Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I woke up with all symptoms of a bad cold. I still have to put DSR up for pre-order. BUT there will be a nap before it. (I’m not sure if it’s a cold or allergy, but I suspect a cold because I feel exhausted and allergy doesn’t do that.) So I thought I’d do a blast from the past. I hope that’s okay.

In Praise of Broken — A blast from the Past from June 2012

If I had a dime for every time I’ve read that “every baby should be planned” and that “every puppy should be wanted” and that “everyone should have a fulfilling occupation” I’d have too many dimes to be contained in the universe.  But the question is: would every dime be shiny?

What are you getting at Sarah?

What I am getting at is that many people seem to have completely lost track of the distinction between ideal and actual.  Let me spell it out for you: ideal exists only as a perfect thing in your mind.  Like the battle plan not surviving contact with the enemy, it will never survive contact with reality.

That perfectly planned child will suddenly become unplanned when it turns out to be a girl, rather than a boy, or a boy rather than a girl.  Or when he/she turns out to have a personality completely different from what his parents’ expected.  While IQ might be broadly inheritable, at least in components (mostly from the mother, interestingly enough) the way it’s expressed isn’t necessarily.  So you’ll have the bookish parents with the mechanically gifted child, or vice-versa.  Planned?  Who told you you could plan a chaotic system?  It’s sort of like planning your day tomorrow – you’d best have three layers of plans in case it rains, in case a wildfire comes through, in case it’s fine and beautiful.  And even then, it will find a way to surprise you.

And the puppy who was so wanted?  The family that adopted him will get sick and have to give him away.  They’ll unexpectedly lose their jobs.  The puppy will turn out to have a condition that’s not fatal but is a life-long drain and expense.  Or something else will happen you can’t predict.

But, Sarah, you say, shouldn’t we PLAN for the ideal?  Then we just adapt to less than ideal.

It depends on the plan.  There is a type of positive planning, in which you leave the route open to the wonder of the broken (yes, I’ll explain) and the negative planning, where you won’t take anything less than absolute perfection.  The negative planning is usually what you get when government bureucrats or do-gooding busybodies get involved.

It concentrates on NOT LETTING the less than ideal happen.  These are the people who think you should be licensed to have children, after you pass classes that say you’re an ideal parent in THEIR WAY.  The people who think every unplanned baby should be aborted or killed up to three months after birth (you only think I’m joking.)  These are the people who post on craigslist screaming at people giving away puppies and kittens that they are terrible people and should have had their animal spayed.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that I think overpopulation is lies, damn lies and statistics and that in fact the current worldwide crisis is caused by population ALREADY falling.  (I confess the evidence is circumstantial and thin, but there is some and – more importantly – the evidence on the other side is dubious and suffers from wrong-process.)  That’s the subject for a whole post and one I don’t have the energy to write right now.  Let’s leave aside the fact that I think our obsession with spaying and neutering in fact can act (is acting?) as a sort of reverse selective breeding, pushing cats and dogs back to non-domesticated (no?  We keep the cutest/friendliest from reproducing.)  And also that in some areas of the country – here – you either buy a breed dog, adopt a dog who turned out less than ideal for someone else, or … adopt a puppy imported from elsewhere.  In Colorado puppies seem to come from Texas.  But in some places they come from abroad.  Cats are more abundant because… they’re cats and harder to catch and confine.

Let’s instead look at the other side of the coin, and why negative planning for the ideal and temper tantrums at people who don’t follow your version of ideal, are stupid: because broken plans and broken ideals often come as a blessing.

Sorry to use the religious term, but I don’t know how else to express it.  Sometimes the crisis-unplanned turns out to be the best thing you ever got.

Right after our cat Pete died, we found ourselves adopting Euclid because otherwise he was going to be euthanized because he had an uti and our humane society euthanizes those, so it doesn’t spread throughout the pens.  We had about twenty minutes in which to decide.  We had – G-d knows – enough cats.  But he would have died otherwise.  We adopted him.

Yes, Euclid is broken in interesting ways.  My son calls him a feline Woody Allen.  Only Woody Allen isn’t into extreme body modification, while Euclid chews off his leg hair and gives himself a poodle cut.  Also, some right b*stard trained Euclid to fabric before we got him, which is why we can’t have rugs on our floors, not till Euclid departs this vale of tears. (On the good side, Euclid doesn’t show any propensity to love on adopted daughters.  Of course, he doesn’t have any.  Um…)

But in the days after 9/11, when it seemed I could not stop crying, he was the cat who came and loved on me.  He’s the one who sits on you when you’re sick or worried, and purrs and reassures you all is well in the world.  And sometimes that purr is your only connection to happiness.

Or let’s look at how many not only unplanned but disastrously unplanned children go on and make the world a better place.  Right now it’s early morning and only Leonardo DaVinci – unplanned, illegitimate, broken in interesting ways – comes to mind, but I know there are scores of others.  (Yes, there’s also people like Hitler – but there is no indication that it was the fact they were unplanned that sent them spinning towards evil.)

A friend who had a terrible childhood once told me that she supported abortion unconditionally, because it would have been much better to be aborted than to be abused.  What she was missing was that her parents would never have aborted her.  She WAS planned and needed in the family: as a scape goat.  The kids that get aborted in that type of calculus are the ones whose parents are afraid they can’t give them the very best – just like the animals who get spayed are those whose owners fear that they can’t find good enough homes for the litters – not those that are born to be mistreated.

Part of this, I think, is that our life has become so good compared to that of our ancestors that we think we can push it just a little further and make it ideal.

Every baby will be wanted!  Every pet will be loved!  And there shall be no more tears and suffering!

Never works.  Ever.  There will always be people who need a kid as a scape goat.  And even if you certified parents there will be parents who are fine young, and then get some illness or some other problem and – there you have it.  Less than ideal.  And before you say “but then the kids can be taken away” think of strangers evaluating and deciding family life from the outside.

I was a disastrously unplanned child, born premature with all the problems that implies.  I had the world’s sickliest childhood.  Mom has health problems that make her less than an ideal parent.  (She knows this.  She never wanted children.  She ended up with two of us by accident.)  Were there rough patches?  Oh, sure.  Aren’t there in everyone’s life?  But my family has a shared sense of humor, which helped.  And I got to live and write, and marry and have kids of my own.  Would it be better if I never existed because I wasn’t wanted?  Or even because I would, of necessity, always be at least partly broken?

