Possibly the least American thing about me, the one thing that acculturation can touch, is that most people not just born and raised in, but immigrating to America, seem to long for the untouched spaces, the miles and miles from the nearest neighbor.

Me? I am a creature of cities. I feel safer — in normal times — in a large city. I like to know there is someone within reach of my cries.More importantly, since my body seems to need walking and since it refuses to walk nowhere, I like to be within reach of places where I can go and have a coffee and people watch, or alternately walk to a store, a church, a farmer’s market.

I haven’t had that for 7 years, and my weight shows it. As do the deep depressive bouts.

I can’t really explain why I feel both safer and happier in large cities, except, perhaps some deep-set evolutionay things. After all, except for smaller contributions, my ancestry reaches to Greece and Rome, long-builders of massive, cosmopolite cities. There is the contributing fact, as well, that I’m an introvert who needs people. I need to SEE people. I don’t in any way need to interact with them, you see? Just see a lot of people, different from myself.

And I know a lot of you are going to bring up all the reasons cities are yucky. And I’m going to shrug and say “whatever.” Because city or deep rural area is all a matter of taste. Both are yucky in the way that humans aren’t ethereal angels, and we must deal with the realities of life, including other people. It’s all on how you prefer to live. My awareness of my surroundings and preparedness to defend myself is no different on a city street than say, my brother in soul Dave Freer, when he goes foraging in deepest wilderness. There isn’t a difference in degree or in skills. Only in favored environment. (No, city people aren’t more dependent on others. Not unless they are in the welfare class, and even then. I was born in the second half to the twentieth century. No sane person then would be dependent on others for their safety and well-being. And if you read enough, you’ll find that goes back to Rome. There might have been a time of greater trust, maybe, but if there was it was small communities and special circumstances. Other than that humans who trust others excessively left no descendants.)

At any rate, I come not to praise cities but — against my own preferences — to bury them. Or at least to sing their funeral dirge. Which is both surprising and weird, to the point that few other people seem to be wrapping their heads around it.

So, let’s talk about cities. Their origins, at least as far as we know, came with the invention of agriculture. Maybe. Gobekli Tepe casts some doubt on that.

The history I was taught was that with agriculture, humans stopped being nomadic, and banded together for agriculture and commerce, and then cities grew.

Maybe.

It makes more sense to me that cities are older than that, older even probably than most people being settled. It makes sense to me for cities to be cross roads trading posts, places where various nomad tribes met to trade and exchange wives and sell slaves and what not. And some people would stay behind, and become …. hosts to these gatherings, merchants, people who kept things that the next people might want. (And some would be dad’s ancestors, probably.) If you want, you can even see agriculture coming from that, not the other way around. Sure, humans probably had figured out seeds and seeding, and the growing of things, but staying in one area would make that painfully obvious. Probably aid in animal domestication too.

No, I don’t know. Neither do they. But it is a possibility.

What we do know is that humans congregate, and that humans tend to congregate in certain places that become/acquire physical structures for the gatherings.

Most of these “cities” even those praised as rich and affluent and admired had maybe 1000 people. 5000? 10,000 was a large city in pre-history, or at least we think so, it’s hard to tell.

However, any modern urban dweller would think Thebes at its height — 80k people — or certainly Rome at its height — estimated at four or 5 million (?) — were cities. Now their living arrangements might strike us as icky and weird beyond belief, but cities they were.

The point I’m trying to make is that cities are very ancient things for humans, a result of our tendency to congregate and trade and gather for all purposes, from religion to finding a mate we’re not related to, to you know, that nice little tavern on the corner that serves some beer to die for.

In the nineteenth and twentieth century (though reaching back to the 16th) we grew megalopolises. If you were a lover of science and knowledge, cities were where you learned. If you wanted to make money trading, you headed to the city. If you were an artist, the cities was where there was money and interest enough to make you famous, or at least to allow you to not starve. If you “just” wanted work in the growing manufactories, you headed to the city. You wanted to exert your craft and learn and excel? Go to the city young man.

Even in the US, and never mind the people who moved ever west when they could see the smoke of other cabins, cities in the newly settled territories expanded rapidly and became the centers of commerce and culture. They also became the subject of f*ck-f*ck games, but that’s something we’ll get into in a minute here.

