Account inactive @literorrery@awoo.space

Alton Brown: Son of Ether
Tokyo Gastronomy: Hermetics
Julia Child: Chorister
Street Food: Akashic Record
Binging with Babish: Cult of Ecstasy
Great British Bake-Off: Verbena
Vegan Black Metal Chef: Euthanatos
18th Century Cooking: Dreamspeakers
George Kamitani: Virtual Adept
Epic Meal Time: Nephandi
Swedish Chef: Marauders

@adeptomega
@mmsword​
@Valerie_Elysee​
@ElectricKeet​

(( And also, please forgive me that moment of indelicacy. I may be angry, but other people don't deserve to be dogpiled. They're under enough stress. Even Operations, for all that they're not helping here, are actually busy. They're just more focused on getting new customers onboarded than they are on solving existing customer pain, because that's how leadership has incentivized them to work in the NOC. ))

And the most frustrating part of it all is that addressing the root issue will require deep domain knowledge that nobody at the company seems particularly eager to share because everyone says "oh, don't learn how the existing software works; it's being actively deprecated as we speak!" Except that the new systems are already behind schedule and the pain we're experiencing is happening to the customers right now.

Instead, I have spent the last four days doing Operations' job for them, because for the last three _weeks_ one of our biggest customers has been in a state of intermittent outage and nobody in Operations has actually been engaged enough to do their role. The customers' stuff is grossly misconfigured, the data we're serving the customer is badly sourced coming in the door, the software is DoSing them with unprocessable requests, and my job has become documenting the maelstrom.

I've been "promoted" to tech lead for the Site Reliability team, which means my job is supposed to be building automation tools and doing end-to-end system analysis. I've designed and have begun an automated-application-restart tool to wire into our monitoring so we can detect when we need to boop our software and do so without having to engage Operations.

I wanted this position. I was really excited to take this position. I've got really awesome designs and architecture planned.

Behold the garden in which I grow the fucks I use at work.

Behold the barrel of salt I keep nearby, in case I catch sight of greenery in this plot.

There are scenes in almost every book I've written that I hated to craft. Giri's last act as an admin. Baron Deterikh's temper. Walker's arrival. Scenes that you know need to be in the book, but that you just really don't want to have to put there.

I know one of the ones in Ties now.
#writing

The person you are when you're at work is your moneysona.

And yes, I do make the rules. At least, I make my rules. You can make your own rules, if you want. You're allowed.

Oh... and be careful if you breathe it. At least, know what you're getting into.

Everyone's heard the reports, seen the stories. I don't believe the rumors about anybody being _hurt_ by breathing that stuff, but you don't want to stand on the borders too long unless you know what it's likely to do to you. Of course, if you know what it's likely to do to you, you're probably the type to want to stand there and let it.

In the end, the fog just _is_. It's just another force of nature. Some days it's thick and you should stay home and wrap yourself in a warm blanket and try to sleep. Some days it's thin and you can imagine what the next town looks like through the faint haze on the horizon. We still have weather, or at least climate, and some radio station will report on the fog thickness in your area. Pay attention and watch for when it rolls in.

Of course, you give a group of bored and restless folks a relentless fog that disappears people, and you'll have folks testing the boundaries, finding what works, what doesn't. And all anyone knows for sure is that it depends. Sometimes folks can walk around in it for days untouched. Some have just vanished, soon as all eyes are off them. It's like somebody's in control, testing the testers, but to what end nobody can say.

We've got ships still, great carriers that are used to carrying freight and people through the fog. Open ocean routes don't seem to have suffered, but the closer to land you have to get, the bigger the risk that the fog will find you. The waters talk, moreso now than before. And they don't seem to take kindly to cheaters.

A few years back, a couple of brave souls put sleeper cars on an electric train and tried to drive it by wire from the tower. That worked... mostly. Those who slept through the trip got where they were going, and most of them say the dreams eventually faded. We don't know where the others went. We just know not everybody showed up, and nobody who's gone into the fog comes back. The world just isn't there, or might as well not be.

We know some things still work out there. The self-driving trucks still show up, carrying groceries from the farms and products from the factories we know are still running. Nobody's starving, any more than they were before, and all the stores still have stuff on the shelves. The planes are all grounded, though; they vanish in the fog same as cars. Everything's slowed down a lot since the Fog rolled in.

Nobody knows where the world went. It can't have just vanished. And yet, the evidence is there, incontrovertible. Walk to the edge of the city, and the road disappears. The fog just outside of town never lifts, and cars vanish from view just a few meters in. You can't even hear their engines any more, and nobody's driven into town in months.