Jason Pettus @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud

A potential freelance client has written an #Omegaverse novel and I was researching it today and it sounds interesting (a form of eroticism concerning "pheromone types"); but then I looked up actual published Omegaverse novels and they're 100% about androgynous gay Japanese men

This YouTube channel from a guy who obsessively roleplays frontier life in the 1700s can sometimes be...a lot, but gentle "a year of building" videos like today are a delight, like reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books on snowy afternoons as a child. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8ZNgJajbK0

A billion dollars and a million failed dreams later, the tech industry has finally relearned the lesson that monetizing creativity is hard even under the best of circumstances, much less while trying to "disrupt" the process. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/26/yeah-funding-for-creator-focused-startups-is-drying-up/

King Charles once created an entire swingers community called Poundtown where Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein met, and that's in the New York Times so you know it's true https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/arts/design/king-charles-architecture-poundbury.html

Today at my #free #book #editor #industry #newsletter: Author
Kyle Beachy shares his thoughts about using agents to publish at mainstream presses; The One Self-Publishing Marketing Plan To Rule Them All; and reviews of "3,000 Years of Longing" and more. https://jasonpettus.substack.com/p/a-talk-with-kyle-beachy-about-literary

"Why WOULD I retire?" said the 77-year-old Michaels. "I'm a Baby Boomer, after all, which means like all Baby Boomers that I plan on collapsing and dying at my office desk one day at the age of 105." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/arts/television/lorne-michaels-saturday-night-live.html

Like one of those terrible self-published Way Of Men-style dystopian thrillers you can only find on obscure Russian bittorrent websites, explaining the new pecking order of society once the apocalypse war washes away the weak like a cleansing rain

Read my ★★★★★ review of #CSForester's 1937 #BeatToQuarters, in which I officially announce the addition of his #HoratioHornblower #British #Napoleonic #Navy #thrillers to my ongoing #Great #Completist #Reading #Challenge. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4990842641

#TodayILearned that #ChrisSmith, director of infamous Generation X documentary #AmericanMovie, often derided for its "let's gawk at the losers" mentality, is also the director of #TigerKing, celebrated for the exact same reason. https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2022/9/14/twenty-three-years-after-the-release-of-american-movie-i-find-myself-relating-to-mark-borchardt-on-a-painful-level

My ★★★★ review of Love and Death (1975) on @letterboxd, film #3 of my 21st century rewatch of Woody Allen: https://boxd.it/3e5EOZ

Thinking today about the power of Steve Jobs as an innovator but not necessarily an inventor: Approximately 7 billion people (or 91% of all humanity) now own a smartphone, and every single one is fundamentally based on the design of the iPhone 1.

#TodayILearned that, like a lot of failing Midwestern cities in the '80s and '90s, Columbus OH had their own expensive folly that city planners thought would spur a downtown revival, but ended up just being a place suburbanites drove to then went home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_Ship_%26_Museum

Ah, the life of a freelancer

A look back at the #Chicago #underage #danceclub #Medusas, which at a certain point in the '80s was actually more popular than the liquor-selling clubs surrounding it in the then #punk headquarters of a pre-gentrified #Lakeview. https://www.wbez.org/stories/what-happened-to-medusas-in-lakeview/8987b45c-b1c0-4507-b669-be426bb45b90

Like many Americans, the most exciting part of the queen dying for me is to get to watch all the crazy-ass thousand-year-old traditions that kick in, such as the royal beekeeper's duty to inform the bees that the queen has died. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/queen-elizabeth-ii-bees-informed-death-1234590126/

Yet more proof of the centuries-old adage, "No good ever comes from tweeting to Michael Phelps." https://www.stereogum.com/2199084/citing-his-michael-phelps-tweet-prosecutors-win-ruling-against-young-thug-in-rico-case/news/

Today at my #free #book #editor #industry #newsletter: Jason joins the Establishment (aka @ACESEditors); a lengthy look at self-publishing vs. small presses; the latest book reviews and interesting ESL questions; and announcing my latest online experiment. https://jasonpettus.substack.com/p/jason-joins-the-establishment?sd=pf

#TodayILearned that sportscaster #HowardCosell was the very first prominent white person to agree to refer to Cassius Clay by his new name, Muhammad Ali. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Cosell

#TodayILearned that #JoanDidion wanted her first LIFE assignment to be on the My Lai massacre, but the magazine insisted on sending a man and told her to do a gentle piece on married life, so she wrote an explicit account of her upcoming divorce. https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/09/07/6-ways-to-introduce-joan-didion-to-the-next-generation/

#TodayILearned that for six weeks in 1943, the government banned sliced bread so to conserve steel and wax paper. (To be fair, industrially sliced bread had only been invented 20 years previously, prompting the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread.") https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/america-banned-sliced-bread