#exploit printers

[galactica7071]

beginning to hate copyright laws

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/07/weird-pcs/#a-mormon-bishop-an-orthodox-rabbi-and-a-catholic-priest-walk-into-a-personal-computing-revolution

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:

http://martinhench.com

This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"

My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.

Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.

Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.

Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).

Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult: a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.

Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers – they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.

Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.

Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.

But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!

You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!

Amazon knows that every time you buy an audiobook from Audible, you increase the cost you'll have to pay if you switch to a competitor. They use that fact to give readers a worse deal (last year they tried out ads in audiobooks!). But the people who really suffer under this arrangement are the writers, whom Amazon abuses with abandon, knowing they can't afford to leave the service because their readers are locked into it. That's why Amazon felt they could get away with stealing $100 million from indie audiobook creators (and yup, they got away with it):

https://www.audiblegate.com/about

Which is why none of my books can be sold with DRM. And that means that Audible won't carry any of them.

For more than a decade, I've been making my own audiobooks, in partnership with the wonderful studio Skyboat Media and their brilliant director, Gabrielle de Cuir:

https://skyboatmedia.com/

I pay fantastic narrators a fair wage for their work, then I pay John Taylor Williams, the engineer who masters my podcasts, to edit the books and compose bed music for the intro and outro. Then I sell the books at every store in the world – except Audible and Apple, who both have mandatory DRM. Because fuck DRM.

Paying everyone a fair wage is expensive. It's worth it: the books are great. But even though my books are sold at many stores online, being frozen out of Audible means that the sales barely register.

That's why I do these Kickstarter campaigns, to pre-sell thousands of audiobooks in advance of the release. I've done six of these now, and each one was a huge success, inspiring others to strike out on their own, sometimes with spectacular results:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/04/01/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter-41-million-new-books/7243531001/

Today, I've launched the Kickstarter for Picks and Shovels. I'm selling the audiobook and ebook in DRM-form, without any "terms of service" or "license agreement." That means they're just like a print book: you buy them, you own them. You can read them on any equipment you choose to. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them to friends. Rather than making you submit to 20,000 words of insulting legalese, all I ask of you is that you don't violate copyright law. I trust you!

Speaking of print books: I'm also pre-selling the hardcover of Picks and Shovels and the paperbacks of The Bezzle and Red Team Blues, the other two Marty Hench books. I'll even sign and personalize them for you!

http://martinhench.com

I'm also offering five chances to commission your own Marty Hench story – pick your favorite high-tech finance scam from the past 40 years of tech history, and I'll have Marty bust it in a custom short story. Once the story is published, I'll make sure you get credit. Check out these two cool Little Brother stories my previous Kickstarter backers commissioned:

Spill

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

Vigilant

https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/

I'm heading out on tour this winter and spring with the book. I'll be in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Burbank, Bloomington, Chicago, Richmond VA, Toronto, NYC, Boston, Austin, DC, Baltimore, Seattle, and other dates still added. I've got an incredible roster of conversation partners lined up, too: John Hodgman, Charlie Jane Anders, Dan Savage, Ken Liu, Peter Sagal, Wil Wheaton, and others.

I hope you'll check out this book, and come out to see me on tour and say hi. Before I go, I want to leave you with some words of advance praise for Picks and Shovels:

I hugely enjoyed Picks and Shovels. Cory Doctorow’s reconstruction of the age is note perfect: the detail, the atmosphere, ethos, flavour and smell of the age is perfectly conveyed. I love Marty and Art and all the main characters. The hope and the thrill that marks the opening section. The superb way he tells the story of the rise of Silicon Valley (to use the lazy metonym), inserting the stories of Shockley, IBM vs US Government, the rise of MS – all without turning journalistic or preachy.

The seeds of enshittification are all there… even in the sunlight of that time the shadows are lengthening. AIDS of course, and the coming scum tide of VCs. In Orwellian terms, the pigs are already rising up on two feet and starting to wear trousers. All that hope, all those ideals…

I love too the thesis that San Francisco always has failed and always will fail her suitors.

Despite cultural entropy, enshittification, corruption, greed and all the betrayals there’s a core of hope and honour in the story too.

-Stephen Fry

Cory Doctorow writes as few authors do, with tech world savvy and real world moral clarity. A true storyteller for our times.

-John Scalzi

A crackling, page-turning tumble into an unexpected underworld of queer coders, Mission burritos, and hacker nuns. You will fall in love with the righteous underdogs of Computing Freedom—and feel right at home in the holy place Doctorow has built for them far from Silicon Valley’s grabby, greedy hands."

