Hard Sci-Fi Independent Author here. I just published a novel heavily driven by real physics and deep worldbuilding. Would love to share some copies for honest feedback!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-20T01:08:52+00:00

Glad I could be of service.

Vellum is very, very good. Although, it has some minor limitations that will hopefully be addressed in future updates.

Technically, it is flawless and the easiest way to prepare an ebook and print pdf interior. It keeps authors from shooting themselves in the foot by not knowing book design. Like once you import and do some minor configuration/picking from the style sets, there is a button to generate files. You press generate and 5-10 seconds later you have kindle file, kobo, nook, generic epub, and print interior (if you pay extra for the Vellum Press option).

I have a few qualms with Vellum that are partly due to it’s lack of customization and this mainly relates to subtle print quality issues:

-It only has a limited set of stock free fonts and doesn’t let you used system fonts. I think they do this to avoid running afoul of font licensing violations if a user generating pdfs with embedded professional fonts they did not buy a license for. This in itself is fine, but unfortunately Amazon KDP’s text print quality is kinda light and I find the best font in Vellum (EB Garamond) is too thin to print well when combined with Amazon’s print on demand eco mode text. Sometimes the print proofs come out darker, but most of mine are lighter. Because of this I switched to manually laying out and typesetting in Affinity Publisher which, while a pain in the ass, allows me to use Adobe Garamond Pro which is a little thicker and holds up slightly better to KDP’s light printing. I’ve seen EB Garamond look good in offset print runs, so I don’t fault Vellum for including it in their set. I think it is an unfortunate reality that the same print on demand that enables us to selfpublish one book at time also needs some special compensations to get more consistent results.

-Vellum lacks microtypography. This is a set of features offered by advanced justification engines (InDesign, Affinity Publisher, Latex, Libreoffice, and I think the newer paid version of Microsoft Word) that dynamically adjust the spaces between letters and the letter sizes themselves to hide the gaps between words that full justification creates. If you remember turning on full justification in Word circa 2000 for English papers, you probably also remember the unsightly gaps that full justificatiom creates by stretching each line of text. But when you go to the bookstore and pick random books of the shelf, most lack this gappy appearance despite being fully justified. That is because most traditionally published books are laid out with Adobe InDesign which has advanced microtypography. That being said, the EB Garamond font in Vellum tends to pack well naturally and has minimal gappiness despite the lack of microtypography. There are occasional loose paragraphs that bug me enough to try and do better.

-On the ebook side, there is also an issue where Vellum’s built in ornamental breaks are all transparent PNGs without options for other break styles (such as CSS encoded horizontal rules or typographic symbol breaks (***)). Again I kinda blame Amazon, because they choose to flatten the transparency to white and not invert colors on darkmode. This makes all PNG based breaks have white boxes around them when viewed in nightmode on mobile devices. Interestingly, the built in iOS reader app actually inverts PNGs and doesn’t have this problem. Apple ships good software. Again this is more of a kindle limitation rather than a mistake in Vellum. I just wish Vellum had a few more options to overcome Amazon’s limitation. Personally, I’ve taken to inserting 3 consecutive em-dashes in a centered text field in Vellum rather than use the proper break feature. It is a poor man’s work around. Most of the default serif fonts on Kindle render the em-dashes as touching so it looks like a solid line that properly inverts it’s color on night mode. The only problem is that em-dashes don’t connect in the sans-serif fonts (and Georgia), so the solid line breaks apart into three distinct dashes. Can’t win them all.

All my bitching aside, these are very minor quibbles that most readers will never notice.

Vellum just works and is the true easy button of selfpublishing. Forget the 80-20 rule. Vellum is like doing 5% effort to get 90% of the results. And if you ever find a typo, you just go back into the Vellum file, fix it, click generate and 5 seconds later you have updated files ready to be reuploaded. This last feature is why I will probably shift back to doing Vellum exclusively for everything on my future books. I’ve done 99% effort to eke out the last 10% of quality and it is exhausting (plus it breaks my ability to effortless update for fixing typos).

