Perfidy
A gentle reminder
To go read the Veil War, and then tell all your friends. I’ve got 9000 words up, and plenty more where that came from.
Actual Fact
Vikings were efficient because they attacked where the money was.
Toward a theory of Buckethead
I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:
Outline for Autobiography
- Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
- Working at apathy (1985-1988)
- An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
- A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
- A moment of clarity (1996)
- The moment passes (1996-1999)
- A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)
CHAPTER ONE
It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn’t the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary’s Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.
At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.
Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot’s license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.
I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work – in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.
But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes’ ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.
My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.
***
“Praise not the day until night has come.”
That’s as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.
Veil War Thursday
Your weekly reminder that today you can go over to Veilwar dot com and read the next gripping installment of the Veil War.
Lewis blocked two handed with his rifle, and the sword chopped into his rifle, right through the rail and into the receiver. The goblin growled in rage when Lewis twisted the rifle, tearing the sword from his grasp. Lewis threw the ruined rifle and attached sword to the side and reached for his sidearm, backpedaling.
The monster was fast; unbelievably fast. He jumped and low tackled Lewis to the ground. Lewis’ head smacked the ground and his vision narrowed. All he could see was the green-hued snarling face in front of him. He couldn’t find the grip of his .45, and the goblin had his hands on his throat.
I have to say I’m slipping into the full time writer thing with shocking ease. It’s going to be painful to go back to work. Cranked out over 5000 words yesterday, and looking to top that today.
Me=Happy.
Pretending to be a real writer
I think I could really dig being a professional novelist.
Granted, this is not at all surprising. I am a professional writer already. I work at home most of the week. I had a pretty good idea. There is nevertheless a big attitudinal difference between writing boring crap for a large corporate entity and writing ripping yarns.
Yesterday I did over 4000 words. The day before was only a little over a 1000, but I had to take the whole fricken family to the dentist, which killed half the day; plus errands and whatnot. Today my goal is north of 5000 words and finish part two of the Veil War. If I maintain that pace through the end of my two weeks, I should clear over 50000 words, which would be a nanowrimo in a fortnight. Nanowrifrt.
Since the completion of an actual novel length chunk of prose is now a goal that is much less airy dreaming and more a reasonable near-term prospect the next thing is just to get to the point where I can get people to buy it and therefore enable me to do it forever.
- Write novel
- ???
- Profit!
Elevenses
Today, my grandfather would have turned 100. He didn’t make it here. Pancreatic cancer got him two decades back.
But I’ve been thinking about him all day, today, every time I see the 11-11.
My grandfather had a thing about numbers. There were good numbers, and there were bad numbers. He’d have my dad get him license plates from the other side of the state because the license plate numbers issued in NW Ohio were better than the ones in NE Ohio. One time, my dad pranked him, though. Told him he’d gotten a license plate XQ-5381. “Oh, no.” He liked numbers that had patterns, or were in some subtle way harmonious. I like to think that that all started because of his birthday, which like today was 11-11-11.
He also liked writing on things. He annotated his physical world. When I was five, he took me down to his cabin in Tennessee. We went hiking over to Cumberland Gap, and he made me a walking stick, just my size. He whittled a handle for me, but he didn’t stop there. He took a pen and wrote
Cumberland Gap, Tennessee
8-26-1974
I may have the date wrong.
My mom sent me a picture today. There was a beautiful tree on the hill behind the farm house he retired to. Grandpa posted this warning:
I miss Grandpa. I wish he could have lived long enough to meet his great-grandchildren.
Same bat time, same bat channel
Installment two of the novel is now up over at The Veil War. Be the first kid on your block to have one. The other kids will be oh, so, jealous.
This is handy
Copy Paste Character allows you to click on useful symbols to pop them into your clipboard. Then, just paste where needed. Now updated with thousands instead of merely hundreds of symbols. Check it out.
That novel I mentioned?
Well, I set up a site for it to live on. Go and see The Veil War, where you can read the first 2000 words. I’ve got almost 30000 in the bag, and a couple weeks worth of vacation before Thanksgiving scheduled to add more, so there will definitely be more coming soon.
