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Welcome in!

As I said on Mastodon regarding this issue, the answer to "there aren't enough non-English speaking/disabled/working class voices being published" cannot be "here's a tool that fundamentally reshapes marginalised voices into the statistical mean voice of those already published"

The lack of wider diversity of voices being published can't be reduced to "but if we make those voices indistinguishable from the mainstream, they too can be accepted" without losing the point.

Ultimately, it doesn't need to be that fancy; this isn't intended as a presentational tool. But not being abhorrent to the eye wouldn't be the worst thing

(Someone suggested jury-rigging an Excel spreadsheet to chart it, and that's probably on the side of being both "a pain in the ass to upkeep" and "ugly as sin")

The example I've been using is Tiki Toki:

(though even this is perhaps more fancy than I need; the multiple aligned timelines would defintely be a boon to my visualisation, though)

I asked this on Mastodon last week, but no-one had any suggestions, so given the number of historians on here I thought it might be worth asking:

Can anyone recommend me an offline horizontal timeline-making tool?

I'm looking for something akin to TimelineJS or Tiki Toki, to visualise some periods of my life, but given the current state of internet scraping I don't particularly want to upload a bunch of personal info to someone else's server.

I'm not after Gantt charts or vertical-scrolling timelines, but most of the search engine results I've found assume I want project management or fancy websites.

Any thoughts?

(Open source would be ideal, but I'm absolutely willing to buy a reasonably-priced product if it's good enough.)

Thanks for letting me know. Soundcloud was doing a "this is a private link, but we've hidden a link that other people can use somewhere in these eight menus" without being clear about it 

Link above is now fixed!

inks

I'm having a play around with some piano arranging this month - specifically because there aren't enough Skies of Arcadia arrangements on the internet - and as part of the process I spent last weekend setting up a recording workflow through Reaper.

As a test track, I had a go at playing Nobuo Uematsu's Zanarkand (not my arrangement, in this case):

https://on.soundcloud.com/vxds31B2N77s4B7b9

In theory, both dates work for me.

Gate

I think that's fair. As you say, there's a degree of vulnerability to the Hugos, due to the high value vs low cost of influencing, that makes them a wide-scope target for attempts at abuse.

The Hugos are also located at a culture war pivot point between a (predominantly conservative) old guard who want speculative fiction to return to the unexamined tropes of the Golden Age, and the rest of us who want the genre to be a vast, diverse exploration of the wider imagination rather than stories viewed through a single cultural lens.

Most of the Hugo meddling has been fundamentally a result of the Sad/Rabid Puppies movements, trying to drag an otherwise forward-looking con membership backwards.

It amuses me that they didn't even bother to make their meddling even slightly obfuscated.

for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers

(And while I'm not inclined towards conspiracy theories, there have been enough meddlings in Hugo voting over the past decade that I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this was an active attempt to discredit the finalist in question.)

Welcome in!

All looks good & new & shiny to me so far!

I was in an online writing forum with Aliette de Bodard back in the mid-2000s, and we've met up a few times. I really like a lot of her work, especially the Xuya series (science-fiction with ancestral mindships); The Red Scholar's Wake was a recent favourite.

I've recently been re-reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War as part of a book club with friends. I very rarely re-read books, but this is one of my favourites, and absolutely something I'd call a modern classic.

It's quite a short book, but goes through multiple transformations of what it's about, and really doesn't waste your time.