Tom

I have nothing against Amazon S3, but I was astonished today to find this claim on their FAQ page:

Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

This is an impressive number, but it's utterly dishonest to make such claims. It implies that there is a less than one-in-one-hundred-billion chance that Amazon will abruptly go out of business, or that a rogue employee will cause massive data loss, or an unexpected bug will result in massive data loss, or a defect in storage media will cause millions of devices to fail silently, or a large solar flare will destroy equipment across three data centers, or that a comet impact will destory three data centers, or that a nuclear exchange will destroy three data centers.

I think these events are all incredibly unlikely, but none of them is one-in-a-hundred-billion unlikely. Yet here is Amazon not only making that argument, but implying that you can safely use S3, a service that launched in 2006, for another ten million years.

Rare events are rare! That's why promises past five or six nines of reliability are functionally meaningless. At that point the "unknown unknowns" must overwhelm any certainty you have about what you think your system is doing.

The risks you failed to model will become obvious in retrospect, and make for an entertaining post-mortem, but that won't get anybody's data back.

Promises like Amazon's should serve as a kind of anti-marketing, suggesting that the company has not thought seriously about the limits of risk assessment and planning.

I suggest the following rule of thumb: if you can't count the number of nines in the reliability claim at a glance, it's specious.

Of course this rant is available in book form, phrased better than I have here. But it's worth repeating at every opportunity.

Happy Mother's Day!

ananthymous:

The Kickstarter for our latest collection, CUTTINGS, is now live!

CUTTINGS is a striking new hardcover collection that includes color fiction Johnny Wander shorts & never before seen art from Yuko Ota!

There’s a STANDARD and LTD edition available, as well as a bunch of other rewards (including previous books in our library)! 

We’re really excited about this book! Thanks for reading!

Aaa oh gosh it’s live!  We’re collecting a bunch of art from this tumblr and also a slew of art that’s never been shared publicly before!  This book is gonna be real handsome, I hope you guys dig it!

I had a bit of wood left over from the mounting board I made, so I made a little display stand for my lapel pins that I can put on my table at cons.
Speaking of which, I’ll be at MCM London this month, on the 24th and 25th of May!

When I was I the US I picked up this great coyote skull and it is now hanging over my TV. I made the mounting board myself.

I’m printing a second edition of Nothing is Forgotten! You can pre-order it here to help me cover the cost of printing and make sure it gets printed:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanandrews/nothing-is-forgotten-2nd-edition

dog and dragon. photoshop.

these boys are going to be the death of me

Last year I did an updated cover for Avi’s “Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?” published by Scholastic.

( illustration : Ryan Andrews )

Eight of Swords.  photoshop.

Whoops another tarot card appeared.  North was rough to associate with a card, he was very nearly the two of cups exclusively on the merit that he looks like the red winged lion from the Rider-Waite deck.

Instead he gets to be represented by a hooded falcon in the middle of a caldera.

Hey everyone! Long time without a blogpost, we know, and we’d like to apologize for that. We have been really busy with our personal lives and only occasionally had time to work on Stabyourself.net related things. We’d like to promise more frequent updates, but it might be another while until we have something new to post.

In other news, a man known by the name of moshboy compiled 100 free indie games into one big torrent and called it The Pirate Bay Bundle. One of the games is our game “Trosh” and there are a lot of other great games in the bundle as well, so you should check it out.

Area Woman Exploits Young Boy's Wood

The Secret Knots Hororoscopes: Sagittarius

myimaginarybrooklyn:

citizendev: independent

Wait, why didn't she just think of more beer?

Where exactly does he keep that piece of paper?

Horoscopes are back.
More news for Sagittarius and every other sign: A new season of stories in The Secret Knots is almost here. March 3 is the date.

Good advice: Make your comics and put them online, then make more then keep doing that without stopping for at least 2 or 3 years before you expect ANYTHING in terms of recognition or readership. 