Read. And tell your friends.
Tab clearing
Fun new blogs. Fun and new for me, at least:
- DR. BOLI’S CELEBRATED MAGAZINE I like the cut of this man’s jib. For instance, he includes in his justly celebrated magazine actual facts. Which are not the same as, but very similar to, these actual facts. He also has advertisements, one of which is eerily apposite of a post from earlier today:
- By way of Foseti, Patriactionary. I was sold when I saw that they had a whole page called “Finnolatry.” When I discovered that that page contains many, many videos of a Finnish metal band singing about alcohol, I immediately added them to the feed.
If the black market were a single national economy, it would be larger than every nation save only the US.
Jetpacks, dammit. But the coolest thing in that article is this:
Jetpacks, sure. But look at the egress – it’s a bouncy slide. It looks something like a DC-X, and it seems that whoever came up with the idea thought that it would operate in the same way. An SSTO capability implies a point-to-point transport to anywhere on earth.
Alrenous has an interesting post on the Genovesi, a proposed new category of human to exist alongside long-familiar Spartan and Athenian types. I like it, but I have two questions:
- Wars between Athenians and Spartans seem to be the particularly nasty ones. Spartan-Spartan wars have a certain restraint – like the wars of the 18thC. Would you imagine that the American Civil War and WWII were Spartan-Athenian wars? And why the Athenian West managed not to have a war with faux-Athenian USSR?
- What city would be most emblematic, and therefore deserving of being the namesake of the lumpenproletariat? Off the top of my head, I would nominate Detroit or Youngstown, but what other cities would be appropriate?
The mechanics
As I mentioned just a bit ago, I am writing an actual novel. So, I’ll like be a novelist and stuff. Sweet.
The actual writing of the novel has been surprisingly pain free, given that I’d been putting it off for almost a quarter century. Once I started typing, it came out at nearly a 1000 words an hour, which is a pretty respectable rate. What has bothered me though, is the lack of decent writing tools that actually do what I want them to do.
As of late last night I seem to have solved at least one aspect of my problem – the need to be able to seamlessly move devices without having to worry about whether I’m working on the most current version. I downloaded iA Writer for both the iPad and Mac, which uses Dropbox for sync. Dropbox, btw, totally rocks.
I’d been aiming for a stripped down writing interface – I don’t want to deal with formatting. I don’t want to deal with most things aside from typing. I didn’t want to use a full-featured word processor. As a technical writer, I fully appreciate the capabilities offered by this sort of tool, but have become increasingly disenchanted with them except for the very final stages of creating a finished document. I find that I do most of my actual writing for work with WordPad. So OpenOffice, Word, Pages – all out. There’s too much in there to distract from actually writing.
Happily, there have been many apps released that purport to be the perfect tool in this space. Unhappily, most of them are wrong in this assertion. The closest was Byword, which has an elegant, non-eye-straining page for typing. It does the full screen, block-out-all-distractions thing. It does typewriter focus, so your cursor doesn’t always end up at the bottom of the screen.
Yet – it uses three different formats for saving files, each with different capabilities. When you fire up the app, if you hadn’t closed your documents from the last session, it will open them in new, untitled files. So if you start typing, Bam! you’ve got a new version whether you wanted to or not. And it didn’t have a companion iPad app, so syncing presented issues.
iA Writer was going for a buck on the iPad, so I had a what the hell moment and bought it. I quickly discovered that it is the best text editor I have yet used on the pad, and I’ve used a lot of them. Advantages: extra bar on the virtual keyboard with left and right arrow, left and right word (jump a word instead of a space) and common punctuation like quotes, dashes and parentheses. Clean typography – it’s very easy to read. (I only wish I could make the text a little smaller, so a little more could fit on the screen.) Word counts. Dropbox sync. Email as body or attachment. Very nice, I thought.
So, I sprung for the $10 Mac App. It doesn’t look as good as Byword, but doesn’t behave oddly. Syncs perfectly with the iPad app. The big type doesn’t look as bad on a 24″ monitor. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
I can now write on the computer, get up and grab the iPad and keep going. I find it amusing that after 30 years of software evolution; and enhancements in infrastructure, networking and computer power; the very best writing app that I’ve found mimics almost perfectly the functions and behavior of a typewriter from 1950.
