Maintenance for Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI
Jul. 8th, 2025 12:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
linode_status_new_feedTHIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Jul 8, 12:00 - 13:00 UTC
Jun 24, 23:11 UTC
Scheduled - The Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI will be undergoing scheduled maintenance between 12:00:00 UTC and 13:00:00 UTC, July 8, 2025. During this window service should not be disrupted. We will update this status page if we encounter any unexpected issues.
Maintenance for Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI
Jul. 2nd, 2025 09:00 pmlinode_status_new_feedTHIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Jul 2, 21:00 - 22:00 UTC
Jun 24, 23:10 UTC
Scheduled - The Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI will be undergoing scheduled maintenance between 21:00:00 UTC and 22:00:00 UTC, July 2, 2025. During this window service should not be disrupted. We will update this status page if we encounter any unexpected issues.
Briefly, Venice
Jun. 24th, 2025 10:09 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
For our 25th anniversary, Krissy and I were planning to go to Iceland and spend a week or so there, getting to know the country. Then the pandemic happened and we ended up spending the anniversary at home. Fine, we would just reschedule Iceland for our 30th anniversary. But then I was invited to do a convention in Iceland last year, and we tacked on an extra five days after the convention to do all the things we planned for our 25th anniversary. This left our 30th anniversary suddenly unscheduled.
Fortunately, I had a backup: I had always wanted to visit Venice, not just for Venice itself, but also, goofily, for the fact there is a Church of the Scalzi there, and a Scalzi Bridge, and, heck, why not, even a Scalzi restaurant. Honestly, how could I not go? Krissy indulged me, and on the week of our anniversary, off we went.
We spent a full week in Venice, which appeared to surprise the people there when we mentioned the fact to them. Apparently Venice is usually a couple-days stop at most, tourists grimly marching themselves from the Doge’s palace to the obligatory gondola ride to wherever else they went before they were hustled back onto a bus or cruise ship and sent off to whatever the next destination was. The fact we were in town for a whole week impressed the locals. They seemed to appreciate that we wanted to take in the city at a leisurely pace.
Which is what we did! We did have two days where we had a private guide to give us a walking tour of the city (including stops at the aforementioned Doge’s palace, St. Mark’s basilica and the Scalzi church) and to take us over to Murano to watch glass being blown. And of course we rode in a gondola, because, hey, we were in fact tourists, and not afraid to do touristy things. But most of the days there we woke up late, wandered around the city and maybe took in a museum or church, and then ate at a bunch of restaurants and hung out in a bunch of bars, mostly on the water, and watched the city go by in various boats. Venice, as it turns out, is a lovely city to just be in. Krissy and I mostly did a lot of not much, and it was pretty great.
Mind you, Venice is one of the most overtouristed cities in the world, and as a visitor you can certainly feel that, especially on the weekends, in the space between the Rialto Bridge and the Piazza San Marco. It’s Disneyland-level crowded there. I can’t complain overmuch about that fact without being a full-blown hypocrite, but we did understand that our role in town was to drop a lot of money into the local economy in order to balance out our presence. We were happy to do that, and, you know, to be respectful of the people who were helping to give us a delightful vacation. By and large the Venetians were perfectly nice, did not seem to dislike us merely for being Americans, and in any event we got out of town before Jeff Bezos could show up and make everyone genuinely angry. No one blamed us for Jeff Bezos, either.
One of the things I personally genuinely enjoyed about Venice was just how utterly unlike anywhere in the United States. Yes, I know there are places in the US where they have canals; heck, the Venice in California was once meant to have them all over the place. But it’s not only about the canals. It’s about the fact that no matter what street you’re going down, what bridge you’re crossing or what side canal you’re looking down into, parts of everything you’re looking at have been there longer than the US has been a country, and none of it accommodates anything that the US would require. There are no cars in Venice, no Vespas, not even any bikes. If you’re going anywhere, you’re walking or going by boat. It’s very weird to have no road noise anywhere. You don’t realize how much you get used that noise, even in a rural area like the one I live in, until you go some place without it. I mean, there are boats with engines. The sounds of internal combustion are not entirely gone. But it’s dramatically reduced.
As mentioned, we stayed in Venice for a week, which I think is probably the right amount of time to be in the city. We didn’t see everything it had to offer, but then we weren’t trying to; if and when we go back there will still be new things to explore. But I did get to check off visiting the Scalzi Bridge, Church and restaurant, and the last of these was where Krissy and I had our actual 30th anniversary dinner. It’s was pretty good. I did not get a discount because of my last name. Alas. Here’s picture of the interior of the Church of the Scalzi:
Slightly more ornate than the one in Bradford, Ohio, I admit. But in defense of the one in Ohio, it’s much easier to dust.
