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0004 Kolera 09: Flesh

Last night, I formally went off the garden.

I’m of mixed emotions on it, really. I didn’t want to let it go. It felt right in many ways, from a spiritual and a sustainable standpoint. I still believe in the cause. I still intend, as possible, to stick to a vegetarian diet. Unfortunately, financial realities are starting to settle in, and part of that means more cooking at home, and more meals that I can share with other people. That, in turn, means more closely meshing the diets of those around me… and that means back on the meat.

I’ll do what I can to keep my indulgences to a minimum, and I’ll be monitoring my weight and other health signs for impact, but I think at least for the time being this is going to be a necessity. I would appreciate it if those who have any strong feelings one way or the other on this please not advocate at me one way or another. I’m not doing this because I’ve changed my mind on any of the reasons why I did it in the first place; I’m doing this because the fastest way for Jessie and I to be able to save a lot of money is to cut our eating-out budget and sharing meals again. Plus, there will be the added emotional benefit of sharing food, which I can’t really underestimate.

This isn’t an abandonment of the ideal. This is a recognition of another, more important one. I have plans for the future, and those plans are going to take a certain amount of money. The more money I can save today, the sooner I can implement my plans, and the happier I’ll be in the future. I can handle a short-term loss for a long-term gain.

And nothing says that when I eat out, I can’t eat like a proper rabbit should.

The flesh that you fancifully fry is not succulent, tasty, or kind.

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By buni – 2010/02/23

0004 Indera 26: Live

After much work and many murmurings and a few fast shuffles behind the curtain, I’m pleased to announce that one of the projects on which I’ve been working for the last four months is finally live! Everyone, take a minute and go check out Prismatic Media!

Zilliards of kudos to Moment, who tirelessly worked to get Nocona’s archives migrated to their new site and who designed the logo for Prismatic. Hojillions of kudos to Jessie both for successfully translating my mad babblings about site design into something that looks really awesome, and for helping me troubleshoot a couple of really nasty Unicode conversion issues. Finally, squillions of kudos to Cube, for having the idea in the first place, and for helping get the server in place to make this happen, as as well for convincing Corasyn to help shill for us!

It is        to introduce the weasel to more people. It is        to tell more people about the weasel. =@.@=

I also want to pause, just for a bit, and give special gratitude to both Jessie and Cube for their tireless—and too-often thankless—buni-management and maintenance while we’ve gotten this off the ground. They, and many others, have done quite a lot to keep th’ buni running while th’ buni has gotten the server running.

We’re a small site for now, but that just means we’ve got lots of room to grow, and plans are definitely in the works for more. More sites, more people, more weirdness! Stay tuned!

There’s no sensation to to compare with this.

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By buni – 2010/01/15

0004 Ertera 25: Validation

This is something of an odd post, but bear with me.

If you’ve purchased a copy of Child of Man since December 1 Gregorian, would you mind terribly letting me know? This is a complete-immunity-no-harm-no-foul post for everyone; I’m not asking for sales here. Rather, I’m a bit concerned that my CreateSpace dashboard isn’t showing me anything at all since my initial orders for author copy to give out to people, and I’m a titch concerned that it’s not crediting me for sales. I hope this is either a sign that their updates are slow. If you haven’t bought a copy, you don’t need to justify yourself here. This is entirely me trying to make sure that my vendors are being honest with me.

That said, if you do want to help support my efforts, I’ve got a couple of suggestions:

  • If you read Child of Man and enjoyed it, would you be willing to review it positively on its Amazon page? I’m not counting on anonymous sales, but good reviews can be a real incentive. I’m not asking for praise you don’t believe; leave anonymous comments if you want. Hell, if you didn’t like it, explain what was wrong with it. Just help me get it past “nobody has reviewed this book yet.”
  • Would you consider a nomination for the Ursa Majors? Again, it’s probably not enough to drive any numbers at all, but these things do get attention within the fandom, and every little bit would help.

Finally, if you have been reading the Nail, thanks for the support you’ve already shown!

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By buni – 2009/12/17

0004 Ertera 11: Plenty

Today is the first day in over a week that the Embassy has only contained the people who live within it, and so it’s probably a good day to take stock of the last few days.

