internet

The End of Netflix Mail-Order Discs

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Friday the 29th is the last day Netflix will be mailing out discs for their mail order movie rental company and even though I live in a city, have reasonably good internet and access to a bunch of streaming channels, I’m still going to miss those red envelopes.

Here’s the thing: When Netflix dvd service started out, it was a great resource for people who couldn’t get access to high speed internet. If you’re living out in the boonies, you might have dialup, but stream a whole and entire movie? No way. didn’t have a Blockbuster down the road.

Mail-order dvds were also a reasonable alternative to driving two hours to the nearest theater, or to see a movie that hadn’t even come to a theater in driving range.

Also, in the early days, they offered access to tons of obscure films. Before Netflix, you might be able to read about the Czech New Wave in a magazine, but you could only watch something like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders if you had an art house cinema in your city, were diligent about checking the schedule, and could get away from work or the kids to catch a showing.

Then: dvd.com came online. I could drop Valerie… into my queue and watch it at home. No worries.

Or, people might rave about Jodorowsky all over social media, prompting me to throw a disc into the queue, then turn it off and mail it back when we saw a man take a shit into a glass box.

Not for me, right? No big deal. Just mail it back.

But as broadband has spread around the country and new players have jumped into the streaming service, you can watch Valerie… any time you want from any number of services. It’s three bucks on Amazon right now, no art house calendar or disc-a-week mailer required. The Holy Mountain is four bucks (just in case you want to see that glass box).

Still, I didn’t want to ditch the discs.

I think everyone has heard stories of dvd subscribers who would receive a disc in the mail, think Eh, I’m not feeling it, then drop it on a shelf where it would sit for weeks.

Like people who paid for a gym membership but never actually worked out there, these were the most desirable customers. Me, I always wanted to be Netflix’s least profitable customer. When the disc arrived, we watched it that night. It didn’t matter if we were in the middle of a great series or whatever. The disc came in and went back out the next morning.

Because even though so many of these movies are streaming now, they still don’t get watched. We’re not going to take a break from Only Murders in the Building or Ted Lasso mid-season to stream Army of Shadows. That’s the kind of film you scroll past, with the Augustinian idea that yeah, you (I) really should watch a piece of landmark cinema, but not yet.

But my self-imposed rule on the discs didn’t allow for procrastination, not if we were going to get our money’s worth. Now that’s gone. “Film Friday” is the replacement idea, but we’ll see if we can stick to that.

Anyway, for weeks now Netflix has been saying that subscribers can keep the last disc they receive, and since there isn’t time to mail this one back and have it turned around, the one that arrived yesterday will be the one I’m keeping. Shin Godzilla, if you’re curious. I was a huge fan of Godzilla when I was tiny, but this was the first Godzilla film that I have genuinely enjoyed in decades. I plan to check out the special features and will add it to my rotation of Halloween discs.

Netflix has also said they’re planning to mail extra discs to subscribers, just to give them away. Maybe  they’ll send ten. Maybe one. Maybe none. We’ll see if we get any. We’ve been subscribers for a long time, but only at the lowest one-disc-at-a-time level. I’ve dropped a few discs into our queue that I’d like to own, like the original Oldboy and the Criterion edition of the first Godzilla film, with that great commentary track. Also, my wife asked me to add Tarsem Singh’s The Fall and my son would like Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner movie.

We’ll see.

I’m surprised they’re giving those discs away to subscribers. Are they hoping to keep people signed up until the very end? Or maybe they don’t have a viable buyer for all that physical media and are just planning to write it off.

It’s just too bad, because this was something I valued, and it’s being dumped as though all that value is gone. Those discs were just about the last thing that came in the mail that I was happy to receive.

A few years ago I wrote a bank robbery scene in passive voice

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A few years ago I wrote a bank robbery scene in passive voice and the result was pretty funny. The robbers themselves completely vanished from the story–only the effects of their actions remained and honestly, I was laughing by the time I got to the end of the first and only paragraph.