-Claire Evans, editor of Motherboard Future, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

"Wonderful…evokes the hacker spirit of the early personal computer era—and shows how the battle for software freedom is eternal."

-Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Facebook: The Inside Story.

What could be better than a Martin Hench thriller set in 1980s San Francisco that mixes punk rock romance with Lotus spreadsheets, dot matrix printers and religious orders? You'll eat this up – I sure did.

-Tim Wu, Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Captures the look and feel of the PC era. Cory Doctorow draws a portrait of a Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros showed up — a startup world driven as much by open source ideals as venture capital gold.

-John Markoff, Pulitzer-winning tech columnist for the New York Times and author of What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

You won't put this book down – it's too much fun. I was there when it all began. Doctorow's characters and their story are real.

-Dan'l Lewin, CEO and President of the Computer History Museum

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: I'm taking the civil service exam and if I get in there, will they fire me if I were mentally unstable?

Cnetizens: Sweetheart, guess why the civil service exam is oversubscribed as fuck?

yll: No, we have one in our unit. His performance bonus was deducted, and then he, armed with a fruit knife, stabbed two Deputy Directors of Bureau and then smashed the Director-general's office. He is now recuperating at home, and we have to visit him regularly. However, he is very principled and only attacks leaders when he has a seizure, not ordinary staff.

xhzz: Warrior.

dtxgg: I heard from my senior coworker in the organization that during one of the general meetings, when the Director-general was making an impassioned speech, this big sister suddenly slammed the table and shouted, “It's all bullshit!” Then she waved her sleeve and left, and from then on everyone realized that she was not normal. Big sister's exploits included rushing in during a bureau meeting and flickering on the forehead of every Director with her knuckle; when the leaders were eating at noon in the cafeteria's booths, she rushed in, made the rounds, and asked, “Yo, where's the corruption?” The leaders told her to go home and get well, she said she was not sick. After that, the big sister became the real Director-general of our unit, walking everywhere with two security guards behind. She came especially early every day, wearing sunglasses, patrolling the unit building, behind the two little brother trembling. No matter who it is, Big Sister will bash them right to their faces. The canteen auntie who scooped less food when dishing out, the masses who came to the unit to handle administrative affairs and stole the paper from the printer. She bashed them all, not to mention the leaders. The leaders have become numb. Later, the big sister's condition was slowly brought under control, and she had already retired when I joined the unit.

xxxC: LMFAO check the comments lmao

luvpp: There was a man in my mom's unit who became mentally unstable after joining the workforce and ran to the Director's office every day to sit there, saying that he himself was the director, and then the director granted him paid leave, and he still went to the unit to sit in the director's office as usual.

yzxka: ASDDFGHFGJ this one

momo: Our unit invited an expert to give a lecture, and when it was all over, he rushed up to the expert and asked loudly, “Do you know what it means to be full of crap?”

sbkpg: lkkfghdfgsdf

xuexue: The leader took me to another building in the office area, beforehand he specifically explained to me, “There is a man who guards the gate, if he asks you, do you believe in the universe, you must answer categorically, I do! Otherwise you won't get in.” Later I realized that the man was a little mentally unstable, and he was transferred to guard the gate, in fact, that building was originally inside the office area but the higher-ranks let them built a fence and set up a security booth in order to give him a post. Once the Director of Division went to a meeting and failed to answer his question and did not get in.

Vvvviola: After reading the comments, you will understand why everyone wants to take the civil service exam, because it is a job where even if you are really crazy, you will not be fired. It is completely different from capitalists squeezing laborers and laying off employees after squeezing them out.

momo: But as long as you don't go crazy, you'll be used like crazy.

arww: That was the case with the senior who was my tutor when I joined the office. She was crazily obsessed with her religion, and I don't know what kind of sect she was, but she played Buddhist scriptures in her office every day, wore a big red robe(*the unorthodox kind sect of buddhism), and meditated when she wasn't working, and practiced her skill in the room. I ordered a takeout at noon, it was Duck Blood and Vermicillon Soup. She righteously criticized me: duck blood can't be eaten, the animal's blood is full of anger, eating it will lead to evil spirits. I was so frightened that I dropped the vermicelli in my mouth. The leaders were quite polite to her. I worked with her for a month, she retired and went home, and I took over her job.

momo: Sister you go eat Duck Blood and Vermicillon Soup fearlessly hahahahhahhahah

lin: The Chief of my section, beat up two directors-general in a row, the third director-general was a woman, she told him, "I'm a woman, you can't beat me up".

xrhmm: they are even haggling

sytxztt: fuck

sstd: so did he beat that director?

lin: No, he doesn't beat women

[samueldays]

I see this shit and I wonder: is there, even theoretically, anything which can be done about it in general?