Would I recommend Venice to others? Definitely. Spend more than a couple of days. Be respectful. Spend a decent amount of money. Have an Aperol Spritz. If you’re from the US, enjoy the fact there is nothing like it in the American experience. Maybe avoid the Rialto Bridge on the weekend. And there you have it: an excellent Venetian vacation. I hope you’ll enjoy yours as much as we enjoyed ours.
— JS
I'm a bad boy?
Jun. 24th, 2025 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbarclayHmm, the domain is rather fresh, just 2 months old. It lists the same email address that's registering our main domain, but it's hosted at Hetzner instead of on-prem. Well, wget it and look at the HTML. Looks like someone scraped our main webshite .. oh and there's "put in username & password and we'll get you your free stuff" (Klimaticket). The HTTP POST then points to our own webshite. The SSL certificate is signed by an unofficial CA .. hey, wait, that CA is trusted by my browsers at 'ork, so central IT must've added it to the store.
Ok, so it's a Phishing Awareness campaign. Talked to my colleagues and they said that if you do put in something in username/password you'll probably just be redirected to a video explaining the dangers of phishing.
So now I want to see that video, but I don't want to use "my" UID. Just varying it gets a plain 404. So I wrote a quick bruteforce shell script - with just 7 chars to go through (and some other constraints) that's perfectly feasible, a mere 300ish million requests. And I want results before the campaign is over, so let's parallelize it a bit, that's what CPU-cores and -threads are for!
...
20 minutes later I got a call from boss^2 requesting to please stop being a bad boy ;) (I did somewhat north of 500 req/s - pretty respectable considering it's spawning one wget per request, and a complete SSL session for each&every one with that - seemingly enough that whatever they're running server-side shat its pants).
DNS Resolution - Northwest Europe
Jun. 24th, 2025 07:17 pmlinode_status_new_feedJun 24, 19:17 UTC
Resolved - We have confirmed that our earlier mitigation step resolved the issue and haven’t observed any additional issues with our Hosted DNS Service, and will now consider this incident resolved. If you are still experiencing issues, please open a Support ticket for assistance.
Jun 24, 18:26 UTC
Identified - Our team has identified a problematic server and removed it from service at ~16:53 UTC. We have received reports and internal testing shows that this mitigated the issue and are continuing work to ensure long term mitigation. We will provide additional updates as we have more information.
Jun 24, 17:37 UTC
Update - We are continuing to investigate this issue.
Jun 24, 17:35 UTC
Update - Our team is investigating an issue affecting our Hosted DNS Service in Northwest Europe beginning at approximately 7:55 UTC on June 24, 2025. During this time, users may experience an elevated rate of errors, including records not updating or resolving as expected. We will share additional updates as we have more information.
Jun 24, 16:08 UTC
Investigating - Our team is investigating an emerging service issue affecting DNS resolution through our nameservers. We will share additional updates as we have more information.
The Big Idea: Travis Kennedy
Jun. 24th, 2025 03:20 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
We’re gettin’ the band back together! And this time, they’re gonna rock the political climate in foreign countries. Author Travis Kennedy is bringing you the best of hair metal bands with espionage on the side in his debut novel, The Whyte Python World Tour. Follow along to see how his Big Idea will shred… your expectations of 80s bands!
TRAVIS KENNEDY:
In my debut novel, The Whyte Python World Tour, the CIA recruits a hair band to foment regime change in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War.
That’s not the big idea I want to write about here, though, and I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t dream it up on my own. There’s nearly a century of evidence that the CIA has meddled with popular music to influence public sentiment all over the world. More specifically for my purposes, there’s a longstanding rumor – made popular by the fantastic podcast “Wind of Change” by Patrick Radden Keefe (2020) – that the CIA wrote the hit Scorpions song “Wind of Change” after the Berlin Wall fell, to rally Eastern Europeans into harmony with the Western world through the power of soft metal.
By the time I heard the podcast, I had been thinking about writing a book in the world of glam metal for almost twenty years – and even earlier on some level, since I was a little kid in the 80s watching MTV even though I wasn’t supposed to. Eight-year-old Travis saw metal guys as zany party animals without a care in the world. The cool kids in the back of the bus. In more recent years, I read autobiographies and biographies and watched documentaries from the era, believing all along that there was a story to be told there that could be bigger than the standard “Behind the Music” drama about how everything was great until it all came crashing down.
