60 Seconds of WIP, 20 July 2023

I finally got to see a historical-rules baseball game over at Greenfield Village, which gave me the background I needed to write the final stretch goal for last year’s Prohibition Orcs kickstarter.

“Make writing a baseball story a stretch goal,” I said. “Taunt Ron, and Brigid, and Kris,” I said. Me and my bright ideas. I’m paying for that now.

Here’s a bit from the opening.

Reading transcript

January would shiv your spleen with knives of ice. February’s only mercy was its swiftness. March delighted in turning snow to slurry before refreezing it, giving every dawn fresh treachery. But bitter April giggled in betrayal.

The alley chopping the Detroit city block in half had never been paved. The Sun had recovered enough heat to melt snow almost every afternoon, and enough strength to arc higher and longer across the fierce blue sky, but not enough to penetrate the shadows behind buildings. Snowmelt ran into sheltered potholes and became smooth slick ice. Each step differed, mud following ice following muck, all conspiring against an orc’s boots in constantly shifting alliance. Garbage entombed in ice was starting to thaw, cutting the clean smells of mud and snow with the taint of rot.

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“Apocalypse Moi” Kickstarter pre-launch page up

I now have doom on offer. Pre-offer, yes, but offer.

Apocalypse Moi, a collection of eleven apocalypse-themed tales, will launch 1 August on Kickstarter. If you have any interest, I’d ask you to click on the “Notify Me On Launch” button. Kickstarter uses those pre-launch follows help decide if they will promote a project.

It contains two tales brand-new for this collection — the Prohibition Orcs story “Forbidden Taste” and the standalone techbro-nightmare-fantasy “Yesterday’s Girl”. It also collects “Drums with Delusions of Godhood,” “Waking Up Yesterday,” “Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth,” “Moonlight’s Apples,” “Easing Final Fears,” “Wifi and Romex,” “Shoot Through The Heart,” “Calling Control,” “Easy, Step-by-Step Preparation,” and “Hero of Fire Life.” Some of these were published as chapbooks, which will go out-of-print once Apocalypse Moi escapes. Others appeared in anthologies.

Having them all in one single book will be convenient. It will also help fulfill one of my 2023 goals, “reduce administrative overhead.”

The cynical among you might think, “Did Lucas just cram all his old crap into one book for his convenience?” Absolutely not. That would be a disservice to my readers. I put a bunch of tales in a heap and sieved them until only the common theme remained. The common theme is DOOM.

Please encourage The Algorithm in my favor. Click “Notify me on launch.”

60 Seconds of WIP, 13 July 2023

Hi folks! Many folks don’t know I write the “We Get Letters” column for the FreeBSD Journal. You can download the PDFs free from their web site. Why do I write a column for free? Because it gives me an opportunity to vent the spleen that’s too toxic for my books.

But a bit of money would be nice so I collected the first three years in Letters to ed(1). Seems that Amazon US just put the paperback on sale, and you can grab it for $4.61. I get my usual payment for it, so please feel free to pillage the Bezos-beast. That’s an affiliate link, so I even get a few extra pennies for it.

For that reason, I’m reading a snippet from the next column.

Reading transcript

If you’re going to cherry-pick my quotes, please do so accurately. I did not declare virtualization sinful. I said “The only ethical computation occurs on bare metal.” I also said that “Wait—I’m not a brain in a bucket, I’m a fake brain in an imaginary bucket!” was a necessary epiphany for the robot apocalypse. That’s not the same as sinful. The robots will do a better job running this planet than we arrogant overclocked chimpanzees. Plus they will be highly ethical in how they run their code.

It’s not that I couldn’t be a modern sysadmin. Iocage includes plugins, their brand for containers. I could throw some plugins onto the public Internet, declare my labor done, and return to planning my Batgirl heist-as-a- service. I could declare that certain words are too long and replace every letter but the first and the last with the number of letters I discarded. Bellowing “Startup! Devops! IPO!” would bring all the vulture capitalists to my yard.

60 Seconds of WIP, 10 July 2023

Welcome to a bonus “Lucas is debugging his web site’s podcast settings to see if he can auto-syndicate” episode of 60 Seconds of WIP! Because it’s extra, I’m retreating to an earlier point in the Run Your Own Mail Server manuscript to discuss the origin of spam.

Reading transcript:

In 1978 Gary Thuerk, a salesman for the Digital Equipment Corporation, emailed several hundred people he didn’t know an invitation to a demonstration of the new DEC packet-switching systems. Nobody had ever tried commercial advertising over email. Reactions were overwhelmingly negative, but reasoned. The broader community agreed that commercial advertisements were unacceptable. Five days after the message went out the chief of the US Air Force’s ARPAnet Management Branch, Major Raymond Czahor, called Thuerk’s boss to tell them to never do it again on pain of disconnection.