By all standards, Bandaza this year was an incredible success. Rather than try to detail everything, though, let me just hit the highlights:

  • The residents of the Embassy converted three rooms—one of which was the combined living-dining space—into usable space, representing a level of cleaning and reorganization that hadn’t been present since we first occupied the area over three years ago.
  • Twenty-one people showed up to the Embassy to share and partake. This is the new record, and probably a snidge over the actual apartment’s capacity. I think this means we’re going to have to have a bigger space next year, or else spread the gathering over two locations.
  • Several individuals’ absences were sorely missed, and much wishing was made among the gathered that they could share in future festivals.
  • Both of the turkeys I prepared turned out better than in the past. Both the Abomination—brined in hickory smoke, maple syrup and pepper, then baked in bag with bacon, maple syrup, and peppercorns—and the Turkey Pie—brined in apple cider with cinnamon and cloves, then baked in bag with honey, cider, butter, and cinnamon—vanished within minutes of hitting the table.
  • Almost everyone that came brought a “little something”, and several people contributed significant percentages of a meal, meaning we ended up with what can only be described as an embarrassment of food riches that took up the entire dining room table, a donated temporary table, and part of the kitchen counters.
  • The tradition of having one cooking disaster continued this year, in the form of five pounds of garlic mashed potatoes that made their way unceremoniously to the kitchen floor. Thankfully, I had just sent Tanya to the store for another five pounds for fear that we wouldn’t have enough.
  • Five extra people stayed for the bulk of the weekend, including one guest who had arrived the Labya prior and stayed through to yesterday.

Every year I do this, the warmth and joy grows a little more. I’ve been doing this in one form or another since adopting my friends’ “Orphans’ Feast” back when I was living in Texas, which represents over a decade of sharing my bounty and encouraging others to share theirs. In the past, I was the only one contributing, and I was fine with that, because it was my belief—even in the worst throes of the O—that this was how I gave back to my community. These days, however, so many people come together to help make this a success that it’s taking on a beautiful life of its own.

It’s my hope that, as the cycles that have brought us together inevitably carry some of us apart, this kind of warmth and openness follows each of us who has been part of this sharing.

In other news, now that the festival itself is done, the time has come to rededicate myself to my projects. Child of Man is complete and available for sale. If you’ve read it and enjoyed it, please consider offering your support by nominating it for the Ursa Major Awards. Beautiful World is written out through chapter 19 and Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold is up to chapter four, and will be starting on the site next Setya. I have four more writing projects in mental development, one of which will become the next major work once BW is finished, but none is ready to move to that state. I’m behind where I’d like to be, but I have a feeling that from here I should have little trouble getting back on track.

There is plenty for all.

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By buni – 2009/12/03

0004 Fathera 22: Final

Awesome of awesomes: Child of Man is finished! Yes, that’s right, the book is actually done before it’s finished on the website. So, buy it early and see how it ends before everyone else! Plus, the book contains some extra content that won’t be appearing on the site. It’s a bonus for everyone! The final price is USD8.00, which I hope is eminently reasonable given the content.

Mad props to go Paka, ’cause the cover he painted is absolutely frazzin’ gorgeous. The book’s worth its price in art alone. Secondly, thanks go to Bea, who helped clean up the writing. It didn’t need a lot, but what it did need, it needed badly, and she helped put the polish on a lot of patches. To Jessie for helping me assemble it, and to everyone who helped keep me motivated enough to finish it, thank you for putting up with my madness!

And now… to get back to work on everything else on my plate. =@.@=

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By buni – 2009/11/16

0004 Fathera 21: Phoenix

I think we’re back. I hope we’re back.

For anyone who noticed over the last two days that things have been a little weird, you have my utmost apologies. Things have been a little hectic around here, for reasons you might have already heard, but the tale deserves a retelling anyway at this point, if only to help me make sure that later down the road, I can remember it in more or less the sequence that it actually happened.