I didn’t entirely know why the genre captivated me so much. The entertainment factor never let me down, of course; a lot of their adventures are objectively funny. These borderline-feral Muppets were suddenly swimming in fame and fortune, and they didn’t have any of the tools to handle either. That was a good place to start. But I did learn quickly that my childhood impression of the glam metal bands was all wrong.
Because more often than not, these guys were not the cool kids in the back of the bus. They were misfits. Outcasts. They had abusive and tragic childhoods.
They usually weren’t popular. They did badly in school. People had no expectations for them. And they didn’t have much expectations for themselves. But they had this one thing they loved and were good at.
Music.
And while they were misfits on their own, when they found each other and played together, they unlocked these superpowers. The castaways and dropouts – with their massive hair, and makeup, and spandex – dominated the zeitgeist of the back half of the 1980s. It was one underdog story after another, like the Mighty Ducks or the Bad News Bears.
There it was: that simple but true BIG IDEA, proven over and over: that when misfits and outcasts find their communities, they can accomplish really big things together.
By the time I listened to “Wind of Change,” I knew already that metal dudes shared a lot of hidden traits. They were resourceful. They were adaptable. They were willing to live in circumstances that most other people weren’t. And they were constantly underestimated.
Those are actually really good qualities for spies!
So, while the concept was still hilarious to me, it was also weirdly kind of plausible. Now I was off and running, and a fascinating thing happened – the big idea kept finding different ways of telling itself in the story. Without spoiling too much, the band Whyte Python is not the only group of underdogs in this book; and whether it’s their Agency handlers or the people living under dictatorships a world away, the spark of music becomes a pretty powerful connector for disparate outcasts who go on to accomplish big things together.
Make no mistake, The Whyte Python World Tour is a satire. But always present is the belief that art – even if that art is party metal, played by feral Muppets – has immeasurable power when it’s shared. When it means something to people, and helps them find other people who have the same feelings about it. You’re doing that now as fans of this website, and every time you give a recommendation for a book or an album or a movie you loved. Participating in culture means that you’re a part of a thousand little movements, inspiring others to seek new ideas and talk about them with each other and maybe build something amazing out of it.
So on behalf of the band, let me be the first to say: welcome to the revolution.
Tell your friends.
The Whyte Python World Tour: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
Author Socials: Website|Band Website|Facebook|Twitter|Rikki Thunder’s Facebook|Davy Bones Facebook|Spencer Dooley Facebook|Buck Sweet Facebook
Community Day 2025 Wrap-up
Jun. 24th, 2025 12:00 amhomeassistant_feed
Our first Home Assistant Community Day was a humbling success — we knew that the community had a desire to have something coordinated like this, but we really did not expect just how widely this would spread. 💖
So much happened in such a short window of time, so let’s talk about how this year’s event went and what the future looks like for Home Assistant meetups.
It started with a question…
Home Assistant Community Day was born from a conversation last year where we asked, “Would the community even want this?” We dropped hints here and there to test how y’all would react to a worldwide event, and after weeks of planning, the response to the event announcement was overwhelmingly positive. 🤩
First, THANK YOU 🙏🏻 to all the hosts for their local coordination, community members who showed up, and the venues that made all this possible. I learned so much with your help, and it will make next year’s Community Day one to remember.
…that turned into a movement…
When I announced Home Assistant Community Day, I didn’t give hosts a lot to work with. I didn’t want the community to think they had to fit into a specific format, and wanted it to be unique to their region. It became clear pretty quickly what information was missing and what people wanted guidance on. For example, some asked for suggestions on what types of venues to book or which activities could make the event more interactive, such as quizzes or presentations. Your questions helped us make it easier for hosts to build cool events, thank you for those!
All around the world, everyone came together to talk about Home Assistant (and its related projects). You swapped hardware, you showed off your automations or dashboards, you participated in quizzes, and you formed new bonds with people in your area who share your passion for Home Assistant. Some people had custom swag printed, others received hardware from a couple of our Works With Home Assistant partners, and one group had a Hackathon event the day before! So many great photos were shared from the events that we can’t possibly include them all here! You can find plenty more by searching #HADay2025 on social media or by checking the Discord meetup thread for this event. It was seriously one of the most uplifting things I’ve had the pleasure to not only facilitate, but also witness. 🥰
…but not without complications
Swag was an unexpected complication. When I first announced the day, we planned to have me order the merch and then send it off to the hosts. This would require collecting addresses and sending packages to people around the world, and we realized quickly that the logistics of that would end up a mess. Instead, we made the sticker designs (along with the Luma calendar invite graphic) publicly available for the hosts to print something locally.