Some of the best pets I’ve had have been mutts or even feral babies whom I tamed.  Right now we have Havey-cat whom we found on a mini-golf course, starved and covered in grease, and with a broken tail.  He now presents and behaves as a Turkish van.  Is he?  At least partially, probably.  But he’s not less loved because he came to us when we were maxed out on cats and definitely not in the market for one who is a fuzz machine (we’re all mildly allergic to cats.)  And he is, again, one of those animals who can lift your mood, because he’s a born clown and still kitten-like after three years.

Oh, yeah, and through no fault of anyone, I never fit in Portugal.  But my askew childhood and youth – difficult as they were in living them – resulted in my falling in love with a stranger from a strange land, and finding home that way.

Will some percentage of children you give up for adoption be abused?  Inevitable.  A controlling system can’t prevent that.  No system can.  What it can do is keep children trapped in foster care or convince people to abort rather than put the kids up for adoption.  Will some percentage of kittens given away end up as snake food?  Inevitable.  No system can prevent that.  I doubt it’s as many as we’ve been led to believe, though.  Most cats throughout history have been pets and not snake food.  Most humans are predisposed to at least not mistreat pets.  Call it co-evolution.

Look at your lives: really look.  Could you have planned everything that happened?  Would your ideal life have been REALLY better?

Take my career: did I intend to have my first trilogy tank, trapping me in ten years of midlist hell?  Well, no.  But let’s imagine it had succeeded.  I’d now be stuck in the “literary fantasy” niche, which btw pays lousily and where they expect only one book every two years.  Worse, I found by my third book that while I can do it and even enjoy it to an extent, if I do nothing but that I become horribly depressed.

But the trilogy failed, and I was broke, and we were paying on two houses and I was fixing the “old” house for sale, and I couldn’t find a day job.  Then Jim Baen offered me money.  Then Berkley paid me to write Plain Jane.  My heart was broken, I didn’t want to write anymore.  The dream was gone.

But I needed money, and so I wrote, and even through the hell of six-books-a-year the dream came back.  And now I’m facing the chance for a better career than I hoped for AND I have the skills of incredible amounts of practice under pressure.

Would I have chosen this route?  No.  Was it rough as heck at times?  Yep.  Would I wish it undone?  No.  I wouldn’t wish any of the books unwritten.  I wouldn’t wish what I learned unlearned.

There is no perfect upbringing – for man or beast.  There is no ideal situation that can’t be reversed.  There isn’t any reason to believe that wanted – animals or humans – are better.  There isn’t any reason to believe the most peaceful places or eras are better.  Yes, the fourteenth century was a terrible time, but it gave us the renaissance and, eventually, the enlightenment.

Taking the broken and doing the best we can with it is all we can do.

And sometimes it’s much better than the ideal could have been.

This is not a butt-kicking post.

Okay, I lie. This is totally a butt kicking post.

Today I dragged my behind out of bed early, after going to bed late last night. You see, I meant to upload Darkship Renegades today, to get it out this month, after the usual arguments with Amazon (what?) It might be less of an argument this time, but I can’t just assume it will be.

But while I was going over it a day ago, I realized two things: First, the mind-talk made no sense whatsoever, because it wasn’t italicized. I don’t know if it was like that in the Baen version — it might have been — but in what I have, from the last go-over, sometimes the mind-talk is italicized, sometimes the tag “he said/she said” is italicized and mind talk is normal text. Somehow my editor missed that, and it made some passages very hard to understand.

And as with everything of this sort, once you start poking and paying attention….

Let’s say I don’t know if it’s simply the fact it’s been 11 years, or if it’s … me. But looking it over, if I were doing that book today, it would be two books, and start 35 pages in.

Those of you who just whined “But it’s my favorite book!” chill. I just changed the wording, because beginning and ending were rushed, and what I call “panopticon” — too distant, glossing over things, etc. — and hopefully made it more focused. I know that this late in the game — forget deadline — it cannot be substantially changed, without getting a whole lot of people mad at me.

However, for those who don’t know this, that kind of revision is very hard. I can’t change it enough to make it perfect, but improving it on that framework is very hard.

I did it till eleven last night, and got up at seven to do it today (I had an interruption midday for 3 hours, but finished two hours ago.) So, when I woke up this morning my reaction was “Don’t wanna.” Because it’s bad enough doing a rehab job when you can make it perfect, but when you know you can’t….

However I kicked my own butt up, and finished the work, and I think I have improved the book. I also do realize it probably wasn’t as bad as it feels to me. It’s always a problem when you’re looking at the back panel of the computer trying to optimize it. You see problems no one else does. I hope you guys will enjoy it.

BUT what I’m trying to say is this: if there’s something that needs to be done, you should kick your own butt and do it.

The world is made up of many, many things you can’t improve or change. Concentrate on what you can. Even if it’s just a little bit, it’s something less broken with the world.

Sometimes — like right now — it’s all we can do: hold a small candle up, against encroaching darkness.

Sometimes all you can do is make a cat happy, listen to a friend, smile at a total stranger. Sometimes all you can do i slightly improve a book. Make a meal. Clean your room.

And sometimes that is enough.

Go do it.

I’ve been reading about Jack the Ripper again. Yes, there was a reason for it, at least at the beginning, until I realized my research was a bit stupid, and what I knew was already enough, unless I can find an interesting way to incorporate all the theories into the story, and that’s unlikely. (Rhodes to Hell. Which will get written one of these weekends.)

Anyway, the current book had an interesting theory I’d not seen before, so I started reading it, because given how our secret services and how corrupt they are I could well believe the British secret service might well have been behind the Whitechapel murders.

Except… two thirds in, before he gets to why the secret service would even do this, he gives us a panorama of the world at the time, relying exclusively on socialist sources.

Look, I’m not going to say there weren’t terrible things happening in Victorian England. For one, yes, they were much poorer than us, which means their poor were far poorer than anyone today. But most of them were recognized as terrible and dealt with by non socialists. And the socialist press was usually at good twenty years behind. Amid the terrible things adduced to the “capitalism” of Great Britain was the story of a single mother abusing her little boy. The only way this makes sense as being the fault of the system is if one swallows the Marxist bullshit that capitalism is the cause of insanity, and that only socialism can bring about its banishment. Which is, of course, poppycock. Also the reason the Soviet Union treated opponents as being mentally ill.

