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Scheduled Network Maintenance - BR-GRU (Sao Paulo)

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/38w418yq1x2k

Sep 29, 12:00 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Sep 29, 08:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 10, 21:44 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing network maintenance at BR-GRU (Sao Paulo) on September 29th from 08:00 UTC to 12:00 UTC. During this window, changes will be made to enhance routing stability, improve convergence performance, and enable additional support for advanced routing features. Individuals may experience short-lived packet loss or latency spikes while maintenance occurs.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/38w418yq1x2k

Review: The Incandescent

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-83502-X.html

Review: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2025
ISBN:	1-250-83502-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	417

The Incandescent is a stand-alone magical boarding school fantasy.

Your students forgot you. It was natural for them to forget you. You were a brief cameo in their lives, a walk-on character from the prologue. For every sentimental my teacher changed my life story you heard, there were dozens of my teacher made me moderately bored a few times a week and then I got through the year and moved on with my life and never thought about them again.

They forgot you. But you did not forget them.

Doctor Saffy Walden is Director of Magic at Chetwood, an elite boarding school for prospective British magicians. She has a collection of impressive degrees in academic magic, a specialization in demonic invocation, and a history of vague but lucrative government job offers that go with that specialty. She turned them down to be a teacher, and although she's now in a mostly administrative position, she's a good teacher, with the usual crop of promising, lazy, irritating, and nervous students.

As the story opens, Walden's primary problem is Nikki Conway. Or, rather, Walden's primary problem is protecting Nikki Conway from the Marshals, and the infuriating Laura Kenning in particular.

When Nikki was seven, she summoned a demon who killed her entire family and left her a ward of the school. To Laura Kenning, that makes her a risk who should ideally be kept far away from invocation. To Walden, that makes Nikki a prodigious natural talent who is developing into a brilliant student and who needs careful, professional training before she's tempted into trying to learn on her own.

Most novels with this setup would become Nikki's story. This one does not. The Incandescent is Walden's story.

There have been a lot of young-adult magical boarding school novels since Harry Potter became a mass phenomenon, but most of them focus on the students and the inevitable coming-of-age story. This is a story about the teachers: the paperwork, the faculty meetings, the funding challenges, the students who repeat in endless variations, and the frustrations and joys of attempting to grab the interest of a young mind. It's also about the temptation of higher-paying, higher-status, and less ethical work, which however firmly dismissed still nibbles around the edges.

Even if you didn't know Emily Tesh is herself a teacher, you would guess that before you get far into this novel. There is a vividness and a depth of characterization that comes from being deeply immersed in the nuance and tedium of the life that your characters are living. Walden's exasperated fondness for her students was the emotional backbone of this book for me. She likes teenagers without idealizing the process of being a teenager, which I think is harder to pull off in a novel than it sounds.

It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn't show up in a list of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a disadvantage — when all you needed to do was neatly jump the hoop of an examiner's grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the teachers who knew, the teachers who could feel the difference. A few times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made you work harder, who asked you questions that had never occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own abilities. If you were lucky — as Walden, this time, had been lucky — your remarkable student's chief interest was in your discipline: and then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.

I also loved the world-building, and I say this as someone who is generally not a fan of demons. The demons themselves are a bit of a disappointment and mostly hew to one of the stock demon conventions, but the rest of the magic system is deep enough to have practitioners who approach it from different angles and meaty enough to have some satisfying layered complexity. This is magic, not magical science, so don't expect a fully fleshed-out set of laws, but the magical system felt substantial and satisfying to me.

Tesh's first novel, Some Desperate Glory, was by far my favorite science fiction novel of 2023. This is a much different book, which says good things about Tesh's range and the potential of her work yet to come: adult rather than YA, fantasy rather than science fiction, restrained and subtle in places where Some Desperate Glory was forceful and pointed. One thing the books do have in common, though, is some structure, particularly the false climax near the midpoint of the book. I like the feeling of uncertainty and possibility that gives both books, but in the case of The Incandescent, I was not quite in the mood for the second half of the story.

My problem with this book is more of a reader preference than an objective critique: I was in the mood for a story about a confident, capable protagonist who was being underestimated, and Tesh was writing a novel with a more complicated and fraught emotional arc. (I'm being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.) There's nothing wrong with the story that Tesh wanted to tell, and I admire the skill with which she did it, but I got a tight feeling in my stomach when I realized where she was going. There is a satisfying ending, and I'm still very happy I read this book, but be warned that this might not be the novel to read if you're in the mood for a purer competence porn experience.

Recommended, and I am once again eagerly awaiting the next thing Emily Tesh writes (and reminding myself to go back and read her novellas).

Content warnings: Grievous physical harm, mind control, and some body horror.

