A Teller of Tales. Husband, father, teacher, tech startup developer. Former Presidential candidate.
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined April 2019
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Happy Black Friday y'all!
Whether you're done with your Black Friday strategic strikes, or just plotting your online shopping spree today, here's a few holiday gift suggestions for the sci-fi/fantasy reader in your life...
(See ⬇️ for the Amazon connections!)
ONE OCTOBER NIGHT - One story every night, born from a drawing. Fantasy, science fiction, mystery, this collection has it all. Come for the night and see what you find, because it's never boring here in October.
RECALL NOTICE - (ebook only) Eddie's had a rough thirteen months. He's been cursed by a gypsy, assigned his own sister as his court appointed witch, and is up to his neck in mandated community service. When he picks up a new client, his luck finally changes — for the worse. Can this PI turned black cat navigate a world of friendly zombies, orcish goons, and bad luck by the crate to somehow save the day?
MINSTRELS IN THE GALAXY - A dozen science fiction authors spin their own yarns, inspired by the music of Jethro Tull. Belly up to the bar somewhere out among the stars. Grab yourself a drink, and settle in for some colorful tales from our minstrels in the galaxy. Stories of things that could have been, things that might have been...and of things that should have been, but never were.
TALES FROM THE WOOD - A dozen fantasy authors spin their own tales, inspired by the music of Jethro Tull. Come join us around the fire for stories of all manner of witches, wizards, dragons, and fae beings both light and dark as these bards bring you their Tales from the Wood.
2024 HIGH CALIBER AWARDS - A young traveling judge on the road with an Imperial Magus struggles to keep his own magical talent hidden while investigating a series of crimes that look to be the work of a powerful necromancer. (I'm working on continuing this story into a full novel for Cannon Publishing! 😁)
WYRD WEST - Out in the Wasaya territory of the Old West, myth collides with reality, and anything can be true. A missing town draws a Federal Marshal and an itinerant preacher together to confront an ancient evil that wants to consume them all - and more. Get my story and another nine from stellar authors in this volume!
ZNB PRESENTS: YEAR TWO - What would happen if the "Chosen One" was a sixty year-old widowed fisherwoman? Find out in "Harrold of the Gods", only one of the two dozen stories in this anthology!
And more! That's a sample of what you can find on my Amazon Author's page. Take a look and find something for the geek that you love, and give them a gift they can enjoy while they're curled up next to a fire this holiday season!
Oh, and if you're looking for some additional information, I list some of my favorite indie publishers and samples of what they offer in a Substack post - pop over and check it out.
substack.com/home/post/p-152…
Sam Robb retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Sam Robb retweeted
Unironically @knighton_bill just came in to find me napping/sleeping in and informed me it’s 10 o’clock. 💕💀💕
"Set in Alexander Macris’s Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) universe, the anthology features nine stories... Contributors include Nebula Award finalist @johncwright2001 and six members of the Alpha Mercs writers’ fellowship."
rightbacker.com/articles/ann…
QOTD from @thenovelninja:
"If you can only enjoy a story if you already agree with the message, it's not entertainment. It's just a sermon."
xitter.cf/thenovelninja/status/2…
Yeah, yeah, elections important, vote against the bad people, vote for the slightly less bad people. Trust me, I'm political.
But stories are how we survive politics. That's why we need stories that aren't just politics. That's why it's such a bad thing to have our major entertainment built around telling The Message rather than an entertaining story that happens to have an underlying message. If you can only enjoy a story if you already agree with the message, it's not entertainment. It's just a sermon.
But guess what. When you brag about starting the fires, eventually someone's going to come stop your next one.
There are rabbit holes, then there are sink holes... then there is the Ancient Elder Rabbit God Sinkhole that is Victorian Thimble Lore.
Sam Robb retweeted
Raconteur Press: Building More Than a Catalog of Books
Raconteur Press is doing things differently. They create opportunities for writers, help them develop their craft...
That's a cultural contribution worth supporting.
rightbacker.com/articles/rac…
Sam Robb retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Sam Robb retweeted
Also, for the record, if you're not reading 2 time Prometheus Award Winner Dave Freer @davefreersf , you're only missing out on someone whose work matches Terry Pratchett's for quality and enjoyment.
GO READ HIM.
Why can I remember "Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock" but I can't remember the name of people I've worked with for ten years?