I’ll grant you that the British empire was not merciful. Though I’ll note it left places in much better shape than the soviet empire did. I’ll also mention that colonialism is just what we call “Mankind’s drive to survive” often expressed at the tribal level. And that you can’t have one without the other, as we’re learning daily.

Anyway, this made me think of how socialism was brought in int he name of “compassion.” In the same way our socialists talk of the difference between rich and poor as calling for some kind of redistribution and vengeance, the author of this book practically foams at the mouth that there were rich people, while the inhabitants of the East End were so poor. And then foams at the mouth some more at the idea that the poverty of the East End was largely self inflicted.

And yet– And yet, even though I note he white washed the biographies of the murdered women a lot, even he records the fact that they were all — everyone of them — addicted to the bottle, and often also to sex with strangers (not just for money.) He foams at the mouth about their not having “the price of a bed” but in at least two cases records that they had it and drank it before night time. In fact, one of them is dying of alcoholism as she’s killed.

All of this is, somehow, the fault of the rich of people, as though — somehow — they were responsible for making sure their brothers and sisters didn’t drink. Or perhaps, had life so good and perfect they had no wish to drink.

I’m not going to say that alcoholism and drug addiction isn’t a disease. I suspect it is a form of mental illness, as are a lot of other things we do to our own detriment. Mental illness, to be fair, is very poorly understood. And I suspect a lot of what we call mental illness are simply impulses that helped our ancestors survive, but which are now out of favor.

Whichever way it is, I have sympathy with those addicted to substances, or for that matter to behaviors. I have a ridiculously addictive personality — I once got addicted to fanfiction to the point of barely functioning — and just about all I can do is avoid things I could be addicted to (there’s a reason my husband won’t let me have mahjong on any computer) and channel it to productive addictions (You could say this blog.) In fact, those who know I’ve barely been on facebook or other social media, know it’s a matter of avoiding addiction.

So, of course, I have sympathy. But sympathy is not the same as wanting to somehow banish the effects of addiction and self-destruction. On the contrary, when you enable addiction and self destruction, what you get is more addiction and self-destruction.

It’s now been a hundred years, more or less, since the socialists got their way, to some extent, in every country of the world.

A social net, administered by the government, and not at the mercy of random charities, and also not requiring any change of behavior from those it “helps” was build under most Western societies, where the free market is more and more restricted every passing year.

And yet, in the year of our Lord 2022, we have “homeless” lying in their own feces in the biggest and brightest cities in the western hemisphere.

They are the same type of people who ended up in the East End. (Not all. There were married East Enders on the way up, like most of the Jewish immigrants from Russia, malgre the socialist illusions of a lot of them.) Addicted, mentally ill, dangerous to themselves and others, and prey to every vice known to men.

As the lives of the prostitutes who were killed by Jack the Ripper exemplify, even then they were not starving. And a lot of them received charity from various sources, including those who got them jobs for a while. It’s just that any additional money went to drink as it now goes to meth or pot or other drugs.

And the more money they are given the more money goes to this, in the end creating a spiraling cycle of self-destruction.

We’ve tried it. We’ve tried taking from the rich to give to the poor, deserving and undeserving alike. We’ve tried propping up the self-esteem of poor strayed lambs so that they don’t feel the need for drink or drugs.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. None of it works that way.

Under the best possible circumstances, human life is tragic. Things happen to every one of us that tear the heart out of us, and the the will to live. Those are of different magnitudes, and the less suffering one has experienced the more one feels the slightest blow. Until one gets to “micro aggressions.” Note this is not a wish for more suffering, merely an acknowledgement that reducing suffering doesn’t mean less addiction or neurotic anguish.

Escaping emotional pain is very human. Some personalities are more susceptible to it than others, but all humans try to escape pain. Which leads us to addiction and alcoholism.

And then there is the fact that normal, not-broken humans aren’t diligent and persevering. Look in the stone age, if you killed more mammoths after you had more than enough to eat, you didn’t end up better off. You just destroyed the eco system in your area.

There is in normal human beings the tendency to do enough to be “comfortable” and not one gesture more. We who work, and like working, and like saving and differing pleasure are honestly more than a bit wrong in the head. It’s just that our brokenness fits with technology and has allowed us to give the world prosperity unknown.

Which doesn’t banish poverty, because most humans are not broken in that way. They will do enough to survive, and not a bit more.

In many ways, except for dying alcoholism and similar diseases, the East End poor were very sane. They were doing the minimal required to survive, even back then. And they did largely survive.

And our homeless (trust me, I used to hear them talk when I walked in downtown Colorado Springs) consider themselves the smart ones. No saying they aren’t either. They don’t do a lick of work, and live lives that would be considered lavish anywhere in the past. And by the way, also lavish in the Socialist Republic of the USSR. The rumored ad that said “Will trade state apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag in the streets of Los Angeles” is only a joke if you look at it another way. Look at it another way, and it makes perfect sense.

Socialists use compassion to get hold of all the levers of the economy. I’m not even going to say some of them aren’t really compassionate, though that becomes hard to believe the more each “experiment” in socialism produces nothing but suffering. However, the only way to avoid people killing themselves on the streets, in their own excrement, is to have a totalitarian state in which everyone is controlled and given so much they can do and earn.

And that, obviously, due to problems of information (and human motivation) always ends in “They pretend to pay, we pretend to work.”

Someone with a state apartment in the old USSR might be (marginally. Trust me, I’ve heard stories) more comfortable than the homeless in LA. But he was also completely unable to change his situation or do anything to improve it.

Someone on a sleeping bag in the LA streets, if not addicted to anything, and if capable of working, would be out of there relatively quickly, and in a trajectory that might have limits in wealth and satisfaction, but probably not relevant ones. And what’s more, their work would ultimately create wealth for everyone else.

It is rumored that Asian illegal immigrants, as well as a certain number of African and Hispanic ones don’t linger long in the homeless camps, even if they head there first. They come possessed of behaviors, and a brokenness that makes them work and try to improve themselves.

The later-day-Socialists we live with have recognized this. They now preach that “privilege” includes any type of education and a willingness to work or interest in creating anything at all.

Which means only that they are now trying to eliminate that, in pursuit of their world where the state controls us each and every one and where even the least susceptible of us feel a need to escape by drugs and self-destruction. Because they’ve become insane enough that to them this is “compassion.” Or at least no one can feel guilty for having more.

