I am considering expanding my indie pub operation to more than just Amazon, but I don't know other platforms or how good they might be.
I recently heard of Kobo. is Nook still a thing, or did that utterly die?

No, not like that.
How do y'all strip your whites? By which I mean, how do you get the armpit grease and banana stains out of your undershirts and others? Traditional wisdom is to near boil that shit with hot water and let it sit in the bathtub, then wash without softener as normal.
I assume if you wash 10 shirts like this, you can bet two of them will be nigh unwearable afterwards (perhaps it was the grease that was holding them together?).
My mom, and a lot of other folks, and also dudes who went to prison, used to use Lestoil to get whites Summer Afternoon in Dixie levels of white. I don't have any Lestoil and I'm not sure if its still legal to manufacture. Anyone ever try Dawn Dish Soap? I figure the blue dye in the soap can only help the whites come out whiter (bluing white laundry is a real thing).

This is really bad: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/us/mahmou...index.html
It's good that the administration can't just deport him, but the fact that they are trying to do this to a lawful permanent resident is a terrible precedent.
It's not an exaggeration to say this is a serious escalation of policies attacking immigrants, political activism, and free expression.
It's pretty textbook that you can't legally punish someone for speech. He had disciplinary charges at Columbia but, as far as I'm aware, no criminal charges, indicative that there was no belief he committed a crime at Columbia, at the time. No actual charges have been revealed, either, not that this administration gives a shit about legal process.
This shit is real bad and likely to get worse.

Fuck it, I have thoughts.
So, I saw the first Squid Game back when it originally came out. It was good but definitely got by on style and gimmicks more than having much depth. The intense commercialization was also icky. I'm not here to rehash the first season; there's plenty of writing about that out there, if you want to find it.
What's interesting to me is that season 2 seems to be less well-received, and I have a few thoughts on that. I actually thought it was more complex and interesting, willing to examine its premise rather than go along with it the way season 1 did.
It will be impossible to avoid spoilers here, so: everything after this will be spoilers!
Season 1 was focused on the game itself: what the individual games were, the rules, the players, who would live or die, etc. There were some subplots but ultimately, you were there to find out if Gi-hun (and anyone else) would live and win.
Season 2 challenges the very existence of the game. Gi-hun has put the fortune he won to work trying to find the people responsible for the game in the first place, starting with the guy who recruits players. You learned very little about him in season 1 but season 2 establishes him to be essentially a psychopath. He torments homeless people for kicks, for crying out loud. I mention this because while the evil of the capitalist villains in season 1 is there, it's not put on perverse display the way it is this time. This time, you get to see that the capitalists and power brokers aren't just agents of a system--they are the facilitators of it, the owners of it, the creators of it, and they know exactly what they are doing.
Naturally, Gi-hun does attract the Front Man's attention enough to get himself reinserted into the game. The show fools you (and Gi-hun) into thinking it's gonna be the same games as last time, because they start with red light/green light. Here is where the show starts to put its message for this season on its sleeve: Gi-hun starts organizing the other players. He tells them how to survive, and those who listen to him fare a lot better than those who don't, or who panic.
Other players' trust in him is diminished when it turns out none of the other games are repeats, though. What's interesting about the games this time around is that they are less gimmicky and flashy (lending themselves much less to fun product tie-ins), and also depend more heavily on teamwork, because solidarity and cooperation are massive themes this time.
There are people who find Gi-hun's message compelling: is it really worth dying to get your hands on some money? Some of the players desperately need it, but they agree with him. They'd rather live than continue to risk dying in the game. Unfortunately, more players keep voting to stay, and the number of them doing so out of pure selfishness is highlighted pretty bluntly. This show is not subtle.
Even less subtle is the Front Man joining the game, albeit undercover. This is where the most overt messaging happens. Here we have the Front Man, the uber-capitalist, insinuating himself amongst the plebs and pretending to be their friend, pretending to be Gi-hun's friend specifically. He earns the trust of their little group, helps them survive and win games, etc. He is content to do this because, in the end, these are his games and his rules. He's not worried about the outcome. (You could also argue that his detachment has left him emotionally bereft and part of joining the game is to give himself a thrill by actually putting himself in danger.)
Gi-hun ultimately realizes that the players who keep voting to stay aren't going to change their minds, so he proposes more drastic action: picking up guns and fighting their way out! Like I said, this is not subtle. Gi-hun, who has organized a bunch of the other players and formed a mini revolutionary army, tries to fight his way to the control room. Notably, we see more of the guards this season and come to understand that they are just working-class shlubs, too, often poor and/or homeless themselves. They are paid to be class traitors, because of course they are. Who does the fighting in all this? Not the lead staff, that's for sure. It's the low level guards and the players who have to shoot it out.
Since the Front Man holds almost all the cards, it's not a huge surprise that Gi-hun's gambit fails and almost his whole force is taken out. The Front Man confronts him but doesn't kill him, because it's more important to break him. What was I saying about subtlety? Killing people is easy. But to see you resist and prove to you that it's futile, that's hard. That requires work. That is part of the work of capitalism, to convince you that you are powerless.
The show ends on a cliffhanger after that. There is a final season coming in the summer.
While this show is clearly not subtle, I appreciated the pretty direct applications of Marxist theory. The only path to worker power is solidarity. Capitalists will pretend to be your allies only to deceive and oppress you. And workers can be turned against each other, even in deadly violence. It is the belief in your collective power that make change possible.
"But isn't this show made under capitalism? Doesn't that diminish its message?" Well, the message is still in it, no? Capitalism indeed embraces and subsumes all critiques of it into itself, but that is because capitalists believe so fully in their unassailable position. They don't think any critique could actually harm them, so they gladly exploit such critiques for profit. But what if they're wrong? What if those critiques are getting through to people, who are starting to rethink the world order they see around them? Hmmm.

