earning growth -skill
re rating - luck

those who don’t believe this, haven’t been in the market long enough to understand this.

So here is a secret: Not everything I write goes anywhere. I have at least 4 books completely written and edited that never went on submission. I have books that stalled out at 20k. I have docs on my computer with opening paragraphs I don't remember writing. But! 1/

Every now and then an idea sticks with me like that corner of tortilla chip that just won't go down your throat. It happened with SPARROWHAWK, which began as 40k of a YA story, died, and was reborn as a comic, thanks to @christopher_j_r and @boomstudios. And now... 2/

It's happening with THE WILLOWS, a short story that you'll see in @UncannyMagazine next year. This Southern Gothic horror story began as an attempt to sell my next Romance to @AbZurdity after the Blud books in 2014 or so. And she didn't buy it. Guess why? 3/

Turns out, it wasn't a Romance! It was Southern Gothic Horror. Even the bones of it screamed strangeness, not sexiness. I loved the taste of the world, but I hadn't found the right story yet. Tried to write it 2 more times and failed. Until I finally understood what it was. 4/

So I took the 50 pages I'd written and cut half of them, twisting the story around from a gothy Romance inspired by the band the Civil Wars and turned it into a spooky descent into madness. And it looked back at me from the abyss as if to say, DUH. Sometimes... 5/

Do you know?

The Golden Shine on the artificial jewellery of modern times is a gift by Nagarjuna.

Now,u might be wondering,who is Nagarjuna?

Nagarjuna was the name of an ancient Indian scholar&scientist whose name is associated with the fields of Alchemy,Chemistry& Metallurgy.

He conducted a number of alchemic and Metallurgical experiments directed towards transforming base elements into Gold.
According to Eduard Sachau's Alberuni's India, Nagarjuna was termed as a Metallurgist who was born 100 yrs before Alberuni's time, who was born in 973 CE.

According to some records Nagarjuna was born in 9th century CE near Somnath,Gujarat and according to some Tibetan & Chinese sources he was born in Vidarbha,Maharashtra from where he later migrated to Deccan region.

Edward Schau quotes in his book,'They have a science similar to Alchemy and Nagarjuna is famous for this science which they call as 'Rasayana'.

Nagarjuna's book 'Rasaratnakara' is one of the earliest documented texts on Alchemy,Chemistry & Metallurgy in Sanskrit.Nagarjuna successfully discovered through his experiments the alchemy of transmutation of base metals into Gold.This was not real gold but a gold like substance.

1/ Today is #BlackHoleFriday, an annual science outreach event that, by complete coincidence I’m sure, is done on #BlackFriday. You’ll read lots of cool stuff about black holes on the hashtag. Here’s mine.

2/ Black holes are weird. Duh. People like to think of them as something like incredibly dense nuggets of stuff that sucks other stuff in. But they’re not like that.

3/ If you squeeze enough mass into a small enough volume, the gravity gets so intense that it’s impossible to escape them *if you get too close*. From far away, though, gravitationally they more or less act like anything with that much mass.

4/ So if the Sun turns into a black hole we wouldn’t get drawn in. In fact, we’d orbit it almost exactly the same way as we do now, though we’d freeze to death pretty rapidly, which, in the end, would still kinda suck.

5/ Black holes get weird *when you get close*. Anything with mass warps space — we feel that warp as gravity! — but black holes stretch space to its limit.

Rhino Barges

One of the dullest, coolest, more bizarre and fascinating pieces of kit used in Normandy.

Which NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT.

BUT I DO AND YOU SHOULD TOO.
/1

#WW2 #SWW #History

Planning for Overlord and Neptune had a serious snag, how to get troops from LSTs onto the beach as simply ramming them onto the beaches and dropping the ramp was known to damage the exceptionally vulnerable LSTs and felt to be unsustainable in the mid to long term. /2

LSTs were essential in sustaining Overlord's progress and were a subject of major headaches in the planning phase, and a real subject of friction when it came to launching additional amphibious operations such as Dragoon.

A single LSTs loss represented a capability nick. /3

So, logic dictated, we don't really want these remarkable but rare and highly valuable vessels constantly doing beach landings, we want something to act as a medium between ship to shore, and in came the (mostly) American designed Rhino. /4

I fucking love Rhinos.

Seriously.

Graceful lines of pure industrial pedigree.

Modular.

LOOK AT IT. /5

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.