Rating: 8 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-83502-X.html

Review: Echoes of the Imperium

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-998257-04-5.html

Review: Echoes of the Imperium, by Nicholas & Olivia Atwater

Series:	Tales of the Iron Rose #1
Publisher:	Starwatch Press
Copyright:	2024
ISBN:	1-998257-04-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	547

Echoes of the Imperium is a steampunk fantasy adventure novel, the first of a projected series. There is another novella in the series, A Matter of Execution, that takes place chronologically before this novel, but which I am told that you should read afterwards. (I have not yet read it.) If Olivia Atwater's name sounds familiar, it's probably for the romantic fantasy Half a Soul. Nicholas Atwater is her husband.

William Blair, a goblin, was a child sailor on the airship HMS Caliban during the final battle that ended the Imperium, and an eyewitness to the destruction of the capital. Like every imperial solider, that loss made him an Oathbreaker; the fae Oath that he swore to defend the Imperium did not care that nothing a twelve-year-old boy could have done would have changed the result of the battle. He failed to kill himself with most of the rest of the crew, and thus was taken captive by the Coalition.

Twenty years later, William Blair is the goblin captain of the airship Iron Rose. It's an independent transport ship that takes various somewhat-dodgy contracts and has to avoid or fight through pirates. The crew comes from both sides of the war and has built their own working truce. Blair himself is a somewhat manic but earnest captain who doesn't entirely believe he deserves that role, one who tends more towards wildly risky plans and improvisation than considered and sober decisions. The rest of the crew are the sort of wild mix of larger-than-life personality quirks that populate swashbuckling adventure books but leave me dubious that stuffing that many high-maintenance people into one ship would go as well as it does.

I did appreciate the gunnery knitting circle, though.

Echoes of the Imperium is told in the first person from Blair's perspective in two timelines. One follows Blair in the immediate aftermath of the war, tracing his path to becoming an airship captain and meeting some of the people who will later be part of his crew. The other is the current timeline, in which Blair gets deeper and deeper into danger by accepting a risky contract with unexpected complications.

Neither of these timelines are in any great hurry to arrive at some destination, and that's the largest problem with this book. Echoes of the Imperium is long, sprawling, and unwilling to get anywhere near any sort of a point until the reader is deeply familiar with the horrific aftermath of the war, the mountains guilt and trauma many of the characters carry around, and Blair's impostor syndrome and feelings of inadequacy. For the first half of this book, I was so bored. I almost bailed out; only a few flashes of interesting character interactions and hints of world-building helped me drag myself through all of the tedious setup.

What saves this book is that the world-building is a delight. Once the characters finally started engaging with it in earnest, I could not put it down. Present-time Blair is no longer an Oathbreaker because he was forgiven by a fairy; this will become important later. The sites of great battles are haunted by ghostly echoes of the last moments of the lives of those who died (hence the title); this will become very important later. Blair has a policy of asking no questions about people's pasts if they're willing to commit to working with the rest of the crew; this, also, will become important later. All of these tidbits the authors drop into the story and then ignore for hundreds of pages do have a payoff if you're willing to wait for it.

As the reader (too) slowly discovers, the Atwaters' world is set in a war of containment by light fae against dark fae. Instead of being inscrutable and separate, the fae use humans and human empires as tools in that war. The fallen Imperium was a bastion of fae defense, and the war that led to the fall of that Imperium was triggered by the price its citizens paid for that defense, one that the fae could not possibly care less about. The creatures may be out of epic fantasy and the technology from the imagined future of Victorian steampunk, but the politics are that of the Cold War and containment strategies. This book has a lot to say about colonialism and empire, but it says those things subtly and from a fantasy slant, in a world with magical Oaths and direct contact with powers that are both far beyond the capabilities of the main characters and woefully deficient in in humanity and empathy. It has a bit of the feel of Greek mythology if the gods believed in an icy realpolitik rather than embodying the excesses of human emotion.

The second half of this book was fantastic. The found-family vibe among a crew of high-maintenance misfits that completely failed to cohere for me in the first half of the book, while Blair was wallowing in his feelings and none of the events seemed to matter, came together brilliantly as soon as the crew had a real problem and some meaty world-building and plot to sink their teeth into. There is a delightfully competent teenager, some satisfying competence porn that Blair finally stops undermining, and a sharp political conflict that felt emotionally satisfying, if perhaps not that intellectually profound. In short, it turns into the fun, adventurous romp of larger-than-life characters that the setting promises. Even the somewhat predictable mid-book reveal worked for me, in part because the emotions of the characters around that reveal sold its impact.

If you're going to write a book with a bad half and a good half, it's always better to put the good half second. I came away with very positive feelings about Echoes of the Imperium and a tentative willingness to watch for the sequel. (It reaches a fairly satisfying conclusion, but there are a lot of unresolved plot hooks.) I'm a bit hesitant to recommend it, though, because the first half was not very fun. I want to say that about 75% of the first half of the book could have been cut and the book would have been stronger for it. I'm not completely sure I'm right, since the Atwaters were laying the groundwork for a lot of payoff, but I wish that groundwork hadn't been as much of a slog.

Tentatively recommended, particularly if you're in the mood for steampunk fae mythology, but know that this book requires some investment.

Technically, A Matter of Execution comes first, but I plan to read it as a sequel.

