Back From Liberty con

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

In which I have become Sarah, Destroyer of Panels.

I’m back, and as much as I’d like to write a coherent post, it’s not going to happen today. So I’ll do an after action report of sorts.

As usual, I go to Liberty con to see friends old and new, and a lot of you who hang out here in the flesh again or for the first time.

This year I wasn’t as available as is normal, because having been sick in the lead up to the con, I was, while healthy, still what the Victorians used to call “very pulled down.” I.e. I tired easily.

Also, it is one of the scars of 2020 that I can’t handle crowds as well as I used to. Hey, I have recovered to the extent that I no longer have an anxiety attack at spending a day with both sons and their wives, but twenty or so people, surrounded by another 100, with occasional look ins and hugs and such from those 100, is a lot. And required a lot of time in my room in silence.

For this I’m sorry, and hope to have recovered some more (psychologically) and to be in better shape next year.

Also I suspect I’ve aged a lot because most people didn’t recognize me, which is disquieting. I mean someone asked me if I’d seen me….

Meanwhile I got put in the Dystopia panel, this year renamed Destroyer of Worlds. Sigh. I told Rich he could put me in it. I INTENDED to behave properly, honestly.

The best laid plans of Sarahs and con goers….

The panel started with SOME MINOTAUR walking in. This would have been perfectly fine, except that both the moderator and one of the panelists were OBVIOUSLY Liberty con firsters and also the panelist took himself super-seriously. All of which was a serious problem, because the panel was 75% Huns and I realized from their expressions they had something planned and were all in anticipation.

Look, I used to teach. I know the look of a classroom that has set up the BEST prank yet and is practically jigging in their seats waiting for the it to fall.

And here, I won’t pretend I didn’t know something was up. I knew that there was a group gift planned from my close-in fan group on discord, because I accidentally stumbled onto that conference. They were collecting for a collective group, and I knew it had something to do with an eagle, and that I’d been warned to have space in the car on the way back.

I did not realize my adorable, insane, frustrating, amazing, completely ungovernable fans had chipped in to buy me a METAL EAGLE THE SIZE OF A SMALL CHILD. Which is, of course, going to have a place of honor in the entrance patio for the new house. No question. And will wear holiday-appropriate hats. Which considering we’re moving deep into suburbia (husband likes it) means that we’ll be the weird people. Ah, well. His name is George.

I don’t have pictures because husband took them and he’s out on errands.

The problem is that OF COURSE the moderator, not being wise to the Huns was somewhere between irate and confused as Orvan delivered the Eagle and I unboxed and displayed it.

And he TRIED TO GO ON WITH THE PANEL WHILE THIS WAS HAPPENING. At one point he asked me, “Is this normal? Does it happen all the time?” To which my answer was “Definitely not. And yes.” Followed by, “I’m sorry, they’re my fans. They’re adorable but insane and I can’t do anything with them!”

He then thought he was safe and tried to resume the panel, at which point the minotaur delivered the… Chinchilla or hope: A BEAUTIFUL Chinchilla plushie with wings and a flower crown. (Yes, I promise pictures later.) I understand Shesellseashells made it. THANK YOU.

And then the poor man tried to re-start the panel, just as Orvan delivered me a notebook with a cover that said it contained the nuclear US launch codes. By that point I was laughing so hard I couldn’t speak.

And from the audience, from a Hun, came, “Behold, I have become Sarah, destroyer of panels.”

At which point the panel resumed, 15 minutes later, with one very bewildered mod and one very upset panelist. All of which was okay until …. three of them claimed that if something or other happens civilization will die. Even you know, a supervolcano erruption or a year without a summer.

And I lost my mind. Because even Cuba still has a civilization of sorts, despite impairment of being under communism and various interdictions. I refuse to believe Americans are less resourceful. Within three days five guys in a garage will ride in with solutions. And hell, if the onerous regulations are lifted, not only will we come back, but we’ll roar past where we are and maybe finally become a multiplanetary civilization.

Look, not only am I not at home to doomerism, but I’m becoming less tolerant to doomerism each passing day. I’m not telling you the way ahead is all ice cream, skittles and smiles. It’s not. never was. Never in the history of ever. I’m not claiming that I’ll survive a massive disaster — being dependent on a daily thyroid dosage, this is HIGHLY unlikely — but humans were made to strive. And Americans are still the most dedicated to individual liberty of any humans in the world and also the more resourceful.

There wouldn’t be ONLY five guys in a garage, but thousands of five guys (and the occasional crazy gal) in a garage and possibly even an army of grandmothers (biological and not) just putting their hands to what they could and bringing civilization back.

