Open Live Writer: how to find your scheduled posts

11 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping

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WordPress.com is currently ditzing back and forth between the old and the new posting systems, so it looks like it really is time to move to Open Live Writer for blogging. One feature is a little tricky for new users to find, in this free offline blogging software. A list of your scheduled posts. Turns out you can get the list, but there’s no labelled way to it. You need to know to click once here…

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This then opens up the panel seen below, and then you drop down the list to click on your full blog name.  A full list of the last 50 posts are then speedily retrieved via RSS, and they include forward / scheduled posts in the correct order and (unlike the new WordPress) with dates that make sense when compared with the Windows taskbar Calendar.  You can then click on one of these to edit, save, change date and time etc.

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It’s also useful to know that Ctrl + J loads Windows Explorer to pick a picture to upload to a blog post. The default ‘pick’ folder is Pictures.

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: the Ladd Observatory

11 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in Astronomy, Picture postals

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Here we see an especially cosmic haunt of the the young Lovecraft, the Ladd Observatory at Brown. Albeit in the bright morning and not star-surrounded and in silhouette at night.

It’s quite possible that we see here the young Professor Upton. Most likely also one of his daughters (either Eleanor or Margaret), come to bring him home for a hot breakfast after a chilly and arduous night of observing.

“The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle.” — H.P. Lovecraft.

Below we see Prof. Upton in his Brown obituary picture of 1914, pictured in his old age — perhaps made circa 1909-1913.

Spacewarp #1

10 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to see that Spacewarp #1 (August 2020) has launched, and is available on Amazon for the Kindle. It’s a valiant attempt by comics veteran Pat Mills to add a booster-rocket to the British comics revival, in the fun gung-ho style of the original 2000AD and with much the same audience demographics in mind.

A touch pricey at £6.99 for 66 b&w pages in digital, I have to say, and with a front cover that lacks the teen-appeal of its interior preview splashes…

I might have gone with issue #1 at £2.99, just to get younger pocket-money readers thundering through the doors. Then had later issues up at full price, before also lifting #1 to £6.99. But at least it’s public and not locked into some walled-garden app system, and the art looks superb. If you can help publicise it further I’m sure all concerned would be very happy. The next Digital Art Live is nailed down now, but Spacewarp will likely feature in the October issue. Sadly Spacewarp is yet another example of how difficult it is to discover new quality comics, as I’m very alert to such things but have only just discovered it.

I should note that other recent “revive British comics!” titles include The 77, The Brawler, and several more. Of course some, such as Commando with four issues a month, are still going strong with the old time-tested formula and low digital prices.

WordPress ditches the old classic editor

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Housekeeping

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Ugh, so now all free WordPress.com blogs have to use the horrible new “Block” blog-post editor and admin interface. Designed by a blockhead for blockheads, but the look of it. It appears to have been enabled and enforced for all, today. Congratulations, WordPress, you’ve made a great system impossible to use by forcing an essentially un-usable interface on users. It used to be that you could still get a redirect to the old Classic editor, via a useful bit of UserScript. That’s now kaput, and if it’s not for you then it soon will be.

There is a “Classic Block” theme which tries to make the new “Block” editor look a bit more like the old one.  So it’s either get a paid version of a free WordPress.com blog that can get that, “or else”, it seems.

I’ve found the “or else”. I am currently writing this with Open Live Writer, and thanks to Major Geeks for vectoring me straight onto that. (Major Geeks is a very useful old-school freeware directory, just make sure to avoid installing the iffy Malwarebytes Anti-Malware desktop Windows software from them).

Open Live Writer is a 2017 open-source fork of the older and well-loved Microsoft Live Writer, and it works fine with this free blog and and needs no API key.  I like it the more I use it.  Saves posts offline, retrieves the blog theme and categories and suchlike. Can see previous and scheduled posts with dates that make sense when compared to the Windows taskbar calendar (unlike the Scheduled post view for the Block editor). Spellchecker. It’s happy about code tags, as you can see with this amusing bit of Regex…

(/(^.*$)/g, '"$1"')

… and much more. I just wish it had the ability to mute the bright white background and an ability to make the font a bit bigger when writing a post. It does have font size controls, but they appear to be about how big the text is that you see, not that I see.

If I post as a draft to the blog, then update a draft post in Open Live Writer, does it update the draft at the blog?  Yes it does.  Wonderful.