Rating: 8 out of 10

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-998257-04-5.html

The Final Tour Event

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/27/the-final-tour-event/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57489

Here in Winston-Salem, NC, where I, Annalee Newitz, Nghi Vo and Maddie Martinez talked about the state of science fiction and fantasy for an hour in front of this very lovely crowd. And then I signed books! And now I’m back in my hotel room! And tomorrow, I go home. Which I am very much looking forward to. This tour has been delightful. But I’m ready be with my spouse and pets.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/27/the-final-tour-event/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57489

Connectivity Issue - India Regions (AP-WEST, IN-BOM-2, IN-MAA)

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/xtkp9skdtnbd

Sep 28, 01:06 UTC
Resolved - We haven’t observed any additional connectivity issues in our IN-MAA, AP-West, and IN-BOM-2 data centers, and will now consider this incident resolved. If you continue to experience problems, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

Sep 27, 16:56 UTC
Monitoring - At this time we have been able to correct the issues affecting connectivity in our IN-MAA, AP-West and IN-BOM-2 data centers. We will continue to monitor for further connection issues. If you are still experiencing issues, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

Sep 27, 14:27 UTC
Identified - We are continuing to experience connection issues affecting our IN-MAA, AP-West, and IN-BOM data centers. During this time users may experience intermittent connection issues and network slowness for all services deployed in these data centers. We are currently working on mitigating customer impact with our 3rd party network providers and will share additional updates as soon as they are available.

Sep 27, 14:03 UTC
Monitoring - Our team investigated an issue affecting connectivity in our IN-MAA, AP-West and IN-BOM-2 data centers. The issue started at 11:00 UTC on September 27, 2025, and was mitigated at 12:19 UTC on September 27, 2025. During this time, users may have experienced intermittent connection timeouts and errors for all services deployed in this data center. At this time, we have been able to correct the issues affecting connectivity. We will continue to monitor for further connection issues. If you are still experiencing issues, please open a Support ticket for assistance.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/xtkp9skdtnbd

Hiking

https://xkcd.com/3147/

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

https://xkcd.com/3147/

Having Dinner With Four Strangers In Columbus

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/having-dinner-with-four-strangers-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57471

To some people, sitting at a table with several unfamiliar faces and being expected to make small talk is a nightmare scenario. The anxiety creeps in of what to say, which topics to discuss (or avoid), and if you’re going to be judged for ordering an appetizer and dessert.

Such was the situation I found myself in last night after I signed up for Timeleft, a company with the goal to help you make meaningful connections with peers from your city.

I had never heard of Timeleft before, but two weeks ago I got an ad for them on Instagram. I won’t lie, the idea of dining with complete strangers was immediately interesting to me, as I love meeting new people, getting to know others, and making friends. What are strangers but friends you have yet to meet? So I went to their website and checked it out.

To my surprise, Timeleft is available all over the world. Sixty different countries and three hundred cities, including Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. I was delighted to see that I really had my pick of Ohio cities, though I would love for Dayton to be on that list. Cleveland is a bit too far, but Cincinnati and Columbus are both about two hours, so I ended up picking Columbus as my city because I prefer the driving, parking, and dining scene over Cincinnati.

First, you take a personality test to determine who else should be at the table with you. Timeleft asks things like what field you work in, what kind of movies you like, if you’re married or have kids, if you like to talk about politics, if you’re a planner or more spontaneous, basically just some standard questions to see who you would, on paper, be compatible with.

After you take the test, Timeleft pairs you with five strangers to have dinner with, and the restaurant is a mystery to everyone until the day of the dinner. One thing I thought was really cool is that you can choose different levels of budgets for your dining experience. There’s $, $$, and $$$. Obviously I picked $$$, because if I’m going to drive to Columbus for dinner, I want to eat somewhere nice (also, I’m just bougie, so). You can also mention any dietary restrictions you have, as well.

Timeleft books the restaurant reservation for you all, and you just show up to the restaurant, meet your dining companions, and spend the next couple hours getting to know each other and sharing a meal together. Not sure what to say? Timeleft actually provides ice breaker games and questions to get the ball rolling.

After the dinner is done, every Timeleft group in the city is invited to an Afterparty. Timeleft chooses a bar for everyone to meet at to have a drink to close out the night. Once you’ve finished the evening, Timeleft asks you who you’d like to keep in contact with, and if you match you can message each other through the app. (Or you can just exchange contact info right then and there if you want. That’s pretty much what ended up happening for me, anyway.)

So that’s how it works! Pretty simple, and very stress-free since they pick and book everything for you! It was nice to have the reservation handled, and just have to show up.

Timeleft isn’t a dating site, it’s meant for platonic connections and people seeking friends in their city. It’s meant for screen-free conversations and connections with people you wouldn’t have normally met otherwise. I think it’s a really cool concept, and I was super excited to try it out.

So let’s talk about how it went.