(To back up Domenech, here is the 2021 interview, the clip is taken from about twentyfive minutes in.)

The obvious first problem is the lying. Legally, this is protected by the First Amendment, and one has to clear a high bar of showing specific harm (such as being defrauded) to prosecute lies in America. Socially, it is one of a great many lies being told by a great many liars. Getting just one to stop would be ineffective, getting them to stop en masse would be a Herculean task. Specifically a task like cleaning the Augean Stables.

The second problem that comes to mind is that even if there were a remedy like "Legally compel @harris_wins to issue a correction", such remedies are extremely prone to abuse as a class. It would take law-writing that is both unusually clever and unusually moral to give Vance some way of punishing @harris_wins for this, without also risking collateral damage to speech protections, and exploitations of the power to punish.

The third problem is that an account like @harris_wins is disposable and replaceable. It is not the official Kamala Harris account. It's a sort of credibility-printer or the product of one, that can be spun up, tell loud and flashy lies, and be ditched when it comes under fire. It's cheap chaff, it's moderately polished with the signs and language of journalism like screaming "BREAKING" on everything, and it gets a million views.

The sort of punishment one can practically inflict on an account like this is only a cost of doing business for whoever's paying the cut-outs and interns and troll farms for Kamala's campaign.

Fourth, I think, is the aggravating nature of this particular lie.

Trump's lies usually involve saying he's the best, he's the greatest, everyone loves him, he'll fix all your problems, et cetera, which are colloquial English for him being moderately above average, some people love him, he might mitigate a couple of problems. I'm autistic and I dislike the way people casually lie in ordinary speech and say "it's hyperbole", but it's hard for me to feel any extra hate for Trump over exaggeration-to-the-point-of-falsehood when it's so common.

Whoever is running @harris_wins does not have the hyperbole excuse. This is not partial support for Project 2025 being exaggerated into complete endorsement, this is a false source and they're claiming it contains something it does not contain at all. Vance never mentions Project 2025 at all (how could he, in 2021?) in the clip, he is saying routine politician things about taking power and replacing the existing ruling class, that is not "Vance completely endorses Project 2025".

[samusamab]

In Golden Flame Live-Blog Chapter 1 Recap

I wasn't planning on posting this so soon, but fuck it, I've got the time. Far be it from me to deny Vex's hunger for empanadas. So, without further ado, the highlights of Chapter 1: The Tachyon Returns

At the start of the first session, all of my players independently decided to message me privately to claim ownership for their pilot having been the one to break the printer. Delighted, I ruled that all three of them submitting conflicting print orders simultaneously is what actually broke the printer.

Pluto & Student invite several people (including their teammates) to a book club they're trying to start up. They also invite Calamity & Jerry.

Walter runs into Switch, who tries to sell him on letting them do a livestream ridealong on a mission sometime with the party. Despite being 3 years old, Walter has the soul of a fourty-something, and has a deep misunderstanding and dislike of Switch because they're a omninet celebrity.

The party ends up accompanying the food negotiations with Impact Dynamics. With the powerful combo of Vulcan's air of authority, Walter's over-the-top flattery, and Pluto doing some light hacking and blackmail, the party manages to secure the food with a healthy "discount".

When fighting off the pirates ID sent after them, Pluto engages with the Squad of pirates in hardsuits and, you know, kills them. Turns out mech weapons are very effective against normal people. Oops...

After defeating S1GN4L, the party decides to let him leave alive, but refused to protect him from the Hellhounds. (Unbeknownst to them, he fled to Icebreaker to lie low and hide from Andros Capella.)

En route to finally get the parts to replace that broken printer, the party spends some time on their ship with Siren. Pluto briefly gets a flamewar on Muse to stop while they all roast him until he logs off. Vulcan gets roped into playing a lot of FleetComm 5014 with Siren, and Walter experiences a strange pang of déjà vu watching a freighter jump to nearlight on the way to Dawnline Shore. Huh, that's probably nothing important, right?

The party investigates the wrecks of the Weasel and the Tachyon. They find the Weasel's flight recorders and decide to enlist Striga's help decoding this when they get back. (I don't know why they made this decision either. None of them have spoken to her "on-screen" before.)

Student and Hathor both start getting a little antsy the more the party explores the Tachyon. But we don't have time to worry about that because...

Andros Capella is here! The party wants to run, but decides not to after Andros gets Vulcan's mech with his boarding leash. Walter ends up getting the final blow on Andros's mech (which has done nothing to help his oversized ego.) The entire party is shocked and confused when Andros seemingly allows himself to be vaporized.