So all I need now if to see if there’s any accessibility software for Windows that can increase font size and enforce a dark mode (or an ‘invert’ mode) at a per application level.

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The raw code view, useful for pasting in links captured in ready-formatted HTML link form.

Update: I’ve fixed the two problems with Open Live Writer.

Dark mode: My choice of colour inverter is the Windows freeware NegativeScreen. Very nice, a super-lightweight system-tray utility. It even does Sepia (Win + Alt + F7, or right-click on the system tray icon) for a steampunk feeling and quite good readability in Open Live Writer.

Font size: As for zoom of the Open Live Writer fonts… it’s built into Windows, no need to use a magnifier. Just hold down Ctrl and use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Crtl + Zero to reset. Who knew?

H.P. Lovecraft in Britain / Sterling in Italy

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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H.P. Lovecraft in Britain (2007), newly republished in summer 2020 as a budget Kindle ebook for £2.28. It’s paired with “The Horror in the Museum” for some reason, though it appears the latter is not annotated or also given an essay.

The long essay untangled Lovecraft’s British publishing history from the 1950s to the 70s, with the help of the Gollancz archives. It was originally published as a limited edition 46-page chapbook from The British Fantasy Society, with a pleasing cover and interior illustrations.

It looks like it may still be possible to get a copy of the original chapbook monograph from the author, for a mere £6 inc. UK postage. As such it may be rather more desirable than the new ebook for many Lovecraftians. Worth a try.

Also new, in a 300-page paperback, is Claudio Foti’s book in Italian on Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling. This was published at the end of June 2020, and has an essay on the pair, “together with all of Lovecraft’s letters to Kenneth J. Sterling” in translation. It looks like it may also have a translation of “Eryx”, and hints at possibly containing other Sterling story translations in Italian. Foci has been a Lovecraft Annual contributor (2017) and hopefully we’ll get an English translation of his essay in due course.

New graphic novels – “Red Hook”, “Herbert West” and “Mountains”

08 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Lovecraftian arts, New books

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There’s a new Italian graphic novel of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”. It’s actually more a Euro-style ‘BD album’ in page-count and large 17″ x 24″ size. The book shipped in July 2020.

The artist is Stefano Cardoselli. The publisher also offer his “Herbert West” (March 2020) and his the Lovecraftian “The Inhabitant of The Lake” by Ramsey Campbell is due in December 2020. Could be an opportunity here for an Anglosphere publisher to translate and bundle all three.

There’s also yet another graphic novel of At The Mountains of Madness, from Adam Fyda. This appeared in July…

British illustrator Dave Shephard has also announced what appears to be a melding of “Dagon” and “The Call of Cthulhu”, which bills itself in the book’s title as a “graphic novel” — but in the blurb as an “illustrated adaptation”. Due Spring 2021.

Also in graphic novels, The View from the Junkyard recently found a neglected Lovecraftian gem in a graphic novel titled Weird Detective…

The story takes detective fiction and merges it sublimely with the Cthulhu Mythos in ways I’ve seen only in such great books as Shadows over Baker Street; a collection of short stories pitting the Great Detective [Holmes] against the Great Old Ones. Finding something similar in graphic novel format is a treat!

A character that looks like Lovecraft, and he has a talking cat. I like it already.

The View from the Junkyard‘s review also notes his disappointment in discovering that this graphic novel was a trade from 2017 (per-issues 2016), and there have been no more in the years since. He wryly points to the huge difficulty involved in simply finding out about completed-story graphics novels of the pulp entertainment type, which get swamped by endless weekly tidal-waves of manga, superhero, and depressive art-school wrist-slashers…

I might need to hire a weird detective to help me find more like this.

Indeed. In the meantime Weird Detective is currently £9.99 for Kindle on Amazon UK, where for some reason it’s been saddled by Dark Horse with a retro Ditko-like cover that really doesn’t reflect the quality of Guiu Villanova’s interior artwork or layouts. It has about 110 pages of story.

Call: Science Fiction in the Museum

05 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by in Scholarly works

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A call for papers for Science Fiction in the Museum. To be a special issue of the paywalled journal Configurations, set for publication in “early 2022”.

“… comparatively little work has sought to develop our understanding of the relationships between science fiction and museum spaces.”

Also Telepoetics, a conference on the mysteries and cultural imaginaries of the telephone. Although the deadline for that has now gone.