The initial ad that I got for Timeleft was them rolling out their new Ladies Only dinner. This was what I tried to sign up for, as I have really been wanting more gal pals lately. Not that I am opposed to befriending men, obviously, but as I get older, I’ve started to really want more genuine female companionship. And not that I don’t already have some super close girlfriends currently, because I definitely do and I’m super grateful for them and our friendship, but who couldn’t use one or two more, right?

Anyways, I couldn’t figure out how to sign up for the Ladies Only one, despite clicking on the ad that was advertising them. I figured I might as well just sign up for a regular one.

I ended up dining at Z Cucina di Spirito in Dublin with four guys. There was supposed to be another girl, but she actually ended up no-showing.

In my group, our ages ranged from 25 to 32, and everyone except me lived in the Columbus area. There was one other person whose first time it was, but the other group members had done a couple of these before, and two of them had even dined with each other in a previous dinner. Between the five of us, our professions were all over the place, as well as our tastes in music, though we did seem to agree on some favorite colors. We talked about travel, movies, concerts, places previously lived, and some bad dates.

While this post isn’t meant to be a restaurant review of Z Cucina, I will say I did like it. The atmosphere was nice, it was a very pretty place, and the food and drinks were quite good. I was the only person to order an appetizer (I did share, because I think food is best enjoyed that way), but everyone did order dessert, so that’s a green flag in my eyes.

I got two cocktails; a Basil-Gin Smash and an Empress, and both were really nice. The bread for the table came with this super yummy red sauce that was surprisingly flavorful. My main was their Bucatini Al Nero Di Seppia, which was squid ink pasta with mussels, clams, shrimp, and scallops, and that was so good. I thought the shrimp and scallops were really excellent, and I’m happy I finally got to try squid ink pasta! I’ve wanted to for so long. Plus, the tiramisu was a huge slice, and I have no complaints about it.

I would say the thing I was the least impressed with was the appetizer. I ordered the Stuffed Risotto Fritters and they were fine but nothing amazing. I will say they were piping hot, though, and it came with four of them.

So, all in all, I really liked the dining location Timeleft picked, and I think they did a good job with my budget choice. Since it was Wednesday, the restaurant was not crowded at all. There was really only a few other people, so it was nice that it wasn’t too loud and no one in my group had to shout across the table.

We all decided to go to the second location, The Pint House in the Short North. My group only ended up finding one other Timeleft group, which was a really friendly group of older ladies and gents. One of them had thirteen grandkids! It was really cool to see that Timeleft isn’t just for young whippersnappers, it’s seriously for anyone and everyone, and proof that you can find people your age and with your interests that also want to make friends! It just felt really wholesome.

I felt really comfortable the whole time, I wasn’t worried about anyone being a weirdo, and we all exchanged numbers at the end. It was so nice to meet people that I would’ve never come across without Timeleft, and it’s honestly just awesome to see how many other people out there are looking to go and meet new people and make friends.

All in all, I really liked dining and talking with everyone I met, and I can’t wait to attend another Timeleft dinner.

Would you give Timeleft a try? Does the idea of dining with strangers scare you, or does it sound super exciting and fun? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!

-AMS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/having-dinner-with-four-strangers-in-columbus/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57471

Scheduled Network Maintenance - JP-OSA (Osaka)

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/bdr28z1n8py2

Sep 26, 00:00 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Sep 25, 20:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 10, 21:41 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing network maintenance at JP-OSA (Osaka) on September 25th from 20:00 UTC to 00:00 UTC (September 26th). During this window, changes will be made to enhance routing stability, improve convergence performance, and enable additional support for advanced routing features. Individuals may experience short-lived packet loss or latency spikes while maintenance occurs.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/bdr28z1n8py2

The Big Idea: L. D. Colter

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/the-big-idea-l-d-colter/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57460

The retelling of myths is a tradition practically as old as the myths themselves. Author L. D. Colter has implemented some Greek mythology to help write her newest novel, While the Gods Sleep. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how a lifelong interest in any and all types of myths led to writing tales of her own.

L. D. COLTER:

I remember sitting on the floor of the library at my school (a junior high and high school combined and small enough that my graduating class had twenty-five seniors), pouring over a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. This would have been about the same time I asked a friend’s neighbor if I could learn some Hindi from her. I remember researching the Buddha after reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and looking up bits of translation of the Qur’an. I searched, pre-internet, for anything I could find on Asian and African myths and their ancient gods, though I found little. Same with Norse mythology—astoundingly hard for me to find until this millennium (but, ah, had I only discovered the rich fantasy worlds of the right comic books back then…).

Years before all this, as a child, a favorite book of mine was a tall, beautifully illustrated book of Russian folklore, given as a gift by my aunt. I still have that book today. Also sprinkled across those years was my fascination with old stories from the British Isles and all things fae: the Arthurian tales, Tristan and Iseult, the Ballad of Tam Lin (and the tale of Thomas the Rhymer, thought possibly to be the same character in tales told centuries apart). Lastly, of course, have been my decades of reading fantasy books of all stripes, especially ones with themes of myths or pantheons or faerie or folklore.