Pluto in convinced that Andros isn't just dead, despite all evidence to the contrary, but the party has to leave before they can do too much more investigating.

And that's the highlights for Act I: Chapter I! I'll have another post up soon about STRIGA's exploits during downtime and the start of their misadventures on Icebreaker Borealis. After that, y'all will be caught up to the campaign as it stands now. (Also, I may post more little fun facts and other tidbits in between session recaps in the future. Idk I'm still feeling this out)

[mister-a-z-fell]

It was brought to my attention that I may not have shared some of our videographic exploits here on the Tumbler. My apologies if you have seen these before…

A few years ago, I made the acquaintance of a gentleman in the employ of Sotheran’s bookshop (est. 1761; they have an owl) when his Tweetles began to be confused with my own (est. 1800; I have a demon) and I sent him a polite letter asking for a little clarification on the matter.*

The following year it came to my notice that Oliver — for such was his name — had developed a yen for some personalised bookplates.

Well, who am I to disappoint?

Crowley was kind enough to pick the bookplates up from the printers and was very impressed at my facility with internet language!

*Assiduously reported by @flameraven

https://www.tumblr.com/flameraven/637870707069648896/if-you-dont-follow-sotherans-over-on-twitter

[angmarenthusiast]

Troll hunters incorrect quotes 3: the thridquel

Aja: You guys worried about Douxie? Jim: Totally! Krel: Yeah, they called me in the middle of the night and just yelled, "what do I do, what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?" Aja: And what'd you say? Krel: "I dunno, I dunno, I dunno, I dunno." Jim: Aja: They're lucky to have you as a friend.

-~-

Claire: What do I get? Toby: A night of fashion, mischief, mayhem, and possible death. Claire: Ooh, check, check, and check; not sure about that last one. Toby: It won't be you. Claire: I'll get my coat.

-~-

*The gang when they drop food on the floor* Claire: Aw man. *Throws it away* Steve: Five second rule! Toby: Foolish germs, thinking they can stop me!? *Eats it off the floor* Douxie: *Sobs on the floor*

-~-

Douxie: We’re going to a candy store?! Jim: No! It’s nighttime, candy stores are closed. Aja: We’re gonna ROB a candy store?!?! Jim, sighing: No-

-~-

Aja: And have you learnt anything this Christmas, Eli? Eli: …Not really. Aja: Nothing? Eli: Tell you one thing I have learnt—Christmas; ultimately, commercial holiday. Who's the real winner at Christmas? Amazon. they have drones now! Tiny little dystopian slaves delivering iPads and headphones. I ordered a toaster; It was on the doorstep five hours later! Do we need that? It was 4.99! For a toaster! I mean, someone's being exploited there.

-~-

*Jim is reading a Clifford The Big Red Dog book* Steve, watching: How did he get to be so big? Do they ever explain that? Jim: Well, Emily’s love for him grew, and so did he. Steve: Well, your dog is pretty small. Guess that says something about you, huh? Jim, angrily shutting their book: YOU’RE SMALL! WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOUR PARENTS?!?!

-~-

Douxie: What’s up? I’m back. Steve: I literally saw you die. You died. You were dead Douxie: Death is a social construct.

-~-

*The gang responding to being stabbed by a sword* Aja: Rude. Toby: That's fair. Douxie: Not again. Steve: Are you gonna want this back or can I keep it?

-~-

Claire: Goddamn it, the printer broke while printing out Douxie's birthday invitations. Krel: Well, what are they supposed to say? Claire: "Douxie's birthday". Krel: So, what do they say instead? Claire: "Douxie’s bi". Krel: Krel: Works out either way.

-~-

Toby: Why don’t you go talk to them? Jim, sarcastically: Oh. Yeah, sure. Toby: What? So you go tell them they’re cute, what’s the worst that could happen? Jim: They could hear me.

-~-

Krel: *enters their own password* I'm in.

-~-

Claire: Who's in charge here? Douxie, shrugging: Usually whoever yells the loudest.

-~-

Steve: Here comes the lightning! Steve, whispering: You've got to imagine it coming out my fingertips, wherein I am an almighty wizard. Douxie: Ok, currently imagining that. Hmm, not bad. Not bad at all.

-~-

Toby: How do I make a date really romantic? Jim: Be mysterious. Toby: Okay! *later, while on a date with Darci* Darci: So where are we going? Toby: None of your fucking business.

[professionalscrublord]

Helicopters

Printed/painted some helicopters. Accidentally found out superglue will foam up if you put it on wet paint, when I tried to glue them on their posts too soon. Exploited that effect to make rotor wash clouds on the base.

