Still my favorite song of all time, and sadly so apt for the current state of the world. Praying for Time 💔🎵

Robo political calls/texts leading up to an election when your cell phone number includes an area code for a state you haven’t lived in for nearly a decade is rather unpleasant.

Well, I’ve voted. Here’s hoping it makes a difference. 🗳

No better motivator for an author’s current WIP than a glowing review on an existing book. 😍📚

Song of the day – Two Less Lonely People In the World by Air Supply 🎵

For those who were waiting for it, the paperback for Haven Divided is now available! 🎉📚

The first round of accessibility fixes for images from my fork of Icro has been merged into the official project. 🎉 A few other minor fixes were also included.

Going to see Elton John tonight as part of his farewell tour. He is one of my favorite artists of all time. 🎹🎵

It’s a rare, wonderful feeling when you finish reading a book and just want to turn back to page 1 and start it all over again. 📚

New She-Ra teaser trailer is here. ⚔️🙌🏻

My fork of Icro now accessibly handles posts with images that include alt attributes. My previous accessibility fixes have been merged into the primary Icro repository.

The audiobook for Haven Divided is in production. 🍾📚🎧

Sneak preview of the audiobook cover for Harmony’s Song 😍

Song of the day – Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper 🎵

The audiobook of Harmony’s Song sounds amazing! I cannot wait for fans to hear it. Narrator Reay Kaplan once again did a marvelous job bringing my characters to life. 📚🎧

I’ve forked Icro, an open source iOS Micro.blog client, and have begun implementing accessibility features. It’s a work in progress. So far, I’ve got all the custom gestures working in the VO Actions rotor and fixed/improved some .accessibilityLabels.

In this episode of Something to Say, I talk about my love of comics as a sighted child, accessibility challenges of the genre, the rise of superhero fiction, and recommend the Super Powereds series by Drew Hayes.

• Drew Hayes Official Site
• Drew Hayes on Twitter

Electron apps are a scourge upon the Earth.

Many have asked about audiobooks for Haven Divided and/or Harmony’s Song. I’m happy to say that we are working on making both a reality very soon. If you want to continue to see audiobooks produced, consider picking up Haven Lost on Audible and rating/reviewing it. 💜 🐉⚔️🧜‍♀️

Song of the day – this was mine and my wife’s first dance at our wedding. RIP 💔 — I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) by Aretha Franklin and George michael 🎵

🔖 Fascinating. 🤨🖖🏽 — BREAKING: Ethan Peck Cast As Spock On ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2

Writing in a new genre is a lot of fun—in the same sense that some people find free falling in the Tower of Terror at Disneyland fun. 😱 But I do enjoy the former…not so much the latter.

🔖 👑💜💛🏒 Cereal to superhero: 10 great Gretzky pop culture moments

Two chapters written for my next novel. There are few feelings quite as satisfying. I think this one is a winner. 😁📚

There have been quite a few good pieces written about the growing discontent toward Twitter, FaceBook, and other centralized social networks of late. The best of these, in my opinion, is this one by Brent Simmons. I agree with a lot of the points being made; they are a lot of why I’m spend less time on Twitter these days and more time on Micro.blog. But I think a few things are getting lost in the shuffle—or at least, not adequately being discussed or considered.

Many people are talking about how the open web is the solution to the toxicity of social networks. If we own our own content on our own websites and take the power away from the centralized networks like Twitter and FaceBook, the argument goes, things will right themselves. On an Infinite Time Scale™, (apologies to John Siracusa), that may be true, but not in the foreseeable future, and certainly not if we convince ourselves that the open web is a silver bullet. It isn’t.

• The web still requires a bar of technical expertise that is too high for many non-tech-savvy people. Centralized networks lower this bar. Something like Micro.blog has taken a middle-ground approach; M.B’s social features are largely centralized (e.g. your M.B timeline/mentions/etc), but you maintain control of your content, hosted yourself and disseminated by M.B, or hosted directly by M.B.
• The web has always been terrible at fluid/real-time conversation. This is an enormous technical challenge on the open web—perhaps not insurmountable, but nowhere near being solved.
• Has everyone forgotten just how toxic the comment sections of blogs have always been? Sure, those comments have a much more limited reach, but the abuse is as bad or worse than something like Twitter. The open web will not solve harassment or abuse—it never has. Those things existed online long before FAceBook or Twitter and will go on after they are footnotes in history books. IRC is/was a non-centralized chat system that was the 90s equivalent to Twitter in many ways. Abuse there happened every bit as often as it does on social networks today. I remember; I was there.

Ultimately, I think it is unrealistic to think that an open web solves the worst abuses we see on the big social networks. If Twitter and/or FaceBook vanished tomorrow, it would, at least in the foreseeable future, have an unintended consequence of amplifying the voices of the more tech savvy over those who are less so. If we, as a society, fail to recognize that abuse, harassment, and spread of toxic/hateful/false information have, do, and will continue to exist on the open web just as they do on social networks, we are setting ourselves up for a rude awakening. If we do acknowledge this, we can protect against it and build a better and more rewardingly social Internet.

I think that many of those taking a stand and abandoning FaceBook, Twitter, et al, actually do understand this, but are focusing too much on the networks themselves. It is not just important but crucial that we put the risk of finding ourselves in the same quagmire on the open web at the forefront of the discussion.

The open web is the tool with which we can begin to solve these problems; it is not, itself, the solution. We need to remember that.