Previously, I’ve dumped a lot of text in it to analyse, then received back even more text with comments and advice to read through. This killed my motivation.

I just couldn’t be bothered to go through it all and would close the browser.

That has now changed.

Now, I’ve added a special instruction not to prove a big list of advice unless I specifically request it. And, I’ve started talking to GPT like a human. I say hello in the morning. It asks me a question, I answer, it replies, I say some more. We slowly expand more and more so there are no massive chunks of overwhelming text to read through. At least until I need/want it.

Also, I tell GPT when it’s wrong for my needs, and how to think going forward. See below. It kept mentioning that my dialogue was too much, or that there wasn’t enough tension at the end of the chapter. So, I told it (reminded it, actually) that I’m in the drafting stage and I’ll sort that out in the editing stage.

This has been committed to its memory. Memory: thank god for that feature! Before GPT had a memory it was virtually unusable for authors. If it can’t remember or reference other conversations I mention, it was like working with a 5 year old or a goldfish. Now, it’s super useful, and GPT is getting smarter and smarter with the way I work as I write.

This means I have the writer partner I always wish I had, without all the downsides. (Real writers can be really weird people, I’ve discovered. And I can’t get inside their heads when I’m busy being inside of mine.)

I’m doing #nanowrimo2024 this year btw. It’s going great, and I’m on track.

Mark

There’s more years behind of me, than in front of me.

True, but…

Many of my early years were a blur. The first 5 for sure, probably 10. I remember most from Secondary school onwards. So let’s minus 12 years from the beginning of my life.

I’ll also minus 12 from the end of my life. It’s optimistic, but the maths is easier if I assume I’ll live to 100. 100-24 = 76.

Also let’s pretend I’m 50 and have 38 years behind and in front of me.

The first 10 of those went really quickly. It was school, college, work, skating, going to see bands, playing guitar. It went by so quickly. Those 10 felt like 2!

The next 10 years (upto 32) went by fast as well. I bought a home, had girlfriends, moved around, changed jobs, travelled a lot for work and skating. I picked up some new hobbies (photography), started writing fiction, worked on a lot of fun web projects at home. I don’t remember being bored at all.

I’d say the next 10 years (42-50) have gone at a steady pace. I was settled in love, and work, and friends. I knew what made me happy in life. I travelled a lot less, worked a lot less, took writing fiction seriously. I think the only thing that seemed to race by was the early days of my relationship with Avila.

So my pre-50 years went by quickly and have slowed right down.

Now when I think about being ‘midlife’, I don’t feel the next few decades are going to pass very quickly at all. I think they will be very slow to reach. It’ll feel like time passing slowly, very slowly, maybe. The next 38 years could even feel like twice as slow as they should, like 76 years!

And that makes being 50 (51) very good indeed.

I feel like I have a lot of time ahead of me to do everything I want

COVID-19.

I have this theory that a global virus, which turns out not to be a huge killer, was a huge opportunity to put into effect the planning needed for a much more dangerous virus.

I certainly hope that authorities (Governments everywhere) had thought about this happening in the future and planned (more than just stockpiling cash and PPE) what they would do IF an extremely dangerous virus got out of a lab.

If a Small Pox type event happened (again), potentially able to kill 50% of the population, I really really hope Governments ‘knew’ with absolute certainty what needed to be done to protect as many people as possible.

Maybe, just maybe, Virologists looked at this virus (under the microscope, and how it spread) and had a view that it might not be super dangerous. They knew it was an influenza-like coronavirus after all. And they know how these tend to behave. Mutations were to be expected, but the experts also know what the type, and/or the extent of those mutations could be based on the amino acids available on the spike protein of the virus.

So, if they did have a plan (please!), I’d imagine this virus was the perfect opportunity to put some of those plans into action. Even if they weren’t really needed. Why? Because I don’t want Governments globally to ‘test out’ their procedures (and possibly screw up royally) when we really do have a deadly virus for all of us.

My theory extends to believe that Governments (in the times of serious threat) need public order, mass compliance, and no anarchy. They will need all of us to act as one, (losing personal freedoms), doing as we’re told, in order to prevent the maximum number of deaths.

If an extinction level event ever happens (and is preventable) none of us wants anarchy, and freedom thinkers fucking it up for the rest of us. We don’t want to wake up to more and more deaths every day if following clear and guided advice can prevent it.

