Interesting Links #26: Forth Eorlingas!

I haven’t done an Interesting Links post in a while because I haven’t really read any interesting articles. But! This week I read a bunch of them:

-This is a fascinating article on the semi-rivalry between Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes and Charles Schulz of Peanuts, and the massive disagreement they had over merchandising. Frankly, I think I agree more with Schulz’s views on the matter than Watterson’s. Selling Out The Newspaper Comic Strip.

-I had one of the original Mac Minis back in 2006 and used it a lot, but I don’t think I would get one of the new ones: Mac Mini Review – A Testament To Apple’s Stubbornness.

-If you use Amazon’s US site from another country and you had trouble accessing it in October/November, this might be the reason why: KDP Books Unavailable To International Readers.

-Speaking of that, Amazon has been having a lot of glitches this year, and an internal database migration is probably the reason why. I was in IT for a long time, and the thought of migrating databases on that scale makes my head hurt: Amazon’s move off Oracle caused Prime Day outage in one of its biggest warehouses, internal report says

-I’ve written a bunch of my recent books on a Surface Pro computer, so I will be interested to read this history of the Surface line: Beneath A Surface: Shipping November 29th.

-And this, ladies and gentlemen, is reason number #46,983 to self-publish. You don’t have to deal with what George Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of publishers and editors: A Glimpse Into The Ideological Monoculture Of Literary New York.

-Here is really good advice for authors with email lists: Email Marketing As An Author.

-It’s been fifteen years since THE RETURN OF THE KING came out in film, and I still think the charge of the Rohirrim was one of the coolest scenes in the history of movies: Ride of the Rohirrim at 15: how Lord of the Rings gave us cinema’s greatest cavalry charge.

-JM