Podcasts about Stealth

Construction workers spend hours on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines to mark where walls, plumbing and utilities should go. It's painstaking, back-breaking labor. And that's how it's been done for centuries. Tessa Lau saw an opportunity — and built a robot that does it faster, safer, and with surgical precision. In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, the Dusty Robotics founder and CEO shares some of what she's learned about transitioning from a researcher to a deep tech founder, including: How she turned past startup mistakes into a rigorous customer discovery process The structured approach Dusty used to land its first paying customer Why she says stealth mode is overrated — and how building in public gave them a head start How “cool tech” can lead you astray if you're not solving a real problem Smart ways to pivot and iterate based on actual user feedback What it takes to build a mission-driven team that scales with you If you're interested in robotics, deep tech, or why some concepts fall into the valley of death while others sail over it like a Red Bull stunt team — listen in. RUNTIME 43:10 EPISODE BREAKDOWN (3:00) “ I always thought I would be a professor someday, and that was my planned career path.” (5:39) How a home renovation project led Tessa into making construction robots (9:16) “ We thought we were going to build a vacuum cleaning robot.” (12:24) “You have to establish that someone is willing to pay for the technology and that it's doable.” (14:15) “ We needed to build something that was 10x better than the status quo in order to scale at venture speed.” (15:41) Finding a deep tech TAM is “ a hard problem, especially when you're creating a new category.” (19:16) “ You can't try to be everything for everyone.” (21:00) Their first prototype “could barely do anything,” but fast pilots helped them iterate quickly. (26:08) How Tessa figured out their pricing *before* they went to market (29:24)  Why marketing and branding are table stakes for a deep-tech startup (33:11) “ As the CEO, you are the face of the company whether you like it or not.” (37:06) “ Our marketing team doesn't need to be very technically savvy.” (38:22) “ I have yet to see a good reason to be in stealth, ever.” (40:53) The one question she'd have to ask a deep tech CEO before accepting a job offer LINKS Tessa Lau Dusty Robotics Philipp Herget, CTO IBM Research Willow Garage, Wikipedia “Savioke is now Relay Robotics,” 5/2/2022, The Robot Report Crossing the Chasm, 3rd edition, Harper Books SUBSCRIBE

PREVIEW: Colleague Rebecca Grant of the Lexington Institute recounts her 3 hour flight in the copilot seat of B-2 stealth bomber. More.

In this portion of Ephesians, Paul talks about how to be better Jesus followers: Christians should live in truth and never lie Christians should look different from the world Stealth-mode Christianity is not helpful Resentment and long-term anger should not be part of the Christian's life   New Discussions Episode: https://youtu.be/j5oibSkWL0A   Hey! Don't leave before looking at other P40 stuff:  YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnh-aqfg8rw Ko-Fi - https://ko-fi.com/p40ministries  Website - https://www.p40ministries.com Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/p40ministries  Contact - jenn@p40ministries.com  Rumble - https://rumble.com/c/c-6493869  Books - https://www.amazon.com/Jenn-Kokal/e/B095JCRNHY/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk  Merch - https://www.p40ministries.com/shop  YouVersion - https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/38267-out-of-the-mire-trusting-god-in-the-middle    Support babies and get quality coffee with Seven Weeks Coffee  https://sevenweekscoffee.com/?ref=P40   This ministry is only made possible due to your generous support https://ko-fi.com/p40ministries  

8 - Cerberus, infiltrating Australia's defences by stealth by Australian Citizens Party

Crude cruising to its highest level in more than 2 months, as geopolitical tensions impact the oil space. Could the energy sector be about to breakout after a lackluster year? Plus A June jolt for Starbucks, as shares of the coffee chain continue a solid move higher. Why investors are sippin' on the stock, and if our traders are joining in on the java trade.Fast Money Disclaimer

The U.S. Treasury just executed the largest debt buyback in history. In this urgent update, Taylor Kenney breaks down what this means for you, your savings, your retirement and most importantly, how to protect your wealth before it's too late. Questions on Protecting Your Wealth with Gold & Silver? Schedule a Strategy Call Here ➡️ https://calendly.com/itmtrading/podcastor Call 866-349-3310

June 10, 2025 ~ Bloomberg Auto Business reporter Keith Naughton talks with Chris and Lloyd about automakers implementing stealth price increases, like decreasing incentives and raising destination charges, to offset tariff costs without significantly changes sticker prices.

We're joined by Matt Baxter to discuss what we thought was a horror film but turned out to be something quite different.Warning: This film and episode deal with suicide, murder, abortion, politics, religion, and pretty much most of the hot potato topics we generally try to eschew. Hopefully we do a decent job of discussing it.Nefarious (streaming) – Affiliate LinkMore on Blaze MediaSome reviews:7th Day Adventist reviewA Christian review with interesting commentsReddit tackles NefariousHorror Obsessive – really didn't care for the “bait & switch”Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/monstertalk--6267523/support.

In this week's episode, we look at five tips and tricks for optimal ebook pricing. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my Tower of Endless Worlds series at my Payhip store: TOWER25 The coupon code is valid through June 30, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 5, 2025, and today we are looking at ebook pricing strategies. Before we get into that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects.   First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my Tower of Endless World Series at my Payhip store, and that is TOWER25. And as always, the coupon code and the links to the store will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 30th, 2025, so if you need a new ebook series to read this summer, we have got you covered.   Now for an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 53,000 words into Shield of Power, which will be the sixth and final book of my Shield War series, and that puts me on Chapter 13 of 29. I feel like the book is going to be between about 105,000 to 110,000 words in rough draft, but we will see when I get there. I'm hoping to have it out before the end of June, but there's a good chance it may slip to July, so listen to this space and watch my website for updates.   I am also 104,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, which as the name implies, will be the third and final book of the Stealth and Spells trilogy. I am right in the middle of writing the climactic scenes of the story and because of the length and how far I've gotten and I've been chipping away at this since October, it will come out very quickly after Shield of Power, possibly even in the same month. I'm also 5,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series, and that should probably come out towards the end of summer, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, Brad Wills is recording Shield of Battle and Hollis McCarthy is recording Ghost in the Corruption right now. I know they're hard at work at it because both of them sent me emails with questions about pronunciations today. Hopefully we'll have some exciting new audiobooks for you later this summer.   00:02:12 Main Topic: Ebook Pricing Strategies [Note: All Prices Referenced are USD]   And now let's move right into our main topic, ebook pricing strategies, which is often a contentious topic for indie authors. We're going to go over five different ebook pricing strategies to look at when they're the most effective or why you might want to try them. I'll talk about when I have used each of them and why I chose to do so or not to do so, as the case might be.   As I said, this is often a contentious topic for indie authors, especially newer indie authors who often have in their head an idea that their book is worth X amount of dollars because the amount of work they put into it, like for example, “my novel should be a minimum of $9.99 or $14.99 because of all the work I put into it. It was a year's worth of work, and if you can buy a fancy latte at Starbucks or $6 or $7 or whatever, then you should be able to pay $9.99 for this novel upon which I toiled for a year.”   And that is a nice sentiment, but in reality it doesn't work that way for a couple of reasons. For one thing, people are only willing to drop that kind of money on authors that they've known for a long time, like hardcore Stephen King or James Patterson or Jack Reacher fans dropping $20 or $30 for the novel in hardcover when comes out the first time. That kind of loyalty has to be earned over the long term, and if you're brand a new indie author or a newish indie author, charging $9.99 for your ebook is something of an ask.   For the second thing, an ebook is not a physical object, and there is a point where people blanch at paying a lot of money for an item that is essentially electronic and digital. If you're paying $9.99 for a paperback, at least you're getting the paperback, the physical object. Paying $9.99 for something utterly intangible like an ebook is a much harder sell. Because of that, the optimal price point for ebooks tends to be a bit lower than that.   For the sake of not adding too many caveats to each point based on genre and format, let's assume for each of these strategies, the ebook we are pricing is a fantasy novel of about 90,000 words without any maps or images and is not being traditionally published by an established author. In an interview, Smashwords founder Mark Coker presented data from Smashwords that showed most indie authors selling full length fiction will see the most success setting their ebook prices at either $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99 (depending on genre). That is still the case, generally speaking. However, there are some special pricing strategies that may increase your sales, and that is what we'll be focusing on this episode. #1: The first of the five pricing strategies we will look at is permafree, and permafree means that the book is permanently set to free instead of just for a short period of time. Why does this work? People like free things. People will eagerly take something that's free while something that's even $2 or $3 will lead to hesitation on their part, especially for an unfamiliar author, and that is true of $0.99 as well.   However, permafree is a strategy only makes financial sense if the book is the first book in a series and there are at least a few books in the series already published. If you have one book and make it permafree, that's fine if you want to give away the book to readers so it's read, but it will not make you any money. It makes more sense to make the first book in a series free when there are like four or five or more books in the series. Just setting a book to permafree is not enough on its own. You still need to spend money on ads and marketing, so you're relying on sales from the next several books in the series to subsidize the free book and marketing cost. Very often I will advertise the free first book in one of my series and then calculate whether the ad was successful or not based on how many copies of the rest of the books in the series that I have actually sold.   There also needs to be a strong hook at the end of the first book to lure readers on to the second book to inspire readers to continue, but not an outright cliffhanger, which will annoy most readers and could hurt your reviews. If you're going to make your first book in the series free, it is a generally bad idea to end that book with a cliffhanger or to end that book with an unresolved main plot. People will get mad at you and accuse you of trying to nickel and dime them on the rest of the series.   It's also a good idea to put the link to the second book right at the end of the first book in order to help the reader continue on in the series. You also need to accept that most of the attention for permafree titles often comes from so-called book hoarders. This strategy is not a great one for trying to get reviews as there is a significant segment of readers who blindly grab whatever is free and then they never get around to reading it, much less finishing it.   In the same vein, you have to accept that the percentage of readers converting from the free ebook to the rest of the paid series will be much lower than the conversion from a paid book to the next paid book in the series normally would be. What kind of conversion rate am I talking about? If you have say, a conversion rate from the free first book to the paid second book of 5-10%, you are doing very well.   How have I used the strategy? I've made almost all of my series starters permafree, and since I write fairly long series, it's easier for me to do that than for people with a series with only two or three books. Making books permafree has been a major part of my indie publishing efforts over the last 14 years, and I found it's pretty much the most consistent low effort thing I can do to drive sales. It's like a constant trickle, though it does work better on the non-Amazon stores than it does with Amazon today.   #2: So now we will move on to our second pricing strategy, which is the $0.99 price. Some authors will temporarily set the $0.99 price at launch in order to gain some reviews and then raise the price once that has happened. Others will price the first book in the series at $0.99 and then price the subsequent books in the series higher, in a similar strategy to permafree. This strategy gets a higher percentage of the people reading the book than permafree and authors have reported a higher percentage of read through continuing to the next book as well.   This price does well with BookBub deals and could be used temporarily for that. BookBub customers are extremely price sensitive and they expect steep discounts. The biggest downside of the strategy is that on sites like Amazon, you'll be paid a lower royalty rate of 35%, so any ads or marketing costs will effectively eat most of your profits. However, if your book is wide in all the stores, many of them offer better royalty rates than Amazon for books at $0.99. For myself, what I've done for long series is that I make the first book free and then the second book $0.99, and then all the books after there are full price. Obviously, you take a bit of a hit on the first few books in the series, but if you have a long series like I do, then you can definitely make up the lost costs with sales of the rest of the books. I've also used $0.99 to pretty good results with BookBub deals over the years.   #3: The third pricing strategy we're going to look at is the box set. This strategy applies to a series since you're packaging multiple full length novels together and sometimes throwing in a short story or other special content. The important thing about pricing box sets is that it should be a substantial discount over buying the full length books in the sets separately. The price will be a bigger hook than adding special features. You might want to make the first box set less expensive than the subsequent ones in order to motivate readers to begin the series. This strategy is great for Kindle Unlimited (KU) since readers are getting multiple books but only have to take one of their allocated book spots in the KU Library. Longer books also lead to bigger payouts, since KU operates on pages per read system, which means that the longer the book is (and assuming someone actually reads it), you'll then get a bigger payout. This also applies somewhat in a more limited way for Kobo Plus, in the way that it calculates page reads. They use minutes read instead of page reads.   How have I used this? I have many box sets, and because of the limitations of Amazon pricing, most of my box sets aren't above $9.99, but if the three novels in the box set are individually $4.99, that is a savings of 33% as opposed to buying the books individually. So I mostly did the box sets to provide a base for doing the box sets in audio, but they do also generate some income on their own because of the savings.   #4: The fourth pricing strategy we're going to look at is coupons. The most common way to provide coupons in Indie Author World is either through Smashwords or a direct sales page, such as My Payhip store, which I mention frequently on this podcast. Coupons are a convenient way to make a book free to only a select group of people, such as newsletter subscribers or contest winners. It is by far the easiest and most flexible way to discount your books temporarily. For example, on Payhip, it only takes a couple minutes to set up a coupon and then it will be ready to use instantly or for whatever specific dates and times you have set the coupon to run. They are the most effective when they are short term to create a sense of urgency to buy the book, but not so short term that readers miss out on the deal. The biggest downside is that most buyers are not as familiar with using Smashwords or a direct sales page, so they may be hesitant to use a new site, especially if they have a large ebook collection on another platform like Kindle.   How have I used this strategy? For years, I've used the Smashwords coupon strategy to give away a free short story when I publish a book (with Ghost in the Corruption, it was Ghost Spells, and when I finish Shield of Power, the short story for that will be called Consort of Darkness and newsletter subscribers will get a Smashwords coupon code they can use to get a free ebook copy of the short story). I also frequently do Coupon of the Week through my Payhip store, where I offer 25% off a featured ebook or series or 50% off an audiobook. Since the royalty rate on Payhip is higher than on Amazon or Audible, I'm able to offer generous sales prices without losing money on a discounted sale. So once you have a large enough catalog, coupons through direct sales can be an effective strategy.   #5: And the fifth and final sales strategy we'll look at this episode is Kindle Countdown Deals. If your book is in Kindle Select/Kindle Unlimited, Kindle allows you to run a limited time discount on it. Readers will see a countdown clock showing how long they have to buy it at the price. To be eligible to run a Countdown Deal, your book must have been enrolled in KDP Select for at least 30 days, and your book's list price must have been unchanged for 30 days before and 14 days after the deal runs. There are some other requirements, so read Amazon's documentation page very carefully before you decide to run a Countdown Deal. The biggest advantage of a Countdown Deal is the royalty rate for the book during the deal will be based on the book's regular price and not what it's discounted to during the sale, so this is a nice way to try a lower price for your book. For example, if the book is usually $4.99 and during the Countdown Deal it is lowered to $0.99, you'll still get 70% of the sale rate. Now granted, 70% of $0.99 is not as good as 70% of $4.99, but you may be able to make it up in sales volume. This strategy gets a lot more viewers than a coupon with Smashwords or your direct sales page would. However, it's not nearly as flexible as those options. It requires some advanced planning. This method is most effective when paired with a marketing push, such as an increase in ad spending or a newsletter notifying your newsletter subscribers about the deal. The biggest downside of this strategy is that you have to be exclusive with Amazon in order to take advantage of the deal. If your books are wide, you can't do a Kindle Countdown Deal for them. I've used this strategy intermittently with limited success, I have to admit, because generally I don't have that many books in KU at any given time. That said, when I have had books in KU, I've tried Kindle Countdown deals and had moderate success with them. Overall, I do think the other methods I've already mentioned on this episode are more effective, but if you have books in KU, it is definitely worth trying a Kindle Countdown Deal in combination with some ads and a newsletter push.   So hopefully these five pricing strategies will help you make sense of the pricing of books in Indie Author World and will be helpful to you as you decide how to price your own books.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we will see you all next week.  

