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Current Mood: bouncy

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Avoiding the Kick Zone

Emily works at a saddle barn, guiding trails at Pokagon State Park here in Indiana. Emily is, shall we say, height challenged. I don't believe it's PC to say "short" anymore. But one thing I've learned from watching her work is that she knows how to get much bigger animals to do what she wants.

She knows how to get me to do what she wants too, but at least I don't have to wear a bridal. Well, except that one time.

I've learned a lot about horses from talking to her and watching her work. Horses are even a large part of my mystery/humor/supernatural novel We Love Trouble, which I hope you all get to read someday. She'll have to be listed in the book as "technical consultant".

Did you stick your tongue out at me, young man? Um, young horse?

That's why I know about the Kick Zone.

If you walk behind a horse, you either want to be right behind it, or drop back about a mile and a half. If you're close, but far enough away that the horse can wind up for a kick, you might soon find yourself landing in a tree.

You don't want to be in the Kick Zone.

Earlier this year I drove to Pokagon to pick up Emily. It gave me a chance to introduce myself to the new mule, who Emily described as "rather large". The Saddle barn had two mules. Freddy, who had his own Facebook and Instagram accounts before he passed, was normal sized. for a mule. The other one I hadn't seen yet, but as I walked up to her I imagined what Freddy said at first sight:

"It's a giant! Mulezilla!"

That's Molly with Emily, and no, this is not a trick of perspective.

Molly is the tallest equine animal in the Midwest. Horses and mules are usually measured by hands, but Molly is eight legs tall. Petting her was like trying to put out a forest fire: It's hard to tell where to start. It takes Emily five steps to get into her saddle, with the first step involving the word "trampoline" and the last step being to put on a high-altitude oxygen mask.

I'm just sayin', big mule.

After we got to know each other, Emily untied Molly and led her toward the barn, past me, which is okay because I'm to her side as she goes by. But that was when something spooked her. The mule, I mean, not Emily. The animals know better than to pull away from Emily, but the plastic bag, or crunched leaf, or perceived insult made her swing her back side around until it was aimed at me. The mule, not Emily.

I was in the Kick Zone.

There's only one thing to do: Flee. I backpedaled, reaching approximately warp 9 in half a second. Even the USS Enterprise can't reach that speed by going backward, but I did. Of course, the Enterprise might accidentally back into the Klingons, and I'd hate to fill out that road rage report.

Directly behind me was the end of the hitching line. It was a plastic pipe, maybe four inches in diameter, with the end aimed right at the small of my back like a police battering ram. Only less fun.

Molly with the offending railing end.

I did not scream when I backed into it at Warp 9, which, as you'll remember, is very fast. I did say something, which I'll just code as "Klingon! Oh, Klingon!"

I said "Klingon" several times.

The moral of this story is "situational awareness". It's also that you should keep ibuprofen, ice, and that green stuff from the chiropractor close by at all times. The chiropractor should also be close by.

Molly never kicked. I suppose her mind was on whatever spooked her: a candy wrapper, a passing mosquito, maybe the realization that Lost will never make sense. The hitching post just laughed off the incident. I drove us home with no problems, although it took several people to pry me out of the car and carry me to the couch. I'm now working on the outline of a novel about evil hitching posts that attack the unwary, and I'm calling it "Post Ghosts". M. Night Shymalan already has the movie rights.

Yes, horses do appear in some of my books, specifically the Storm Chaser series. Find them all here:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Just thinking about horses costs money for a horse lover, so help us with sales and reviews!

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1058: refine

Challenge #1058: refine

Challenge #1058 is refine.

The rules:

All stories must be 100 words long.
Please place your story behind a cut if it contains spoilers for the current season.
Remember, you don't have to use the challenge word or phrase in your story; it's just there for inspiration.
Please include the challenge word or phrase in the subject line of your post.
Please use the challenge tag 1058: refine on any story posted to this challenge.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Location: Around

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Call For Books, and Authors Make Appearances!

I can type again! .... some.

