Private Mars Rocket II

Three random items, related only by being things I found:

1) The Bookshelf Cafe News interviewed me. My favorite quote from the interview? On being asked, "What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book?" I said, "Finish the book! Many writers start a book and abandon it or get stuck in a revision loop."

2) Here's a miserable dude who seems to want to inflict his misery on others: Meet Matthew from Knoxville! - Matthew, meet the internet!

3) On Syria: Personally I think Assad would look good hanging from a streetlight by a meat hook. Alas, he's now in Russia, hoping that Putin doesn't decide he would look better after being thrown out of a window. I do think his government's collapse in Syria points out to a "feature" of dictatorships - their collapse is gradually, then all at once.

I'm glad to see that the Republican Party is the party of law and order. Blue lives matter! (That's sarcasm, for those unclear.)

Calling Trump's coup yesterday half-assed is an insult to half-assedness, which is par for the course with Trump. And yes, it was a coup attempt, and even after half-assed coups you need to remove the coup plotters.

You see, if you plan to overthrow the government by shutting down the legislature, you need to do three things. One, send in a mob. Two, make sure that, imbedded in said mob, are some people who can take out key targets under cover of the mob. Three, be able to show up on a white horse and restore order. Fortunately, Trump's too stupid and lazy for steps 2 and 3. We got lucky.

In related thoughts, I whole-heartedly agree with John Scalzi when he says Trump is the worst President ever. From Scalzi: James Buchanan allowed the country to fall into the Civil War because he believed (erroneously, in my opinion) the principles of the country could not stop it from happening. He was wrong, terribly wrong, but at least there was a principle behind it. Trump, it is now perfectly and unambiguously clear, would be delighted to have the country fall into a civil war, not for principle, but simply for ego. He would destroy our country and democracy because he can’t abide what he now is: a loser.

Lastly, we've seen police can be polite to rioters, as long as said rioters are white. Good to know.

I am opposed to giving stupid people guns. Over the weekend, a pair of wealthy lawyers became yet another set of poster children for this premise. The pair of them came out of their house with guns to "protect" said house from a mob. Thoughts:

1) All indications were that this "mob" was no more dangerous than the crowd at the midway of your local fair.
2) If, however, one feels threatened by a mob, one should not stand in such a place that mob members can easily lob bricks at your head. Stand inside your house by an open window - much harder to be seen or hit.
3) Should the tactical situation require you to be visible to the mob, avoid verbally engaging individual mob members. While you're arguing with Mob Member #1 and distracted, Mob Member #2 can be up to no good.
4) If you have time to get your gun, you have time to put on shoes. Should matters go kinetic, the ground will quickly get covered in debris.
5) Our pair of defenders, the Straight Out of Applebee's Kids, felt they were "defending the Bastille." Given that the defenders of the Bastille lost, one should have a plan to retreat if need be. Again, shoes would be helpful.

In short, stupid is as stupid does.

If you have a minor fender-bender, please move completely off of the road to exchange details. Do not sit in the turning lane of a major intersection during rush hour, especially if you are 10 feet away from a store parking lot. That is all.

An email I received today which seems totally legit to me:

We came across your resume on a job board, and we wanted to contact you regarding a job opportunity at our company.
We feel that your qualities and skills are in line with being a suitable applicant for this position.

Job Type: Home-based;
Compensation: up to $2500/month;
Prompt Start: You will start working immediately; No Investments: You do not need to make any investments to start with this position!

The position will be taking about 2-3 hrs of your time per day. Flexible Schedule.

Job Requirements:
- General knowledge of Adobe Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Office applications;
- Consistent Internet access;
- Access to printer and scanner;
- Must be accurate and attentive to details.

Duties:
Goods will be sent to your residential address.
You will have to to examine the merchandise, repack it, take pictures, make detailed reports, and reship the items to the customer.

If you wish to discuss this opportunity further, please reply to this address and HR representative will reach out to you as soon as we are able.

If the described job is not interesting to you, please do not respond to this email.

Comes news today that the author John C. Wright has penned and published a novel entitled Superluminary: The Space Vampires. Mr. Wright is better known here as the proprietor of the blog I refer to as Wrights' House of Wrong. He's also, to quote Eric Flint, a member of the Saudi School of prose in which, "no noun may go out in public unless she is veiled by grandiloquence and accompanied by an adjective."

So, perhaps I'm not exactly the target audience for Mr. Wright's latest effort. On the other hand, I remember the 1980's movie Lifeforce. (You do too - it stared Matilda May in her birthday suit running amuck in London.) And as I recall, the vampires of the movie were travelling in Hailey's comet and were the source of the vampire myths on Earth. The concept has a certain charm. So, out of boredom and a bit of mischief, (no booze - I'm stone sober) I decided to take a look at the various free samples of the book in question.

I shouldn't have bothered. Judging from what I could force myself to read of the samples, Wright has managed to suck all the lifeforce out of what could have been an interesting concept. The basic setup is this - in the far future, when man has colonized all nine planets and apparently genetically-engineered the bejesus out of himself, a faster-than-light spaceship is constructed. We're told that said construction takes all of man's efforts. The ship is then sent more-or-less blindly into interstellar space, where it discovers that all of the galaxy is dead, except for the space vampires (who are also dead), and said vampires are coming for humanity.

Except we don't discover any of this. Our POV character, Aeneas, who is apparently the pilot of the FTL ship, is told this by "Lord Pluto" and "Lady Luna." Who are these people? Damned if I know. Who is Aeneas? No clue, other than that he's nine feet tall and referred to by male pronouns. We're told that Aeneas and his unnamed ship has jumped into a double star system which we later discover is the Alpha Centauri system. Said system, at 4.3 light years away, is the nearest Sol-like system, and a logical destination.

