The Never-ending FAQ: Addendum

Welcome to this week’s addendum to The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.

Normally we run The Never-ending FAQ on Wednesday, but we had so many questions in the queue this week we decided to run an addendum today, rather than let them overflow into next week.

Q: Why did you decide to grow a beard?

A: I didn’t “decide” to grow a beard. I’ve been growing a beard ever since I was a teenager. About two weeks ago I decided to quit shaving for a few weeks, in hopes of trying the “ruggedly handsome” look for the summer. Thus far, though, it’s seems more like the “scruffy and possibly homeless” look. That, and it itches like crazy. I doubt my beard will survive this weekend.

Q: Is it true they’re doing a remake of Barbarella?

A: Yes, God help us. It’s to star Sydney Sweeney, who you most recently didn’t see in Madame Web, the latest Marvel super-hero movie to do a mighty face-plant at the box office. I think my favorite of all the hundreds of 1-star reviews on IMDB was, “Makes Morbius look like The Dark Knight.” And we did try to warn you about Morbius.

Q: Is it true there’s a Season 2 of The Odin Chronicles in development?

A: It’s not merely in development, Episode 1 goes live on Saturday, June 1st. Watch for it!

Q: Why isn’t Stupefying Stories on Instagram?

A: We experimented with that. All that creating https://www.instagram.com/stupefyingsf/ seemed to accomplish was to make it slower and more cumbersome to create and send out posts, and to provide more opportunities for Meta to saturation-bomb us with ads telling us we’d do much better on Instagram if we just bought this plug-in or that advertising plan. That, and Instagram makes it very difficult to link to stories or content elsewhere, which makes it nearly worthless as a tool for promoting stories on SHOWCASE or books on Amazon.

Q: Did you try LinkTree? 

A: Yep. Our LinkTree page looks like this: https://linktr.ee/stupefyingsf/store. Again, very lovely and visual, but as a tool for promoting books and stories, very limited. I thought Amazon’s emphasis on thumbnails was challenging, but LinkTree’s insistence on cropping them down to square thumbnails is worse.

Thus far the ascendancy of TikTok, Instagram, X, et al, only serves to convince me that Homo sapiens is in the process of being out-evolved by Meleagris gallopavo. At least turkeys are smart enough not to walk out into traffic while their attention is fixated on their cell phones.

This is how The Great A.I. Menace is going to kill you, you know. It won’t need terminators. It’ll just send something so attention-grabbing to your cell phone that you forget how to survive. Sending people GPS instructions directing them to drive off cliffs was merely a trial run.

Have a happy and safe holiday weekend, and see you back here next week! 

~brb