A Page-Turner for All Seasons

I have a complicated relationship with reading that I think a number of people can relate to. Simply put, I blame school and I blame movies. The latter is straightforward enough. I grew up in a golden age of cinema: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride, Big, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ghostbusters, Short Circuit, The Goonies, Labyrinth, and too many others to name. These movies were every bit as deep and thematically complex as any book, and all I had to do was push Play on the VCR. As for school, bear in mind that I’m not mad, only frustrated. The biggest problem is on my end; I never got the hang of speed reading. I figured, if someone wrote all this, the least I can do is read all of this. When you’re reading on your own, who cares? With school, however, not only are you expected to read the book within a timeframe, you’re also going to be quizzed on it. Therein lay the problem, you want to get through the book quickly, but you’ve got to retain as much detail as possible, otherwise you won’t do so well on the assignment. It’s simply a skill I never got to develop properly. Some people got it. I didn’t.

In recent years, I feel I’ve gotten a little better at it, and have been able to polish off some books fairly quickly. There’s a caveat to this, however, that the book is between 200-300 pages or, according to its audiobook counterpart, able to be read in 8-10 hours maximum. Even if I only read on weekends, that’s a book a month at my slowest.

When I was gifted an audiobook of Project Hail Mary, I made an exception (and I'll probably make a few more exceptions that I'll talk about later). It’s 16 hours, but there’s a twist. The book switches between the present day plot and a past flashback. It’s rather like reading two books at the same time, which is a surprisingly good way to stay engaged with a plot that might otherwise drag. That may sound like the problem is with my attention span, and that’s fair. Some stories take more telling than others, and a tighter plot doesn’t necessarily make for a better book. 

Someone on social media (I can’t find where now) was talking about the state of television, specifically streaming shows, how there’s so few episodes per season and we have to wait sometimes several years for the next season. They went on to elaborate that sometimes a show would just have an episode in which nothing happens and that this is becoming a lost art. These are sometimes called Bottle Episodes, depending on who you ask. A more cynical person would call them Filler. Bottle Episodes are designed to be self-contained and usually intended to give audiences a breather between longer or more significant plot points. They’re typically confined to a single location and are often more dialogue-heavy than a standard episode. Reasons for a Bottle Episode will, once again, depend on who you ask. Writers like and will vehemently defend them because it's a chance to flesh out their characters. They're also typically born of necessity, like a show going over budget on an earlier or upcoming episode. 

Here’s the thing about streaming versus traditional television regarding filler: There are no time slots to fill anymore. I was thinking about this when finishing off season two of My Adventures with Superman. I never really got into any of the Superman comics growing up, but when it comes to the Man of Steel’s other media appearances, I’m always curious to see how it works out. With My Adventures with Superman, every episode was an absolute banger, not a single moment wasted, not one episode that could be written off as filler. Between the two seasons, the total number of episodes is 20, the first half in 2023 and the second half in 2024 (as of this writing, the third season is about two weeks away). That got me thinking about that old Lois and Clark series from the 90’s, the one with Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher. That was a show that felt like it was on forever. When I looked it up, I found it was only four seasons spanning 1993 to 1997, but each season was 22 episodes. Do you remember all of them? I sure don’t. Of course, it’s hardly fair to compare a live-action superhero show from the mid-90’s to a modern animated program nearly 30 years apart; animation is expensive and therefore doesn’t have time for filler. Still, when you’re bringing Superman to the small screen, maybe quality should take precedent over quantity. Sure, watching Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet, try to balance is his secret identity with his relationship with Lois is part of the mythos, but peppering in a few breakable sets and props isn’t exactly making the most of said mythos.

As for the time between seasons, I can’t help but suggest to these impatient viewers… maybe read some books. You’ve got time. 