If you take the veneer off the novelty of having Donald Trump as President, you can see that we are heading down that slippery slope where we know the Deep State has not gone away -- there was no special eradication of this separate government, only an enhancement with tools of Artificial Intelligence to make this country a stealthy, predatory surveillance apparatus. As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the machinery of power is quietly shifting into the hands of algorithms. Listen tonight on Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis from 7-10 pm, Pacific time on groundzeroplus.com. Call in to the LIVE show: 503-225-0860. #groundzeroplus #ClydeLewis #surveillance #DeepState #AI

S2E8: Cyber Insurance for Healthcare Provider Organizations Guest host Lisa Gallagher, National Cybersecurity Advisor, CHIME Guest: Dan Bowden, CISO, McLennan Global Business To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen

5 Biggest Stealth Retirement Costs – Chris Boyd and Jeff Perry review a recent article from Kiplinger's magazine (linked below) as they discuss the “Five Biggest Stealth Costs in Retirement.” The conversation begins with the notion that most people planning for retirement have a basic understanding of their future cash flow needs. Chris and Jeff dig into the costs that many people make incorrect assumptions about or ignore all together. Included in the conversation are unexpected health care costs, income tax errors, unanticipated financial emergencies, family member needs/gifts, and the long-term impacts of inflation. https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/the-biggest-stealth-costs-in-retirement For more information or to reach TEAM AMR, click the following link: https://www.wealthenhancement.com/s/advisor-teams/amr

Something horrific is said to stalk Bray Road. Relying on Stealth, it is said over hundreds of sightings have seen this thing on Bray Road in Wisconsin. But what exactly is it? lets discuss that in todays episode! Thank you for watching Roanoke Tales and I hope you enjoy HUNDREDS Say Something BLOODTHIRSTY Is HUNTING Bray Road... Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RoanokeTalesPatreon Merch: Roanokemerch.com #truecrimecommunity #crime #truestory

Are you a cybersecurity sales or marketing leader seeking new ways to stand out in a crowded market? Do you struggle with demonstrating real value to CISOs who have “seen it all” and are wary of generic pitches? Wondering how to engage technical buyers who know the ins and outs of your product's shortcomings? This episode with Joe Silva, co-founder and CEO of Spektion, is packed with fresh perspectives on tackling these challenges head-on.In this conversation we discuss: 

What's really eating away at your Social Security check? In this live radio show, Josh breaks down how Social Security gets taxed, why so many retirees get caught off guard, and what you can do to protect your income. He explains the history of the program, the rise of stealth taxes, and how proposed policies could reshape your retirement. Along the way, callers weigh in with questions about Roth conversions, annuities, bitcoin, and more, giving Josh a chance to connect the dots between retirement strategy and real financial concerns. Can't get enough of The Financial Quarterback? Click ‘Subscribe' so you never miss a play. If you're enjoying the show, leave a 5-star rating and drop a review—it helps keep the game going!

In this week's episode, we take a look at the major self-publishing platforms that I use, and examine the pros and cons of each. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, Book #8 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: DOOM50 The coupon code is valid through June 24, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 253 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 30th, 2025, and today we are looking at the current major self-publishing platforms and what they offer indie authors. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing projects.   So let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress (book number eight in the Dragonskull series, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is DOOM50. And as always, we will have the coupon code and the links to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June 24th, 2025. So if you are setting out on summer travels this summer and you need an audiobook to listen to while you're in the car or plane, we have got you covered. So now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. Ghost in the Corruption (as I mentioned last week) is now out and available at all the ebook stores: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. It is selling well. So thank you all for that. Now that Ghost in the Corruption is finished, what am I working on next? Well, back in 2023, I finished the Dragonskull and The Silent Order series back to back, so I declared Summer 2023 to be my Summer of Finishing Things. Well, it looks like Summer 2025 is going to be the Super Summer of Finishing Things because I intend to finish three series back to back.   First up is Shield of Power, the sixth and final book of The Shield War series. As of this publishing, I am 26,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 29. So I think it's going to end up being around 100,000-110,000 words long, and I am hoping it will be out in June, though it might slip to July depending on how things go. Once that is done, the next one up will be Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, which will be the third and very definitely final book of the Stealth and Spells Online trilogy. Believe it or not, I have been working on Final Quest on the side for so long that I passed the 100,000 word mark in that book this week. In fact, it's been a side project for so long that I don't remember how long I've been working on it, and I had to look up the metadata to check that I indeed started chipping away on it on October 18th, 2024. So I am very pleased that I'm nearly done with the rough draft and because of that reason, if all goes well, it'll come out very quickly after Shield of Power, since I think the rough draft will end up at about 125,000 to 130,000 words or in that neighborhood. Once Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest is finished, I will then write Ghost in the Siege, which will be the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series. I am 1,500 words into that and hoping for that to come out in August or September, if all goes well. Once The Shield War, Stealth and Spells Online, and Ghost Armor are finished, I will finally be free to return to the Rivah and Nadia series. I realized that through all of 2024 and the first half of 2025, I had five unfinished series at the same time, and that was just too much for me to keep track of as a writer, and I think it may have been too much for the readers because it was too much of a wait between the different series as I worked my way through them. So five series at the same time is too much, so hence the Super Summer of Finishing Things. Going forward, I've decided that three unfinished series at the same time will be my maximum, which after the Super Summer of Finishing Things will be Cloak Mage, Half-Elven Thief, and a new epic fantasy series that I will set in the realm of Owyllain.   In audiobook news, Brad Wills started working on Shield of Battle this week and Hollis McCarthy started working on Ghost in the Corruption, so hopefully before probably about July or thereabouts, we will have those audiobooks available for you to listen to. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:03:49 Main Topic of the Week: Self-Publishing Platforms for Ebooks [Note: Information in this Episode is Very Likely to Change]   So now let's move on to our main topic for the week, which is the main self-publishing platforms for ebooks. Today we will do a brief overview of the self-publishing platforms I currently use: Amazon/KDP, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Draft2Digital/Smashwords. The reason I wanted to do this is because there are many scammy platforms for self-publishing out there, but fortunately there are also many legitimate ones. Today we'll compare several of the most popular ones for ebooks. Just to make things easier for comparison, we'll be using the term platform to discuss both retailers and aggregators and we're not going to talk about options for self-publishing print or audio formats today. We're going to focus solely on ebooks.   First of all, what should you look for in a publishing platform? The first thing is to make sure you retain complete ownership of your content in all formats. Some of these scammer ones try to claim all rights to anything you try to post or sell through them, so that is definitely a red flag to watch out for. Make sure that you understand any exclusivity requirements of any programs that you sign up for such as KDP Select, such as if other formats like audio are also included in their requirements, how long exclusivity lasts, et cetera. If the platform requires exclusivity, that is definitely something to pay attention to. Make sure you do your research carefully to understand how pricing, royalties, and payments work on each individual platform. Sometimes some of them will pay quarterly, some of them pay monthly, and some of them pay you last month's royalties at the end of the month. Some of them like Amazon run like two months behind.   Finally, and this is a big one, you should not have to pay any money in order to upload your work. If they are asking for money upfront, it is probably a scam. Now, there are some aggregators that don't take a percentage and instead charge you a yearly fee. I'm not talking about them in this podcast episode because I don't use them, but they are out there. One example would be Book Funnel, which does charge a yearly fee for you to use but provides a valuable service in being a backend for running your own store on like Payhip or Shopify, and there's a couple of other useful services in that way, but they're not a storefront and they don't take a percentage of any royalties. They just charge a yearly fee. So they're not the topic with this episode.   All the platforms I've talked about today do not have any fees in order to upload. Reputable sites like Amazon or Kobo will instead take a percentage of each book's sale. It's also good to have a few realistic expectations before you start using self-publishing platforms, and one of them is that the platform is not a marketer. For example, many people complain that KDP doesn't showcase their books and they get lost in the millions of books available. However, none of these services are promising that you'll make the front page of their site just by publishing there. It's a common delusion among new indie authors that when you publish your first book, that's all you have to do and people will flock to it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.   In fact, since Amazon makes a small fortune off book ads, it's not in their interest to give away screen space for free, and this isn't to knock on Amazon, that's just the way the retail industry works. For example, if you go into a Target or a Walmart or another big box retailer, note the products that are prominently displayed on the aisle displays or the endcaps of the aisles. They didn't just get there randomly. The manufacturers of those products paid big money to Amazon and Target and Walmart and the other big box retailers to have their products featured there. In many cases, online commerce is no different.   Getting your book uploaded onto a platform is just the first step. Promoting and marketing the book is up to you and strategies for those will vary based on which ones you choose to use. For example, if you choose to make your work exclusive to just one platform, it's not a good idea to run Facebook ads in countries where that platform either doesn't exist or where it's not terribly popular. Today we're going to be just focusing on comparing the platforms, not how to best to market from them. So what are the options?   #1: First up is the most common platform people use and it's the 800 pound gorilla in the self-publishing space, and that is Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. And what are the pros and cons of KDP?   Pro: They are the biggest force in ebook publishing in many countries, including the United States. Some authors find that as much as 80 to 95% of their ebook sales come from Amazon, even if they are not exclusive with Amazon. For myself, it's usually about 50 to 60% of my sales on any given month are from Amazon and the rest come from the other retailers.   Heavy readers are generally very familiar with the Kindle Store interface and Library setup, and many readers are kind of locked into Amazon because they own Kindle devices, subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, and have large Kindle Libraries. So those are all the pros of publishing with KDP.   Cons: If you're expecting a large portion of your sales to come from the print version of your book or if print sales are very important to you, be aware that many bookstores and libraries either can't or won't buy print books from Amazon, so you should find an additional platform for the print version such as Ingram Spark or maybe Barnes & Noble's print division. One big concern about going exclusive with Amazon is that you're losing readers who don't have Kindle books in their countries, people who are boycotting Amazon for a variety of reasons, people who are locked into another platform such as Apple or Kobo, or people who want to self-archive their ebooks since Amazon doesn't allow that anymore. If you're already wide, you'll have to look carefully at what percentage of your sales are non-Amazon and if this percentage is an amount you'd be comfortable risking losing in order to be exclusive. Occasionally authors do complain about the customer service available to KDP, especially if it's urgent. For myself, I've not personally had any huge problems with KDP customer service. That said, I think you should expect a lead time of about one to two business days on anything you ask because I usually go through the email form.   Does KDP offer a subscription service? Yes. Kindle Unlimited (KU) readers pay a set amount and can read an unlimited number of books each month, although they're limited as to how many they can have in their library at any one time. Promotions happen regularly, usually based around big sales like Prime Day, and it can make a subscription as cheap as $0.99 for a three month period. Some also receive free subscriptions by buying certain Amazon products such as a new Kindle or Kindle Fire.   The downside of being in Kindle Unlimited is the exclusivity. You can't be in KU without being exclusive with Amazon, or at least the specific book in question has to be exclusive. Not all of your books have to be exclusive, and many authors such as myself will usually put one series in KU and then make sure everything else is wide. You must agree to be exclusive with them for ninety days and that time period is renewable.   What does KDP pay in terms of royalty? For $2.99 to $9.99, they give you 70% of the sale price. Under $2.99 and above $9.99, it's 35%. So that is sort of an encouragement from Amazon to price your ebooks in the $2.99 to $9.99 range. Currently I price new novels at $4.99 and do short stories at $0.99 cents.   What do I do? I have all of my titles available through KDP. I have a smaller portion of my collection exclusive through KDP Select/KU, and I have only recently increased that amount of Select titles due to the economic downturn. I suspect that KU users are likely to hold onto their subscriptions while cutting other expenses because honestly, KU is a pretty good deal for readers and the monthly subscription costs is about the same as one tradpub frontlist ebook, but with a KU subscription, they could read thousands of books for the same price. The value of KU is really very strong for frequent romance, LitRPG, science fiction, and fantasy readers. There's a strong population in the KU subscriber base often referred to as binge readers. They care more about variety, discovering new books, and the ability to read a lot over the ability to read specific authors or stories.   So overall, I think if you are self-publishing and even if you don't like Amazon very much or don't plan to go exclusive, it's still in your best interest to publish your ebook with them, even if you are wide and intend to do all the other retailers just because Amazon really is the biggest ebook platform out there at the moment. #2: Now, the next self-publishing platform we're going to look at is Barnes & Noble Press, which as the name implies, belongs to Barnes & Noble. The Pros: some people are never, ever going to let go of their Nooks or they already have a large personal ebook library through the Nook so they feel locked into that platform. These readers are the majority of people buying ebooks through Barnes & Noble, but fortunately that group tends to read a lot. There's also a lot of trust in Barnes & Noble as a brand, and that inspires people to continue buying from them.   In fact, for a while in the indie author space at the end of the 2010s and the start of the 2020s, it was a regular prediction that Barnes & Noble was going to go out of business soon, but then the company was bought by a private equity firm, and while private equity firms often have a deserved bad reputation for stripping a company of assets and then selling it off at a bargain basement price (such as the fate of Red Lobster), that does not seem to be the case of what happened with Barnes & Noble and the company really has been strengthening in recent years. So they may be here to stay for a while.   The downsides of publishing with Barnes & Noble Press is that Barnes & Noble is relatively a minor player in the ebook market, though usually in the top four of most indie author ebook sales if they're wide. They have shifted their focus to selling print books instead of Nook devices, especially in the retail space.   Do they offer a subscription service? They do not. However, nothing about Barnes & Noble requires exclusivity, which is nice, and the royalty structure is pretty good. It's 70% over all titles over $0.99. So if you want, you could price your ebook at $0.99 or $19.99 and still make 70%, which you couldn't do with those prices on Amazon.     #3: The next self-publishing platform we'll look at is Kobo Writing Life, which is the ebook platform to publish on Kobo, which is owned by Rakuten. Pros: Kobo is strong in the international market and will help you to reach readers in many countries. Based on my sales data, in Canada and Australia, Kobo is significantly bigger than Amazon for ebook sales. Kobo has also had a surge of recent media attention in the US as people seek out alternatives to Amazon and Kindle devices.   The Con of Kobo, and this is a fairly small one, is that their US market share is still fairly small compared to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or some of the others. But as I mentioned, they're a lot stronger in Canada and Australia, and they do reach a lot of different countries, more than Amazon does.   Does Kobo have a subscription service? Yes, Kobo Plus. Kobo Plus is significantly less expensive than Kindle Unlimited, and there's an additional tier that allows you to add audiobook content to the plan. The library isn't quite as extensive as KU though, though. I should note that in the years since Kobo has been introduced, I'd say about half of my revenue from Kobo (sometimes 60% of my revenue from Kobo) comes from Kobo Plus and not from direct ebook sales. So it's getting to the point where the majority of their ebook revenue I suspect, is coming from Kobo Plus and not direct Kobo sales.   Do they require exclusivity? No, which is another strong selling point for Kobo Plus. For their royalty structure, ebooks over $2.99, you get 70% and any books over below $2.99, you get 45%, which is a more generous term than Amazon in terms of the royalty rate for below $2.99 and above $9.99.   So what do I do? I currently use it as one of the platforms for my ebooks. It's been a pretty strong seller for me consistently over the years, and every Kobo book that I have is also available in Kobo Plus, which probably explains the revenue split I was talking about earlier. #4: The next platform we'll look at is Draft2Digital/Smashwords, which we'll do as one because Draft2Digital and Smashwords are in the process of merging. Draft2Digital is technically what's called an aggregator, where you upload your book and then they can publish on a variety of different platforms for you, and in exchange, they take a small cut of the sales. Draft2Digital is, in my opinion, probably the most effective way to get your ebooks through Apple and Smashwords. Apple does have its own direct uploading service, but I've never used it because there are a bit too many hoops to jump through.   Draft2Digital does, as I mentioned, have a way to publish on multiple storefronts at once while managing uploads and sales reporting through just one interface. They're not a storefront in and of themselves, although since Draft2Digital does own Smashwords, Smashwords essentially acts as their storefront for them. Although Draft2Digital lists Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble as an option, most authors will upload to these sites separately, and in fact, that's what I do for myself.   The Pros of Draft2Digital is that it's a definite time savings using Draft2Digital to publish across multiple platforms, especially with platforms like Apple that are more difficult or time consuming to learn. This is also a convenient way to make your work accessible to library platforms like Overdrive/Libby, Hoopla, and Bibliotheca, if that is important to you. Library sales have never been a huge priority of mine, but I've never been opposed to them either, so I usually just flip those switches on and then don't think about it again.   The Cons for Draft2Digital are that there was a period after the Smashwords migration where they received complaints about customer service and difficulty in setting up tax information, though I think that is mostly ironed out now.   One potential hazard for Draft2Digital with a very specific subset of writers is that if you are a writer of, shall we say, very hard erotica, the sort that ends up in very restricted categories on most stores, you will probably have trouble publishing through Draft2Digital. This is not, however, a problem that's unique to Draft2Digital. Amazon has what is called the “erotica dungeon”, where if you publish certain kinds of, like we said, very harsh erotica, your book isn't searchable on the Amazon store. You can link to it directly, but it will never show up on any search results. Kobo in particular has had problems with erotica.   Back in the 2010s, Kobo was also distributing ebooks to some British retailers, and these British retailers suddenly got upset when they noticed that these kinds of hard erotica were showing up on their store pages, which was not a good look for the company. And so there was a kerfuffle until that was all sorted out. My frank opinion with that is if you are writing these kinds of erotica, the big stores and Draft2Digital will never be on your side, and so you are better off pursuing a sort of a Patreon/running your own store on Shopify or Payhip strategy, but that is a bit of a digression.   So in terms of royalties, Draft2Digital takes 10% of the book's retail price per copy sold, which is in addition to whatever amount is taken by the specific storefront. So you are paying a bit of money in exchange for convenience for just uploading your book to Draft2Digital and having it push out the book to all the different stores for you.   What I do is I use Draft2Digital for Apple mainly because for a while I was using Smashwords, but Smashwords in the 2010s was a bit more persnickety than is now, and you needed to prepare a specially formatted doc file to publish on Smashwords and sometimes getting it through the Smashwords processing onto Apple was a bit of a pain. Draft2Digital took epub files, which are much easier to work with, and after a while I switched over all my Apple publishing to Draft2Digital entirely. So that's why I use Draft2Digital for Apple and for various library services that tend to be a minor amount of sales. Because of the difficulties on publishing direct to Apple, I do find that that 10% is good trade off in terms of selling books on Apple for me.   #5: Now onto Google Play's ebook self-publishing platform, which is, I think its full name is the Google Books Partner Center, which lets you publish books to the Google Play Store for sale on Android devices.   The Pros are that for writers interested in the international market, Google Play is another strong choice for a platform since the international mobile device market is very Android heavy. The iPhone (Apple) tends to be concentrated mainly in the US and a few of the wealthier countries like the UK and Canada, but Android has a much more international reach in general than the iPhone. Google Play also has some interesting promotional options for ebooks, such as offering the buyer a chance to subscribe to a specific series.   The cons are that some authors report that their sales reporting doesn't always consistently generate reports, and others are annoyed that it only generates a CSV file, (which isn't that much of a hardship for people who are familiar with Excel).   For myself, I found that there is a bit of a reporting lag on Google Play where it will sometimes take as long as five or six days for sales to show up on the dashboard, though usually it's only a delay of two days, though sometimes during the month you'll get these bigger lags and sometimes processing new material on the Google Play Store can be slow, and it can sometimes take two to three days for things to appear, though it usually gets worked out in the end. Does Google Play have a subscription service? It does not, nor does it require exclusivity, which is another point in its favor. And the royalties, the data is quite nice here. It is 70% for all price points in the countries listed on their support page, which only excludes a handful of countries like India, South Korea, and Japan (because of currency conversion regions or other local laws).   So those are the ebook publishing platforms that I currently use, and because I use them myself, I would recommend them. Hopefully that is helpful to you as you are looking for places to self-publish your book as you set out to become an indie author.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the backup episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