As P. J. O’Rourke said in his trip to Russia: the utter dinginess of the place would not survive a few Americans with bottles of windex and rags.

We will be okay. And I think we’ve turned the corner on the worst. Yes, the communists are coming out of the closet and sure this time it will work. Be not afraid. Their plans always fail. Yes, sometimes they impose a lot of suffering on the way, but the hey day of their destructive philosophy has passed. We have the receipts. Just keep working. And most of all, keep being American. As hard as you can. No, Harder than THAT. Just do it.

….. I think, though, I’m going to have to beg off the dystopia panel in the future.

137 thoughts on “Back From Liberty con”

    1. Yeah….. Afraid not. To be fair, the moderator was very gracious and I felt awful for him.
      I ALSO WANT TO REGISTER MY DISPLEASURE AT NOT HAVING BEEN GIVEN THE JEWISH SPACE LASER CONTROLS. YET.

      Liked by 8 people

      1. Catholicism is broader than Judaism, therefore, longer wavelength. I think the Catholics get space microwave satellites, not space laser satellites.

        Pity the unitarians, they have to settle for acoustic beamforming in very low earth orbit, and it does not work so well.

        Anyway, I was going to joke about doomy doomy doom doomed instead, but you gave me material so much more entertaining to work from.

        Liked by 5 people

        1. Sir, I think I qualify for Jewish space lasers on genetics. As Nathan Brindle put it this weekend “Just look at her younger son and tell me he’s not a nice Jewish boy.” :D

          Liked by 4 people

            1. I’d go for Orion and the Pleiades. Alas, night vision went south a while ago, courtesy (needed) retina procedures. I miss The Sisters, though I can make out much of the big guy on a good night.

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    1. They failed at murderous intimidation in the 1960s, ’70s, and 80s, more or less.

      Then they tried to long march.

      Switching back to open murderous insanity is neither a sign of success, nor an opportunity likely to succeed.

      Liked by 4 people

  4. “I’m going to have to beg off the dystopia panel in the future.”

    Yep, like me, you’ve likely “lived through” too many “We’re All Doomed” times. [Crazy Grin]

    Liked by 4 people

    2. As I say whenever the next doomscreeching comes around, I lived through the last 47 apocalypses, this one’s nothin’ special.

      Liked by 2 people

  5. Desiccated Thyroid – difficult to dose but better than nothing. While some doomers might think I am talking human source, I think cow or sheep would be safer. Just make friends with a farmer, or if necessary, a mortician. You’ll be fine come and go the apocalypse because you are the destroyer of panels.

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    1. Pig is what the original formulation came from I believe. And no longer having a thyroid, at any given time I can calculate the “expires on” date for my living self if there ever was a disaster where I lost access to my meds. #days on had +about 2-3 months. You just…slow down and then stop. Mind you the one time that they had to take my meds away for a bit for final cancer testing, and was let back on. 3 days after I started taking them again WOW WHAT A RUSH.

      Liked by 3 people

      2. Desiccated thyroid has both T3 (rapid acting) and T4 (takes about three days for your body to rev up). If you are off again for another scan you could always pimp your prescriber for a few days of the DT or more expensive T3 alone.

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      1. It seemed like You and Tim Akers were the only two who realized that villains don’t always need redeeming qualities.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. They don’t. Not all villains are “heroes of their own stories” in terms we UNDERSTAND. Sure, every villain thinks his actions justified. so do most serial killers. it doesn’t make them good.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. Some serial killers literally believe the thing about consuming parts of the ‘target’, and obtaining magical power.

            That does not make them correct.

            If delusional, sometimes the delusion is a willing choice of evil.

            And, I dislike literary theory as is spread in modern academic departments.

            Some of it is just scholarly nonsense that dilutes distinctions between good and evil.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Villains need to be the heros of their own story insomuch as they need to have a desired end state that they are trying to achieve with their actions. The goal can be evil, the plan can be bugnuts, but they need to genuinely believe that their goal will make life better for some group of people, even if said group consists of themselves and their egos.

            Even the most nihilist destructive iconoclast has some reason why the world will be better at the end of their destruction. Not a logical or moral reason, mind you, but a reason.

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            1. Yes, absolutely. That’s more or less what I said. But this has been soppilly extended to “they’re trying to do something good.” Which er… not true.

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        2. Yeah, why not have a variety of villains? Having only one of type of hero or villain would be boring.