Standing out strongly across these years, though, has been my love of Greek mythology. I checked out copies of The Odyssey and The Iliad from the city library to read over summer break in high school and read and re-read my copy of Bulfinch’s The Age of Myth until I rubbed the gold lettering from the fabric cover. (Seriously. I still have that book as well, and the cover and spine are plain brown.) I bought tickets to myth-based movies—the good and the bad—and sought out novels with retellings and reimaginings of Greek myth.

Armed with this lifelong love of tales from around the world I wrote my first novel, an epic fantasy with my own version of the Celtic Seelie and Unseelie and—in my imagined secondary world—the gods who had abandoned them. It was rewritten many times as I learned the art of storytelling and was, at last, published as The Halfblood War in 2017. Meanwhile, my second novel, A Borrowed Hell (a portal/journey story), ended up being my debut novel in 2016. And then, finally, I tackled the set of three myth-based novels I’d long been wanting to write. Unsurprisingly, I began with Greek mythology.

My formative reading had been filled with Tolkien, Vonnegut, Pat McKillip, Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and others, but at the time I wrote While the Gods Sleep, I was heavily influenced by China Miéville and Tim Powers. In this book, I wanted to explore my own boundaries of weird fiction, big endings, and gods as characters—in other words, my big idea. What I discovered the hard way was that leaning weird was harder than it looked from the outside: I got my main character into the underworld with some fun weirdness along the way but then had to maintain the weird while worldbuilding an entire underworld.

But the biggest hitch to my big idea came when I discovered that writing an ordinary mortal into trouble with a pantheon of gods and demigods had been the easy part. Writing him out of it was the real challenge. My “messy middle” (as every author I’ve known encounters somewhere between that inspired beginning and the ending you’re working toward) was starting to look more like quicksand. It was suddenly very clear to me why the “chosen one” trope was so popular—at least you have one card up your sleeve to help your character win.

I persisted, though, and fortunately managed to surprise myself with plot twists that I never saw coming until I got there. When all was said and done, I like to think I ended up with a dark-fantasy thriller that does indeed lean weird and keeps picking up steam right into the final pages. Best of all, I finally satisfied my years-long goal to write a book that borrows from Greek mythology while getting to tell my own unique story.

While the Gods Sleep: Amazon|Amazon UK|Barnes & Noble|Kobo

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook|Bluesky

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/the-big-idea-l-d-colter/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57460

View From a Hotel Window, 9/25/25: Richmond, VA

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-25-25-richmond-va/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57458

And the parking lot is in the sky! Amazing.

Hello, I am in Richmond, Virginia and I will be seeing at least some of you tonight at 6pm at Fountain Books! Then tomorrow I am off to Winston-Salem, and the Bookmarks Festival of Books! Here is my schedule for that.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/25/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-25-25-richmond-va/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57458

Entry tags:

life

Other Stuff

I note I am doing other stuff, not just being grumpy about the EHRC, but this is a kind of handy place to keep track of the EHRC activism.

We had a good summer, with trips to Devon and Yorkshire, involving a lot of hills and waterfalls :)

Now we're back into the routine of school and work, but Mike and I had a nice day off together to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary.

I'm also starting to put together plans to celebrate my 50th birthday in November. Well, the birthday is in November, some of the plans are actually for the end of October because that's when half term is and we can go away for a few days with family. Extra long birthday :)

Still not sure whether to try do a big party, or just declare a pub and invite people to join me. Sadly mid-November is not the best time of year for outdoor events, and I'm not sure how to filter venues for "has really good air filtration system".

Got my NHS flu jab booked for next Friday, and my expensive covid one for the following week in town.

Entry tags:

trans rights

EHRC Guidance

Wrote to my MP yesterday. Still dreading the point when the guidance actually drops, and we have to actually stand up and say "No, we will not comply" at work. (Yes, I'll be saying that too, even though I'm not trans myself - and I changed my record in Employee self service so I now decline to answer the question of whether I'm trans or not).

Dear Pippa Heylings,

I'm writing as one of your constituents, to ask that you press for the new EHRC guidance in the light of the Supreme Court ruling to be discussed in Parliament, and not simply approved by the Minister for Women and Equalities without any further consideration as to its impact on trans people.

When I filled in the consultation I was appalled that the guidance did not give any advice to individuals or organisations who wanted to be trans inclusive, and I am concerned that the feedback of me, and many others like me, may not have been taken into account.

I note that the "Not in our name" petition, on behalf of women in the UK who do not wish trans people to be excluded, has now been signed by over 50 thousand women like me.

https://notinourname.org.uk/petition/not-in-our-name-women-in-support-of-the-trans-community/

As a member of staff at Cambridge University, and a member of the UCU branch committee, I would very much appreciate the opportunity to meet with you, even briefly, to discuss how important an issue this is, and how detrimental to society it would be to exclude trans people from being able to participate freely in everyday life as their true lived gender, in their place of work, as well as in healthcare and leisure settings.