GOLDEN DOME Blaine Holt, retired Air Force general who served as deputy military representative to NATO, on this: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3311539/can-chinas-new-stealth-tech-challenge-trumps-golden-dome @GORDONGCHANG, GATESTONE, NEWSWEEK, THE HILL 1994

In today's short clip, constitutional scholar Stephen Vladeck explains why the Supreme Court's use of unsigned, unexplained decisions—known as the “shadow docket”—is so dangerous. He shares why this judicial behavior, even when done in good faith, undermines public trust and the Court's ability to function in our constitutional system.

“They're not calling it QE, but that's exactly what it is,” says Michael Gentile, founder partner at Bastion Asset Management. He tells Daniela Cambone that the Fed's quiet purchase of $43 billion in U.S. bonds signals “how precarious the situation” has become—with rising deficits, fewer natural buyers of U.S. debt, and the Fed increasingly forced to intervene. As a result, central banks around the world are rotating out of the U.S. dollar and into physical gold, driving a multi-decade structural shift in global reserve strategy. “We're seeing a multi-year, multi-decade rotation out of U.S. dollar assets into gold,” he states. Watch the full video to discover how to better protect your wealth in these uncertain times. Even better — join Daniela Cambone and Michael live tomorrow (May 29, 2025) in Montreal, Canada for an exclusive conversation on “Building Generational Wealth.” Sign up for the event here:https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/ticketing/building-generational-wealth

Kyle continues the spirit of Andy's episode by exploring the alternatives for cards that tend to get removed. Though the ceiling may be lower, do we always need to include the flashiest permanents in our EDH decks—only to see them become removal magnets? With card examples provided by Patreon supporters and Kyle, the boys explore strategic swaps for commander decks that may save you some aggravation and money. (00:00:00) - Introduction (00:00:50) - Musical Adventures for the Road (00:07:30) - Disappointment in Powerful Permanents (00:20:40) - Thesis: Theory v. Practice (00:28:35) - Tokens (00:49:10) - Pillowforts vs. Aikido (01:03:35) - Card Draw (01:18:30) - Twinning Spells (01:28:15) - Voltron (01:52:05) - Concluding Thoughts Look for links to deck lists on our lists-from-the-pod channel on Discord. ------------------- ------------------- Music Mentioned in this Podcast: ------------------- Music this episode comes courtesy of Makeup and Vanity Set. Be sure to support them by buying their music on Bandcamp! –

