THANK YOU! November 21, 2005 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy, Sybil's Garage

Yes, a big thank you to all the folks who have sent us stories, poems, artwork, essays, booby-trapped mail, & Chinese restaurant menus. While we are still going through the last batch of submissions that came in up to midnight of last night, the tally so far is something like:

155 Submissions
132 Rejections
About 9 Stories Accepted, 3 poems
1 artwork contracted

I would also like to thank the editors who have helped to keep the slush pile manageable and the reading process smooth. Thank you to Mercurio D. Rivera, Paul Berger, Greer Woodward, Ajit George, Lauren McLaughlin, Devin J. Poore, & many Others.

I expect to send out rejections & acceptances for the last few stories and poems within the next two weeks. Feel free to query if it has been 30 days.

Now off to the fun part: the layout!

In other news, Wired reports on the news portal site called Digg. While neck-deep in computer malfunctions and network administration during the tech boom era of the late 90s, Slashdot was my home page. There I read the latest tech news, rails against Micro$oft’s [sic] monopoly, and college-student-come-lately rants about who knows what. But I became increasingly frustrated by two things. First, the tone of Slashdot is overly didactic. I feel that every post is like a homework assignment. Second, the site tends to attract people-who-think-they-are-smarter-than-they-are. Some of these oh-so-logical rants are nothing of the kind, and I soon stopped going there because I felt like I was hanging out with a bunch of sniveling teenagers. I haven’t had time to poke around with Digg yet, but one of the major differences is that the users decide which stories are worth posting. I’ve read the argument that in an “expertless” society, chaos and mob rule are the norm. Well, Digg is a perfect testbed for that mentality. I suspect that other news sites will soon follow suit.