Now the games go on, but things are changing. Despite the fact that in the late 20th century we were all taught — or imbibed through entertainment — that the future was the megalopolis, and that in the future everyone lived in cities, the future has taken a sharp u-turn, and what we’re looking at is quite different.

We are standing, staring in awed horror, as cities take themselves apart. It seems Detroit was the foretelling of destiny for the American cities, the inescapable future. But in the end it’s not even Detroit. It’s the way of those enigmatic ruins found in the middle of nowhere, where you look at them and say “Who were they? Why did they build this? And why did they leave it?”

Why did they leave it in the first half of the 21st century is readily answerable: crime, malfeasance, bureaucrat hatred of those they govern, making the cities unlivable. Who will stay to be abused when they could live anywhere?

And that’s the second part, the sting in the tail of what’s happening: the seekers of knowledge, the setters of culture, those who make and break things do not need to live in the city anymore.

To the extent we need to congregate, we can do it online. And we do. My work friends range all over the US, with a few more far-flung tendrils, like Dave Freer. I can talk to them, share knowledge, coordinate projects, and I don’t need to see them in the morning for coffee. (Though I’ll grant you, it would be nice.) Both husband and younger son work from home offices for out-of-state companies, while living in places where they probably couldn’t find work, if they looked.

I’ve seen this coming — insert Foul Ol’ Ron screams of “I tol’ ’em, I tol’ ’em, Millenium hand in shrimp.” — for years. FOR DECADES.

Yeah, yeah, I’ll grant you that only about 30 to 35% of the people CAN work remote (and only that many because many clerks and administrative assistants CAN in fact work remote.)

There is a vast number of people who CAN’T: factory workers, and factory supervisors, truckers, and everyone in the hospitality industry.

But the point on this is that the push towards the cities and what made them centers of abundance and interest and magnets for the young were the people who can work remotely.

The other point that some of you might miss — if you haven’t driven around this great country of ours recently — is how much factories are automated now. No, seriously. I first became aware of this in the eighties. We knew someone who lived in the middle of nowhere and worked in a factory. It was him and another guy. Two 12 hour shifts. (I don’t know what they did for weekends.) The factory was that automated. Someone just needed to be there to deal if anything went wrong. The factory made the sorts of things later outsourced to China (I guess it was cheaper. Who knows. Slaves are maybe cheaper than machines.) — plastic buckets and basins, plastic container of all sorts, the kind you found at the dollar store.

More recently, in the last five years, driving criss-cross America for cons and just because we wouldn’t be locked down, we saw many of these. In the middle of nowhere, there will be a factory, and it’s plain there is no great population nearby. They make…. well, a lot of the things that are starting to come back from China (because even five years ago, the problems were obvious.)

No, this doesn’t mean that these professions can be remote. But it means that they can be located in nowhere’s ville — except for one thing. Notice I said that we saw these while traveling around. My friend Jeff Greason says we’re limited by ability to ship stuff. He’s not exactly wrong. But he’s not exactly right either.

Sure, for a certain size of product, you need…. seaports, or airports or at the very least railway confluences. (And if your ears just perked up on that, more in a minute.) For the small crap? All you need is a highway and trucks. (Did your ears perk up again? Yeah.) And America has plenty of those…

Now the conditions for this abandonment of the largest cities, this slow emptying, were there all along. Since… the mid nineties and reliable net access at least.

Militating against them was …. habit. Inertia. Even now, the managerial class is fighting light living hell to have everyone go back to offices. For one, because, you know, they have those expensive buildings. But also because most of them are raging extroverts. But a broad class of mind-workers are fighting back just as hard.

Because…. well, you know? Those people moved. And found they like living some place smaller (in some case the suburbs, but–) and raise their own kids, and spend time with their spouse.

The catalyst was the lockdowns. MOST people found they could work just as well away from the big centers. And they intend to do so. For one, in the midst of economic f*ckery it’s a lot cheaper.

The bureaucratic classes, never having realized what they were bringing about (their minds are slow to see new things) are fighting this as hard as they can. There is a strong attack on transportation, a wish to make trains “unsafe” (which is new, since lefties love choo choos) and a fight against trucking, in the name of their insane enviro illusions. Because if they can stop transport of goods across great distances they can — they think — pen us all back in the cities.

