Friday, 21st of April, 2006

Ever wondered about that precarious business called book publishing? Anna Lousie Genoese from Tor Books, one of the biggest sf publishers in the world, has a rundown on the financial maths of putting out a mass-market original — that is, a novel that is first published as a paperback, rather than having an initial hardcover run. I’ll hopefully find out when she posts part 2, on hardcovers, but for now go and read and weep (and never entertain the notion again that book publishing is a great way to make lots of money!)
Link

Monday, 17th of April, 2006

Pure gold
Sorry. But I’ve just been enjoying the comments thread on the above-linked post so much that I wanted to share it with you. Another passionate atheistic post from the redoubtable PZ, this time about how horrible the Easter story really is, and how it links in with how horrible Christianity really is.

Sunday, 2nd of April, 2006

I’ve installed a sexy AJAXified feed reader called Gregarius and I’m just testing how it goes with automatically checking for updates and stuff. So ignore this (and ignore this update, if you see it!), but if you’ve got a feed reader installed on your own server or are thinking of doing so, it’s looking pretty good.
At the moment I’m using a fairly modified version of feed on feeds, which is functional and simple, but Gregarius is looking a lot prettier and has some good functionality missing from fof…

Saturday, 1st of April, 2006

Kissing Hank’s Ass is an excellent piece of parody. If you’re a religious Christian and easily offended, then fie on you! And don’t blame me.

Dan Jones’s The Proper Study of Mankind (referenced in the previous post) is a fabulous blog by a guy whose opinions on lots of things seem remarkably close to mine (e.g. philosophers’ zombies, and Richard Dawkins’ The Root Of All Evil? (Parts 1 & 2 - he also responds to more Michelle Bunting nonsense here). He has an excellent post about atheism, theism and agnosticism, and his position on why he calls himself an atheist is almost exactly where I would place myself.