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July’s Jabberwocky Sausage

This post goes to Patronizers at the beginning of July, and the public at the beginning of August.

Once upon a time, I owned a Chevrolet SSR hard-top convertible. It retailed for fifty thousand dollars in 2005, back when that was real money. No, I didn’t buy it. I won it at a $500/plate charity auction. That I got into for free.

It was a fantastic car. It devoured road. The sound system stunned drivers on the opposite side of the divided highway. Over the fifteen years we owned it, three women and one men ran up to me at stop lights to give me their phone number. Not that I called any of them. Even if I wasn’t happily married, anyone who wanted to hang out with me because I drove an expensive car would find themselves disappointed in every other aspect of my life.

When I had a real job that required my presence on site, I would drive that car one day a week. If I had a day where I ran errands after work and needed to drive extra, I chose that day. Now that I’m directly employed by all y’all I leave the house to go to Costco, my monthly writers’ meeting, the dojo, and BSDCan. Costco is about a four mile trip, maybe once or twice a month. The writer’s meeting, once a month. I drove the convertible to those whenever possible. I had no trouble taking the convertible to the dojo, but I sure wouldn’t let my stinky sticky self back in the car afterwards, so that was a no. Driving it to BSDCan was fun.

Here in Detroit, I could use the car five or six months out of the year. That’s thirteen trips, most of them only a few miles and one over a thousand miles.

I put the car up for sale in 2019, and it sold in January.  I was paid in 2020 dollars, sadly. The pandemic hit immediately afterwards, so we put the money in the bank and waited for the next debacle.

This June, our home air conditioning stopped working.

The HVAC mechanic came out and informed us that the system was thirty years old and had been incompetently installed. Hearing that from a service mechanic is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof. He provided it, with details like “the interior unit draws power from the electric meter, not the breaker box” and “the reason your bedroom is warm is because rather than put an angle connector in the ductwork, the installer bent it with a hammer.” It’s not that the 1990s coolant this thing used was illegal, but it’s now expensive enough to discourage using it. If we replaced the pipe that blew and recharged the system, one of the others would probably blow.

The lifespan on a modern AC unit? About fifteen years.

How much for a new AC?

Almost exactly what we made selling the convertible.

One of the annoying things about this business is that borrowing money is difficult. The United States runs on credit. I firmly believe in paying cash or doing without, and I don’t mind heat if I can open the windows, but the wildfires get worse each year. I’m not sure if the high particulates give me asthma, or if my lungs are still inflamed from covid, but air conditioning is now mandatory. The HVAC company claims they offer easy financing, but one look at my employer and they’d dial the interest up to “loan shark.” My family needs to pay cash or do without.

I don’t mind living on a cash basis.

I do mind not having options.

We now have air conditioning, and I’ll spend the next year or two replenishing the emergency fund. It’s okay. That’s what emergency funds are for.

And writing is for replenishing that fund.

Run Your Own Mail Server is congealing. The topic requires more up-front explanation than usual, with walking the reader through the basics of forging email and sending spam and exactly why email is a very special trash fire.         I keep thinking I’m going to buckle down and pound through these words, but illustrating every step feels like dragging a moose through quicksand and explaining anything requires explaining another topic first. I must disassemble every topic and put the pieces in a meticulous order. That order is achievable, yes, but the reader doesn’t immediately gain anything from that background. I’m pulling every trick I know to make the text pleasant to read, even if the reader doesn’t get the constant slow dopamine hit of technological epiphany. (Some of you will get that hit from the text. You are nerdier than most. Congratulations.)

I took half a day and released a new Prohibition Orcs short story. Yellow-Eyed War is exclusive to my web site for a couple reasons. Yes, disintermediation is one; I prefer people buy direct from me. But it would take me about five hours to upload this tale to every single distribution channel, and I’m not going to make enough on the story to pay that back. So I’m trying exclusivity. We’ll see how well that works. Many of you got this story as part of your Patronizer benefits, so the sales channels is irrelevant.

That leaves the question of what to do with chapbooks, however. (A chapbook is a print edition of a short story or tiny novella.) I put short stories in print to make the ebook versions look inexpensive. (That’s the same reason I offer tech books in hardcover.) I would sell one or two of them to hard-core collectors, but most of the sales were electronic. Of the chapbooks, most of them went to print-level Patronizers.

Additionally, I put stories in print so I can test different fonts, layouts, and other formatting options. I’ll keep designing chapbooks and shipping them to print-level Patronizers, but I suspect that Patronizing is the only way folks will be able to get them. I want to reduce my administrative overhead, and managing yet more stuff in IngramSpark and Amazon’s print program when there’s almost no sales is pure overhead.

Speaking of adding administrative overhead: I seem to be starting the world’s lamest podcast. 60 Seconds of WIP has one guest, me. I read sixty seconds of a current Work-In-Progress, such as RYOMS. It was Allan Jude’s idea, so please direct any blame his way. I got recording and posting each down to less than five minutes, so I’ll probably do one a week for a while and see if anyone cares. This week I’m switching to audio-only, and perhaps sending them into the various podcast distributors instead of just my blog.

Thank you all for your support. I sincerely appreciate it.

60 Seconds of WIP, 27 July 2023

Today’s snippet is from Run Your Own Mail Server. Here’s a tidbit about the link between Unix accounts and email addresses.

I expected to be further along, but Apache and X.509 had different ideas. Delay: yet another service they provide!

Your test system is set up the same way most twentieth-century mail systems were. Each email address is associated with a Unix account. Adding a Unix account automatically creates a matching email address. Email addresses without Unix accounts are processed by the aliases file as discussed in Chapter 1. If an address has neither an account nor an alias, the address is invalid.

This is undesirable for most modern systems, even if you’re truly running email for only yourself. If you want additional accounts for friends, family, or a small organization, it’s a disaster. Perhaps my half-Wookie-but-balding uncle needs an email account at the family domain, but I know for a fact that he answers every hair restoration spam and he doesn’t understand the difference between Netflix and his cell phone. His email should not be tied to a Unix account or, indeed, any system access whatsoever.

The book’s still open for sponsorships, if you’re interested.

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Enterprise Ebook Licensing

Tilted Windmill Press now offers group and enterprise licensing for ebooks.

I deferred implementing this for years, despite the occasional request. Then I saw Julia Evans’ income graphs, where enterprise licensing is a big chunk of her income. Somewhat amusingly, my annual income reports inspired her to post this. Be generous with information about how you run your creative business, people will build on it and you can stealborrow their improvements.

The enterprise licensing also applies to bundles.

I’ve also implemented a very special option for select users. If you want to have your computer auto-complete a book in my style, you may license my entire TWP ouvre for AI/machine learning. This option is available exclusively through my bookstore, and allows you to derive documents from my work for one year.

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.