Lofty Goals

In the wake of World War 2 and the spread of globalization, New York City found itself with an excess of large, empty lofts meant for manufacturing work. As a result, they had to lease these places for dirt cheap. This attracted a number of artists from painters to sculptors and everything in between to set up shop. The understanding was that these facilities were not to be residences. To that end, anything like air conditioning, running water, and even electricity in some places had to be installed at the renter’s expense. As might be expected, these artists did in fact make homes of these lofts, the landlords simply looking the other way most of the time since they were getting paid and even having utilities installed at no cost to them. Eventually, these landlords started to get tired of being taken advantage of, so they moved to evict these artists from their spaces so they could renovate them into upscale apartments. Some lobbying and political dealings later and the Loft Act was introduced in 1982. Officially called Article 7-C of the New York Multiple Dwelling Law, the long and short of this new lease on life for the artists was that they were allowed to maintain their spaces with rent control in full effect on the condition that they were in fact full-time artists making a living from their art. You were a professional or you were out. That was the deal. Many of these artists are still working to this day in the same space they leased all those decades ago. It’s a charming little piece of history. 

In 2013, I self-published a novella. At least, I call it a novella. According to some guidelines I read here and there, what I actually produced should be called a novelette. Frankly, I think discussions of book length are the very picture of pedantic. Rendezvous with Rama clocks in at a little less than 260 pages and Atlas Shrugged is over 1200, yet no one bats an eye at calling either of them novels. Fun fact: L. Ron Hubbard's posthumously published Mission Earth was originally a single, million-plus word novel broken up into ten separate volumes between 1985 and 1987. At the end of the day, some stories take more telling than others and the rest is simply publishers making sure they get their money’s worth from your work. Anyway, for my self-publishing, I used a service called Smashwords. They took on the task of formatting my document into an ePub format and then distributing it to all the notable ebook sellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books, to name a few. Originally I put the book out there with a price tag, but decided to make it free after about two years time. I even posted it to my DeviantART page. The price was more of a statement than anything else; It was to prove that I was serious about my work, even if the book is immensely silly. I mean, the chapter titles are quotes from Return of the Jedi. Despite having no science fiction elements at all beyond the occasional defiance of physics, I was indebted to two figures who helped bring a faraway galaxy to our theaters: George Lucas and Sir Alec Guinness. 

I took writing advice from both of them. Lucas set aside a block of time each day to sit at his desk and write away on his legal pads. The deal was he stayed there for the whole time no matter what, whether he wrote a little or wrote a lot. That was my schedule on the book from November through early the next year. I’d come home from work, and apart from bathroom breaks and dinner, I stayed at that keyboard whether I wrote a sentence, a paragraph, a whole chapter, or nothing at all. As for the late and great Sir Guinness, he once told Don Swaim of BookBeat that the best way to keep yourself motivated in writing is not to get up or stop or otherwise take a break unless you know what the next thing you’re going to put down is. In other words, don’t take a break when you get stuck. This has a few positive effects, but I think the most prominent one is that it helps keep your vision fresh in your mind. It’s like challenging yourself to memorize a long string of numbers. The brain is a muscle and the more you use it, the better you’ll be at keeping thoughts fresh in your mind. 

I may not be a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take what I do as seriously as one. 

Then I got an email yesterday. 

A few years earlier, Smashwords had been acquired by another self-publishing/on-demand entity called Draft2Digital. Nothing really changed in that time except the layout of the website. However, with this email, they announced a rather drastic change to what exactly they expected from their writers. 

In short, if your book sales fell below 100USD in a 12-month period, you had to pay a 12USD annual maintenance fee. That is, if your books weren’t selling, and Draft2Digital wasn’t getting their cut of the sales, you had to pay the rent out of pocket for the honor of having your books listed on their site. 

Oh, how I wish my sales had exceeded a full Benjamin at any point. That’s not entirely true; like I said, it was more a matter of principle that I charged for the book at first. Still, you never know what’s going to blow up, so better to hedge your bets. I completely understand why Draft2Digital wants to go this route. Their revenue is made from book sales, and servers aren’t free. There’s a reason they call it a maintenance fee. Digital real estate is still real estate and not every company is Google and can therefore afford to float a few freeloaders. I mean, I haven’t paid for this blog. Google keeps Blogger around more or less out of the goodness of its heart. 