A civilization capable of settling all nine planets would be able to build telescopes capable of seeing planets in orbit around such a star. None have been built, because Aeneas has no clue what's in the system until he gets there. Then, much incomprehensible techno-babble later, he blind-jumps out of the system into a triple system. He states, "If this had been a single star system like Sol, we’d have unwarped out of folded space directly into in the middle of a sun.... we just took a fifty-fifty life-or-death gamble without knowing the stakes or the odds."

Dude, you jumped from a single-star system (Sol) to a double (Centauri)! You really didn't know what would happen when you came back? With a ship the that took the entire civilization to build? Oh, and Mr. Wright - the distance from Earth to Moon is 1.3 light-seconds, not 1. That's probably the least of the scientific errors in the excerpts. Our astronaut has no idea what the typical planetary system looks like, despite the fact that we mere 21st century humans are finding planets like Easter eggs.

Other questions pop to mind. Do I really need to know that Lady Luna ordered a "small luncheon of fruit, salad, venison and red wine?" The blind jump takes the ship to an unknown triple star system 35 to 50 light years from Earth, yet in the immediate next chapter (or "episode") we're told the system is Zeta Herculis. How do we know this? All these and many other questions are left unanswered, buried in mountains of turgid prose. But in that same prose we keep getting told that Spaaaaccce Vampires(!!!!!) are everywhere!

Vampires in space can be done campy (Lifeforce) or serious (Peter Watts). Now we see they can be done boring and baffling (John C. Wright).

I had a quiet weekend and spent most of today out-of-pocket, so this will be a brief update. It will, in fact, consist of three Tweet-level thoughts.

Thought 1 - Assault Weapons

I am and remain a gun owner. Having said that, I agree with the tweet I saw (originally from Elizabeth Bear): "here are two reasons for a private citizen to want an assault rifle. 1) to kill a lot of people as conveniently as possible. 2) because it's a neat toy." To expound on that, neither reason is protected by the Constitution.

Thought 2 - March for our Lives

I am amazed (well, not really) at how badly the NRA and their associates are showing their asses regarding the organizers of last weekend's anti-gun marches. Calling them "crisis actors" (and WTF is a "crisis actor" in the first place) and all the other slights seem almost deliberately aimed at making the NRA look like a mustache-twirling villain in a grade-Z movie.

Thought #3 - Children of the Divide

Over the weekend I finished the third of Patrick S. Tomlinson's novels, Children of the Divide. In it, Tomlinson tuckerizes another writer of my acquaintance, Adam Rakunas, and tells an interesting story of two species living together on one planet. It appears that Tomlinson left himself room for more books in the series, which I don't see forthcoming. In any event, it's well worth a read, and since it's set 18 years after the other two books, should stand alone.

Over on his blog, Scott Adams insists I am in a mass hysteria bubble. Perhaps obviously, I disagree. Scott makes many statements, and herewith I take issue with two.

1) Scott says of Trump [choice 3 of 4]: A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.

I say, except for:
- The economy was doing well before Trump, and jobs were going up. In fact, Trump's signature job "save" at the Indiana Carrier plant proved to be a lie (plant's closing anyway).
- North Korea hasn't blinked. They were threatening this week to drop missiles near Guam.
- ISIS in Iraq was on the ropes before Trump. This "on the ropes" organization has also just this week staged attacks in Spain and Finland.
- The Supreme Court got a judge because Mitch McConnell blocked Obama's nominee.

2) Scott says of Trump (and this his Scott's preferred answer) [choice 4 of 4]: The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.

I say, except for:
There was no violence on both sides. The right committed murder and assault, the left defended themselves.

Methinks I know who suffers from a mass hysteria bubble, and it ain't me.

So, audio tape of Donald Trump being an ass (or being Donald Trump, but that's redundant) was released. It reveals nothing new, but does pop Trumpishness into the minds of those voters who are just now turning their attention to the race.

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame (about whom I wrote here) is on vacation. Despite this, Scott decided to write a few hundred words on how this will actually help Trump, about whom Scott is 98% sure will win the election.

Scott says: That opens the door for Trump to attack in a proportionate way. No more mister-nice-guy. Gloves are off. Nothing is out of bounds. It is fair to assume that Bill and Hillary are about to experience the worst weeks of their lives.

To which I say:Are you smoking dope? How can Bill's infidelities be held against Hillary? How does a man on wife #3 attack a couple on marriage #1? Please proceed, Governor Mr. Trump.

Scott Says: I assume that 75% of male heads of state, including our own past presidents, are total dogs in their private lives. Like it or not, Trump is normal in that world.

To which I say: Wasn't Bill Clinton a head of state?

Scott says:But if the new battleground is spousal fidelity, you have to like Trump’s chances.

To which I say: Three divorces.

Last night, for the second night in a row, the Trump campaign robocalled me. Both calls followed a very similar format. The call opened with a recording of Trump yelling one of his applause lines at a rally (audience background noise audible). Last night it was "law and order" and the night before it was "Hillary Rotten Clinton." Then, the recording switched to a man speaking with all the urgency of the guy on late-night TV selling Ginzu knives. He urged me to press one immediately to register my support and donate to help Trump.

WTF? Specifically:

1) I'm not a Republican. I've given money to Democrats, and anybody with any computer tech should have figured that out.

2) Illinois (my home state) is not in play. IIRC, last time we went for a Republican for President it was when Reagan was running.

3) Who exactly is this call supposed to persuade? I mean, couldn't Trump at least record a special message for me as opposed to recycled yelling in my ear?