Arthur

Welcome to the homegrown artisan Midwestern cloud. We have successfully migrated! Except for lingering image issues because pictrs and wasabi are not behaving... I except to get those ironed out today. Please bear with me as I hit them with a hammer until I'm happy.

Hey all!

As you may know, prices for server components are increasing across the board to astronomical prices. We currently host lit cafe on Hetzner, as do a lot of our peers. They recently announced significant price increases across the board for servers with components that they have already purchased... which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, the prices are becoming unreasonable for simple VPS hosting situations at Hetzner. Because of that and some other reasons, we will be migrating lit cafe to a new provider. We are currently paying for a ccx23 for the main server and a ccx13 for the alternative frontends. We expect a 30% increase in our bill with these changes.

The new provider is https://nulled.llc/services/kuhaku a smaller provider located in the Midwest, USA. On top of the significant prices savings, we will be supporting a small business with homegrown artisan Midwestern cloud vibes. We appreciate the support we've received so far and expect similar performance with the ability to consolidate our server footprint back to a single VPS. We are expecting to begin the migration tomorrow ( Thursday, March 19th 3pm EDT) and hopefully will be done in a reasonable manner. Longest thing will be backing up and restoring the database of course.

Thank you for understanding!

TL;DR lit cafe is migrating, there will be scheduled downtime tomorrow to move.

Truly devastating news, I know I'm late.

Interesting choices...

Hey all!

It's been a while... but I thought it would be fun to try and revive this community a little bit! So I'll go first and talk about what I've been reading. Well, technically what I've been listening to since this is all the audiobooks I finished while grinding out the miles. My one rule is that I can't listen to an audiobook unless I'm running (it's a little treat for me doing the work.) So if I'm listening to a bad book there's more of a chance I drop it and physically read it later. I try not to DNF books if at all possible so I can fully judge the entire story.

Waterblack - Alex Pheby

Now this is arguably not speculative fiction... or arguably is once you get more through the book... it's confusing actually. Anyway, a friend recommended the first book in this series (Mordew) when it came out and I really enjoyed it! I did not like the second book so much, it felt like such a slog to get through. Waterblack... it was ambitious. I think there were things I liked and things I very much didn't like, but overall if you want something different in "dark fantasy" this might be the series for you. Hard to talk about this book without spoiling the whole series though so I will just leave it at that, it's different, ambitious and I respect Pheby for trying it out!

***House of Suns - Alistair Reynolds ***

Holy SHIT -- fucking loved this book. I am obsessed with this self-contained story. I have read a few Reynolds books, mostly the famous Revelation Space series. I didn't really like Revelation Space, I am more of a fan of The Culture by Banks and I felt like Reynolds didn't do as good a job world building and also I am just generally a Banks-stan. I kind of dropped off Reynolds and that was a mistake because damn this book has one of the best self-contained stories I feel like I have read in a long, long time. Truly a special gem in his bibliography in my opinion. This book had me running extra miles just to get through more of it. The world-building was incredible, the pace was perfect and just in general the story was intriguing and the suspense was top-notch. I felt really, really engaged the entire time and just in general hats off to Reynolds!

Roadside Picnic - Arkady Strugatsky

This book was a blind spot for me... I had never read it but knew a lot about the story since I played a decent amount of S.T.A.L.K.E.R when that game came out. I thought I would pick it up and it was worth it. Truly another engaging book that kept me out running extra miles. The story is so creative and the world is just intriguing. I really enjoy books that don't hold your hand and just throw you in the world and let your mind figure it out. If you haven't read this one yet, highly recommend. I think the soviet-era writing is a nice break from normal western speculative fiction and really challenging some preconceived notions I had.

The Dragon Never Sleeps - Glen Cook

This one was fun! I read Black Company from a friend's recommendation and hated it, then read it again and loved it so I thought I would try out Cook's science fiction book and honestly... really enjoyable! I wouldn't say good... but it's fun! It's kind of cliche in some points and a slog in a few places but Cook just has a fun prose that is enjoyable to me. Highly recommend if you want something different from the "creator" of dark fantasy. It was interesting to see his take on what he thinks sci-fi is!

Thanks for making this far, please post what you've been reading recently I would love to get this community back up and going!

Hello!

As you might already know or have seen if you browse the local feed of our instance, we are going to be putting into effect some tighter rules around what sort of communities will be allowed on this instance. Mostly just saying this is a literature focused instance so we want literature focused communities on here. I've reached out to all of the moderators of the communities that will be disallowed going forward and they have graciously agreed to start their migration. I do want to say we appreciate whole-heartily how understanding everyone has been with this change. This is going to be a rolling change, I don't except compliance immediately to all who are affected. I have updated the rules in the sidebar, but we will work with a rolling schedule to allow for migrations.

8. Please keep instance-hosted communities related to literature and literature topics.

This is the new rule. This only affects communities, you can of course use your accounts on here to interact with other communities in the fediverse. I don't think I needed to say that, but I guess better safe than sorry? Please feel free to reach out with any suggestions!

Thank you!

I'm sure this will bubble up to SCOTUS and they'll decide that all libraries are illegal or some shit, but still maybe a little good??? For now??

Hey everyone,

I assuming if you are reading this, you also noticed that the instance has been down for a few hours. We have been struggling with some sort of traffic issue from our mlmym self-hosted instance at https://old.literature.com/. It had been flooding the instance with so many requests that it could not keep up. I went ahead and shut it down and we should be good to go for now. I'm not totally sure what that issue was but if I figure it out I will throw it in the comments.

I also learned today that mlmym has been abandoned by the developer. :(

Anyway hope everything is smooth sailing from here. I will post a more detailed "state of the server" later this week.

Thanks all!

EDIT:

I deployed Anubis in front of mlmym so https://old.literature.com/ is back up for anyone that uses that front end (me included). If this is successful, I mostly likely will deploy Anubis against the main frontend as well. Stay tuned for any announcements about that.

The shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award was published a few days ago and I missed it! Links go to openlibrary pages. Most of these novels don't have fully fleshed out pages though on there though... :(

Private Rites by Julia Armfield

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Extremophile by Ian Green

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud Woolf

So sorry about that downtime, our VM was unexpectedly shut down. Everything should be up and federation will level out soon.

Again so sorry. I'm going to set up an uptime and status page on a different server so I can communicate if things go sideways again.

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the delay in the application process, I was out of town and very behind. I just approved a bunch of new users today and over the last few months.

If anyone wants to introduce themselves, ask for recommendations, get help, etc feel free to reply. I would love to hear more about the people in our little community here!

Enjoy!

We have updated to lemmy v0.19.10, you can read the release notes here.

Small release, except one notable "fix/feature" is the removal of PMs when a ban happens... I think we all know who that is for...

Enjoy! Feel free to PM if you have any issues at all with the instance. I know I'm a lurker, but I am trying my best to keep the instance humming along.