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.