I’m Clapping My Hands

There has been a lot going on lately, lots of projects of various kinds—almost all of which have wrapped up successfully. The big house project was that we had our deck refinished. It was looking quite shabby. We had professionals come out and blast it clean, scrub it, replace a number of rotted boards, and re-stain it. This was quite a project due to the size and weird shape of the deck.

The project was not without issues. While it was cleaned they accidentally started a small fire when the high pressure water hit the timer attached to the pool filter. Fortunately the filter and the electrical outlet are all ok (the time is toast). The other problem was that a lot of wood dust and old stain ended up in the pool despite their best efforts to keep it clean. It’s been a few days of recovery, but with any luck it will be back up to the point where we can use it again. I’ve been out every day vacuuming the pool (with the real vacuum, not the little robot dojobbie). The first few days I could only get about halfway through before I had to stop to clean out the pump filter and backwash the filter. There is still a little detritus in the deep end, but it rained today and stirred everything up, so that is Future Me’s problem.

Depending on how that goes, I may spend a little time with the blueberry mead tomorrow as well. You may remember that when I racked it a few weeks ago it needed some work to tame the alcohol flavor. If I have time, I will try to back-sweeten it and then pasteurize it before letting it sit again. I’m hoping that I can bring the berry flavor forward with a little work.

The Kickstarter for Nightmerica was a success and that anthology is now available (see below).

Also, after weeks of back and forth, we finally have control of the Dragon’s Roost Press Facebook page again (see even further below).

Listening To: I am currently listening to The Clash Station of Sirius XM through the television. I finished Another Fine Mess yesterday while vacuuming the pool. I haven’t decided what I will be moving on to next in terms of audiobooks.

Currently Reading: I have been alternating between Laserblasted and A Very Scary Christmas: A History of Yuletide Horror Films, 1972 - 2020.

Current Obsession: Finishing things. It is important to finish things.

As noted above, the Kickstarter campaign reached its funding goal. We finalized the BackerKit survey earlier today and sent out the first set of e-mails. This process is known as the Smoke Test. A random group of backers receive the survey to make sure that everything works properly. If this works, we will be sending out the rest of the surveys soon. We have already set up the tee shirt and water bottle designs, the hardcover edition is ready to go, and we are just waiting for the final backer numbers to start the ordering process.

Don’t worry if you missed the Kickstarter. Nightmerica is available for purchase all over. Check this post on the DRP site for further information.

Work continues on Here There Be Horrors and It’s Dark in Here. 2025 is going to be another big publishing year for Dragon’s Roost Press.

Yes, it’s only just past the halfway point for this year, but we’re already looking ahead to what we will be publishing in 2026. Stay tuned!

Today I was able to chat and later web-conference with Leo from Meta who was able to once again return the Dragon’s Roost Press Facebook Page to my control. As you may remember, this asset was hacked early last month—just in time to fuck up any promotional opportunities we might have had for the Kickstarter, not that I’m bitter or anything. Leo was amazing. In about 30 minutes he was able to get everything all set up for me.

This was not always the case. It has been around a month since someone hijacked the page, which also gave them access to the credit card associated with the account. This meant I had to cancel that card and get a new one. Naturally, this was the card that everything gets charged to, so I also got to go through three months of credit card statements to see what got charged to it monthly and switch that over to the new one. Fortunately, they didn’t post anything awful under the DRP banner.

The real kick in the ass was how difficult it was to get to anyone who could actually help. The process went like this: explain what happened including a timeline and the names and e-mails of everyone involved, provide screenshots, get handed back and forth between various people in the same department (no two e-mails came from the same person). Then have someone finally decide that the issue was not something that could be handled within their department and have the whole thing transferred to a different department. This meant going through the whole labyrinthine process of connecting on Meta’s damnably circular AI run customer “assistance” process. Then another series of e-mails asking for the same information in the same order, only to be shunted off to someone else.

After the second time, I put everything into a Pages document which I copied and pasted into the first e-mail along with a folder full of screen shots. This was accompanied by an e-mail greeting along the lines of “This is what I already sent the last bunch so I know what you are going to ask for” DUMP.

Don’t get me wrong, the reps were genuinely trying to be helpful, but all of the suggestions in their scripts were things that I had tried unsuccessfully. The main issue appears to be that they too are relying on the same defective flowchart: Go here, click on this, answer this question, go here, FAIL. If someone could fix that error point the whole process would have gone smoothly and this would have been resolved a month ago. Instead it was a series of aggravating tail chasing.

Naturally, and this will come as no surprise to anyone who has been here a while, I blame the Meta AI. It is set up not to answer questions, but to direct the user to various articles. If these articles don’t have the answer, you are fucked. There is no way to skip past this point, no way of saying “I already tried this,” and no way to directly access anyone.

Let me say that again. There is no way to actually access the chat function. The entire system is set up to be handled via the AI and the articles. This is why I spent weeks sending e-mails back and forth, one or two per day, instead of being able to handle it in real time. The only reason I was able to chat with Leo today was because I signed up for one month of Meta Verified (and yes, I immediately removed the payment method after it cleared) and even then I had to initiate the chat on my phone. There is no computer based chat function. Today’s process was chat on the phone until Leo called, then set up the screen sharing thing (which only works with Chrome because fuck you if you use Safari or Firefox).

At some point someone must have been able to do something with the account because when we got to the DRP page, the person who had taken control of it and booted me was no longer listed as the person in charge. Or that person (@nguenkhaihuan.dvfb. on Instagram — rot in Hell you crusty cocksplat) just got bored and logged out after my card stopped working.

I can only imagine how much worse this could have been if I wasn’t decades too old to use TikTok.

The big takeaways are that it is working for me now and Meta’s AI is a useless pile of crap.

Thank you for attending my TED Talk.