One would think at some point they would re-examine their premises and wonder if all accumulation of wealth is theft, and if in fact wealth can be created as well as destroyed.

Of course they don’t, because they aren’t aware of the philosophy behind their feelings. They simply feel that no one should be allowed to have more than anyone else.

Which is all very well, except that if they take down the US, they take down the source of wealth that has been keeping the more socialism-infected countries from starving. Already this winter, we’re going to see the fruits of socialism worldwide. And it will get harder for the next two or three years at least.

The funny part is that the socialists can’t understand why people are revolting against their “compassionate” rule. Which figures, because they also can’t understand why some homeless guy isn’t entitled to take, say, everything I own.

Well, I came to this country with a suitcase weighing 20kg (It was the maximum.) What I have I’ve made, saved and built (And I’m by no means a paragon. Yes, I could have a lot more.) And what is mine I keep, partly out of compassion, because giving money to the self-destructive only makes them destroy more. And entices a lot more people to the same vices.

The false compassion of the socialists is based on erroneous premises, and is about to bring down the very engine of prosperity that lifted humanity out of dire need.

What can’t go on won’t go on, and the burned hand teaches.

There are a lot of burned hands in the world right now. And they’ll bring down socialism worldwide, from the “compassionate” states of Europe, to the repressive ones of Cuba and China.

It is more than time. 100 years is a long time for humanity to spend destroying everything in the name of compassion.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.
*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. – SAH*

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Preternaturally Familiar

Where is home for a Hunter?

Uneasy rests the head upon which rests the leadership of the River County Hunter clan. Arthur Saldovado’s older brother grows distant and untrusting. Arthur must balance his duty to the senior Hunter with protecting the shadow mage Hunter in Shadows and preventing strife within the clan. Arthur’s adopted daughter, Lelia Lestrang, watches and worries. That is, when she’s not trying hard to keep from ordering her children to marry (she wants grandchildren!) and sighing mightily when her much loved husband leaves his clothes lying in front of the laundry hamper yet again.

Then a sorceress discovers the remains of a gate between the worlds, cast with blood-path magic.

Where can an out-cast Hunter find shelter, save for the grave?

“I wish something would happen and clear the air!” When the storm breaks, Lelia, André, their Familiars, and their family pull together to fight a battle Lelia though had ended fifty years before.

The end of an era? Or the start of something Preternaturally Familiar?

FROM TOM VEAL: Daimon Born: The First Adventure of Theagoniste

To feeble human perception, Earth is a tiny ball inside a gigantic void. To the daimons, the aetherial winds fill that void with sights, sounds, odors, tastes, feelings and sensations that humans cannot comprehend. From the clash of those winds, daimons come into being. “Daimon Born” portrays that strange world beyond the Moon from the viewpoint of Theagonistes, a daimon whose actions will someday be highly consequential for the human world. This prologue to his biography recounts his first (literal) impact on the Earth and how he became an exile there.

FROM E. L. LYONS: Starlight Jewel: Gifts of the Auldtree

Gifts of the Auldtree is a world of mythology, glamor, mud, blood, civilizations in conflict, and hints of distant powers. In the center of it all is the mysterious Starlight Jewel of Minalav.

Axly, the Starlight Company’s premier seductress-thief and assassin, will do whatever it takes to keep her human brother hidden. The secrets of his origin could tear their world apart, and keeping them has driven her to lies and murder. Her people, the sprygan-human hybrids that live under the city of Minalav, aren’t keen on allowing their most skilled asset to roam free. A job with a human offers a chance to get her brother out of danger, but it comes at a price. Divided loyalties, duty, romance, and the twisted hands of fate intertwine as the characters struggle through this epic fantasy adventure.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Flight of Miss Stanhope: A Short and Sweet Regency Romance

Marianne Stanhope is in trouble. Her family is urging her to accept the attentions of a most odious suitor, so she turns to a gentleman of her acquaintance for aid. But Mr. Firth has his own reasons for assisting Miss Stanhope, and it falls to her childhood friend Mr. Killingham to convince her that she’s made a dreadful mistake.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Simple Service: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure

They’re stranded beyond the known stars. Will Peter Dawe’s perilous mission with a brother he despises end in death?

A lost starship’s settlers, isolated on an uncharted alien world, manage to terraform a mountain-ringed valley into a rich replica of Earth. Despite their success reproducing the environment they need to survive and thrive, only tenuous forces hold together the human

colony on the world of Not What We Were Looking For. The governor’s appropriation of the western settlers’ weapons for the city strains those bonds to breaking point—and then beyond when Peter Dawe’s father sends him to get the weapons back.
Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe’s restless nature easily endures the lost colony world’s rigors. His genetic modifications make it even easier. So when Peter retrieves the family weapon, he also brings back a motorbike, a piece of technology no longer available to everyone.

It would be a fine prize to keep to himself. He won it. He earned it. He quickly learns that his brother Simon lies in wait to take what isn’t his. Simon wants more than just the motorbike. He wants Peter’s glory.

But when Peter’s father forces him to take his hated older brother on Peter’s next mission, the pair must not only navigate the city’s perils and politics but learn to work together—when neither thinks the other should be in charge. Their success—and their very lives—depend on it. Or will Peter be proven right that he should have faced this task alone?

Simple Service is the first book in the immersive Martha’s Sons science fiction series. If you like gripping action, insurmountable odds, and alien worlds, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s tale of a man determined not to let family ties sabotage mission success.

Buy Simple Service to pull off the impossible today!

FROM ROY M. GRIFFIS: The Thing From HR: A Cthulhu, Amalgamated Novel

What’s a nice Shoggoth like him doing in a dump like this?

Narg was content working as a Damnation Services-10 in HR. Sure, he was related to one of the Elder Gods, but a little nepotism never hurt any Thing. His life was just wailing and gibbering, right up until his Uncle needed a small favor from his nephew.

All Narg had to do was go down among the humans…and pretend to be one of them.


These are not your Grandfather’s tales of Eldritch Horror: this is the untold story of the ghastly, unappreciated (and entirely expendable) minor monstrosities that support the Inscrutable Plans Of Dark Gods And Elder Things Beyond The Knowledge Of Men.

The Cthulhu Amalgamated series is a comic romp full of action and mystery, including, of course, Sanity-Shattering Horror––and that’s just the paperwork. Even H.P. could not conceive of the Corporate Terrors that await The Thing from HR.