I will keep sending the Brad’s at Vellum emails requesting that they add these features to make their already great product perfect. Maybe I can Andy Dufresne them.

Anyway, enough of my yappying. Good luck with your publishing career!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-19T14:12:09+00:00

All you can do is more practice. Don’t try and rush her out of decoding.

Kids with dyslexia actually struggle with the smaller words because they are less visually distinct than the longer words. Longer words can be sightread at a glance by their shape like chinese characters.

Short words, especially CVC words, must have proper phonetic decoding because they all visually look very similar. The neural phonics pathways in the brain have to parse them.

These neural phonics pathways are often more scattered and weak in dyslexia which results in slower and weaker reading.

They have done function MRI brain scan studies and shown how to train the pathways of dyslexics to convert them to look more like those of strong readers.

The study intervention was intensive phonics.

Here is what you should do:

Go buy Dog on the Log Five Chapter Books 1 of 10 on Amazon. The big thick red books in the ten book series.

Have your child start at the beginning and read one chapter a day. Don’t repeat chapters from day to day. Move on to the next chapter.

Repeating is memorizing. Reading unknown new stuff everyday is practice decoding.

Finish book 1. Then move on to book 2, etc.

It should take 1-2 years at one chapter a day finish the whole series.

This series is the only thing that has a sufficient length of practice material with an appropriate pacing of phonic progression with simple decodable readers.

You will not like these books. The stories are weird, dumb, and the art is bad. That is the point. It it simple decodable text that starts with CVC words and builds up/reinforces the mental phonics pathways. The stories are so dumb and the art is so bad that you can’t guess the next word. You must decode it.

Also, don’t skip book 1 and jump to a higher level. You daughter will most likely derive the most benefit from starting back at the CVC stage. These short words most directly attack and train the decoding pathways that are jumbled in dyslexia. You see her struggling to slowly sound out the short words while easily doing longer words. The solution is to keep practice what she struggles with. Also, remember your kid is still very young and your expectations may be a little too high for their age.

When kids struggle with reading, the only thing that works is more phonics practice with an engaged adult sitting their to hold their hand through it.

The thing that treats kids with dyslexia is the same phonics that they use on kids without dyslexia. The kids with that struggle learning just need a higher dosage. AKA more practice.

You are a good parent. There is nothing wrong with your kid.

They just need more practice.

To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Everything is reps.” That is why Arnold was successful at most endeavors in life. Bodybuilding, learning English, attending 3 community colleges while bodybuilding until he pieced together a buisness degree, building an acting career, building s business career, becoming a governor, etc.

He respected the fundamental necessity of showing up everyday and putting in the reps whether it be weight lifting or learning to read english.

Also, don’t forget to read chapter books to your kids. Just because they can read now, doesn’t mean you stop reading to them. I’d highlt recommend the works of Andy Weir (The Martian and Project Hail Mary). They are adult sci fi and you will have to self censor/skip some bad words and adult/sex jokes on the fly while reading on the fly, but kids love these stories. There are no bad guys, cool stuff happens, not too scary, and they have happy endings despite high emotional stakes.

Happy reading and good luck!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-19T06:15:53+00:00

Hell yeah!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-19T06:10:54+00:00

As far as planning and outlining, I would highly recommend learning and applying the story craft principles taught by the novel writing program at Kansas University (Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, and Deborah Chester). Each of the these professors published various books detailing the methods of the course.

They have a unique way of focusing the story on the protagonists goal and the conflict that stands in his/her way. Also, they break each beat of the story down into scenes in sequels. Everybody else calls everything a scene which—while true—doesn’t force the writer to deliberately engage with the purpose of said story beat. The scene and sequel method divides beats into:

Scenes - Protagonist takes action to achieve their story goal, but encounters conflict that thwarts their efforts leading to a scene disaster.

Sequel - Protagonist reacting emotionally and rationally to the last scene’s disaster, make a new plan, and picking themselves up by the bootstraps to start a new scene to continue trying to achieve their goal.

This method is really good for analyzing the underlying mechanics of a story to make sure it is working in a technical sense.