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my anthologies at my Payhip store: JUNE25 The coupon code is valid through June 17, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 252 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 23rd, 2025, and today we are looking at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. We missed doing an episode last week for the simple reason that the day before I wanted to record, we had a bad thunderstorm that knocked down large portions of my fence, so my recording time was instead spent on emergency fence repair. However, the situation is under control, so hopefully we'll be back to weekly episodes for the immediate future. And now before we get to our main topics, let's have Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing projects.   So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook version of all my short story anthologies at my Payhip store and that is JUNE25. As always, the coupon code and links will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 17th, 2025, so if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered.   And now an update on my current writing projects. Ghost in the Corruption is finished. It is publishing right now. In fact, I paused the publishing process to record this and so by the time this episode goes live, hopefully Ghost in the Corruption should be available at all ebook stores. My next main project now that Ghost in the Corruption is done will be Shield of Power and as of this recording I am 15,000 words into it. My secondary projects will be Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest and I'm 97,000 words into that, so hopefully that will come out very shortly after Shield of Power and I'll also be starting Ghost in the Siege, the final book in the Ghost Armor series as another secondary project and I'm currently zero words into that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   In audiobook news, Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now out and should be available at all the usual audiobook stores so you can listen to that if you are traveling for the summer. Recording of Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is underway soon. I believe he's starting it this week, so hopefully we will have another audiobook in the Shield War series for you before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:02:17 Main Topic: Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup   And now let's move on, without any further ado, to our main topic. Summer is almost upon us, which means it's time for my Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup. As usual, the movies and streaming shows are listed in order for my least favorite to my most favorite. The grades are based upon my own thoughts and opinions and are therefore wholly subjective. With all of that said, let's get to the movies and our first entry is MacGruber, which came out in 2010 and in all honesty, this might be objectively the worst movie I have ever seen. The Saturday Night Live MacGruber sketches are a parody of the old MacGyver action show from the ‘80s. And so the movie is essentially the sketch stretched out to make a parody of an ‘80s action movie. It is aggressively dumb and crude. Its only redeeming feature is that the movie knows it's quite stupid and so leans into the stupidity hard. I'll say this in its favor, MacGruber has no pretensions that is a good movie and does not take itself seriously and then runs away hard with that fact. For that he gets a plus, but nothing else. Overall grade: F+   Next up is Down Periscope, which came out in 1996. Now the fundamental question of any movie is the one Russell Crowe shouted at the audience in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?” Sadly, I was not entertained with Down Periscope. This wanted to be a parody of Cold War era submarine thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, I say wanted because it didn't really succeed. Kelsey Grammer plays Lieutenant Commander Thomas Dodge, an unorthodox US Navy officer who wants command of his own nuclear sub, but he's alienated a few admirals, which is not traditionally a path to career advancement in the military. Dodge gets his chance in a Navy wargame where he has to command a diesel sub against nuclear subs. Sometimes parodies are so good that they become an example of the thing they are parodying (Hot Fuzz and Star Trek: Lower Decks are excellent examples of this phenomenon). The trouble is that the movie takes itself too seriously and just isn't all that funny. A few funny bits, true, but not enough of them. In the end, this was dumb funny but didn't resonate with me the way other dumb funny movies like Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder did. Overall grade: D   Next up is Deadpool and Wolverine, which came out in 2024. Unlike Down Periscope, I was entertained with this movie, though both movies reside on the dumb funny spectrum. Deadpool and Wolverine is basically one long meta in-joke/love letter for the last 30 years of superhero movies. If you've seen enough of those movies, you'll find those movies funny, if occasionally rather tasteless. If you haven't seen enough of those movies, Deadpool and Wolverine will just be incomprehensible. The plot is that Wade Wilson AKA Deadpool gets pulled into some Marvel style multiverse nonsense. To save his universe from destruction, he needs to recruit a Wolverine since in his universe, Wolverine died heroically.   In the process, Deadpool stumbles across the worst Wolverine in the multiverse. Together they have to overcome their mutual dislike and attempt to save Deadpool's universe from destruction at the hands of a rogue branch of the Time Variance Authority. This means the movie can bring in a lot of cameos from past Marvel films. Hugh Jackman's performance really carries the movie on its back. Like I said, this movie is essentially one very long Marvel in-joke. I thought it was funny. I definitely think it can't stand on its own without having seen a sufficient number of the other Marvel movies. Overall grade: C   Our next movie is the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which came out in 2024. This is very loosely (with an emphasis on “very”) based on Operation Postmaster during World War II, when British Special Forces seized some Italian ships that had been supplying parts for German U-boats. It was entertaining to watch but it couldn't quite make up its mind tonally if it was a war thriller or a heist movie about Western desperados recruited into a crew. It kind of tried to do both at the same time, which killed the momentum. Like, the first parts of the movie where the protagonists take out a Nazi patrol boat and then free a prisoner from a base were good thriller stuff, but then the plot fused with the heist stuff and really slowed down through the middle forty percent or so. It was also oddly stylized with a lot of spaghetti western-style music that seemed out of place and some stuff just didn't make sense, like at the end after pulling off the mission, the protagonists were all arrested. That just seems bizarre since if anything, Winston Churchill and a lot of the British wartime leadership were enthusiastic about special operations and probably had too much confidence in the effectiveness of covert operations. So I did enjoy watching this, but I can see why it didn't make a lot of money at the box office. Overall Grade: C   Next up is The Gorge, which came out in 2025. This was a peculiar mix of science fiction, romance, and horror. For the romance part, perhaps shooting zombies together is a good idea for a first date. Before I dig into the movie, a brief rant. In one scene, a character is using a chainsaw with no protective gear whatsoever and she's not fighting zombies or anything in a situation where she has to pick up a chainsaw without preparing first. She's trimming branches to pass time. If you're using a chainsaw, at a minimum you want protective eyewear and headphones. Ideally you'd want chainsaw pants as well to reduce the chance of serious injury if you slip and swing the saw into your leg. Since I became a homeowner, I've used a chainsaw a number of times and believe me, you definitely want good eye and ear protection. This has been your public safety announcement for this movie review.   Anyway, loner former sniper Levi is approached by a high ranking intelligence officer giving him a mysterious job. He needs to guard a tower overlooking a mysterious mist-filled gorge for one year. On the other side of the gorge is another tower, guarded by an elite Lithuanian sniper named Drasa. Like Levi, Drasa has a fair bit of emotional damage and they're officially forbidden to communicate. However, they're both lonely and they soon start communicating over the gorge using telescopes and whiteboard messages. Eventually Levi gets emotionally close enough to Drasa to rig a zipline to cross the gorge and speak with her in person.   Unfortunately, it turns out the gorge is full of twisted creatures that storm out and attack and the job of the two snipers is to keep them contained. If Levi and Drasa want to save their lives, they'll need to unravel the dark secret within the gorge. This movie was interesting and I enjoyed watching it, but it falls apart if you think about it too much (or at all). Like the chainsaw thing I ranted about above. The entire movie runs on that sort of logic. That said, I appreciate how the filmmakers were trying something new instead of something like Deadpool and Wolverine. Additionally, this was an Apple+ movie and it's interesting how Apple's approach to streaming is to just make a whole bunch of random stuff that's totally distinct, from Ted Lasso to Mythic Quest to Severance to The Gorge. It's like, “we have more money than most countries, so we're going to make Ted Lasso because we feel like it.” Then again, Apple+ is apparently losing a billion dollars every year, so maybe they'll eventually change their minds about that approach. Overall Grade: B-   Next up is Click, which came out in 2006. Cross It's a Wonderful Life with A Christmas Carol and the comedic style of Adam Sandler and you end up with Click. Basically Sandler plays Michael Newman, a workaholic architect with a demanding boss and increasingly strained relationship with his wife and children due to his workload. In a fit of exasperation with his situation, he goes to Bed Bath and Beyond, where he encounters an eccentric employee named Morty (played entertainingly by Christopher Walken). Morty gives him a remote control that lets him fast forward through time, which Michael then uses to skip the boring and tedious parts of his life, but he overuses the remote and goes too far into the future and sees the disastrous results of his current life choices. Definitely a story used in A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life but effectively told and I was entertained (rather on the crude side, though). Overall Grade: B- Next up is Mr. Deeds, which came out in 2002. This was actually one of Adam Sandler's better movies, in my opinion. It was a remake of the ‘30s movie Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. In this new version, Sandler plays Longfellow Deeds, a popular pizzeria owner in a small New Hampshire town. Unbeknownst to Deeds, his uncle is the owner of a major media mega corporation and when he dies, Deeds is his legal heir. When the company's CEO and chief lawyer arrive at the pizzeria to inform him of this fact, Deeds goes to New York and soon finds himself involved in the CEO's sinister machinations. Yet he happens to rescue an attractive woman from a mugger, but there is more to her than meets the eye. The movie was funny and not as crude, well, not quite as crude as some of Sandler's other stuff. It had good story structure and several great lines, my favorite of which was “he was weak and cowardly and wore far too much cologne.”   Sandler's movies, in a strange way, are often very medieval. Like various medieval fables had a savvy peasant outwitting pompous lords, greedy merchants, and corrupt clergymen. The best Adam Sandler protagonist tends to be a good natured everyman who defeats the modern equivalent of medieval authority figures- evil CEOs, arrogant star athletes, sinister bureaucrats and so forth. Overall Grade: B     Next up is House of David, which came out in 2025 and this is basically the story of King David from the Bible told in the format of an epic fantasy TV series. Like if someone wanted to do an epic fantasy series about Conan the Barbarian, it could follow the same stylistic format as this show. And of course Conan and David followed a similar path from adventurer to king. Anyway, if one were to pick a part of the Bible from which to make a movie or TV series, the story of David would be an excellent choice because David's life was so dramatic that it would hardly require any embellishments in the adaptation. The story is in the Books of First and Second Samuel. King Saul is ruling over the Israelites around 1000 BC or so, but has grown arrogant. Consequently, God instructs the prophet Samuel to inform Saul that the kingdom will be taken away from him and given to another. God then dispatches Samuel to anoint David as the new king of Israel. David is a humble shepherd but then enters Saul's service and undertakes feats of daring, starting with defeating the giant Goliath and leading Saul's troops to victory and battle against Israel's numerous enemies. (The Iron Age Middle East was even less peaceful than it is now.) Eventually, Saul's paranoia and madness gets the best of him and he turns on David, who flees into exile. After Saul and his sons are killed in battle with the Philistines. David returns and becomes the acknowledged king after a short civil war with Saul's surviving sons and followers.   If Saul's fatal flaw was his arrogance of pride, David's seems to have been women. While the story of David and Bathsheba is well known, David nonetheless had eight wives (most of them at the same time) and an unknown but undoubtedly large number of concubines. Naturally David's children from his various wives and concubines did not get along and David was almost deposed due to the conflicts between his children. Unlike Saul and later David's son Solomon, David was willing to repent when a prophet of God informed him of wrongdoing and to be fair to David, monogamy was generally not practiced among Early Iron Age Middle Eastern monarchies and dynastic struggles between brothers from different mothers to seize their father's kingdoms were quite common, but enough historical digression.   Back to the show, which covered David's life up to the death of Goliath. I thought it was quite well done. Good performances, good cinematography, excellent battles, good set design and costuming, and a strong soundtrack. All the actors were good, but I really think the standout performances were Stephen Lang as Samuel, Ali Sulaman is King Saul, Ayelet Zurer as Saul's wife Queen Ahinoam, and Davood Ghadami as David's jerkish (but exasperated and well-intentioned) eldest brother Eliab. Martyn Ford just looks extremely formidable as Goliath. You definitely believe no one in their right mind want to fight this guy.   Making fiction of any kind based on sacred religious texts is often tricky because no matter what you do, someone's going to get mad at you. The show has an extensive disclaimer at the beginning of each episode saying that it is fiction inspired by the Bible. That said, House of David doesn't really alter or deviate from the Biblical account, though it expands upon some things for the sake of storytelling. Queen Ahinoam is only mentioned once in the Bible as the wife of Saul, but she has an expanded role in the show and is shown as the one who essentially introduces Saul to the Witch of Endor. Goliath also gets backstory as one of the “Anakim,” a race of giants that lived in Canaan in ancient times, which is something that is only mentioned in passing in the Old Testament. Overall, I enjoyed the show and I hope it gets a second season.   What's interesting, from a larger perspective, is to see how the wheel of history keeps turning. In the 1950s and the 1960s, Biblical epics were a major film genre. The 10 Commandments and Ben Hur with Charlton Heston are probably the ones best remembered today. Eventually, the genre just sort of ran out of gas, much the way superhero movies were in vogue for about 20 years and began running out of steam around 2023 or so. Like, I enjoyed Thunderbolts (which we're going to talk about in a little bit), but it's not going to make a billion dollars the way Marvel stuff often did in the 2010s. The wheel just keeps turning and perhaps has come back around to the popularity of Biblical epics once more. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Chef, which came out in 2014. I actually saw this back in 2021, but I watched it again recently to refresh my memory and here are my thoughts. I quite liked it. It's about a chef named Carl Casper, who's increasingly unhappy with his work after he gets fired over a Twitter war with a writer who criticized his cooking. Carl is out of options and so he starts a food truck and has to both rediscover his love of cooking and reconnect with his ex-wife and 10-year-old son. In Storytelling: How to Write a Novel (my book about writing), I talked about different kinds of conflict. Carl's conflict is an excellent example of an entirely internal conflict. The critic is an external enemy, but he's basically the inciting incident.   Carl's real enemy is his own internal conflict about art versus commerce and a strained relationship with his son. I recommend the movie. It was rated R for bad language, but there's no nudity or explicit sexual content and honestly, if you've ever worked in a restaurant kitchen or a warehouse, you've heard much worse in terms of language. The movie also has an extremely valuable lesson: stay off social media when you're angry. Overall Grade: A     Next up is Thunderbolts, which came out in 2025 and I thought this was pretty good, both very dark and yet with quite a lot of humor to balance the darkness. Former assassin Yelena Belova has been working as a mercenary for the sinister director of the CIA, Valentina de Fontaine (now there's a villain name if there ever was one). Yelena has grown disillusioned with her life and career and is suffering from increasing depression since she never really dealt with the death of her sister. Valentina promises her one last job, only for Yelena to realize that Valentina decided to dispose of all her freelance contractors at once, which includes US Agent and Ghost (previously seen in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Antman and the Wasp). In the process of escaping Valentina's trap, Yelena stumbles across a mysterious man who identifies himself as Bob, who has no memory of how he got there, but shows increasingly unusual abilities. Yelena wants to deal with Valentina's betrayal, but it turns out one of Valentina's science projects has gotten out of control and is threatening the world. The movie was well constructed enough that it didn't rely too heavily on previous Marvel continuity. It was there, but you probably wouldn't be lost without it. It almost feels like Marvel looked at the stuff they did the last couple of years and said, okay, a lot of this didn't work, but makes great raw material for new things. It helped that the central conflict was in the end, very human and about the characters, not stopping a generic villain from getting a generic doomsday device. Overall Grade: A   Next up is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which came out in 1988. This is a movie length episode of The Return of Sherlock Holmes television series, which had Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Dr. Watson. The plot deals with Sir Henry Baskerville, the American heir to an English manor set in the Windswept moors of Dartmoor. Apparently there's an ancestral curse laid over the Baskerville estate that manifests in the form of a spectral hound. Local rumors hold that the previous holder of the manor, Sir Charles Baskerville, was killed by the ghostly hound and many of the local people fear it. The local physician, Dr. Mortimer, is so worried about the hound that he comes to Sherlock Holmes for help. Holmes, of course, is skeptical of any supernatural explanation and soon becomes worried that an extremely subtle and sinister murderer is stalking Sir Henry.   Jeremy Brett's version of Holmes is, in my opinion, the best portrayal of the character and Edward Hardwicke's version of Watson is a calm, reliable man of action who sensibly takes a very large revolver with him when going into danger. Definitely worth watching, Overall grade: A   Next up is Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which came out in 2024. The 2020s have been a downer of a decade in many ways, but on the plus side, between Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, people have finally figured out how to make good video game movies, so we've got that going for us. Sonic 3 was an excellent kids movie, as were the first two in the trilogy. In this one Sonic is living with Knuckles and Tails under the care of their human friends Tom and Maddy, but then a dark secret emerges. The government has been keeping a Superpowered hedgehog named Shadow in stasis and Shadow has broken out. It's up to Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails to save the day.   Meanwhile, Dr. Robotnik is in a funk after his defeat at Sonic's hands in the last movie, but then his long lost grandfather, Gerald Robotnik returns seeking the younger Dr. Robotnik's help in his own sinister plans. Keanu Reeves was great as Shadow (think John Wick if he was a superpowered space hedgehog in a kid's movie). Jim Carrey famously said he would retire from acting unless a golden script came along and apparently that golden script was playing Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his evil grandfather Gerald. To be fair, both the Robotniks were hilarious.   It is amusing that Sonic only exists because in the 1990s, Sega wanted a flagship video game character that won't get them sued by either Nintendo or Disney. It is also amusing that the overall message of the Sonic movies seems to be not to trust the government. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Paddington in Peru, which came out in 2024. This is also an excellent kids' movie. In this installment, Paddington has settled into London with the Brown family and officially become a UK citizen. However, he receives a letter from Peru that his Aunt Lucy has mysteriously disappeared into the jungle. Distraught, Paddington and the Browns set off for Peru at once. Adventures ensue involving mysterious lost treasure, a crazy boat captain, and an order of singing nuns who might not quite be what they appear. Anyway, it's a good kids' movie. I think Paddington 2 was only slightly better because Hugh Grant as the chief villain, crazy actor Phoenix Buchanan, was one of those lightning in the bottle things like Heath Ledger as the Joker in the Dark Knight. Overall Grade: A   Now for the two best things I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. The first of them is Andor Season Two, which came out in 2025. Star Wars kind of has an age range the way Marvel stuff does now. What do I mean by that? In the Marvel comics and some of the TV series like Jessica Jones, they get into some really dark and heavy stuff, very mature themes. The MCU movies can have some darkness to them, but not as much because they're aiming at sort of escapist adventures for the general audience. Then there are kid shows like Spidey and Friends that a relative of mine just loved when he was three. You wouldn't at all feel comfortable showing a 3-year-old Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Spidey and Friends is just fine.   Star Wars now kind of has that age range to its stuff and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you want to see a dark meditation upon human nature. Sometimes you need something kid friendly to occupy the kids you're babysitting and sometimes you just want to relax and watch Mando and Baby Yoda mow down some space pirates or something. All that said, Andor Season Two is some of the darkest and the best stuff that Star Wars has ever done. It successfully shifts genres from Escapist Pulp Space Fantasy to a gritty Political/Espionage Thriller. We in the audience know that the emperor is a Sith Lord who can use Evil Space Magic and wants to make himself immortal, but that fact is totally irrelevant to the characters. Even though some of the characters are high ranking in their respective organizations, this is essentially a “ground's eye” view of the Rebellion and life under the Empire.   In some ways, this is like Star Wars' version of Wolf Hall (which we're going to talk about shortly), in that we know how it ends already, but the dramatic tension comes from the harrowing emotional journey the characters undertake on the way to their inevitable destinations. Cassian Andor is now working for the nascent Rebellion under the direction of ruthless spymaster Luthen Rael. Mon Mothma is in the Imperial Senate, covertly funneling money to the Rebellion and realizing just how much the Rebellion will require of her before the end. Syril Karn, the ineffective corporate cop from Season One, has fallen in love with the ruthless secret police supervisor Dedra Meero, but he's unaware that Director Krennic has ordered Meero to manufacture a false flag incident on the planet Gorman so the planet can be strip-mined for resources to build the Death Star and Dedra has decided to use Syril to help accomplish it. All the actors do amazing jobs with their roles. Seriously, this series as actors really should get at least one Emmy. Speaking of Director Krennic, Ben Mendelson returns as Orson Krennic, who is one of my favorite least favorite characters, if you get my drift. Krennic is the oily, treacherous middle manager we've all had to deal with or work for at some point in our lives, and Mendelson plays him excellently. He's a great villain, the sort who is ruthless to his underlings and thinks he can manipulate his superiors right up until Darth Vader starts telekinetically choking him. By contrast, the villain Major Partagaz (played by Anton Lesser) is the middle manager we wish we all had - stern but entirely fair, reasonable, and prizes efficiency and good work while despising office drama. Unfortunately, he works for the Empire's secret police, so all those good qualities are in the service of evil and therefore come to naught. Finally, Episode Eight is one of the most astonishing episodes of TV I've ever seen. It successfully captures the horror of an episode of mass violence and simultaneously has several character arcs reach their tumultuous climax and manages to be shockingly graphic without showing in a lot of actual blood. Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but then Peak Streaming collapsed, and so the remaining four seasons were compressed down to one. I think that was actually to the show's benefit because it generates some amazing tension and there's not a wasted moment. Overall Grade: A+   Now for the second of my two favorite things I saw, and that would be Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, which came out in 2024, but I actually saw it in 2025. This is a dramatization of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, who is King Henry VIII's chief lieutenant during the key years of the English Reformation. The first series came out in 2015, but the nine year gap between this and between the second series and the first series actually works quite well since Thomas Cromwell looks like he ages nine years in a single year (which may be what actually happened given how stressful working for someone like Henry VIII must have been). Anyway, in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell has successfully arranged the downfall and execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry's previous queen. Though Cromwell is haunted by his actions, Henry still needs a queen to give him a male heir, so he marries Jane Seymour. Cromwell must navigate the deadly politics of the Tudor Court while trying to push his Protestant views of religion, serve his capricious master Henry, fend off rivals for the King's favor, and keep his own head attached to his shoulders in the process. Since Cromwell's mental state is deteriorating due to guilt over Anne's death and the downfall of his former master Cardinal Wolsey and Henry's a fickle and dangerous master at the best of times, this is an enterprise that is doomed to fail. Of course, if you're at all familiar with the history of Henry's reign and the English reformation, you know that Cromwell's story does not have a happy ending. Rather, Wolf Hall is a tragedy about a talented man who didn't walk away from his power until it was too late and he was trapped. Anyway, in my opinion, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light was just excellent. All the performances were superb. Mark Rylance is great as Cromwell and has some excellent “WTF/I'm SO screwed” expressions as Cromwell's situation grows worse and worse. Bernard Hill played the Duke of Norfolk in the first series, but sadly died before Series Two, so Timothy Spall steps in and he does an excellent job of channeling Hill's portrayal of the Duke as an ambitious, crude-humored thug.   Damien Lewis is amazing as Henry VIII and his performance captures Henry's mixture of charisma, extreme vindictiveness, and astonishing self-absorption. The real Henry was known for being extremely charming even to the end of his life, but the charm was mixed with a volcanic temper that worsened as Henry aged and may have been exacerbated by a severe head injury. Lewis's performance can shift from that charm to the deadly fury in a heartbeat. The show rather cleverly portrays Henry's growing obesity and deteriorating health by having Lewis wear a lot of big puffy coats and limp with an impressively regal walking stick.   Overall, I would say this and Andor were the best thing I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. I wouldn't say that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is an accurate historical reputation. In real life, Cromwell was rather more thuggish and grasping (though far more competent than his rivals and his master) and of necessity the plot simplifies historical events, but it's just a superb historical drama. Overall Grade: A+ As a final note, I should say that of all the 2024 and 2025 movies mentioned here, the only one that actually saw in the theater was Thunderbolts, and I hadn't actually planned to see it in theaters, but a family member unexpectedly bought tickets for it, so I went along. Which I suppose is the movie industry's biggest problem right now. The home viewing experience is often vastly superior to going to the theater. The theater has the big screen and snacks, but at home you can have a pretty nice setup and you can pause whatever you want, go to the bathroom, and you can get snacks for much more cheaply. That's just much more comfortable than the movie theater.   Additionally, going to the theater has the same serious problem as booking a flight in that you're an enclosed space with complete strangers for several hours, which means you're potentially in a trust fall with idiots. All it takes is one person behaving badly or trying to bring their fake service dog to ruin or even cancel a flight, and the theater experience has much of the same problem, especially since the standards for acceptable public behavior have dropped so much from a combination of widespread smartphone adoption and COVID. The difference between the movie industry and the airline industry is that if you absolutely have to get from New York to Los Angeles in a single day, you have no choice but to book a flight and hope for the best. But if you want to see a movie and are willing to exercise some patience, you just have to wait a few months for it to turn up on streaming. I'm not sure how the movie industry can battle that, but sadly, it is much easier to identify problems than to solve them.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

