morning, computer

🌐 TODAY IS MONDAY 17jun24

• London overtakes Paris as Europe’s biggest stock market after Macron’s election gamble
• The loudspeakers deployed by South Korea to wage psychological warfare against North Korea faced audits and legal battles claiming they are too quiet
• Here comes Europe’s ‘foreigners out!’ generation

📡 DIVERS, SPACE BEES, GRAVEYARDS

“High-speed baby stars circle the supermassive black hole Sgr A* like a swarm of bees.”

Observational astronomy shows that newly discovered young stellar objects (YSOs) in the immediate vicinity of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* located in the center of our galaxy behave differently than expected. They describe similar orbits to already known young evolved stars and are arranged in a particular pattern around the supermassive black hole.

Shyama Golden.

Ago Bay lies beneath a rolling coastline lined with lush green trees in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. A peninsula protects it from the Pacific, but on a windy day the sea turns white with waves and the trees shiver all the way up the bluff. It’s here, in these waters, that you find the legendary Ama, the female freedivers who have sought pearls, lobsters, abalone and more for 3,000 years. 

And I found this via Jay last night: ostensibly about the Old School Renaissance, a movement in tabletop role-playing games, it sources some scary quotes about US book publishing:

The DOJ’s lawyer [the DOJ having brought the antitrust case] collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

And:

Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, State of Emergency, has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan. The journalist and media personality Piers Morgan had a weaker showing in the United States [than the UK]. Despite his followers on Twitter (8 million) and Instagram (1.8 million), Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts has sold just 5,650 U.S. print copies since it was published a year ago, according to BookScan.

and:

[I]n 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies.

All of which makes me think about many things, not least being how I put a return to self-publishing aside again due to lack of time. Maybe I should make the time. Maybe it’s okay to retrace my steps.