A few author appearances are coming up:

On September 20 we'll be at Albion's Fall Celebration, which is on a Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Lots of vendors, plus a car show, all on the Noble County Courthouse Square in Albion. We plan to have all of our books available, and fingers crossed for good weather. Honestly, outdoor appearances make me very nervous, what with rain and all the paper.

https://www.albionstarteam.org/fall-celebration

On September 28th Emily and I are going to be guesting on the Easily Distracted by Cemeteries podcast, in a discussion I suspect will involve ... cemeteries. They're based not far from Diamond Lake, which, along with its accompanying hill, has a rich tradition of the supernatural.

https://rss.com/podcasts/easilydistractedbycemeteries/

"Join us as we discuss cemeteries, ghosts, and the antics of those visiting cemeteries with many distractions and laughs along the way."

We're starting at 2 p.m., but I assume this isn't live. I'll let you know when I have a broadcast time.

On October 30, from 6-7:30 p.m., we'll be at the Assembly Room of the Community Learning Center in Kendallville. I'll be giving a talk, then hosting a Q&A. But on the brighter side, I'm told there'll be drinks (non-alcoholic) and snacks. I'm reasonably certain I'll be able to string two words together, maybe three.

https://thecommunitylearningcenter.org/

This will be a ticketed event, which wasn't my idea, and please show up! It's to cover the CLC expenses, and it's a pretty great organization. The Community Learning Center is at 401 E. Diamond Street, in the old Kendallville High School, which was more recently the old Kendallville Middle School.

Hope to see everyone there, which would be quite a crowd. But if you can't make it ours books are all available online, pending operations by Skynet:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Fresh air never hurt anyone. I mean, outside of blizzards. And heat waves. And ... never mind.

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big wide world

9/11

I always remember sweet_ali who first put up this virtual candle in memory of the friends she lost.

Current Mood: indescribable

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Meet the Gaza music teacher behind viral drone song

"In the middle of this war and this madness, there is a flower inside the fire."

Watch on YouTube

Current Location: sydney, australia

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1057: attention

Challenge #1057: attention

Welcome to

dw100! Challenges are posted approximately once a week.

Challenge 1057 is attention.

The rules:

All stories must be 100 words long
Please place your story behind a cut if it contains spoilers for the current season
You don't have to use the challenge word or phrase in your story; it's just there for inspiration
Please include the challenge word or phrase in the subject line of your post
Please use the challenge tag 1057: attention on any story posted to this challenge

Good luck!

Current Mood: sleepy

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Updateyness

How is it already Wednesday? /rhetorical question

On Saturday we watched the new Superman, and it is as delightful and uplifting as everyone promised. Also very silly, which is important I think. We need silliness to help ward off the horrors. ETA: It's already out on streaming, which made it a lot easier!

Promethia and I also posted the first chapter of a new Dead Boy Detectives fic:

The Song of Rowland, 10k

Summary:

Most ghosts didn’t celebrate their birthdays.

But Charles Rowland wasn’t ‘most ghosts’.

Indeed, Charles’ birthday was a high point of the year, a guaranteed day of fun for himself and Edwin. The fun always helped to push down the unvoiced emotions below: the loss, the unresolved pain of his death, the feelings of failure and inadequacy. Charles saw no reason why this state of affairs shouldn’t continue forever.

But then he turned fifty.

Or:

How a medieval poem changed Charles’ afterlife forever.

(Only 2 chapters in all, amazingly not everything I write turns into an endless WIP!)

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The Glorious Transhumanist Centaur Future

Apparently I am a good level of tech-savviness for vibe-coding a Linux version of this thing.

"Write, from scratch, a program that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white": beyond my skill level.

"Here is a Python script that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white! It has one (1) critical bug causing it to silently fail. Figure out that the bug exists, then track it down, then fix it": *not* beyond my skill level, actually.

---

(I *was* originally running the linked program in a Windows 7 virtual machine (connected to the Internet, but not logged into anything), but at least one of the following possible explanations had started to happen:

(1) Windows was pissed that I didn't give them a software key and, after a grace period, started throttling me.

(2) The updates Windows 7 had downloaded (apparently Microsoft is still running update servers for 7, just not uploading new patches to them?) had increased its minimum viable specs beyond the specs I'd given the VM.

(3) It was getting clogged with viruses.

(4) Other.

A Linux Lite VM should be better at these. (Except maybe "other".))

