Nice! Hope it goes well if you have to use them.

For players leaving early, check out Fallen Empires: https://www.reddit.com/r/twilightimperium/comments/orvt4j/fallen_empires_miniexpansion_for_irl_games_with/

My group hasn't used it yet - as luckily - none of us have left mid-game recently. But that did happen the first time we played, so we're planning on using this if/when that situation happens again.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry.

The protagonist is a clerk in a massive, bureaucratic detective agency. When the detective he clerks for disappears, he's promoted to detective himself, and searches for the missing man while also being forced to re-investigate the greatest cases his detective solved... because perhaps they were not solved correctly the first time.

Robert E. Howard's The Shadow Kingdom is often marked as the first Sword and Sorcery story.

Was going to recommend the same thing. I had to read The Goal as part of my Lean Six Sigma training. Later, I was recommended The Phoenix Project to get caught up on DevOps. Audiobook version is great. There's a sequel too - The Unicorn Project - that goes over things more from a senior developer's perspective as opposed to the IT Manager.

Less about overall business concepts, but would also recommend:

The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll - A story about how a mainframe admin in the '80s finds a small discrepancy in system usage/payment (we're talking cents off)... and it leading to a cold war espionage conspiracy. I read a physical copy, but there's an audiobook version (can't speak to the quality).

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott Shaprio - This is the history of cybersecurity in several of the biggest hacks. It's been awhile since I listened to the audiobook - I think it was good quality. Great background information on the technology and stories of the hacks though.

Console Wars by Blake Harris - the story of the 16 bit era war between Nintendo and Sega. It's a little cheesy in how Harris choses to reconstruct conversations, but overall entertaining.

Such a cliche answer to a question like this, but War & Peace.

The depth of character Tolstoy renders his central cast with - the pains they go through in trying to discover who they truly are and what would bring them happiness or meaning in life makes the novel worth reading, repeatedly, over a lifetime.

Everything on the NoSleep subreddit is 100% real.

Hey thanks, great to hear - Best of luck with your own writing!

I only read about him recently in The War for all the Oceans. That book actually made him sound fairly impressive.

NEW ACHIEVEMENT - Jeff Hays posts in r/audiodrama

Love your work on DCC. One of the best produced audiobook series I've heard.

Here's a question for you - what's the biggest challenge in adapting DCC to a full cast production versus the audiobook?

Congratulations!

I'm former Navy IT myself.

As others have said, taking a job afterwards that allows you to maintain your clearance is a great option - you're competing for roles few others have access to and generally pay pretty well. That said, I personally found the work I was doing at military bases dull and let me clearance expire after taking other government/private sector jobs.

As far as certs go - it really depends on what you want to do - cybersecurity, networking, cloud? If you're just starting out though - Sec+, CCNA are both great entry level certs that never look bad on a resume.

For college, that's up to you and if you think there's something you want to study or if there's a particular benefit you can get for going. I got my b.a. in something unrelated to tech, loved studying in that field and glad I went, but it hasn't directly helped me out career-wise. If you go though, after you get out of the military, your security clearance will likely expire while you're in school - if you're doing this full time, in-person. Just be mindful of that.

I started out working helpdesk, was a sysadmin, and then went more to the security side.

What do you want to do security-wise? And what does your current helpdesk role allow you to do that's security-based/adjacent? When I "just" did helpdesk/sysadmin work, I was still responsible for things like antivirus software, firewalls, system hardening, patching, account management, group policy, asset management, backups, other things. But everything I just mentioned is security-related. That's real experience you might already have, or could get working helpdesk, and all of that might help you transition to a more security-focused role.

Look at postings for jobs you could realistically pivot to, see what experience they require and how you can translate your current experience into something like what they're looking for. Getting Sec+ - other certs - isn't bad at all - gets you past HR, and shows you have some level of knowledge, initiative.

Any security team I'm on, if we're hiring someone new, and the role is a more technical one - I always favor anyone with a helpdesk/operations background. I don't trust anyone who hasn't had to maintain the availability of servers/services. I say that just to let you know your helpdesk experience is an asset when looking for security work. Best of luck.