Over a year ago, in the process of upgrading and moving systems around, I managed to rip the power coupler point off of a drive. Jessie executed a daring solder-repair, and we resuscitated the drive, but we both knew that was a temporary fix, and I needed to build a new system drive. However, as one can imagine, I always had something that was far more important than upgrading the server, motherbrain. Eventually, the hardware I had purchased specifically for that reason got repurposed, and by that point the momentum was lost. Of course, this didn’t stop me from volunteering the server to host a rash of other important systems—a MUCK for some friends, my wife’s writing project, my writing blog, an IRC server for some other people, et cetera. You know, to ensure that I’d have a nice big userbase looking at the server at all times.

So, knowing that I had let things get out of control, I had actually started taking the first steps towards fixing this admittedly-embarrassing situation. I had gotten the hardware I needed, and with some help—and a bit of prompting—from Jessie and Cube, I had, in fact, commented to th’ otr that I was making some decent headway. I’d finally decided to get away from Slackware and enter the Twentieth Century with everyone else and start using Ubuntu, I’d gotten the hardware built out, and I’d gotten the OS installed. Late Friday afternoon, I told Cube that I’d gotten a list of packages together on the new system that I thought were the bulk of what I needed to install, and the rest I could iron out in time. I then went off to play Race for the Galaxy with Nicky and generally relax from the annoying work week, with an eye towards getting ahead on my writing backlog.

This is when the Cosmic 2×4 struck.

About 23h30 on Jugya, Indi calls me and says he’s noticing some permissions weirdness with the MUCK database, and could I help him diagnose it. We work on it for a bit, figure out that I ran something as root I shouldn’t have, and it had a file locked. Easy fix. I excuse myself from the game, sit down to work on it, and Indi figures that it’s probably a smart move to back up the database “just in case.” I agree, which is unusual for me because I’m usually prone to just blasting through things and trusting that fools and little bunis have a bit of play with the Dice.

Of course, they do, but as it turns out, that’s not always the good kind of play. Right as the backup finished, the server started beeping at me. This was not just the polite “I believe you have sat on the keyboard” beep. This wasn’t even the “hey, you might want to take a look at this” beep. This was the full-volume fast-repeating beep of something seriously wrong. The console greeted me with things like “Kernel panic” and “Killing Interrupt Handler” and “AIEEE!”

This is not good.

I power-cycled the server, intent on fixing whatever was wrong… only it was over 180 days since its last fsck on all drives and had to force a journal check. Okay, fine… only it gets to 28% on the first drive and does it again. Reboot again, second time clean, gets to the next disk… gets to 10% and crashes.

Wonderful.

So, with many apologies to Nicky—and to others whose weekends I may have negatively impacted—I did the only thing I could do: I took the drives out of the old server, put them into the new server, did a full dump of their contents, and proceeded to launch the new server in place of the old. Like the man says, no problem, only solutions. How hard could it be, really? I wasn’t changing that much, really. I mean, check it:

Old New
CPU 1 32bit 2 64bit
OS Slackware Ubuntu
Package manager pkgtool apt-get
Named BIND 8 BIND 9
Apache 1.3 2.0
Postfix configuration Sendmail emulation using m4 Postfix native
MTA Sendmail emulation Dovecot
PHP 5.2.10 tarball 5.2.6 package
IRC Unreal 3.1 Unreal 3.2
IRC Services version 4 version 5

Simple!

Suffice to say, I’ve spent the last thirty-six hours either getting the system rebuilt. The only thing that hasn’t changed between the old environment and the new is the majority of the user data, and even those aren’t perfectly identical. I think at this point that most things are restored to a state of pretty-much-like-they-were, but this is going to be a few days in burn-in in the new environment, if not longer. At least we’re on current hardware, with current software.

The greatest irony of this, of course, is that the soldered drive still seems to be working fine. As indicated in the link above, the problem appears to have been something related to the motherboard clock ticks being dropped, which would confuse things during long I/O sessions. The server has followed us through two moves, and it belonged to a friend of ours prior to Jessie and I inheriting it, so this has apparently been a time bomb whose time had come.

