It’s been another trying year at Black Gate. In early January we had a serious site outage (caused by poor backup management that built up 900 Gig of site backups); in February we realized our WordPress package couldn’t handle any more growth, and upgraded to a (much more expensive) dedicated server; and just four days ago we suffered a malware attack that rendered the entire site inoperable for 48 hours (traced back to an obsolete WordPress plugin). It’s things like…

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Things have finally calmed down in the O’Neill household. Presents have been opened, snacks are munched, and hordes of Chaos Space Marines have been defeated in a family game of Dawn of War (I would have been exterminated if Tim and Drew hadn’t rushed to my base to assist. But we delivered the Emperor’s justice in the end.) It’s been a trying year. We experienced intermittent site outages as we continued to adjust to our new service provider. At the…

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It’s evening in the O’Neill household, the sounds of Christmas music and video games have finally subsided (a little), and it’s almost… quiet. I’m finally in front of my computer, looking out over our backyard, with a peaceful minute to compose my annual Christmas message. It’s been a helluva year. Plagues and pandemics. Economic uncertainty. Climate change. Endless political rancor. I suppose this is what being an adult is all about: seeing the world as it truly is, with all…

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It’s early evening in the O’Neill household, and the frenzy of Christmas Day is starting to die down. The presents have been opened, Alice’s Christmas quiche has been eaten, the Zoom calls are over, and the family movie is done (this year we all watched Stephen Chow’s brilliantly funny Kung Fu Hustle for the first time, and unanimously agreed it was a wonderful Christmas film). In the two decades I’ve been running Black Gate, my priorities have changed quite a…

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It’s Christmas evening. All the presents have been opened, Alice’s quiche has been consumed, the kids have settled down… and it’s 56 degrees outside, the warmest Christmas of my entire life. Every year a new surprise. I have a cup of hot cocoa, and it’s finally quiet enough for me to write my annual Christmas message. As the years have gone by (decades now, since that long ago time in 1999 when I made the fateful decision to start a fantasy…

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Christmas morning. It’s always hectic, no matter how carefully you prep for it. I awoke this morning to the usual excited screams from my teenage kids, just before they dashed downstairs. After our traditional breakfast of Alice’s homemade Christmas quiche (onions, ham, red and green peppers, mixed with 4 eggs, an entire block of swiss cheese, and two cups of cream — yum!), the kids vanished into the basement to begin an 18-hour movie and video game binge session, Alice happily retired to…

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I woke up this morning the same way I have on Christmas morning for the last 18 years: to the excited screams of children telling Alice and me to get out of bad, Santa has come. Ten years ago, I thought I had only a few more years of this. Turns out teenagers love to shout on Christmas morning even more than toddlers. Well, at least it got me up early. After all the presents were unwrapped, and we’d all snacked…

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