WIP before detail paints. The helicopter model was free, stand was made of cylinder/cone primitives in the printer slicer program itself, base was recycled from some Mercs box tanks that I liberated from their unnecessary bases via knife.

From this lovely free pack at Metal Core Collectibles:

[therichantsim]

I hate that we don’t own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription, even fucking printer ink! I also hate how much we’re being surveilled. All these apps, smart devices, smart appliances and electronics mine our data and sell our data etc. We are slowly having our privacy stripped away. Every new update comes with automatic opt in as the default option and sometimes the only option. Every human thing we do is used to feed and program generative AI. All of this while we’re being sold and feed food that isn’t safe, over medicated but under funded for healthcare. Under a government system that no longer even pretends to care about its citizens. Yet they tell us we have a choice/democracy but our only options are all bad options. All of this while our government and it’s war machine exploits and kills innocent people in other countries.

[rohirric-hunter]

Things I saw at the thrift store and didn't buy:

Like 70 things of cadmium yellow. All taped together in a plastic box so you had to buy all of them

Blank book that requires an app

Cool old Free Westinghouse sewing machine in cabinet. Thought about buying it (It still had the original owner's manual!) but one of the bobbin pins was bent, so I decided to leave it for someone who would know how to even begin to fix that, or who would be content to use it for decoration

Adorable tin that looked like a pie and was painted like blueberries on the inside. I actually was going to buy this but I put it down somewhere and couldn't find it again

Candle that looked like a sailboat. Too pretty to burn

Printer that exploits you for money

Printer that doesn't exploit you for money (might go back for this tomorrow)

Big bag of old Coats & Clark thread on wooden bobbins. Would have bought it but there was no price tag. Also there were some unsecured needles in the bag and I didn't want to carry it all the way home with constant risk of a needle sliding out and stabbing me

Same edition dictionary as the one I grew up with. Had weird stains inside the front cover

So Much Yarn (I've forbidden myself from buying more yarn until I've finished the commission I'm working on. It's not helping)

[alexanderwales]

Finished book 2 of Crystal Society. I enjoyed it about as much as the first book, though I do have a few quibbles, and I think I might have liked it better if it hadn't had so many cases of outside perspective and stuck with Face (or aspects of Face).

Spoilers follow.

About halfway through the book, Face undergoes a radical change in personality and goals, essentially an entirely new character. This makes sense narratively, but it's very close to being a protagonist switch, and I could feel some of my investment bleeding away. I had enjoyed reading about the old Face, I guess, particularly the prospect that Face had divided up into virtually-embodied aspects that interacted with each other, and it felt like that lasted for only about a chapter. And New Face is less personable, less distinctive, which is a problem.

Stuff I liked:

The route-hack and workaround stuff, as well as some of the exploits.

Some of the shock-value dissonance when Face does things that would be insane to a human.

Most of the social manipulation stuff, which I think it at its best when I have some sense of what's being done and why, and can track it (or have it explained to me) rather than just "hey, I did this, and it worked", though it's hard for me to tease apart which falls into what category.

Setting up the three-way war was a really strong ending for the book.

Stuff I quibble with:

The book has autofabs, and while there are several 3D printers in our house, I think some of the things these autofabs are doing come close to being magic. The thing I'm particularly raising an eyebrow at are all the things that require microchips. I'm reading this as a physical book, so couldn't ctrl+F, and it's possible I missed something.

There are a few times in the book when there's some segregation of cause and effect, at least narratively, and there are many ways in which the motives of characters (particularly the AI ones) are opaque. The one that stood out to me most is the attack by the aliens against the base, which completely disrupts everything that had been going on, and doesn't feel motivated. I was left wondering whether this was caused by one of the characters, whether it was someone's gambit, but it felt like it came out of nowhere. ("Knowing what's happening and why" is one of those "unrealistic" things that I think is often very important to fiction unless you're really trying to evoke a feeling of "gotta roll with the punches in this random and chaotic world that's so hard to understand".)

I do want to know what's going on with Earth. I do want to know exactly what Growth did to make Acorn and how that works, and the negotiation that Dream and Vista had to become Vision. We're stuck in the viewpoint of Face, and I feel like sometimes we hop over to someone else who is less connected to the main plot, but not someone who is more connected to the main plot?

I'm onto book 3 now, and curious where the story is going, since a battle between superintelligences with their own specializations sounds great, yet my impression of audience reception is lukewarm.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour

This week only, Barnes and Noble is offering 25% off pre-orders of my forthcoming novel Picks and Shovels.

