Become the Writer you Want to Be! A hundred thousand gurus offer contradictory writing secrets. You must outline! You must free write! You must write at a standing desk with your bare feet in cold oatmeal! The gurus are all correct— and all wrong. In Domesticate Your Badgers: Become a Better Writer through Deliberate Practice, full-time author Michael W Lucas demonstrates how to build a personalized plan to transform yourself into the best author you can be. Writing is a set of skills, and deliberately stocking your tool chest makes each piece you write better than the last. Want to be a pro? Use the same techniques pros use. Stop flailing. Start learning. No badgers were harmed in the writing of this book. Contains no badger or badger by-products. Regulations on badger domestication vary by location.

Become the Writer you Want to Be! A hundred thousand gurus offer contradictory writing secrets. You must outline! You must free write! You must write at a standing desk with your feet in cold oatmeal! The gurus are all correct- and all wrong. In Domesticate Your Badgers: Become a Better Writer through Deliberate Practice, full-time author Michael W Lucas demonstrates how to build a personalized plan to transform yourself into the best author you can be. Writing is a set of skills, and deliberately stocking your tool chest makes each piece you write better than the last. Want to be a pro? Use the same techniques pros use. Stop flailing. Start learning. No badgers were harmed in the writing of this book. Contains no badger or badger by-products. Regulations on badger domestication vary by location.

THE END OF YOUR WORLD? These twelve tales from critically-acclaimed author Michael Warren Lucas remind us that doom is always personal. Genes gone wild, or not wild enough. Cosmic heroes demanding you show them to a bank robbery, or else. Learning after a lifetime that your love is named chocolate, and chasing it no matter the cost. Discovering that your cozy desk job might get you killed, that one of your coworkers is a murderer, or the Faerie Queen wants your pelt. Apocalypse is loathed liberation, shredded innocence, or blowing up your own life to clasp a gaunt hope of love. A dozen different dooms await you. Some of them are delicious. (Includes Drums with Delusions of Godhood, Waking Up Yesterday, Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth, Moonlight’s Apples, Easing Final Fears, Wifi and Romex, Shoot Through the Heart, Calling Control, Easy, Step-by-Step Preparation, Yesterday’s Girl, and Forbidden Taste.)

DNS The world’s most successful distributed database—and the most naïve. The Domain Name System is one of the Internet’s oldest protocols, designed for a network without hostile users. Intruders targeting a network start by investigating their DNS. DNS Security Extensions, or DNSSEC, hardens DNS and brings it into the 21st century. Learning DNSSEC required wading through years of obsolete tutorials, dead ends, and inscrutable standards. Until now. This new edition of DNSSEC Mastery will have DNS administrators deploying DNSSEC with industry-standard software in hours instead of weeks. You will: · Understand what DNSSEC provides · Configure your servers to resist attack · Verify your environment supports modern DNS · Debug DNSSEC and the Chain of Trust · Sign your zones and attach them to the Chain of Trust · Conceal zone data with NSEC3 · Automate DNSSEC maintenance · Roll over keys to maintain integrity · Implement DNSSEC on private networks · Securely distribute security-critical information via DNS And more! DNSSEC Mastery transforms DNS from a headache to a solution.

"Many users assume that their advanced filesystem is better than UFS because they have so many features—snapshots, checksums, compression, sophisticated caching algorithms, and so on—while all UFS has ever done is muck about putting data on disk. But, conversely, UFS users believe their filesystem is better for exactly the same reasons." —Hitchhikers Guide to OpenBSD Disk management is the core of system administration. Nobody can tell you how large that database is going to grow or how many files that archive must eventually support, but for everything else there’s OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems. This guide takes you through the latest in OpenBSD storage management, including: · OpenBSD’s cross-platform storage stack · MBR, GPT, and disklabel partitions · The Unix File System · Growing, removing, and repairing filesystems · Memory file systems · The Buffer Cache · Why you need swap, and how to live with it · Coping with FAT, NTFS, EXT, and more · The Network File System · iSCSI · Software RAID · Encrypted filesystems · Encrypted installs And more! Partition yourself for success and grab OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems now.