That’s part of the problem. The other part is organization of background material. For my novel, I have tons of background notes to keep everything straight. Lists of characters major and minor, notes on the locations, notes on the various entities and their capabilities, notes on things that the characters don’t and likely won’t ever know but which certainly effect how the story goes. Putting all this in, say, one long word file would work in the sense that all the information would be stored on my computer.
But it wouldn’t be easy to access. If I were careful, and did everything up with headings, I could use the document map sidebar to be able to easily see any one part of it. But often, I want to look at more than one part of my notes. I always want the cast of characters visible, so I can reference that, and usually one or more other things that are relevant to what I’m typing. Word falls down there unless I want more than one document, which kind of defeats the purpose.
And I haven’t found anything significantly better. Right now I’m using Ulysses, which basically organizes text files into bundles, with a navigator at the side. I got it cheap, and it works, but there is no good way to really organize the files. I’d almost be better having small text files in a folder hierarchy – but only almost. Its saving grace is that I can view two (and no more than two) of the individual files. So I can have my cast of characters and one other thing visible.
I’ve tried Scrivener, which is a little better, but not much, and I don’t want to pony up $50 just to see if it works a little better than Ulysses. (Though they just upgraded to version 2.1…) I’m tempted to see if I can make Yojimbo work – which I’ve used to keep track of clippings and receipts and the like. If I did make individual text files and dropped them into Yojimbo collections, that might conceivably work. And, as a bonus, all the textual material would not be in proprietary formats.
What I really want is this, which I first wrote about over five years ago. A visual way of navigating files. If any coders out there would like to help me build this, I’d be more than willing to share the profits.
Aside from that gaping wound in my workflow, other bits have fallen into place. Sigil is a nice little app that creates ePubs pretty easily – and allows you to edit them if you discover some last second thing that needs changing. TextWrangler is a nice power editing tool useful taking .txt files and making bulk changes and has a good search function. Finally, Pages makes nice pdfs if you’re into that sort of thing.
Hey, look at this
While I’m being all Mr. Blog Chatty Cathy, look at this:
Ominous volcanic lightning pics are like catnip for Buckethead.
Ask Son of Buckethead
My son, having become cognizant of the existence of this blog, has offered to participate. If anyone has any questions – about anything whatsoever – ask and he will make up an answer for you. Just leave a question in the comments and I’ll pass it on to him.
Here’s a small one to get you started:
Q: Son of Buckethead, who killed President Kennedy?
A: It was the butterflies. Butterflies ate Oswald’s brain, enraging him. Enraged, he went to the Book Depository building and shot the president.
Q: Son of Buckethead, why did the butterflies hate Kennedy? And were they responsible for Oswald’s death as well?
A: Butterflies hate everybody. Usually, they just flutter around and stuff. But sometimes, they get mean. The ninja butterflies ate Jack Ruby’s brain to cover up the eating of Oswald’s brain. Butterflies are pretty sneaky.
In other news
In pursuit of my life long dream of having a career that involves nothing more than sitting in front of a computer in my jammies, I have been writing a novel. It became apparent to me that sitting in front of a computer in my jammies four out of five days a week as a technical writer and web developer is not enough. I need that last day. The novel is about 1/4 done, and the initial feedback has been very positive. Yay, me! I will shortly be setting up another website for that novel to live on, and you’ll see a link here.
Also, I have remembered that I never finished my series on state mottoes. Expect updates soonish.
I would like to state for the record that it has become almost impossible for me to have normal conversations about politics with, well, anyone. I no longer have common referents with the average interlocutor. And I can’t really say, go read the last six months of Zero Hedge, the entire corpus of Moldbug, and a hundred other things and get back to me when you can understand what I’m talking about. And can you summarize Austrian economics and the history of the Great Depression and the formation of modern banking every time you’re talking to someone about the state of the economy? And God forbid trying to explain where I’m coming from on politics.
And, on that note, thanks Chris for having read Zero Hedge and Moldbug and Charleton so that I can talk to you. You’re a mensch.