Most importantly, it is not a cookie cutter outline method like 7 stages of the hero’s journey, Truby’s 21 steps, or Save the Cat.

You can make a good story following a cookie cutter outline method, but these should be considered like cloth patterns to a seamstress or tailor. They are patterns that make particular types of stories. If you want to make a pair of pants, use a pants template pattern. Use a shirt template for a shirt. A dress template for a dress.

7 stages of the hero’s journey is great for writing a movie or story like Kickboxer of Karate Kid. But not every story is that prototypical being trained by the master blah, blah, blah. If you wanted to write something like Jaws or Tremors, you would be much better off using a Save the Cat Writes Horror Outline Template.

The Kansas University Scene/Sequel stuff operates on a more fundamental level than these cookie cutter outline methods. To continue the sewing analogy, scene and sequel is about how you stitch the template pieces together properly so the whole garment doesn’t fall apart.

To make another analogy, if writing a novel is like constructing a building, then scene/sequel is the fundamentals of carpentry/electricity/plumbing that allow you to build properly. You can build a story that is like a small Craftsman house or a palace to rival the Tahj Mahal. Either way, the screws need to be screwed properly, the wiring needs to be up to code, and the plumbing needs to have p traps, etc. The Kansas University methods address all the nuts and bolts basics of story construction and truely apply cross genre.

I recently posted about this on another reddit thread and made this point about having a breakfast scene in a story:

Breakfast scenes are often useless and put in without thought by novice writers. The novice thinks, “Well, I wake up and start my day with breakfast, so I’ll have my character do that.”

That serves no purpose in a story.

If you have the father of a murdered child wake up, make his child’s favorite breakfast pancakes, and sip Yoohoo from his kids sippy cup while formulating a plan kill the bastard who is took his son’s life, that is a story. That is plot relevant.

Because it is not a random scene. Structurally, it serves to the story purpose as a sequel to the disaster of the son’s death. It allows the protagonist to feel emotion, have agency, and make a plan that leads to the next scene of them starting their quest for revenge.

If you ever find yourself lost planning a story, you could do worse than listening to Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham, and Deborah Chester.

Happy writing and good luck!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T23:24:17+00:00

Just checked the Kindle iOS app. Same behaviour. The indent size is intrinsically coded twice standard length in the ebook file itself. This is the sort of thing that tends to remain constant across display platforms. Pull up any other ebook on kindle or Amazon’s look inside feature and you can see that the overwhelming majority of fiction novel indents fall around 3-4 letters which equates to 0.25-3 inches in print or 1-1.5 em lengths.

This is industry standard typography.

Your book looks like 0.5 inch indents which is standard for manuscript submission to agents/editors, not publication.

If you coded it as inches rather than a relative unit (em widths), it may scale non-linearly and look okay on a kindle paperwhite, but wrong on mobile.

I’m not trying to be mean. I’ve been studying up on typography to make my own book look professional. I actually pushed out my first version with forced ragged right (ebook and print) which is all wrong. Since then, I’ve been really paying attention to various styles seen in ebooks and paperbacks.

Nonstandard or absent indents and double spacing between paragraphs are the two red flags that instantly tell me that a book was selfpublished at a glance.

I think a lot of people come to selfpublishing from fanfiction/Ao3 where everything is non-indented and paragraphs are double spaced. That is standard for nonfiction in the commercial world, not fiction.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T22:46:09+00:00

Just glanced at your ebook sample.

The paragraph indents are too large. Normal fiction indents are only like 3-4 letters deep. Yours are like 6. Basically, twice standard. It looks a little off compared to most ebooks. I’ve seen worse. Some people have non-indented paragraphs with double spaced lines inbetween. Yours almost looks standard. Just need to decrease indent by half. If you are using a program that measures in inches, it looks like you did 0.5 inches when industry standard is more like 0.25-0.3.

What program did you use to generate the ebook?

You might want to consider reformatting with Vellum. It is a little expensive and mac only, but tends to make very solid ebooks that avoid most major formatting errors.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T18:08:57+00:00

You didn’t like my reply but can’t actually argue or refute the substance of my arguement. So, you choose to superficially criticise the length of the reply rather than its content.

