60 Seconds of WIP

I’m fighting with the Kickstarter web interface to fulfill the Run Your Own Mail Server campaign and trying to get Dear Abyss ready for launch, so here’s a chunk of an advice column.

All three regular readers of this column appear to be drawn by the pleasure of watching my childish behavior when confronted with the tedious duty of writing said column. While “you insulted me in the first three words of your greeting” is a feeble justification for breaking into your systems and converting them to global-warming-accelerating SkunkCoin miners, I’m willing to make it work.

Because that’s what’s sysadmins do. We make things work.

Even bad things.

Software vendors insist on developing new bad things and cramming them down gullets already obscenely bloated with horrendous badness. Systems administrators stagger through the endless hours of their brief years struggling to live beneath tremendous loads of badness smelted from software like arsenic from arsenopyrite. The inherent insecurity of absolutely everything enhances this burden like a beached, deceased whale enhances an oil spill.

The urge to retreat into malaise is a natural human reaction.

Sysadmins lack the luxury of being human.

The prelaunch page for the next Letters collection, Dear Abyss, is up at Kickstarter.

Been super busy with Run Your Own Mail Server page layout, but took a break to finish writing next month’s FreeBSD Journal Letters column.

These “generative artificial intelligences” scour the Internet collecting text strings and noting which characters often appear in which order. The programmers heard the phrase “the wisdom of crowds” and thought it wasn’t satire. When you enter a string into the system, they produce a string that looks like something that would appear after your string. In other words, if you enter something that looks like a StackExchange question, they provide an answer that looks like something you would get from StackExchange. The average answer on any public technology forum is a poison to the spirit that makes my Perl look glamorous. Not Hollywood glamour. More like Eldritch Faery Queen Glamour that winds up with you chained to your keyboard condemned to write for the entertainment of the Unseelie Court until you become the greatest author on Earth, which would give you lots of practice but as you no longer receive books from Earth you can’t perform the comparison that would conclude your deal. Still, don’t do that. The Faery Queen carries one heck of a grudge, especially if you smuggled lockpicks in with you.

I expect to launch the “Dear Abyss” collection in September.

Hello. Welcome to Sixty Seconds of WIP. I’m Michael Warren Lucas. Today is (11 June 2024). I’m in the last week of my anthology submission binge, working on a new Rats’ Man’s Lackey tale, but it’s going to trad pub so I can’t share tidbits. The Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales could be described as “Jason Bourne living in Supernatural Witness Protection.” Here’s a snippet from the first one, The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Half Gallon of Christmas Miracle.

Getting from my attic room to the boss’ sanctum meant lowering the ladder, avoiding Magrat the Mayhem Maid as she “cleaned” the third floor, taking either the narrow twisty servants’ staircase with its they’re-not-ghosts or the main stairs with the now-those-are-ghosts, through the gallery of I’m-telling-you-those-are-paintings-not-real-people, down the freakishly wide spiral staircase that escaped from a 1950s Hollywood spectacle, and crossing the main hall.

That marble floor’s tried to murder me twice.

The second time, with a knife.

Until recently, I didn’t believe in any of this tripe. Today, I didn’t want to bother with it.

A December morning sun poured over the oaks and maples surrounding the manor. It was just warm enough for this Northern boy to have the window cracked, but cool enough you might think winter would decide to fire a blizzard across Georgia just for funsies. A perfect day to climb down the trellis.

Episode 52? One year’s worth of this daftness? I suspect most podcasters come to their senses well before this. Is anyone actually listening to this drivel?

I’m mostly resting this week because I’m taking vacation after BSDCan and the Kickstarter of WTF. Not sure which was more exhausting. The new Steampunk Fantasy Storybundle just launched, though, and it includes my Prohibition Orcs novel Frozen Talons, so here’s a sweet little old lady forging a weapon out of her dead husband’s bones.

The grooms’ quarters was too cramped for bone-melding, but Mha made it work. Bone-melding should be done beneath the open sky. It should be done at a roaring fire built up from entire trees torn from the soil and the bones of slain enemies, witnessed by the clan. She had a tiny stove heated until it gleamed in her night-sight even through the sunlight drifting through the high narrow windows.

And all the orcs she knew witnessed from gleaming eye sockets.

She had feared she had forgotten the rites, but her ragged voice recalled the words and her age-bent hands remembered the motions, the gestures, the twist of bone against bone until they caught one another and bound harder than iron. The comforting smells of scorched bone and burned blood and viscous sweat filled the air.

That orc’s thighbones were not long enough, so she added the shin bones. The smaller calf bones went on the side, to give the shaft a sharper shape so her feeble hands wouldn’t slip. Not that a properly bone-melded shaft could slip in its maker’s grip. The kneecaps, worn to smoothness by decades of joyful life, nestled together perfectly on the bottom as a base.

The Storybundle’s a heck of a deal, and gets you great books by a whole bunch of good authors. And my book.

My next book will be Dear Abyss: The FreeBSD Journal Letters Column, Years 1-6. Seeing as each column was written in a one hour burst of bile, I’m going through them and polishing off the missed opportunities for rage.

The annoying thing about asymptomatic system failures is that they’re asymptomatic—but no less real than the kind with noticeable symptoms. Some user makes a call, an actual voice call where they’re spewing random words in some language from their food-hole and you’re expected to parse that babble with your ears, when even Hollywood knows that sysadmins are artisanally optimized to receive information via their eyes and extrude alloyed sarcasm and results from their keyboard-callused fingertips. Any one of these users can at any time disrupt the meticulously assembled hallucination of whatever problem you’re working on and demand that you turn your three pounds of skull-pudding to the fact that their web browser jittered, actually jittered, when they played a cat video off the fileserver or they got a “File not found” error when they know darn well that they saved their proposal under that name just last night on their son’s computer.

Kickstarter has the prelaunch page up. I’m afraid that the ridiculous success of the mail book there has trained me to launch absolutely everything through Kickstarter. Even the stupid things. I expect this to do much less well but hey, those nickels spend.