The Charlton
I have been, as is my wont, supremely lax in posting. This despite my setting up an automated process to post. So there you go.
I would say that the spirit moved me to the post this, but that would not be true. Even without the spirit motivation, Bruce Charleton has had some very interesting posts over the last little while. The one that caused me to actually pull the trigger on this post is this one:
Charleton’s knife of insight is sharp, here. If a modern St. Patrick were sent to us by real Christians from some parallel world, maybe from a Patriarch of Constantinople who didn’t live in Istanbul, what would he think of us? I imagine that this hypothetical Apostle to the Americans would see us in our secular glory rather like the Conquistadors saw the Aztecs. With horror.
What common ground could our St. Patrick find with us when the core assumptions of our daily life are so far removed from what, historically, people have always believed? Oh sure, we don’t put people on altars and rip their hearts out. Yet. But at least the Aztecs believed in the divine.
I have what others have described as an interesting relationship with Christianity. (And there’s a draft post that needs finished…) I find that I need a Pagan Missionary, really.
Then we have this:
Therefore deification does not mean the “actualization” or “realization” of one’s latent divinity, a belief that is less Christian than monistic or pantheistic.
Actualization is a fingernails on blackboards kind of word for me. It makes me want to punch somebody. Kind of like the feeling I get when I see someone wearing a Che tshirt. It is indicative of the depths to which we have sunk that even the people pretending to traditional faith still feel that it’s all about them, and not, you know, God or something.
And finally this:
But in Orthodoxy (so far as I see it, not far) there is not the same sense of trying to reach an intellectually coherent and satisfying answer as there is with Western Catholicism.
For the Orthodox there are these parable-like narrative theological explanations, mostly comprehensible to the common man – and beyond these simple explanations there is mystery.
If you want to go further, the path is spiritual not philosophical. The understanding aimed-at, therefore, is not more complex or logical, but (presumably) an understanding which comes directly by revelation, and is not (perhaps) communicable to those of lower levels of holiness.
This is the one thing in Orthodoxy that most appealed to me, when long ago I formally converted. I was raised in a particularly dry and dusty sort of Lutheranism. A comfortable enough community, in its way, especially if you can’t sing and like potluck dinners. Which, as it happens, is me all the way. However, the efforts of our Pastor to explain to me the passion and mystery of Christ, redemption, and the like fell a little flat. Largely because it sounded like he was relating to me the minutes of the local Rotary club. Of which he was a member. Look at the benefits that accrue, to you – the local business man, if you become a Rotarian!
Exciting.
And the Roman Catholic hyper legalism is just as annoying. But here’s these guys, the Orthodox, with a rich, nay, baroque iconography, beautiful liturgical music, they don’t do any of that. They go up to a certain point, stop, and say, “It’s a mystery.” I like that. I may not have the spiritual development to understand. Might not ever. But at least I’m not treated like a prospective Chamber of Commerce supporter, or bedeviled with hair-splitting exegesis.
From the feed
I’ve always thought that good intentions were, in general, given too much credit. But this goes a little further, and rings true to me. Especially this:
“When I examine my conscience, I perceive that the worst intentions were typically those times where I was trying hardest to signal to myself and to others that my intentions were good, pure, blameless.
That was when I was most deeply in thrall to pride.”
From the feed
A question that has been festering in my brain for some time now, even though I am not rich:
“But where can the rich go? Their choices include nations that have swarms of malaria-infested mosquitoes, bad TV, deadly climates, decapitation issues, French people, bland food and other signs of inhospitableness. When you consider these factors plus wars, pollution, terrorism, floods, droughts, earthquakes and tornadoes, I think you’ll agree that most of the surveyed land on Earth is unfit for fancy people.”
I may not be rich, but the nation of my birth is becoming increasingly annoying.
Scott Adams on Taxes, the Wealthy and a Return to the Ocean – WSJ.com
from online.wsj.com
From the feed
“Picture Alexander Hamilton. In 1805, as he lay dying at the hands of Vice President Aaron Burr, could Hamilton have credibly groaned to his seconds, echoing Romulus, “Go, and tell the Romans Americans that by heaven’s will my Rome America shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman American arms. “
Twice in two days, through no real effort or bent of mind, I ended up discussing the possibility of Caesarism in America. This lays in the background. And, my absolute favorite bible verse.