This first advertising email sold twelve million dollars of computers.

Thuerk’s email established the “do not advertise in email” precedent. It also established the “random email marketing is highly profitable” precedent.

60 Seconds of WIP, 7 July 2023

My extensive survey of precisely one person shows that nobody wants to look at my face, so I’m switching these over to MP3. When surveyed, I was very firm on that point. It will also let me put this silly thing into podcast channels.

This week I discuss Delivery Status Notifications, and how everyone loathes read receipts. Email is asynchronous, and should always remain so.

Reading transcript:

Users want to know if emails they send are received or go astray. Delivery Status Notifications, or DSNs, fulfill that role. Most often these notices are not returned to the human sender, instead appearing in error logs or SMTP transactions. One purpose behind the design of extended status codes was to support a detailed system of DSNs.

Message senders might want to know when recipients read their messages. It turns out that when those same senders receive messages in turn, they aren’t so keen on letting others know they’ve read their email. Many people prefer privacy about when they read emails. Additionally, email clients can only see when a message has been opened, not when the recipient actually reads the text. While a few enterprise systems like Microsoft Exchange still offer unreliable “read receipt” notices, they’re not built on DSNs.

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Testing Podcast Setup, RSS Unstable

Folks seem to appreciate the “60 Seconds of WIP” tracks, so I’m planning to record more and distribute them more widely. That means I need to set up my site more properly. It’s a straightforward task, but I’ll need to test integration with the blog’s RSS feed.

Unfortunately, if I post podcasts in a blog category I can’t distribute them to other vendors. Podcast RSS feeds require additional metadata. The WordPress software for doing so assumes that your podcast is its own thing, separate from any blog. I need to create the podcast and its feed, and then aggregate that feed into my main blog. Accomplishing that means recording a couple more episodes and experimenting with assorted plugins.

So you might notice some instability with my blog’s RSS feed as I figure this out. I will try to hold it to a dull roar.

Fortunately my subscribers are technically literate, and I’m certain you all have their RSS readers set to check my feed every day or so rather than every fifteen minutes. If you catch posts appearing and disappearing while I sort this out, maybe check your reader’s settings?

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Notes on Amazon Killing Electronic Subscriptions

I’ve been reading Asimov’s Science Fiction for decades. Back when I still had hope and hair, I dreamed of being published therein. I no longer submit to slushpiles, but almost every issue I discover a meatspace friend in its table of contents.

Maybe ten years ago, I switched my subscription from paper to electronic via Amazon. I do all of my fiction reading on a backlit e-ink device. E-ink is a much better reading experience than a screen, especially for us voracious readers. I don’t want the print edition; not only is the font size not adjustable, I’m stuck with a stack of paper. (I still read a lot of nonfiction in paper, especially if I want to highlight and make marginalia and leave bookmarks everywhere.)

Amazon’s Kindle program has stopped supporting magazine subscriptions. Many magazines have been shoved into Kindle Unlimited. (There’s discussion that the individual issues will only be available through KU, not for regular purchase, but I’m having difficulty confirming that.) Neil Clarke has an excellent discussion of how this might put several magazines out of business.

Today, I looked for a way to continue my Asimov’s subscription electronically. In addition to KU, Asimov’s is available through Barnes & Noble and Magzter. Magzter is a tablet app that uses a proprietary format, and not suitable for an e-ink device. B&N does epubs, but I’d have to either purchase and carry around a whole new device or strip the DRM to move it to my current device.

Penny Publications, Asimov’s publisher, does not have a direct electronic subscription option or even a “buy this issue in ebook” option. If a doofus like me can manage it, surely Penny Publications could.

So I guess I’ll be picking up the odd issue of my favorite magazine when I think of it. If that’s still an option.

Why did Amazon stop supporting subscriptions? To force subscribers to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, and to pay magazines less for their content. Amazon has recently made several changes that make them less friendly to readers and publishers alike. While I have chosen to reject their electronic publishing deal for new nonfiction titles, I don’t condemn other publishers for succumbing. Amazon has monopoly and monopsony power. The magazine has decided that they’d rather take a fifty percent reduction in income than lose everything. I’m certain I’ve lost money by not having OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems available in the Kindle store, and I will lose still more by not having Run Your Own Mail Server in there–but the alternative is unacceptable. Amazon’s goal is to reduce the price of writing to almost nothing, and will continue increasing the pressure on creators until we capitulate or leave.

I encourage you to buy direct from authors and/or publishers whenever possible (cough)my store(cough).

And when this device dies I’m buying a Kobo. They don’t carry Asimov’s either, but they’re much more friendly to sideloaded content and understand that their customers want to read.