Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Don Webb

Out of Hand

This must be the “hands” issue. First we have Graciela Tillard’s “The Hands,” where the completely passive hero comes to no good end — somewhat like the rest of us, left slavering for all those juicy editorials of Jerry’s that keep getting eaten by the computer Overlords. Then the issue index is scrambled, probably by one of Pat Morgan’s Abstract Demons. Issue 152 is well on the way to being our most Bewildering yet.

I notice, Jerry, that you copy the previous issues’ editorials and overwrite them for the most recent one. Efficient, but the ed.html template you’ve been using is way out of date. For example, the footer links seemed to be going the way of Kaolin Fire’s prayer-wheel radio signal: they’d gotten dimmer and dimmer until they were showing up only on mouse over. I’ve fixed that; you can safely use the current editorial as a template now.

I’ve also been standardizing the departmental pages by making the header (the logo and menu bar) a server-side include. I had a chance to view BwS with other browsers last week, when I was out of town. Not good. In some cases, the menus were too large, and the headers weren’t centered. I think we can fix the menus by specifying 11-pixel sizes in the style sheets. I dunno about centering the headers in issues prior to this one, though. Just as in the old joke, we’ll just have to keep doing it over and over till we get it right.

Anyone who sent us anything between June 8 and 12 and has not yet received a reply might do well to resend it. I’m only now catching up with the current issue.