The Chains of the Improbable vs. The Chains of the Impossible | The Committee of Public Safety
From the feed
Seeing if the “note in reader” function will post the same way from the browser bookmarklet as it does from within google reader.
This, by the way, is the page where all the “wik” comes from.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) – Crazy credits
from www.imdb.com
From the feed
This is a good observation:
“Great presidents (Roosevelt and Reagan) transform their times; good presidents (Eisenhower and Kennedy) understand them almost without trying; bad presidents (Buchanan and Carter) are overwhelmed by them. Obama is the first who has tried to defy them. “
I think I might have to read the article
from View from the Right
From the feed
I think I’d prefer a 1-day starship. Then I’d have it by next Tuesday.
STARSHIP DREAMS: A look at DARPA’s 100-year starship….
from Instapundit
Playing with a new toy
Found a thing called ifttt – If this, then that. It glues interweb thingies together.
So far, I set up a task to mirror all my Google+ posts to my Facebook wall. I set up a task to automatically add any item I star in Google Reader to Instapaper. I set up a task to text my phone when the forecast calls for rain. Those were all found task recipes that were on the site.
The previous post is my first attempt at creating brand new tasks. If I share something with a note in Reader, then it should appear here on Perfidy. However, if it just posts anything I share at all, then I’ll have to start over.
Interesting tool, check it out.
[wik]: Okay, it just posts anything I share. Not so good.
[alsø wik]: Tried another way. Better in that it only picks up things I share with a note, but I can’t use the note for the blog post title like I can if I’m pulling from reader. Hmmn.
[alsø alsø wik]: Tried to do it via email, which does allow me to control the title, and which ones would go here to Perfidy; but it trashes all links because it’s taking the plain text of the message body. Which doesn’t work.
[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?]: Well, I can get a standard title, like, “From the feed” or something, and have the comment appear in the body of the post. Which works well enough. Still have the problem of it posting everything I share, which is more than I want to go here.
[See the løveli lakes]: Very frustrating. You can trigger off starred, liked and shared items. But only shared items have access to the comment. Ick. And using a standard feed as a trigger buries the comment in with all the other text, and you can’t control the post title at all.
[The wøndërful telephøne system]: So, if I change my sharing behavior – that will affect two people, and not greatly. I can cope with that. But I still have the mildly annoying issue of using the comment field either as post title, or as post content, but not both. Using the shared item’s title as the post title is awkward, because I can’t control the length or formatting – for example, Instapundit always has titles in all caps. (Shouting at the world since 2001!)
But using a standard title, like “From the feed” gives the reader no clue as to the content, and funny (or at least mildly amusing) titles are kind of a thing for blogs and Perfidy. But if I use it for that, I’m left with just a link in the body of the post. I can’t actually comment on the thing I’m linking to.
I think I’m leaning toward using the comment for actually commenting.
[And mäni interesting furry animals]: The thing that will annoy me is the repetitive, “From the feed” titles.
Teh funny
Facebook Privacy ProTip
No need to thank me. It’s all part of being a full service Internet Security blog.
from Borepatch http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2011/10/facebook-privacy-protip.html
Oh, ramp on the inside
Now this makes more sense than a barrel full of sensible stuff. People have been arguing about how those crazy Egyptians built the pyramids for, literally, thousands of years. Now some French dude thinks he’s got it sussed out:
A radical new idea has recently been presented by Jean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect who has devoted the last seven years of his life to making detailed computer models of the Great Pyramid. Using start-of-the-art 3-D software developed by Dassault Systemes, combined with an initial suggestion of Henri Houdin, his engineer father, the architect has concluded that a ramp was indeed used to raise the blocks to the top, and that the ramp still exists–inside the pyramid!