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By buni – 2009/11/16

0004 Vasera 15: Preparation

I’m not yet at the “living the winter off of the summer” point, but if this weekend was any indication, it might not be hard to get there. At this point, I now have all of the following in the apartment:

  • Five quart jars of homemade spaghetti sauce:
    • Five pounds of tomatoes
    • Four pounds of onions
    • Two pounds of yellow bell peppers
    • Three pounds of white mushrooms
    • One bottle of cabernet sauvignon
    • Three cans of tomato paste
    • Half a pound of garlic
    • Crushed red pepper and other spices
    • Preserved with lemon juice
  • Five quart jars of homemade swamp chow:
    • Three pounds of red beans
    • Two pounds of onions
    • Two pounds of celery
    • Two pounds of yellow bell peppers
    • Two cups of vinegar
    • Half a pound of garlic
    • Cajun seasonings and filé
  • The last quart jar of Too Much Chili
  • Seven cup jars and two quart jars of USDA Chile Salsa:
    • Five pounds of tomatoes
    • One-and-a-half pounds of mixed chiles
    • One pound of onions
    • Half a pound of garlic
    • A cup of lime juice
  • Two quart jars of Harvest Fruit:
    • Three pounds of peaches
    • Three pounds of pears
    • Harvest syrup:
      • Six cups of water
      • Two cups of brown sugar
      • Two cups of honey
      • Two tablespoons of cinnamon
      • One tablespoon of ground clove
      • Two tablespoons of vanilla extract
      • One packet of fruit pectin for thickening
      • Directions: Boil until it stops reducing
  • One quart and one pint of Harvest Syrup
  • One quart of hard-boiled eggs pickled in balsamic vinegar, garlic, and rosemary
  • One quart of garlic dill cucumbers
  • One quart of hot garlic cucumbers

Not all of this went down today, but as I was putting the last of the jars in the canner—at much too late an hour, I might add—I realized that the second dozen jars that I knew would be too many are almost all in use. I also organized my pantry space to make room for all the new homemade goodies sitting on the shelves.

I think taking up baking and learning to make bread is going to have to be next on the list.

The Harvest Fruit, I should note, are not to be opened until Bandaza. Cracking any of those jars early will likely result in instant death via rapid -onset diabetes. I tried some over a bit of vanilla ice cream that th’ jaql had left in the freezer, and I think my liver died of happiness overload.

I also chaptered out the next novel, Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold. I don’t quite have enough yet to start writing it, but I’m really not far off. I need solid character descriptions and a couple of final notes on motivations for things, as well as fleshing out a couple of the more specific events beyond, “hey, this is the chapter where the big reveal happens.” That, however, should go really fast, and if I have things at the point that I think I do, I should be able to start actually writing it after Jessie and I get back from Boston.

This whole “being prepared in advance of when I need to do things” is really weird. I’m not sure what to make of it, but I think I like it.

It was a bit of a botch job, you see; we only had seven days to make it.

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By buni – 2009/09/14

0004 Vasera 13: Child of Man

At 01h19 Pacific Standard Time, I officially finished the first draft of Child of Man. Fourteen chapters and an epilogue, split up over thirty-two sections, for a total of 47,951 words. It is, as far as the Science Fiction Writers’ Association and the Ursa Major awards is concerned, a full-length novel. Yes, it’s short, compared to some things. It’s still the longest single piece that I’ve completed to date. Beautiful World tops it at 50,866 words, but it’s only at roughly the two-thirds mark. Child of Man, barring any gross editing that Bea suggests that I actually decide to do, is done.

I feel like I’ve just dropped a boulder off my back. I quite literally started this book over a dozen years ago. I posted the first three chapters to alt.horror.werewolves, for aether’s sake, which means I had to have started no later than 1997, and possibly as early as 1995 if I began writing it in Perth. It’s older than my tits. It’s older than my present relationship. It predates every piece of computer equipment I presently own. I have been carrying this story with me for over a third of my lifespan and I have been quietly and secretly tearing out massive clumps of my fur in private at its perpetually abandoned status and now it is finally out of my head.

Now, of course, the hard part begins. It’s rough. Very rough. Some of this is going to have to be polished. Some of it is going to have to be quietly excised and replaced. Some of it I’m simply going to accept is not getting any better and will be appearing, warts and all, in the final printed edition. I’ve contacted someone about producing a cover, which I’m hoping to have by early November, well in advance of when the final few chapters will show up on the Nail. Once all of that is done, I should finally be able to assemble this thing into a paperback and sell it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever make a cent off of it. I don’t know if it will do a thing for me, monetarily. That’s not important, right now. What’s important to me right now is that I have completed a full-length novel project and that I salvaged this ancient albatross and gave it new life after almost a decade of neglect. I can, at least in some fashion, call myself a novelist now.