I posted it online because I had gotten caught up in a (deeply stupid) argument about the subject. What exactly is passive voice, and is it always terrible?

To answer the second question first, no, of course it’s not always terrible. There are times when passive voice is exactly what a sentence needs. The whole point of studying writing as an art form is to recognize that words and sentence structures are tools that we can put to use. So, there’s nothing inherently bad about passive voice. It just has to be used correctly.

As for what passive voice is, the question gives me flashbacks to the person who argued “Blood pooled on the floor” was in passive voice because blood is an inanimate object and how could it therefore be doing the action? The active force was gravity, which might have been absent from the sentence but was the active force causing the blood to pool. Therefore: passive.

Which… sure. But we’re talking about literary structures here, and that argument misses the point.

Another sentence that’s not passive? “He was tall.”

Which brings me to Prosecraft, (link deliberately excluded) a service offered by a company using an AI called Shaxpir (a joke name that I didn’t get until I said it aloud.) Supposedly, you submit your work of fiction to them and they use Shaxpir to run a linguistic sentiment analysis to compare it with other previously published works in their database.

There’s one work by me in there. The Twisted Path.

Some authors are contacting the guy behind it all with angry demands to pull their works from his site as though this was another free pirate library. I’m not sure it is, though. If he’s bought these works legally, then run them through his dumb (more on that later) algorithm to analyze and compare them, I’m not sure that’s a copyright violation. If he’d been doing the same analysis and comparison with a notebook and sharp pencil, I doubt anyone would complain.

Others are unhappy by the idea that he’s using their works to “train” his AI, Shaxpir. But when I look at the site, Shaxpir seems to be another a word processor with some publishing and analytical bullshit thrown in. It doesn’t appear to be one of those enter a prompt and the AI will vomit a novel manuscript for you places. It looks a bit like Scrivener.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not going to look any deeper into it, considering the quality of the analysis it does.

Judging by the Prosecraft page about my own work, I see problems with the service. First, listing adverbs–broken out into adverbs with an -ly at the end and those without–as a percentage of the total word count, then ranking the book in a “percentile” with other books in the database tells you nothing about the quality of the book. Adverbs are not a metric for quality. They’re a tool, and the only measure that really matters is whether the tool is used correctly.

Second, the service breaks down the text into “vivid” and “passive” words, then using the aforementioned sentiment analysis determines where your book is more of one of those things than the other. There’s even a little color coding for the text: the words the system codes as vivid are red, and the deeper the color the more vivid they’re supposed to be. Passive is the same but blue.

And state of being verbs are all rendered in the most intense blue.

Maybe the creator of prosecraft was a little careless with the way he labeled things. Maybe he liked the word vivid because he thought Vivid books are good books, and so he wanted to put something with a negative connotation at the other end of that scale. Therefore: passive. Passive is bad, right?

Except, in his blog post on the software, he posts an analysis of some text from one of his favorite authors, says it rates in the 99th percentile for Passive, then talks about how much he likes the guy’s writing, esp his use of “passive-voice constructions.”

No surprise then that, out of all that blue text indicating passive voice, only one of those sentences is actually in passive voice. The rest just use state-of-being verbs, which are not themselves passive voice, although there’s an argument to be made that they are not particularly vivid.

But you know what state of being verbs are? They’re really easy to identify.

So it’s a mess, really. The Passive label is being stuck on words/sequences that are not in the passive voice, and passive is used as a binary opposite to the Vivid label, which it absolutely is not.

If the books are being shared like a library, that’s bad and it shouldn’t happen. If they’re being entered into an AI so the algorithm can pull them apart and regurgitate them as works of fiction, that’s also bad and shouldn’t happen.

But as I see it, the main problem is that the service Prosecraft offers is a mess and is basically useless.

Edit: He took the website down. I knew I should have just been lazy and ignored all this. Now I’ve blogged about nothing.

Newsletter Problems

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When I sent out that last newsletter with the free promo codes for The Iron Gate audiobook, I got an unprecedented number of error messages. At the time, I had more than 1450 subscribers and I got more than 180 bounces.