When we did this, we (as the Open Home Foundation) committed to reimbursing the hosts for these swag purchases, along with venue fees or other reasonable expenses they might have on the day. The idea being that no host should be out of pocket for supporting their local Home Assistant community. You support us (by contributing time or by being Home Assistant Cloud subscribers), and we want to give back to the community in any way we can.
I’m excited to share that we plan on using those same guidelines for any community meetup, not just the ones that happen on Community Day! 👏🏻 We’re building a new community page where all of these details will be available, so stay tuned for more information.
Some stats for the nerds
We had 82 events with over 1,600 registered guests, spanning nearly every corner of the globe. The events started in New Zealand and ended on the West Coast of North America. This meant we had meetups held from 10 pm May 23 to midnight May 25 (UTC time), that’s over 26 hours of constant partying! 🥳
We had events in every major region except Australia! Most meetups were in Europe and North America — probably not too surprising for most. The smallest events had 2 registered guests, and the event that had the largest number of registered guests was Utrecht, with 200!
With an average of 20 people attending a meetup, we know that we can advise a lower capacity limit for future events. This will be included as part of the guidelines we’ll have on that new community page I mentioned above.
Keep the fun going!
Many hosts told me that they’ve created a new space for the attendees to chat or that they were going to start doing some regular meetups (some have done both!). Since Luma worked so well for us for Community Day, I’ve created a general calendar for meetups! I also have graphic assets publicly available for your Luma event and any social media you’d like to post your event on — use the 1:1 ratio image for the invite image on Luma. There are two events live there now, way to go Chile (Santiago) and Belgium (Hasselt)! 🤩
While we don’t have a solid date for next year’s Home Assistant Community Day, I can at least let you know that it will not be in May and instead later in the year. I’m aiming to give you at least a two-month heads-up for when it will be this time. We’re planning on doing something bigger and I can’t wait to do it all again with y’all next year. 😌
P.S. - Did you spot our refreshed Creator Network page yet? 👀
Why is there no consistent single signon API flow?
Jun. 23rd, 2025 10:36 pmmjg59This is largely optimised for web authentication, which doesn't seem like a huge deal - if I'm logging into Workday then being bounced to another site for auth seems entirely reasonable. The problem is when you're trying to gate access to a non-web app, at which point consistency in login flow is usually achieved by spawning a browser and somehow managing submitting the result back to the remote server. And this makes some degree of sense - browsers are where webauthn token support tends to live, and it also ensures the user always has the same experience.
But it works poorly for CLI-based setups. There's basically two options - you can use the device code authorisation flow, where you perform authentication on what is nominally a separate machine to the one requesting it (but in this case is actually the same) and as a result end up with a straightforward mechanism to have your users socially engineered into giving Johnny Badman a valid auth token despite webauthn nominally being unphisable (as described years ago), or you reduce that risk somewhat by spawning a local server and POSTing the token back to it - which works locally but doesn't work well if you're dealing with trying to auth on a remote device. The user experience for both scenarios sucks, and it reduces a bunch of the worthwhile security properties that modern MFA supposedly gives us.
There's a third approach, which is in some ways the obviously good approach and in other ways is obviously a screaming nightmare. All the browser is doing is sending a bunch of requests to a remote service and handling the response locally. Why don't we just do the same? Okta, for instance, has an API for auth. We just need to submit the username and password to that and see what answer comes back. This is great until you enable any kind of MFA, at which point the additional authz step is something that's only supported via the browser. And basically everyone else is the same.
Of course, when we say "That's only supported via the browser", the browser is still just running some code of some form and we can figure out what it's doing and do the same. Which is how you end up scraping constants out of Javascript embedded in the API response in order to submit that data back in the appropriate way. This is all possible but it's incredibly annoying and fragile - the contract with the identity provider is that a browser is pointed at a URL, not that any of the internal implementation remains consistent.
I've done this. I've implemented code to scrape an identity provider's auth responses to extract the webauthn challenges and feed those to a local security token without using a browser. I've also written support for forwarding those challenges over the SSH agent protocol to make this work with remote systems that aren't running a GUI. This week I'm working on doing the same again, because every identity provider does all of this differently.
There's no fundamental reason all of this needs to be custom. It could be a straightforward "POST username and password, receive list of UUIDs describing MFA mechanisms, define how those MFA mechanisms work". That even gives space for custom auth factors (I'm looking at you, Okta Fastpass). But instead I'm left scraping JSON blobs out of Javascript and hoping nobody renames a field, even though I only care about extremely standard MFA mechanisms that shouldn't differ across different identity providers.
Someone, please, write a spec for this. Please don't make it be me.
