Month: March 2024

“It is eminently doable to buy or lease a Xerox or similar machine that prints perfect bound books and use it to do short runs and galley printings. One of these machines could print books for a lot of SPD clients, I expect. I kinda wish I had tried harder to raise the funds for one back then. I even took a meeting with a guy from Xerox! And had some convos with the folks at CMLP! If there is money anywhere in the publishing ecosystem, it might be in printing (or sprayed edges!). And if there is power to be had in publishing—well, the means of production and all that. Fuck superstructure: focus on structure”

https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/spd-authors-equity-and-distribution

“In 1978, Congress passed and then-President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Airline Deregulation Act, which was part of a deregulatory zeal that grabbed national lawmakers in the 70s and 80s, and led to the deregulation of vast swathes of the economy, from trucking to railroads to telecoms to, perhaps most famously, banking and finance.

A provision in that law wiped away the ability of anyone in state government to make rules or do any enforcement “related to a price, route, or service of an air carrier.”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/how-airlines-fly-away-from-accountability

“Some players have reacted with dismay to this game’s inflexibility, but I respect Dragon’s Dogma 2’s willingness to ruin your day from time to time. It doesn’t bend to your will; you have to work around its rules – even when, at the beginning, you don’t necessarily know what they are. At first you might be frustrated that, for instance, characters often tell you about intriguing legends and rumours, but the game never marks these things down on your map to tell you where you might find them. Then, as the hours go by, you might find yourself caught out in the wilds at night without a camping kit, and seek shelter in a cavern that turns out to lead to a crumbling mountain shrine, where you find an actual sphinx. You realise that if someone had marked its location on your map, you’d never have felt so awed when you first spied its glowing eyes in the dark”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/mar/27/pushing-buttons-dragons-dogma-2

“Publishers believe—and to be fair I see no reason to think they’re wrong—that having a few years between books is useful for everyone involved. It gives the publishers more time to launch books properly, gives readers time to catch up and build excitement, and those both help the author actually sell copies”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/on-productivity

“But I soon recognized that time-consuming reporting or rich critical essays were less valued by upper management than quick hits. I’ll never forget the day I was told, breathlessly, by the then-head of the entertainment channel that Toni Collette was trending. (Trending, I say, trending! Do you hear me? Toni Collette is trending!!! I believe it was her birthday.)

Swiftly, I put aside whatever it was I was doing to meet this task head-on. I dashed off something to the tune of “8 Toni Collette Performances You Need to See” and was sure to shout-out About a Boy and the Nightmare Alley remake that was somehow nominated for a Best Picture Oscar even though no one watched it. (It’s pretty enjoyable!) If I may be so bold, I wrote a damn good article about Toni Collette. But even working at supersonic speeds, by the time I finished, Toni Collette wasn’t trending anymore. Heck of a way to run a business”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/02/killing-the-messenger-my-final-days-working-at-a-disaster.html

“When I returned to the state in September, she invited me over, and for several hours at her kitchen counter, where she showed me the semiautomatic rifle she keeps in a drawer, she explained how a former precinct captain for Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign became the kind of woman who bulldozed through a crowd of protesters outside a MAGA rally with both middle fingers raised in the air”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-2024-republican-presidential-primary-voters.html

“In its better moments, the House of Lords is a kind of council of elders, where the polished word and cogent argument have a home in a place where politics is more than an exercise of slavish obedience in the interest of climbing the career political ladder. It is a bulwark against populism, which is also flourishing in Britain – as seen in recent days with the government essentially suspending the right to asylum.

In its worse moments, the House of Lords is derelict ruin occupied by upstarts, party donors and lobbyists for whom nothing is further from their minds than true democratic rule. And in the already divided kingdom, the worse moments of late have heavily outweighed the better ones”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/haunted-house-on-the-thames-behind-the-scenes-in-the-house-of-lords-a-a85dc866-8843-414a-91b7-850487e41891

“Senior civil servants are “who you dream of, if you’re a vendor”; they may be exceptionally bright people with Oxbridge firsts who have completed their training at the Major Projects Leadership Academy, but in practice they have never worked in the industry with which they are negotiating. More fundamentally, civil servants do not understand that the other side is designing its bid to arrive at what project managers call the OFM (Oh, F**k Moment), when a new set of costs suddenly appears. The engineers have found that they’ll have to drill through granite to build the tunnel, or the data scientists have found errors in the old system. “As long as you can find things which weren’t covered in the original contract,” they told me, “you’ve opened the door to expanding the scope and demanding more money.”

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2024/01/the-rotten-state

“Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn’t a thriller where you’re trying to surprise them with twists and turns”

https://anildash.com/2024/03/10/make-better-documents/