• Listener Ryan praises Moe Dewitt's hands-on legal help and accessibility • Ross McCoy guest hosts; jokes about Moe's “minions” and Coors vs. Kirkland beer • Summer of Sips announced at Jeff's Bagel Run with flavor drops and giveaways • Blogger tip: ask “what's hot” at Jeff's; suggestion for a Krispy Kreme-style hot light • Moe segues into a donut addiction story about his dad • Science Night Live promo: May 31, adult superhero night at the Orlando Science Center • Ross and Dan text weirdness, superhero jokes including “Silverfish Man” • Tommy completes 5th grade; Tom reflects on graduation renaming and Crystal's over-the-top party bags • Gift bags include Raising Cane's lip gloss and sanitizer; Tom forgot to hide animatronic Satchmo • Tom calls it a “hunk of shit” as Crystal walks in; awkward doll display mocked • Tommy becomes “Ranch King” despite not liking ranch; classmates gift him packets and pizza • Max is dubbed “Ranch Prince”; nickname sticks post-graduation • Tom's emotional gap as a parent surfaces after missing Tommy's straight-A award • “Non-confrontation of the Week” debuts with a Jackal-made theme song • Tom runs from a dog that bites his butt mid-jog and avoids confronting the owner • Second story: Tom lets teens into Baldwin Park pool who then disrupt the lanes and flirt with moms • Dan scolds Tom for mishandling the pool key; Tom hopes pool moms intervene • Stealth camping rabbit hole: Canadian YouTuber Steve Wallis hides in pallet trailers • Wallis has a full camper inside, cooks jambalaya, checks cams, and avoids notice • Dan is obsessed with stealth life; Tom jokes about ghillie suits and fake stores • Listener brings up game show prize buyouts; old vs. new show nostalgia • Mr. Beast's prize model debated for lacking stakes; “The Running Man” joked about • Diddy/Kid Cudi drama: dog locked in bathroom, gifts opened, and a Molotov cocktail attack • Court stories reveal female DNA on the explosive; Cudi later hires an armed dog sitter • Ross calls Diddy “the Grinch”; Tom pitches “Black John Wick” starring Kid Cudi • Segment closes with Diddy allegedly trashing presents and intimidating behavior • Bull & Bush final show promoted; Ricky Reyes joins Moe Comedy Jam lineup • Memorial Day note: ACT show Monday, BDM on Tuesday ### **Social Media:**   [Website](https://tomanddan.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/tomanddanlive) | [Facebook](https://facebook.com/amediocretime) | [Instagram](https://instagram.com/tomanddanlive) **Where to Find the Show:**   [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-mediocre-time/id334142682) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2FtZWRpb2NyZXRpbWUvcG9kY2FzdC54bWw) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Mediocre-Time-p364156/) **The Tom & Dan Radio Show on Real Radio 104.1:**   [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-corporate-time/id975258990) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2Fjb3Jwb3JhdGV0aW1lL3BvZGNhc3QueG1s) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Corporate-Time-p1038501/) **Exclusive Content:** [Join BDM](https://tomanddan.com/registration) **Merch:** [Shop Tom & Dan](https://tomanddan.myshopify.com/)

S2E7: Leveraging Technology to Improve the Patient Experience Host: Frank Cutitta Guest: Surabhi Saxena - Manager Quality, Safety, PFR at Spaulding Hospital Cambridge, Inc. To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen

Just because an outage is subtle, doesn't mean it's harmless. Learn how to catch those pesky “stealth outages” that can so easily slip under the radar, and also unpack recent service disruptions at Slack, Microsoft 365, and X. CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 00:56 Slack 08:16 Microsoft 365 11:22 X 13:26 Outage Trends: By the Numbers 16:26 Get in Touch ——— For additional insights, check out the links below: - The Five Phases of Internet Outage Recovery: https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/five-phases-internet-outage-recovery-infographic?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=fy25q4_internetreport_q4fy25ep2_podcast - The Guide to Next-generation Assurance: https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/guide-to-next-generation-assurance-ebook?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=fy25q4_internetreport_q4fy25ep2_podcast ——— Want to get in touch? If you have questions, feedback, or guests you would like to see featured on the show, send us a note at InternetReport@thousandeyes.com. Or follow Cisco ThousandEyes on LinkedIn or X. ——— ABOUT THE INTERNET REPORT This is The Internet Report, a podcast uncovering what's working and what's breaking on the Internet—and why. Tune in to hear ThousandEyes' Internet experts dig into some of the most interesting outage events from the past couple weeks, discussing what went awry—was it the Internet, or an application issue? Plus, learn about the latest trends in ISP outages, cloud network outages, collaboration network outages, and more. Catch all the episodes on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-internet-report/id1506984526 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ADFvqAtgsbYwk4JiZFqHQ?si=00e9c4b53aff4d08&nd=1&dlsi=eab65c9ea39d4773 - SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ciscopodcastnetwork/sets/the-internet-report

Just because an outage is subtle, doesn't mean it's harmless. Learn how to catch those pesky “stealth outages” that can so easily slip under the radar, and also unpack recent service disruptions at Slack, Microsoft 365, and X.CHAPTERS00:00 Intro00:56 Slack08:16 Microsoft 36511:22 X13:26 Outage Trends: By the Numbers16:26 Get in Touch———For additional insights, check out the links below:- The Five Phases of Internet Outage Recovery: https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/five-phases-internet-outage-recovery-infographic?utm_source=transistor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=fy25q4_internetreport_q4fy25ep2_podcast- The Guide to Next-generation Assurance: https://www.thousandeyes.com/resources/guide-to-next-generation-assurance-ebook?utm_source=transistor&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=fy25q4_internetreport_q4fy25ep2_podcast———Want to get in touch?If you have questions, feedback, or guests you would like to see featured on the show, send us a note at InternetReport@thousandeyes.com. Or follow us on LinkedIn or X at @thousandeyes.

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss Jake's new stealth grill, his eldest son's takeover of the state finals (and metric's takeover of measurement), and Michael goes through the process of refining over 150 talk submissions down to the final Laracon AU schedule.

Damien Garros, CEO and co-founder of OpsMill is with us once again for today’s podcast. Since we last spoke with Damien, OpsMill has emerged from stealth mode and is making progress as one of the leaders in network source of truth in the field. Today, we’ll talk through the progress Infrahub has made and get... Read more »

Damien Garros, CEO and co-founder of OpsMill is with us once again for today’s podcast. Since we last spoke with Damien, OpsMill has emerged from stealth mode and is making progress as one of the leaders in network source of truth in the field. Today, we’ll talk through the progress Infrahub has made and get... Read more »

The pros and cons of paying off your mortgage before retirement, stealth expenses that can quietly drain your budget and the skyrocketing cost of the proposed CTA Red Line extension.

Stealth expenses can quietly drain your budget... Shari Greco Reiches, Co-Founder of Rappaport Reiches Capital Management here in Chicago, joins Rob Hart on the WBBM Noon Business Hour to talk about spotting, tracking and cutting hidden costs to regain control of your money...

Harry wants you to know, none of this is personal.This week on Action Surge, Harry starts things off by expressing how deeply grateful he is that we filmed Episode 29 on a Sunday, not a Saturday. Apparently, he wasn't prepared for... well, any of it. Which means, clearly, we're winning D&D. That's how you win, right? Just completely ignore whatever your DM had planned. And sorry again to Mark at Crafted Campaigns.We unpack our rather bold approach to this episode. Stealth hasn't exactly been our strong suit lately, so this time we took the front door. Literally. And Dolly? Dolly was the ticket in.Harry talks about the challenge of running two groups simultaneously in the same location, on the same timeline, acting separately, and what happens when they maybe start to overlap. He might have been stressed, but we've got to say, it didn't show.Hollie and Doug share what it's like being up and down from the table throughout the episode, and how that affects focus and energy. Also, for the first time in a very long time, we didn't have music in the room. Why? Because the recording PC exploded right before filming. Literally. No music, just chaos (and a slight electric shock for our Producer, Tom). We also take a moment to celebrate Alex's spotlight and how Harry fully embraced the chance to get inside his head, purely to mess with him of course. Reliable Talent absolutely came in clutch, and we're all looking forward to seeing where I leads us.And yes, Parvus gets a little love too. We really don't mean to forget him.Sorry, Parvus. We love you. Honestly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chips are a critical component of the AI industry. But new chips don't hit the market with the same speed as new AI models and products do. Cognichip has a lofty goal of creating a foundational AI model that can help bring new chips to market faster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Stealth mission is continuing swimmingly....

