Almanack is regularly updated catalog of the modern calendar year, serving folks who toil in the fields of tech, just as earlier Almanacs' accompanied agriculturalists as they navigated the seasons. It contains a miscellany of factual pieces, stories, reviews, predictions, annual tech rituals, calendar items, puzzles, gossip, and hoary advice.
Like Ben Franklin's Poor Richard before it, our Almanack is also a lightly fictionalised framing device: namely that the publication has played this role for enthusiasts of technological progress (with mixed results) for the last three centuries.
The goal of this conceit is to let us commission and publish essays, criticism, fiction and code on the modern world – without falling into the trap of taking ourselves , the present or the future too seriously.
Almanack is compiled over the year, and commissioned works are added to the web site regularly, with a printed anthology of last twelve months' pieces published in December as the official Almanack for the next year.
We earn money through Almanack sales, online subscriptions, and non-behavioral advertising, handcrafted to fit the conceit. Our rates for creators are currently $500 up for a single long piece (500-1000 words), $250 for artwork, $100 for smaller items.
We commission longer pieces in the form of serials (both non-fiction and fiction), and pay per installment.
Our finances are transparent, and can be viewed, live, online. We budget a burn rate of $2K a month, and aim to always have at least six months of runway assuming the above rates. We hold a mid-year fundraiser to grow that runway and to raise money for the hard-cover publication.
When we have 18 month of runway (i.e. $78,000), further revenue will be used to increase these rates for future contributors.
Contributors also receive a royalty payment from the profits (ie after costs) of the printed collection, proportional to their contribution.
Payment is on week of publication. Kill fees are 33% of agreed rate. You retain your copyright. We and many of our contributors prefer a CC-BY-SA license, but we can negotiate a narrower right (for a lower rate, weirdly).
Modern online writing can be disabling and dispiriting. To stand out, we want our readers to be more energized after reading a serving of Almanack than they were before. They should feel more informed, more curious, more empowered, and optimistic about their ability to change the world for the better.
Everyone here has burned through snark, irony, rage, edutainment, simple awe, and aloofness, so we're looking for something else. It's early days, but so far, what we have is a sense of knowing foolishness: not so much self-deprecation, but gentle deprecation on behalf of the entire human race.
We are cautiously positive about the future (although it is always unclear if this is just part of the Conceit). You don't have to be so positive, but if you're going to be a downer, aim to make your readers feel more complex emotions than simple despair.
Almanack also has a light tone, but don't feel you need to lean into jokiness – or the Conceit. It is always fine to ignore our setting or mood entirely for your own purposes.
Don't talk down to the reader or over-explain. Assume that the reader is smart, and can look things up. Prefer density of information above explanation. Link heavily.
If you're writing online these days, it's easy to get tied up in an imaginary dialog with future commenters – either making fierce assertions to chase away disagreement, long defenses to try and win over stragglers, or apologies or justifications to prevent misunderstanding.
Skip all that.
If there's something where you feel like you need to justify or evade or confirm an attitude, palm off that obligation by citing Almanack's 300 year long archive.
While apparently a modern phenomenon, Almanack is heavily implied to have been in continuous publication for the last three hundred years – with an back catalog that covers many of the most contentious areas of modern debate.
Here, you will find that the magazine has dealt (in meticulous and entirely unavailable depth) with your most distracting side quests, as well as those of your most cantankerous readers.
Sadly, this resource is often unavailable for temporary technical reasons, but you can still refer to them, via a `footnote`.
Footnotes look this:
We like serials, and would like to support them when we can. Some guidance:
By fictional serials, we mean webserials or multiple-part stories. Each episode should be 500-1500 words. We anticipate these serials to be weekly or monthly. Our arbitrary maximum is twelve installments.
By non-fiction we mean long-form pieces, broken down into smaller pieces (think a true crime podcast). We're still experimenting with this form, and anticipate daily or weekly episodes.
By graphical works, a short comic series. Under 8 episodes, please.
We don't at this time accept unbounded serials (i.e. traditional webcomics, sprawling Ra-like webserials, or columns).
We're unlikely to commission someone who hasn't already completed a webserial or other long-running piece. Please include links to them when you approach us.
Include a general idea of an arc, and how many episodes you expect the piece to take. Some flexibility is fine, but the pay rate will be based on this number. We expect to have three episodes in hand before we begin publication.
It's a lost art! Give your readers a reason to come back.
Online publications don't usually accept or commission code, but we're weird.
We're really weird, though.
Part of the Conceit is that we are heavy advocates, for somewhat arbitrary reasons, for a eldritch stack of tools. We see ourselves as part of the tech community that work this stack, and seek to contribute back to it. You don't have to use this stuff in your own work, but code that uses it will be particularly welcomed.
We avoid proprietary (i.e. closed or non-free) software where possible.
Our stack is:
Yeah, it's ugly in lots of ways, but we're making a bet that when all of this other stuff is buried under its own technical debts, GNU – because of its historical persistence, semi-religious adherence, and sheer doggone orneriness – will remain. We also see our work as an opportunity to nudge GNU into the 22nd century, by being an enthusiastic advocate for its continuation, and elaboration. That means we also use:
Guix is the GNU-flavored version of Nix, implemented in Guile Scheme. We use this as the basis for our operations.
We are devoted advocates for capability-based security, and use Spritely Goblins under the hood for our toys and infrastructure. We use Ocapn to communicate.
We :heart: decentralization, and a bunch of us work in this space. You can use other decentralized tools, but IPFS, LibP2P, UCANs, and Filecoin are our defaults. Talking of which:
Whaaat, that blockchain nonsense? HOW DARE YOU SIR, HOW DARE YOU. More seriously, in a continuing vein of holding a candle for technologies we believe cannot die (no matter how much they may deserve to), we hold a place for crypto, both for financing/securing Almanack, and for the stream of innovative new work, including zero-knowledge and so on.
Of course, sometimes you just have to get some actual work done. For that, we use Django.