FROM AMIE GIBBONS: Scorpions of the Deep: The Demon Crusades Dark Paranormal Thrillers

If you love chilling tales of the demonic that’ll keep you up at night a la ‘The Conjuring,’ and stories of the ultimate battle against evil for humanity’s soul, then plunge into this pulse pounding, paranormal thriller series from bestselling author Amie Gibbons.


Since The Fall, demons have infected humanity. Most people these days don’t believe. And as the world grows darker, what they don’t know will hurt them.

Sarah Blakely’s back home after college when her life falls apart. With no plan, no direction, and no hope, she could use something to believe in. Especially after her depressed mind starts playing tricks on her.

She’s seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, that can’t be there, no matter what abilities she’s imagined herself having in the past, because demons, ghosts, and the supernatural aren’t real…

But there are more things in Hell and Earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy. They’ll use her depression to break her. Does she have it in her to save her soul from the clutches of Hell?

FROM SARAH HOYT: Deep Pink

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: POSITION

You, dear reader currently reading this, are almost certainly of miscegenated race (to use the good old, racially-loaded word of the 19th century.) And by that I mean that within the last two thousand years or so you have received blood from someone whom an American would identify at first sight as “another race.”

The exceptions are people from populations so isolated over the last two thousand years or so that they are effectively a single “race.” And even those, if you look beyond two thousand years are more meaningful mixes of well… the original human “races” or perhaps “Subspecies” is a better term here: Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Nadeli, Homo Denisovan, Homo Soloensis. I’m probably missing ten or so of them, because every time I dip in after a while away there is another species discovered that contributed to our DNA.

I’ll note that those ancient species had a heck of a lot more differences from each other than any of our so called “races” which are mostly indistinguishable under the microscope, unless you’re looking for specific diseases of isolated populations, and even that, often, is not congruent with what we view as racial characteristics.

I have to tell you one of the things that drives me completely bonkers about my fellow Americans born and raised here is the way they’re completely obsessed with reading racial tea leaves.

I had a moment of shock when a friend and I selected someone for the cover of a romance who looked rather like a girl who is my cousin on both sides of the family (mom’s cousin married dad’s cousin) and the writer objected because the cover was “obviously” Hispanic and the character wasn’t.

Here I must point out that Hispanic and Latin are CULTURES, not races. Though Americans moved happily from the identification of a common culture to considering it a “race” and now insist you have to have Indian blood to belong to either, all of which is frankly goofy, since there are Hispanic and Latin cultures where the majority of the people consider themselves white, or for that matter part African.

The obsession with reading racial tea leaves from features strikes me as somewhere between giggle-worthy and the sort of horror you get when you find mom eating live snakes in the kitchen. Because it is for real and actually completely insane.

Part of this, and it worries me a little, because I wonder if it’s intentional malice or a fear of goring the deeply-cherished racial cows of the population, is that history is very poorly taught in the US.

I keep running into well-intentioned people who believe that wherever slavery existed black people were always slaves and white people masters.

I will illustrate this by mentioning the priest who on the feast day of St. Perpetua and St. Felicity gave a sermon on how the two saints overcame “racial prejudice” and proceeded, in the happy assumption that one of them was black and one white. This is in fact possible — I bow to Suburbanshee if she has sure knowledge — but not absolutely sure just from the fact one owned the other. It’s entirely possible (and some of the orthodox icons depict them this way) that one of them was of Mediterranean subrace and the other blond. BUT even if one of them was black, under Roman rules, the black one might very well be the mistress and the white one the slave.

HOWEVER every single depiction by and for Americans represent the slave as black. And a priest, who surely learned some Roman history in seminary (I PRESUME) also assumed this as correct.

This amounts to a rat’s nest of racial idiocy in American heads. Many schools teach — by default — that white people invented slavery to enslave black people. This discomfits both races, because it makes blacks feel both righteously oppressed and also that there must be something profoundly broken with them, else who could they have been thus selected for oppression. At best it stokes permanent anger at the world and white people. At worst it creates utter despondency. (Note that a lot of black parents object to CRT on that exact ground.)

To come up with that just-so story, it requires ignoring the fact that in fact slavery continues in Africa, and that the enslaved are mostly Africans, but also any skin color that comes within the slaver’s grip.

It also requires ignoring that every possible and impossible race imaginable has been both slaver and enslaved. The reason for this is simple: in subsistence societies there is always some number of tasks that no one with free will will want to do. Also, because humans are flawed and derived from Great Apes, we find we like owning vanquished enemies. At its origin, slavery is the “merciful” option, where instead of killing every member of the defeated tribe, you kept the inoffensive ones alive but as slaves, so that you could control them and they wouldn’t endanger your tribe. Which means most slaves were originally almost indistinguishable from the slavers. And yes, that you’re descended from uncountable numbers of slaves and their owners, be you black as pitch or blond as a Viking.

Yes, the most recent iteration of slaves, in modern Europe/America were Africans, mostly because on discovery of Africa the Europeans plugged into existing networks of slave trading. In other words, because African slaves were plentiful and cheap.

I’ll also note that since the industrial revolution, and through long and patient work of Christians, there were groups opposing slavery. In fact,t here were some working tirelessly from the sixteenth century or so on (That we know of.) These people were mostly “white” Europeans, of well-to-backgrounds, who fought tirelessly for the freedom of the enslaved, despite the fact that the enslaved looked quite different from them.

I’ll note in passing that yes, the Portuguese, Italians, Greeks and other Mediterranean sub races were often viewed by Northern Europeans as a “lighter African” mostly I believe because we tan, though possibly also because there were more black Roman citizens among us. Maybe.

Also, because of Othello the moor, Englishmen tend to think of “Moor” as black. Which is somewhat crazy cakes. The Middle East/North Africa of Mohammed was a boiling mess of remains of Roman mercenaries, Africans, etc. So, they were a ah “melting pot.” However, through the long (around 1000 years) occupation of the peninsula, the “Moors” became practically indistinguishable from anyone else, largely through enthusiastic taking of slaves on both sides of the moveable frontier.

Sure, you can say that the South of Portugal, which contains a higher rate of Mouriscos (secret Moors. Eh, in some variety) than the rest of the country is generally more tan, shorter, and of more gracile build than the North. But that assumption that this is because of “moors” would ignore the fact that the starting populations of both sides were different (The North being notably Celtic, the South having more Greek Colonies) and that the contributions to the genetic pool were by and large different. (Won’t bore you, but the South was more Visigothic, and the North more Swabian.)