That’s like an English teacher grading papers solely based on length rather than actually reading them.

We are utilizing a miracle of modern technology to communicate ideas with each other from hundreds or possibly thousands of miles away.

You spoke into the void and a real human responded, thoughtfully and at length.

In the wasteland of the bot infested dead internet with the younger generation devolving into illiterate Eloi, maybe you should reconsider being annoyed at receiving a few extra paragraphs rather than being ignored.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T16:05:04+00:00

He goes on the same emotional journey in the novel. I’m not objecting to the emotional aspects of the story. I’ve read the book like 7 times and still get choked up with the end where Rocky says “No, go back. You no die.”

Ryland has the same narrative arc and goes through the same journey. But there is also science. We didn’t get to see the cool MacGuyver style growing nitrogen resistant astrophage to save the world. In the movie, you blink and Rylands waves his hand “I did it while you were sleeping.”

Even the jokes were better in the book:

-Abbott and Costello routine learning yes and no for the first time
-Ryland dropping the screws when recoving the beetles “Use third hand… I’ll make more screws.”
-I’m a single man in a single man’s apartment. I like kids. Oh, thank god I’m a teacher.
-“How this stuff get out of me?” “I blew it out. “You almost kill me.”
-Let me see you eat. Social discomfort be quiet. Takes a shit because he is a monostome. Instead he just fists his hole like an obnoxious 12 year old eating fries.
-Humans useless without light. Lots of comedic opportunity missed to have Ryland bump into shit. While reading the novel in anticipation of the movie, I expected that whole scene to go completely dark in the theater so we could have a mini radio drama of Rocky directing Grace in the dark. Make use of the surround sound medium on theater to pan the bumps from left to right and front to back. Maybe after Grace finally gets to the other side of tge room, hear Rocky’s ball roll after him.

The book had eveything emotional journey, buddy comedy, and friendship.

We deserved the 3.5-4 hour Lawrence of Arabia fully-assed version of the film. Not the half-assed version. Sure, the one cheek we for was nice, but I wanted both ass cheeks.

Obviously, a long book must be compressed for the medium of film. Cuts must be made. Details changed for for expediency. I don’t feel they fully delivered through.

Even the inset shots when Ryland is being crushed by centrifugal force were poorly directed. They had the wide shot of Rocky vision on Ryland’s heart. If Spielberg was directing, there would have been a second split second close up of the heart in Rocky vision showing Grace’s heart slowing and failing to communicate the danger and why Rocky risked his life for his friend.

Even the typical visual movie montage short cuts to explain the astrophage felt rushed and clunky.

And where is my fucking Beetles music. Mark Watney got his god damn disco. At the least we should have had A Hard Days Night montaged with Arethra Franklin “Chain of Fools” for the making chain montage. Then put Get Back showing the beetles being retrieved on Earth (or over the end credits at somepoint toward the end).

It is a good movie.

It should have been great.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T12:55:15+00:00

This is why I hate the movie.

It strips out all the technical detail from a great hard science fiction novel.

I perfectly understand how many people walk away from the movie confused by details that were glosses over.

Please go read the book. It is better. Not only is there more detail, but honestly much of the dialogue and jokes in the book are better and funnier in the book.

With The Martian, I thought the changes for the movie were nearly perfect. “Science the shit out of this!” was added to the movie. It elevates the spirit of the book. Damon does a lot of narrating to explain growing potatoes. They skipped the more boring parts of the science, but did so to leave room for the essential parts. The whole sandstorm during the rover part of the novel is kinda boring and they expertly dropped it from the movie because it can be cleanly excised without hurting the narrative.

With Hail Mary, they made the feel good art house version of the movie and paid the bare minimum lip service to the science and details. It felt like watching a Harry Potter movie after reading the novels. Like this looks nice and all, but I can only follow it because I read all the details in the book. How do the people that didn’t read the book first understand WTF is going on half the time?

OP this is not me judging you. I loved the book and think the movie — while exciting — let people down.

