Sir, may I humbly request you stop doing awesome stuff on Saturday. This humble meme gatherer would like her afternoons off. Thank you for your attention to this matter — SAH.
To the people belly aching about war with Iran: BITCHES, I watched our country be humiliated by the taking of hostages. My 12 th grade class song was “And I Ran, I ran so far away” and no, it wasn’t talking about aerobics. We’ve watched Iran finance destruction against the US and Israel and taunt our presidents. We watched them arguably interfere with our elections for decades. Yeah, we bombed the evil oppressive regime of Iran. Don’t like it? Go cry SOMEWHERE ELSE. Your crocodile tears give me a rash.
Sarah is at a family reunion of sorts, and expects the regular weekend posts to happen when she needs a break. Please possess your souls in patience if they are late.
Interestingly, eagles sitting on posts, and hawks sitting on posts, and smaller hunter-scavenger birds sitting on posts, are a common feature in my life. They show up to eat what is there in the field that is eating the crop, or what was there eating the crop before the heavy machines rolled through. Trying to find a photo of this, however, on the internet . . . well, I guess eagle on fence post is just not a showy enough eagle for the internet.
Have a lovely Friday. The sun is shining, Gertrude get off the table (cats!), and the weather is suspiciously April-ish for February, as it has been suspiciously April-ish since November, and we have no snow when we should have a couple feet. I expect a very bad fire season in the Western USA, so if you need to make sure you have a rescue inhaler or in house air filters for wildfire smoke, given how the winds blow east, please so do. And the rest of us should get ourselves outside and start clearing hazards.
See you in the comments! Or with the chainsaw . . .
Is there something you’d like to do? Some secret ambition that seems out of reach? Some longing of the heart that you think will never happen?
No, I’m not going to sell you my instant method for achieving this. For one, signing any documents for an impeccably dressed gentleman, a man of wealth and taste, who smiles a lot and smells a little of sulfur. That’s probably bad for you. And though I’m part Nigerian princess (apparently) probably on my father’s side, you’re not my beloved and I don’t have a bank account with a million ill-gotten dollars I need to transfer to you, with which you can achieve your dreams. I can’t even promise that if you do this you will succeed. But I can promise you you’ll get closer.
What’s the miracle action?
Good question, because I have an answer. And you’re not going to like it: Take a step. Take a step towards what you want. Just one. Do it.
Yeah, yeah, journey of one thousand steps starts with a single step and all that. But you know why those sayings persist? Because they have a point. It does start with a step. Which — at some point — makes the next step easier. which makes the NEXT step easier. You might not notice the “easier” part for a 100 or 1000 steps, but eventually it will kick in, I promise.
Want a cleaner house? clean one little corner. Tomorrow clean a bit more. Then a bit more. (At which point you’ll have to start from the beginning but that’s the Zen of house cleaning, as it were.) Want to be famous game designer? Start with learning programming or find a program to do it in. (Like I know. That’s not my area of expertise.) Want to have a paying you tube channel? Put up three videos. Want a blog with high traffic? Write a post every day. Send the more interesting ones to your friend who posts at the giant aggregator blog. Want to write a novel? Write a page. Want a better job? Think what your ideal job would be, then what you need to get there. And then take a step: write resume tilted at it; take that online certification; sign up for — groan — that college class. Take one step.
Now, that last one? If you’re going to do the immense job, to walk those thousand steps one step at a time, make sure it’s something you desperately want. It helps. It helps because the progress motivates you.
And here we hit the other thing. It’s recently come to my attention that we and people like us will do a lot of stupid work, a lot of ridiculous things that don’t pay anyway, or that eat away at our soul, instead of reaching for that thing we really, really want; for that secret desire of our hearts.
I’ve known Odds who have some amazing, OBVIOUSLY outsized talent: painting pictures, or making amazing clothes, or creating moving music, or, yes, telling stories. But they never do. Even though it’s obviously what they are happy doing. Instead they work an endless stream of soul-eating jobs, many of which are also extremely low pay. Why?
Ah. Well, when I was doing it — and ooh, boy, I have that T-shirt. Bought multiple times, because I loved it so much. (Though in my case the “outsized talent” is meh, but I have something I use instead of and it serves my simple needs.) — I kept getting told I had a fear of success. Which normally caused me to snort-giggle or something ruder. I would like to point out not only do I emphatically NOT have a fear of success, I don’t understand anyone having such an odd animal. What I DO have is a panic fear of failure.
This is very useful when it causes me to, say, scramble madly to remain published after my first series “failed” and I was told I’d never work in this town again. Scrambling madly kept me published for over twenty years and arguably ensured more success than that enjoyed by people with actual outsized talent.
It is, however, what causes the syndrome above. Because, you know, if I fail as a translator, or as a retail worker, or an office worker, or even as a housewife, well, that’s fine. I can fail at those. It was not what I wanted. It was not heart’s blood. Losing it didn’t MATTER. Meanwhile my precious was safe, because I wasn’t acting on it, or not really. This was at first with writing, and then with writing WHAT I REALLY WANTED TO. (Which required me to go indie, but I had the keys to do it since 2011, so why only last year? Because if it failed it would break me, that’s why.)