The theory suggests that for the bottom third of the pyramid, the blocks were hauled up a straight, external ramp. This ramp was far shorter than the one needed to reach the top, and was made of limestone blocks, slightly smaller than those used to build the bottom third of the pyramid. As the bottom of the pyramid was being built via the external ramp, a second ramp was being built, inside the pyramid, on which the blocks for the top two-thirds of the pyramid would be hauled. The internal ramp, according to Houdin, begins at the bottom, is about 6 feet wide, and has a grade of approximately 7 percent. This ramp was put into use after the lower third of the pyramid was completed and the external ramp had served its purpose.
The design of the internal ramp was partially determined by the design of the interior of the pyramid. Hemienu knew all about the problems encountered by Pharaoh Sneferu, his and Khufu’s father. Sneferu had considerable difficulty building a suitable pyramid for his burial, and ended up having to construct three at sites south of Giza! The first, at Meidum, may have had structural problems and was never used. His second, at Dashur–known as the Bent Pyramid because the slope of its sides changes midway up–developed cracks in the walls of its burial chamber. Huge cedar logs from Lebanon had to be wedged between the walls to keep the pyramid from collapsing inward, but it too was abandoned. There must have been a mad scramble to complete Sneferu’s third and successful pyramid, the distinctively colored Red Pyramid at Dashur, before the aging ruler died.
Well, yeah. And, he’s got the evidence:
A microgravimetric survey done in the 80s revealed what looks like a blocky spiral on the inside of the pyramid. Pretty cool. Read the whole thing, here.
The big list
NPR is doing a top 100 sf novels OF ALL TIME! list. (hat tip, Isegoria and Scalzi.) I have my favorites – the perennial favorite post here at perfidy is the top five list post – but of the books actually on the selection list, if I just had to choose, I’d pick these today:
- The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
- A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
- The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
- The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
- The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
- Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
- The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
- Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
- The Uplift Saga, by David Brin
For a lot of the books on the NPR list, I would have chosen a different book by the author, but that’s just me being picky.
What really startled me, though, was the vastness of the list that I had not read:
- The Acts Of Caine Series, by Matthew Woodring Stover
- Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan
- Beggars In Spain, by Nancy Kress
- The Black Company Series, by Glen Cook
- The Black Jewels Series, by Anne Bishop
- The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
- Children Of God, by Mary Doria Russell
- The City And The City, by China Mieville
- The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
- The Coldfire Trilogy, by C.S. Friedman
- The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton
- The Company Wars, by C.J. Cherryh
- The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
- The Day of Triffids, by John Wyndham
- Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison
- The Deed of Paksennarion Trilogy, by Elizabeth Moon
- The Deverry Cycle, by Katharine Kerr
- Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
- Don’t Bite The Sun, by Tanith Lee
- Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
- The Eisenhorn Omnibus, by Dan Abnett
- The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
- The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
- The Faded Sun Trilogy, by C.J. Cherryh
- Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser Series, by Fritz Leiber
- The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
- The Female Man, by Joanna Russ
- The Fionavar Tapestry Trilogy, by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The First Law Trilogy, by Joe Abercrombie
- The Foreigner Series, by C.J. Cherryh
- The Gaea Trilogy, by John Varley
- The Gap Series, by Stephen R. Donaldson
- The Gate To Women’s Country, by Sheri S. Tepper
- Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
- The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway
- The Gormenghast Triology, by Mervyn Peake
- Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper
- Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World, by Haruki Murakami
- The Hollows Series, by Kim Harrison
- House Of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
- I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
- The Inheritance Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin
- Kindred, by Octavia Butler
- The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
- Kraken, by China Mieville
- The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
- The Last Coin, by James P. Blaylock
- The Last Herald Mage Trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey
- The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
- The Lathe Of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
- The Liaden Universe Series, by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
- The Lies Of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch
- Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler
- Little, Big, by John Crowley
- The Liveship Traders Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
- Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg
- Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees
- The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
- The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
- The Manifold Trilogy, by Stephen Baxter
- Memory And Dream, by Charles de Lint
- Memory, Sorrow, And Thorn Trilogy, by Tad Williams
- The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
- The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy, by Robert J. Sawyer
- The Newsflesh Triology, by Mira Grant
- The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, by Peter F. Hamilton
- Novels Of The Company, by Kage Baker
- On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
- Oryx And Crake, by Margaret Atwood
- The Otherland Tetralogy, by Tad Williams
- The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
- Parable Of The Sower, by Octavia Butler
- The Passage, by Justin Cronin
- Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
- The Prestige, by Christopher Priest
- The Pride Of Chanur, by C.J. Cherryh
- The Prince Of Nothing Trilogy, by R. Scott Bakker
- Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds
- Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
- The Saga Of Recluce, by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
- The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
- The Sarantine Mosaic Series, by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The Scar, by China Mieville
- The Shattered Chain Trilogy, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
- The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge
- Song for the Basilisk, by Patricia McKillip
- The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
- Stations Of The Tide, by Michael Swanwick
- Steel Beach, by John Varley
- Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
- The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
- The Swordspoint Trilogy, by Ellen Kushner
- The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
- Tigana , by Guy Gavriel Kay
- The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
- To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis
- The Troy Trilogy, by David Gemmell
- Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
- The Valdemar Series, by Mercedes Lackey
- The Vurt Trilogy, by Jeff Noon
- Watership Down, by Richard Adams
- The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
- The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
- When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
- Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
- Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler
- The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
- World War Z, by Max Brooks
- The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Edison
- The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Well, I guess I have some reading to do.