Back in the Day and Here and Now
Jun. 23rd, 2025 09:39 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
My friend George sent me this picture of me and Krissy — which I had been literally trying to find for years! — where she and I were at the wedding of my friend Clete. I was a groomsman, which is why I’m dressed up; Krissy is dressed up because, you know, wedding, you’re supposed to look nice. I seem to remember the wedding taking place in 1995, although I might be off by a year; either way, this is us, roughly 30 years ago.
And here we are now!
30 years is a lot of time and also, not nearly enough time with someone if you love them a lot. Fortunately for us we get to keep going. Not gonna lie, though, I miss my hair. Krissy’s still looks spectacular, of course. That’ll have to be enough for the both of us.
Also, hello, we’re back in the United States now. Venice was lovely. I’ll post some more pictures of it soon.
— JS
Music For Your Monday: 6arelyhuman
Jun. 23rd, 2025 05:16 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
Feeling the Monday Blues? Have I got the cure for you. Introducing one of my recent favorite artists, 6arelyhuman (pronounced barely human)!
Imagine the most hype, energizing club music that makes you want to take shots and dance till the sun comes up. No, not Kesha, but pretty close in vibes.
I came across 6arelyhuman on TikTok last year, and their song “Faster N Harder” ended up becoming my number one song on Spotify for 2024. I listened to 6arelyhuman’s songs on repeat daily for months last year, and I’m still loving them. They self identify as a freaky alien here to create absolute bops.
Here’s the song that started my obsession:
Don’t you just wanna dance your pants off?! Well let’s keep the party going with some others I really love from them:
And technically on this next one they’re only featured and it’s actually Odetari’s song, but I still really like it:
So, are you feeling amped? You simply can’t be in a bad mood after you listen to this music, trust me, I’ve tried.
Don’t forget to check 6arelyhuman out on Spotify, and let me know which song was your favorite in the comments. Have a great day!
-AMS
Maintenance for Linode Support Ticketing System
Jun. 28th, 2025 06:30 amlinode_status_new_feedTHIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Jun 28, 06:30 - 07:30 UTC
Jun 23, 16:59 UTC
Scheduled - On Saturday, June 28th at 2:30AM EDT (Saturday, June 28th at 6:30 AM UTC), scheduled maintenance will be performed on the Linode Support Ticketing System. Expected downtime for this maintenance will be about 60 minutes.
This should not impact the ability to access services or utilize Cloud Manager. Customers who need assistance from Linode Support during this time will need to call 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 outside of the United States) to contact our Support team. Please note that our Support team will not be able to assist with issues related to the Cloud Manager or API, authenticate users to their accounts, or respond to Support tickets for the duration of the maintenance window.
As soon as our Support team regains access, we will answer tickets in the order they are received.
5xx Errors on api.linode.com and cloud.linode.com
Jun. 24th, 2025 04:17 pmlinode_status_new_feedJun 24, 16:17 UTC
Resolved - We haven't observed any additional issues with the Cloud Manager or API, and will now consider this incident resolved. If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 Intl.) or send an email to support@linode.com for assistance.
Jun 21, 04:21 UTC
Update - At this time we have been able to identify the cause of the issue affecting the Cloud Manager and API. We will continue monitoring to ensure that the service remains stable. If you are still experiencing issues and unable to open a Support ticket, please call us at 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 Intl.), or send an email to support@linode.com.
Jun 21, 03:15 UTC
Monitoring - The issue impacting api.linode.com and cloud.linode.com has subsided by 00:40 UTC, June 21, 2025, and there has been no recurrence since. We are actively monitoring this to ensure that the service remains stable while investigating the root cause. If you are still experiencing issues and unable to open a Support ticket, please call us at 855-454-6633 (+1-609-380-7100 Intl.), or send an email to support@linode.com.
Jun 21, 02:10 UTC
Update - The issue with sporadic 5xx errors when accessing api.linode.com and cloud.linode.com appears to have remained stable for the past hour. Investigations into the root cause and monitoring for recurrences are ongoing. If you are encountering any issues with your services which you believe may be related to this situation, please open a Support ticket from the Cloud Manager to speak with our Support team.
Jun 21, 00:48 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating an issue where 5xx errors are sometimes being triggered when attempting to connect to api.linode.com and cloud.linode.com. As our teams investigate, please open a Support ticket from the Cloud Manager to speak with our Support team.
The Big Idea: Jane Mondrup
Jun. 20th, 2025 02:20 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
Sometimes when you look in the mirror, it can feel like you don’t even recognize yourself. This might be doubly true if you’re looking at a perfect copy of yourself that thinks you’re the copy, not them. Author Jane Mondrup brings us such a conundrum in her new novel, Zoi. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how evolution is just the beginning.
