DreamForge Magazine has published a reprint of my story "The Van Helsing Women's Shelter", which is about a different approach to fighting vampires. The issue is online is at: https://go.dfstory.com/anvil24 and a direct link to the story is at: https://go.dfstory.com/van-helsing.

Through hijinx, I ended up with a lot of old Astounding and Analog magazines. I'm going to post some of the more interesting covers here.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/647c1d8903b2193defe65a34aec85ef2/aea182e4cec4df8a-4a/s640x960/ce745bc325cad2b983e2f4e7e16eacf4be710d66.jpg

"Vacation Gnomes" reprinted in _Sages of Metaphorosis_

 The Metaphorosis Magazine people did some collections of their work and my story "Vacation Gnomes" now appears in the _Sages of Metaphorosis_ collection. It's available as a Kindle ebook or as a hardcopy from Galaxy Bookshop.

"Vacation Gnomes" published in Metaphorosis Magazine

 My fantasy short story "Vacation Gnomes" appeared in Metaphorosis Magazine on Friday, February 5, 2021. 

How to pronounce my name

 The easiest way to remember how to pronounce "DaMommio" is that it rhymes with "the Romeo."

How lockdown bored am I ? How lockdown bored are YOU?

 I just spent 15 minutes making these lovely paper airplanes in the shape of hands. So that  I could throw hands with my daughter. 

Armadillocon 42 is live now: 2020 convention is online and completely free

 Check out http://armadillocon.org/d42/ to register for the con and join. Browser-based videoconferencing software is being used, so it's easy to get involved. 

"The Great Pause" ... a reminder to keep in mind the differences in our lives we see from the Corona pandemic

Karen Watkins sent me this link and I thought this article was incredible food for thought. https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

Goodreads page for me

Now I have a Goodreads page listing things found there that I have stories featured in.

Reprint of "Daughter of Mettle"

A reprint of "Daughter of Mettle" appeared in the July 2018 issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly.

"Things I Realized on Finding an Alien in the Passenger Seat of My Car" appears in Flash Fiction Online

My short story Things I Realized on Finding an Alien in the Passenger Seat of My Car has been published in the April 2018 issue of Flash Fiction Online. I've been waiting for this for about six months. This is my second sale at a professional rate, and my first SFWA-qualifying sale.

I've been having a great time with this one. It's pretty great to have a story in an online magazine where you can share it with everyone and they don't have the barrier of having to locate and purchase a copy before they can read it. Tons of people at my office have told me they read and enjoyed it, and then they cite details proving they really did read it.

Some reviews of my story "Daughter of Mettle"

I did some vanity googling and found these brief mentions of the story. The story itself (which came out way back in 2013) can be read at http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/superhero/aaron-damommio/daughter-of-mettle

It's rewarding to find people posting about it. In several cases below, you'll want to search for the word 'mettle' as the story gets only a paragraph in an article.

• https://scwade.wordpress.com/page/3/  
• http://www.diabolicalplots.com/daily-science-fiction-april-2013-review/
• http://www.songsoferetz.com/2013/04/review-of-daughter-of-mettle-by-aaron.html

My story "Road Trip" to appear in anthology

My story "Road Trip" will appear in the Fell Beasts and Fair anthology from Spring Song Press.  The anthology collects stories about magical creatures. This'll be my longest published piece so far, at about 3500 words, and my first one to feature a werewolf, and a sandwich. 

It's available for preorder now, shipping March 20, 2018. The link above takes you the Amazon page; it's available as a Kindle ebook and a paperback, though the paperback may trail the ebook in availability. 

As a result, I now have an Amazon author page, and you can search Amazon for 'damommio' and find the book, which somehow thrills me a lot.

Generating menu ideas with a simple Excel spreadsheet

I have often found it difficult to plan menus for our house. So I thought I'd try randomly generating menus, and I'm excited about the results. We've been using this system for about 3 weeks, and here's what I've learned:

• The most important thing here was to make a list of entrees that we actually cook at our house. That alone is a great resource for planning new menus.
• "Aaron likes lists, and solving a problem with a new list makes him happy" isn't really anything new. But this is the first time I've tried to make a relatively comprehensive list of meals.
• We're trying to plan our weeks more tightly. It's ok if we change the plan mid-week. But I'm finding it more useful than ever to have a plan for the whole week.
• This is of some use in avoiding letting food we buy go bad before we cook it, but only if I stay on top of that issue.

I'm only talking about dinners here. I tried to find the lowest-tech way I could do this fast, and also something that would keep whatever data I generated in a common format. So, here's what I did:

• Made a list of meal options in one column of an Excel spreadsheet
• Inserted random numbers in the next column, using "=RAND()" in each cell.
• SORT the list using the column of random numbers as the sort key.

The sort trick isn't my idea, I got it from searching on ideas for how to randomly sort rows in Excel. 

That's it. I made it slightly fancier by writing a macro to do the sort and tying that to a key combo, but really I didn't do that until I had it for a while. 

Each week I sort the list and then take the top 10 or so options and pick the actual ones I feel like making, freely throwing out stuff we ate recently or that sounds too involved for this week. 

At first I thought I would be generating a list of 5 or 10 items,but sorting the WHOLE list and then just taking the top few items works fine. If I hate most of the top choices, I can just go deeper in the list.

Could you use JavaScript to make links that both rickroll and provide the original link as well?

I was thinking that it ought to be possible to use JavaScript to create a link that takes you to a rickroll youtube page, but also provides the original desired link in some fashion. That is, you get rickrolled, but then the actual link you thought you were clicking on is available to you.

But, I'm not quite sure how to approach that, and I don't find anything like that in a Google search, so I'm putting it out there lazyweb style to see if anyone else knows how to do this.

My story "The Van Helsing Women's Shelter" now published on Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE

I'm very pleased to announce that a short story of mine, "The Van Helsing Women's Shelter," is now available on the Stupefying Stories SHOWCASE website, just in time for Halloween. In a world where vampires are real, you could hope we might create a few institutions to deal with the problem.

This story was something of a response to one called "Bitten Women's Shelter" in Daily Science Fiction...a story whose premise I loved but whose take on the situation bugged me. So thanks to author Sean Vivier for blazing that trail.

You can find my complete list of publications here.

Colorado having great success with long-term birth control methods to reduce teen pregnancies

...but funding is apparently drying up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/science/colorados-push-against-teenage-pregnancies-is-a-startling-success.html?_r=0

Why people choose violence

I thought this article on Aeon was striking for its evidence-based approach to trying to answer the question of why people commit violent acts.

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/people-do-violence-because-their-moral-codes-demand-it/

It has ramifications for our justice system and for attempts to reduce things like gang violence, and in general for understanding other cultures.

Beating a chess master with a queen sacrifice

Wow, long time no post. Here's a fun piece about how having good chess AIs available to all can change the way people train for chess. In it, the author describes how he prepared for a queen sacrifice gambit and then executed it against a much more highly rated player.

http://magazine.storycollider.org/2012/features/the-departed-queen/view-all/

A storehouse of pencil and paper games

Here's a nicely organized collection of games that one can play with only pencil and paper. Really handy to learn a couple of these for entertaining kids on the fly.

http://www.papg.com/


I also found this interesting tic-tac-toe variation, ultimate tic-tac-toe:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/06/16/ultimate-tic-tac-toe/

...which has a smaller board inside each square of a larger one. The kicker is, you must make your move on the small board corresponding to your opponents last move.