Frankly, I don’t like the idea of paying 12 bucks a year for every year I don’t make 100 or more in selling my silly little stories, so I made a decision. I delisted everything I’d put up there, and I’m in the process of closing my account. There wasn’t actually a way to do that on their site, so I had to email them, which was prefaced with a warning on the web page that there was a massive influx of inquiries and so it may take some time to receive a response. 

I think it’s fair to presume a number of other people aren’t too keen on the maintenance fee. 

Anyway, according to my account, my fee wouldn’t even be charged until March of next year, so I’m not at all flustered about the time it may take to receive a response about closing my account. Who knows, maybe they’ll even walk this back in a few days or weeks given the sheer volume of people jumping ship. 

As I said, I don’t blame them for this move and I do honestly wish them success going forward. I’m clearly not cut out to be on their platform and there’s no point in my taking up their server space. As a result, the only way to read the book now is on my DeviantART page, and that will be the case for at least the next two years. 2028 will make the book 15 years old. On that anniversary, my plan is to re-release it, maybe with an introduction or some additional material. I’ve had a sequel in mind for some time, but I have no timeframe for when that’s going to be made a reality, so you’ll just have to settle for the original. Back when I published the book in 2013, I think I originally wrote it in Evernote and then used some other application to convert it into a Word document. In the years since then, I’ve learned that Apple’s word processor, Pages, has a neat little pipeline baked into it that lets you send your manuscript straight through to Apple Books. One single application and no annual maintenance fees. I can still export to an ePub and have it made available through other stores like Kindle, but I don’t really care so much about reach. As a wise and disembodied voice once said, “If you build it, they will come.” 

New York built lofts, and along came the artists. 

Update: Received a reply from Draft2Digital and they clarified that the maintenance fee will only be charged to accounts with books listed. You do not need to delete your account if you don't want to. In fact, if you do delete your account and decide to open one later, you are charged a one-time activation fee. To review, if you delist your books, you are not charged the maintenance fee. Deactivating your account is not necessary to avoid the fee. 

The Great UnGoogling Side Story: The Optimal Death of Prime

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/

I've been invested in the Amazon ecosystem for many years. You might even say I was an early adopter, especially when they expanded their offerings from books to DVDs. It was simply the best place to get movies if you had particularly obscure tastes like I do. I mean, if Suncoast didn't have it, it might as well have never existed.

Hopefully, you don't need me to tell you about everything wrong with Amazon. If you do, let's just say their convenience comes at a steep price, and I don't just mean the flow of money. 

Speaking of money, I had a Prime membership for years. It seemed like a no-brainer; 2-day shipping, Prime Video, Music... You were paying for the streaming service but with a boatload of perks. 

As time has gone on, however, the perks have not increased in value. In fact, many features have ducked behind paywalls and has left my membership feeling rather anemic. 

First, there was Amazon Music. Instead of giving you unlimited plays of certain songs, everything went to a Spotify-like shuffle mode. The entire catalog was available, but you'd have to wait for it to randomly show up. The biggest problem with this was that it affected any singles or albums that you purchased. This was resolved eventually, but that it happened in the first place showed how much of a rushed solution this was to a cashflow problem. 

After that, they started putting ads on Prime Video. Here I was paying about 140 dollars a year, and they were still going to have me sit through ads while watching movies and shows. Rather than make a new, ad-supported tier to draw in new users (like HBOMax and Netflix), they changed the tier I was already in to the ad-supported one. Simply put, this is not what I signed up for, and I wasn't alone in feeling this way. Ironically, I wouldn't have minded if they simply upped the price of Prime as they've done in the past. I pay it annually because that is much more convenient than juggling monthly charges. However, getting rid of the ads on Prime Video requires a monthly charge of 3 dollars. There's no option for me to pay more annually. Bear in mind, I also pay for Kindle Unlimited and Audible, so this was turning into a mess. I can understand making those a separate charge, but now they're going to nickel and dime me on a service I already paid for in advance. 