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      2. Not being at LibertyCon (my excuse is that I was halfway around the planet, and really, have you heard a better one?), I didn’t have a chance to hear the rant on Richard III. Is there a recording somewhere? Or lacking that, could anyone summarize the key points?

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      2. What do the fans of NASCAR root for, other than rando drivers with great hair? Crashes. Huns are not far from zoomy turn left fans, except moar books, less tailgating, more sci fi, less exhaust fumes, and did I mention lots and lots of more books?

        …I may have gotten distracted.

        So yes, the devolution from orderly process is not a bug unless it’s a giant invisible insect we named Jim. One would think that the population of LC staff, as I recollect it from about a decade ago now, would know this already. And make allowances for strange occurrances.

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        1. I’ve made it from the waiting list. You can sign up for notification when tickets go on sale. I was checking email when I was notified last year. Usually, I’m a day late.

          Liked by 1 person

  10. These days? Catastrophic failures without access to medications? My mom is more likely to survive than I am. Or, at least a lot longer. She’s 91. Won’t expire right away. But likely won’t starve either, be dead before supplies run out.

    There are too many places in the US, let alone the world, who may not even notice a disruption.

    Now if collapse of civilization is caused by the earth blowing up. Then they might have something. Otherwise? Not so much.

    Liked by 5 people

  11. Let’s see. I saw LawDog four times (OK, I saw LawDog’s shirts four times), and waved once. I saw Sarah once, but she was on her way to a panel, and talking to people, so I didn’t approach. I saw Nathan B., SheSellsSeaShells, PsychoKitty, Orvan, Jay Maynard, and a few others, but we were all in motion at the time, so I didn’t really socialize much.

    The Yellowstone Supervolcano popping would be a bit difficult to recover from quickly, because a LOT of the land used to grow grain in North America would be taken out of production by ash as well as cooler weather, and two major east-west transport routes would be impassible (I-80 and I-90, probably I-70 would be clipped, and perhaps the Trans-Canada Highway as well). A lot depends on wind direction when the main eruption hits. That said, we’d have a lot of warning*, and could be planning how to reroute transportation as well as moving people and shifting resources.

    *Harry Turtledove fast forwarded a lot in his novel, for plot reasons.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. And I didn’t dry to draw attention to myself, or wave, or call. :) You were near the top of the escalators into the convention center, and I was on the rotunda ramp.

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    2. Yes. Super volcano like Yellowstone, or the one in the SW, would inconvenient US, Canada, and Mexico, based on location. It would disrupt the world food baskets, travel (Helen caused temporary travel problems of the various routes you listed, and she was a zygote in comparison). But it wouldn’t destroy mankind, or the world.

      Would geologists have “a lot of warning”? Recent Biscuit Basin eruption took specialist by surprise. Not like eruptions aren’t expected out of Yellowstone. It is the degree that can surprise the experts. Now if one of the other US continental based super volcanoes started being more geologically active, that would make them sit up and notice.

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      1. If I understand the geologese [totally a word] correctly, the Biscuit Basin eruptions and pool formation seem to be caused by first, something in one of the shallow thermal water vents getting sealed and then popping its cork when the pressure below got too high, and second, water seeping into a micro-fault and causing a small pop and then collapse that created a new pool.

        I’m not certain those would show up on our current detection systems because they were so small and shallow. The magma starting to heave under the caldera and producing larger and larger foreshocks had darn well better show up, or a lot of people have a metric kiloton of explaining to do.

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        1. “magma starting to heave under the caldera“

          –

          Problem is for places like Yellowstone, South Sister, St Helens, etc., is this is “background noise”. They are active. In case of Yellowstone, very active. St Helens, which we know blew recently, there was a lot of hedging. Can you imagine the headlines if Helen had blown May 17th instead (the day PTB let caravan of homeowners in)? Helen taught the geologist a lot. If the geologist had known then about the possibility of the lahars, could you imagine the screaming of the red zone increased size? It was a compromise as it was. Yet, the bulge on South Sister grows annually, and “just watching” (it is not having the massive foreshocks, yet).

          “producing larger and larger foreshocks had darn well better show up, or a lot of people have a metric kiloton of explaining to do.“

          –

          I do understand your point. I don’t disagree. I just don’t know that the warnings will be taken seriously.

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    3. I live in northern Utah, I always viewed the potential eruption as sudden death. Can you elaborate on warning time and dispersion patterns?

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      1. Oof. The information I’ve seen is scattered here and there, in geologies of places like Ashfall Fossil Bed State Park, the Roadside Geology of Utah and Utah Underfoot, and other places. I seem to recall that the Roadside Geology of Idaho also had a lot of material about the Yellowstone hot spot and its eruptions before it reached the current location.