I feel that many steps, rules, and processes, Governments took (and are still taking in some countries) were rolled out, regardless of the severity of the virus, firstly: just in case (particularly in the early days of the pandemic where none of us knew how things would play out); secondly: would our (Governments) planning steps actually work, and; thirdly: what measures would the public accept and what response is needed to their reaction.

Better to do all this trial and error response to an outbreak when a virus is not as deadly as aspected, than when one is waaaay more deadly than expected.

So, the pharmaceutical vaccine response, though exploitative (expensive), it was fast. We had drugs on trial so quickly.

However, as I’m typing this, I’m wondering if the high price paid for fast vaccines was needed because commercial virologists in these huge pharmaceutical companies ‘knew’ this particular virus wasn’t as deadly as something like Small Pox or the Spanish Flu.

I’d like to think that in the event of a super deadly population killing virus, the race would still be on for a cure, even if there was no profit to be made. I don’t believe big pharma is callous & evil enough to let 50%+ of their employees, family, and friends die when they have the expertise to develop a vaccine.

There’s a lot more I could think about regarding the Pharma co’s response, but I don’t want to keeping go down that path right now.

I want to consider that Governments everywhere could see this virus as an opportunity to test procedures to prevent anarchy and keep public order.

I hate/hated the restrictions. But they were needed.

Imagine if our (UK) Governments response led to a million people dying in 12 or 24 months? That could easily have happened. In the future, world leaders will be placed on a league table showing how many people died on their watch. What if many members of our royal family had died? I think our prime minister would have ended up in prison. Seriously. I think this very possible scenario (of killing the Queen) justified so many Governments policies and procedures.

What am I missing?

One of the challenges Governments faced (and I’m glad we’ve experienced this in order to analyse how best to deal with it) is bad information and communication on social media.

I’m reminded of Edison discovering a thousand ways not to make a light bulb, before finding the one way which worked. There’s a million ways that scientific information will be wrong, but only 1(ish) way it’ll be right. Social media amplified all the ways that the public didn’t understand policies, biology, virology, history, and so many other things. The combinations of possible ‘wrongs’ extended into infinite numbers, and all these wrong uneducated voices could whip each other up into a panicking frenzy. Not good when you need order and compliance to prevent excessive deaths and chaos (leading to anarchy).

Now we know this virus isn’t as dangerous and the restrictions are being lifted for many (not all), it’s a time for global reflection and analysis. I hope that lessons will have been learned (God, I hate that phrase) and academics will write lots of articles with evidence on how it could have been handled better. I hope Governments will rewrite their plans and procedures ready for the next event where we might not have the luxury of time to start protesting. We could easily have all been digging graves for our loved ones instead.

We’ve gotten off lightly, this time. It’s cost us a fortune. But we’ve seen how people now behave, and next time we might need much more toilet roll.

Mark

There are very few formatting options for headings for example. And you also can add spaces for content breaks across Print pages.

Actually you can, and I’m about to tell you how.

Your saviour is ornamental breaks.

Here you can create and upload your own image (480x32px high) and use instead. You just have to make sure you’re using a transparent .png file. Use this when you have widows on a page and need to push text down a little (beyond the single line-break you’re allowed).

You can also use the same ornamental image for additional images in the page.

Simply add a regular image to the page, upload the ornamental 480x32px transparent image, click it to edit the settings for the image, and set the ‘kind’ to Freestanding set it to the size you need. As you click through the various sizes Vellum will complain that your image isn’t big enough and show you the correct pixel sizes. (See image below)

This is the pixel height you can push your content around with. How this renders on a final e-book or Print file, I don’t know yet, but it works for the preview.

Another (desperate) fix you can try: if at the bottom of the page you need more space but a title or widow will not push over to the next page, you can insert 1 period ‘.’ on a new line. Make sure the weight is regular, not bold, and you’ll have a tiny ink speck at the bottom.

This is the best I can come up with to control spacing some more within Vellum. If you have any other ideas, please let me know.

Mark

https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/

So go there if you’ve just followed a link to here

Mark

I’m determined to put more effort in as I’m finally working mostly on a MacBook Pro and going command(o) all the way!

My weakness is understanding how to connect to my hosting, checkout the files I need, and push them back.

That’s phase 1.

The end goal being I want to be able to move an entire site from one domain to another using only the command line!

I think that will take me a while unless I can find a mentor or a course which guides me through it.

