Sam Robb

A Teller of Tales.
Husband, father, teacher, tech startup developer.
Former Presidential candidate.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

Happy Black Friday y'all!

Whether you're done with your Black Friday strategic strikes, or just plotting your online shopping spree today, here's a few holiday gift suggestions for the sci-fi/fantasy reader in your life...

(See ⬇️ for the Amazon connections!)

ONE OCTOBER NIGHT - One story every night, born from a drawing. Fantasy, science fiction, mystery, this collection has it all. Come for the night and see what you find, because it's never boring here in October.

RECALL NOTICE - (ebook only) Eddie's had a rough thirteen months. He's been cursed by a gypsy, assigned his own sister as his court appointed witch, and is up to his neck in mandated community service. When he picks up a new client, his luck finally changes — for the worse. Can this PI turned black cat navigate a world of friendly zombies, orcish goons, and bad luck by the crate to somehow save the day?

MINSTRELS IN THE GALAXY - A dozen science fiction authors spin their own yarns, inspired by the music of Jethro Tull. Belly up to the bar somewhere out among the stars. Grab yourself a drink, and settle in for some colorful tales from our minstrels in the galaxy. Stories of things that could have been, things that might have been...and of things that should have been, but never were.

TALES FROM THE WOOD - A dozen fantasy authors spin their own tales, inspired by the music of Jethro Tull. Come join us around the fire for stories of all manner of witches, wizards, dragons, and fae beings both light and dark as these bards bring you their Tales from the Wood.

2024 HIGH CALIBER AWARDS - A young traveling judge on the road with an Imperial Magus struggles to keep his own magical talent hidden while investigating a series of crimes that look to be the work of a powerful necromancer. (I'm working on continuing this story into a full novel for Cannon Publishing! 😁)

WYRD WEST - Out in the Wasaya territory of the Old West, myth collides with reality, and anything can be true. A missing town draws a Federal Marshal and an itinerant preacher together to confront an ancient evil that wants to consume them all - and more. Get my story and another nine from stellar authors in this volume!

ZNB PRESENTS: YEAR TWO - What would happen if the "Chosen One" was a sixty year-old widowed fisherwoman? Find out in "Harrold of the Gods", only one of the two dozen stories in this anthology!

And more! That's a sample of what you can find on my Amazon Author's page. Take a look and find something for the geek that you love, and give them a gift they can enjoy while they're curled up next to a fire this holiday season!

Oh, and if you're looking for some additional information, I list some of my favorite indie publishers and samples of what they offer in a Substack post - pop over and check it out.

https://t.co/Gf4UPbBawj

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

"Star Trek makes me think about societies I wouldn't necessarily want to live in. Shipbreaker makes me sympathize with a labor movement whose broader politics I don't necessarily share.

That's what good art is SUPPOSED to do. It makes you engage with ideas, even ones you disagree with."

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

You're arguing against a point nobody is actually making. Well, the phrasing of the argument is poor, but the ACTUAL argument.

The problem isn't politics in video games. The problem is shitty writing and ham-fisted political messaging that ruins otherwise good entertainment.

Most of us have absolutely no problem with political themes in games, movies, or television. We have a problem when writers sacrifice storytelling, character development, and entertainment to beat the audience over the head with their personal politics.

Take Star Trek, for example.

Star Trek is basically space socialism in a post-scarcity economy. Its practically a laundry list of political and economic ideas that most conservatives like me fundamentally disagree with.

And you know what? I fucking LOVE Star Trek.

Why? Because the stories are excellent. The characters are compelling. The writing makes you think.

Some of the older episodes are preachy. Some are EXTREMELY preachy. Even when I disagree with the message, I can appreciate the storytelling.

Here's another example: Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It's a game about being a blue-collar worker dismantling enormous spaceships for a corporation that has turned exploitative employment practices into an Olympic sport.

The game is VERY pro-union. You could reasonably describe its politics as socialist or at least heavily sympathetic to organized labor.

And you know what? I LOVE THAT GAME, TOO.

The mechanics are fantastic. Cutting apart enormous spaceships in zero gravity, carefully extracting valuable components, and occasionally turning yourself into a rapidly expanding cloud of debris because you accidentally cut through a fuel line is genuinely entertaining.

And the pro-union message? IT FITS THE STORY.

You're playing an exploited worker trying to survive under an absurdly oppressive corporate system. Of COURSE labor organizing is going to be part of that story. The politics emerge naturally from the world, the characters, and the circumstances.

I might disagree with some of the broader political conclusions, but I don't feel like the developers are wasting my time by including them. The politics are part of the storytelling, not a substitute for it.

Now compare that to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where we get clumsy lectures about gender identity and characters practically turning to the camera to explain the writers' political opinions.