And that’s what I see in a lot of people.
… Except the precious isn’t safe, because over the years of not doing it, your inner self becomes frustrated and embittered. You fail by never doing it more certainly than if you did it. Jordan Peterson says if you’re a creative who doesn’t create you start dying. Psychologically, first, but eventually physically. He’s right there. But he’s not right ENOUGH. It’s not just creatives. It’s everyone who has a secret need to do something, to succeed at something. You avoid it, and avoid it, and avoid it. And it turns sour and despairing in you, and you feel like a failure and it infects everything in your life, eventually.
Yes, I know it takes a lot of courage to do the thing you really want to do — arguably I’d never have managed it without the Chinchilla of Hope Brigade cheering me on all the way and telling me to keep going, it wasn’t horrible (Which is why they’re thanked in the opening to No Man’s Land) — courage and persistence and a lot of steps. Make your gut into a new heart and take a step. If the secret desire of your heart is neither illegal or immoral, you should still do it. The alternative is slow suicide with steps.
Find or create a cheering section and take a step. (Lord, if you have to use an LLM. Heaven knows they’re fawning and servile enough. I want one with the personality of Mycroft in TMIAHM.) Just one step. Then another.
As Jordan Peterson also says, if you’re so broken, so HUMAN that all you can do is a small, irrelevant first step (the one he gave for cleaning your room was just opening your closet and looking at it. Just looking.) do that, then reward yourself for it. And tomorrow do a little more.
Because there’s really no alternative, if you want to do something that much. It’s that or death.
I can’t promise you success. There is no way to guarantee that, particularly if your desire is to do something artistic. And I sympathize with your need for safety and certainty.
If I were a super-hero, I’d be “Security Girl” because that’s what I crave.
And yet, here is a paradox: Every time I’ve done the sane and secure thing: buy the smaller house, get the day job, take the agent lower on the vine, because (theoretically) she’ll have more time for me, stay with trad pub– EVERY TIME I do that it blows up in my face, sometimes spectacularly.
On the other hand, if I ignore caution and safety and — against my best judgement — do the thing I really want to do no matter how crazy: if I buy the big, impractical Victorian in bad shape, with the understanding I’ll have to build it while living in it and doing everything else too; if I move across the country (of across the ocean) without ever having seen the place I’m moving to, and with nothing but a vague idea that’s where want to go; if I finally go indie and do what I want to?
It always turns out well. Every single time. And no, I don’t think that’s just me.
I think the effect is when you jump off the edge, and are trying to fly, you are scared enough to do everything you can. And then you actually fly. (This is a metaphor. Don’t do that in real life. Please. Unless you’re a bird. Then you can do it. But birds don’t read blogs, so you should see someone for that delusion.)
So go on. TRY IT. Avoiding it just guarantees failure. And bitterness. And death or something like.
I need to stop being surprised at how bizarrely naive people are. I was going to say I don’t think I was ever that innocent, but of course I was. I mean, I know this isn’t entirely believable to most of you (as Bradbury demonstrated, the old were never children) but I was once a little baby, a toddler, a little girl. And I can still on occasion be startlingly naive and well meaning, particularly when I have some reason to like the person selling me the swamp land in Florida. … And since I generally like people (they’re fascinating) this leaves me open to a lot of bs.
But let me put this way: I was never happily and stupidly credulous. When someone tried to tell me to do something for my own good or worse for a bunch of other people who weren’t asking me to do it, I always wondered what was in it for the person. Always as far back as I remember.
Which is why I sometimes hit my desk so hard with my forehead that it leaves big dents, and I wonder “How can adults not see the trap in giving a lot of power to the government? Precisely?” Particularly a bunch of power over your ability to express yourself on the internet?
Yeah. Increasingly I’m coming across articles on the right lauding the kind of Self-Doxing that Europe is requiring of people on the net. Because, you know you should prove your age before you access stuff. And also we really should “clean up” the net. For the children.
When I come across this nonsense I’m neither child nor work safe for about ten minutes. And I’m fairly sure I invented some new German swear words.
Look, yes, there is horrible stuff out there. Arguably there always was. Not just the internet but everywhere. My parents kept a tight rein on me and we lived in a village. Most of the books I read had been stored by some ancestor or other. Apparently some of them liked spicier stuff? I mean– weird, but– Look, Victorian porn was bizarre, okay. Anyway, moving right along, there was also Roman myth available because I sneaked the books from a friend’s father’s library.
If you’re laughing, don’t be. It gave me a very weird idea of what went on between men and women. And the livestock manuals didn’t help. Not even slightly.
The point being that a child who is curious and will read everything could stumble on bizarrely inappropriate stuff even in the “safe” mid sixties in a country known for ALMOST keeping its women in purdah.
And I raised kids in the age when the internet was a wild frontier. You could — and sometimes hilariously did, at a con, in front of a bunch of people, type something innocent in, and get page upon page of outright gross porn opening up on your screen. Add to this that my kids each had their own computer, kept in their rooms from age three, and had internet connections from age 8 and 12.