In other words, looking at current populations for the characteristics of past races is sort of like looking at linguistics, and deciding that “HUman” is propaganda, since it refers only to races other than white, being derived form Hue-man. (No, it’s not. Just like History is not His-story. Both are insane and cause me to scream and foam at the mouth.)

Incidentally, the same applies to 23-and-me which compares your genetics to those of current populations. This means that even if you have fairy well documented Amerindian ancestry from the North East, that will show as “English or Irish” mostly because those tribes stopped existing, subsumed by English and Irish populations, which means that this is how they’ll show.

So, even if your “genetics” show as pure Scandinavian, Germanic, British, whatever, let me reassure you that you are in fact miscegenated as is the rest of the human race.

(It was hilarious before they had enough of a Portuguese sample, to see my genetics show up as…. well, all of Europe, part of Africa, and a decent amount of Amerindian. They have …. shaken out differently now.)

Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth.”

My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)

For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.

The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.

This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes,t here were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.

There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.

HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.

HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month.”

Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad king George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features…. As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.

Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)

The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black.” WITHOUT LOOKING.

And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people.”

This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.

What can we do about it?

Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.

I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human.”)

Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)

We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.

We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.

It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.

It’s time to stop with the nonsense.

(Update: fixed wrong word. Thank you John S. for pointing it out. The other one still comes up first for me, but I’m coming to the conclusion my search engine is weird.)

Let me start festivities by pointing out I’m not a doctor and I’m not impersonating one.

This is a schedule I’ve been advised to follow, and which seems to work (though it takes two weeks to a month to ‘establish’ and I keep falling off the wagon. However, when I’m doing it, and not interrupted by say cons, or family stuff, my autoimmune gets better; my ADD goes to manageable levels, and well… I generally perform way better. The trick is staying on it.)

So, it’s all in the approach to going to bed.

Two hours before going to bed, get off glowing screens. You can read, but do so on the kindle with the backlighting turned off, or on a paperbook. If you need minimal backlighting, put it on warm light, not blue.

About an hour before going to bed take 3mcg (I think. could be mg. The bottle is upstairs) of melatonin, unless it’s conterindicated. Half an hour later, take it again.

Try to go to sleep about 8:30 hours before you have to wake. If you wake during the night, stay still and try to go back to sleep.

Make sure your room is dark. There’s dark excluding curtains and shades. You shouldn’t be able to see your hand in front of your face. Ideally, you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your eyes closed and your eyes open.

Also, you should sleep a little cold. if temperature is a problem, investigate cooling sheets and covers.

Try for eight hours of sleep. It will take you about two weeks for it to happen naturally. Keeping the same time to go to bed helps.

Now, if you are me, and politics makes your heart race, try to avoid looking at politics after about 8 p.m.

You’re allowed to look at them in the morning, because it makes you wake up.

And that’s pretty much it, except for trying to do something relaxing when you’re off screens.

Now I’m working on drinking enough water…. It’s …. difficult.

Anyway, that’s the whole thing. If you have other things that work, let me know. Particularly if I can get in the groove faster.

I was frankly surprised only one of you complained and couldn’t even about the suggestion to abolish public/government schooling. There is a reason I had an heresy graphic with it.

I don’t know why one of you protested, because the complaint was about the overton window and I guess that I could now suggest things like this without scandal.

We’ll shelve that for late and psircle back to it.

Some of you had quibbles, and a friend had straight up opposition, so let me dispose of those before I return to the whole over-tuned window of legend.

The quibbles were:

that letting the families fend for themselves in education meant some kids wouldn’t be educated at all. I think you’ll find that’s wrong, if you look at past and other places with no state school. There are all sorts of organizations and societies that offered schooling, down to “That kind lady on the corner, who teaches poor kids”. (Someday remind me to tell you about my very first school, which was not a government school.) “But Sarah,” you say. “If the parents don’t care, the kids won’t learn.” “Yes,” I say. “And the same is true of government schools.

We’re already in a massively stratified educational culture, in which kids don’t learn much, and most of what they learn in school is indoctrination about whatever the thing the government is chasing is. (Right now, weirdly, anti-Americanism.) If parents don’t take an interest and push, they end up with maleducated liberal parrots. I don’t see how getting rid of the centers that make them so is any worse.

-For a well educated officer corps, there must be central instruction.

Well, yes, indeed. Which means the various services could/should set up schools (perhaps at high school level, to which admission would be by exam, and those interested in the services, or perhaps merely wanting to study there, would apply to them. Yes, these would still be government funded, but with specific purpose and intent, which makes them different from “push the newest thing this administration thinks it’s cool at everyone in general.” Which leads to yes, anti-Americanism, but also total educational mal-practice, such as teaching kids that white people invented slavery to enslave blacks, instead of just teaching them that slavery is a sin as old as mankind, and existing in all races, and inflicted upon all races. And that we’re blessed and happy to be existing in a time when slavery is not everywhere. All of this poison is being put in the national bloodstream by the schools paid for by a government that seems bent on annihilating us. A school set by a military service would obviously be different.

But beyond that, you’re missing the fact that other entities would set up schools. Small towns, for instance, would be quite likely to start schools for their youth. As would larger cities. Various companies would set up schools for the kids of employees, as a benefit (bet me.) As would neighborhoods and just some people wanting to make money.

Now, would all those be equal/comparable/teach the same thing? No. And therein is a strength.

Look, recently we ran into someone that believed the series Bridgerton was true history, and that England in the regency had a sort of apartheid system, with black people (including noblemen) living separate lives from white, until the king married a black woman. (The woman was actually German, with a distant Portuguese “moorish” ancestor, which means, mostly, honestly, probably a redhead (Ask me sometime about how the Moors in the peninsula became redheaded) and also from a line my mom is descended from (the Moorish thing is a … it was a political slander.) Anyway, she was blond, but one of her pictures some people think show “African features” (less than I have) and there you have it. An idiot American decided she was black and spun an entire lie from this.) Why do they believe that? Because they’re all indoctrinated in the same exact false history.

Yes, if you have different entities controlling the schools, then all of them will teach false things to some extent. It is impossible to teach the absolute truth, not the least because we don’t know it (though the truth 200 years back should NOT be a challenge.) But then many “Truths” will be in circulation, and by rubbing elbows with people who were taught differently, people get to discuss things, and eventually maybe come closer to the truth.

