Blog

68: Flying Crabs with Teeth

Today you get a snippet of the unnamed fiction WIP.

Here’s the problem: evolution doesn’t do what works. Evolution does random things. Some random things survive. Most do not. Entirely different branches of life tried making solar panels to absorb energy, and survived. Leaves “work.” Neighboring branches tried absorbing energy from stone, or wind, or indie rock, and died.

Raising the solar panels a little higher meant the creature survived better than those around it. Stalks “work.”

Raise enough of those solar panels, and you need a thick stalk. Call it a trunk. Boom. Evolution has yet again produced trees, or eyes, or caffeine. When humans reach civilized space they’ll discover flying crabs with teeth, because those things all “work.”

Study their ancestry and you’ll discover that oaks are strawberries. Mesquite is a pea. They diverged at the invention of the seed, and those branches of the family haven’t talked since. Two wholly separate things survived because they randomly wound up in similar shapes.

Is this a novel or a rant? I fear that’s not an “or” question.

Posted on

“Networking for System Administrators, 2nd edition” cover art

The inimitable Eddie Sharam has finished the cover painting for the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators. It’s a parody of Giuseppe Zocchi’s Pietre Dure of Architettura. It’s a wraparound, but you can see a mockup of the front cover at the sponsorship page.

Eddie painted this. Like, on paper. With paint. The current plan is to include the painting as a Kickstarter reward level, much as we did with the cover for Run Your Own Mail Server.

At this moment, N4SA2e has 98 print sponsors. Two more sponsors and I have to do a challenge coin. If I have to do a coin, it’ll have the usual rat and bear the words NEVER MY FAULT/ALWAYS MY PROBLEM.

Mind you, my plan is that I will get exactly one more print sponsor and then y’all’ll stop backing it, so I don’t have to do any extra work.

Posted on

New Releases: Dear Abyss, The Last Hour of Hogswatch

It’s the end of the year, so I’m shoving a couple titles out the door at the last minute. Like you do.

First up we have Dear Abyss: the FreeBSD Journal Letters column, years 1-6. The ebook is on most platforms now, and print is leaking out.

For the folks who are into solstice holidays, my story The Last Hour of Hogswatch is now available standalone. It’s only in my bookstore; I don’t bother putting short stories on the big stores any more, or in print.

Happy holiday-of-your-choice, folks!

Posted on

November’s Neurypnological Sausage

[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.

Posted on

My Social Media in 2024

I left Twitter right after Elon Musk bought it. After exploring many alternatives, I’ve settled in the fediverse (often called “Mastodon”) as my main social media channel. I also have a Bluesky account, but it’s decidedly secondary.

Why did I choose this? Isn’t Bluesky the Next Big Thing? Isn’t it “like Old Twitter but better”?

Bluesky sucks less than old Twitter did, yes. It has nice features, like subscribable community-maintained block lists. It’s still a business, though. They are not making money yet. Their plans to do so appear remote. Which means that somehow, I’m the product.

I’ve said this so often it’s turning into a Lucas Cliche, but: the Internet’s business model is betrayal. Every mature social media platform has betrayed us. Every big search engine has betrayed us. (Search Google for “the strike is the compromise”. Then ask yourself why they’d be hiding some of the most contentious bits of labor history. No, I’m not afraid that the Goog will deprioritize me. They already have. Google once sent me hundreds of blog each day. In the middle of the year, that fell off a cliff.)

Bluesky might be a public benefit corporation, but that only means they are allowed to consider public benefit as well as profits.

Is it possible that Bluesky will stand by their declared morals and not eventually sell us out? Yes. But I’ve watched Internet companies rise and fall for decades. I haven’t seen any company remain benign, and extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. I don’t want to invest ten years in a third party platform only to have it do a rug pull at the end of my career.

Until it can prove otherwise Bluesky is just another company, sowing another crop of victims.

Yes, I know you can’t prove a negative. I do not own that problem.

The fediverse is open. Any social network I build there is mine to grow or destroy. I control my experience, and can easily block alt-right/TERF/racist garbage at the server level. Does it grow more slowly? Yes. Does the fediverse lack a coherent user story? Also yes. The whole “by picking a server you’re picking the kind of moderation you want” aspect is critical, deeply confusing, and unadvertised.

Despite all that I’ve built a fedi following as large as I had on Twitter, and it supported me through the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter.

What about Threads, Instagram, or Facebook? Pffft. Meta is the poster child for betraying its users.