This week on the podcast we go over our review Corsair Nautilus 360 RS Liquid CPU Cooler. We also talk about what we expect to see at Computex 2025, some drama going on with NVIDIA and reviewers, a possible 24GB VRAM Intel Arc card, white ASUS graphics cards, Battlefield 6, and much more!

Going Rogue dives into the power of throwing what you know out the window and focusing on the organic opportunities that come with community management to drive your marketing. Learn tactics to building these connections, how to explore new ways to think of community management, and how it can create a buzz around your project. Smashing skulls with overt marketing is no longer the way - it's time to get stealthy about how we approach it so that it doesn't give players the ick.

In this "Kim on a Whim" segment, Kim St. Onge joins Marc Cox to explore Missouri State Highway Patrol's rollout of stealth vehicles with “ghost graphics.” They dive into the public's mixed reactions, concerns about impersonation risks, and the debate over whether these low-visibility tactics improve safety or reduce public trust. The conversation also touches on broader issues, including police manpower shortages, enforcement of non-emergency calls, and how Missouri's approach compares to other countries' policing methods.

In the late 90s, John Romero convinced Warren Spector to join his studio in order to make the game of his dreams. This game was something Spector had been thinking about since 1993. It had a couple of names over the years – Troubleshooter being one, and Shooter: Majestic Revelations being another – but one thing remained the same: it was ambitious. We're going back to 2000 to take a look at a first-person shooter, that is also a stealth game, that is also an RPG – so I guess we can call this one an immersive sim. We're talking Deus ExOn this episode of Stealth Boom Boom, we chat a little bit about Ion Storm's origins, Daikatana, and how one developer was going to make you his bitch. We also look at how that Dallas attitude affected Austin, the difficulty in marketing a game that's quite different to everything else out there, how being a pacifist is okay actually, and how single player games are not dead.Here are some of the things you're gonna hear us chat about in our review: the Revision mod; stealth systems that are reliable, but working underneath, meaning you have to mostly go on vibes; being seen is just part of your story rather than failure; THE QUICK SAVE; looking at every possible route to sneakily get around the world; the glorious lockpicking waggle; the invisibility cloak; weak small arms for those that want to kill quietly; the beast riot prod and the even beaster lightsaber Dragon's Tooth sword; permanent a/b choices that really make you think about your build; draining bioenergy; remembering to turn off your augmentations; TORCH EYES; the GEP gun, the LAM, and all of this game's wonderfully silly explosive weapons; managing the Resident Evil style inventory; boss encounters that don't betray the game; kill phrases; your first encounter with the NSF on Liberty Island; buying drinks in Hong Kong's Lucky Money club; conspiracy theories now vs conspiracy theories then; predictions that have come to pass (and others that have not); changing the course of its plot and how characters react to your actions and decisions in ways that never stop being brilliant; and that absolute stone cold classic of a theme song.After all that, we take you through what some of the critics were saying about the game around the time it came out, and then we give you our final verdicts on whether Deus Ex is a Pass, a Play, or an Espionage Explosion.For those who would like to play along at home, we'll be discussing, reviewing and dissecting Ghost of Tsushima on the next episode of Stealth Boom Boom.IMPORTANT LINKS TO THINGS

Episode 561 of the A Minute to Midnite Show. Alex Neman joins Tony K. Big news of the day is the death of Pope Francis, and it's implications are discussed here. Also revealed here are some of the stealthy ways that the globalists continued to march forward with their agenda.

In this week's episode, we take a look at four different ebook formatting tools for indie authors. We also discuss the phenomenon of Star Wars day. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Malison: The Complete Series at my Payhip store: MALISON25 The coupon code is valid through June 3, 2025. So if you need a new book for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 251 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 9, 2025, and today we are looking at ebook formatting tools. Before we get into our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week, a progress update at my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week. We'll also close out the show with a preview of my new audiobook Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy).   This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Malison: The Complete Series at my Payhip store, and that is MALISON25. As always, we'll have the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through June the 3, 2025. So if you need a new ebook for spring, we have got you covered. Now here's where I'm at with my current writing projects. I am 87,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption and I'm hoping to hit 90,000 words by the end of today. So if all goes well, I will finish it up later this week and then begin editing. I am also 9,000 words into what my next project will be, which is Shield of Power, the final book in The Shield War series. I'm also 91,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and that will be my main project after Shield of Power is finished. So my writing goals for the next couple months will be Ghost in the Corruption, Shield of Power, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and then the final book in The Ghost Armor series (the title of which I should really decide since I'm getting close to being finished with the fifth book).   In audiobook news, recording of Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is finished. That should be turning up on all the various audiobook stores before too much longer. Shield of Deception (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is finished and available at all the audio stores: Audible, Apple, Google Play, Spotify, Chirp, and all the others. You can get that right now. Brad should be starting a recording of Shield of Battle sometime in the second half of May, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:02:09 Question of the Week   And now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question: what is your favorite Star Wars? The inspiration for this question is the fact that May the Fourth has become Star Wars Day (in a very tongue in cheek manner). And as you might expect, we had a variety of responses to this question. Justin says: I have not seen any Star Wars TV series, but your other choices are mine as well. I have the Trawn Trilogy in the box set and got a PC joystick just for playing TIE Fighter again. Jonathan D. says: Empire Strikes Back is still the best film. I cannot get into the Disney canon after they destroyed the Expanded Universe. I watched The Force Awakens and that killed any interest in watching Disney Star Wars for me. Books is either Heir to the Empire Trilogy or the Darth Bain trilogy. A well done film adaptation of the Darth Bain books would be the only thing that would make me want to watch any new films. Video games would have to be Knight of the Old Republic 1 or 2, with Jedi Academy coming in third. The original Battlefront games were also great.   John Paul says: Loved the Mandalorian and the Book of Boba Fett, especially when they had the characters from each other's show guest starring in them. I saw somewhere they aren't making another series, but [there] was talk about a TV movie to finish it off, but [they are] now showing Series 4 on IBMD with no date. I grew up with the original trilogy though some of the later films are good, especially the special effects, though Jar Jar Binks spoiled the first three movies. Maybe they should reedit the character out since Lucas has spent some money on adding new effects to the trilogy to bring in line with the new movies. Skeleton Crew made me think of the movie Flight of the Navigator with Star Wars added, so I enjoyed that even though it's mainly for kids. I have fond memories of Space Invaders with the sidekick from the original Fall Guy TV show. Again, made for kids though adults can enjoy if they watch tongue in cheek.   Andrew says: There are only three Star Wars movies, of which Empire Strikes Back is my favorite. I really enjoyed Mandalorian Season One. Now Star Wars is dead to me, except for lightsaber battle videos. I really like the Princess Bride Battles. I played TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, and Knights of the Old Republic.   Tom says: Favorite film, Rogue One. With you on Mandalorian Season Two as favorite TV show. Favorite game, Rogue Squadron.   Tracy says: My favorite was Return of the Jedi.   Jenny says: Thrawn Trilogy for sure! Dark Forces was my very first computer game, so it's always going to hold a special place in my heart.   William says: The unofficial remasters of the original trilogy from preserved reels are a godsend.   MG says: Knights of the Old Republic was quite good and Knights of the Old Republic 2.   John K. says: I'm a grim dark sort of guy. Really liked Rogue One but it's slightly edged out by the original Episode IV. I absolutely love Andor but honestly, have not hated anything. Enjoyed them all. I was a nut for the original X-Wing game. Got good enough to one shot TIE Fighters with one quad shot and rarely missed and learned how to solo Star Destroyers pretty easily, though it would take forever. Having played the game that John K. is talking about, I can agree with him that you could take down Star Destroyers in your X-Wing if you knew what you were doing, but it really would take forever.   Dave says: Book wise, I really enjoyed the Thrawn books by Timothy Zahn, also the X-Wing series by Michael A. Stackpole was a personal favorite.   And finally Michael says: I agree on Empire Strikes Back though as a kid, I disliked the lack of upbeat movie. Also really liked the Solo movie. I confess I found the Thrawn books underwhelming, though the original Star Wars novelization is pretty good. And finally, I got to agree on TIE Fighter, such great game. Also, I have a soft spot for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.   For myself, I would have to break it down into four categories because Star Wars media covers so many different formats now. For favorite movie, I would say Empire Strikes Back, with Return of the Jedi as the runner up. For the favorite TV series, Season 2 of The Mandalorian. For my favorite book, The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, with Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover, Darth Plagueis by James Luceno, and The Darth Bane Trilogy by Drew Karpyshyn coming in as strong runners up. Seriously, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably enjoy reading books, so these five are definitely worth your time.   For my favorite video games, I would say TIE Fighter, with Knights of the Old Republic as a very close runner-up. But TIE Fighter was definitely my favorite. In the game, you play as an Imperial pilot, and the designers had the clever idea of making the Empire sympathetic by having the player spend most of the missions hunting ruthless pirates, suppressing alien civil wars, and fighting renegade Imperial warlords who are trying to overthrow the Emperor. In the last two expansion packs for the game, the player is flying as Grand Admiral Thrawn's elite pilot against the renegade Grand Admiral Zaarin, and finally defeating Zaarin after like forty missions was VERY satisfying.   So those are my favorite Star Wars media items. As we can see.  there is quite a range of opinion in the answer to that question.   00:06:54 Main Topic: Ebook Formatting Tools   Now let's move on to our main topic, which is ebook formatting tools. And this is an important thing for indie authors to discuss because if you do want to self-publish your books, it is one of those foundational skills you have to master. You need to know what kind of file format the platforms you're publishing to you take and how to produce it. Now this is something you can hire out but you really, really shouldn't in my opinion, especially because some ebook formatting services charge as much as $2,000 to turn a Word document into files ready to upload for ebook stores. Considering that it is something you can easily do yourself with free tools and a little bit of practice, spending any amount of money on it is probably a waste. I mean, there's a difference between the kind of intricate formatting you would need for say, a full color medical textbook with illustrations and a 60,000 word romance novel. Fortunately, all the major software programs are nowhere near as expensive as $2,000 a book and don't have as much of a learning curve as you might expect. Both video and written tutorials are plentiful for all of these options, making it easy to learn at your own pace. Today we're going to go over four software options for formatting ebooks and discuss their pros, cons, and the best uses for them. Although some of these products have word processing functionality and other features built in, today we'll focus on just the ebook formatting part of the software. #1: The first option we will look at is Atticus. Atticus is from the same company that makes Publisher Rocket, which is a software program I've spoken of very favorably of on the show over the years. The company has made an effort to understand the needs of authors over the years and added new features to Publisher Rocket consistently as time went on. The company Kindlepreneur has also made significant enhancements to Atticus since it launched. As of the time of this recording, it is a one-time purchase option that has free ongoing updates and the current cost is $147 (in United States dollars). Expensive, but the founder of the company Dave Chesson has said frequently he doesn't like software subscriptions. So hopefully this will continue to be a one-time fee and not become a subscription thing.   So here are the pros to using Atticus. It is less expensive than Vellum and has the same features. It works on operating systems other than Mac. In theory, since it has a web client, it can work on any platform. Reviewers say it is very pleasant to use and those who want a lot of customization options are generally happy with it and it has a nice tool for creating and reusing the template for things like author bios or link pages.   The con is that it does require an Internet connection to use and you have to have a computer connected to the Internet. Some people also prefer not to have their work stored in the cloud like Atticus does. Some users report slowness while opening or closing or when saving a file, especially if it's a book with a high word account. Because of the online requirement, there can be issues related to syncing. It does not support .mobi as a file export option. However, that's not a big deal anymore because Amazon is officially phasing out the .mobi file extension and is requiring people to use .epub. So this is not a major point and it's only for people who have a customer base with very old e-readers that can't handle .epub.   And finally, Atticus does not offer a free trial period if you just want to try it out, but does offer a refund within the first 30 days if you try it and decide that you don't like it. So what users would find Atticus the best? It's probably best for PC or Linux users who don't want a Mac and also want to have lots of fine control of your formatting or customizing your layout. Atticus is also heavily built around collaboration, where different people can work on the same file. So if you do work with a team (and many indie authors do) or are co-writing a book, then Atticus might be a good tool for you to use.   #2: The second program we're going to look at is called Vellum.  Vellum has been seen as the default option for ebook formatting for a lot of writers for a while now. As of the time of recording, there is a one-time purchase option that has free ongoing updates. The current cost is $199 for the ebook only version or $249 for the version that includes paperbacks. Vellum has gone on sale occasionally in the past, usually for Cyber Monday in November. The pros for Vellum are that many reviewers consider it the best option for ebook formatting and say it delivers professional results without too much work and a minimal learning curve. Vellum lets you try out the software for free, but you won't be able to export the files you're publishing until the software is purchased. Like Atticus, it offers a 30 day window for a refund.   Vellum is not cloud-based software and it can be used offline. So if you are, for instance, working on a laptop on the road with spotty internet connectivity, this can be a lifesaver. Now for the cons and the biggest con is a big one- that Vellum is Macintosh only. You need to have a Mac to use it and it is not currently available for Windows and Linux. The developers have said that presently they have no plans to port it to either Windows or Linux. It will also not work on iOS, so that means you can't run it on your iPad or your iPhone. You can in theory use it on a PC with a Mac OS virtual machine, but people have reported very mixed success with that. The other con is that it is the most expensive option. So the users this is best for I think would be if you already have a Mac or you are willing to buy a Mac for just one piece of software. #3: The third software program we're going to look at is called Jutoh. Jutoh is a labor of love, mainly created by two people in the UK and has been around for a long, long time. As of the time of this recording, there is a one-time purchase option that costs $45 (US dollars) and a Plus version for $90 that supports some additional features. It currently offers a free trial that you can download and install, but functionality is limited in the trial version. The pros of Jutoh is that it works on Windows, Mac, and most versions of Linux. It is not cloud-based software/is local to your computer. It does not need a constant Internet connection to function. Reviewers frequently praised how responsive their customer support is and of the paid options we are discussing, it will be the least expensive of all of them. The cons are the interface is a bit dated. It does kind of look like something from the early 2000s in terms of the buttons and where they are. Because of that, it can be more difficult for some users to use than Atticus or Vellum. It does not create PDFs or print ready files, so you would not be able to use it to format your files for print books, which is something both Atticus and Vellum offer. I think this is best used for users who want a less expensive option than Atticus or Vellum or a PC user who wants a non-cloud based option.   #4: The fourth and final program we're going to look at is called Kindle Create. And as of this recording, it is the only one of these four options that is free. It is a free download. This software is created and maintained by Amazon. The pro? It's free and you can use the .epubs it creates to upload your books onto other platforms. Just because you've made your ebook in Amazon Create, that doesn't mean you can't use the file for Barnes & Noble and Kobo and Apple and so forth. You can go ahead and do that. However, because it is free software, there are quite a few cons to it. The functionality is pretty limited and only a few fonts are available. It is not good with complex layouts and Amazon's own documentation recommends not using it for books with tables, footnotes, or complex text formatting.   The program doesn't handle edits well. There are people who write books in Vellum even though the developers don't exactly recommend that. And Atticus is designed to have books written in it. However, Kindle Create definitely cannot handle that very well. Windows and Mac are supported, but you can't install it on Linux. Kindle Create no longer supports .mobi as a file export option since Amazon is moving away from that option and most other vendors haven't used it ever. That is a minor point.   I think Kindle Create is best used by users who are just starting out and don't have much in the way of budget and have books that don't require a lot of complex formatting. Kindle Create is actually quite good for novels because novels in general don't have a lot of complex formatting and because it's free, it has a little bit of a steeper learning curve, but that can be advantageous as well.   So looking at those four options, what do I use and why? Well, for the first seven or so years I was self-publishing, I didn't use any of these. I used a program called Sigil, which is an .epub editor. And if Kindle Create has a high learning curve, Sigil's is much higher because you're essentially editing the raw guts of the .epub file.   I was content using that for a number of years, but what I needed was a program that would make uploading print books and formatting print books much easier because at the time I was using Create Space and Create Space required a specialized Word template that was just an enormous headache to use. And the reason that many of the Frostborn books have exactly 24 chapters is because I had a template that worked really well with 24 chapters for print books and I wasn't going to mess that up by trying to add a chapter or have one fewer chapter. So for some of the Frostborn books, I made sure there were 24 chapters.   Obviously this was not a tenable situation for the print books, even though I was happy using Sigil for the eBooks. So I eventually heard good things about Vellum. In 2018 (I believe) I got a used Mac and installed Vellum and started using that for print books. I was much happier with that.   Because the books looked so good in print, I eventually switched over to using Vellum for formatting my ebooks as well and I've been using that ever since. So my main ebook format writing program (as of May 9, 2025) is Vellum and I have a Mac specifically for that purpose. However, I also has high praise to say about Jutoh. I got started using Jutoh because for a while, Smashwords required you to upload a book using a specialized Word format. They didn't accept .epubs for the longest time and formatting a book in that proper Word format for Smashwords was a large headache, I have to admit. I never managed to get it automated quite right. And I had frequent problems with Smashwords rejecting the Word document I uploaded and so forth. Eventually, I discovered that Jutoh also had an export option for creating Smashwords-friendly Word documents. So I tried it out and that was just a godsend, I have to admit. It saved me so much time. So for about seven years as well, I used Jutoh for Smashwords formatting. However, in 2024 after Smashwords was acquired by Draft 2 Digital and the two companies became more and more merged, Smashwords changed and now accepts properly formatted .epubs. They don't do that specialized Word document thing anymore, which has made it much easier to upload files to Smashwords, I must say. But that also means that I've used Jutoh less and less in favor of Vellum because I no longer need those specially formatted Word documents. However, I do have nothing but positive things to say about Jutoh; it is a very good program. If you don't want to shell out the $249 for Vellum or if you don't have a Mac, I think Jutoh is an excellent option for you to use. I have never actually used Atticus, but it's popular enough that I wanted to talk about it on this show. I do know a lot of people who have used it to good effect. Just bear in mind the pros and cons we mentioned. And as for Kindle Create, there's nothing wrong with it. I think it's good starting point, especially if you're just starting out and want to format your book without paying a lot of money or having to pay $2,000 to someone on the Internet to do it. I do think it's a good starting point, even though it's very basic and for your first couple of books, it would be good. But as you get more experienced and want to branch into things like print books, you'll probably want a program with greater functionality like Jutoh, Vellum, or Atticus. So myself, I use mostly Vellum (with Jutoh occasionally), and that is what I use for ebook formatting.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.   00:19:53 Audiobook Excerpt   And now we'll close out the show with a short excerpt from Ghost In the Assembly, as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. [Remainder of podcast is audiobook except]