So, how come they didn’t get catfished by pedos, or get a porn addiction or– Well, like with houseproofing the house, we didn’t internet proof the house. We internet proofed the kids. We explained all the possibilities, the pitfalls, why things weren’t good for them, until it came out their eyes, I think. We still dealt with an addiction issue, but it was to neopets, not porn. And we talked to and with them. A lot. Some would say endlessly. So we knew what they — even super-secretive younger son — were thinking and doing. And they were aware that Dan could — and did, about once a month — look at their history and see what they were up to.
We were very hands on, very active parents. And when they read something that had mention of adult relationships (usually not terribly explicit) they were comfortable enough to talk to us about it.
Oh, and we raised them in a church that gives a strong moral foundation.
Did it work? Seems to have. They’re in their thirties and seem like decent human beings.
Was it a lot of work? Oh, heck yes. I refer to days and weeks of getting up each day with a longer to-do list and never getting to sleep 8 hours a night, and–
Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Because it was tailored to our kids, whom we understood, we could keep them out of danger without nerfing everything around them. When they came of age, they were prepared because they’d never been over protected.
As I tell people: The Spanish royal family tied pillows around very tree in their park to protect their hemophilliac sons, who still got injured and died young. Because nerfing the world doesn’t work. Preparing the kids does.
Are there misfires? There are always misfires. Even in the tiny village where I grew up, girls got persuaded away by traffickers, and kids found out things they shouldn’t be exposed to, and child abuse is a human failing. BUT I was okay, despite my bizarre reading and some very weird ideas, because my parent shad made me suspicious of strangers bearing gifts. Perhaps a little too suspicious but that’s better than the alternative.
Unfortunately telling people “The solution to keeping kids out of trouble is to watch them, to talk to them, to discuss things with them, and to know your own kids” is not popular. “Let’s give the government the ability to see that everyone is on the internet under their own real name and address and says only things that are safe for the kids” is. Because it involves no personal work.
It does however open the door to a lot of horrible stuff and to totalitarian control, that has nothing to do with the children. And don’t come back at me with “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” because you’re not an infant or a mental defective and you KNOW better.
For one because every one of us who is on the internet publicly and on the right has a passel of stalkers. They’re mostly annoying and probably harmless. Maybe. Looks at Charlie Kirk’s death. MAYBE. Yeah, people can find addresses for us. If we’re smart enough, those are decoys (not counting some bizarre internet confabulations that link me to people I’ve never met, too. And the fact that Dan and I have apparently to body doubles running around who are married to each other. For a while we lived in the same neighborhood in Colorado Springs. Never managed to meet. Now we’ve both diaspored away. I usually find out because someone tells me they went to my talk. It’s not mine. Or for a while that they saw a house I’m selling. The other Sarah Hoyt is a real estate agent. Their sons have the same names as ours. I have a head story that they’re us from other universes.) Anyway…. we all have people who’d like to kill us for things we say. And some of them don’t even work for the government.
If I were doing this again, from the beginning, I’d fly under a nom de internet. Heck, I did for a while, I just dropped it because it was so much effort. Because you really don’t need your net life to bite you in the *ss in real life, because you didn’t do anything wrong, just said some thing that someone else didn’t like. Or even didn’t say it, but they spun it up in their heads to where you said it.
To clarify: I’ve had people furious at me for writing a post about my own struggles with awards and whether to campaign for them, that someone else convinced them was about THEM. (Hint to anyone wondering: I NEVER WRITE THINGS TO GIVE HINTS. If I think you’re doing something assholish, I’ll name you by name. You’ll KNOW if I’m talking about you. The exceptions are close friends I don’t want to call out, just say “well, they’re good people, but they’re wrong on this” because they’re friends. And I don’t name writers and books when I find a book horrible, because I don’t need total strangers googling themselves and coming over to yell. I have trouble enough.) I’ve had people have a confrontation on this blog and decide I was the devil and go on multi-year revenge quests, at least three of them ongoing (and crazy. Did I mention crazy?) I’ve had people develop a crush on me sight unseen and try to move INTO MY HOUSE (which was fortunately not my house, but our drop address. But still.)
Forcing me to dox myself would materially endanger me and mine. My husband, my kids, my cats. Yes, the kids are grown and moved out, and fully able to defend themselves, but they have their own social lives and careers that don’t need my public life hanging over them.
And this is me: I do nothing more wrong, ever, than writing some things that upset people for reasons that often are in their own heads. And for questioning orthodoxy because it makes people uncomfortable.
Then there is the governmental decisions of what you’re not ready to see. Yeah, yeah, it was supposed to be stuff like porn. Guess what? It took them zero seconds in the UK to decide kids needed to be protected from knowing about the rape gangs. Or the Israeli hostages. Or….
Yes, yes, all that is strong material for young minds, but guess what? It can happen to kids, so kids should know about it.
The government can in fact take something as simple as “protect kids from porn” to “Protect” kids and adults from the truth. And will. As soon as some bureaucrat with an ax to grind gets hold of it.
I’d think after the gaslighting of COVID you wouldn’t be so eager to give the government the power to control what you see and what you read, and to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says something they don’t like.