This accomplishes several things. 1) It keeps you from viewing your work as precious. Don’t obsess over one piece, draw and redraw, correct and perfect it all while never posting it. You get better by making MORE comics. Not by making the same comic over and over. 2) It gets you accustomed to the cycle of creativity. Have an idea, refine it, make it, put it up, repeat. 3) It gets you accustomed to taking and responding to feedback and criticism. The more work you post the more readers you’ll get and the more opinions you will start to receive directly or indirectly about your work. 

More good advice: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be kind. Be kind online, be kind in person, be kind to your readers, be kind to your fellow artists, be kind to the world. This is important above all else because 1)Being an online persona means YOU are the product you are selling. If your product is a total dickbag, the only people who buy it will be total dickbag enthusiasts. 10 years down the road and you realize all of your readers are assholes and you’ve hand picked them because of how you acted. 2) Your peers talk about you when you aren’t around. They decide who to work with on collaborations, who to bring in on new opportunities and who share hotels/booths/wonderful experiences with at conventions. Word will get around SO VERY FAST if you are not a nice person and you will start to wonder why fun projects keep passing you by. 3) Can anyone honestly come up with a reason to NOT always be kind? When looking for a default behavior, you can’t do much better than this. 

Even More good advice (lightning round): Don’t worry about merch. Worry about making good comics. Dont worry about getting more readers. Worry about making good comics. Don’t EVER compare your perceived success to that of your peers. You don’t know their situation, or how they came about what you think they have that you might want for yourself. Just worry about making good comics. Never envy your peers money, readers or success (sounds a lot like the last one right? That’s because it’s super important.) Instead, envy how hard they’ve worked and try to emulate that. Also, just worry about making good comics. Don’t try to find success by doing exactly what another artists has done. We all have different paths to success and you’ll do better finding your own rather than copying someone else (in art as well as in business). Also just worry about making good comics.

The worst piece of advice I ever got: Get an invitation to the cool kids table, i.e. Get in with this certain clique and you’ll be instantly welcomed into the secret world of webcomic success. This secret club, community, group, whatever you want to call it DOES NOT EXIST. I spent too many years waiting for artists I admired to take notice of me that I eventually started to obsess over making them like me. Spoilers, it never happened and I had nothing to show for all that worry and grief. I gave absolute strangers power over my mental well being that they didn’t even want and certainly didn’t deserve. Don’t worry about making “powerful” friends. You will make more friends in this industry by BEING a good friend first. Offer help, offer support, share your audience with artists whose work you admire. Be honest, be genuine and be kind. Repeat that 1000X in your head every day until it’s the only thing you even understand anymore. 

By the way, the person who gave me that terrible advice was me. 

The Spanish language newspaper El Universal reported two weeks ago that the Drug Enforcement Administration in the U.S. has been supporting the Sinaloa Cartel, which “supplies 80 percent of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine — with a street value of $3 billion — that floods the Chicago region,”  where I live. It’s in English on Business Insider and Vice and Forbes and Latino Fox News but not regular Fox News for some reason??

The Forbes blogger might be my favorite: he asks if this could be connected to a similar scandal involving guns that got attention primarily because a law enforcement officer was killed. He thinks that might make everyone feel better because it could show that the DEA’s strategy was to give arms to drug cartels so they would kill each other and save us the trouble.

You don’t have to prosecute someone who’s dead! You don’t have to prosecute their families, you don’t have to prosecute their crying children or traumatized communities. It makes things much easier, for everyone.

Government support of drug distribution is an old strategy that has never “worked” as in put a significant dent in the drug trade, but has “worked” in that it has perpetuated the economics of the drug trade and law enforcement simultaneously.

Supporting one part of a drug economy doesn’t damage that economy, but it can provide more predictable, safer arrests and other evidence needed to prove “productivity” in law enforcement. It is understandable that the people who work in law enforcement don’t want to die. They want to bring a paycheck home and feed their families like everyone else. I wish we’d stop doing it this way though.

Choosing our income, our safety, and our affluence over others results directly in suffering and death among groups of people we’ve decided operate outside the boundaries of our empathy. If there were a “drug war” in the U.S. there would be police in white and wealthy neighborhoods knocking down doors.