And they need to.

You see, for many years — at least 100 and possibly more — there’s been this weird game going on with cities at least in America. Make the city hard to live in, chase the productive away. Bring in huddled masses (that way you can accuse the productive of being racist or perhaps just rich and uncaring.) Devalue the real estate. Then start a clean up and sell the real estate (which weirdly you or your friends own) to the newcomers. Heck, if you can put restrictions on building, you can sell it to the huddled masses coming in to work on the rebuilding, with every little closet turned into an apartment. (We call that NYC.)

And I think a lot of importing homeless and the destruction that went on, particularly during lockdowns, had this in mind. Recall the NYC mayor, likeanidiot saying that he’d replace the people fleeing with illegal immigrants. He meant it, because, well, that has been the history of NYC since the civil war. And when the factories were IN THE CITY and therefore illiterate immigrants could — being used more or less as slave labor — become immediate sources of wealth, this made perfect sense.

They’re just starting — slowly — to get a feeling this time might be different. I’ve read articles lamenting “What are we going to do with all these expensive office complexes” with the usual berks calling for it to be turned into welfare housing, an expensive endeavor that will only accelerate the destruction.

I understand Denver is one of those seeking to restore the idea that it’s clean and safe for tourists. Good for them. But at least one of the people who visited there recently reported an eerie feeling of “where are all the people?” And judging by the “please send money” from all the cultural institutions (including our church) we used to patronize, I see no reason to doubt it.

Note too, that smaller cities aren’t facing this kind of come apart. At least not yet, perhaps never. Because they remain regional trading spots. And they probably always had a lower percentage of what we’ll call “mind workers” (Only because laptop-class is a weird term that lumps people like me and bureaucrats together.) They might bleed a little but not crazy amounts.

Is there a way for the great cities to avoid death? Well, h*ll yeah.

No, they will never be great industrial centers again. Most of them already weren’t that. And the daily worker grind and commute is or can be a thing of the past.

But most great cities in America have history. And a lot of them are in scenic places.

Besides, they have something mid size cities, towns, and little towns and villages throughout the US can’t get: a variety of cultures, cuisines, shows, etc.

If the weasels in charge of the largest cities — most of them socialists, which can be defined as followers of a 19th century prophet who seek to take us back to the 1930s — had half a brain, they’d set out cleaning up: not just the physical landscape, but crime. (They should all be supporters of a tight immigration policy, but they live in the past) They should make cities as welcoming and safe as possible. Attract interesting ethnic communities, with their cuisine, sure, but they too must be safe for tourists. And make a big deal of the city’s history and culture.

In fact, make each vast city a sort of amusement park, where people in the far flung parts of the country can go. I bet there are enough internal (not to mention external) tourists, to make these cities, centering on the hospitality industry, very wealthy indeed. Glimmering centers of pride for locals and people of the world. Magnets for tourism. You can even slide a little debauchery and bohemian life in there, if you don’t wave it in the face of those who don’t want to see it. The outre has always been an attraction of large cities.

If you’ve noticed, they’re going EXACTLY the other way.

That’s because the ironically self-named progressives really live, mentally, in the early twentieth century. Their philosophy is not suited for any other era.

So they’re going to try to drag us kicking and screaming to the past. And do a lot of damage, trying.

But this type of movement can’t be countered, short of shutting down all of civilization, and I’m going to bet they can’t.

Insert pithy saying about sliding through tightening fingers.

In the end, we win, they lose. Because their entire movement is an attempt to force toothpaste back into the tube.

And meanwhile the rest of us who prefer large cities must learn to live in smaller ones. And do the best we can.

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 HOLLY CHISM: Detritus

Nick Bryant was a junkie. Lived on the streets, and everything. And then, he saved a baby girl from drowning, and fell into the role of protector. As he, the baby, and her older brother get to know one another, he decides that maybe, there’s more left to him than the drugs, and decides to try to live again. And maybe build a family.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Madeleine and the Mists

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went. . . the Misty Hills were filled with marvels.

Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old.

But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband.

She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king — and the Misty Hills.

Some things are not so easily evaded.

FROM LAWDOG: The LawDog Files: Revised and Expanded.