But most important is ensuring that this guidance is not brought into place without government scrutiny, so I beg you again to try and ensure that it is discussed in parliament as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Eleanor Blair (she/her)
[address supplied]

Scheduled Network Maintenance - JP-TYO-3 (Tokyo 3)

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/f24c29r2r420

Sep 25, 00:00 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Sep 24, 20:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 10, 21:36 UTC
Scheduled - We will be performing network maintenance at JP-TYO-3 (Tokyo 3) on September 24th from 20:00 UTC to 00:00 UTC (September 25th). During this window, changes will be made to enhance routing stability, improve convergence performance, and enable additional support for advanced routing features. Individuals may experience short-lived packet loss or latency spikes while maintenance occurs.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/f24c29r2r420

The Shattering Peace is a New York Times Bestseller

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/the-shattering-peace-is-a-new-york-times-bestseller/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57452

Specifically, it’s at #9 on the Combined Print and eBook Fiction list, which, if I’m being honest, is higher than I expected, inasmuch as I expected it to be at 14 or 15 if it got onto the list at all (the competition for the NYT list is significant right about now). I am, as the kids do not say, gobsmacked. This is a very good day.

If you pre-ordered or bought the book in the first week, thank you. You’re my favorite. And if you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s not too late! Copies are still available!

And to celebrate: I’m gonna have some pizza. And then go to sleep. I’m still on tour and have to get up in the morning.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/the-shattering-peace-is-a-new-york-times-bestseller/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57452

Investigating a forged PDF

I had to rent a house for a couple of months recently, which is long enough in California that it pushes you into proper tenant protection law. As landlords tend to do, they failed to return my security deposit within the 21 days required by law, having already failed to provide the required notification that I was entitled to an inspection before moving out. Cue some tedious argumentation with the letting agency, and eventually me threatening to take them to small claims court.

This post is not about that.

Now, under Californian law, the onus is on the landlord to hold and return the security deposit - the agency has no role in this. The only reason I was talking to them is that my lease didn't mention the name or address of the landlord (another legal violation, but the outcome is just that you get to serve the landlord via the agency). So it was a bit surprising when I received an email from the owner of the agency informing me that they did not hold the deposit and so were not liable - I already knew this.

The odd bit about this, though, is that they sent me another copy of the contract, asserting that it made it clear that the landlord held the deposit. I read it, and instead found a clause reading SECURITY: The security deposit will secure the performance of Tenant’s obligations. IER may, but will not be obligated to, apply all portions of said deposit on account of Tenant’s obligations. Any balance remaining upon termination will be returned to Tenant. Tenant will not have the right to apply the security deposit in payment of the last month’s rent. Security deposit held at IER Trust Account., where IER is International Executive Rentals, the agency in question. Why send me a contract that says you hold the money while you're telling me you don't? And then I read further down and found this:

Text reading ENTIRE AGREEMENT: The foregoing constitutes the entire agreement between the parties and may bemodified only in writing signed by all parties. This agreement and any modifications, including anyphotocopy or facsimile, may be signed in one or more counterparts, each of which will be deemed anoriginal and all of which taken together will constitute one and the same instrument. The followingexhibits, if checked, have been made a part of this Agreement before the parties’ execution:۞Exhibit 1:Lead-Based Paint Disclosure (Required by Law for Rental Property Built Prior to 1978)۞Addendum 1 The security deposit will be held by (name removed) and applied, refunded, or forfeited in accordance with the terms of this lease agreement.

Ok, fair enough, there's an addendum that says the landlord has it (I've removed the landlord's name, it's present in the original).

Except. I had no recollection of that addendum. I went back to the copy of the contract I had and discovered:
The same text as the previous picture, but addendum 1 is empty

The same text as the previous picture, but addendum 1 is empty

Huh! But obviously I could just have edited that to remove it (there's no obvious reason for me to, but whatever), and then it'd be my word against theirs. However, I'd been sent the document via RightSignature, an online document signing platform, and they'd added a certification page that looked like this:
A Signature Certificate, containing a bunch of data about the document including a checksum or the original

A Signature Certificate, containing a bunch of data about the document including a checksum or the original

Interestingly, the certificate page was identical in both documents, including the checksums, despite the content being different. So, how do I show which one is legitimate? You'd think given this certificate page this would be trivial, but RightSignature provides no documented mechanism whatsoever for anyone to verify any of the fields in the certificate, which is annoying but let's see what we can do anyway.

First up, let's look at the PDF metadata. pdftk has a dump_data command that dumps the metadata in the document, including the creation date and the modification date. My file had both set to identical timestamps in June, both listed in UTC, corresponding to the time I'd signed the document. The file containing the addendum? The same creation time, but a modification time of this Monday, shortly before it was sent to me. This time, the modification timestamp was in Pacific Daylight Time, the timezone currently observed in California. In addition, the data included two ID fields, ID0 and ID1. In my document both were identical, in the one with the addendum ID0 matched mine but ID1 was different.

These ID tags are intended to be some form of representation (such as a hash) of the document. ID0 is set when the document is created and should not be modified afterwards - ID1 initially identical to ID0, but changes when the document is modified. This is intended to allow tooling to identify whether two documents are modified versions of the same document. The identical ID0 indicated that the document with the addendum was originally identical to mine, and the different ID1 that it had been modified.

