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assignedmale_feedThis year was the most prolific of my life, but also the most anxiety-inducing. I wrote and published a new novel and drew about two hundred pages of comics, as if to numb the things I was feeling. But life has ways to tell us we’re burning out.
I am not known for sharing much about my private life - probably a consequence of a whole decade of harassment and stalking from anti-trans zealots - but allow me to do it today. You might know that at the start of the pandemic, my husband and I decided to move into a century-old cabin in the woods. We have slowly been turning it into an artist retreat for trans and queer people. I really needed the seclusion, the quiet and the natural beauty of the place, especially after many years of being the target of hate campaigns, doxxing and death threats. This place that we call home has been a blessing, but it was always meant to be temporary.
Due to life and health situations, it’s now time for my husband and I to come back to civilisation. I won’t go into details, but I’ll just say that our nearest hospital is a 3h round trip drive, and that living 10h away from my husband’s relatives is becoming impossible. Furthermore, we still believe in our dream of turning that space into a retreat for trans and queer artists, but the renovations left to do are simply incompatible with my husband’s pregnancy.
That is why we are getting prepared to move back to the city. It’s a hard and lifechanging decision for us, but there is no avoiding it. It’s also going to be costly : another reason we moved in our current ruin of a home in the first place was to be able to focus more on making art and less on making rent. If you feel so enclined, you can contribute to our relocation effort by getting a coffee at www.ko-fi.com/sophielabelle or supporting my work at www.patreon.com/assignedmale . It always means the world to us, now more so than ever!
I’ve decided to spend the last few weeks of the year focusing on catching my breath, preparing for the move and trying to get through the 15 000 emails that I’ve let piled in my inbox since my beloved cat, my bestest friend, passed earlier this year, and hopefully finishing the children’s book I’ve been working on for way too long. I still have a few new comics lined up for the Holidays, so don’t expect me to stay quiet!
So that’s what’s up. Thank you for reading, thank you for being there, I love you all, even the ones who rage-read my comics. Keep shining!
Sophie
the_daily_wtf_feedAs the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one's mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn't so cold that it hurts to breathe.
Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.
A long time ago, Luciano worked for a small company, along with some friends. This was long enough that you didn't rent compute from a cloud provider, but instead ran most of your intranet services off of a private server in your network closet somewhere.
This particular server ran mostly everything: private git hosting, VPN, email, and an internal Jabber server for chat. Given that it ran most services in the company, one might think that they were backing it up regularly- and you'd be right. One might also think that they had some sort of failover setup, and that's where you'd be wrong.
Late August 12th, the hard drive on their server decided it was time to start its own holiday. The main reason everyone noticed when it happened wasn't due to some alert that got triggered, but as mentioned, Luciano was friends with the team, which meant they used the Jabber server to chat with each other about non-work stuff.
Because half the country was already closed for August, getting replacements delivered was a dubious proposition, at best. Especially with the 15th looming, which not only made shipping delays worse, but this particular year was on a Friday, marking a 3-day weekend. Unless they wanted to spend the better part of a week out of commission, they needed to find an alternative.
The only silver lining was that "shipping is delayed" is the kind of problem which can be solved by spending money. By the time it was all said and done, they paid more for shipping than they paid for the drive itself, but the drive arrived by the 14th, and by the end of the day, they had the server back up and running, restored from backup.
And everything was happy, until August 12th, the following year, when the new hard drive decided to die the exact same way as the previous one, and the entire cycle repeated itself.
And on the third year, a hard drive also failed on August 12th. At least, by that point, they were so used to the problem that they kept spare drives in inventory. Eventually, someone upgraded them to a RAID, which at least kept the downtime at a minimum.
Luciano has long since moved on to a new job, but the date of August 12th is his own personal holiday: an unpleasant one.
gunnerkrigg_feedysabetwordsmith
ysabetwordsmith ysabetwordsmith
daily_illuminator_feed
The holiday shopping rush is getting even wilder! While Black Friday may be the busiest day of the year, Super Saturday – the Saturday before Christmas – is in the top five and just a few short days away. The suggested shipping deadline to have the best shot of gifts arriving before Christmas (for physical Warehouse 23 items) has now passed, but you still have time for last-minute presents.girlgenius_main_feedysabetwordsmith gws_feed
I always love getting to this strip and realizing we were well past a third of this series before Thea and Angel properly met!
egs_comic_feed
That's good, Hope! Tedd was sorta counting on that.
Bishop, having not been privy to Tedd's thoughts on the previous page, essentially saw a kid saying they were going to figure out cold fusion.
Panel four, meanwhile, is one reason why Bishop has been outwardly polite during this part of the story. She genuinely feels sympathy about what happened. She might disagree one thousand percent with Tedd having been given uryuom technology—as she demonstrated years ago—but there's no way she'd rub it anyone's face right at this moment.
Maybe give her a week.
- Bishop overhearing talk of giving Tedd alien technology
- The next page in which Edward gets a talking to
- How that conversation with his boss wound up going (later in Layers)
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ysabetwordsmith dialecticdreamerysabetwordsmith, with my thanks to her and to the wonderful readers. Enjoy! ::
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