Turing didn't see this one coming
There's a weird, funny thing about running an online business where people are so often forced to interact with chatbots and "knowledge bases" that they'll just assume any customer support process they have to deal with is automated. So when you hear from your customers at all, it's in the form of messages that read, in their entirety, like this:
download not working need refund
To my customers' credit, once I message them back they usually notice I'm not a robot and start talking to me like a human being. Which is itself kind of a nice reminder: not everyone who's rude to you is doing it on purpose. Many of them, in fact, would've been perfectly polite if their expectations for the encounter hadn't been utterly fucked by forces outside their control.
Last Week of the LGTBQ+ Romance Book Giveaway
As of this mailout, there's still a few days left of the LGBTQ+ Romance Book Giveaway on Prolific Works. You can get 21 queer romance books — including my novelette "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" — for free until February 28!
New on Ko-fi: "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God," Chapter 5
Chapter 5 of "Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God" is now up for all supporters on Ko-fi. If you don't want to read the story in serialized form and would prefer to get it all at once, you can also buy the entire novelette as an ebook.
This Week's Links
A disturbingly large volume of writing and texts on sales encourage you to do things that in the context of personal relationships would be considered coercive or, in an intimate context, sexual assault. You're encouraged to violate consent, be relentlessly pushy and never take no for an answer, and encourage people to act against their best interests in order to make you happy. In a word, many, many hangouts of salespeople become rooms full of the kind of creep that you would do your best to avoid at a party.
Here's a PDF Version of the CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism
Last week, I wrote about the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” a World War II era guide to resisting fascism for normal people. At the time, it was the fifth most popular book on Project Gutenberg, a website that hosts public domain books. It had been downloaded 60,000 times over the last month.
For those wondering, I'm still in Portfolio Hell but have elected not to include the story where Sebastian Moran gets pegged.
-K
