Gleefully Malicious Books
What most of you probably don’t want
A virtual con, that is. Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) asked me for an interview. I’ll be live tomorrow at noon, US Eastern DST (1600 GMT).
It’ll be on Jitsi, so there’ll be the tech to have a live Q&A. I expect we’ll have time.
Not on the schedule yet, but I’m sure they’ll get things updated.
A few weeks ago, as part of BSDCan 2020, I held an auction to benefit the Ottawa Mission. And once again, Bill Allaire crushed all opposition. (Not that there was a huge amount of opposition, because plague, but still.) Bill has made his winning donation and then some, and is entitled to my malformed student notes.
Bill is too generous for his own good, however. This is not the first of my auctions that he’s won. (I believe there’s more, but they’re not coming up on a blog search.) What’s more, the student notes he won? They are being donated to the BSDCan 2021 Charity Auction.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled apocalypse.
Yes, this is obvious. Still should post it. No plans to reschedule at this time. Like everyone else, I lack enough information to decide anything.
Stay safe. Stay away from people. We have cooties.
Obscure MWL historical trivia: I got my start writing tabletop role playing games. It seems they have greater staying power than I ever thought they would.
The Plus Or Minus podcast interviewed me about my TTRPG Gatecrasher, which came out in 1995. A good time was had by all.
Also: 1995 was a quarter of a century ago. Not quite half my lifetime. Dang. I’m old. When did that happen?
The headline pretty much covers it. I’ll be talking SNMP at the semibug.org meeting next Tuesday. 7 PM, Altair Engineering.
I use the semibug presentations to dry-run talks that I’ll be presenting elsewhere. The next place I’ll give it will be at HasGeek in Bangalore. So, if you’re in North America and want to see it, I highly encourage you to attend.
Also, semibug encourages heckling. Creative heckling, that is.
One of the high points of the annual BSDCan tech conference is the charity auction in the closing session. We habitually support the Ottawa Mission, right down the street from the venue. After walking past the mission every day to find breakfast, the attendees are highly motivated to donate. The auction is especially amusing because the contents of the lost and found get auctioned off. More than once auctioneer Dan Langille has announced “I have here a power supply for an Apple laptop” only to have an audience member groan. It’s become a point of honor that people buy their stuff back, and folks delight in running up the price to twice what a replacement costs. We auction off everything from “the last cookie from the lunch buffet” to novelty pens to entire servers that dealers don’t want to take back to the States. (git commit murder’s auction scene is stolen wholesale from BSDCan.) Really, it’s an excuse to collect charity cash from well-paid IT workers.
In early 2019, I declared that I’d auction off the mostly complete manuscript of Terrapin Sky Tango at BSDCan. This was mainly to give me a deadline to finish writing the dang book.
I made it with thirty hours to spare.
Time in the auction is tight, so I elected to do a silent auction for the “mostly complete Terrapin Sky Tango” manuscript at my table. Competition quickly narrowed down to two people, Bob Beck and Kristof Provost. But at 4 PM Saturday, an hour before the closing session, my bid sheet disappeared. I couldn’t end the auction.
The closing session ends at 6 PM, and Bob had a flight out at 7PM. He’s in the closing session with his suitcase, coat over his arm, ready to charge out the door the moment the session ends. (You can do this when flying in a civilized country.)
You can see what happened on the video and skip ahead to my pics for the coda, or just read on.
What should turn up in the main auction but my silent auction bid sheet? It went for $40.
Turns out the last bid was Bob’s, for $189. Kristof runs him up to $200. A good laugh is had by all. Bob throws money at the secretary and bolts for the door.
Dan announces the next auction item: the last 27 pages of TST.
Bob freezes in place.
That bit where I said the manuscript was mostly complete? It sounds like it just needs editing, right?
Yeah. I suck. Stealing the last 27 pages of a thriller is downright mean.
That person on the video screaming LUCAS? Bob’s got a real good set of lungs on him.
Bob remains to bid on those last pages. He’d blown his wad on the main manuscript, though, so Kristof handily outbids him. Kristof tucks the envelope containing those last pages under Bob’s arm as he heads out the door. Kristof gets a well-deserved round of applause for his good sportsmanship. I’m told that the flight attendants didn’t actually bruise Bob’s butt slamming the airplane door behind him, but it was a close thing.