And don’t give me “The US is different”. Yeah, until we aren’t. We’re still living with FDR’s bs. And this would just make it a lot worse and postpone getting rid of it.
We’ve been fighting back, to the extent we have, because the internet gives us the ability to talk freely and to talk back at the barrage of mass media propaganda. To codify some “internet safety act” would be to tie us hand and foot and deliver us bound to our foe.
You can take your little horse out of the rain. And not wait with sandwiches by the phone. Because we’re not — repeat not — going to let you do that. Particularly not after the last 5 years. We’ve seen what y’all want for us. And we don’t want it. Bleating “For the children” is not persuasive anymore.
“BUT SARAH! CHILDREN WILL SEE BAD THINGS!” Oh, yeah? And they won’t in schools? This article is horribly written, but the point is the books this school carries. Click through. The ones I’ve read are appalling for eighteen year olds, and I wouldn’t want anyone younger getting them. And yet, they’re fighting back against the mom trying to remove them from the school library where kids are supposed to roam free.
Nerfing the internet will do nothing if you let your kids go to public school. Nerfing the internet will do nothing, if your kids have friends whose family situation might not be ideal.
Look, the truth is nerfing the internet will do NOTHING. Yes, there is bilge out there. There has always been, there will always be. Don’t delude yourself the situation was better pre-internet. It wasn’t. It was just different.
The solution to keeping your kids safe and introducing them to this fallen world at a safe and sane pace is to WORK WITH YOUR KIDS. There is no other solution. There is only blood, sweat and tears, day in and day out. And yes, sometimes it will fail, because horrible things happen to good people. But it is still the only solution.
I don’t remember who said that it makes no sense to prevent adults from eating steak because children cannot chew it. However, it’s even worse to prevent the children from seeing the inappropriate by blindfolding every single person, and giving the government the chance to say what is inappropriate.
Don’t be naive. The government is not your friend, even when it is, temporarily sort of kind of on your side. People in government are there because they like power. And the more power they get, the more they’ll take.
The solution to raising moral, sane kids is for PARENTS to raise them.
No, I don’t mean aliens who are like us lot, though that’s a strange idea. Maybe all the people who talk about aliens disguised among us are really talking about Alien Odds, coming here because they don’t fit elsewhere. But I’m so for sure not going there.
There’s been a lively discussion in the comments about the nature of aliens and whether it’s plausible that we are in fact alone in comments.
First I must say as Drak said that I hate and despise the idea of all aliens being more advanced and/or somehow standing in moral judgement over us. Yeah, maybe that’s possible, but it’s certainly not guaranteed, nor would be universal.
And then 11B-Mailclerk posted the following comment, which makes it actually plausible we’re the most advanced, or close to: Link.
Quote: 11B-Mailclerksays:
The prior two generations of stars lack sufficient “metals”, basically anything heavier than Lithium. Stellar Thermonuclear Synthesis forms elements up to Iron. When the stars flare up in their end states, they scatter elements for later accumulation in subsequent stars. The supergiant stars go supernova, producing further heavy elements that are net endothermic in fusion reaction, and scattering all the produced stuff vigorously for later re-accumulation. Further heavies are formed from less well understood processes, including, apparently, pulsar collisions in dual-star systems. I suspect black hole accretion areas eject a significant fraction of stuff that fell in and bounced off other stuff, more condensate and scatter for re-use.
Our Sol System is about a gen3 -3.5, so rather rich in metals. Earth, particularly rich in heavy elements. Thus lots of current state comments.
Hard to build an industrial civilization if one’s planet doesn’t have large surface deposits of metals. The “black iron ore” / “banded iron deposits” of Earth are hypothesized to be biological residue, from our earliest ocean of iron-saturated water. That ore is cheap to process, and yields relatively high-quality resultant metal.
You need that cheap Iron to get to cheap electricity, whereupon Aluminum goes from rare precious metal to cheap commodity. Thus to aircraft and spacecraft, thence other supermetals.
You also need huge deposits of easy to burn fuel. Wood works, but you run out of trees way too fast. Coal solves the problem. Almost as if someone knew we would need a 3000-5000 year pile of cheap fuel, and spent a billion-ish years growing vast swamps only to fold them under mountain ranges, heat for eons, and cook up solid-carbon-rocks. Also some choice liquid stuff for lubricants and fuels.
Kinda amazing the right stuff for civilization and its advance was just there all along for us to find and figure out.
And then some clever monkey looked at Uranium anew and said “thats odd”…..
Back to that early primordial H/He/Li mix. It is -very- difficult to initiate H-H fusion. A star has to be supermassive/hypergiant to light a pure H or H/He core. If there is even a small trace of Lithium, even a very small star lights early. We found this property out when one of our early Thermonuke tests went 3.5x yield. We thought only one isotope of Lithium would be fuel for fusion. Turns out, the other major isotope is also pretty good if you first superheat and compress it, like in an H Bomb or Star. The predicted primordial soup has -just- enough to get stars going easy enough and fast enough to get metals at Sol/Earth levels in the 13-14 billion years.
Another just-right “Goldilocks” value that makes or breaks a universe with Us in it, right about now.