My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I'm about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there's a nonzero chance I'll be in a city near you between now and the end of the spring!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Picks and Shovels is a standalone novel starring Martin Hench – my hard-charging, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant – in his very first adventure, in the early 1980s. It's a story about the Weird PC era, when no one was really certain what shape PCs should be, who should make them, who should buy them, and what they're for. It features a commercial war between two very different PC companies.

The first one, Fidelity Computing, is a predatory multi-level marketing faith scam, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Fidelity recruits people to exploit members of their faith communities by selling them third-rate PCs that are designed as rip-off lock-ins, forcing you to buy special floppies for their drives, special paper for their printers, and to use software that is incompatible with everything else in the world.

The second PC company is Computing Freedom, a rebel alliance of three former Fidelity Computing sales-managers: an orthodox woman who's been rejected by her family after coming out as queer; a Mormon woman who's rejected the Church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's quit her order to join the Liberation Theology movement in the struggle for human rights in America's dirty wars.

In the middle of it all is Martin Hench, coming of age in San Francisco during the PC bubble, going to Dead Kennedys shows, getting radicalized by ACT UP!, and falling in love – all while serving as CFO and consigliere to Computing Freedom, as a trade war turns into a shooting war, and they have to flee for their lives.

The book's had fantastic early reviews, with endorsements from computer historians like Steven Levy (Hackers), Claire Evans (Broad-Band), John Markoff (What the Doormouse Said) and Dan'l Lewin (CEO of the Computer History Museum). Stephen Fry raved that he "hugely enjoyed" the "note perfect," "superb" story.

And I'm about to leave on tour! I have nineteen confirmed dates, and two nearly confirmed dates, and there's more to come! I hope you'll consider joining me at one of these events. I've got a bunch of fantastic conversation partners joining me onstage and online, and the bookstores that are hosting me are some of my favorite indie booksellers in the world.

BOSTON (Feb 14): Boskone, 4PM, Westin Boston Seaport District

BOSTON (Feb 14): Brookline Booksmith with KEN LIU, 7PM, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline

VIRTUAL (Feb 15): YANIS VAROUFAKIS, sponsored by Jacobin and hosted by David Moscrop, 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern, 6PM UK, 7PM CET

MENLO PARK (Feb 17): Kepler’s Books with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, 7PM, 1010 El Camino Real

LOS ANGELES (Feb 18): Diesel Bookstore with WIL WHEATON, 630PM, 225 26th Street, Santa Monica

SEATTLE (Feb 19): Third Place Books with DAN SAVAGE, 7PM, 17171 Bothell Way NW Lake Forest Park

TORONTO (Feb 23): Another Story, 630PM, 315 Roncesvalles Ave

NYC (Feb 26): The Strand with JOHN HODGMAN, 7PM, 828 Broadway

PENN STATE (Feb 27): Kern Auditorium, 7PM, 112 Kern Building

DOYLESTOWN (Mar 1): Doylestown Bookshop, 12PM, 16 S Main St

BALTIMORE (Mar 2): Red Emma’s, 2PM, 630PM, 3128 Greenmount Ave

DC (Mar 4): Cleveland Park Library with MATT STOLLER, 630PM, 3310 Connecticut Ave NW

RICHMOND (Mar 5): Fountain Bookstore with LEE VINSEL, 6PM, 1312 E Cary St

AUSTIN (Mar 10): First Light Books, 7PM, 4300 Speedway/43rd

BURBANK (Mar 13): Dark Delicacies, 6PM, 822 N. Hollywood Way

SAN DIEGO (Mar 24): Mysterious Galaxy, 7PM, 3555 Rosecrans

BELFAST (Mar 24) (remote): Imagine! Festival with ALAN MEBAN, 7PM UK

CHICAGO, Apr 2: Exile in Bookville with PETER SAGAL, 7PM, 410 S Michigan Ave, 2nd floor

BLOOMINGTON, Apr 4: Morgenstern Books, 6PM, 642 N Madison St

PDX, Jun 20 (TBC): Powell’s Books (date and time to be confirmed)

I'm also finalizing plans for one or two dates in NEW ZEALAND at the end of April, as well as a ATLANTA date, likely on March 26.

I really hope you'll come out and say hello. I know these are tough times. Hanging out with nice people who care about the same stuff as you is a genuine tonic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/06/picks-and-shovels-tour/#19-cities-plus-plus

[mothyandthesquid]

Another classic gets a remake for 2024. This is “A Winter Rose”, delicate pink and green speckles on a snowy white background. I opened international shipping for everywhere except Europe yesterday.

It’s taking me about half an hour EXTRA to process an overseas order because my computer really is THAT slow!!!