I've been writing for a long time, and one thing I was thinking about is how my mentality has changed since I started. I suppose it would have to, otherwise you're being stagnant, and that's no good.
My earliest characters--two of whom are still kicking around, namely William Pearson and Robert Maxwell--are prototypical Captain Kirk types, men of action. Probably because that's what I was inundated with as a kid so that just became the obvious hero type.
I had come up with both of them before I was 20, so they've been with me a long time. I would say starting in my 30s, I started to dislike what they stood for, recognizing a lot of their aspects as toxic masculinity. I didn't want to not write about them, but I started having a very different lens about them.
This ended up coming out as a couple different approaches.
For William, in TOTALITY, his actions were shown to have generally more negative consequences. His "act first, think later" MO blows up in his face repeatedly. At the same time, I found myself liking Sasha more, as a character. She was thoughtful, troubled by the things she saw, actually felt the burden of leadership, and even if she didn't always make the right decisions, they were always made with consideration for who they would affect, rather than serving her own ego. That's what she aspires to, at least. I wouldn't say I have any "perfect" characters, as there are no perfect people. Everyone is flawed. For Sasha, as an example, her desire to please everyone and always make the best decision sometimes leads her to dangerous inaction. But that's probably better than acting rashly, damn the consequences, eh?
It's worth noting that the iteration of TOTALITY published now is the third version of it. The first was written 1999-2003 as weekly installments, called The Journeyman. (I changed the name when a TV show by that name came out, but then the show got canceled, but in any case, TOTALITY is a better name.) I attempted a rewrite in 2011 or so, but it didn't get far, I think because I wasn't quite where I needed to be, as a writer, to really handle it how I wanted. The most recent rewrite turned out much better, I think!
As for Robert Maxwell: he starred in his own Star Trek-like stories from when I was about 8, and when I was a teenager and joined an X-Men forum where people did role-playing and wrote fanfic, naturally he became my alter ego. This also meant he showed up in a lot of stories, where he got fleshed out a lot more, as a character. (His similarities to Cable were, uh, not entirely coincidental, but I like to think he has become fully distinct since then.)
I wrote him out of the shared fanfic universe of the X-Men forum... then back in... then out again. Clearly, I couldn't quit him, as a character. Then he gathered dust for a few years and I ended up starting a full rewrite of his exploits, called Shatternity, which is a name I have been far too attached to considering how silly it is. I got a lot further on that rewrite than I did the first TOTALITY rewrite, but after writing the first 3 parts (which constituted a single novel), I stalled. I think part of it was that I was still envisioning him as kind of cool, when my own sensibility was coming to regard characters like him as dangerous rogues whose selfish actions do more harm than good.
So, he sat and collected dust again. One aspect of his character is that, since he came to "our time" in the year 1988 and aged contemporaneously since then, I could "follow him" up to the present day. Based on his fictional history, he would be 84 years old, which is old enough to still be mentally sharp but definitely too old to be gallivanting around the galaxy (barring some Star Trek-level anti-aging technology, which I decided he can't have too much of.) I realized it would be a more interesting approach to have him be telling his story to someone else, reflecting on his past--and being challenged on it. So, that's where Sender Silent comes in. You should read it, by the way: https://www.sendersilent.com/
I thought it was at least a little inspired for his foil to be a zoomer. Part of that is wanting to buck the trend of shitting on younger generations (Brynn isn't stupid or naive, etc.) and she's also a good lens through which to critique his (many, many fucked-up) actions. You could say it's a little like this:

Except he's not dead (technically.)

Just kick nazis in the face. That's all.

I have Steam keys for Pacific Drive and Homeworld 3. Whoever wants one or the other or both can have them!

On the heels of it coming out that the most popular writer on Substack is a Nazi (lol), I wish to remind everyone: if you don't own your platform, your platform owns you.
This site? Just a bunch of stuff I can download and reup anywhere I want. Servers are disposable. Your audience isn't.
Every creator platform, it seems, goes out of its way to ensure they own your audience, not you. Twitch, Substack, Medium, YouTube, TikTok, you name it. Patreon seems to be the least bad among these, but that's not a high bar to clear.
All that's to say: I am willing to help people set up sites for themselves, away from the control of big platforms.
@Aloria I believe I still owe you a site!

What's something kind someone did for you a long time ago that you've never forgotten? It doesn't even have to be a big thing. Just something that sticks with you.
Last night I was cleaning up my office, and I keep my collection of scarves in my closet. I don't know, I just like scarves.
I noticed the multicolored scarf hanging there, hand-crocheted, and I recalled how I got it.
I was on a message board in the late '90s/early 2000s, and I helped this girl who went by the name Safiya set up a website, as she didn't really know how to do that.
I didn't ask for anything in return, I just wanted to do something nice for her. Lo and behold, one day I received a package with a scarf and a card, where she explained how much she appreciated me helping her out. The scarf was clearly handmade and really nice. It was just totally unexpected, and I know it must have taken her many hours to make it.
It's probably one of my favorite things that I have. We lost touch and I'm sure we haven't talked for over 20 years by now. But I hope she's living her best life.
What about the rest of you?