Personal

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My email addresses on mcgath.com are temporarily not working. My outgoing mail was all being blocked, and HostGator was totally useless at helping me with the problem, so I’ve migrated my mail to Dreamhost. The DNS setup had a mistake, which I just recently fixed, and it will take a while to propagate through the Internet. At the moment I can send mail but not receive it.

Hopefully this fix will get everything working again. If you need to mail me and get a bounce, try again tomorrow. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Update: I’ve started getting email, so the problem appears to be fixed. There could still be glitches for a while, since not everybody in the world gets DNS updates at the same time.

Update 2: In the process of getting it working on Dreamhost, I determined that a major issue was a broken SPF record, which HostGator had created for me. The HostGator support people never recognized this issue, instead trying to put the blame on T-Mobile.

This blog is still on HostGator for the moment, because it isn’t broken and migrating a website is a pain. No promises either way for the future.

Thug threatens pro-China freedom activist — and me

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I’d wondered if China’s thugs would ever threaten me for all the posts I’ve made about the China Worldcon. Well, you know what they say: Be careful what you wish for, or you may live in interesting times. Before the sun came up this morning, I had my life threatened on Twitter. Since originally posting this, I’ve received new information and updated this post.

Let’s start at the beginning. In today’s news I read that one Xiaolei Wu was arrested for threatening violence against a pro-Chinese freedom activist. I did a search on Twitter to see what I could find about Xiaolei Wu and found a post by a person using that name. As we know all too well, names on Twitter prove nothing, but this person claimed to “represent the future of China” and was begging to the Chinese ambassador for help. I later learned that the holder of this account is an impersonator, so I was threatened, but as a bad joke and not by the same person who was arrested. Here’s the reply I got:
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This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Internet on by | Open »

In case you’re interested, I’ve set up an account on Flipboard to post interesting links. You’re welcome to follow me.

Also, I’m taking a break from Twitter. This isn’t directly related to Elon Musk; I’m just not finding it very enjoyable these days. People use it to assert or insult rather than to inform.

This entry was posted in Personal on by | Open »

The period for this pledge has ended, and I have made the donations as promised. The album is still available.

This is off-topic from writing and more personal, but it’s a chance for you to support two worthwhile charities, so I hope no one will mind.

I currently have three albums up on Bandcamp. I don’t claim to be a musician of any distinction; they’re there for my friends, with payment optional. One of them is on the theme of The Magic Battery, so there’s a tenuous connection to my writing.

For the month of September, the net payments I get from Bandcamp for the latest album, Spontaneous Order, will go to Doctors without Borders. In addition, I’ve just announced that I’ll match whatever net payments I get during September 16-30 from any of my albums with a donation to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, to a cap of $250. Martha’s Vineyard is currently burdened with immigrants that Ron DeSantis dumped there with no warning, and MV Community Services seems to be the best-placed organization to deal with them.

You can download the albums for free or pay as little as one dollar. Even if you don’t like the music, you’ll have done some good.

To Hell with Twitter

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged Twitter on by

I am furious. Therefore I will choose my words very carefully.

The ex-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad posted on Twitter: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.” In context, he was cheering on the brutal murder of Samuel Paty. Twitter did not suspend his account and was slow to delete that tweet.

I responded with what I consider an appropriate level of outrage and called on Twitter to remove his account.

As a result, my Twitter account is now suspended. If Twitter went to the trouble of suspending an account as obscure as mine (524 followers, last I checked), it likely did the same to a lot of other people criticizing Mahathir Mohamad, though I don’t know.
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The Magic Battery: Now on Smashwords!

This entry was posted in My writing Personal Writing and tagged fantasy fiction magic battery writing on by

My novel The Magic Battery is now available as an e-book on Smashwords. As an expression of thanks for reading my blog, I’m offering it for $1.99, instead of the usual $2.99, with the coupon code RW83R through the end of June.

This is a novel for fans of thoughtful historical fantasy. It presents an alternate Germany where magic works, and where the authorities allow only Christian men to practice it. Thomas Lorenz discovers a way to store magic spells in gadgets that people can buy or rent, putting magic in the hands of anyone with a little money. The conflict that develops parallels the effects of the real-life innovations of Luther, Paracelsus, Copernicus, and others.

In sixteenth-century Saxony, magic is a trade. Mages draw power from the World Behind, but they don’t understand it. Thomas knows that magic needs to be scientific, that it follows mathematical laws. He draws inspiration from his master Albrecht Ritter, who knows nothing is ever “good enough,” his teacher Johan Brandt, who is hiding an infamous past, and later his wife Frieda, who sees the prospect of a more enlightened future. He faces the persistent opposition of Heinrich Gottesmann, a fanatical lawyer and witch hunter. He learns that there is more at stake than just a new way of making lamps.

I’ve been to some of the places used in the book: Heidelberg, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Hildesheim. I’ve engaged in considerable historical research to get the period right. Apart from the magical elements, the setting is as close to the historical Germany of the 1540s as I could make it. None of the characters hold 21st-century ideas; that would be absurd. However, Thomas and especially Frieda see beyond their time.

Links, reviews, and shares will help to get the word out. You can link to the Smashwords page or to my page on this site.