JANE MONDRUP:
An endosymbiosis involving humans and set in space—that is, in very few words, the big idea of my science fiction novel Zoi.
Symbiosis is a close relationship between two life forms, often (though not necessarily) to the degree of mutual dependency. Endosymbiosis is when one of those life forms gets integrated into the other, living inside it.
One very important endosymbiosis, which happened around two billion years ago, provided the conditions for the evolutionary jump from the simple life forms—the procaryotes (bacteria and archaea)—to the much more complex eucaryotic cell, of which we and our multi-cellular relatives are made. This is a whole little world in itself, full of internal structures and mobile elements, all with specific functions.
To furnish its lavish lifestyle, the eucaryotic cell needs energy—lots of energy—and that energy is provided by an organelle called the mitochondrion. And the really interesting thing is that this extremely important element didn’t develop inside the cell but was originally an independent organism; a small procaryote that somehow ended up inside a larger procaryote, managing to survive in there and become an integrated part of its host and all its descendants. These proto-mitochondrial lodgers were the kind who not only pay the rent and keep their room in order but start refurbishing the whole place, in this case developing a small hut into a veritable castle.
Not being a biologist, I heard about the origin of the mitochondrion on a podcast, the 2016 episode of Radiolab titled Cellmates, and found it endlessly fascinating. My subconscious started working on it, until it surfaced again in the shape of a dream vision of two identical women drifting apart. I knew it was a cell division, happening in space. Like proto-mitochondria, the women (originally one person) had become part of a larger organism and was now included in its procreation.
There was a story here, but what story exactly? And how could I tell it?
That’s often how a story begins for me, with a situation I either have to work from or get to. Making up what feels like a plausible background for this (usually quite strange) situation will send me in all kinds of interesting directions. In this case, I had to invent a creature fitting the picture, a cell-like, space-dwelling species that I decided to call zoi, based on the Greek word zoion (living being).
The zois, I figured, had not developed an immune defense, but the opposite. In space, life would be very rare. You wouldn’t have to defend yourself against parasitic intruders, and the chance encounters with other organisms would represent an evolutionary opportunity.
Whenever the zois came across another life form, they would invite it in, immediately discern its basic needs and start to accommodate them. Some needs would either be impossible or very costly to meet, and it would be more rational to solve the problem the other way around, helping the life forms it had engulfed with adapting to their new environment. Changing them.
This was the unsettling situation the woman (I named her Amira) was in—residing inside a living creature, experiencing changes to her body, and then starting to grow a double. It seemed very scary indeed, and my story could easily be a classic SF horror, ending in some terrible conclusion. But that wasn’t what interested me.
The horror elements were there, and I absolutely planned to harness them for emotional impact, but the horror ending didn’t fit my dream vision. The women in it had looked desperately sad. They obviously had a very close relationship which was now broken up. There was regret too, a hint of unsettled conflicts. But no enmity.
When a cell divides, the two resulting cells aren’t parent and offspring, but equally newborn. I saw the two Amiras in the same way, not as a human being with an inhuman clone, but a set of identical twins—one person becoming two. While the double grew, there was only one consciousness. Then, the two woke up with identical memories, both convinced of being the original. That would be a difficult situation, and very interesting to explore.
Amira would be part of a small crew of astronauts, the first to leave the solar system inside a zoi. They would know some but not all of the consequences, and they would react to them in different ways. The impact of these differences on their relationships to each other would be another backbone of the story.
Even before the cloning began, the astronauts were undergoing physical changes, starting with adaptation to the lack of gravity. In zero g, humans quickly start to lose bone and muscle mass, which is why astronauts on space stations have to do a lot of exercise. The zoi would recognize the deterioration as something that needed correction. This would be the first of many adjustments helping the mutual adaptation along.
Just like the bodily transitions and upheavals of a normal human life, such changes would have consequences for mood and physical well-being. This parallel allowed me to draw on concrete experiences with puberty, pregnancy, illness, menopause, and aging. These are all processes involving bodily reactions outside our control, influencing or even determining our thoughts and actions.
I have a lot of themes in Zoi, but they are all related to the big idea: becoming part of another life form, and what that would entail. My aim has been to write something both visionary and tangible, based in science but easily understandable, equally comprising ideas and emotions. If you find this essay concepts interesting, there’s a good probability that you will like the story. I hope you will read it.
Zoi: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Indigo|Kobo
Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook|Bluesky
Read an excerpt.