🤖🤖That's not storytelling. That's a mandatory corporate diversity seminar with a fantasy RPG awkwardly attached to it.🤖🤖

And before you misunderstand me, there's absolutely nothing wrong with having gay, transgender, or nonbinary characters in a story. But for FUCKS SAKE, give them personalities, motivations, conflicts, and character arcs. Make them interesting PEOPLE instead of walking political statements. Making them just walking political statements insults them and the reader/player, too.

Here's another example.

Imagine watching Aliens, one of the greatest science fiction action movies ever made.

Imagine, if halfway through the movie, Corporal Hicks suddenly puts down his pulse rifle, looks directly at the camera, and launches into a fifteen-minute lecture about the Second Amendment, the importance of civilian gun ownership, and why gun control advocates are idiots. I'd probably agree with the entire screed.

I'D STILL THINK IT WAS FUCKING TERRIBLE WRITING.

I came to watch Ripley fight xenomorphs, not attend an NRA convention on LV-426.

The political message isn't the problem. The fact that you've brought the entire story to a screeching halt to deliver it, is.

Good writers understand how to weave political and philosophical ideas into their stories. They create situations where characters confront difficult questions, make choices, suffer consequences, and occasionally discover that their beliefs were wrong.

Bad writers stop the story to lecture the audience, then congratulate themselves for being courageous.

Here's the really frustrating part: Ham-fisted political messaging doesn't just ruin the story. It cheapens the message itself. You can absolutely put politics in your video games. Some of the greatest games ever made are deeply political.

Star Trek makes me think about societies I wouldn't necessarily want to live in. Shipbreaker makes me sympathize with a labor movement whose broader politics I don't necessarily share.

That's what good art is SUPPOSED to do. It makes you engage with ideas, even ones you disagree with.

Just learn the difference between telling a compelling story that explores political ideas and using a video game as a delivery mechanism for your personal manifesto. That's the distinction you dipshits keep missing.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

The only way out is through.

They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.

There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.

The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.

There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.

The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.

The only way out is through.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

ZCQOTD: "Thanks for your snooty & patronizing quip from the peak of Mt Dunning-Kruger..."

[susanhogarth @susanhogarth]

Unironically @knighton_bill just came in to find me napping/sleeping in and informed me it’s 10 o’clock. 💕💀💕

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

"You are in the house of Elrond. And it is ten o'clock in the morning, on October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know."

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

"Set in Alexander Macris’s Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) universe, the anthology features nine stories... Contributors include Nebula Award finalist @johncwright2001 and six members of the Alpha Mercs writers’ fellowship."
https://t.co/CXUAHnXYiF

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

QOTD from @thenovelninja:

"If you can only enjoy a story if you already agree with the message, it's not entertainment. It's just a sermon."

https://t.co/x21EGSaeWf

[Novel Ninja | Catholic Geek @thenovelninja]

Yeah, yeah, elections important, vote against the bad people, vote for the slightly less bad people. Trust me, I'm political.

But stories are how we survive politics. That's why we need stories that aren't just politics. That's why it's such a bad thing to have our major entertainment built around telling The Message rather than an entertaining story that happens to have an underlying message. If you can only enjoy a story if you already agree with the message, it's not entertainment. It's just a sermon.

But guess what. When you brag about starting the fires, eventually someone's going to come stop your next one.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

There are rabbit holes, then there are sink holes... then there is the Ancient Elder Rabbit God Sinkhole that is Victorian Thimble Lore.

[Dabs🩸 @DabsMalone]

a lot of old software was protected by “exploiting this would be an unreasonable amount of work”

we have invented a machine that does unreasonable amounts of work

anyway how’s the patch backlog

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

@TempusMalleo Reminder: you can write it NOW, you just can't publish it until 2049.

[Raconteur Press, LLC @raconteur_press]

Raconteur Press: Building More Than a Catalog of Books

Raconteur Press is doing things differently. They create opportunities for writers, help them develop their craft...

That's a cultural contribution worth supporting.

https://t.co/7zzif8kbfj

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

There's a third kind that's good at hiding it, but just doesn't bother.

[⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnine]

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and https://t.co/QlOXb3COq3 went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

@CTHULHUApproves Well, I'd have two for breakfast, so...

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

I'm at the age where I want my breakfast burrito to have 200mg of ibuprofen baked in.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

I need to put this on the back of my business cards.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

@katesylvanwrite I at least have an excuse for my daughter cell phone number: I never had to memorize it. I called it once, then associated her name with it in my phone.

But the old home phone number? Right there with you.

[Sam Robb @SamRobbWrites]

Why can I remember "Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock Jock" but I can't remember the name of people I've worked with for ten years?

[Sarah A. Hoyt @SarahAHoyt]

Also, for the record, if you're not reading 2 time Prometheus Award Winner Dave Freer @davefreersf , you're only missing out on someone whose work matches Terry Pratchett's for quality and enjoyment.
GO READ HIM.