[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and to the public at the beginning of December. Not a Patronizer? Sign up at https://patronizemwl.com. Okay, fine, technically, you don’t sign up there. You get to choose between my Patreon and my private patronage system. Still, you all get treated with the same confusion and astonishment. There’s no way these silly posts are worth $12/year, let alone what the daft folks like the infamous First Wildebeest send me. But here you are anyway.]
The important thing first: if you’re reading this on tiltedwindmillpress.com, and you want to receive announcements of new posts by email, you need to sign up again on the right-hand sidebar. I previously used Jetpack for emailed announcements, but the WordPress.com/WP Engine feud moved “ditch Jetpack” up to the top of my “annoying tech tasks” list. This is the last announcement that will go out via the old system.
Also: the RYOMS online launch party (a result of the Kickstarter campaign) will be held on 23 November 2024. There’ll be one session at 1500 UTC (10AM EST), and another at 2400 UTC (7PM EST). That’ll give the Europeans and the US West Coast reasonable sessions, and once again welcome the surprisingly robust contingent of Australian insomniacs. Mark your calendars.
I don’t have links yet, because this launch party will be different than previous ones. My last one was for Prohibition Orcs. That campaign had 197 backers, plus y’all. 26 folks attended. If I scale that up to RYOMS’ 1966 backers, that means I’ll have about 260 people. Even divided between two sessions, that’s a lot. My Zoom account can handle 100 attendees. I’m running a survey to see which backers wish to attend. If there’s anywhere near 100 per session I’ll need to beg, borrow, or steal videoconference facilities and probably suck someone into playing moderator.
Watching the rest of the RYOMS Kickstarter fallout is kind of mesmerizing.
My big experiment for this Kickstarter was dropshipping direct from printers. After the IOSS saga and resolving delivery problems, it comes out that I had about a 7% error rate. A few packages just… didn’t arrive. Some places, like South America, needed 45-60 days to deliver. Most problems fell into three categories:
- EU shipments without phone numbers
- Non-ASCII addresses
- Canada
Each of these are mostly fixable, except for Canada. My loss rate for dropshipping to Canada was about 35%. It didn’t seem to matter if the recipient provided a phone number or not. Some packages took two weeks to arrive: others, six or eight weeks. I suspect Canada customs loathes international media mail and puts it at the bottom of the processing pile.
The current Kickstarter (Dear Abyss) does not offer dropship outside the EU, UK, and Australia. I need to figure out the failure patterns and what I can do about them before I dropship across national borders again.
I also launched sponsorships for the second edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. I declared that if I got 100 print sponsors I’d do another sponsor-exclusive challenge coin. About a month in, and there’s 77 print sponsors. Many of them are first-time sponsors, lured in by the RYOMS Kickstarter. Just wow. Sucking people further down the Customer Acquisition Funnel works! And there’s a good chance I’ll have to follow through on the challenge coin.
Making new words has been difficult, what with the buildup to the most consequential US election in my lifetime. By the time this post hits the public we’ll know the outcome, but at the moment I’m hoping these posts don’t turn into “the difficulties of being a self-published writer building an entirely new legal infrastructure while living on a Digital Nomad visa and learning a new language.” At the time I write this, that’s a real possibility. Yes I’m a straight white middle-aged guy, but I’m also an insolent anti-authoritarian writer who throws around words like “neurypnological.” As soon as the list works through “women” and “queer folks” and “PoC” and down to Q-list celebrities, I’m on it. Creative work while carrying this sort of mental overhead is like losing half your RAM, and the human platform has incredibly poor paging and swapping performance.
If things go well, though, I’d like to crunch to finish Project IDGAF by the end of the month. It’s not a long book. All I need is time and spoons. I mean, I had time to write a Fediverse bot, so it should be perfectly doable. If. I’m amusing myself by imagining how I would market this ridiculous atrocity.
I am going through the N4SA manuscript, marking stuff to check and places to add stuff and discussions I need to have. Overlay networks like VPNs and MPLS are much more broadly used today than ten years ago. TLS, which was the main driver for this edition. Lots of little warts. It doesn’t matter how large a wart is, though; it’s still a wart and should be removed.
The nice thing is, I’m about out of inventory for Things I Need To Sell. I have an assortment of short fiction collections that are nearly ready. My Christmas collection needs a Prohibition Orcs short story, but I don’t want to launch that until next June so that’s okay. I have about 50,000 words of Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales, which is 1-2 stories short of a collection. There’s about 25,000 words of uncollected Prohibition Orcs, just short of half a collection. I could finish up any one of these but the truth is, I want to build up some inventory first. I want to do some damn writing.
So I’m going to try to do that now.