        Warning time depends on how well certain signals are interpreted. As Dep says, there is a lot of background noise with active-but-sleeping volcanos. At what point would the USGS say, “OK, all the animals that can flee have left, enough trees have died from poison vapors and so on, and the ground is so hot that we are certain this is The Big One”? And what is the jet stream and weather doing? Sometimes the bulk of the ash from the hot spot went almost due east. Sometimes it went more south-southeast. https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/volcano-updates

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        1. “OK, all the animals that can flee have left“

          –

          “Um. Why are the bison stampeding out of the park? They normally just meander over the boundaries!”

          “Looks like the wolves devastated all the elk!!!!!” Reeeee (Nope. Just refused to go back because …)

          “Wait! Kanas doesn’t have grizzlies?????”

          Point is. Can the animals that could flee, allowed to? St. Helens took out a lot of wildlife.

          Yellowstone blows, no one in the Northern Centennial Americas are going to be having a “good day”. Might even make Hood, Rainer, Shasta, and a few other not so dead volcanoes wake up, making it a really, really, bad day. (Or as one St Helens inspired t-shirt stated “Okay boys … On 3, all together now … 1 – 2 …”)

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          1. “there is a lot of background noise with active-but-sleeping volcanos.“

            –

            I have reasons to say “Um. Guys, you know ….”

            We were in Longview May 1980. We listened to everything we could. Everything “they knew”. Before. After. They didn’t know. Even after the mountain blew.

            Yes, the mud flows did make it to the Columbia River, fowling the shipping channels until dredging cleared them. It just stayed in the Cowlitz river banks as it hit Longview/Kelso. Castle Rock OTOH, high school, had their ball fields raised a few feet.

            A lot of speculation of “What if the new Spirit Lake dam doesn’t hold? Because of the continued after shocks from ongoing eruptions?”

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      2. alternate perspective:

        in theory, remote sensing can do a lot

        in practice, the mathematics suck

        there are two possible indicators.

        One is something something energy, from reading the seismic signals and understanding how to interpret them.

        I’m basically neither a volcanologist nor a seismologist, so for all I know there could easily be a model that would let them do that with the current spread of sensors. I basically tend to be more skeptical that we can predict events of the next higher energy level until it can be shown that we actually have done so. And, I’m like freshman level in this area.

        The other indicator would be the cloud of ash.

        So, lets talk phenomenology.

        We also talk about hypothetical eruptions in terms of such and such many tons of TNT, but that does not mean ‘treat it like a nuke, will be close enough’.

        Nukes are very dense energy, and very fast propagation.

        So what propagates for a volcano, and how fast?

        Heat and light can propagate at ligth speed, but I kinda have the impression that those won’t be the dominant energy transfer.

        My feeling is that volcanos are maybe pretty slow, given the distances, with light speed remote sensing that can process things fast and clearly enough to alert people. (Major, major if. I’m not currently aware of any combination of algorithms that is known to handle this identification well, much less quickly and efficiently. Now, I might well be likely to be ignorant if it was known to exist. ) If the cloud of particles is the killer, and if it moves at normal weather speeds, some amount of evac may be practical.

        This is more ifs.

        I think the problem sounds hard, and I would not be confident I understood the basics without a couple years of focused reading.

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  12. Bwahahahahahaha!

    George sounds awesome and I am now sorry I didn’t get to that panel.

    I feel you on the easily pulled down – I spent one day with a migraine, the second with a migraine hangover, and the third going “Why haven’t I bounced back and become perky as my thirty-year-old self would have?

    Here’s to us recovering, getting all the laundry done, and proceeding to be the embodiment of anti-dystopia!

    Liked by 3 people

  14. I have a fondness for disaster novels. It is hard to pull off.

    John Ringo can do it–it was eerie how _The Last Centurion_ and _Under a Graveyard Sky_ foreshadowed the Covid era.

    Lucifer’s Hammer. The World Ends in Hickory Hollow. The Last Tribe (Brad Manuel). The Sleep of the Gods (James Sperl).

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  15. “… if something or other happens civilization will die.”

    A few months ago, my wife really wanted to read a book out loud to me, because the movie was going to come out in theaters, and she wanted us to read the book together so we could watch the movie without getting spoiled on the book. (And she likes hearing me speculate ahead of time about what’s going on in the book, hence why she reads it out loud to me and I interrupt her to speculate. “Oh, it’s going to turn out that the butler did it, and you’re supposed to think that the butler couldn’t possibly have done it because that’s the classic answer, but this time I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.”)