---

the code (click to expand)

import time
from PIL import Image
import os

# Define region to monitor: left, top, width, height
REGION = (100, 100, 200, 150) # x, y, w, h

# Path for temp screenshot
SCREENSHOT = "/tmp/screen_region.png"
SOUND = "/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga" # replace if needed

def capture_region():
os.system(f"scrot -o -a {REGION[0]},{REGION[1]},{REGION[2]},{REGION[3]} {SCREENSHOT}")

def contains_white_pixel(image_path):
img = Image.open(image_path)
pixels = img.getdata()
return any(pixel[:3] == (255, 255, 255) for pixel in pixels)

while True:
capture_region()
if contains_white_pixel(SCREENSHOT):
os.system(f"ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet {SOUND}")
time.sleep(1) # avoid repeated alerts
time.sleep(0.5) # check interval

Everything *except* the bolded "-o" was written by ChatGPT (current default free tier). If you don't include the "-o" (for "overwrite"), each screen capture is written to a new file with a new filename, but the program only tests the *original* file for white pixels. So it only actually functions during the very first screen-check after you start the program, and each new check after that just re-does the first check over and over (while also piling up more and more screenshot files it isn't looking at).

You also have to figure out yourself (and manually edit) what the pixel coordinates should be for your particular usecase, but that's fair.

(Note: I haven't included the part where ChatGPT explains which prerequisites I should make sure I have installed in order to run this, but it did explain that and it does seem to have been correct.)

---

This may all have sounded like faint praise, but as someone who has barely used LLMs other than Whisper, I am genuinely very impressed by how close it got. Nullius in verba, sure, but that's true of Stack Exchange too.

Rather than digging around trying (and failing, other than the Windows program) to find someone who has posted *almost* what you were looking for so that you can tinker with it until it does *exactly* what you were looking for, you can directly ask an Internet egregore to manifest the software that post *would* contain if it existed!

The future is *wild*.

Current Mood: crappy
Current Location: home

Entry tags:

Prices and Shipping Costs, and Other Boring Book Stuff

Pardon any typos, I'm still doing the speech to text thing.

We investigated the costs of producing and shipping our print books, and got some bad news: We're actually losing a little money on a couple of the books, and making hardly any on others. I'm all for a fun hobby, but this is also supposed to be a business, and when it comes to style--red is a bad look on a business.

So we have to increase the price of a couple of the books, by a dollar. This, of course, doesn't apply to the traditionally published books, Haunted Noble County, Indiana and Images of America: Albion and Noble County. In those cases the publisher sets the retail price.

On the matter of shipping costs, we took some books to the Post Office and did some figuring. Basically, sending our books to anywhere in America is $4.77 to ship, not including envelopes, which are around 50 cents or so. There's also handling, but we don't get enough mail orders to charge for our time.

It means to mail one book to you is $5.00, which for Haunted Noble County is now set up on our website:

https://markrhunter.com/haunted-noble-count

Hitting the buy button will take you to a PayPal area for payment, and it will give us the address to ship it to. According to the Post Office, ordering two books would increase shipping to $5.22.

You might be money ahead to buy the book direct from Arcadia Publishing, where shipping and handling is a dollar less:

https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/collections/vendors?q=Mark%20R.%20Hunter&contributorID=14550

Last time I checked Amazon S&H was actually more, but a lot less if you have Prime, or a larger order to go with it:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mark-R-Hunter/author/B0058CL6OO?ccs_id=89718b2f-0cc8-425b-8418-0cb29ec6e039

It's also online at Barnes and Noble and--wait for it--copies are available at the Barnes and Noble store at Fort Wayne's Glenbrook mall:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/%22Mark%20R.%20Hunter%22

Has anyone seen Haunted Noble County, Indiana for sale at any other brick and mortar locations?

So you can get a signed copy direct from us through the website, or from Butterfly Alley Gifts here in Albion:

www.facebook.com/p/Butterfly-Alley-Gifts-61551021355135/

You can also get signed copies at one of our upcoming author appearances, which I'll give you information about on my next post. If you show up somewhere with a book you already bought, of course we'll sign it ... but don't count on that increasing the book's value.

I have to stop for now ... my talking muscles are getting tired.

Oh, just one more thing: When I say "we" set up this or set up that, it's actually Emily who did it. Even if I could type right now, my lack of talent on computer design verges on legendary.