Service Issue - US-LAX (Los Angeles)
Jun. 20th, 2025 04:23 pmlinode_status_new_feedJun 20, 16:23 UTC
Resolved - We haven’t observed any additional issues with the Block Storage service in US-LAX (Los Angeles), and will now consider this incident resolved. If you continue to experience problems, please open a Support ticket for assistance.
Jun 20, 14:59 UTC
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Jun 20, 14:37 UTC
Update - We’re actively investigating this issue and will share additional updates as they become available. We sincerely apologize for any impact this may have and truly appreciate your patience as we work to resolve it.
Jun 20, 13:45 UTC
Update - Our team is investigating a service issue affecting Block Storage in US-LAX (Los Angeles). We are still working to identify the cause, and we will provide an update as soon as we have more information.
Jun 20, 12:38 UTC
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We’re Seeing Art
Jun. 20th, 2025 12:28 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
And it’s giving us a lot to think about.
Venice continues to be lovely and also at this moment rather warm and sweaty. After a morning of seeing art we’ve retreated back to the air conditioning of our hotel room. We’ll go back out again when we’re not so darn sticky.
— JS
My a11y journey
Jun. 20th, 2025 01:11 ammjg59The timing was fortuitous. Sun were pumping money and developer effort into accessibility support, and the Inference Group had just received a grant from the Gatsy Foundation that involved working with the ACE Centre to provide additional accessibility support. And I was suddenly hacking on code that was largely ignored by most developers, supporting use cases that were irrelevant to most developers. Being in a relatively green field space sounds refreshing, until you realise that you're catering to actual humans who are potentially going to rely on your software to be able to communicate. That's somewhat focusing.
This was, uh, something of an on the job learning experience. I had to catch up with a lot of new technologies very quickly, but that wasn't the hard bit - what was difficult was realising I had to cater to people who were dealing with use cases that I had no experience of whatsoever. Dasher was extended to allow text entry into applications without needing to cut and paste. We added support for introspection of the current applications UI so menus could be exposed via the Dasher interface, allowing people to fly through menu hierarchies and pop open file dialogs. Text-to-speech was incorporated so people could rapidly enter sentences and have them spoke out loud.
But what sticks with me isn't the tech, or even the opportunities it gave me to meet other people working on the Linux desktop and forge friendships that still exist. It was the cases where I had the opportunity to work with people who could use Dasher as a tool to increase their ability to communicate with the outside world, whose lives were transformed for the better because of what we'd produced. Watching someone use your code and realising that you could write a three line patch that had a significant impact on the speed they could talk to other people is an incomparable experience. It's been decades and in many ways that was the most impact I've ever had as a developer.
I left after a year to work on fruitflies and get my PhD, and my career since then hasn't involved a lot of accessibility work. But it's stuck with me - every improvement in that space is something that has a direct impact on the quality of life of more people than you expect, but is also something that goes almost unrecognised. The people working on accessibility are heroes. They're making all the technology everyone else produces available to people who would otherwise be blocked from it. They deserve recognition, and they deserve a lot more support than they have.
But when we deal with technology, we deal with transitions. A lot of the Linux accessibility support depended on X11 behaviour that is now widely regarded as a set of misfeatures. It's not actually good to be able to inject arbitrary input into an arbitrary window, and it's not good to be able to arbitrarily scrape out its contents. X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet. We're seeing that happen now, though - Gnome has been performing a great deal of work in this respect, and KDE is picking that up as well. There isn't a full correspondence between X11-based Linux accessibility support and Wayland, but for many users the Wayland accessibility infrastructure is already better than with X11.
That's going to continue improving, and it'll improve faster with broader support. We've somehow ended up with the bizarre politicisation of Wayland as being some sort of woke thing while X11 represents the Roman Empire or some such bullshit, but the reality is that there is no story for improving accessibility support under X11 and sticking to X11 is going to end up reducing the accessibility of a platform.
When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.
When Life Looks Like a Movie Set
Jun. 19th, 2025 08:57 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
The little island town of Burano, which for all the world looks just like someone set designed the place. Cute tiny colorful homes set next to a canal? Check! You half expect Popeye to show up, singing a sea shanty. But it is, indeed, real. And apparently it’s against the law to change the house colors without permission. The things you learn.
We’re still on vacation. It’s still lovely.
— JS
The Big Idea: Auston Habershaw
Jun. 19th, 2025 06:19 pmwhatever_scalzi_feed
There’s magic to be found everywhere you look, even in a mall! At least, such is the case in author Auston Habershaw’s newest novel, If Wishes Were Retail. Come along in his Big Idea to see how this idea initially set up shop in his brain.
