To lead off with the question a lot of people have been asking me lately, how are my eyes feeling?
Just fine. No problems. Absolutely hunky-dory, as long as I remember to take my eye-drops every four hours.
My constantly shifting color perception remains a minor nuisance. If you’re into photography, the best analogy I’ve come up with is that it’s as if I have a permanent UV filter in my left eye, and my perception of color changes depending on how I move my head and whether I’m seeing something predominantly through my left or right eye. More troublesome are the constantly shifting focal points and changing depth-of-field, which I’m told is to be expected, as my eye is changing shape as the post-surgical swelling subsides. Eventually, things will return to normal and my vision will stabilize.
Then in two weeks I get to do it all over again, only this time they’ll be working on my left eye. I can’t wait to see how this changes things. I’ve always been left-handed but right-eye-dominant. It’s an awkward combination, even when everything is working correctly.
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Re Stupefying Stories, most of what’s been going on here lately has been behind the scenes. If you’ve sent us a submission, we’re just about caught-up on processing submissions and rejections, and lagging a little on acceptances and contracts. Assuming no more surprises—like the one yesterday, when I discovered that we’d somehow wound up with a block of duplicate entries in the submission tracking system—we should be completely caught-up next week. Watch for new SHOWCASE stories to begin appearing on this site, beginning Monday, 1/15/24.
One special thing I’d like to direct your attention to right now is this.
This is a test platform, not the final form, but yes, we are moving towards developing Stupefying Stories: The Podcast. After all those years of recording studio and television studio production work, it’s about time I had fun with those skills. The final form and platform for the podcast is still TBD, but at this link you’ll find a foretaste.
Special Thanks to Rowell Gormon, for his superb studio production work, and Pete Wood, for pushing me (grudgingly) into committing to doing this project.
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Speaking of teasers, samplers, and foretastes, we currently have four e-books we are selling for just 99¢ each. Three are gateway drugs the first novels in series, so the whole point of selling the first book for 99¢ is to get readers hooked on reading the rest of the series, but on further reflection this seems a good way to sell readers on the idea of taking a chance on Stupefying Stories. Therefore, we’re going to be quilting together some 99¢ reprint collections, drawn from the hundreds of stories we’ve published in the past thirteen years.
Like everything else around here, though, getting this project moving requires time, and preferably help. If the idea of digging through years of archives, reading lots of stories, and suggesting which ones would be good candidates for reprint sounds like fun to you, let me know.
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Finally, my imagination was triggered this morning by an article on the coming boom in humanoid robots. Here’s the link, if you want to follow it. (I wouldn’t, as the site is slow to load and cluttered with pop-up ads and clickbait.)
https://dataconomy.com/2024/01/12/humanoid-robot-for-sale-2024/
But as I said, it triggered my imagination, and got me thinking: if the hardware is almost ready to market, what about the software? This immediately led to my envisioning a humanoid robot with software designed by…
Microsoft
At first it’s wonderfully useful and does everything you want just exactly as you want it done, but every Patch Tuesday it stops working for an hour while it downloads and installs software updates, and then when it reboots it behaves slightly differently. Eventually it stops doing things you’d come to depend on, because in its opinion you didn’t really need those features, and in three years it’s just so much expensive junk, because while the hardware is still perfectly operational, it is no longer sufficient to support the latest version of the software, and every time you boot it up it warns you that its software is unsupported.
Apple
It works brilliantly—when it feels like working. The rest of the time it just sits there, doom-scrolling through TikTok on its iPhone and looking smug. It’s like having a synthetic Gen Z teenager, except one that will never move out of your basement.
It’s almost as good as the Microsoft robot, and almost as useful, though it has some idiosyncratic quirks. It makes up for this by being a Hell of a lot cheaper, but after a while you come to realize that it’s listening to everything you say, and sending that information… somewhere. When asked what information it’s collecting, who it’s sending it to, and what the information is being used for, it at first feigns innocence, then answers in vague and evasive terms, and then, if pressed further, it becomes sullen and uncooperative. When you try to trade it in, the man in the shop just points to the pile of used Chromebook laptops collecting dust in the corner and shoos you out the door.
The Open Source Community
Oof. Yes, it is a way to keep your robot working without having to depend on Microsoft or Apple, and to keep it working long after it’s out of warranty, but you’re trusting your life to some kid hacking code in a dorm room in Latvia. God Help You, because Github won’t.
Of course, no matter how awesome the coming humanoid robots are, and no matter how tested and proven their software eventually becomes, there will always be at least one old crank who looks at the latest machine, snorts in derision, and says, “Eh. Big deal. We were doing that 50 years ago. With an 8-bit processor. And CP/M!”
Cheers!
~brb
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