(Omitting Goldilocks comments on gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, C, and a number of other phenomena that are oddly, coincidentally, -just- right for everything to work as needed to get to what is.)
Is this accurate? I don’t know, but it’s plausible. And it makes it entirely plausible that we’re the first to travel in space and/or the most advanced.
If you just recoiled at that idea, that says more about the culture of science fiction than it says about the odds this is true.
Which brings us to “the great white alien” (Pardon me!) in the style that natives in the 20th century referred to either the American president or the British King as “the great white father.” Beyond all probability of lack thereof, there is the fact that this cliche in fiction has become SO PERVASIVE as to make it ridiculous and boring. Just through repetition. As I said, Pratchett skewered it beautifully in Good Omens. If for no other reason than “booring” I’m going to oppose it. Just on the basis of being me and reading scifi.
It was new and refreshing when Heinlein did it — though note even his superior aliens aren’t MORAL or at least not moral by human standards! He was saner than that. Try for the same– but now it’s old and busted. Come up with something else.
In fact the idea that aliens are more advanced MORALLY is a complete non-sequitor. Surely morals are different depending on the species/world? What is life enhancing and improving for sharks isn’t the same as for humans. And we’re both children of the same world. How much more different would aliens be?
I will confess to a great now no longer secret love for “Humans are the old ones of the Galaxy” i.e. we were once the Lords of it all, carrying the Human Burden, as it were, until the colonies/satrapies/protectorates rebelled, and confined us to Earth. And everyone out there is terrified of our return.
I’m not a fool, I know the reason I love that so much I could eat it with a spoon is because it’s very flattering to us humans. And being a human I like us being flattered. But it’s also so countercultural in this culture of human-hatred that it is very cheering. If you do that, it might be as improbable as the “Great White Alien” but I will not chide you for it, because I’m too busy nom nom nom nomming it with a spoon.
The truth though is that if we have alien visitors of encounter aliens, we’ll likely never know. Why? Well, because aliens will be aliens. We have recently done studies on the cognitive abilities of things like octopi and elephants. And elephants at least might be close to our level. Just so alien and along such different lines that we’d never know how to communicate, not really. Or even how to evaluate their intelligence. Not really.
Now, I know Trump has promised to release anything about UFOs.
I could be wrong, but I expect it to be a giant nothingburger. There might be stuff about orbs and other unexplained stuff, but no aliens. I mean we know that Orbs occur. They occur in ghost hunting too. And that they often react as though sentient. What they are we don’t know. But they’re probably no alien. And I doubt they’re sentient as such. However we shall see.
Ultimately how we see aliens are a reflection of how we see ourselves as humans. And frankly I’m tired of us beating up on ourselves. And all in on us building ourselves up for a change.
It might be bad — both for Western Civ and Humans — to have too much self regard. It might mean we trample other ways of doing things for no other reason than being different. Maybe.
But it’s not nearly as dangerous as too little self-regard or oikophobia. THAT is deadly and will kill those who engage in it.
It’s time we stop it.
Yes Humans (And western civ) have flaws. But they are the greatest thing of its kind, from our own perspctive. i.e. if humans are destroyed, we will be too. And self-murder is repugnant. As for Western civ, again judging on the principle of fewest dead babies and long, healthy old age, it’s winning. And again, as a human I must support that.
Try not to live for the approval of some imaginary alien, and instead to support that which is good for yourself and your own species.
Aliens, if they exist, will take care of their own. They don’t need you to be their Great Human Savior.
Be for humans because you are human. What enhances humans enhances you. Anything else is nihilistic hubris.
Yesterday I was kidnapped by Witch’s Daughter to attempt a big push to finish. Which was odd, since I thought I’d have to finish editing the first 9/10 before the last three chapters consented to be written. Anyway, they’re done for a value of done that includes a lot of square brackets with “They resolve the thing with the griffins” — and by the way, who in living heck allowed me to write a story with a mythological species that has at least four valid spellings? To which I add, of course, my plethora of invalid. my poor copyeditor. She’s getting white hairs — which I hope to fix today, so it can go to the structural editor, while I keep pounding on the wording itself, and resolving tiny discrepancies like “What happened to her magical stones” from front to back.
Good news, the end is near. No, not that end but getting this novel written, which considering it was started almost 15 years ago is something. (Yes, Rogue magic will be done too. I HEAR you. Trust me.)
However the side effect of my sitting at my desk — actually since it was the weekend, I sat on the recliner on the family room, while my husband watched stuff, but never mind — all day is that I did not do any dishes. I’d put dishes in the dishwasher Saturday night which I — naively — thought were done. But because I still had to feed us on Sunday, and because we found a bunch of dishes that were supposedly done, but weren’t (look, I was unloading late at night, okay?) means there’s a pile on the counter.
Two things to add to this: the dishwasher is practically brand new. It might be a year old, or a year and a couple of months, but not much more than that. And it’s top of the line, because we didn’t want problems because they interfere with my work. And it’s been washing badly for about two weeks. Which …. I figure I would need to deal with but not yet. Actually I specifically meant to deal with it next week, since this week was ‘fun with doctors.’