Another service I'd paid for annually was Disney+. However, after that business with Jimmy Kimmel, an increase in their annual price, and now their current deal with OpenAI to flood Plus with slop, not only did I not renew my Disney+ subscription, but I'm not giving them any money for the next year at least, including going to their movies. I'm not paying for slop. If they want in bed with OpenAI, they can have each other.

Speaking of AI, Amazon made their own AI deal that served as the straw that broke the camel's back for me. I have an array of smart speakers around the house. They're very handy. I use them for kitchen timers while cooking, controlling lights, making grocery lists, playing music (if I don't mind the shuffle mode), and sometimes as an intercom with my roommate, among other things. Again, very handy. Alexa Plus, meanwhile, is only handy in the sense I want to put my hands around its neck and squeeze its damned life out of it. At first, it was offered as a beta program and an update to the Alexa app. In addition to the hassle of dealing with how everything was rearranged in the app, using the new Alexa Plus was equally tedious and even counterproductive. Without getting into the weeds of how virtual assistants work, they replaced Alexa's hard-coded routines with a chatbot that turns nearly everything you ask it to do into a big production. I almost wouldn't mind it except everything took slightly longer than it normally did. I swear the first time I tried adding something to the grocery list in the new app with Alexa Plus, it took about five minutes. Full disclosure, I've used AI chatbots before, and I hate them. I hate everything about them. It gets under my skin because chatbots are essentially what customer service jobs want you to sound like in a call center scenario. It's that mode of speech which tries to sound casual and friendly but is so forced as to be legitimately insulting. There's an uncanny valley aspect to it as well; it's trying to sound so human that it backfires. 

I tried to back out of the Beta program, and was successful, but only until the app update forced Alexa Plus onto me. If I kept my Prime membership, I was getting Alexa Plus whether I wanted it or not. 

This led me to look into my Prime membership and see just what exactly I was (and wasn't) getting for my money. One of my favorite aspects of Amazon is something called Subscribe and Save. At the risk of sounding like a sales pitch, you lump so many items together in a single shipment and set them to be dropped off at regular intervals, and this not only comes with free shipping, but discounts on the goods in question compared to one-time purchases. This is how I get my cat food, kitty litter, paper towels, bath tissue, and even my protein bars. Having boxes of paper towels and toilet paper dropped off on my front step instead of dealing with it during a Target trip is so convenient. It's pretty much like having a bulk store membership only you get everything delivered. I'm even using it for my roommate's colostomy supplies. I was convinced that all this was part of the Prime membership; it seemed like the next logical step from the 2-day free shipping that Prime offers. Looking into it, though, it turns out this is not tied to Prime. It's a completely separate service that anyone can sign up for. 

That was my a-ha moment. The only thing that my Prime membership was offering besides 2-day shipping on some items with no minimum total in the cart was Prime Video, and that was really not worth having the ads on it for what I was paying. If I really want to see something, it's easy enough to just wait for the whole series to drop, pay for a month (maybe even shell out the extra 2 or 3 dollars to watch without ads), and then binge the whole thing before the time goes up. My roommate's a little disappointed as she's a big Critical Role fan. Even though this membership won't lapse until June, that means future seasons of both Vox Machina and Mighty Nein will have to be consumed via the binge and run model.

I wonder how long before Amazon enacts an "x-months minimum" stipulation to their Prime Video memberships. 

The Correct Resolution of Paper

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions, typically; I prefer CGPGrey’s idea of having themes. However, in 2025, almost as an afterthought, I vowed to go paperless for the year. This was partly spurred by having gotten some Mobiscribe e-ink tablets, one to use at work instead of notepads or composition books and one at home for reading (and a color one because it was a good deal and I was curious about the tech). I was planning on using them for Inktober, but decided against it as getting notes and drawings off of the devices is more than a little tedious for something I’m supposed to do daily 31 times in a row. In the end, with only about a half-dozen Post-It notes at work as the exception, I stuck to the resolution well beyond the 365 days. 