A few of those were the usual stuff: this email address doesn’t exist/please fill out this form to have your email whitelisted/this server doesn’t exist. But most of the bounces–more than 150 of them–were from gmail telling me that I haven’t set up some kind of special new email authentication.

Which has to be written in a kind of code.

What do I know about coding? Nothing.

Does my domain host have a little “set up SPF for this site” box for me to check. No.

Was it something I could just copy and paste? Absolutely not, and nothing about the little codes they required made sense to me.

Luckily, my son is teaching himself to program. He helped out (meaning that he took over while I did dishes) and set up something that erased the big red X error messages that popped up when I ran a check on my mail server. There were exclamation points in a circle though, so I contacted the domain host help desk and asked them to look it over.

They wrote back to say that they’d made some changes to the SPF my son created.

I checked again. A big red X error message appeared again. This one, in fact:

domain must have at least one mail server error message

“Domain must have at least one mail server.”

When I sent this screencap to my domain host help desk, they told me it wasn’t their fault. They had done everything correctly, even though it was a change they’d made that triggered this error message. They suggested I read that “help center article,” which of course I’d already tried to do.

Basically, it felt like they had washed their hands of me.

Anyway, I’m expecting another newsletter to go out when The Flood Circle comes out in audio. Will gmail users receive it? Honestly, it’s hard to say that this point. I hope so.

I Don’t Have A Venmo Account

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In case anyone out there needs to hear this: I don’t have a Venmo account. Please don’t send money to me through that service. That’s not me.

I got an email on Saturday congratulating me on opening an account, and I assumed it was phishing and sent it to Spam. Then the emails kept coming, and a quick check showed they were from the actual company.

Fun fact! In their original email, Venmo included a “Not you? Click here” -style link that would remove my email address from whatever account had been created with it.

Another fun fact! That link didn’t work.

So it’s been the usual back and forth with the help people, who per standard practice skim over my initial message and offer advice that doesn’t work for me. At this point, it seems we’ve reached the stage where they have blocked that email address, but I keep asking if it has been used to trick people into sending money and somehow the support staff keep missing that message.

God, the future is stupid.

Anyway, I don’t have a Venmo account. If someone impersonated me in that service and asked you for money, please report that.

Less Twitter. Less of the Twitter Effect.

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Rest in peace, Chadwick Boseman.

It took the passing of movie star Chadwick Boseman at the young age of 43 to make me realize that I needed to cut way back on Twitter.

See, I wanted to write something on this blog about Boseman’s passing, about the work he’d done while he was sick, knowing that his life might be cut short. About the impact he’d had and the joy he’d spread. That I admired the legacy he left behind and feel awful that he’s been cheated of the time he could have spent with the people he loved. 

But I can’t seem to focus on the subject. I can’t even sort out my own feelings about the passing of this famous stranger. Everything’s all jumbled up.

And this isn’t true just with this one subject. It’s true about politics, movies, all sorts of things. I’m more distractible. I’m finding it harder to focus.

The more intense the problem becomes, the more I’ve begun to associate it with Twitter.

Obviously, there are other causes, too. Generalized anxiety about the pandemic. Being stuck at home, looking at these same few rooms. But I think the bulk of the problem comes from what I’m calling the Twitter Effect: a continual flood of information in small doses on widely disparate topics. 

As an example, this is what’s popped up in my Twitter timeline as I write this:

  • Sports team urging people to vote
  • A snide remark at a pundit’s old tweet
  • Trump administration
  • Abolishing Daylight Savings Time
  • Trump’s golf shoes
  • Misinformation from QAnon
  • Joke about Plato
  • Snide election comment
  • Halloween book recommendations
  • #WritingLife
  • State-level (but not my state) police reform
  • Retweeted cross-promotion for a TV show
  • Author promo
  • San Francisco rent laws
  • Superhero commentary
  • Trump joke
  • Mask commentary
  • COVID-19 symptoms/treatment
  • Voting
  • Superman joke
  • Trump tax returns
  • Climate change policy
  • Alexa’s “whisper mode”

I stopped scrolling just now when I came to a cartoon with the caption “My desire to be well-informed is at odds with my desire to stay sane.”