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It's the 250th episode of The Pulp Writer Show! To celebrate this occasion, this episode takes a look at the expectations people have of a full-time writer's life and contrasts them with the reality. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: TALONS50 The coupon code is valid through May 27, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 250 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 2, 2025, and today we're looking at what it is really like to be a full-time writer. This is also the 250th episode of the podcast, so thank you all for listening to the podcast over these last six years. Before I started recording, I totaled up the total length of previous podcast episodes and came to about 78 hours, give or take. That's like three days of continuous talking, which sounds less impressive when you realize it was recorded over the last six years.   Thank you all for listening and here's hoping you can stick around with the next 250 episodes. Before we get to our main topic, which is the expectations versus reality of being a full-time writer, we are going to do Coupon of the Week, a progress update my current writing projects, and then Question of the Week. So let's kick off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book Six in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is TALONS50. As always, you can get that coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through May 27th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered.   Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 60,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which puts me on chapter 13 of 21, so I'm about two thirds of the way through. I think the rough draft will be between 90-100,000 words long, so hopefully I can have that out before the end of May, if all goes well. I also just finished Chapter One of Shield of Power, which will be the final book of the Shield War series and that'll be my main project once Ghost in the Corruption is finished. I'm also 87,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, and that will be my main project once Shield of Power comes out. I expect Final Quest should come out pretty soon after Shield of Power just because I've been chipping away at it for so long and I'm getting close to the end.   In audiobook news, recording is almost done for Ghost in the Assembly and that'll be narrated by Hollis McCarthy. Recording is totally done for Shield of Deception (as narrated by Brad Wills) and that is working its way through processing at the various audiobook platforms, so hopefully we'll not be too much longer before we can get that to you.   00:02:26 Question of the Week So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. And now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is your favorite Jonathan Moeller book? The reason for this question is that this is the 250th podcast episode, so it seems like a good topic for that particular milestone. And as you might expect, we had an array of different opinions.   Joachim says: You are kidding us! By the end of the week? How long did you think about your own answer? Let me mirror you: for my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I spent money on all your books, which meant I thought all of them a good buy. So let me split my answer into male and female protagonists. The best female book was Ghost Exile: Omnibus One because it prompted me to continue with Ghost Exile and fill in the Ghost series later. The Ghosts Omnibus One and Ghost Exile: Omnibus One were my first two books from you. The best male book was the one with Jack March where Thunderbolt said, “males are ogling breasts which never existed”, especially as such AI generated videos are now all over the place on YouTube.   I have to admit that I first came up with the character of Thunderbolt back in early 2021 when I was working on Silent Order: Rust Hand (that was before the AI boom really took off), so she turned out to be a very prescient character for the AI era in a number of ways.   Joe B. says: That is a tough question as there are many contenders. I'm going to go with one that is a little different, Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, but now known as Stealth and Spells Online: Creation.   Justin says: I nominate Soul of Swords, an excellent end to an excellent series.   Perry says: There can only be one! Demonsouled. Paul says: For me, I think my favorite female protagonist  book is Cloak Games: Truth Chain. Such a dramatic change to Nadia, sets up the series in her struggles with self and enemies so well.   Brad Wills (who as you know narrated the Frostborn, Dragonskull, Malison, and Shield War series for me) says: Does a three book arc count?  Excalibur, The Dragon Knight, and The Shadow Prison made for a fantastic lead-up and finale of the Frostborn series.   Hollis McCarthy (who as you know, narrated the Ghosts and Cloak Mage audiobooks) says: Ghost in the Storm, when Caina and Kylon meet in the Battle for Marsis. Nonstop action, incredible chase scenes, and a great intro to their combative relationship.   Fred says: It's hard for me to say which book is my favorite. All your book series were all great.   Juana says: Frostborn: Excalibur with Ridmark. I happen to love stories about Excalibur, odd but true. Caina in Cloak and Ghost: Rebel Cell because Caina and Nadia are an incendiary team. So there! Randy says: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight. This whole series is great, but that is one of the high points.   Dennis says: I couldn't name my favorite as I enjoy everything you write. I probably enjoyed the Frostborn series best at the time, but having bought and read every one of your books it's now impossible.   Kevin says: There's no way on earth that I could put one book above another, so I would've to take the coward's way out and say Frostborn: The Gray Knight simply because it has a book that drew me to the worlds of Jonathan Moeller back in the spring of 2017, since which time I have bought 117 of his books, including a few omnibus editions, so a few more actual books, I suppose. I avidly read them all as they're published these days, except the Silent Order series (just doesn't grab me and pull me in like the others). Jesse says: Cloak Games: Sky Hammer. Damaged Nadia at her best, epic action the whole way. And yeah, the chapter The Last Death of Nadia Moran was viscerally cinematic and probably the biggest emotional payoff you've written in my opinion, tied her entire journey together. In my head, I cast Castle-era Stana Katic as Nadia, and it worked better than I expected it might.   Morgan says: I can't narrow it down to just one. So top three in no particular order, Sevenfold Swords: Swordbearer, Dragontiarna: Gates, and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling. That being said, I think Niara might be my favorite character of all your books I have read.   Jonathan T says: I too am torn though only between two books, Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife and Frostborn: The Shadow Prison.   [Side note/addition from The Transcriptionist: My vote is for Half-Elven Thief!]   So thank you everyone for the kind words about all those books. For my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I've written them all, which meant I thought all of them were good idea at the time. I suppose the glib answer would be the one that made me the most money, which was Frostborn: The Iron Tower, but it really depends on the category, like my favorite heist book, my favorite mystery book, my favorite dungeon crawl, my favorite first in series. So I think I'll go for the most basic level of categorization and split it up by male and female protagonists.   My favorite book of mine with a female protagonist would probably be Cloak Games: Rebel Fist, since it's such a turning point for Nadia and starts the trajectory of the rest of her character arc. It's the first time she really has to save the day instead of just trying to save herself and shows that her brother Russell can also handle himself, which as you know, comes up again later. My favorite book of mine with a male protagonist would probably be Dragontiarna: Defenders, since it has the Battle of Shadow Crown Hill, which was one of my favorite sequences to write. Four different characters have plans and they all crash into each other at the same time, which was a lot of fun to write and set up, which was a real highlight for me in 2020 because as we all know, 2020 was a fun year.   00:07:35 Main Topic of the Week: Writing Full Time: Expectations Versus Reality   So that is it for Question of the Week. Now let's move on to our main topic this week, writing full-time: expectations versus reality (admittedly from the perspective of a self-published author). If you spent any time around the writing community on the Internet at all, you know that many people dream of becoming a full-time writer, and sometimes people think that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write full-time. There are many expectations that people have about what it means to be a full-time writer. Now that I've been a full-time indie writer for nearly nine years at this point, I can provide some lived perspective. In this episode, I will talk about five of those expectations that people have about full-time writing and the way those expectations might be skewed.   So before we get to those, I should mention how I actually became a full-time writer. In 2016 (which seems like a really long time ago now), the Frostborn series was doing really well, and at the time I was also working full time and I realized that summer I was going to have to move for family reasons. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of moving at first, but I decided to embrace the idea and try to make the best of it. This would involve moving a considerable distance to a different state and all the different problems that entails. So I thought about it and I thought I could look for a new job, but any job I would be qualified for in the area I was moving to would make less money than I was actually making from writing part-time. So I thought, why not try and make a go of full-time writing and see what happens?   Since that was nine years ago, I think I can safely say it's worked out pretty well. And I will say that it's been a pretty good experience and I am very fortunate and very grateful and very blessed to have been able to do this because not everyone has the opportunity to pursue a full-time creative job like I have been able to for these last nine years. That said, while it has been pretty great, it comes with a lot of flexibility and I've gotten to write a lot of great books that many people have enjoyed, it's not always all wine and roses, so to speak, which is part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode to let people more in what the reality of being a full-time writer for this long has been like. So with that introduction out of the way, let's move on to our five expectations versus reality.   Expectation #1: Full-time authors make a lot of money. The reality is that even full-time authors generally don't make that much money. A survey from The Author's Guild showed that the median amount that full-time authors make was just about $20,000, though full-time romance writers had a higher median income of about $37,000. Remember that this amount is before any health insurance costs, benefits, retirement contributions, and of course taxes that a traditional job might be able to provide or help with. In the United States, buying even fairly basic health insurance can easily be a thousand dollars per month for a family, and that doesn't include any costs related to deductibles, prescriptions, or additional dental or vision insurance. Authors are either on their own for healthcare in the US or have to rely on a spouse or partner's healthcare coverage. In other words, you either have to pony up a lot of money to buy your own health insurance or you have to rely on your spouse or partner's healthcare coverage.   And at least in the US, taxes are also much higher on the self-employed. Uncle Sam really does not like the self-employed. If you are self-employed, it is in your best interest to essentially form a small corporation and work for yourself (though for details on how to do that, you should consult with an accountant licensed to practice in your region). Now all these costs can add up pretty quickly, and they make the amount of money that you'll earn from writing much less than you think based on raw earnings before taxes and all the other expenses we were talking about. You also have business expenses like cover design, site hosting, editors, narrators, advertising, et cetera, that take even more pieces out of those earnings. You can duck some of those, but not all of them.   So it boils down to that you have to make a significant amount of money as an author to make an actual living after taxes, healthcare costs, and business expenses are taken out of your earnings, which is one of the reasons that writing part-time as you have a full-time job is not the worst idea in the world and can in fact be a very good idea.   Expectation #2: My next book will make as much or more than the last one did. The reality is that your next book or series might not make you as much money as the previous ones did. In fact, you can reliably predict that most book series will have a certain amount of reader drop off as a series goes on, which is why these days I tend to want to keep my series under nine to ten books or so. Budgeting based on your current income levels is not wise, especially with the current economic climate (which for a variety of reasons is very unpredictable) and with increased competition in the ebook market. Most authors have a peak at some point in their career. For example, Stephen King is still obviously making a great living as a writer putting out new books, but his new books don't sell nearly as well as the ones he put out in the ‘80s. J.K. Rowling's novels for adults (she writes as Robert Galbraith the Cormoran Strike series) don't sell anywhere near the number of copies as her Harry Potter series did at its peak.   For myself, my peak years in terms of writing income were 2016 and 2017, and I've never quite been able to recapture that level. In fact, in 2024, I only did about two thirds of what I did in 2017 (my peak year), which can be a little nerve wracking as you watch those numbers move up and down. That is why it is important for a writer (like many other creatives like actors) to anticipate that they might only have a limited window of peak success and to save aggressively rather than living large on the amount you're earning in that peak era. And I am pleased to report that I was fortunate enough and sensible enough to do that, so that even if my income has varied from year to year (2017 onward), it hasn't been a crippling loss and I haven't been out in the street or lost the house or anything like that.   Expectation #3: You will be happier if you write full-time. The reality is that is not true for everyone. Some people actually do better creatively and emotionally with the time restrictions placed on them by having a full-time job. Many famous writers, including Trollope and Kafka, kept their full-time jobs. Even Tolkien was never a full-time writer. He was a professor of philology until he retired. That was interesting to me because personally, I haven't had much in terms of emotional trouble being a full-time writer. I've always kind of had the ability to hyperfocus on a task, and I've been doing that for almost nine years now, and it's worked out well for me.   I've since realized that is not true for many people. One of the things that demonstrated it to me, believe it or not, was insurance actuarial tables. One thing that I tried to do after I became a full-time writer was try and get disability insurance in case I had an accident or severe illness and could not write anymore. I learned that it's extremely difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance due to their high rates of substance abuse and mental illness. I was astonished by this because I've never had problems with substance abuse or mental illness myself, but given the number of writers and other creatives I've known who have had those issues, perhaps that's not that surprising, but I was still baffled to learn that.   For example, in my area there are a number of tree management companies (because it's a heavily wooded area) and it's a lot easier for an arborist who works with a chainsaw all day to get disability insurance than it is for a writer, which is somewhat crazy to think about because as a writer, I'm mostly sitting in a chair all day pressing buttons on a keyboard while an arborist is climbing a tree or in a crane with a chainsaw, which is a much more physically dangerous thing. But because of the rates of substance abuse and mental illness among full-time writers, apparently it is very difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance. Some people struggle with the lack of structure and outward accountability that comes from being a full-time writer and find that actually decreases their productivity and leads them to fall into substance abuse or sink deeper into mental health problems. Very few people have the self-discipline and mental resilience required to be a full-time writer for years on end. And that's not me tooting my own horn so to speak, but apparently it is just the facts. Some writers even go back to full-time work just because they find it less stressful or better for their wellbeing. So I think this is an excellent example of having to know yourself and know what is best for you. For example, if you're a very extroverted person who enjoys talking to people at the office, becoming a full-time writer where you spend most of your time by yourself typing might not be the best for your long-term mental and physical health. Expectation #4: Writing full-time will make me more productive. The reality is having more time does not necessarily mean that you'll be more productive. Writers are notorious for falling prey to time wasters, such as social media scrolling, research spirals, and writing adjacent activities (of which there is a whole series about on this podcast already). It does take a lot of a self-discipline, focus, and determination to be a full-time writer. If you are a full-time writer, especially a full-time indie writer, you also have to balance writing time with various administrative tasks, marketing and ads, social media, fan correspondence, and the various tasks involved in the self-publishing process. Writing is not the only thing that writers actually do, and the other tasks often make finding time for writing more difficult than you might expect. Even traditionally published writers still have to carve out time for administrative work and assisting with marketing and social media work.   As your writing career scales up, so does the behind the scenes workload. This is true in my case. Up until 2023, I basically did everything myself, but I did have COVID pretty badly for a while in 2023 and it just knocked out my energy for a while and I realized that I can't keep trying to do everything by myself. I basically had a choice, either cut some tasks or get some help. So I have some people now, some contractors who help me with things like listening to audiobook proofs (I used to do that all myself), doing the podcast transcript, and Excel record keeping (which I used to do myself). While that is an expense, I don't regret it because it really has taken a lot off my plate and freed up more time for writing, which of course is the entire point.   Expectation #5: I admit this one made me laugh. I will have more free time as a full-time writer. I can attest firsthand that that is not true. What you have as a full-time writer is flexibility. The reality is, although there is flexibility on the job, the hours can be more than for a full-time job. There's a joke that full-time writers can work any 12 hours they want every day.   Most indie authors are putting out far more than one book a year in order to make a full-time income, and that requires a fairly demanding pace that most people don't have the self-discipline to maintain as a lifestyle for years and years on end. The majority of full-time writers right now are either romance or erotica writers who are putting out at least a book a month, sometimes even more. As I mentioned in an earlier point in the show, the administrative task can take far more time than most people would imagine. They could, depending on the circumstances, be easily 40 hours a week on their own before you have time to do a single word of writing on the page. I found you really have to guard your writing time well and find ways to keep administrative tasks, distractions, and necessary tasks such as home maintenance or childcare separate from writing.   Anyone who has ever worked from home is familiar with how difficult that can be because home comes with a wide set of distractions. Granted, that's often fewer distractions than the office, but home can have its own set of distractions. I've mentioned before that you need a bit of tunnel vision to produce the quantity of writing I do month after month. I do keep to a pretty rigid schedule. I have daily word count goals I always try to meet and I use the Pomodoro Method to make sure that I'm prioritizing my writing time.   If you are self-employed and working for yourself, that means there are no allocated vacation or sick days and no paid sick leave in the writing world. Taking a couple of weeks off usually means anticipating a loss in income, such as a month without a book being released. Sometimes, especially in the case of illness, family emergencies, and so forth, that just can't be helped. However, the long vacations people imagine writers being able to take mean either a loss of income or a couple of weeks beforehand of working extra hours to make up for it. For example, Brandon Sanderson, who is probably the most famous fantasy author right now, still works and writes on his vacations and does extra work before leaving for a vacation (such as pre-recording videos).   So as you can see, most of the expectations people have about what it's like to write full-time come from the hope that it will change their productivity or make it easier to write. In reality, if you manage your time well, you can often meet all your writing goals even while working another full-time job. Some people are even more productive under the time pressure of only having an hour or so available to write each day. You don't have to wait until you are a full-time writer for your writing career to start. I wrote for decades and published for years before I was a full-time writer.   Frankly, the idea that you need to be a full-time writer in order to be taken seriously or make money exists only in your own mind. Whether you are a full-time writer or not, what matters is having the discipline to shut out distractions and write with absolute consistency regardless of the circumstances. Even writing 250 to 300 words every single day can add up very quickly, even if you don't do it in 15 minute bursts like Anthony Trollope did.   Finally, I suppose this makes it sound like I'm painting a very bleak picture here, but I'm not. As I said before, I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do, and I'm very grateful to all my readers that I'm able to write full-time and even hire on contractors for narration and behind the scenes work. I appreciate and am very grateful to all the readers who have supported me by continuing to buy my work and access it through subscription services like Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus or library options like Libby and Hoopla.   So that is it for this week. I hope it provided some insight into what it's like to be a full-time writer. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and all 250 episodes. I hope you found the show and all 250 episodes useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In Episode 303 of History in Five Songs with Martin Popoff, Martin explores the phenomenon of "stealth platinums" — albums from hard rock and metal bands that unexpectedly went platinum in the U.S. despite being critically dismissed, commercially forgotten, or largely unloved by fans. AC/DC – “Two's Up” Blue Oyster Cult – “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” Kiss – “Let's Put the X in Sex” Scorpions – “Hold Me Tight” Nazareth – “Miss Misery” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