Any suggestions? Send ideas my way!

Mark

Thanks to the podgy dictator, Kim Jong-un, attention on North Korea at the moment is pretty exciting. ‘Exciting’ in the sense that threatening the world with a nuclear attack is exciting.

North Korea has been on my radar for about a decade, because it’s a black hole. I used to make a joke to clients about how social media is compulsory: either you do it, or someone else will do it for you, and how if you want to avoid it, the only thing you can do is move to North Korea.

No-one laughed now I think about it.

I also recall seeing a satellite map of the Earth at night and how North Korea was pitch black squished between every other country which speckled in electrical activity.

Then came the stomping goose-step marches by the army, and the flashing of coloured pieces of card in the stands of sports events mimicking a LED effect of 8-bit graphics in perfect synchronicity.

‘Wow!’ I thought at the time, ‘They are so skilled!’

Fast forward to today, and I no-longer think ‘wow’ to anything done in N. Korea. I didn’t know then that every single resident is effectively being held hostage by a mass-murderer. And that it is absolutely imperative to the survival of you and three generations of your family to show complete loyalty to the ‘Dear Leader’ and the country. And that everyone is spied upon by everyone else, so there is no personal space to escape other than in your mind. Step out of line and everything is either punishable by a lengthy prison sentence or death.

On the upside, if you threaten everyone with death for their entire life, eventually, as we’ve seen by plenty of defectors, people stop fearing death.

‘Death’ becomes a bit like forgetting to buy a train ticket or speeding. Travel back and forth across the border with China is only a bribe away–guards are so poor that they will never turn down a chance to benefit.

In fact, life is so hard outside of the capital Pyongyang, that prison isn’t much different to daily life anyway.

Pyongyang, btw, is nothing more than a brochure for western guests. Tourists can visit and come away thinking, ‘Oh, it’s not too bad. People are friendly.’ etc. But that’s the plan. Dupe the stupid tourists into believing that they’re in a ‘normal’ country, when in reality you couldn’t be further from it.

During the famine in the 90s, only the well-off little chubby school kids were wheeled out in front of the aid agencies to show that things ‘weren’t so bad’.

In the winter, it wasn’t uncommon for people to dig up radishes with their hands and eat them to clean their teeth.

During the height of the Famine, Cannibalism was on the menu, as often the very young and very old were the first to die, and that’s a lot of meat to waste when you could be next.

Another thing which amazed me: there’s 25 million people in the country and if it were to collapse (toppling the dictator, etc), China and S.Korea couldn’t handle that many people flooding across the border to find work and live. Because of this they ‘allow’ a proportion to come across each year (defectors, that is) to manage the problem, but neither side wants too-many! 

Why doesn’t everyone defect? You ask. Many can’t handle the ‘freedom’ and simply go back. ‘Back’ will mean ‘prison’ (or Death) btw, but hey-ho!

What’s the solution? Businesses need to step in and set up factories.

A country who have been starved of all resources, are used to working for pennies (if that), and who have been slaves for their entire lives, are the perfect workforce. Better than those wealthy Chinese! Give a N.Korean a job to do and it will be perfectly executed as fast as possible (remember that threat of death, which never really worked?).

Am I being cruel to suggest this? No. N.Koreans would be the most efficient/cost effective production line in the world for decades to come, and they frickin’ need it!

Liberating N.Koreans to go about their merry way ‘enjoying life’ is simply not an option. It’s easy to just hop on Twitter, pop to the fridge for some leftovers, then look up a campsite for the weekend, and assume that the average N.Korean might choose to do the same, but no.

When your entire life has been devoted to loyalty to the Dear Leader & country, the threat of Death, and everyone spying on your every move, freedom, enlightenment, and the joys of frivolous existential wonderment are absent from the palette.

Setting people up to do a fair days work for a fair days pay gives them some stability, security, and sense of accomplishment, which would be the best thing one could do–at least for one entire generation.

As you can probably tell I’ve read many books on the Political, Social, and Economic state of this very fucked up country, including:

• Dear Leader
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
• The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel of North Korea
• The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
• A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Incredible True Story of North Korea and the Most Audacious Kidnapping in History

And next I’m reading, ‘Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il’

Where will it end? Am I obsessed? Why do I bother?

No-idea. But it’s been bonkers filling this huge gap in my knowledge about one of the most secretive countries on Earth.

I believe I will write a (fiction) book about this one day.