Full of awesome
Once I thought that this was the most awesomist picture ever:
Or maybe this one:
But now I know that it’s this:
Bearmageddon. Jesus wept.
Today is day zero for this webcomic, done by the guy who did the starkly amazing Axe Cop with his kid brother. New pages every Wednesday and Friday.
Apropos the last post
Getting passports for the whole family will cost $850. Escape will be expensive.
And while we’ve got the posty-thing fired up
I hear that there’s some debt shenanigans going on. If I weren’t so appallingly cynical, I’d be shocked at the apparent inability of politicians and professional economists and Wall Street pimps to understand what’s happening. I mean, it’s pretty simple, as Reddit demonstrated the other day.
I see only a few possibilities:
- mendaciousness – the individuals in question really do know what’s happening, and are lying to us for their own gain.
- cluelessness – they really are that stupid, and don’t see that they’re spending us right off the cliff.
- unjustified arrogance – along the lines of what Oxford Sovietologist Ronald Hingely once said, noting that basic misapprehensions about the nature of the Soviet Union were rare among really serious scholars, and also among ordinary people. Those who didn’t get it were those of fair intelligence, the “educated elite.” Hingely commented: “For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed.”
It seems to me that each of the three groups most responsible for our current predicament fits one of those descriptions. I will allow that there is some possibility of overlap…
I’d say that reading the economic news is like watching a train derailing, except that you can’t exactly watch a train derailing from the inside, so its not a perfect analogy. I have this terrible sense that inexorable doom is coming toward us. You look at the similarities between the first great depression and our current situation (banking crisis, pause, soveriegn debt crisis… who will be the Creditanstalt for our times?). You look at the results of debasing the currency in Imperial Rome, in pre-Industrial England, in dozens of countries from Weimar Germany to Zombabwe in the last century and wonder how we can be different, except in scale. You look at the disingenuousness of the economic statistics – Q1 revised down to .4% growth? G is a component of GDP. Take that out, subtract that from next to zero, and what do you have? And let’s not mention the unemployment numbers.
In this environment, people like Ron Paul are made to look like the crazed radical for pointing out the obvious. Well, maybe the food, gold, ammo approach is less unreasonable and paranoid than it once was.
Horror!
We received an email here in our sekrit underground bunker from a concerned reader. Someone out there in the wild internets had mentioned pepper-infused Vodka, and perfidy. Now, it may seem obvious that these things go together like two things that go really well together. And you’d be right in thinking that. But our concerned reader was unable to find the actual posts.
Given my staggeringly efficient search skills, locating the posts in question was in no way a problem. In fact, if you’re interested in putting spicy and boozy in the same place, just look here:
Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow may be tax time or something. And that would suck, you know?
and
Question and answer time with Drunkle John
But what was really horrifying was that this website has not mentioned Vodka – not even once, glancingly – since four years ago yesterday.
Well, VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA!
There. That’s better.