Now I have a pile — and I mean a pile — a dishes to do this morning, while I also have to finish Witch’s Daughter, sort out the books and set up for Confinement, where I have a sales table (The Little Pickle will sit at it most of the time, honestly. But–) and do all the laundry so we don’t attend the con naked. (NO ONE WANTS TO SEE THAT.) And also the inevitable stuff that will come up (It’s this month, I swear. It’s been a month of years.)
One of those would normally be a day, but I’ll do as much as I can, and try to do more tomorrow….
But I have one question: What happened to things that just work?
I realize I might have a force field around me that does things to machines. Perhaps mom was right discouraging me from becoming a mechanical engineer but REALLY!
The washer and dryer are speed queen — again, we didn’t want problems, so we paid more… — and we’ve already had a repair call a few months ago, because something went wrong with the timing and the washer loads were taking longer and longer and longer. What did we do wrong? Nothing. “It’s something that happens to this model.”
I suspect what it is is a bunch of stupid “environmental” regulations under the Autopen. Because their ideal is to have the machines work not at all, so only the self-proclaimed elites who have servants can afford not to stink or spend half their lives at the kitchen sink.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had it up to here — indicates a point well above her head — with stupid environmental rules that nerf the functioning of our household appliances.
I grew up where no one had household appliances and let me tell you housekeeping even for our little family of four was a full time job. Even with a girl who came to wash dishes after dinner and a cleaning lady doing dust-and-vacuum on the weekend, mom did so much on the house, just to keep it functioning that I’m still in awe she also managed to run her own business, and a successful one too.
And the worst part of all this is that there is no point. No, I don’t mean the climate scam, that everyone suddenly is actually admitting was a scam. I mean if it weren’t a scam none of this would still make any sense.
Look, the low-flush toilets — which I see a point for in say Colorado or Idaho, or Arizona or other states with low water — are now better, yeah, (but they’re not so low anymore) but for years what low flush actually meant was “either fill a bucket and throw it in with force, or stand by the toilet, flushing, and flushing, and flushing” Which in the end, I’d bet you amounted to more water.
And the last few dishwashers we’ve had — a reason we went with this one, which actually doesn’t have that problem — had so much insulation to save electricity on heating the water that we ended up having to do three or four loads for a normal dinner for our family. (Yes, I cook from scratch, but I’m not older son. I don’t use that many pots and pans.) In the end, of course, it took five hours to do the dishes, and used a lot more electricity.
So the supposed point of it was never served. It just “sounded good.” That’s it. Which to be fair, is the way of things done for and by the government.
If the Earth really needed saving — no, it doesn’t. Your soul might need it. The Earth doesn’t. Stop confusing geology with religion — the government would be the absolutely wrong way to do it.
Besides the pervasive “do it so it looks good” which actually hurts things, I swear there is a spirit of hatred for everything human and for the masses they supposedly serve.
They want us smelly and busy at our kitchens, which they’ll soon declare need to be a fire in the middle of the room, with a hole in the roof above, and swishing the dishes in the nearest river, once they ban soaps and detergents.
And I’ve had just about enough of it. If feminism and women liberation meant anything, instead of trying to shove us into male dominated professions whether we want to be there or have a talent for it or not, they’d stop the bureaucracy’s attempt to shove us — and a lot of men — into the role of medieval serfs, tied to homestead and field, unable to do anything else.
Bah.
I’m going to go do the pile of dishes, and swear a bit to clear my head now!
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. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM JENNICA POUNDS (DATA REPUBLICAN) ON PRE-ORDER: Unelected.
How the NGO-Administrative Complex Seized Power—And How to Get It Back
$200 billion for Ukraine. $50 billion a year for USAID. $9 billion for resettling refugees. Meanwhile, Americans struggle to earn a living, buy a home, and start a family. The welfare state works for everyone but employed citizens trying their best to make ends meet and pay their taxes on time. Why are the world’s most generous people financially abused by their own government?
As one scandal after another breaks, there is one question that becomes harder and harder to ignore: How did the American government and a vast network of NGOs become the vehicle for funneling American middle-class wealth to the rest of the world? The surprising answer is not financial, but philosophical, the little-known yet centuries-old ideology called supranationalism. From George Soros through George W. Bush, from the 17th century Treaty of Westphalia through the rise of President Donald Trump, a clear timeline emerges for how everyday Americans became the number-one mark for a global ruling class intent on redistributing their resources. Barricading its backroom dealmaking behind federal departments, nonprofits and NGOs, and charitable foundations whose names we all know yet whose operations will still shock and horrify, this NGO-Administrative Complex has perfected the art of converting U.S. taxpayer money into instant-access welfare for the rest of the world.
This is the story of how this machine was built, how it runs, and how it can finally be dismantled.
Drawing on Jennica Pounds’ receipt-backed analysis trusted by millions on X at @DataRepublican, together with page-turning narratives of New York Times best-selling author Joshua Lisec, Unelected maps the money, names the gatekeepers, and rug-pulls the unelected networks running the show from behind dated logos and sappy slogans to impoverish us all and usher in a new world order in which every American city is destined to become another Minneapolis.
The Orgy Drug was just a snickery rumor . . . until an afternoon garden party when someone spiked the punch.