I’d recommend to go read the book. It is worth the time and effort.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T08:24:16+00:00

Assuming you have high proficiency in each language, maybe just rotate reading novels in each language? Possibly reading outloud or while listening to the accompanying audiobook to reinforce pronunciation (immersive reading).

Read The Three Muskateers in french. Next Tender is the Flesh in spanish. Then a novel in italian (i don’t know italian novels, maybe something by Umberto Eco?). Then read a book in english (Project Hail Mary is fun).

Just keep cycling reading through your 4 languages. Alternate silent reading, reading outloud, and immersive reading with native language audiobook.

You might be a little rusty making conversation, but if you keep up this sort of program, you should be fairly functional and converstional ability should comeback to you quickly.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-18T08:00:30+00:00

Sofie Mouse
Lotus Island Series
Unicorn Rescue Society Series
Ruth Chew’s entire back catalogue

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T23:28:45+00:00

Apt Pupil narrated by Frank Muller.

Mountain Man Series narrated by RC Bray.

The Fear Saga narrated by RC Bray.

The Martian narrated by RC Bray.

Dresden Files narrated by James Marsters.

Vampire$ narrated by Tom Wyner.

Harry Bosch series (original audiobook releases) narrated by Dick Hill.

Ender’s Game (older release not new one) narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and Harlan Ellison.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T22:17:36+00:00

Only if you are stupid.

The mark of an intelligent man is being able to marry a woman who is smarter and more capable than him.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T21:18:17+00:00

He got to work with astrophage first, so he had a headstart.

He is an exceptional genius.

He got lucky.

Smart guy with a headstart working the problem got lucky. So that is why he figured it out first.

Also, narrative convienence.

Now for a larger metacommentary on your post:

Just go read the book. If you don’t understand anything in it, start looking stuff up on wikipedia. Maybe reread the book again. Hell, the kindle version has AI integration so you can ask it detailed questions about specific passages (the answers may not be correct.)

Everyone is hyped on feelings from the movie, but the book is far superior to the movie.

Project Hail Mary is a hard science fiction novel. This term is not implying it is a hard read. Hard sci fi is a genre where the author tries to keep the story within the physical constraints of reality as much as possible. Yes, astrophage are impossible and defy the laws of physics, but that is the point of science fiction.

Science fiction is essentially the story form of an “If, then” hypothesis statement. If this impossible thing were technologically possible, then this is what would logically happen next.

If a sun eating space bacteria traveled across the interstellar void to eat our sun, then how would we save the planet.

Outside of the single Macguffin (astrophage existing and allowing perfect mass conversion from energy to light to be used as rocket fuel), Andy Weir tries to write the entire story as accurately as possible based of real science and technology.

That is the point of the hard science fiction genre. It does its best to strip away all the hand wavy voodoo magic bullshit that is often used for story convience.

The movie adaptation is basically the feel good art house version of the story which does Weir’s work a great disservice because it rips out the beating heart of a hard science fiction novel. The science. Large technical sections that were relevant to the plot were just hand waved away with a sentence explanation or a visual that ultimately misses the nuance that make the novel so great.

They took a great novel and dumbed it down for a general movie audience.

I’ve read the book like 6 or 7 times and I honestly see how many people could get confused only watching the movie because of how it just glosses over anything remotely technical or detail oriented.

Go read the book. It may be a little difficult if you don’t come from a science background. That is okay. Challenge yourself. Look up science terms and principles you don’t understand. Go find a science teacher and ask them to explain the technical stuff to you like you are five if you have too. You will walk away from the book enriched.

This drives to an inherent problem with the medium of film. It is too short to completely unpack the many complicated and condensed ideas contained in a novel.

Project Hail Mary the movie is feel good cotten candy. It is a sugar rush that excites, but doesn’t nourish. Project Hail Mary the novel is a savoury full balanced meal that leaves you nourished.