Reflecting on this, I had another thought of something I could do as a resolution for the year 2026. It occurred to me while playing a typing game called Glyphica. In the game, you occupy a central turret and fire at invaders coming at you from all sides. You select your target by typing the word that appears above them. The game is a lot of fun; reminds me of the quality time I spent with Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast, an  edutainment title that doubled my typing speed in the course of a few weeks. Though the games are very different in terms of presentation, the biggest difference is one of quality of life. In the decades between the two titles, we’ve gone from spellcheck being a luxury to the software going the extra step of not only correcting your errors without you asking, but even predicting what it is you’re trying to say in the first place. If I start typing a word like constitution, I only need to get about as far as “const” before the autocomplete shows me the rest of the word, at which point I need only press the tab key to finish what I started and move on to the next word. A hundred keystrokes can drop down to as low as sixty-five in this way. So, what, you may ask, is the problem? 

Between Glphyica and an online typing speed test called Monkeytype, it's occurred to me that I've amassed a sizable number of bad typing habits because autocorrect swoops in and fixes them, sometimes before I even notice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s convenient when it’s not trying to forcefully make me say an incorrect word, but I feel like this is offloading vital aspects of a skill I happen to be very proud of. Between that and autocomplete, the software is doing too much heavy lifting for my liking. 

My worst habit is something I like to call chording. It happens with especially short words such as "the", "to", and... well, "and." The problem is I hit all the keys at once and I end up with "teh", "ot", and "adn." I can't help but wonder if stenographers have this problem outside of the courtroom. Although chording has technically been with me since I first learned to type, autocorrect and autocomplete have made it substantially worse. Rather than typewriter keys jamming or the timing of my keystrokes being measured in imperceptible milliseconds, the software is able to work out that I'm writing "the" and not "teh" as "teh" isn't a word as far as I know, at least not one in English. 

If you've ever seen that brain teaser where the words in a paragraph all have their respective letters out of order (yet it's still readable because your brain unscrambles it from context clues), that's more or less what my typing feels like to me at this point. It's like I know words as clusters of letters rather than sequences of them. My muscle memory has contracted to the point where it's folded in on itself. My speed has been relatively consistent, but my accuracy has taken a massive hit, and that's no good to anybody ecepxt vrey wreid poelpe who lkie tshoe arfoneemtoiend barin tseaers. 

This has led me to the decision to disable autocorrect and autocomplete on my Mac. Spellcheck gets to stay, inadvertent brain teaser construction be damned. A red line appearing under a word I just typed doesn't bother me. That's instant feedback on a mistake I made and it's on me to fix it. It's gently saving me time, not doing the work for me. It's what The Oatmeal would call an administrative task and not a creative one. When I give what I've written a once-over, it's highlighted the areas that need my attention first. It's working ex post facto rather than trying to get ahead of me like far too many "smart features." Those assume what you're going to do next. Sometimes they're right, but other times I want to write construction or constriction or consternation or even constituent rather than constitution. 

As for my iPhone, predictive text (which is essentially autocomplete) remains enabled on my keyboard of choice, Microslop's SwiftKey, the only Microslop product I use willingly and with any consistency. The reason for keeping this feature enabled is simple. It's a small and cramped keyboard and I need all the help I can get. It's like Lewis Carroll's Nyctograph, a specific tool for a specific job. In his case, it was writing in the dark and without getting out of bed. In my case, it's when I need to write something and either can't get to one of my full-sized mechanical keyboards when I want to or, like Mr. Carroll, I can't be bothered to get out of bed or off the couch at the moment. 

The jury had been out on the iPad since it's a notable difference in screen real estate, but I don't always have one of my Bluetooth keyboards along with me and the on-screen keyboard still has all the same problems as the iPhone. 

As for the paper resolution, that has stuck around as far as taking notes at work goes, though Post-It notes will no longer give me pangs of guilt on the rare occasions I have to use them. For everything else, I do want to start doing more traditional art instead of my usual vector works. I'm even going to try using a fountain pen after either losing or breaking the first one I tried. I don't remember which fate befell it, which is why I'm happy to have discovered that disposable fountain pens exist. In fact, some artists recommend them over their more expensive brethren. 

Welcome to 2026, everybody.