💌Hanlon’s Reader #9: April Newsletter

"Sometimes, you have to roll a hard six." 🦇L⭐

Apr 25, 2024

^📅Monthly Update: April 2024

You ever had to deal with an interrupter before?

It’s the kind of person who stops you mid-sentence by interjecting and simply talking over you until you shut up and let them finish. They ask a question, and before you can finish your answer they’re already speaking over you again. When you try to clarify, they branch off to another topic before you can resolve the first thing.

This isn’t me leading into some weird trick that short-circuits the interrupter’s brain and teaches them to correct their behavior, I’m just venting. Maybe I take everyday respect for granted, but it’s not hard! 😐

I come from the school of thought that says, “Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?”

The Office Star Shares His Thoughts On What Kevin Malone Is Doing Now

I don’t speak as often as others, but when I do say something I try to make sure it’s meaningful or contributes something. So getting into a back-and-forth where half the points made get lost can be frustrating.

Anyway, it’s all good, it’s whatever! 😤

I’ve got more content lined up to fill out the worldbuild-y AI art and graphics projects like the 📗Compendium of Beasts and 🌌Planetary Tour. It was fun to scratch that itch—working on this helped me develop some finer details, solidify my universe, and just… make something new.

🔃 In Progress

📘 The Star Pirate’s Folly - Epilogue

Well, here we are… finally at the end. For those of you reading as I’ve posted, your interest has been much appreciated! Tomorrow 4/25 when the epilogue arrives in your inbox or notifications or whatever and you read through the final pages, it would really help me out as an independent author if you let me know your thoughts.

So if you could just go ahead and Like/Share/Comment… that’d be terrific.

Buy Me A Coffee ☕

Or (now that Substack has DMs) you can send me a Direct Message which will be private and you don’t have to worry about what anyone else thinks of what you say! Except me I guess. Anyway, let me know how this story hit you—where’d it ring true, where’d it miss the mark? What are you looking forward to, or imagining?

📘The Star Pirate’s Folly — α | 1 | 2 | 3 | … | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34

The Star Pirate’s Folly will stay available in full, free on Substack until June 1, 2024. Now that it’s done, I’ll be going back through to add any missing hyperlinks so that readers can go through the entire thing in order from any chapter. I got lazy after a certain point fur sure. 😬

❗❗ Upcoming:

Part 3 concluding *Strange Harvest* short series

🎁 Bonus Content:

OK surely at this point all the office references are a dead giveaway, IT’S SPREADSHEETIN’ TIME!! You know what we’re gonna learn today? It’s probably the single most useful thing I’ve come across in my (so far brief) career.

Q U E R I E S

Let’s go, hop in and try it out, it’s easy! New sheet

Click the + to add a new tab Sheet2 and copy/paste these columns of simple example data into your sheet in cell A1:

Book	Chapter	Name	Wordcount
The Hero's Journey	1	You	1000
The Hero's Journey	2	Need	1250
The Hero's Journey	3	Go	1500
The Hero's Journey	4	Search	1000
The Hero's Journey	5	Find	1250
The Hero's Journey	6	Take	1500
The Hero's Journey	7	Return	1000
The Hero's Journey	8	Changed	1250

Then go back to Sheet1 and copy/paste this:

=query(Sheet2!$A:$D,"Select * where A is not null")

Yellow highlight = cell query formula is in

So let’s break this down. If you double click on the cell the formula is pasted in, you can bring up this handy little popup window that explains each of the required or optional variables in the formula.

Clicking on the different parts of the query will highlight the corresponding variable which lets you know where to look to get more info if you’re not sure what the formula needs, what order, etc. This tooltip thing is SO, SO helpful! 💚

So what are we even looking at? Basically, this query is looking on Sheet2 for columns A through D, selecting all of the rows in A through D where the value in column A isn’t blank. The $ are to lock those ranges in place in case you move the formula within the sheet—learning about this is a whole other lesson in itself.

Mainly, the reason queries are great is because you can specify a crazy amount of complicated conditions within them (or simple ones). Let’s say I want to know which chapters of the book are at least 1250 words. Go into your query cell on Sheet1 and add this into the “Select” portion of the formula after “null” but before the final set of double quotes:

and D >= 1250

Now we’ve told it, “I only want to see rows where A isn’t blank and D is at least 1250.” So the query has filtered out any rows with a chapter length less than 1250. But wait, there’s more!!! What if we don’t care about seeing the chapter name, and we only want to see chapters greater than 1250 words??😲

=query(Sheet2!$A:$D,"Select A,B,D where A is not null and D > 1250")

So if you have a big set of data where you only need certain columns, and/or certain rows based on certain conditions, queries can be your best friend! 🤩

Can you guess these quotes? 💬

This list just keeps growing! Highlight → Right click → Restack to your people and see if anyone knows these:

💌#4: "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from." ☀🏜

💌#5: 😎 "Kaneda! What do you see?!" 🌞

💌#6: 📦 "The test is simple. Remove your hand from the box, and you die." 💉

💌#7: 🃏➡ "A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left." ⬅🃏

💌#8: 🗡 "May thy knife chip and shatter." 🗡

Previously Guessed on Hanlon’s Reader

💌#1: "If you ain't first, you're last." 🏁 🏎💨
✅ Guessed by: El Generico II - Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

💌#2: "... it'll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly." 👾 🌃🚸🌃 👾
✅ Guessed by: Architectonic - Alien (1979)

💌#3: "All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's?" 😐🍷 🍷🤔
✅ Guessed by: El Generico II - The Princess Bride (1987)