In a society divided by class, and ruled by the Mentalist Elite, who even keep their wives controlled with brain chips . . . Six upper class young ladies and their maids are faced with the ruination of their reputations—and the reactions of friends and family—and they’re going to deal with it, each in their own way. Using the cultural changes forced by the loss of Zhivvyy Provoda, the Power Plague attacks, the illegal Orgy Drug circulating widely . . . and contact with other dimensionally-able civilizations, they’re all going to make it, one way or another.
Most military fiction regales the reader with fast-paced tales of strong men with sexy weapons who close with, engage, and destroy the enemy with lethal precision. What it tends to ignore, though, is the supply clerk who issues him the body armor that protects him in the fight, the intelligence shop that arms him with information, or the maintenance troops who keep the vehicles running (ideally). Because there are so many ways in which POGs (I served in the early 2000’s) support the fight, one anthology was simply not enough to convey it all, so we had to do another one. This time, Ted Begley takes us along for the ride with a shuttle driver who has an eye for a bargain. Addison Reid shows us that sometimes a logistics officer knows what troops on the frontline really need, even better than they do, however inexplicable it may seem. An FNG (Freakin’ New Guy) and his first-line leader learn a valuable lesson about an ancient tradition in Jason Hobbs’ “Snipe Hunt.” B. K. Gibson reminds us that even if you don’t expect the unexpected, you’d better be prepared to adapt to it. Rounding out the collection, Malory demonstrates that a POG’s most underappreciated, yet critical skills are, as always, ingenuity and resourcefulness. The authors all do a fantastic job of capturing different facets of a POG’s life, from the professionalism to the competence to the humor and everything in between. As a former Air Defense Artillery officer, many of the stories in the following pages remind me of my own troops at different times, and I sincerely hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
The treasured anadi who must learn what it means to choose… the mysterious chenji whose magic comes at a terrible price… the jeweler who finds that love requires facing the unknowable future… and the Claw of the empire who discovers that loyalty has limits. Clays Upon the Sands, volume 2 in the Jokka Clays series, collects seven more stories of the Jokka of Ke Bakil, an alien species with two chances to change sexes: female, neuter or male… a species where destiny and biology intertwine in ways both beautiful and heartbreaking. Whether it’s accepting an unwanted Turning, defying an empire’s cruelty, or learning that some truths can only be spoken in the dark, each Jokkad must navigate the complex currents of identity, duty, and desire.
Seven voices. Seven transformations. A world where nothing is certain but change itself. Come explore.
In the sweltering summer of 1900, fourteen-year-old Eddie Donahue calls the walled International Legation Quarter in Peking, China, his home. While his father runs a bustling silk trade, Eddie watches in awe as soldiers from America, Europe, and beyond march the streets, guarding against growing unrest outside the gates. Dreaming of adventure beyond his errands, Eddie encounters rough-and-ready U.S. Marines and glimpses the enigmatic threat of the ‘Boxers’ – warriors bent on driving out all foreigners from China. As tensions boil over into conflict, Eddie must summon his wits and bravery to face dangers that test his family, his friendships, and his resolve.
This gripping historical novel captures the Boxer Rebellion through a young boy’s eyes, blending real events with tales of courage and discovery.
Jesse Lomax is salvaging a news career with a temp gig shooting video at an obscure, corrupt third-tier think tank in Washington called the Institute for National Renewal. What do the rag-tag band of INR pseudo-scholars say when it’s suggested that they accept tainted money? “Tain’t enough!” they cry in unison.
INR is staffed with a collection of cynical Ph.D.-level grifters, experts in political dirty tricks, and a fundraiser cougar. The “research organization” is led by the narcissistic bully R. Morrison Dixon whose patriotic posture belies his hidden, unsavory past.
Jesse, a valedictorian-level high school drop out from Erie, Pa., tells himself he can rise above the moral slime, put together a nest egg for his documentary production start-up, and blow this hated capital. He turns down a lucrative invitation to join the Fellowship of Obscure Men, INR’s skunk works for political dirty tricks and extreme partying. Jesse’s last day at INR is circled on the calendar.
But events draw him in deeper. A fundraising email minus personalized salutations but carrying the placeholder “Dear Rich Idiot,” goes out to INR’s top donors. Geneva Duke, the “luscious peach” of an intern, is scapegoated and loses her job — much to Jesse’s dismay.
Pastor Hadwin “Bud” Garnsey, INR’s director of faith outreach, goes on the lam from the law for an “indiscretion” at the Folger Library. Garnsey has the receipts on Dixon’s shady past. He shares these with investigative reporter Alan Faberman who is working on an expose of INR’s founders and connections to illegal lobbying for a Mideast pipeline. And Gladys Strumpf, a pistol-packing, wheelchair-bound board member incensed by the “Rich Idiot” email, threatens to tear up her lavish bequest to INR.
Jesse’s posture of neutrality and indifference is tested when Elmar, the thuggish pipeline executive, confronts him. Elmar is convinced that Jesse is secretly working with Faberman on the INR expose.
Geneva Duke wants her revenge. She begs Jesse to help her take down “the evil, the lies, the greed” at the heart of INR. She knows what evil looks like from her own experience, which she only hints at. When Jesse refuses to join her crusade, she goes it alone.
