@Mary-Anna said: Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do. I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines. Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago. My husband loves short stories but they’ve never been my favourite. However, some of my most memorable reading experiences have been short stories by Stephen King. In fact, I absolutely loved when he published The Green Mile originally. It was in “chapbook” form, inspired by Charles Dickens. They were released one a month, IIRC, and I looked forward to each one. As much as I loved that experience and others I have had with short story collections, as MaryAnna said, I generally don’t get short story collections even when written by authors I love. Short stories do seem to fall into two camps (at least from what I’ve noticed). Highly literary authors (Margaret Atwood, for example, has a number of books that are her collected short stories), and genre authors. Sci fi and fantasy collections of short stories are published all the time, and I actually will read the stories by my favourite authors! But I don’t know why I am less inclined to do so with, for example, realistic fiction.

@jon-nyc Hilarious

What Bernard said. Most of us would like to look forward.

This is great. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of hydrogen since, to date, it has basically been a battery technology not a true energy source. But this is different. Apparently there are around 2x the recoverable reserves of hydrogen as there are of nat gas. I had no idea!

Glad everyone is OK.

Out for a walk around a local Wildlife Trust area with ponds and river and there were loads of ox eye daisy, flocks and campion. And lovely water lilies [image: 1781236077354-20260607_120015-resized.jpg] Meanwhile my sisters garden is in full bloom with yellow scabious [image: 1781236426195-20260609_130953.jpg] A pure white peony [image: 1781236447723-20260609_130813-resized.jpg] And rampant fragrant rose with clematis [image: 1781236523498-20260609_130719.jpg]

It’s clearly the work of those same aliens responsible for crop circles.

I just did a Google's AI search about relations between country x and country y. I thought I was reading Cold War propaganda. It was wild.

[image: 1781183934674-img_2824.jpeg]

Oh, it just occurred to me that maximum annual contribution and market volatility are not related to each other. Duh. I had to leave the USAA page alone and do something else. It's almost sunset. It's finally cooled off again. I might return to it tonight. I might wait until tomorrow.

@Mark Place "WOW" emoji here.

My grandfather kept one for upkeep on the farm ditches. He called them by an older name, "motor patrol". He would stand and watch it work. He would stop it and tell the driver what he wanted more frequently than was necessary I am sure. The water drainage district did more of that work in later years. No doubt my grandfather told them how to do it.

@AdagioM said: Ewww. But well played. Exactly that. Thanks