    That book was Project Hail Mary.

    For those who haven’t read the book, I won’t spoil anything (and boy oh boy, are there lots of things to spoil!). But the problem presented at the very start of the book is that the sun is dimming, for unknown reasons. If this is not reversed, then first civilization and then the human race will eventually be doomed: a global ice age would lead to extinction. Then the entire book is about trying to find a solution to the problem.

    For those who have read the book, this seems like a good time to recommend my wife’s fanfic of Project Hail Mary, at https://archiveofourown.org/works/85847161. If you haven’t read the book, do not click that link! Even reading the description will spoil something major about the book’s plot! But if you have read (and enjoyed) the book, then I think you’ll like that fanfic; it’s got lots of people saying that she nailed the main character’s voice, and it feels like more of the book. Which is pretty high praise. (I realize I’m biased, but I really, really enjoyed reading it). Oh, and she just finished the first draft of a second fic, which I’ve just beta-read and suggested some changes to; it should be going up on AO3 in a week or two.

    But getting back to the point, Project Hail Mary is a superversive story. The human race is doomed, you say? The problem is insoluble? Well, it might look insoluble, but that just means we have to try harder. And the solution that is eventually found (is it a spoiler to say that someone figures out a solution, and the book does not end with the extinction of the human race? Probably not, because if you know me you know I wouldn’t be recommending the book if it didn’t end with a solution being found) feels plausible, and isn’t just a deus ex machina. It does require not just effort, but brains, and people who can think out of the box. And I want to say more, but saying anything more than that would bump into spoilers, and I really want people to read the book unspoiled.

    Summary: if you haven’t read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, go check it out of your local library. (Or more likely, get yourself on the hold list, because it’s a really, really popular book right now). And if you have read it already, check out my wife’s fanfic that I linked up above, and let me know what you think of it.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. So, for hypotheticals that are not desireable.

      We do not actually know that in forty years it will be impossible to exterminate the blacks.

      We can probably know that such is impossible now. We can know this because the possibility or impossibility is basically down to preferences and attitudes of the fighting men currently alive, and in fighting condition.

      Forty years is far enough out not to know, because we do not know preferences of the twenty year olds for sure, and in forty years they will be sixty, which will probably be the top end of military age. Basically everyone that we have information for strong inferences about will be really too old for the most active fighting by then.

      This is a special case of the general ‘what if everyone changes their mind’ hypothesis.

      Which is relevant, because the ‘if everyone suddenly changes their mind’ is basically the most plausible key to an end to humanity. IE, a spasm of murder that sweeps up everyone.

      Anything else, that is not on the order of hundreds of millions of choices, is simply relying on reduced order models, and on humans waiting to die instead of adjusting. (Maybe the physicists don’t actually know that the earth cannot suddenly energetically self-disassemble beyond any remediation. But, as layman who are using the ordinary everyday statistics, we can infer that such is unlikely. Beyond that, the scenarios which are not mostly hypotheticals of human choice are pretty much special pleading and setting the stage of assumptions very carefully.)

      Anyway, civilization can end if every human in it voluntarily chooses to abandon it. So it is maybe technically possible. But, it is absurdly unlikely.

      The academics who overpredict that case are mostly doing so because they have themselves voluntarily abandoned civilization to become savages and barbarians.

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      1. ‘Twouldn’t take ‘everybody’ to end civilization, or even a majority, just a big enough minority with sufficient practical ability. Fortunately, commies are chronically short of practical ability. They just make a lot of noise.

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        1. Also ending civilization* doesn’t equal ending humanity. We’d claw our way back somehow.

          This would obviously be terrible and I don’t expect it to happen.

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      2. Anyone predicting humanity’s extinction is also probably rooting for humanity’s extinction. There might be some sort of transhumanist exception where humanity becomes extinct because we turn into something else. I’ve never liked the transcend the human body and become a being of pure energy trope though.

        Liked by 2 people

          1. Plus the subset of, “Mankind creates self-aware robots/robotic brains that replace him by sheer merit,” a subset going back to at least John W. Campbell. The current heirs are the folks afraid AI will eliminate all human jobs without creating new ones.

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    2. One of the problems I had with the book was that they had swallowed the anthropogenic global warming to the point no one even questioned it. Other wise, good book. I really liked Rocky.

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      1. I was pleasantly surprised that a book whose plot involves a global temperature change threatening humanity involved global cooling being the threat, rather than global warming. Also, that the “AGW is real” bit was basically limited to only one scene, and also that the part most directly related to causing global warming on purpose involved methane rather than CO2. Methane-as-a-greenhouse-gas has actual science behind it.