AUSTON HABERSHAW:
When I graduated from college, I had a really clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a novelist. I’d already written a novel during college (I will never inflict it upon anyone, I promise) and I figured, if I worked hard and focused on my goals, I’d be a professional author making a comfortable salary by the time I was 25.
I’ll pause here for your peals of laughter.
…
Done yet? No?
…(checks watch)…
Okay, okay—the point here is that I needed to get a job in order to pursue my dreams. For that period of time (my early-mid twenties), the idea was to get a job that wouldn’t occupy much of my attention so that I could focus the balance of my efforts towards writing. That’s how I wound up doing a lot of odd jobs and minimum wage gigs. I was a coffee barista, a restaurant server, a lifeguard, a swim instructor, a theme park performer (I dressed as a pirate), an SAT tutor, a hotel bellhop, and so on and so forth. I spent most of my time broke and barely able to pay rent and in the evenings I bashed my head against a keyboard until words came out and I published exactly nothing. I was exhausted, usually hungry, but still chasing that dream.
And that, right there, is where If Wishes Were Retail comes from. Everybody’s got a dream, right? And the world just gets in the way, you know? Money, opportunity, luck, health, family—the list of obstacles to “making it” are endless, or so it seems. Enter the genie.
I mean, everybody’s thought about it, right? If you could get 3 wishes, what would they be? We ask ourselves that, over and over, because just about no one is content with the state of their lives. There’s always some mountaintop we have yet to reach, and the only way we feel we’ll ever get there is, essentially, an act of God. A lottery ticket. A mysterious stranger, offering us a deal for our soul. A genie in a lamp. Rare, mythical things; unheard of strokes of fortune. We all recognize that is never going to happen to us. The world just doesn’t work that way.
But what if it did? Say we have a genie and he’s just there, you know? In public, doing his thing. Anyone can just walk up and make a wish. Now, of course, the genie has goals of his own and dreams he’d like to see realized, so he’s charging money for wishes. Cash. Walk up to him with a stack of twenties and plonk it down and BAM, you could have the life you’ve always wanted. What would you wish for? How much would you spend?
When preparing to write this book, I asked people I met those two questions. I would say “what if you could make a wish, but it cost money? What’s the wish? What would you pay?” This was a fascinating experiment. First off, a lot of people wouldn’t wish at all. They assumed the genie was malevolent and they wouldn’t get what they paid for. Second, people would make outrageously powerful wishes (World peace! A cure for all cancers! My own private moon!) and then offer some piddling sum, like ten bucks or something. “What’s it matter,” they’d say. “It doesn’t require any effort on the part of the genie! What does he care?” Everyone agreed, though, that the money—having to pay for a wish—sort of ruined the “magic” of it all. Money got in the way of their dreams.
I wanna repeat that last bit: money got in the way of their dreams. Ya THINK? Could, possibly, money and the way our economic system works interfere with people’s ability to achieve happiness and satisfaction in their lives? NO, SURELY NOT. Everyone, we live in capitalism, the fairest and most beautiful-est system ever, where the only thing that stands between you and complete material and spiritual satisfaction is hard work! Just work hard, and everything will work out! I have been informed by my lawyers that this is entirely 100% accurate with no loopholes or conditions whatsoever.
Hang on, someone is handing me a note…
…oh.
Oh no.
And, not only, does our capitalist system make it difficult to achieve our dreams, it also just so happens that we, fallible mortal creatures that we are, are incorrect about what we want! We wish for stupid, selfish things! We seek self-destructive ends! So, like, even assuming you manage to run the gauntlet of 21st century late-stage capitalism to somehow, maybe hack your way to the top of the artisanal bagel shop market only to realize you hate it and are miserable anyway. And that, friends, is a super-common problem that not even a genie can fix! How’s the genie supposed to know that you would hate being a fashion mogul? And even if he knew, would you listen to him if he told you?
I wrote this book to reflect upon the ways in which our grind-mentality, sleep-when-you’re-dead, coffee-is-for-closers culture has led us astray. Our society has created essentially infinite obstacles in an unending labyrinth that we have been told leads to happiness and fulfillment and we expend such massive amounts of energy seeking these things only to miss sight of all the things we could have that are right in front of us. It’s tragic sometimes, but it’s also funny and absurd and just, like, life you know? What are you gonna do, not be human?
Anyway, I wrote a book about this. It’s funny and it has a genie in a failing mall seen from the point of view of a teenager with big dreams, just like I was. Just like maybe you were or even are. Here’s hoping it’s exactly what you want and exactly what you’re willing to pay.
If Wishes Were Retail: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Facebook
Read an excerpt.