December 2024 Archives

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.)

If I am forced to close the pub for good, maybe someone other than me can set up a forum somewhere outside UK legal jurisdiction where you can all stay in touch. But it won't be me, because then I'd be breaking the law and it's alway sunwise to bend over and hang a sign on your back saying "POLICE PLEASE KICK ME".

Meanwhile, you can already find me on:

Mastodon: @cstross@wandering.shop

Bluesky: @cstross.bsky.social

Reddit: /u/cstross

(And if someone I know opens up a Discord or other non-UK, non-UK-run forum for fans of Charlie Stross, I'll add it here.)

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

Because we are obviously living in the silliest, darkest time line—or maybe the darkest, silliest time line—Donald Trump's pick to lead American healthcare next year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an anti-vaxxer crank. And this week the New York Times broke the news that Kennedy's Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine. They add, "Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services."

(Suffice to say, this is a terrible idea: it's about the safest, cheapest, life-saving intervention 20th century medical research has given us, and polio is a horrible, awful disease that cripples people for life.)

Donald Trump is on the record as saying he's open to abolishing childhood vaccine mandates. All of them. Because he's a moron and a narcissist whose first instinct in a pandemic was to tell outrageous lies then try and work out how to use it to make himself rich by promoting ineffective medical treatments we can't discount this as a possibility.

I emphasize: this is a thing that actually happened in 2020, during the previous Trump administration. So there is every reason to expect it to happen again, harder and faster.

I am a writer. I am always looking for a new Torment Nexus angle these days. So, in anticipation of a resumed Reign of Trump—I mean, Reign of Malignant Idiocy—here is my 2025 business plan:

My US publisher, Tor.com, is discounting the most recent Laundry Files/New Management novel, Season of Skulls, to $2.99 in all North American ebook stores this month (December 2024). The price of the ebook will go back up in January.

(It's a promotion to support the release of A Conventional Boy on January 7th 2025.)

This offer does not apply to ebook stores outside the USA and Canada (where the ebook is published by Orbit, not Tor.com), nor does it apply to audiobook or paper editions.

I'm not going to deep-link into Amazon and life's too short to link to every ebook store that sells it (Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes and Noble, etc) but if you go to your regular supplier and search for "Stross Season of Skulls" you should find it.

The subject here needs some unpacking ...

Over the past 20+ years I've published a bunch of novels (over 30 at last count) and a couple of short story collections. In that time I've covered a bunch of tropes, that is, genre-specific shibboleths that authors feel the need to play with. (Vampires? Check. Time police? Check. Interstellar war? Check. Elves? Check. The Singularity? Check. Waking up in the wrong body? Check. And so on.)

Let's briefly split the question in half: science fiction, or fantasy? It's a hair-splitting distinction (and one mostly dictated by reader preferences and marketing requirements) but let's just call science fiction fiction that needs to stay within bullshitting distance of reality, while fantasy can wave a magic wand and thereby shred the rule book of the physical sciences.

There are a bunch of science-fictional ideas I haven't tacked because they don't make sense to me. I haven't done a full on zombie rising, although I've considered it (detailed explanation here): the Residual Human Resources in the Laundry Files are the closest I've gone. Psionics and telepathy and psychic powers in general were pretty thoroughly debunked by the Koestler Parapsychology Unit's research, so I don't go there outside of fantasy. Alien life is another matter and one that falls on the science fictional side of the genre fence, but the idea of tool-using, communicative aliens that can survive in a human-compatible biosphere is one I find difficult to swallow (hint: microbiology and immunology militate against it--even H. G. Wells in 1895 got that right).

Anyway.

I'm nearing the end of the Laundry Files, and have finished with the Merchant Princes. So I'm trying to figure out if there's anything I haven't done in terms of genre tropes that I should add to my to-do list for the next decade.

Discuss?