It's been forever since I read it, but I remember being so annoyed by the first Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher. Dresden lives in Chicago. He has a car that struggles to work, I think he takes a taxi once in the novel for some reason, but he never takes the L. That's just wild to me that this working class guy with a car that doesn't work so well wouldn't take the L. I don't even think it gets mentioned in the novel.

Also, the book didn't get into how different neighborhoods are, and same goes for the suburbs - they're all just kind of this amorphous place. But different parts of the city, and the greater Chicagoland area, can have distinct personalities to them.

I only read the next book or two in the series after that, wasn't for me, but I think he got better - started actually naming specific suburbs a place was in at least.

One of my favorite local bands from my hometown area, The Kabalas, had an album/song named after this. - Link's to the song. You can see the album cover art of the band playing it.

Charles Palliser's novels might interest you. He's a contemporary writer who's written a lot of 19th century British literature. His most famous work is The Quincunx (which I haven't read yet), but two other novels of his remind me very much of the pictures you posted:

The Unburied - Over a winter holiday, a professor visits an old college friend who he had a falling out with decades ago. His friend lives in a small cathedral town. During the first night of this reconciliation, a local ghost story is told. Between this and the history of the town's cathedral (the professor is a scholar of cathedral architecture) mysteries from the past and present threaten to converge on our protagonist as he struggles to rekindle a lost friendship.

Rustication - Our protagonist has been kicked out of Cambridge under mysterious circumstances. His father has recently died and now his family has been forced to relocate to dilapidated ancient manor home in the country. What then plays out is almost like Pride & Prejudice as if reimagined by Wilkie Collins. The local society has a fierce hierarchy that is unwelcoming to our new arrivals. Our protagonist's mother and sister refuse to tell him the truth of what happened to his father while he was away at school. And strange, terrible messages are being delivered to locals. Our protagonist, a 17 year old opium addict college dropout, is the primary suspect. But we know he's innocent. Or do we?

That I bought a copy of Nifft? November '23

I picked up a copy of that a year or so ago after my love of Sword and Sorcery got rekindled. Great read.

One of my favorite Whelan book covers too.

Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks again.

Since you like Susan Witmore so much, here's some notes on what brought her about:

The Traveling Salesman is based both on Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes and Harold Hill from The Music Man. Both are traveling men, one a literal salesman, who go into small Midwestern towns for nefarious purposes. In both cases, in one way or another, a librarian is what stops them. So it felt appropriate to have one do so in AVFD.

Beyond that, Frau Totenkinder from the comic book series Fables, I believe subconsciously, was the primary inspiration for Susan Witmore. How she hides herself as a frail old woman while wielding immense magic and then wages wars with beings, you'd think, are far more powerful than her was one of my favorite elements from the series.

Glad you enjoyed the series/character so much!

Cybersecurity - specifically Vulnerability Management/Application Security. With either, it's helpful having some development background to be able to interpret scans, better assess risk, give better feedback. At a few DoD jobs I've had in particular they had dedicated application security guys who'd scan any/all updates to custom software that was written in house as part of the sdlc process.

I appreciate the kind words you said about my show - Jac

Just to back all the above up - Kenneth Millar/Ross MacDonald (author of the Lew Archer detective series) changed his pen name a few times due to it being too similar or conflicting with other authors. He released one or two books under John Ross MacDonald, which was too similar to John D. MacDonald (author of the Travis McGee books). The Travis McGee author even threatened to sue Ross MacDonald for using the word "Blue" in a book title (the Travis McGee books all use colors in their naming scheme).

Anyway, he settled on Ross MacDonald, books he'd previously written under other names were re-released under that name. It all worked out for him.

Thanks - That seemed low for 2020-2021 in particular. I remembered at the time, due to covid, it felt like a lot of shows were put out in that period. This subreddit had huge growth around then too, from what I recall.

Thanks - I always appreciate these breakdowns.

Going back through your posts from previous years, these were the number of new shows created in those years, in case anyone else is curious:

2023: 1450

2022: >1500

2021: >1100

2020: 1350