That’s a powerful elixir, and I think I like it.

The sky shall open, and I shall drink my fill.

P.S. Everybody who can see this, hie your happy tails over to the and recommend Five Glasses of Absinthe for the 2009 Anthropomorphics Comic Strip and Graphic Story lists. I mean it. Go. Now. I’ll be begging you to add me to the list once the damn novel’s printed, but until then, I can at least point the HappyGun in a positive direction.

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By buni – 2009/09/12

0004 Vasera 09: Lockstep

By now, folks should have noticed that I’m actually updating my writing site twice a week. However, as I’m sure other folks have noticed, there have been a few hiccups here and there along the way. So, I’m going to take a minute and explain just what’s going on around here:

  • In order to know what my buffer is between today and “when I run out of written material”, I schedule my posts in advance. Every Tuesday and Friday, at 09h00 PST, the server will automatically release the next scheduled post into the wild, as long as I have prepared material.
  • This means that I no longer have to remember to manually update the site, but it does mean that I have to manually update my LiveJournal “some time after nine o’clock” in order to provide folks a link back to the Nail and whatever post came out today.
  • I found a crossposter tool, Live+Press, which seems to work really well for crossposting from both here and the Nail to LiveJournal, and it respects my privacy codes and such and in short does what I need it to do…
  • … with one noted exception: it doesn’t know how to interact with the post-scheduling mechanism, because a scheduled post in WP is a “published post only not yet.” So, L+P looks at the scheduled post and says “oh, you’re not really in the wild yet” and doesn’t crosspost. Then, when WP releases the scheduled post, L+P looks at it and says, “oh, you were already published,” and doesn’t crosspost.
  • The practical upshot of all of this is that I have to manually update my LiveJournal every time a post goes live if I want the folks on my LJ to know I posted it.

This is, as you may be able to guess, a less-than-ideal state of things.

For now, I don’t mind doing it, but the truth is that it’s a pain in the tuchas, and I’d really rather not have to keep updating. Nor, however, do I want to lose readership just because I can’t remember this step. Does anyone know of any tools for importing an RSS feed into LJ that doesn’t involve giving money to them? I’m looking at the LJ FAQs, and it looks like you have to be a paid user to add a new feed. On the flipside of the same question, how many folks in LJ-land use a non-LJ RSS feed reader?

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By buni – 2009/09/08

0004 Vasera 08: Swing

Over the last seventy-two hours I have

  • had a good drive down to Portland with Jessie
  • enjoyed the company of close friends
  • remembered why I enjoyed Betrayal at House on the Hill
  • had several really good scenes with people
  • cried on someone’s shoulder in a really good way
  • helped someone compost ideas for a really awesome-sounding novel
  • composted ideas for two more of my own novels
  • finished another chapter of Beautiful World
  • scripted out the last of Child of Man
  • shared homemade pickled eggs in malt vinegar and hot garlic with folks
  • served the last of my canned spaghetti sauce to a positive reception
  • received a big bag of home-grown Roma tomatoes which will go into the next batch of sauce
  • eaten a really good mozzarella-and-caramelized-onion omelette with two giant pancakes
  • realized that one of the above novel ideas amounted to an extended series of character vignettes that probably wouldn’t interest anyone as-is
  • realized that the other above novel idea probably could not be published legally in the United States
  • received a three-hundred-fifty dollar ticket for “following too close” while driving out of state on Labor Day.
  • cried on someone’s shoulder in a really bad way
  • drove back to Seattle
  • picked up another dozen canning jars and a stock pot for making larger batches of homemade goods
  • did a load of dishes
  • realized I left my black flats in Portland
  • assimilated the new Rebel vs. Imperium cards into my Race for the Galaxy set and decided to buy card sleeves
  • come home to discover a party was apparently held while we were out
  • had my wife discover she was a snow leopard

Not much else is new.

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By buni – 2009/09/07