I don’t know how basic these things seem to you, but these things seem worth expressing to me. Here are some ways I’ve seen the “drug war” play out in person:

I did criminal background checking for the Chicago Housing Authority in 2005 and 2006. I saw the confused conflux of circumstances that results in people getting into trouble with the state and with drugs, then getting help from the state, then getting pulled off the state help because the state help wasn’t helping.

I spent a lot of time looking through records at the Rolling Meadows Courthouse with another criminal background checker who spoke openly to me about her cocaine use. She lived with her boyfriend, a cocaine dealer, and told me when the time came for her to stop using coke their relationship was probably not going to survive (probably). She got out of her situation later, but throughout it she told me she felt little danger from the law. She came to the courthouse every weekday and typed up other people’s crimes. She and her boyfriend were white, and they lived in a white neighborhood.

I lived in Mexico in 2007, and eventually found out the city I was living in, Zacatecas, had been negotiated for by local government. The Zetas were given control over other towns in the state in exchange for leaving the capital city alone. Some of the friends I made in Zacatecas told me it could be scary and strange to visit friends and family in these towns because the Zetas had free reign.

Returning to Zacatecas from a road trip to Mexico City, we were searched by the Federal Police, which was not too unusual. This time though they told us half a dozen police officers had been killed execution-style in the main square of one of the neighboring towns. Had someone violated part of some deal? Was it retaliation or aggression? The press covered the killings but no one could say why. I can’t imagine how it must feel to live in the crossfire between police and drug cartels, especially when both groups seem uninterested in your welfare.

I lived on the west side of Chicago in 2008 and 2009. I met several children who were later killed, unarmed, by gang violence and by police. There was a point when two unarmed boys were killed by police over the space of a few months, and I saw the neighborhood organize a march on the police station. I can’t find a link for this, so if there was press coverage, there wasn’t much.

In 2012 I obtained a large quantity of dimethyltryptamine, an illegal psychedelic “drug” that occurs naturally, it seems, in all living things. The people who supplied the plants with high concentrations of DMT, according to my contact, had their home “raided” by the DEA some time later. The majority of their belongings were destroyed and no charges or arrests were made. They moved and set up shop elsewhere.

None of our Drug Enforcement strategies have worked. I don’t think the “law” or any particular “system” is to blame. I think we have a culture that encourages individuals in law enforcement and elsewhere to react to our confusing and contradictory culture with self-preservation instead of empathy. 

If you have not been affected by any of this, the first step you can take to end the drug war which does not exist is to close your eyes and imagine. Your friends and family, your stoner cousin, your aunt with the anger problem. They’re in prison. They lived exactly the same life and were exactly the same people, but they were arrested and sent to prison. Maybe in a different neighborhood, in a different economic class, with a different skin tone. But they are exactly the same person, with the same basic desires and needs. You are in prison.

m1ssred:

chemical reaction

“Mali Mani lured the Halfway Beast deep into the Liminal Wood, and cut him down with bell and sword….And light returned to the world.”

Hey guys! Happy Thursday! I just want to thank everyone who has donated both through the donate button and through the Bird Boy Patreon Campaign! Thanks to the generous donations, I have been able to do several really awesome things!For one, I am now able to secure a monthly advertising schedule for Bird Boy so that the site can always be bringing in new readers! I have also been able to use the donations to completely fund the monthly subscription for Photoshop CC, which I use to do all of my art! Thanks so much!

I have many more ideas of where the money from donations can go and how it can be used to help fund the production of Bird Boy. Convention appearances for one, are still far above my budget, with traveling, hotel stays and table expenses. I’d love to get to conventions more frequently and meet with more Bird Boy readers! Site hosting, a new (read, not broken) cintiq pen, merchandise, mini comics are among other things I’ve been thinking about!

Thanks for your support, enjoy the page!

witchsona meme. photoshop.

It is I, amateur botanist and cat-haver.

Once I was bitten by an awarewolf, and on every full moon I explained the bile duct to passersby.