So: follow me on the fedi. Or on the RSS feed here. Or subscribe to my announcements-only mailing lists. Or, if you must, follow me on Bluesky.

67: Outmoded Oddities

Working on updating Networking for Systems Administrators. The gentle “yes you need IPv6” paragraph in the first edition is getting an update to something a little more… ranty.

Commercial operating systems now default to IPv6, falling back to IPv4 only if IPv6 is unavailable. New networks, especially phone networks, are often IPv6-only. Much of the southern hemisphere, much of Asia, and much of the human race? IPv6-only. Their IPv4 connectivity is a kludge of proxies, carrier-grade NAT, 464xlat, and a melange of workarounds that I’d call black magic if the Evil Wizards Union wouldn’t sue me for slander. These ramshackle measures require constant maintenance and adjustment. Such network operators are desperately maintaining their trickery until the day the majority of traffic uses IPv6 and they can dismiss IPv4-only sites as outmoded oddities.

When is that coming? We don’t know exactly, but Google reports that 45% of all their Internet traffic is IPv6.

My infrastructure is all IPv6, except for my home ISP, where I’ve chosen robust IPv4-only service over “dual stack with nine fives uptime.” But 13 more print sponsors on this book and I have to do another challenge coin.

66: It Means Nothing

Here’s a chunk from the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators.

Through your career, people have repeatedly blamed “the firewall.” The word firewall dates from the 1980s, when the concept of network-level access control was both exotic and bizarre. In the last fifty years, access controls have become broader and more complex. Some controls remained in the devices arbitrarily labeled “firewalls,” while others migrated to routers and switches and other devices. What does the word “firewall” mean today?

Like the words “computer” and “security,” it means nothing. Nothing.

Every layer of the network supports access controls. Any of these controls might trouble you. Proxies, network address translation (NAT, see Chapter 3) devices, packet filters (Chapter 5), protocol content filters, all of these can reasonably be called “firewalls.” Your network might have a device that gets called “the firewall,” but any organization’s network has multiple access controls.

The truth is, if I was willing to just slam out a chapter on TLS and X.509, and cut the stuff on 10/100 Ethernet, I’d have a first draft of this book by next week. But nooo, I have to be all stupid and ethical and painstakingly go through the entire book to be sure it’s the best, most up-to-date work I can create. You could support me by sponsoring the book. 16 more print sponsors and I do another challenge coin.

65: Ignore the Flinch

Here’s a chunk from the new edition of Networking for Systems Administrators.

Similarly, some vendors use the word VLAN. Others talk about tagging or VLAN tagging. To create a VLAN, devices add a tag to an Ethernet frame. It’s all the same thing

Most network administrators use the language of their preferred vendor. If your company only uses network gear from company X, it almost certainly uses that company’s terminology. Those of us who have been around for a long time either adopt our organization’s language or, worse, use all of these terms interchangeably. If I’m your network admin, I might tell you that I’ve configured a trunk to your server. Or that I’m sending you some tagged VLANs. Or that I’ve configured a trunk on your trunk, at which point you’re allowed to proceed directly to hard liquor.

If you’re in doubt, ask your network administrator if this is the trunk with tagged VLANs or the trunk with multiple cables. Ignore the flinch, she can’t help it.

You can sponsor N4SA2e. And, in case you missed it, Dear Abyss is finally live on Kickstarter.

Posted on

October’s Ostrogothic Sausage

[This article contains RYOMS gift spoilers for print-level sponsors and Patronizers. I think everyone has their packages, but just in case, you’ve been warned.]

[This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of October, and the public at the beginning of November. Not a Patronizer? You could be, for the low price of $12 a year all thee way up to the high price of “however much money you want to dispose of.”]

It’s Halloween Month, and there was much rejoicing.

I perform one experiment with every project I do. Sometimes, like with RYOMS, I do two. I’ll discuss the boring experiment at the end of this post, but let’s start with the one that bit me.

For the Run Your Own Mail Server Kickstarter, my experiment was “drop shipping.” A reader buys the book from me, I order it from the printer and have it shipped directly to the reader. Seems fine, right? I discussed the problems with the EU’s IOSS last month, but this month has uncovered new wrinkles.

Dropship books might take weeks to deliver. If I’m lucky.

