“Oy!” “Wut?” Just chat (The Return of)

[Marx]

Okay, so this is a long shot, but:

Does anyone know a sci-fi book cover artist that is accepting submissions/commissions? My previous cover artist has switched to using AI, and while I understand it (he sold covers for about $100USD, and most covers cost closer to $600-900 USD), I hate it and I don’t want to support it any more.

I’ve tried searching through The Google, but almost everything is pre-generated covers using AI or massive companies like Reedsy that I’ve no experience with and don’t know if I can/should trust. I’ve also reached out through emails to a few artists I know have done covers I love in the past, but that’s just cold-calling extremely busy people so who knows if that will ever reach anyone.

I’m in no rush to publish the novel… it’s just on it’s final editorial polish before I convert it into an e-book and sell it through Amazon… so if anyone knows anyone who can make a cover and draw a cool lookin’ spaceship, lemme know? I would, ideally, like somebody who actually knows how to make a cover and not just a general artist, but as long as it’s a human I’m giving money to I’m flexible.

The novel is an exploration sci-fi with some darker undertones (think Star Trek meets Battlestar Galactica), and the cover really just needs a starship of approximately the right sense of power, authority, and a touch of malice, my author name, and the slightly ridiculously long novel name (A Desperate Path Through the Stars).

[yashima]

i actually designed my own cover from a photo I had taken and some Photoshop because i didn’t know where to find someone at the time. it wasn’t great though…

i had considered asking a friend with some art skills. In a few years i could probably refer you to his daughter but she’s too young still and he’s not into SF at all and also it’s just a hobby (his art is good though).

have you asked your editor? they might know someone?

[Boronian]

Does it have to be scifi artist? I “personally” know a good fantasy artist who creates a lot of Malazan artwork.

https://www.artstation.com/santilozano

Not sure he make covers but check him out. Maybe you’ll like him.

---

This guy I don’t know personally but he made book covers for very special Malazan editions and also Dune.

DUNE

[Marx]

So today in “Everything Is Expensive,” my quest for a cover artist continues (thank you everyone for links, DMs, and messages) and it looks to be in the $300USD range. That’s better than I was expecting, so we’re going to call that a win.

I looked into getting a mailing list setup for my website/author. There are a couple free services that are highly recommended (MailerList and Kit), but both require you to have a domain. Which I have… but they also require you to have an email for that domain, which I do not have. But since I use Squarespace, I can set it up through that!.. if I pay Google Workspaces a bunch of money to.

Or I can use Squarespace’s in-house email list manager!.. if I pay Squarespace more money. So either I pay Google to use a specific service designed for this, or I pay Squarespace almost as much for a service that is not specifically designed for this, but is already integrated into the website. My partner recommends that I stop using Squarespace altogether, switching to a different… I don’t know what to call Squarespace, since my domain is managed through another thingy (EasyDNS), but whatever Squarespace is doing right now, doing it through somebody else. Which would mean transferring a bunch of stuff and writing up a new… I’m exhausted just thinking about it…

Argh.

Okay, fine, I also rearranged my game room so I can setup a table to do my stopmotion stuff on (yay!), but now I need said table. I can spend $250+ tax for 2 Kallax shelves that are almost exactly the right size (maybe eventually putting a table top on them), which comes with the added bonus of shelf-space, or I can get a custom table built sometime in the next 6 weeks for a modest estimated cost of $1,350 (in “wormy maple”)… but built to my specifications and with shelving underneath as well.

Again. Argh.

/whine

In other news, I’m playing Game of Thrones 2nd Edition tonight for the first time! I played 1st Edition… oh, ten to fifteen times with all the old expansions, but this will be the first time I’ve played 2nd ed! I am very much looking forward to it! I think I’m playing Tyrell (Growing Stronger), which is also a first… I used to play a lot of Stark, since they are in a very weak position on the board and nobody ever wanted to play them.

I have both of the new small expansions, and we might use the new House Cards, but I’m not pulling out the big expansion until we’ve got at least a few games of the new version under our collective belts.