It’s not just that social media can feel so combative and alarmist. That, I can manage. It’s that I’ve spent 13 years training my brain to take in random, scattershot input about all sorts of different things. I need fewer soundbites and more long form thinking. More time reading outside Twitter, in other words.

For a long time, I held on to Twitter because 1) it has replaced blogs as a source for interesting/amusing links, 2) I follow some very fun and funny people and it’s become my main source of laughter during the day, 3) book talk, which is mostly pretty dull but this is what I can get, 4) film and tv talk, which tends to be more analytical and therefore more interesting, 5) and finally, the big one, politics.

Twitter was the place where I kept up with political scandals and wonky procedural shit and climate change and so on. Turning my back on that felt like being a bad citizen. 

And few things are as irresistible as an addiction that feels like virtue.

So I’m cutting back on Twitter in a big way. Years ago, I set up my writing laptop to block it during the day so i could get shit done. This past weekend, I set up my desktop to block Twitter (and Steam, because 2580+ hours of Sentinels of the Multiverse is plenty) from midnight to one in the afternoon. 

That still leaves my wife’s iPad, which I can use to access the service if I want, but that belongs to my wife and it’s not convenient. Part of any plan for breaking bad habits is to make them inconvenient. Plus, I’m not trying to drop Twitter completely, as I did with Facebook. I just want to cut back.

So I’ll be on Twitter less because less. I won’t be completely gone, but I hope to put an end to doomscrolling and political hobbyism.

It’s a relief, honestly. Social media feels both necessary and damaging at the same time. I’ve sort of grown to hate it.

Quarantine Post (Lucky) 13: I Swear the Singer is not Singing the Lyrics Listed on Lyric Sites. Plus Grim London

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Let’s return to the Avalanches for one of the most persistent (but enjoyable) earworms of the pandemic:

And we jump from that upbeat song with the dark video to a site that’s straight dark. Grim London is one of the resources recommended in the tabletop rpg Liminal (As I type this, I’m about half an hour away from our first session) as an interactive reference to hauntings and murders in that very old city.

Obviously a labor of love. Very cool.

5 Things Make a Post (nostalgia remix)

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1. Remember the old days when a person would simply turn to their blog and record a bunch of thoughts, instead of giving them away to a profit-free social media company like Twitter? Man, those were the days.

2. I’ve reached a tricky part of The Iron Gate. That’s not a bad thing (the exact opposite, in fact) but this is a part of the narrative where I’m going to be second-guessing myself and jumping around, trying to iron out a decent sequence of events so that things are fun and also cool and also make you want to keep reading. Every once in a while I see writers talk about writing a first draft and just going out with it, and I wish I could do that. Never happen, though.

3. Watched Ernst Lubitch’s final completed film last night: CLUNY BROWN. It’s a rom com that doubles as a satire of upper class British manners. (“Darling, if I trust you now, I’ll always have to trust you. And I won’t.”) Often, when a movie criticizes social mores, it makes itself a period piece. Its much more palatable (marketable) to GREEN BOOK racism than to address racism in the here and now. But CLUNY BROWN, released in 1946, was set in 1938. Anyway, it’s a funny, clever film with terrific performances. Worth watching.

4. Two weeks ago, I asked you guys to please review One Man and my other books, too, and you have really responded. Before I that blog post, sales for all my work on the Kindle store were in the mid-20s. Almost immediately, they jumped to the high 50s or low 60s, and now One Man is only 8 ratings/review from that sweet 100 mark on Amazon. Thank you all. It really makes a big difference to discoverability and to overall sales. If you’ve been meaning to post a review but haven’t gotten around to it, the links at the bottom of the main post should make for easy clicking. Thanks again.

