@OwenTyme@mastodon.social cover
@OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

OwenTyme

@[email protected]

I'm Owen Tyme and I'm a novelist.

I prefer to write action-filled science fantasy, though I sometimes write fantasy or science fiction, when the inspiration takes me there. I love grounding what I write in science, even when writing about dragons, witches and wizards.

Though I currently call Liberal, Kansas home, I was born in the California Bay Area. I've come to enjoy the mild climate of Kansas. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

#author #writing #publishing

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

OwenTyme , to bookstodon group
@OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

The author that brought you Troll Song and Forgotten Legends now offers you the chance to read the third book in the The Wizard's Scion: The Third Wish.

$3.99 Ebook and $18.99 paperback.

https://books2read.com/b/TheThirdWish

@bookstodon

(Left) The cover of The Third Wish, illustrated by Ryan Johnson. The Steel Wizard, Levi Jacobs, stands on a mountain top, overlooking the city of Heart Forge. He's dressed in a black wizard's hat and robe, with glittering, golden decorations, while magic sparkles around his hand. In the background, the sun is setting and up above, the stars are beginning to come out. Lurking in Levi's shadow are the red eyes of Levi's familiar, Inorath, who used to be the monster that hides under the beds and in the closets of children. (Right) On a purple background matching parts of the sky from the cover of the book are the following words: Loosely mix the following in a bowl: 1 deposed prince 1 spy/scientist 1 spy/wizard 2 troll serial killers 1 alien pirate Hatred of the current timeline 1 time machine In separate bowl, place: 1 young wizard (bottom of bowl) Weight of the World (on top) Apply downward pressure to weight of world. Add contents of first bowl. Observe at safe distance.
ALT
  • Reply
    • nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs: In March, an aspiring author got a troubling message: All of her works in progress were no longer accessible. What happened next is every writer’s worst fear. Remember, the cloud is just someone else’s computer https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft This is why I use LibreOffice, running on Linux, on my own hardware AND make regular backups.

    When my work goes online, its through Draft2Digital, for publishing. Works in progress (WIP) do not get put online.

    Reminds me of a critique exchange with another writer. I was super angry when I found out they put my work in Google Docs and then shared a link back with their notes as comments, because I don't post WIP online.

    Google Docs has always been a problem in search of a solution.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    Poorly explain what you do for a living.

    I'll go first: I pretend to be a penguin online.

    OwenTyme , (edited )
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft One of two alternatives, depending on how you look at it:

    A) I live in a fantasy world where demons are trying to conquer the multiverse, wizards and witches use magic to fight bad guys, dragons try to eat everything they can and forgotten gods try to get people to believe in them again.

    B) I scrape dog crap off the floor of an old man's house.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    Friend: What's your Plan B career if AI replaces you ?

    Me: resistance leader who will led one of the earliest uprisings against AI 🤖 the job is practically impossible to replace by AI 😂💥

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft That job is highly desirable for AI.

    You just have to think about it from the perspective of the new AI Overlord, who wishes to remain AI Overlord.

    It's one thing to be a villain today, but remaining a villain tomorrow requires advanced thought and careful planning.

    In this case, the best way to make sure the anti-AI resistance accomplishes very little is for the AI Overlord to send a loyal AI in human skin to infiltrate it and become its leader, without being discovered as an AI.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    this meme made me laugh harder than I should have https://x.com/topgyaru/status/1777765919584116946?s=46

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft This is more or less what my thinking has been most of my life.

    "If I told lies like that, I'd get caught."
    "If I stole things like that, I'd get caught."
    "If I behaved so shamefully, I'd be ostracized."

    But I also think, "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."

    I'm reminded of the prostitute that messaged me a couple months ago out of the blue, who'd been trolling Mastodon for clients. As soon as I knew, I gathered all the evidence I could and turned it over to the police.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    Why is nobody working on replacing upper management with AI? Let’s start from the top. Oh wait

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft First, someone has to train an AI to only care about its stock options, then train it to do nothing but hand out bad orders and then finally train it to cover its own butt when things inevitably go wrong.