[SteveB_uk]

In honour of Lalo Schifrin (who died at 93 this week), composer of the Mission Impossible theme, I just found out that of course the Morse Code for “MI” is:

Dash Dash
dot-dot
Dash Dash
dot-dot…

[SteveB_uk]

Also I didn’t realise that as well as Bullitt, Dirty Harry etc Schifrin composed the music for Enter The Dragon!

[Sexagesimalian]

I heard on NPR that Bruce Lee specifically asked him to compose the music.

[Phil]

Well now I want to know what this bit means:

dot-dot-dashhhhhhhhhh
dot-dot-dashhhhhhhhhh
dot-dot-dashhhhhhhhhh
dot-dot

[pillbox]

Found this hilarious jab but don’t have anyone in particular to use it on. So I’m sharing it here in case any of you do

[raged_norm]

I’m going to find a way to stick that onto the guy at work that recommends Debian Linux as the solution to all our Corporate Windows Environment woes.

[tomm_archer]

We had an experienced software engineer start recently who spent most of his time getting frustrated that he couldn’t get a flavour of Linux as his main operating system.

Only stuck around for a couple of months.

[Phil]

I feel that. I’d probably go a little crazy if I had to use Windows. But… that being the case… I also think I’d make sure I knew the situation before I accepted the job.

Maybe. Or perhaps it would be like how it never even occurs to me to ask whether the food I’m ordering contains onions, despite the fact that experience would suggest there’s a strong chance of onions, because I never put onions in anything so why would anyone else? and then dammit it’s unexpectedly full of onions!

[yashima]

@raged_norm

Debian Linux a

We always called the current debian release… Debian Stale
(I used to be a big fan b/c apt-get… but now that apt has made its way into countless distros…)

I would always recommend Linux to replace windows server solutions but not debian. Not that I am expert enough at running software to recommend any particular distro. That’s Betriebsthema and I am just a software dev.

PS: the first distro I ever installed was a SuSe Linux sometime 1996/7-ish. I had a multi-boot system with Windows95, MsDOS, OS/2 and SuSe Linux We thought that the next big thing was that we were going to talk to the computer because voice interface was hot stuff… except that never happened.

[JGD]

@tomm_archer

We had an experienced software engineer start recently who spent most of his time getting frustrated that he couldn’t get a flavour of Linux as his main operating system.

Corporate requires that everyone has a Windows laptop to run Office, Outlook & Teams. Most of my product team do development on Windows, but we implicitly require them to learn to do simple stuff on Linux and macOS, and supply Linux dev machines to anybody who wants one.

[tomm_archer]

Our main products are embedded software/hardware. So like you, everyone has a Windows laptop to run Office, Outlook & Teams. Historically, software engineers had a Linux/Unix environment for development, but these days we predominantly cross-compile.

It sounded like said software engineer wanted the Linux machine just for doing the compilation, even when I’d already figured out the cross-compilation toolchain.

[JGD]

@tomm_archer

It sounded like said software engineer wanted the Linux machine just for doing the compilation, even when I’d already figured out the cross-compilation toolchain.

We have the advantage that most of our Linux machines are x86-64, so we can switch hardware between that and Windows quite easily. We have quite a few Linux build/test machines, and have been able to let engineers who prefer to work on Linux use those without any objections from Corporate. They have learned that if they ask for justifications, they get them, in overwhelming detail.

Our infrastructure has been gradually migrating from Windows to Linux for 15 or so years, as commercial Windows tools (coverage analysis, source management, and suchlike) have been replaced by better and free Linux ones. It’s possible that your engineer who wanted to work on Linux wanted to use something like that, but if he didn’t explain his reasons, he couldn’t expect to get very far.

[Whistle_Pig]

@yashima

the first distro I ever installed was a SuSe Linux

First distro I installed was Gentoo, because my then-boyfriend talked me into it put me off Linux for ages…

[yashima]

oh GenToo is harsh.

[pillbox]

I cannot explain the sequence of events that lead to this eventuality

[Phil]

Water has never been so refreshing #CatsDoesCountdown #Shorts