Articles

Here’s the scenario you find yourself in: you’ve built and deployed a cool little Django app, and successfully deployed it on Heroku. You’ve followed all the great advice out there and are using django-environ to help manage all the various configuration variables you have to retrieve from your Heroku dynos.

Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas.

Numenera Discovery and Destiny in their slipcase cover Numenera Discovery and Destiny are here, and they do not disappoint. As always, Monte Cook Games nails the production quality, with some beautiful volumes filled with incredible art.

This July, I’ll be running my first convention game of an RPG at GeeklyCon. I’ve been a DM for many years, but my focus has been running long term campaigns for my friends.

Pop quiz: you’ve set up a static web site like all the cool kids these days, but you still want to be able to do scheduled posts. There’s a lot of good reasons why you might.

It’s the January of 2018, and the sickness is upon me again. Sometimes you can feel it coming, like that first head fog that warns of a coming cold, or the klaxon of a stomach churn that alerts you to an impending flu.

Yay, the obligatory retrospective post! Let’s face it, in many ways, 2017 was a dumpster fire of a year. The political and social climate has been toxic and frankly it’s hard to be effective in this kind of environment.

Continuing my recurring feature where I publicly post a report card of fiction writing activity each month. This series is inspired by Aeryn Rudel’s blog Rejectomancy. Each month I’ll post a report card summarizing words written, submissions, rejections, and hopefully acceptances.

Last month, I announced a new recurring feature where I’ll publicly post a report card of fiction writing activity each month. This series is inspired by Aeryn Rudel’s blog Rejectomancy. Each month I’ll post my results, summarizing words written, submissions, rejections, and hopefully acceptances.

Reader, I did it again. I joined another social network. I know, I know. I should know better, right? But this time feels different. There’s something special about this one. Maybe it’s simply the contrast from Facebook and Twitter that makes it so appealing, but I can’t help but feel there is great promise in Mastodon.

The tangle of human lives is spun with stories. Every relationship, every shared belief, and every history is made up of such things. More importantly, your stories are what define you, whether you are conscious of it or not.

I’ve been writing a lot more lately, shifting my work from a secret passion to more of a serious pursuit. The last few months I’ve been making steady progress on project DARK CONDUIT, and producing short stories which I’ve been submitting to fiction markets.

I’ve written here before about one of my side projects, a suite of productivity tools for writers called Writer’s Ledger. The idea began from a desire to convert the spreadsheets I use for tracking manuscripts to a reusable web app.

Are you a fiction writer? Do you find yourself curious about how other writers work and track their progress? You are not alone. I am fascinated by the processes that people use to blend their creative work with the business of making art.

OMG, a workflow post! Apps, tools, productivity, oh my! Listen, we all know that no app can make you more productive by itself. Your methods are always more important than your tools.

Since my post about Aikido at work a few months ago, I’ve received a number of questions that have the same theme. Take this one from reader Kevin: I like what you’re saying about resolving conflict, but doesn’t that [mean] you’re always reactive?

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross ⭐️️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️⭐️ / ⭐️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️⭐️ It’s hard not to love Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series as a concept. A clandestine government agency of computational demonologists defend the world from horrors beyond space and time, all while trying to keep up with their expense reports.

About a month ago, on a whim, I started an experiment where I stopped checking my personal email on my phone, or via the web. Instead, I moved all my personal email activity over to Mutt.

Star.Ships by Gordon White ⭐️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️ / ⭐️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️⭐️ Gordon White’s exercise in using data analysis to speculatively reconstruct ancient belief systems is a mind-bending journey through our most ancient history. In this book, he tracks our species’ first departure from what we now call Africa, and the beginnings of both the Laurasian mythological “novel”, as well as the Gondwana “grandmother myths” that came with us.

The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge ⭐️️️️⭐️⭐️ / ⭐️️️️⭐️⭐️⭐️️️️⭐️ This is a book where my opinion of it has changed the longer I’ve been away from it. It’s a strange book, and honestly its structure was nearly its undoing for me.