Time passed. Visualize those calendar pages flipping past as TST goes through copyediting, into production, and hits the bookstores. I sent Bob and Kristof ebook copies as soon as they were available. It really was the least I could do. The very least. Seeing as they paid hundreds of dollars for parts of an unedited manuscript, though, I decided I should ship them a signed print copy.
For reference: here is a photograph of the hardcover edition cover. The paperback edition is the same, but more difficult to photograph.
Here’s the paperback I shipped Bob and Kristof.
Both put it on the shelf, or in the recycle bin, and sent me a nice thank you note. Neither noticed the blank back cover, or thought anything was amiss with the book.
Two weeks later, I sent this.
Each had a sticky note on the front that said “OOPS, MY BAD ==ml”
Yes, the first book they received was missing the last 27 pages.
Four copies of the Beck Edition and the Provost Edition exist. Bob and Kristof each got one. I’m keeping one. The fourth will be auctioned off at BSDCan 2020.
I love being a monster.
I’m back from vBSDCon, stuffed to the gills and vaguely conscious, so I’ve done this.
The stack on the right are the Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition print sponsor gifts. I’ve upgraded the envelopes. While paperbacks travel fine in paper envelopes, hardbacks… not so much. I’m told by someone who does shipping that these critters are nearly indestructible, and that my sponsors will need to attack them with drills and chisels to extract the contents. That seems a reasonable price to pay for gifts surviving the mail.
The boxes on the right are for my biggest Patronizers, who get everything in print and credit in same. They’re getting Terrapin Sky Tango as well as Sudo Mastery; the books came out so close together that I’m shipping them together. I’ve added some extra tidbits to improve their Patronizing experience.
Y’all should have your gifts and rewards soon. My gratitude goes to all of you.
For those of you who’ve been asking, this mostly clears the way for me to announce SNMP Mastery sponsorships. I’m still waiting on a couple external elements I can’t control, but it should be very soon.
I’m traveling to Seattle at the end of July for business. Most of my time is booked with publishing stuff, but I have one evening free. And there’s gelato. A whole bunch of gelato, all around the Pike Place Market. Which is not terribly far from where I’m staying.
So, I’d like to invite everyone to join me for gelato at Bottega Italiana at 7:30 PM on 1 August 2019 (Google Map link). If you have ever had the burning desire to meet me, I’ll be there for an hour or so.
Why this place? It’s open later than 8PM.
Last night, I finished the first draft of Terrapin Sky tango, aka Butterfly Stomp Waltz #2. At 117K words it’s my longest novel to date. It’s a first draft, so I’ll be sending this to first readers and fine-tuning it for a while before release.
In weirdly related news–Every year, I donate something to the BSDCan charity auction. This year it’s
1) a copy of the Bail Bond Denied edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails.
2) The mostly complete first draft of Terrapin Sky Tango, This is mostly an excuse to separate nerds from their cash for a good cause. As this is a specialty item, not of general interest to the con attendees, I’ll do this auction silently during the con. See me for the bid sheet.
My draft of TST is almost 700 pages long. I printed it in slightly smaller type, with reduced spaces between lines, and got it down to under 500 pages. So I printed it double-sided, because this is mostly a novelty (or, for the person who thinks I’ll be a Collectible Big Name one day, an investment).
Please accept this totally non-faked photographic evidence that the manuscript is a real thing.
And I will see each and every one of you at BSDCan!
I’ll be at Penguicon this year, doing a few talks and panels and such. It’s only fair to warn you where I’ll be.
Friday, 3 May
Saturday, 4 May
Sunday, 5 May
I’m pretty sure that adding three more events will allow me to reach Penguicon Transcendence. I shall become omnipresent, simultaneously attending and giving every single presentation. I recommend you attend Penguicon before that ghastly, inevitable development.
Or maybe they’ll just assign me a room and put a sign on the door: “The Lucas Show! Different Lunacy Every Hour!” So long as they shove LN2 ice cream under the door every few hours, that’ll work.