdom and empathy did not suddenly alight upon my shoulder upon high school graduation. There’s plenty of my writing in the 90s — when I was a full grown adult — that is absolutely cringe on reflection. I’d sorted most of my homophobia by my exit from college, but hashing out my tendency to fall back on casual sexism for a laugh took well into the 21st Century to deal with. I can and do still slip into what I might call “avuncular pontificating” mode, and especially in the early days of Whatever this mode was indistinguishable from generic mansplaining. I try to do better, and I’ve been trying to do better for a while now. We are all permanently works in progress.
But that does mean that, unlike when I was younger and thought everything of mine should be read, I now understand why people curate their work, and let lots of it slip out of view. There is work from every stage of my writing life I am proud of and happy to show people. There’s a lot more I’m fine with letting it be, or, at best, it being of interest to a biographer, should one be foolhardy enough to emerge. There is a reason why, in the Site Disclaimer for Whatever, I mention that when you come across something that sounds like me being an ass, check the date and see if there’s not a more recent piece that reflects my current position on the subject. Also, this is why, if someone presents me with something I wrote a a decade or two (or three!) ago, I am perfectly happy to say, when necessary, that younger me was a jackass on many things and this happens to be one of them.
While I’m on the topic, and this is a thing which I think these days is actually important given the current state of technology, this is why you can’t just feed everything I’ve ever written into a Large Language Model and have it shit out a reasonable facsimile of me. Leaving aside any other issue with the current model of “AI” being an unthinking statistical matching machine, I am a moving target. I am not the same writer at 56 that I was at 16, 26, 36 or even 46. Is there a consistent thread between those versions of me? Absolutely; you can read something I wrote as a teenager and see the writer I am now in those words. But the differences at every age add up. You can’t statistically average the circumstances and choices I made across 40 years into something that reads like me, either as I am today or how I was at any previous stage.
And yes, you could ask an “AI” to control for these things, and it will, but it’s still not going to do a great job. I am me because of the lifetime of experiences I have had, but that’s not all of what makes me who I am in any present moment, What in my experiences contribute to that are not all equally weighted, or of equal consideration when I write… or when I’m thinking about what to write next. An LLM won’t and can’t understand that, which is why an attempt to use one to write like me (or any other author) is an exercise in the Uncanny Valley all the way down. Recently someone tried to convince me an LLM could write like me by cutting and pasting to me something he had it write “in my style.” It was only vaguely like how I would write, and also, I was mildly concerned that this person thought this was actually how I wrote.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of writing from me, and mostly what it does is give you an insight into who I was at the time it was written. Some of it good! Some of it is not. Some of it you can find, and some you cannot. And while I very much want you all to buy every single novel in my backlist, Tor and I both thank you for your efforts on that score, otherwise I’m perfectly okay with you focusing on what I’m writing now rather than what I wrote way back when. I’m related to that guy, and we’re very close. But we’re not exactly the same person anymore.
— JS
rachelmanija
bluedreaming posting in fan_flashworkspetra - Fun things to do on a snowy Friday - Kink list updatedwhateverjohnonly_feed - The Charm, Such As It Is, of the Charmerapetra - US Politics: Minnesota under attackpetra - US Music: Social Singers in the Northeast - Youth Trad Song Weekend waitlist is openrachelmanija - The Huntress, by Kate Quinnxkcd_feed - International Stationsholio - Babylon 5 2x07 "Soul Mates"minoanmiss - Well here we go, Bostoniansminoanmiss - Two Good Moviesminoanmiss - Fun readingrachelmanija - Krampus, by Bromminoanmiss - Good morningdarkjediqueen in fan_flashworks - S.W.A.T.: Fan Fiction: Couldn't Waitosprey_archer - Book Review: Thérèse Raquincaptainawkward_feed - January London meetupsmallhobbit in fan_flashworks - Sock: Spooks (MI5): Fanfic: Four Sockspetra - Discussion questions on fanfiction and what can happen if you try them outcelli - I finished a book! On a Wednesday!ciexmod in pinchhits - Consent Issues Pinch Hits Due January 22 (Negotiable)sage - What I'm Doing Wednesdayxkcd_feed - 16-Part Epoxyrachelmanija - They're All Terrible 1-3minoanmiss - Story Idea from Real Lifesummercomfort - (no subject)whateverjohnonly_feed - The Academy Is…: 2005minoanmiss - What should I cook?minoanmiss - An apology to future historiansosprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Memebadly_knitted in fan_flashworks - Torchwood: Fanfic: Return Of The Living Socksmaevedarcy in pinchhits - Holly Poly 2025 Pinch Hits Due January 25thrachelmanija - The Hike, by Drew Magaryphilomytha - the word fear did not and does not exist in my vocabularyosprey_archer - Book Review: Mr. Midshipman Hornblowerbrightly_burning in pinchhits - A Hand in the Hole Fisting Exchange Pinch Hit Due January 19thsummercomfort - (no subject)xkcd_feed - Sailing Rigscelli - Signal Boost: Fandom Trumps Hate 2026whateverjohnonly_feed - A Minor Planet, a Major Thrillminoanmiss - The Four Marysrachelmanija - I got interviewed about Paper & Clay Bookshopcelli - 2 new BTS fics and the podfic I made for themwintermod in pinchhits - Wintertime Woes Post-Deadline Pinch Hits Due Jan 17celli - BTS podfic: More Hesitationminoanmiss - Success!petra - Recommendation: Too Late, Too Late - Hornblower amalgamsholio - B5 color theorizingwhateverjohnonly_feed - The Offline Archiverachelmanija - A Prayer for the Crown Shy, by Becky Chamberscelli - Signal Boost: Fandomtrees due Jan 17 (Deadline pushed back)bluedreaming in fan_flashworks - 子非鱼 (Zi Fei Yu): Fanfic: imagine a life (but surely hell)branchandroot