5. My son has been working on a novel and has given me his first draft. It’s pretty good for a first effort, although no where close to ready for public consumption. But every moment I spent doing something other than editing his book or working on my own makes me feel guilty, like I’m slacking off. Luckily, guilt has never stopped me from being super lazy, so I’m going to log off, make a couple of notes about our respective works, and then put in the library dvd for TITANS, which I’ve heard is terrible. If so, I can turn it off after ten minutes or so and never be tempted by it again.

It’s Not the Thing You Don’t Know That Get You…

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It’s the things you think you know but are wrong.

For ex:

Everyone was telling me that five cents a word was too low, and I kept responding by saying some variation on, “SFWA set the minimum pro rates (for short fiction) at five cents a word. That’s the number I’m going to use!”

Except I was wrong.

As pointed out to me by another author (and if you have a middle grade fantasy reader in your life, or if you like historical fantasy with lots of Big Romance, you should definitely check out Stephanie’s books) SFWA changed the minimum pro rate months ago. I should have gone with eight cents a word.

Which is hilarious to me. It would have been the work of sixty seconds to check that, but it never even occurred to me that I should.

And of course, nothing has changed about the Kickstarter or the books I’m planning to write, except now I have to explain to my wife that she was totally and absolutely write all along, and with a little more smarts I would have done what she wanted me to do.

Anyway, as you can see by the embed below, one novel is already paid for. You can help make a second happen by pledging $4 or more. (Which gets you two ebooks)

The Iron Gate Kickstarter Campaign at 24 Hours

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screencap from KS dashboard showing 921% of goal

That’s pretty much a novel right there.

After 24 hours, the dollar amount guarantees more than 90,000 words, so I’m thinking The Iron Gate is going to be a novel.

It also looks like the campaign might reach the upper limit, which means I’d have to write the next Twenty Palaces book pretty much right away. (For more info about the upper limit, check the campaign page itself).

This is wild, guys. This is also a lot of work. I spent most of yesterday wandering around my apartment, then checking the pledges, then washing a few dishes, then checking pledges, then vacuuming, then checking, then playing SOTM, checking, scrub toilet, check, open the file for The Iron Gate, then close it again so I can check.

Which means I haven’t been as productive as I need to be. That changes today. If I’m going to get this first book to you in 12 months, I have to do some thinking and some typing.

Anyway, please spread the word to any other fans of Twenty Palaces or contemporary/urban fantasy that you know. I’ll keep tapping away at these keys.

Here’s the updated version:

The Iron Gate, a New (Break) Kickstarter Campaign

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Kickstarter is running a “Break Kickstarter” campaign, which invites creators to use the platform in unusual ways. Not to break their rules, but to organize a campaign in an unusual way.

Until I saw that promo, I hadn’t been planning to use Kickstarter again. To be honest, I was gratified that my 2013 campaign for The Great Way did so well, but it was a crapton of work, and I’m a naturally disorganized person. I screwed up a few times while fulfilling that campaign, and that was extremely embarrassing. I didn’t want to put myself into that position again.

But if there’s an opportunity to flout the usual expectations? I’m signing on for the next Twenty Palaces story, The Iron Gate.

Here’s what’s going to be unusual in this campaign:

No video
No stretch goals
One reward: an ebook (although you could decide not to take a reward if you prefer)
One pledge level: (although KS lets you pledge more if you want)
You decide how long The Iron Gate is going to be

The Twisted Path was a novella, and some readers really wanted me to go back to novels. I’m not sure how much demand there is for this, but let’s find out.

For every $50 pledged to this campaign, I will write a thousand words. That’s the minimum professional rate, established by SFWA, of five cents a word.

In practical terms, I’ll look at that as a minimum word count.

So, if the campaign meets its goal of $500, I’ll write a 10,000-word novelette, which is about the length of “The Home-Made Mask”. If all twelve-hundred-ish people from the Great Way campaign pledge $4, that’ll be about enough for a novel.

I’ve set an upper limit, too. If you want to know what that is, or have other concerns, please check out the campaign. Also, if you’d like to take part.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/harryconnolly/the-iron-gate-break-kickstarter