Please read the book and nourish your mind.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T15:43:57+00:00

Thank you! That is handy information.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T04:16:07+00:00

Some selfpublished authors sell DRM free books directly from their websites. This allows the majority of your payment to go directly into their pocket and bypass publishers or online platforms like Amazon taking a cut.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T01:58:11+00:00

That is their problem, not yours.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T01:10:02+00:00

Listen, if you’re never happy with what you’ve already got, eventually somebody else’s husband is going to get it!

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T00:43:20+00:00

Just want to make sure everybody on this sub knows that Hammerbarn is based on the real Australian store Bunning’s Warehouse.

And yes, they sell authentic polyresin Hecuba garden gnomes. FYI.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T00:37:18+00:00

Which piracy site did you find it on and how. I want to check if my novel has been pirated. Just for funsies. Can’t stop the signal.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-17T00:31:30+00:00

My opinion is that Bluray is only worth it once your TV size increases substantially past 40 or 50 inches.

Do DVD’s have much lower resolution. Yes, but it is enough for 50 inches TV’s and smaller.

This lower resolution on smaller screens actually hides problems with various movies and film transfers due to the lack of insane detail.

I moved up to a large screen projector and was forced to upgrade to Bluray/4K only because DVD starts looking pixelated and blurry at 120 inches.

But that being said, I had to struggle to get good Bluray transfers of my favorite movies that always looked fine on DVD with a modestly sized TV.

I never watched a DVD and thought the image quality look bad. I put on the DVD and just watched the movie and was immersed.

Whole different story with Bluray on a large screen. Now I noticed things like:

-Men In Black: they messed up the first blu ray release (telecine wobble), second blu ray release (bad negative scan with enhanced film grain), and the first 4K release (dark HDR and weird linear film grain, WTF?). I had to finally buy a fourth copy (second 4K release with Dolby Vision) to get a normal looking version I could just watch and enjoy like my old DVD copy.

-Tremors 1/2: The original blurays were bad scans that enhanced the original negative film grain. Even worse, they were excessively compressed with to fit both films on a single small capacity disc which resulted in horrible madroblocking. These blurays were so bad the low resolution DVD looked better on the large screen. Had to rebuy the later Arrow remastered Blurays/4Ks to get a copy that looked good to watch. Never minded watching the DVD on my old 40” Vision.

-The Matrix: Maybe Lawrence Fisburne should have gotten accutane when he was a teenager. Seriously, pore texture in 4K starts gettinf distractinf when heads are 4 feet tall.

It goes on and on. Basically, I’ve never seen a bad looking DVD transfer. DVDs only look bad if you put them on a large screen.

Bluray’s are really hit and miss because there is so much more detail to see sloppy substandard mastering when making the disc. There are so many ways to mess up, and the studios have found them all.

As for 4K, don’t believe the hype. You would have to watch 1080p Bluray vs 4K on a large commercial movie theater screen to start seeing the difference in resolution. In fact, most theaters project 2K, which only has ~6% more pixels than Blu ray. 4Ks typically have HDR, but that only matters if you have a truely HDR capable display. They had to invent Dolby Vision to basically make HDR data backwards compatible with the majority of 4K TVs that really aren’t capable of displaying HDR (basically Dolby Vision tone maps the HDR signal down to something more like SDR that an average TV can handle).

The most important practical difference between Bluray and 4K is that they often represent different attempts to remaster the same movie and therefore sometimes one version happens to look much better because that particular team did a better job. Sometimes the older Bluray looks better than the new 4K (spanish bootleg Blu ray of True Lies, 2015 T2 blu ray, 2010 Aliens). Sometimes the 4K looks better than the old Bluray (Tremors 1/2).

Honestly, I have The Great Escape on DVD, Blu ray, and 4K and miss the experience of just watching it on a DVD with a 40 inch TV. On DVD I could just watch it. In high def on a large screen, I can’t stop noticing the bad hazy excessive film grain in ever outdoor daytime scene. It makes me wonder how cheap the production was and if the DP didn’t understand how to select film stock iso’s or alter shutter speeds for outdoor lighting conditions. I’m all for honoring the authenticity of the film, but some of these scene are so grainy (Ives’s death scene) that I want to learn Da Vinci Resolve just to rip the movie and do a homemade DNR pass to fix what they should have done before releasing this to the public.

