Entry tags:
Status Report for July, 2024
Oh hai, I am a year older! (as of the 18th)
My birthday dinner was the usual, duck from Le Fontaine, served on a bed of wild rice with mixed vegetables, with tiramisu for dessert. Yum!
I outlined not one, but two possible standalone novels. These are:
Intruder - first contact at 0.05 times the speed of light. The two great factions of humanity, locked in a cold war with one another, discover an alien ship crossing the solar system at insane speed. Each launches a mission to attempt to rendezvous with the ship before the other one can. But the first mission goes silent days after it begins its operations. Now, months later, the second mission is about to close in on the Intruder. Are the aliens hostile? What happened to the first crew? And why didn't the Intruder stop in the solar system?
Re: Fleet Academy - a disgruntled engineer comes across a mysterious artifact on a planetary expedition that offers her the chance to redo her life. She accepts and finds herself back in her academy days. Score! But her captain, the very reason she's doing this, has gone back in time after her, and is determined to bring her back before the timeline is changed beyond repair. Now the two of them must deal with classmates, their first training cruise, and each other. Is a happy life so much to ask for?
Intruder is off to review by a friend of mine who's much better with things physics than I am, since it's a hard-ish science fiction story, set in a slower-than-light universe. He's already taken one look at things and I've made changes based on his suggestion, but it may be a while before he gets to a second look, so I pressed on with the second outline.
Thanks to![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladyrowyn who read over Re: Fleet Academy and gave me some great suggestions, I broke ground on it a few weeks ago, and presently have one and a half chapters written: 10,877 words. I have hopes that it will be a moderately thick novel, around 120k words, but we'll see how that goes.
Interestingly, it took 18 days to write, then revise the outline for Intruder... 5 and change for Re: Fleet Academy's outline. We'll see how that goes.
In other mews... CentOS 7, which is what my old remotely-hosted Linux server is using (I use it for mail and hosting an RP MUCK) has reached end of life, which I found out when the updates stopped running because they'd turned off that service. So I did some digging and figured out I could migrate it to Alma Linux using ELevate. There was a very nervous-making hour and change while it did the reboot thing, but it came back up successfully. Whew! So that's one headache out of the way.
Now what am I gonna do about Windows 10 reaching end of life next year and my machine being too old, apparently, for Windows 11... Eh, that's next-year-Tufty's problem.
My birthday dinner was the usual, duck from Le Fontaine, served on a bed of wild rice with mixed vegetables, with tiramisu for dessert. Yum!
I outlined not one, but two possible standalone novels. These are:
Intruder - first contact at 0.05 times the speed of light. The two great factions of humanity, locked in a cold war with one another, discover an alien ship crossing the solar system at insane speed. Each launches a mission to attempt to rendezvous with the ship before the other one can. But the first mission goes silent days after it begins its operations. Now, months later, the second mission is about to close in on the Intruder. Are the aliens hostile? What happened to the first crew? And why didn't the Intruder stop in the solar system?
Re: Fleet Academy - a disgruntled engineer comes across a mysterious artifact on a planetary expedition that offers her the chance to redo her life. She accepts and finds herself back in her academy days. Score! But her captain, the very reason she's doing this, has gone back in time after her, and is determined to bring her back before the timeline is changed beyond repair. Now the two of them must deal with classmates, their first training cruise, and each other. Is a happy life so much to ask for?
Intruder is off to review by a friend of mine who's much better with things physics than I am, since it's a hard-ish science fiction story, set in a slower-than-light universe. He's already taken one look at things and I've made changes based on his suggestion, but it may be a while before he gets to a second look, so I pressed on with the second outline.
Thanks to
ladyrowyn who read over Re: Fleet Academy and gave me some great suggestions, I broke ground on it a few weeks ago, and presently have one and a half chapters written: 10,877 words. I have hopes that it will be a moderately thick novel, around 120k words, but we'll see how that goes.Interestingly, it took 18 days to write, then revise the outline for Intruder... 5 and change for Re: Fleet Academy's outline. We'll see how that goes.
In other mews... CentOS 7, which is what my old remotely-hosted Linux server is using (I use it for mail and hosting an RP MUCK) has reached end of life, which I found out when the updates stopped running because they'd turned off that service. So I did some digging and figured out I could migrate it to Alma Linux using ELevate. There was a very nervous-making hour and change while it did the reboot thing, but it came back up successfully. Whew! So that's one headache out of the way.
Now what am I gonna do about Windows 10 reaching end of life next year and my machine being too old, apparently, for Windows 11... Eh, that's next-year-Tufty's problem.
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Happy belated birthday, fellow July birthday person!
Both novels sound quite interesting. I do like a second chance story. Probably why my one NaNo project to get past 50K was as I once described it, "A guy who is just coasting through life goes to bed on his thirtieth birthday and wakes up to discover it's the first day of high school, he's no longer Leslie the second oldest boy but Leslie the oldest of the girls in the family, oh, and now a wolf person." It's on my list of things to pick up again and do something with. So Re: Fleet Academy definitely sounds like it could be fun to read. Intruder does as well, but well, I do have that second chance go back and try things again itch that I like finding stories for.
I had actually just been considering setting something up with CentOS when they announced that they were not only was the version that was out going to be the final version but that they were IIRC going to EOL it ahead of what would have been the normal schedule. And then just to pour salt onto the people who were unhappy about it, suggested, "Oh, if you're unhappy about this distro designed to be nice and reliably stable going away how about you switch to our bleeding edge distro?" Then they were somehow shocked that Alma and Rocky sprang into existence as spiritual successors to CentOS. So at that point I decided that if Ubuntu kept getting more annoyances in it for me I'd investigate going to Debian. And while my 'desktop' system is still Ubuntu the laptop I carry around is Debian. But I'm considering setting up a box with either Alma or Rocky on it. Although I might possibly set up something with FreeBSD to try something even further afield. (I have a handful of Raspberry Pis and a couple of tiny x86 boxes that could be doing something useful)
As for the Windows 10 EOL stuff, to quote myself from over on the fediverse:
I don't actually have anything running Windows (other than a work laptop) but I've been tempted to set up a mostly isolated Windows 10 VM for a handful of programs I'd like to run that either only run on Windows or run better there. But I spend enough time making Windows behave at work that I think I'd just stick to a Windows VM. (I'm halfway considering setting up an 86Box VM with Windows 98SE and using that to finally get around to playing Final Fantasy VII, since 86Box will apparently emulate the Voodoo graphics card FFVII on the PC wants)
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Second Chances was actually based on a random idea I had... You know those 'Reincarnated as the Villainess' manga and light novels? Well, I was thinking "what if that, but it was science fiction instead? Hmm, a royal school with people in uniforms but science fiction... Where do you-- oh snap. Starfleet Academy."
After that I started brainstorming how the various popular romcom tropes could get in there, and eventually enough pieces stuck together I had an outline. Yay, outline!
Yeah, Red Hat/Fedora has really made a mess of their schedule, and hopefully their lunch gets eaten.
I use Windows because most of the games I play want it, so... Well, I do have some random thought toward setting up a second machine at some point, but I'm not sure if I'd go with a ChromeBook, or a Linux laptop. There's nothing particularly urgent about it, it'd just be nice to have a machine I could wander around the house and work on, rather than being tethered to my desk.
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