        So while it wasn’t perfect on the subject of AGW, it could have been a whole lot worse than it actually was.

        Liked by 1 person

      1. If you’re referring to my wife’s fanfic, thanks; I’ll pass the praise on to her. BTW, you may be interested in checking back in a couple weeks when she posts the next fic, which is basically a sequel to this one. The first draft is finished, and we’re going over it now to tighten it up and make sure all the science is right (or as right as we can make it) before uploading it. Once we’re ready to upload it, we’ll be uploading one chapter per day just like she did with this one.

        Liked by 2 people

    6. My Kindle keeps adding that to the “you might as well buy this one; you’ll like it” list when I finish a book. It’s highly unlikely we’ll go to a movie theater (last occurrence, sometime in late ’90s or very early Aughts), but the book sounds interesting.

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    7. Yes!

      Sorry to come back so late to such an old thread, but sorry: Just Gotta.

      “Sing Name” is one of the peaks in the current skyline. Thank thank thank you both for creating and posting it. Youse got The Knack.

      I’m still only barely aware of Project Hail Mary, with no clue about plot beyond “uh… something about space, prob’ly. That Martian guy wrote it, Andy Weir. That was a good one.”

      So to me, “Sing Name” was a standalone short story with a cold open. The narrator’s methodical prose seemed like it was gonna be a bit of a slog until I realized “Oh yeah, Andy Weir. We’re sciencing our way through The Problem.” Catch that cadence, and the prose was right on beat from the start, and builds broad, deep characters from both players.

      “Sing Name” is beautiful, careful craftsmanship close up, and the sweep of the whole thing is beautiful at a distance. The world is a Perfect Callback Punchline for its existence. Thank thank thank! 5/5

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  17. Also I think the panel took far too narrow a view of the resilience of the American people in coming back from an apocalyptic event — even a full-on Yellowstone event. There would be survivors and they would thrive and bring things back, eventually. Generations? Yes. But it would happen. Which is what you said, loudly and stridently, and I hope to hell it made it into certain panelists’ brains. Especially the moderator, whom as I seem to recall was (or was formerly) a FEMA guy?

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    1. Even Stirling’s Emberverse (Dies the Fire) has strong pockets surviving (implied globally) explicitly throughout the US and Canada. Some pockets do not know anything is wrong (certain isolated island populations). This is with huge handwavin’ changes of natural gas and electrical laws preventing extreme combustion or non-biological electric (no vehicles, no guns). Even the worst areas had survivors that didn’t go savage or mad (lost skills, didn’t learn the new skills needed to thrive better, but they survived). The underlying theme of the books after the initial trilogy is learning about various groups survival as a small group hoofs it east, reverse Oregon Trail/Lewis&Clark expedition, all the way to northern east coast, and back.

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    2. Here’s the thing, I think both sides are correct in the argument that came out in the panel. Yes, it’s possible for blocking or destroying a few highway chokepoints to cause a major disruption of just-in-time shipping for a significant city or geographic area, but not the whole country. And almost like an organic system, the routing will evolve over time to evade the blockage. I think we all remember the supply disruptions during the Wuflu…more annoying than anything else. But even a massive black swan event, you’d have thousands of “five guys in a garage” working over, under, and around. It’d suck, and people would die, but it wouldn’t be permanent.

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      1. “possible for blocking or destroying a few highway chokepoints to cause a major disruption of just-in-time shipping for a significant city or geographic area, but not the whole country.”

        –

        For the US, yes.

        Canada, OTOH, has a bigger problem. There are scenic highway routes across the country that do not rely on Canada (freeway) 1, but not many.

        US has multiple freeways and highways, both north/south, and east/west, that would be difficult to completely isolate the country.

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        1. I’ve driven the Trans-Canada Highway from Calgary to Medicine Hat (where I spent a month, one week) and then east into Saskatchewan. Once you get out of Calgary, it’s a four-lane divided highway but not limited access, so not as expensive as a freeway. The traffic levels were low enough that an Interstate-class freeway would have been a waste. And that’s the first place I saw actual tumbleweeds.

          In practice, I’m not at all sure that cutting the Trans-Canada out there would do much to isolate the provinces. Cutting the rail lines, OTOH…

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          1. Yes cutting the Trans-Canadian highway wouldn’t cripple Canada, but it would make it a lot more difficult because the freeway and highway systems isn’t as built out. Canada has similar problems as the US in the western states: Mountains. In addition: Snow.