Well, ok, that seems like a pretty strong demonstration. I had the "I have a very particular set of skills" conversation with the agency and pointed these facts out, that they were an extremely strong indication that my copy was authentic and their one wasn't, and they responded that the document was "re-sealed" every time it was downloaded from RightSignature and that would explain the modifications. This doesn't seem plausible, but it's an argument. Let's go further.

My next move was pdfalyzer, which allows you to pull a PDF apart into its component pieces. This revealed that the documents were identical, other than page 3, the one with the addendum. This page included tags entitled "touchUp_TextEdit", evidence that the page had been modified using Acrobat. But in itself, that doesn't prove anything - obviously it had been edited at some point to insert the landlord's name, it doesn't prove whether it happened before or after the signing.

But in the process of editing, Acrobat appeared to have renamed all the font references on that page into a different format. Every other page had a consistent naming scheme for the fonts, and they matched the scheme in the page 3 I had. Again, that doesn't tell us whether the renaming happened before or after the signing. Or does it?

You see, when I completed my signing, RightSignature inserted my name into the document, and did so using a font that wasn't otherwise present in the document (Courier, in this case). That font was named identically throughout the document, except on page 3, where it was named in the same manner as every other font that Acrobat had renamed. Given the font wasn't present in the document until after I'd signed it, this is proof that the page was edited after signing.

But eh this is all very convoluted. Surely there's an easier way? Thankfully yes, although I hate it. RightSignature had sent me a link to view my signed copy of the document. When I went there it presented it to me as the original PDF with my signature overlaid on top. Hitting F12 gave me the network tab, and I could see a reference to a base.pdf. Downloading that gave me the original PDF, pre-signature. Running sha256sum on it gave me an identical hash to the "Original checksum" field. Needless to say, it did not contain the addendum.

Why do this? The only explanation I can come up with (and I am obviously guessing here, I may be incorrect!) is that International Executive Rentals realised that they'd sent me a contract which could mean that they were liable for the return of my deposit, even though they'd already given it to my landlord, and after realising this added the addendum, sent it to me, and assumed that I just wouldn't notice (or that, if I did, I wouldn't be able to prove anything). In the process they went from an extremely unlikely possibility of having civil liability for a few thousand dollars (even if they were holding the deposit it's still the landlord's legal duty to return it, as far as I can tell) to doing something that looks extremely like forgery.

There's a hilarious followup. After this happened, the agency offered to do a screenshare with me showing them logging into RightSignature and showing the signed file with the addendum, and then proceeded to do so. One minor problem - the "Send for signature" button was still there, just below a field saying "Uploaded: 09/22/25". I asked them to search for my name, and it popped up two hits - one marked draft, one marked completed. The one marked completed? Didn't contain the addendum.

Fantastic Four

https://xkcd.com/3146/

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

https://xkcd.com/3146/

View From a Hotel Window, 9/24/25: Shepardstown, WV

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-24-25-shepardstown-wv/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57446

The parking lot isn’t for the hotel, and it isn’t even really a parking lot, it’s a car wash. Also, there’s this big damn pine in my view. West Virginia is going hard, y’all.

Tonight: Four Seasons Books at 6 pm, which is an hour earlier than I usually start. You should be on your way now!

Tomorrow: Richmond, Virginia! At Fountain Bookstore! Also at 6pm! The Virginias do things early, I suppose.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/view-from-a-hotel-window-9-24-25-shepardstown-wv/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57446

The Big Idea: Cadwell Turnbull

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/the-big-idea-cadwell-turnbull/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57440

Reality can oftentimes be stranger than fiction. Author Cadwell Turnbull speculates on this funny thing we call reality in the Big Idea for his newest novel, A Ruin, Great and Free. Follow along to see how our reality helped shape the world for the final novel in the Convergence saga.

CADWELL TURNBULL:

Back in the early months of 2020, a lot was happening. In January, the then-Trump administration killed an Iranian general in a drone strike, an “arbitrary killing” that, according to the United Nations, violated international law. At the same time, cases of infections from a new virus were being reported across the globe.

In November 2019, I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel just as the first cases of coronavirus were being reported. Station Eleven told the story of several characters before, during, and after an influenza pandemic which kills most of the world’s population.

I promptly began talking about the coronavirus cases with my friends. Even now, I recognize that what I’d been reading was guiding much of my anxiety on the matter. I possessed no special knowledge.

But then the moment came where it was clear to everyone that this thing was indeed happening. Or it should have been clear to everyone. Instead, there was a split in our collective sense of what was happening—a fracture. As people died, I witnessed personally a very stubborn denialism take hold. As city streets lay empty and hospitals filled beyond capacity, people began protesting the need for lockdowns and other such precautions. The pandemic became a partisan issue. But even on the personal level, among friends and family with politics all across the spectrum, I witnessed a range in how the pandemic was being perceived.