They might or might not get tracking numbers, depending on the recipient’s country, but the form email the printer sends includes the text “Here is your tracking number.” If they won’t give a tracking number, that space is blank. People are understandably confused. I can say “give me a tracking number for all shipments,” but printers charge a great deal for that. Some destinations are only $20 in shipping, but some are over a hundred dollars! There’s no way to tell before you order. It’d be cheaper to give up on dropshipping altogether.

I’ve said many times that I believe in incremental progress, not virality. Expecting that your project will go viral is a great way to fail. While I don’t believe in virality, virality believes in me. Suddenly I was performing my little dropship experiment on hundreds of people. A smarter author would have limited the number of dropships to a manageable level, but “smarter author” goes in the same heap as “jumbo shrimp” and “Trump’s intelligence.” I suspect the dropships were part of why this campaign went viral, though.

So now I’m managing expectations for hundreds of people, and I’m not entirely sure when the books will arrive or where the are. Because no tracking numbers.

The next time I do an experiment with something that runs a risk of going viral, I’ll be labeling that option “experimental” and add text like, “I have learned how this is done and understand the mechanical process, but have no personal experience with it in the real world. I have no idea what the problems will be, but I will work through them and communicate.”

New words proceed slowly, thanks to me shipping about five hundred signed books this month and various family emergencies. While I can have my job as long as I do the work, I also have the most flexible schedule. This means that if a parent winds up in the hospital, I’m elected to deal with it. Lucky me!

But initial feedback on RYOMS is mostly positive. Except for the dropshippers, and they’re complaining about delivery rather than the book itself. Publishing is hard, y’all.

So then there’s my second experiment. It affects sponsors. I talked about my Reader Acquisition Funnel over a year ago, but as a quick reminder: that’s the process I use to lure readers into a closer tie with my work. It has nine layers, just like Dante’s Inferno.

  1. Read my free or discounted samples (articles in magazines, free first in series, sample pages in bookstore, library check-out)
  2. Buy my books through retail channels
  3. Social media follow
  4. Sign up for my mailing list
  5. Buy books directly from me
  6. Kickstarter
  7. Sponsor
  8. Regular monthly contributor (you folks!)
  9. You do all my chores so I can write more

My goal is to lure people down into the deepest layers so it’s harder for them to escape to cut out middleman fees. But if I’m offering backer-exclusive special editions on Kickstarter, I need to offer something something to entice those people to descend into sponsorship. The special editions are exclusive to prepublication backers, but what do the sponsors get?

For RYOMS, the sponsors got this.

It’s the RYOMS Challenge Coin! It’s weighty. The rat is solidly three-dimensional, looming out of the coin. Plus, I firmly believe that SIGYIKES would be a valuable addition to Unix.

Which is perhaps the daftest thing I’ve ever done–other than the Manly McManface edition of Ed Mastery, of course.

And the Networknomicon.

Okay, yeah, fine, there’s the systemd satirical erotica.

And the blockchain dystopian erotica.

Look, we could be here all day. Let’s move on.

The minimum cost-effective press run is 100 coins. The only way to get this is to be a print sponsor or print-level Patronizer. I do have a few extra coins that I’ll use to solve fulfillment problems. Any survivors will be auctioned off for charity. The coins seem to amuse people, so if I ever have another book with 100 print sponsors I’ll probably do it again. I must offer something unique to lure people deeper down the funnel, after all!

I must once again thank y’all for hanging out in Malbolge with me. I’m not saying that my career is a fraud–no, wait, I say that all the freaking time. At least I’m honest about it. I’m sure that’ll count for something when I reach the Afterlife. Not that I believe in an Afterlife, but if it’s a real thing I’ll be able to shout “Yay, I was proven wrong!” which is infinitely better than not having the chance to lament being correct as the neural network I call me dissolves into the Void. It’s Pascal’s Wager in reverse.

On the 15th of this month I’ll be launching the Dear Abyss Kickstarter and sponsorships for Networking for Systems Administrators, 2nd Edition. Because a sane release schedule is something that happens to neurotypical neural networks.

And with that, I better go make some words.

Posted on

“Dear Abyss” live on Kickstarter

Confession time: I don’t love Kickstarter. I don’t love money either, but it does seem to be a dependency when living in capitalism.

When I release a book on my site, I sell a few copies. When I launch it on Kickstarter, sales go up tenfold.

So: Dear Abyss is live on Kickstarter. The book exists, and the moment I get paid it goes to everyone.

Backers immediately get a copy of Letters to ed(1), the out-of-print three-year compilation.