Things haven’t been the same since Minister Johno stopped posting.
Linkalicious – science edition
Discovered Locklin on Science a little while ago, and I’ve been trolling through his archives. Found several gems – Spotting Vaporware, Nano Nonsense, The Airship: An Aesthetic Appreciation, The Atlantic: Tool of the Oligarchy, To Learn About the Future, Study the Past, How Hackers Ruin Everything With Computers, and finally, A Peregrination on the Nature of Money. That’s a lot of links, but I commend all of them to you.
The Amish don’t get Autism. This goes into the whole vaccination/autism thing, about which I am undecided. I probably lean towards vaccination.
Homeless Planets may be common. I thought homelessness never appeared in the media unless there was a Republican in the White House. Some catastrophists have speculated that Saturn and its moons were homeless, until captured by our Sun. It is interesting that several planets have almost identical axial tilts.
Comet collides with Sun during massive CME.
According to NASA’s SOHO, a bright comet, most likely from the Kreutz family of comets, which was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, slammed into the sun, but as it dove into it a coronal mass ejection blasted out. There is no correlation between the strike and the solar eruption; it was just a coincidence.
I guarantee it was not a coincidence. As the comet comes in from the outskirts of the Solar System, it will be moving into a differently charged regime. That is why comets have tails. This was an electrical connection between the comet and the sun, and this isn’t the only time that this has happened. There’s a whole bunch of EU comet articles here.
Comet theory of North American extinctions coming under fire. Shame, it was a cool theory.
Looks like there is a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, modulated by solar activity. This, if true, would invalidate most of the AGW we’ve had shoved down our throats for the last decade or so.
Alfven and the electric universe.
In an ESA report last month the high-resolution of the Herschel space observatory produced another surprise, “The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and Herschel has shown that newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them… Such filaments in interstellar clouds have been glimpsed before by other infrared satellites, but they have never been seen clearly enough to have their widths measured. Now, Herschel has shown that, regardless of the length or density of a filament, the width is always roughly the same. “This is a very big surprise,” says Doris Arzoumanian, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/IRFU, the lead author on the paper describing this work. Together with Philippe André from the same institute and other colleagues, she analyzed 90 filaments and found they were all about 0.3 light years across, or about 20,000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This consistency of the widths demands an explanation.”
So what is the favored conventional explanation? What else but “sonic booms” generated by “exploding stars!” But where are these exploding stars? And explosions should impose some degree of radial curvature on these filaments. But what we see is more like the tortuous paths of cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts. For that is what they are, in fact, on a cosmic scale.
The ‘father’ of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén, wrote in 1986, “That parallel currents attract each other was known already at the times of Ampere. It is easy to understand that in a plasma, currents should have a tendency to collect to filaments. In 1934, it was explicitly stated by Bennett that this should lead to the formation of a pinch. The problem which led him to the discovery was that the magnetic storm producing medium (solar wind with present terminology) was not flowing out uniformly from the Sun. Hence, it was a problem in cosmic physics which led to the introduction of the pinch effect…
However, to most astrophysicists it is an unknown phenomenon. Indeed, important fields of research, e.g., the treatment of the state in interstellar regions, including the formation of stars, are still based on a neglect of Bennett’s discovery more than half a century ago… present-day students in astrophysics hear nothing about it.” [Emphasis added]
The constant width over vast distances is due to the current flowing along the Birkeland filaments, each filament constituting a part of a larger electric circuit. And in a circuit the current must be the same in the whole filament although the current density can vary in the filament due to the electromagnetic pinch effect. Therefore the electromagnetic scavenging effect on matter from the molecular cloud, called Marklund convection, is constant along each current filament, which simply explains the consistency of widths of the filaments. The stars form as plasmoids in the Bennett-pinches, also known in plasma labs on Earth as Z-pinches.
Here’s two sites which, regardless of whether you end up buying it or not, are just fun: Ancient Destructions and Saturnian Cosmology.
And, Bosnian pyramids.
And Zero Hedge dips into weird science: Earthquakes and Weird Atmospheric effects. Strange phenomena have been associated with earthquakes since the classical era, but seem to be largely dismissed nowadays.