Which brings us back to the Overton window.

The Overton window is not natural to human society. It is the product of the mass-information-media-entertainment era.

No?

Sure, in some villages, or some other places, there are things you can’t see/say. That is usually because someone in that society, be it a village or a nation, is going to get under your nose for saying it. (At one point, you could get arrested in Portugal for shouting “Portugal is a sh*tty country!”)

Having “Unsayable” and “Unthinkable” and “if you say that in public you’ll be shunned” is always a sign of an oppressive society, whether the punishments are physical or mental, beatings or mere shunning.

Having beliefs that are beyond the pale — in fact, the existence of the pale — are a sign of an unhealthy society, one in which a truth is being enforced that is different from reality.

No? Fight me.

Look, yeah, sure, there are things people in all eras didn’t discuss in certain company due to manners or delicacy. One didn’t discuss sexual acts in front of children, not equipped to understand them, in most of the west since the onset of Christianity. One didn’t say certain things in front of elders either. “Gentlemen don’t discuss politics or coitus.” But that was a matter of — in a small gathering, or a confined society — keeping the social gears lubricated, and keeping disagreements at bay. What “couldn’t be said” varied.

However, the Overton window is something else. It is “you can’t report certain things, even if they are true, at the risk of becoming a social pariah.”

It avoids discussions of really important things, like how our kids are being sodomized by public education. Or how welfare really doesn’t contribute to the welfare of anyone. Or how Child Protective Systems is a money-laundering scam, in which kids die. Or how our government-funded science has become all government and almost no science. Etc.

It encourages rape rings like Rotherham, and has most of the black population of the US believe they are more at risk of police shootings than whites, which is plainly not true, but can’t be said, because the media has deemed saying so is “racist” (Somehow.) So people live in fear, rather than knowing they’re not at higher risk than anyone else.

And while speaking of risk, the media, and its control of information and encouragement of shunning dissenters, has led to fear of a “slightly more dangerous” flu, and led to elderly people living their last years in isolation and terror, and also led to our kids being isolated into loss of social function.

Furthermore, the only way to keep the Overton window over a whole country is to enforce strict control over the media, and even social media, and to ruthlessly crush down dissenters, so that everyone appears to agree, leading to shock-rejection of those who manage to break through the wall of government-encouraged-enforced lying.

A wall that they try to keep even when the lies are patently absurd and harmful. (Like the idea anyone who dislikes the Biden reign of terror is a terrorist or insurgent, or for that matter racist.)

The Overton window can suck what I don’t have.

Fortunately the total control that allowed the Overton window to move only at the careful prodding of the — mostly leftist — media and state is gone. They still have more control than I like, but not as much as they used to.

The truth is that we need to see reality and work from reality, not from the carefully constructed “reality” of “intellectuals” soaked in Marxism since pre-school. Because Marxism is not only not reality, it’s like malware for human societies and human souls.

If we are to retain civilization — let alone freedom, or individual rights — we must, right now, as hard as we can, smash the Overton window, and run towards the light of truth.

It is the only way we survive.

Good Morning, Ladies, Gentlemen and Hermit Crabs! It is Wednesday and here at According to Hoyt it’s Heresy Time!

Today’s heresy — against “the way things have always been done” is “Let’s get the state out of education, and let’s keep those two separated forever more!”

Stop looking at me like guppies. First, “the way things have always been done” applies, at most to the last 100 years. Second, you guys know how I feel about the state. Everything goes worse with the state involved! (Except possibly for defending our borders. I don’t know. We’ll find out if the state ever decides to do it.) Third, I am not calling for guillotines or ropes and lampposts, so as things go around here, I’m very calm, bordering on practically asleep.

What I am calling for is a cold, hard look at the utility of mass-industrial, state enforced education as we head out of the mass-production, mass-skills era.

I am not in any way shape or form calling for an end to education itself. I think my household has always spent ten times the average normal amount a household spends on education. (However much that is. Those statistics are mostly compiled by the state, and therefore not worth the paper they’re printed on or the pixels they burn.) We consumed formal online courses, educational videos, materials and tools for learning to do things…. it’s just what we do for fun around here.

And it is known that learning, and acquiring new skills all the time is great insurance against dementia. It’s also, in general, a good way to stay employed and support yourself.

However, tell me, not-so-gentle reader, what the heck business is this of the feds? Or even your very own state bureaucrats? I’m willing to concede it might — might, perhaps — be of interest to your city, local business associations or churches. In which case those entities are perfectly free to start schools to make sure future citizens or employees, or even believers, know how to use the oxford comma, tie their shoes, and speak in full, coherent sentences, or even solve quadratic equations, if that is what is required.

But why is it the province of the state?

Oh, I know what the excuse/reason was at the turn of the 20th century. Then as now, the US was trying to digest a massive bolo of immigrants who didn’t know how things were done here. And let’s be honest, teaching them to be “good Americans” was better than now, when we teach them to hate the country they just immigrated to.

On the other hand… On the other hand a lot of that “good Americans” thing taught them to be members of FDRs vision for the US. And…. And led to everything else that’s come along.

So why not remove all educational requirements, take the public schools and raze them, possibly salting the land afterwards, just so people get the point that no, this is not good and should not be done again.

Oh, you work and can’t be at home to look after the kids? Well, then. The money the government takes from your paycheck to pay for education should be refunded with all possible alacrity, and you can probably find someone to teach your kids what you want them to be taught, or just to let them free-range while you’re at work. Look, if you really insist, we can find you a multi-tattooed, pink-haired monstrosity to convince your kids that they’re really trans-dragons and you get the entire public school experience.

On the serious side, while there probably are still good teachers laboring in vain in public schools, I can guarantee there are fewer of them every year. The teachers #1 son loved had left either for administration positions, or left the system altogether by the time #2 son came along 2 years later. The horrible time-wasters, the perverts and the insane, however, stayed right there in the classroom.

The entire system is designed to make those who actually want to teach, and those who actually want to learn run out of the system or turn into useless drones. And our university system has been turned into a credential factory that actually teaches remarkably little.

In fact, the predictable result of turning education over to the state (note not the states, but the state, since it’s all overseen and dominated by the Federal government) has been to make it a factory of indoctrination, turning out people with the “correct” views, instead of those that conform to reality.

The only way we escape this dumpster fire in a clown shoe factory is to stop the automated production of more clown shoes by our state indoctrination mechanisms.