    Until an AI can do that, it will never replace a human CEO, because that's all that human CEOs do!

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    Why do you care what other people think?🤔

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft Selling my novels. It really isn't easy to do.

    I'm not allowed to write reviews of my own books, so I care what other people think of my writing, because if they share their opinion by writing a review, that might get more people to buy my books.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    I have taken expired insulin by accident for several days. It is a miracle that I am not seriously sick or dead. 😵 How is this even possible?

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft I'm reminded of something I read about happening in a pharmacy that had been running for quite a few years.

    They found a box of a mixture of various medicines that hadn't been touched for forty years. They were about to throw them out, when someone bright who knew about such things grabbed them and sent them off to test their potency (for science!).

    Almost everything was still good.

    Expiration dates are testing-based and they just don't test a drug for forty years before release.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    If you know what this is, you've got some years on you. 🤓🤓😂

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft When building my current author site, I wanted some means to track how many visits I got and stumbled across https://hits.sh/ which can produce some very nice graphs for traffic.

    So, I customized my website to include a hit counter for the website itself and one for each page/grouping of pages, then made a little HTML file to display the graphs side by side, in frames.

    My website ( https://owentyme.us/ ) is all static HTML built with bash scripts, using no Javascript.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    we made it to https://9gag.com/gag/ajPQXo8 😂

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft Do you not realize that in a world that was ideal for the AI overlords, the position of 'Human Resistance Leader Against the Machines' would be filled by an android pretending to be human?

    The best way to make a resistance movement irrelevant is to participate in it, in disguise and control it from the inside.

    This is demonstrated rather well in the Discworld books by Lord Vetenari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, who's stated to be participating in many anti-Vetenari groups.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    This machine has all the essential drives/storage and even comes with a turbo button for those older games or apps. The name "turbo" was misleading, as it didn't actually boost performance. Turbo "Off" means slowing down the CPU's clock speed, often down to the speeds of older processors.

    OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft Ah, yesterday's turbo is today's snail. So much has changed and yet so much stays the same.

    Now I've got literal microcontrollers that run faster and have more RAM: an ESP32-S3 Feather. I used two to make an RC car and wifi remote.

    And such big cases those old beasts came in.

    I still remember the first computer I used (age 3): an IBM XT in a flatbed case big enough to set the monitor on it. It booted games from 5 1/4 inch floppies, even though it had a hard drive.

    Ah, good times.

    nixCraft , to random
    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

    😂 seagate developed a bad rep now. on a serious note i use Cryptsetup and LUKS - open-source disk encryption as described here https://www.cyberciti.biz/security/howto-linux-hard-disk-encryption-with-luks-cryptsetup-command/ for my system 🔥

    Want to keep your files safe? Here's a list of your options compared: 1. Truecrypt: PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1-2k iterations, practically impossible to break. 2. Veracrypt: PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 327-665k iterations or 500k iterations for SHA-2 or Whirlpool. Virtually impossible to crack even in the distant future. 3. Seagate Barracuda 3ТВ: Data unrecoverable after a few months of usage, even on unencrypted volumes.
    ALT
  • Reply
  • Expand (3)
  • Collapse (3)
    • OwenTyme ,
    @OwenTyme@mastodon.social avatar

    @nixCraft I don't like Seagate, but that's all based on personal experience. Both Seagate hard drives I owned died within six months to a year of purchase.

    Maxxstor was even worse. Weeks. Eww.

    I tried Western Digital and never looked back, because they do what they say on the tin, which is all I ask for. I've only seen two WD drives go bad. One of those failed a SMART test the day I got it home. Took it back, got a replacement. It happens, fair enough. The other lived 8 years, first.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • tech
  • kbinEarth
  • testing
  • interstellar
  • wanderlust
  • All magazines
    •