S2E5:A Veteran Marketer's View of How Healthcare Technology Buyers Engage in the Digital World Host: Frank Cutitta Guest: Larry Kaiser, VP, Marketing at Optimum Health To stream our Station live 24/7 visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com or ask your Smart Device to “….Play Healthcare NOW Radio”. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen

Curtis interviews Trevor Loudon to discuss the 2024 election results, Trump's first 100 days, and the Communist plot to take over Australia on May 3. He discusses his latest book, STEALTH, and explains the plans China has for America, how they captured the Democratic Party, and how they want to take over America by 2030. Dr. David Noebel said, “Stealth is the book of the century.” To get STEALTH, go to: www.TrevorLoudon.com  

In this jam-packed edition of the RattlerGator Report, J.B. White brings his signature energy, spiritual insight, and unapologetic fire to one of the most explosive episodes yet. Broadcasting from Tallahassee amid technical chaos and BB-gun vandalism, JB dives into the escalating war inside the Department of Defense, where Trump's America First appointments are triggering panic and leaks among Obama-era holdovers. Anchoring his analysis in a powerful clip from Dan Caldwell's Tucker Carlson interview, JB walks through the impressive team Trump is assembling at the Pentagon, from Pete Hegseth's embattled leadership to rising figures like Elbridge Colby, Dan Raisin Kane, and Troy Mink. He unpacks the deep-state backlash, suggesting a black-ops-style leak campaign is targeting these individuals through the Defense Policy Board, where names like Susan Rice still linger suspiciously. JB speculates on a behind-the-scenes op possibly involving Elon Musk and even hints at double-agent intrigue surrounding Rice. He also reflects on Schedule F's strategic implementation, the broader financial chess game involving Bitcoin and gold, and how Trump's subtle pressure on Jerome Powell may be part of a controlled economic takedown. From Vatican vibes to Supreme Court power plays and the CIA's murky legacy, JB weaves it all together in a riveting hour of geopolitical prophecy and patriot passion. Buckle up, Trump 2.0 is just getting started.

In this episode of Maximize Your Hunt, host Jon Teater discusses various strategies for effective hunting, focusing on land management, water management, and the importance of scouting. Joined by Ty Jennings, they delve into the significance of understanding deer behavior, core areas, and the best practices for accessing hunting spots. The conversation emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach to hunting that combines knowledge, observation, and strategic planning. In this conversation, the speakers delve into advanced hunting strategies, focusing on deer behavior, terrain features, and the importance of stealth and patience. They discuss the concept of the 'fatal funnel' where deer position themselves for safety, the significance of understanding bedding areas, and the role of weather in hunting success. The conversation emphasizes the need for careful observation and scouting, as well as the mental discipline required to execute a successful hunt. Takeaways: Water management is crucial for habitat improvement. Understanding deer behavior is key to successful hunting. Spring scouting helps in planning for the upcoming season. Food and cover are essential for creating effective habitats. Trail cameras provide valuable insights into deer movement. Accessing hunting areas from multiple directions is beneficial. Observing deer behavior can inform hunting strategies. Planning should be based on historical data and current conditions. Utilizing maps can help in visualizing deer movements. Maintaining flexibility in hunting strategies is important. Aggressive hunting requires flexibility and awareness of surroundings. Understanding deer behavior is crucial for effective hunting strategies. The 'fatal funnel' concept helps hunters predict deer movement. Identifying bedding areas is key to successful hunting. Scouting involves analyzing tracks and scat rather than just rubs. Stealth and access are critical components of a successful hunt. Deer have unique alarm responses that hunters must learn to interpret. Weather conditions can significantly impact deer behavior and hunting success. Training your observation skills enhances your ability to spot deer. Patience and focus are essential for executing a successful shot.   Social Links https://www.instagram.com/thewhitetailproject/ https://whitetaillandscapes.com/ https://www.facebook.com/whitetaillandscapes/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a textWelcome back to the Ones Ready Podcast! Today, we've got a fresh load of Pentagon nonsense, including SignalGate fallout, B-2 bombers strutting their stuff, and how the Air Force is trying to keep up with China's space game. Let's break it down:

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found Click On Picture To See Larger Picture The infrastructure has been falling apart, this is because of regulations. Trump has implemented 25% tariffs on Canada and EU on autos. Trump warns the EU and Canada, if they are try anything he will increase the tariffs, liberation day is here. The [DS] tried to trap Trump and his team by using their app Signal, they thought they would have the ability to fire Trump nominees. The plan backfired and now the people are seeing that there was no confidential info and they lied. Trump has exposed the signal app and showed the media lies. This was done because it is all connected to the overthrow of elections, Russia hoax and the impeachment hoax.   (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); Economy https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1905085621384704173 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1904934041595634162 President Trump Announces 25 Percent Tariff on Import Cars and Import Car Parts, Effective April 3rd and May 3rd Respectively   [Full Executive Order Here] The 25% import duty applies on top of any preexisting tariff for cars and light trucks.  The 25% tariff also applies to imported car parts.  The USMCA trade agreement between the U.S. Canada and Mexico still applies. If the content of a car assembled in Mexico/Canada contains 50 percent component parts from the USA, the 25% tariff only applies to the final value of the imported components. In this example the tariff rate would be 12.5% of the total value. The tariff applies to all imported cars and light trucks.  Approximately half of all cars sold in the USA are currently American made, the other half are import vehicles from mainly Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany. This is a very big kick in the teeth to Germany.  Previously in a long-term strategy to avoid U.S. tariffs, German automakers invested billions in auto assembly plants in Mexico.  Ex. the BMW parts were shipped from Germany and the cars assembled in Mexico.  Now that investment is worthless as the vehicle will be taxed at a rate of 25% regardless of whether it is assembled in Germany or Mexico. Ex.2 High end auto Mercedes currently builds SUVs in the USA in order to avoid the previous 25% tariff; however, they still build cars outside the USA and export them into the USA market.  This will likely change quickly, and Mercedes will begin building all cars and SUVs in the USA.   [SOURCE] It cannot be overstated how big a hit this will be to the German economy specifically.  That's why EU President Ursula von der Leyen is couching her words very carefully. Germany drives the economic engine of the EU, and the Germans care about their money far more than they care about the security of Ukraine.   The next biggest impact will come to Canada.  The auto-sector in Canada only exists to send cars and trucks into the U.S. market.  That's the entire purpose and business model behind the Canadian auto industry.  Every component part of a Canadian car that does not originate from USA will now be subject to a 25% tariff. Source: theconservativetreehouse.com https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1905109609150599253 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1905102546063991237   Political/Rights  Geopolitical/Police State https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1905078932925280705 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1904972878501827035 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1905293314401632507   and shot the cars along with igniting Molotov cocktails. "He used what appeared to be multiple Molotov cocktails an...