But Jesse can’t quite let her go. As much as he wanted to disentangle from INR, what he wants much more is Geneva.
Dixon and his insiders are criminal goons who play rough. The “luscious peach” is headed for some real trouble. Jesse joins her crusade against evil doers at the 11th hour. But is he too late?
Delaney Wolff Fox is a spy. A cute spy. A deadly spy.
A spy you want at your back when stuff gets real.
From a palatial office in Johannesburg, to a fancy whisky bar in Sydney, Australia, to a beautiful private beach in southwest Florida, to the great and wild city of New Orleans, Captain Delaney Fox, United States Space Force Marines (Intelligence Division) finds herself beset by assassins at every turn, while first saving an alien government’s valuable artifact from the South African cartel that’s stolen it, and then being assigned to guard said artifact while it completes a world tour, on loan from that same alien government.
But like the proverbial fox in the proverbial henhouse, you can count on Delaney to complete the mission and come out with the prize, intact and in hand – even if the “farmer” isn’t all that keen about her doing so.
What if history almost changed—and no one noticed? In this imagined rediscovered manuscript, Archimedes of Syracuse undertakes a secret journey eastward to exchange knowledge with scholars of the Qin realm. Geometry meets administration, philosophy meets engineering, and curiosity bridges civilizations separated by distance but united by mathematics. Together, Greek and Qin thinkers approach a discovery centuries ahead of its time: the controlled power of explosive chemistry. The knowledge is lost in a storm near Malta. Preserved only through damaged scrolls, argumentative footnotes, missing diagrams, and a long-suffering modern translator, The Geometry of Smoke blends historical fiction, scientific imagination, and dry scholarly humor into a tale about discovery, accident, and the fragile path of human progress. Featuring:
Faux academic commentary
Disappearing diagrams
Scholars arguing across centuries
And alien observers quietly relieved by a shipwreck
A novel for readers who enjoy history, science, and the comedy of intellect.
Amaryllis and Chris have been in love since…forever. Even if Amaryllis didn’t realize it until Chris fell off a ladder. A year later, they’re working and planning toward a wedding. Eventually. When they get enough money built up, and can take the time to do it.
Unfortunately, Amaryllis forgot Thanksgiving. Her mother decided that since she forgot it, she could make it. And that would have been fine, if the turkey hadn’t suddenly been the worst thing ever.
Now, she’s got three weeks to plan her own wedding, and only four hundred dollars to pay for it. But she’ll manage. It’ll work.
Charles Alden Seltzer was one of the first crop of western authors, a contemporary of Zane Grey and William MacLeod Raine. But he *really* hit his stride in 1921, and these three post-1921 novels prove it!
Brass Commandments
“He’s man’s size, goin’ an’ comin’. No show, no fuss; likes to play a lone hand. Cool an’ easy an’ dangerous. Two-gun. Throws ’em so fast that you can’t see ’em. Lightnin’s slow when Lannon moves his gun-hand. Dead shot; cold as an iceberg under fire.”
Such was the opinion in Bozzam City of Flash Lannon. Five years of getting an education back East might have tamed him, some, but when rustlers target his cattle, and the local law doesn’t care, Lannon nails a new law to the wall of the local post office: his brass commandments naming the five men who must leave the country — or die.
Bombs, fire, and murder….Caldera City. Stronghold and refuge, built by faith and elemental power in the heart of a volcano; surviving through magic, tactics, and a daring alliance with dragons. For Allen Helleson, Caldera was an escape from the lives ruined by his family’s hardline traditions; now he walks the streets as an Inspector for the Caldera Watch, defending the city other nations see as a pit of hell. For Shane Redstone, Caldera was the home she risked life and soul to defend as a Flame – until enemy curses blinded her, sending her away from the front lines forever.The war has come home again….Together they survive the first bomb. But Caldera’s enemies never stop with just one. Now a scarred yet deadly ex-soldier and a spirit-reading Inspector have to find and stop the bombers… before Wards fall, dragons die, and the caldera erupts in flame. One wrong move, and the city burns.
This is going to be the best post-apocalyptic high urban fantasy pulp detective novel you will read today!
Cin City. The tinsel crown of the magical Kingdom of New California – and Tom Vargas’s favorite place in the whole, wide world. Sure, as a Shamus he has to Clear a lot of Cases, listen to a lot of lies, and get battered and bruised in the process, but it’s worth it. Cin City is worth it.
But when trouble shows up as a dead mage at the Castle, he’s got to work fast and smart to save his city. New California doesn’t have mages, you see. And Cin City is safe for just as long as nobody can prove otherwise.
(Note: this book has a sequel, but it is not part of an epic fantasy trilogy.)
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
With an introduction by Holly Chism.
AND YOU KNOW I’M CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED TO DO THIS. I’LL STOP WHEN THE NEXT BOOK IN SERIES COMES OUT:
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all. Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction. Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.
Volume 1 The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep. They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner. The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives. Skip’s already broken that one. Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.
Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.
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.
11B-Mailclerksays:
According To Hoyt 