I set checkout to only accept worldwide orders of over £30 only to avoid unpaid labour over a single skein. Unfortunately, Shopify took $30US orders overnight so I��ve put it up to £60. I think it might have accepted 30 units of any currency as minimum order value, which I would NOT have agreed to!

I’m really sorry to do this but I have resolved, this year, to reduce self-exploitation. It’s only temporary, until I can afford a decent machine. If the expensive (by my standards) new printer I was forced to buy had connected to my phone wirelessly as advertised then this wouldn’t be happening.

[radnewworld]

I have a great adversarial review team in my corner. They're experienced with a variety of games, approach gameplay from completely different styles, aren't afraid to argue, and best of all, none of them are afraid to be critical. If an idea is stupid, too complicated, or exploitable, they'll catch it.

Will have a meeting with one of them this Saturday to discuss changes I've been rolling around in my head. From there, it's back into reworks and writing.

Also completely failed my Self Control check to avoid making a Comstar army. The printer is alive and only wants clanner blood.

[greenhorn-art]

Prince of Shadows, Lord of Thieves by alkat

Fandom: The King's Avatar | 全职高手

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Category: Gen

Words: 1 929

Once upon a time, their exploits were immortalized by artists and writers across the tapestry of history. Once upon a time, they were worshipped as gods and reviled as demons. None of that stopped the Met from stealing all their shit.

About the Book

FONTS: Alegreya [Google Fonts], Lato [Google Fonts]

IMAGES: all art made by myself @greenhorn-art for this fic

MATERIALS: regular ol' printer paper (8.5"x11", 20lb, 96 bright); ~2-2.5mm binder's board; Neenah cardstock (8.5"x11", 65lb, bright white); Cialux bookcloth (black); waxed linen thread (30/3 size, white); wheat paste (1:4 flour:water); paste wax (from a friend, unknown ingredients&quantities, some kind of wax and turpentine/mineral spirits)

PROGRAMS USED: Affinity Publisher 2; Affinity Designer 2; Bookbinder JS | Renegade's Community Imposer (settings: Quarto, snug against binding edge, custom signatures of 2, 1, 2 sheets).

Text & QR codes printed with colour laser printer (duplex, flip long edge), images printed with inkjet printer. QR codes generated with LibreOffice Writer, snipped, saved, and inserted where needed.

BINDING: quarto (quarter-letter) size, sewn board binding with french link stitch and breakaway spine.

.

So this one all started because the visual of HST's outfit was so fun that I was possessed by a visceral need to draw it. Inspiration slapped me across my mind's eye, and much like a medieval knight being slapped in the face by a glove (which didn't actually happen, that's a myth that sprung from the throwing down of a gauntlet. but that's beside the point), I felt bound to take up the challenge. Which lead me to draw a few more, and then I ended up binding the whole thing.

(Also, I find it really amusing that the famous Terracotta Warriors were just storage for YXs stuff. And the gang going 'shopping' at various exhibits for gifts for friends/family,, like that sure is SOME window shopping! I can hear it now: 'Oooh I'll take one one those SMASH, and that SHATTER, and throw in some of those CRASH, they're going to love these! 😇'. All in all, it was a fun little read, and fun little project! :D)

About the Art

Because this was initially a one-off drawing I tried a new art style (and struggled to at least not stray too far for the rest). It was fun and helped me think more about shape and visual focus, instead of being caught up in the details.

The crow (based off of image ID: 4039963 from Rawpixel) and the red umbrella on the front cover were filled curves made with the pen tool. The illustrations' poses were based off of a combination of images found on Google and photos taken by myself.

Pinterest is awful for sources, but it would have been handy to pin the references I'd googled. Only remembered to save the one of a man sitting at a desk. (I deliberately searched for someone sitting with bad posture because YX is described as being "slumped" over the desk. I figure that since "the laws of physics held no meaning to ["cursed souls eschewed by the natural order"]", they'd also be immune to mundane things like discomfort from sitting hunched over for too long. Back pain images were a gold mine! All I had to do was choose one with lighting that would give me a silhouette.)

The Myriad Manifestations Umbrellas and illustrations were drawn in Procreate.

I opted for a more plain umbrella design because it's not (presumably) a fantastical weapon in this story. Though the initial version did have YX cradling the donghua!MMU.

For the scene breaks I inserted the images, pinned them inline as character, and adjusted height and baseline in the pinning menu to fit.

The author wrote one scene break differently than the others, using multiple empty paragraphs instead of just one. Following suit, I used a different image for that particular break. I wanted to reference vampires somewhere, so for that break I made two bloody spots resembling bite marks. The blood spots were made with a group of shapes in Designer.