I was surprised and not surprised. The effects of the pandemic were terrifying, but we all weren’t terrified by the same things. It also confirmed in a very dramatic way a speculative hunch I’d embedded into the project I was working on at the time.

Almost a full year before the pandemic I’d created a fictional fracture of my own. It was at the heart of No Gods, No Monsters, the first in what would become the Convergence Saga. In the novel, evidence of the existence of monsters from folklore and popular culture is released to the public. Almost immediately this evidence—two videos: an officer-involved shooting of a werewolf and an act of protest from said werewolf’s wolfpack—is seemingly erased from everywhere all at once.

With the loss of the evidence, the collective sense of reality splits. Some people become obsessed with the videos and their disappearance. But other people—most people, in fact—self-delete the event from their own minds. The reasons for both responses were the same. A terrifying truth can take over a person’s mind or cause a person to look away completely. In the series, I was tying this fracture idea to a bigger one, a question at the center of reality itself, a real-world counterpart to a cosmic puzzle.

As I was drafting No Gods, No Monsters, I struggled a bit with the believability of this fracture idea. Peers that workshopped early parts of the novel questioned it. I also kept questioning the idea. Right up until the pandemic forced the world into lockdown and some people still didn’t believe it was happening.

I started No Gods, No Monsters in late 2018 and it was released in 2021. The following book, We Are the Crisis, was released in 2023. And the final book, A Ruin, Great and Free, was released on September 16th. My work on this series has spanned a very interesting time in our American (and global) politics.

Sometimes basic facts of our current life feel so strange to me that I wonder if we’re all trapped in some collective nightmare. I’m constantly reminded of The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, where protagonist George Orr has dreams that can alter reality itself. This personal quirk is then amplified by use of a machine called the Augmentor, weaponised by Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist with goals of remaking the world into a utopia. Naturally that doesn’t quite work out, as Le Guin masterfully shows us the disastrous results of Haber’s hubris.

The Lathe of Heaven envisions for us what it might look like if a subjective ideal is imposed on the objective world. If one person can determine (either by accident or manipulation) what the world looks like, what is the cost?

I think we know this speculative premise has real-world counterparts. As individuals and collectives, we are constantly remaking reality according to our ideals.

In the Convergence Saga a shadowy kabal tries to manipulate the world for its own purposes. Like in The Lathe of Heaven there is a supernatural reality-warping effect at work in the story’s world, but there’s also a very natural one. Ideas have a heat to them. They can be felt, drawing us in. Ideas can make us ignore things right in front of us. They can also make us imagine things that aren’t there. And once we’re under the spell of certain ideas, it can be difficult to root them out. An idea embeds itself.

Like a lot of people right now I’ve been obsessively watching the news. I find it frustrating how much of the news is political commentary. I am even more frustrated by the reality-warping effectiveness of bad-faith commentators on our current reality. Once again I find myself catastrophizing about a future I don’t want to live in, but we seem to be slipping toward. At the same time, I see the split happening. We can’t agree on what we’re seeing.

If the Convergence Saga is about the questioning of reality, it is also about expanding empathy. Trying to find healing for a fractured world. Trying to mend what has been broken. The story does not neatly provide an answer—because I personally don’t have one—but it shows an earnest attempt by the characters to find a way out of the political upheaval they’re facing. Much of that work is in finding new communities, forming new coalitions, and building solidarity networks for economic support and mutual aid. Occasionally, these coalitions of monsters, humans, and cosmic beings have to do battle against nefarious organizations and supremacist groups.

Turns out that in our world there are more people that want a fascist, white supremacist future than we thought. And we’re already glimpsing what that future could look like.

Fortunately, reality remains a collective act. And they’re not the only ones out here. We also get a say in what the future looks like.

A Ruin, Great and Free: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

Read an excerpt here.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/24/the-big-idea-cadwell-turnbull/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57440

Service Issue - Linode Cloud Manager, API, and CLI - All Regions

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/fhfll69zgrqj

Sep 25, 08:59 UTC
Resolved - We haven't observed any additional issues with the Cloud Manager, API or CLI, 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.

Sep 24, 11:32 UTC
Monitoring - At this time we have been able to correct the issue affecting the Cloud Manager, API and CLI. We will be monitoring this 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.

Sep 24, 10:40 UTC
Identified - Our team has identified the issue affecting the Cloud Manager, API and CLI. We are working quickly to implement a fix, and we will provide an update as soon as the solution is in place.

Sep 24, 09:47 UTC
Investigating - Our team is investigating a service issue that affects the Cloud Manager (https://cloud.linode.com/) and API. During that time, some users may experience issues when attempting to access these systems. We will share additional updates as we have more information.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/fhfll69zgrqj

Emerging Service Issue - Linode Manager and API - All Regions

Posted by Linode

https://status.linode.com/incidents/bd2mlmbfrfqk

Sep 24, 09:10 UTC
Investigating - Our team is investigating an emerging service issue affecting Linode Manager and API in all Regions. We will share additional updates as we have more information.

https://status.linode.com/incidents/bd2mlmbfrfqk