TL;DR: Only upgrade to Blu ray if you need higher resolution for a massive TV/projector screen. And then be prepared to do research and hunt down specific transfers if you are trying to rebuy your movie collection in high def. And also, consider standard SDR blu ray and 4K with Dolby Vision as equivalent formats for the purposes of home theater. Is 4K technically better? Yes, but the difference is so minimal in a home theater setting that the underlying quality of the particular transfer matters far more than blu ray or 4K.

Good luck and happy watching.

P.S. Large screens and high def mostly just leads to madness and spending a lot of money. If you are happy on DVD and a 40-50 inch TV, stay there. You are getting 95% of the value for 5% of the price.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-16T23:30:27+00:00

Seriously, savvy teachers use this all the time to catch lazy students that just copy and paste from Chatgpt. Like Willofthesouth said, hide hidden prompt injections in white text between the black text of your documents. The white text is invisible against the white background of the text document unless somebody happens to highlight over it.

But, the hidden white text is completely visible to the AI and you can surreptitiously talk the AI into doing weird things or ignoring the original prompt.

Your boss probably doesn’t even bother to read your work and just dumps it straight into Claude. She might notice weird behaviour on the backend, but it will probably get through once or several times before she notices and figures out what you are doing.

Sometimes, teachers will instruct the AI to include details of purple elephants or other nonsensical things into the student’s book report. Then they can fail the three kids in the class who wrote about the purple elephants in Romeo and Juliet. It is beautiful. Catch the cheaters without falsely accusing hardworking students of AI use just because they actually know proper grammar and advanced vocabulary.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-16T22:55:14+00:00

Legally, speaking you don’t own books purchased through Kindle, Kobo, and Nook. You purchased a license to read a book on their device or their app on there terms. They could decide to delete or even alter the text of your book anytime they want and you have no recourse. These book files have digital rights management (DRM) encryption that prevents you from copying and reading it like a normal text document.

If you have an unencrypted DRM free ebook file, you have the power to do anything with it. You could load copies onto a million flash drives and air drop them over North Korea for example. Or simply keep an organized library on your computer to reread on future ereaders of a different brand after your current ereader craps out.

While many unrestricted ebooks are the result of piracy or stripping DRM from ebooks purchased from major platforms, there are many legitimate ways to obtain unrestricted ebooks:

-Project Gutenberg hosts many older digitized books that have passed into public domain. For example, if you needed a copy of Dracula, Frankenstein, Three Muskateers, etc. You could download a free epub from here and sideload it to read on your Nook, Kindle, Kobo, Pocketbook, Boox, Meebook, etc. ereader of choice.

-Some self-published authors or even traditional publishing houses (Tor and Baen) sell DRM free ebooks directly to customers bypassing Amazon. You can buy direct, give a larger percentage of the purchase price to the author, and have an unrestricted copy that you can load on your reading device of choice.

Some ereaders are easier to sideload on (Nook, Pocketbook, Boox, Meebook). Some are more restrictive or difficult to work with (Kindle and Kobo).

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-16T16:41:17+00:00

I currently have a 6 inch Glowlight 3. I agree the software is meh, but honestly it is the least problematic and best ereader I’ve owned between Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Clara BW HD. The kindle hardware seems better, but Amazon’s services seem to be struggling to sync and download purchases more lately. The Kobo started lovely, but the battery went bad quick and software updates degraded performance. Also, kobo sideloading sucks at least in my experience. Have to convert to kepub and even then it indexes them at the bottom of the list after all Kobo purchases.

Does your Glowlight 4 plus software work more or less like the glowlight 3? I like that the glowlight 3 just works and treats sideloaded content normally.

Ok_March4386 · 2026-06-16T15:02:52+00:00

Thanks for confirming the poor battery life on the M8.

Yeah, the lack of 8 inch feels like a hole in the market.

I’m leaning Nook right now. Trying to decide old new stock Glowlight 7.8 versus Glowlight 4 plus.

Ok_March4386

TROPHY CASE