On cover design:

Because the MMU is what sparks the whole heist, I wanted it on the front cover.

Earlier iterations involved a full cover spread with a man's shadow standing before a shattered glass case, with a plaque mounted on the wall to the left providing information. The plaque was formatted like a museum label and had the author, date published, title, event collection, and story description. I'd also added a QR code to it. Ultimately, I abandoned the concept because it was difficult to decipher what is was when only looking a one cover at a time.

My second idea for the cover would have been a bookcloth-only cover with a cut-out of the MMU on the front, acting like a window showing off an image of the MMU on paper below it. (Inspired by the work of a number of folks over on Renegade's Discord. Here's a few examples gleaned from a quick search: szynkaaa's lung cutouts, some of EHyde's books, and the front cover of Spock's massive all-in-one TGCF). As fun as that would have been to try out, I felt it didn't quite suit the style of the art so I nixed that too.

Eventually I landed on the back cover design with the Met exhibition webpage. At last, I felt that the back & white and simple-shapes-background went with the artwork. The webpage viewed on the phone is based off of the Met's actual website. I took a snip/screenshot of the Met's logo from the banner at the top, then looked at their exhibitions' pages and eyeballed it to create my own. (Threw in the QR because I wanted the easy access to the fic online on the back cover). I chose to use a phone screen rather than I computer monitor because it worked better composition-wise. And besides, while YX may be allergic to owning a phone, SMC is not. I imagine that she saw the news while on her phone then messaged him.

The front cover came together after that. An umbrella for the MMU, and a pop of red. One of YX's messenger crows. A black shape in the background similar to the back cover's, sort of creating a spotlight over the umbrella and placing the rest of the cover in shadow.

Trying New Things: Applying a protective finish to printed covers

Over on the Renegade Bindery Discord, folks have spoken about using a beeswax & turpentine/mineral spirits 50-50 mix to seal printed covers (thank you Kate). According to my dad that's just a paste wax, so he threw 3 different ones at me and said 'have at it'.

I tested them out using the same paper and inkjet I'll use for the cover. I was looking at 1) whether the paste wax affected the paper colour or print quality, and 2) the finish. After applying one coat each and buffing them out I had my winner. Then I applied & buffed two more coats to it and tested 3) water resistance by dripping tea on it. The liquid beaded up and wiped away without staining -- good, three coats will work nicely.

(Test results: Mystery paste wax from a friend wins.

The commercial SC Johnson Paste Wax Original formula (intended for woodworking) has a nice dry shiny finish, but coloured the paper slightly brown -> disqualified

My dad's homemade stuff has a nice shiny/satin finish and didn't change paper's colour, but it felt slightly tacky even after buffing it -- maybe I didn't buff it enough?

The gifted paste wax has a matte finish, didn't change paper's colour (in the image below this one has 3 coats. The paper is now slightly off-white, but still acceptable), and while not as dry-to-touch as the Johnson it was not as tacky as the other homemade stuff.)

When I print out my quarto covers, I print front and back covers side-by-side on the same page*, with some guides to ensure I'm cutting and gluing in the correct place. (The guides mark the boundaries of the covers and start of the turn-ins, and stop at the edge of where I cut. Before cutting I flip it over to mark the guides [see marks indicated in image below] on the wrong side and connect them so I can see where to glue/place book. Then flip it back over to cut, right side up.)

*I'm being economical here at the cost of possible warping damage. This layout means that I'm only using one sheet of paper, but the grain is running in the wrong direction (across the book instead of preferred head-to-tail/top-bottom). This could cause warping issues, but I'm OK with that. I'm hoping that by just gluing at the edges, instead of pasting down the whole thing, warping will be minimized. (I use wrong-grain endpapers most of the time with larger books anyways).

I applied the paste wax before cutting out the covers, working carefully to avoid accidentally creasing/bending the paper (which happened twice, but it was minimal and I hardly notice it). Doing so before cutting ensured that the cover material was completely covered. Even the turn-ins -- something I later came to regret. After all, wax is used specifically so that things don't stick to it. It made it rather difficult to drum on the endpapers because I was trying to glue something down onto a waxy surface. It all worked out in the end -- perhaps due to the fact that there were multiple layers of wheat paste which could adhere to each other, followed by being squashed in a press.

[therealsaintscully]

If Douglas Adams were alive today, he’d have penned a whole book about how HP Deskjet printers evolved into soulless agents of chaos, exploiting every human weakness along the way, reflecting some dark truth about our species—and I'd probably have read the whole damn thing again and again. But he’s not, so here we are.