You asked. He didn’t answer. The We Get Letters column of the FreeBSD Journal has been called “a tsunami of bile disguised as experience and erudition,” “a torment to the eye and a stain upon the soul,” and “the corroded battleship anchor that will drag an otherwise illustrious Journal to an ignominious demise.” If you ask people who aren’t the columnist, you’ll get a less luminous view. Perhaps even negative. We sincerely apologize. This collection of the first three years illustrates how rapidly Lucas abandoned any pretense of answering questions usefully—or, indeed, paying any attention whatsoever to his correspondents. It is unacceptable. What the editors conceived of as an innocent letters column quickly transcended bitterness to become elevated, even elegant enmity. Against everyone. Apologies are insufficient. In an attempt to keep these columns from teaching other articles bad habits, we have confined them in their own private volume. The publisher expects it to be presented as evidence at his inevitable competency hearings, as well as most of the civil suits. Next week’s suits, at least. "While we appreciate Mr Lucas' unique contributions to the Journal, we do feel his specific talents are not being fully utilized. Please buy his books, his hours, autographed photos, whatever so that he is otherwise engaged." – John Baldwin, FreeBSD Journal Editorial Board Chair

The modern year of 1927, and orcs still have to fight elven asshole bullshit. Prohibition left exceptions for the church of Men, the Elvish sacraments, even the Dwarfish rituals. But the elves in Congress insist that orcs have no sacraments. Without the Orcish draught, without the rites, Uruk-Tai’s fine strong boys might grow tall. They might earn respect. But they will never be Orcs. And Uruk will not let that happen.

"I love these stories" Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Hugo- and Nebula-award winning author of The Fey ELVES WENT INTO THE WEST—TO AMERICA. GENERATIONS LATER, ORCS FOLLOWED. 1927 Detroit. Orcs fight Prohibition, avoid police, and labor hard for their children. All while doing their best to navigate the narrow human world. Men drive fancy Dodges and Cadillacs; orcs squeeze into fourth-hand Model Ts. Dwarves dominate the skilled trades; orcs push brooms. And behind everything, elves make it their life’s work to deny orcs have worth. To be an orc is to endure, but when the world tries to deny even that, an orc must act. And Uruk-Tai will do anything for his family. This long-demanded collection includes all the Prohibition Orcs tales—Spilled Mirovar, Final Gift, Drowned Mirovar, Witness November, Degreased Hopes, Woolen Torment, and the never before published A Debt of Meat. With an introduction by USA Today best-selling author Robert Jeschonek

High Speed Madness, with Love at the Wheel Love. The most overloaded word in our language. Love of your mate, love of pets, of parents and children and friends, all different things. We spend our last breath sharing our love. For love, we break not just the law but ourselves. Love is pure devotion, and pure corrosion. Love propels these stories. Thrillers and fantasies, science fiction and historicals. Love chained by brain implants and little old ladies who should have been left undisturbed. Love strong enough to unravel the universe, with the knowledge to do it. Minuscule love wiggling its whiskers against your cheek. Trapped children freeing themselves through love of the incomprehensible. Love of art and family and another person, the kind of love that violates museums and gnaws Semtex. Selected from a decade of the author’s work, these eleven tales affirm the power of love—at knifepoint. “Each story is Hieronymus Bosch writing a love letter to Charlie Brown’s little red-haired girl now grown and so weary she aches.” – ZZ Claybourne

“ A tale so outlandish it feels real. Prohibition. Grosse Pointe elves. Automotive lords. And the orcs doing their best to make America make sense. A riotous fantasy within a fantasy. Terry Pratchett via Detroit!” --Zig Zag Claybourne, author of Afro Puffs are the Antennae of the Universe HOPE EXISTS TO BE CRUSHED The tenuous bootlegging alliance between the Tai clan and the human Sanford brought wealth to Uruk-Tai’s family. But a treacherous shadow has poisoned booze in the clan’s name. Humans have died and other humans blame Uruk, the way small men always blame orcs. But when an orcish child dies from poison draught and war erupts between clans, Uruk finds himself forced into a magic-bound partnership with a clan rival who wants him dead. As the Sun surrenders to the Longest Night, Uruk charges through the belly of 1927 Detroit to find a cowardly killer before his own family is destroyed. Is it a lone poisoner? Or have the arrogant elves decided to end their slow feud and destroy Uruk’s family? An orc endures, but endurance is not enough. By dawn, bodies frozen to the street. Perhaps Uruk’s children among them.