“But Sarah” you’ll say “People will be illiterate!”

Will they? They weren’t by and large, before the institution of free public schooling. Communities, groups of families, and even cities got together and chipped in money to hire teachers. Yes, I know, horrors, teachers wouldn’t be “certified.” They might however — take heart – be able to count to twenty with their shoes on. And likely wouldn’t be trained in teaching your kids the new gender of the week. Or enforce bizarre rules that ostracize kids they don’t like. Or–

Worst case scenario, the kids will indeed be illiterate. But they will be honestly illiterate and not illiterate holding a diploma from — is it Oregon? — that says they’re high school graduates, even though they cannot spell their own names.

In fact, at this point, I’m willing to say that kids roaming the neighborhoods in groups getting into trouble is — for the average neighborhood — way better than whatever is happening at the clown factory of government schools. Heck, even in the worst neighborhoods it wouldn’t be any different. They are already not going to school. The only difference would be that there isn’t a gigantic building where some people are getting paid for not teaching them.

You know, I come from a society in which, though schooling was theoretically mandatory through fifth grade by the time I came along, only about 10% of the people went that far. By and large everyone went to school through 4th grade, after which you claimed your kid was mentally retarded and got permission to send them to work.

So…. were all those people visibly worse educated than Americans with a 12th grade education? Not really. Like most Americans they continued learning (mostly bullshit) through entertainment and the news, and conversations with other people. (Mostly bullshit, because entertainment and news media were already taken over with rampant Marxism.) In their day to day lives, though, they learned what they needed to get along.

There were still illiterate people — mostly women — around from before there was any system of education at all. But you know, they were honestly illiterate. They didn’t try to tell you they’d gone to school and therefore knew they were oppressed or that they didn’t read because “the man” was keeping them down. And most of them had picked up enough reading to read the signs on merchandise, and enough counting to count money — both of which they did fast and accurately. You haven’t lived till you see an illiterate vendor in a market add the prices or what you just bought in her head, fast and accurately, apply any percentage discount, and give you the exact amount in seconds. Something our college graduates would feel was a micro aggression to even be asked to do.

All in all, yeah, the illiterate will always be with us. They’re with us now.

But a lot of the now illiterate might very well learn to read and write, at least enough to get by, by other means than state school, if we weren’t imprisoning them in mandatory seclusion and stealing their best learning years in a system that is obviously broken.

We don’t need any more state schools to produce “experts” for the system.

Open the doors. Let the kids out. Let employers find their own way to certify what people know. Or allow different companies to set up competing systems of certification.

Let the best system win.

The free market works better than the captive market in everything.

Education is no different.

As you probably noticed, I didn’t put up a promo post today. Mostly on account of taking a lot of unscheduled naps today. (I blame the cats for this. Havey kept pinning me down and not letting me move.)

I’m now thinking I’ll do the promo this coming Sunday. I always hate to do that, because sometimes people have promos. So, if you have a promo that expires before Sunday, ping me on Discord, or FB or even in my real email (not the promo email) and tell me, and I’ll figure out something.

On – I think, it’s all a blurr since Wednesday — Thursday night, I received sad news.

The King is dead.

King Harv, of King Harv Coffees, which by and large power this blog, passed away from complications of COVID.

You know, the woo flu while generally at this point about the same danger as the flu had the ability to cause more “What the heck?” deaths than any other respiratory infection, it seems. Or maybe it’s because we’re paying closer attention, and this happens with other viruses too. I just know that while for most people it’s a non-event, and a mild to severe flu, some people seem to become very very ill to an amazing degree. We almost lost one of my ducttape-family who is in his late thirties last year. And I lost half a dozen friends around my age, while people much older and in worse shape survived.

Anyway, the Chinese plague claimed a great coffee artist — seriously, since they started sending me coffee, I can no longer return to my “broke days” habit of just buying some Dunkin Doughnuts. In absolute need, I drink other high quality coffees, but I still prefer King Harv’s– and friend of this blog, one who had besides, a great sense of humor. (I can’t find the print out they sent me with their Planet coffees, but it explained about their great coffee plantations in various worlds. And the coffees are out of this world.)

The house has passed to the capable hands of his son and grandson, but I wish they had a page for us to express our condolences. They’re great people who make great coffees.

Of course, like any artist, King Harv will continue to be remembered in his art.

So, I went to Fencon. I did not get a T-shirt.

I had gone to Fencon 10 years ago, but this time was nothing like it was then. It felt smaller to me, but that might be because It was wholly taken over by our people.

As you probably know Larry was the Guest of HOnor, and he was great, as usual. I got to see Bridget, and Yeah, I had sort of seen her at Liberty, but we were both so busy….

This con I only had two panels, but got hauled into the piracy and smuggling panel by Kal Spriggs (It was good to see him again, too. It’s been years.)

Got to see the Texas troublemakers. Got to go to dinner with Snelson and his wife when we first arrived (Well, we’ve known each other for ages, but we didn’t know them in person. Yes, they’re nice.) Then kidnapped random people and ducttape families for all meals but one.

Our last dinner there was with Synova and her husband who got to talk computers with Dan (making them both happy.)

Meanwhile I met so many of you, and hung out with so many of you I’ll never be able to mention you all, but it includes Cybersmithe and Jolie.

Right now, I can’t think of names, so I require that all those who met me, self-denounce in comments please. It’s not that I don’t know your names, I just didn’t take notes and now I’m completely confused. I do remember I made two grown men (Separately) squee upon meeting me. It’s always good.

Oh, Yeah, Dr. Robert Hampson, AKA speaker to Lab animals, grew a beard and somehow this makes him completely unrecognizeable. We went on the assumption that he is speaker from an alternate universe, but unfortunately he wouldn’t admit to being a rat shifter.

Also there was no midnight sex (use thereof in SF!) panel or such. I need to make suggestions if I can go next year.

Oh, yeah, and I finally managed to make it to a “No Shit There I was” panel which was great, including hearing Lawdog telling Pinkie’s story in person.

More stuff will surface in time, but I’m requesting help to tell this….

If you didn’t see, the lost half of the novel was found.

Now headed for bed, as soon as I feel awake enough to navigate stairs.

It was probably one of the nicest cons I’ve been to, but I managed to do very little but hang out with friends. So, why am I so tired?

Oh, yeah, no longer used to people-ing. This too shall pass.

Tired now.