            OTOH, look at Washington and Oregon. Neither have a lot of routes between I-5 and the eastern side of the Cascades. Or Oregon from Willamette Valley west through the coast range to highway 101. Oregon is particularly bad for routes from highway 97 to Idaho border (dang mountains, again). Road systems are there, logging roads, if the roads are open (gated or abandoned).

            Cut the railroads in the US, and same problems. Particularly in the west. A lot of abandoned rail lines.

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            1. I was actually coming back to say the easiest-to-isolate thing I could think of was the stuff crossing the Cascade mountains, and that’s mostly because they take a lot of work to keep the freeways open.

              Winter, it’s not really something you can go over, you have to go around. (possibly multiple states north or south) Summer, like you say, logging roads and stuff.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Yes. As 2020 showed us. 2020 it was fire. But, snow, wind, or accidents, can shut them all down.

                Donner Pass, California was closed this week, end of June. Whiteout snow conditions. Yellowstone didn’t close (*passes might have, BearTooth was impassable), it had a good amount of snow too, for the last few days (haven’t checked FB posts for today).

                (*) Reason why when we go to Yellowstone I turn on the road text alerts. Even in August. More likely Dunraven and Beartooth passes temporary closures. But the pass on the southern loop has closed overnight due to ice/snow too, any month.

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                1. If the west/east routes are closed and cannot be cleared due to snow in Oregon or Washington, then, by road both would be isolated, except for maybe highway 101. Because if the east/west routes are closed over the Cascades, almost guarantied, the Siskiyou Pass for I-5 and highway 97, is closed. Siskiyou Pass is more likely to be closed than the other highways.

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  18. Whew. The lead in had me worried that we should all hide our Japanese folding panels from Sarah. Glad to see that it was a mere hijacking. I really should go to Libertycon at least once before I die. It’s really hard to go afterwards, and people look at you funny if you do.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. One of these days I’ll go back. Can’t bring the old folks, too much involved nowadays to be farther than touching distance from the hospital dorks and nursey nerds.

      Liked by 2 people

  20. Oh, gads–I heard something about… an “intel guy” claiming that one mass event and transportation would be shut down in days, or something like that?

    Which is…

    :runs hands into hair, attempting to force top of skull back down:

    No. Just no. Severely impacted, sure. Out of reach for casual use, yes, of course.

    But for heaven’s sake there’s dozens of horse teams in a days’ travel by horse wagon from me!

    Liked by 5 people

    1. For a city, or even a smaller state, yeah. For the entire country or wider? You’d need a Stirling-level event. And even then the resilience of Americans in particular and mankind in general would shine through. Eventually.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. All the scenarios I can come up with that would actually shut down shipping “in days” are “wiped out the dinosaurs” level events, in which case it’s stopped because most humans are dead.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Well, actually, a correction, I created one that’s planet wide for a story I’m playing with, but it wouldn’t even work because the nanites only take out microchip and smaller type electronics, not like old tractors that don’t have a computer in them.

          Liked by 1 person

  22. It was great to see you and the other Huns (and a multitude of non-huns as well). I would not have missed that panel for anything. Easily my favorite.

    I did have a discussion with the mod (both us being from Iowa and former EMA) afterwards in the hallway and he didn’t seem particularly discombobulated.

    Besides, it was “Good Training!” for him.

    Here’s hoping I can make it to next year’s

    Liked by 1 person

  23. Sarah, we are also back (well, we’re on the next step of our 25th Anniversary World (and Ohio) Tour and Hootenanny) and…well please understand that LC 38 was my first con. Not my first LC. My first con EVER. The hilarious memory of that panel, those gifts, and your “I MUST VIOLENTLY DISAGREE” delivered one inch away from the microphone in full-on Disappointed Village Grandmother voice will live with me the rest of my days. Also the moderator’s rather panicked expression.

    And yes, Shells did the Chinchilla of Hope for you. The plushie is a cute chinchilla obtained somewhere but the wings are hand-made. Because finding fairy wings for a chinchilla is something that even Amazon can’t help you do, apparently.

    It was awesome to meet you and so many other Huns and both of us hope to return and meet many more in the future. Thank you. This community is the best.

    Liked by 3 people

  24. “until …. three of them claimed that if something or other happens civilization will die.”

    Okay, fess up. Who else was unable to stop laughing when they heard this. (raises hand)

    Liked by 4 people

  25. Man, I wish we could have been there. It sounds like a blast.

    We’re now at a site with 50 amp, meaning we have air conditioning, but the slideput problem is not fixed. Sigh.

    Meanwhile….. keep an eye out this weekend.

