I’m going to change what arrives in your mailbox in a very minor way. You don’t have to do anything except whitelist my emails when they get sent to junk mail. (Gmail sometimes sends them to “Promotions” for some reason.)
Here’s the short version.
I’m retired from consulting but I’m still going to write about technology every couple of weeks.
Those emails will come from Bruceb News, like they did for many years. They’ll be posted on bruceb.com.
I’m writing my next book. Very occasional promotional posts about our books – Uncommon Scents, Veilpiercer, The Avatar Murders, and The Next Bestseller – will come from Arrgle News and be posted on arrgle.com. (“Arrgle” is the fictional company in our books which is not at all like a mashup of Apple and Google as far as lawyers can tell.)
The beginning of 2025 is an inflection point for me, a confluence of many things that have me thinking about precipices and fault lines and crossroads.
I stopped doing consulting work during 2024. There was a critical juncture when the retirement became official: I cancelled my Quickbooks subscription and stopped sending invoices. It’s not like I couldn’t do business after that but it’s important to observe symbolic moments.
I turned 70 in the middle of November.
A month later, Jim Rowson, my beloved best friend and co-author, died.
Two weeks later, another lifelong best friend and his wife lost their home in the Pacific Palisades fire.
BEGIN RANT ABOUT POLITICS – please skip if you are sensitized or Republican
In November, more than half the electorate failed to pass a simple test of decency. Now a band of vandals, criminals, and buffoons is setting the country up for a massive giveaway for billionaire backers, with open and transparent corruption, agencies set to conduct dramatically less oversight of corporate behavior and financial markets, and numerous legislative pushes to cut taxes on the rich. The cost will be offset by shredding the social safety net.
The majority of the country will be told repeatedly (1) things are fine, ignore your lying eyes, and (2) it’s the Democrats’ fault. And they’ll believe it because propaganda works and the Democrats are terrible at it.
Plus when you see real people being harmed by policies that seem intentionally cruel, remember that for many people, the cruelty is the point.
END RANT ABOUT POLITICS and I won’t mention it again.
A rough start to the year, eh?
2025 is the year of writing dangerously.
I’ve got the outline of another novel. If things go according to plan (and they always do for authors, I’m pretty sure), it will carry on with characters and settings from Uncommon Scents and Veilpiercer. It will be able to be read as a standalone for people who have not gotten to the earlier books but marketing may lead to each book being subtitled “Tales From The Arrgle Archives” as if it’s a series.
It’s a story about giant AIs and how people react when they learn that the planet is going to be destroyed by an eruption of the giant caldera under Yellowstone, which is totally a thing. Plus there’s a spaceship because I always wanted to write a story with a spaceship that makes “pew pew pew” noises.
The working title is “Galactic Rabbits.”
I got distracted and lost my writing routine in 2024. I was dealing with Jim’s illness and wrapping up the consulting business, plus, well, I was traveling and having a fabulous time, and the novel was set aside.
For the foreseeable future, I’m going to focus on Galactic Rabbits. Unless the title changes to “Love In The Time Of Algorithms” or “Goodnight, Humans.”
I’m not going to have any reason to beat you up with book promotion emails for a year or so. Maybe once in a while. If, say, Veilpiercer is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, the email will come from Arrgle News.
But I want to keep writing regular newsletters, mostly about technology. Every so often you’ll check your inbox on Tuesday morning and there will be an explainer in plain English of the latest in AI or augmented reality or virtual reality, or snarky complaints about Microsoft, or warnings about security and loss of privacy, all the things I’ve written about since the dawn of the internet in 1997.
Occasionally I’ll write about something else on my long list of obsessions – rare books and first editions, classic science fiction, a particularly cool game, the joy my lovely wife gets from line dancing, or the latest reason I’m in awe of my kids.
To do that I’m going to return to the comfy world of Bruceb News, the title of the newsletter I sent out for twenty years.
If I don’t get distracted by the giant spaceship, I’ll send a Bruceb News article next week about why AI is so confusing. As always, no cost, no obligation, no ads. Watch your junk folder so you don’t miss anything – you know how much trouble it is to catch up when you fall behind.