    Liked by 2 people

  26. You are 100% right about the resourcefulness of Americans. There are many Youtube channels showing people building unique vehicles from a variety of junkyard parts. Mechanical creativity is beyond the expertise of most of the doom and gloomers. Americans build things. My lab partner in aircraft mechanic school was excited to hear that I had a Kawasaki H2 motorcycle because he had build the engine from one into a giant chainsaw for the lumberjack competitions in Hayward Wisconsin. Merely keeping society running while rebuilding after a disaster would be a piece of cake.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. The collapse of the centralized government would be the collapse of bureaucrats with all their regulations holding us back…

      Speaking of collapsing regulations, did you see the awesome news?

      “Today USDOT announced a new proposal to enable civil supersonic flight by replacing speed limits with noise limits, ushering in a new era of safer, quieter, and faster air travel for all Americans.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Only one problem with that: Isn’t there actual Federal law that says that no civilian flight shall cause a sonic boom to reach the surface of the United States?

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        1. This regulation change is based on Booms supersonic tests where they showed with advanced weather modeling and their plane design they could go supersonic without a ground noticeable boom. So we CAN have our cake and eat it too apparently.

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      2. Yeah, the idea of bringing back civilian supersonic flight has been bubbling up for several years now. Part of push is designing aircraft to minimize the strength of the shock wave produced. The other part is ensuring that those shock waves are only produced at high enough altitude that by the time the “boom” reaches the ground damage is non-existent and annoyance is minimized. Updating the regulations to focus on measurable noise rather than a blanket speed limit is part of making the change possible. This time around they might even be able to make supersonic transport more profitable than the Concorde ever was.

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    1. They’re so repetitive too. Like you read 1984 and Brave New World and maybe one or two others after that, exactly what new ground is being broken?

      Liked by 2 people

    2. :has half an idea after seeing a headline for a Dave Bautista and Sam L. Jackson movie, plus memories of Avengers: Endgame:

      …What if…post-apocalyptic fic were to take off? Where people rebuild the world after it “ended”? :pokes idea further: I was wondering what the opposite of dystopia might be a few days ago. Hmm. If it was done with hope instead of all grimdark….

      Liked by 1 person

  28. Man, I wish we could have been there. It sounds like a blast.

    We’re now at a site with 50 amp, meaning we have air conditioning, but the slideput problem is not fixed. Sigh.

    Meanwhile….. keep an eye out this weekend.

    Liked by 4 people

            1. Maxim 5 – Close Air Support and Friendly Fire should be easier to tell apart.

              Maxim 15 – Only You can prevent Friendly Fire.

              Liked by 1 person

  30. Regarding dystopian civilizational collapse: Blackpill is just “stop trying”, to which I say —

    F RIGHT OFF.

    Humans try, even when trying looks stupid. Yoda and George Lucas were just wrong – there is definitely “Try”.

    Liked by 3 people

  31. LOL Missed that panel. My sympathies to the bushwhacked panelist and moderator though.
    I have little interest in dystopias, but am thinking about tagging Advance Guards with dystopia since many of my readers seem to consider it such. When I get home, I’ll have to get right on that.

    Liked by 1 person

  32. I would like to see pictures of George the eagle and the chinchilla of hope in a future post.

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  35. This is hilarious. Just the other week, I was talking about collisions between Serious Organized panels on the coasts, and Midwest chaos.

    And lo, it sounds like a nice example happened. In one of the border states between fannish settlement patterns.

    Honestly, I like this a lot. Not because conflict happened, but because it is a beautiful demonstration of different fannish agendas and base assumptions.

    Wish I had been there.

    Liked by 3 people

  36. When I was in high school, back in the mesozoic, I was a library aide (with an ‘e’) at a school where all the grades were in a single building. One of the duties that the aides had was taking a cart full of books to a middle-school sustained silent reading thing and then rolling it back to the library at the end of the period. This usually was assigned to a one particular aide, but one day they were out and I drew the short straw.

    At the end of the period, as I got ready to roll the cart back up the hallway to the library, perhaps 100 yards away, I looked up and saw every one of those middle-schooler’s eyes were on me. Now, I’m not that interesting a character, so I knew something was up right away, and it gave me pause.

    I figured out just exactly what was up as I attempted to push the cart out the door. One of the imps had set the wheel brakes on the cart while I was paying attention to something else. Apparently, that was a common prank they played on anyone new that brought the cart down. Fortunately, I was familiar with the functionality of that kind of cart wheels and was able to release the brakes without too much delay, so I’m afraid their entertainment was short-lived.

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