The entire sworn personnel complement of the department consisted of the Sheriff, the Chief Deputy and two patrol deputies.

That was it.

I miss that county.

To me, law enforcement is tracking an Alzheimer’s patient for four hours through the boonies after he wandered away from home; answering a 911 call because a rattlesnake is about to eat a nest full of baby birds; and scaring off ghosts because the lady of the house lost her husband ten years ago, her children live out of state, and you are the only outside contact she gets.


For me, being a cop is about keeping an eye out for a black-and-white dog of indeterminate ancestry, red bandanna, whose 9-year-old owner is crying his eyes out.

Most new officers will start out in medium-to-large cities/counties and never know what it’s like to patrol when your only back-up is 45 miles away as the cruiser drives – and asleep in bed, to boot.

So, I tell stories and hope that through those, the Gentle Reader can get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Western small-town, rural Peace Officer

FROM LAWDOG: The Africa Files (The LawDog Files).

Africa is different.

Most people who grew up in the Western world don’t realize just how different.

In this volume, LawDog relates stories of growing up in West Africa, including run-ins with the flora and fauna, a younger brother, their engineer father and redheaded mother.

The Africa Files isn’t just a collection of childhood shenanigans, though there’s a lot of that, but also a fond recollection of a time and place that shaped a Texas lawman.

FROM C.V.WALTER: Pursued by the Alien Pilot

Dorcas knew what she was doing when she volunteered to join the Forward Hope; getting as far away from her past as possible.

What she found on board was a purpose and community far beyond anything she’d dreamed of since her escape. Off the planet and surrounded by aliens, she’s safe from the machinations of the creature who abducted her years before…

Or so she thought.

When a nightmare from her past threatens to come after her family, Dorcas does the only thing she knows how to do; confront the monster in his lair and pray for a rescue.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Let Us Tell You Again

The continuing story of April, Jeff, and Heather after they conspire to rebel against North America and their efforts to find friends and a safe haven in the stars. Continuing to close the time gap to the later Family Law series of books.
Heather and her peers impose a ban on armed ships beyond L1 in the Solar System and a prohibition for explorer ships going interstellar heavily armed. There are continuing stories of future characters still stuck on Earth.
Heather has a lot of help from her friends but it isn’t easy being the queen.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Destroyer

Ice is back!

And back in trouble.

His mission–sabotage the Cyborg Empire–goes awry when the Cyborgs discover his dimensional gate, and Gior, the obnoxious young woman with the rare talent of being able to manipulate dimensional phenomena, is forced to close that gate moments before the Cyborgs capture her.

Now Ice is not just marooned in enemy territory, he needs to rescue Gior quickly, before they get a control chip into her brain.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Lord Adrescu’s Blade: A Familiar Origins Tale.

A legendary sword, and the man who wielded it.

Lord Danut Adrescu returns to his keep to find a mystery and a warning. A battered young Healer who cannot speak, and a vision of battle with a half-bull monster. What links the two? And what ties them to his new sword, a battle-claimed blade made by the finest Italian swordsmiths?

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: SMOOTH

Halfway to Success by Thomas Kendall

               I think what’s dead clear at this point is that half the takes about the Starship launch indicate that people don’t know what Starship is for, or how the program around it within SpaceX operates. In 2021, Everyday Astronaut did a tour of Starbase guided by Elon Musk, and interviewed him the whole time. Even if you’re not a fan of Musk, the whole interview should be required listening for people who are serious about understanding Starship. The second part especially is the juiciest in terms of understanding some key points that I will condense down here. The below quotes by Musk are pull-quotes from the video. I have in some cases used ellipses to condense down some beating around the bush, and used bold to emphasize what I feel are critical statements, but you are welcome to hear the un-retouched statements and form your own opinions.

               First, Starship is designed to be a rapid prototyping program that throws things at the wall as quickly as possible. Musk sees it as explicitly a program designed around aggressive iteration to the exclusion of all else, describing it as the “polar opposite” of Dragon. He says:

“We have just a fundamentally different optimization for Starship versus say the polar extreme would be Dragon. Like Dragon there can be no failures ever, everything’s gotta be tested, to, you know, six ways to Sunday. (…) That’s like extreme conservatism. Then Falcon is a little less conservative, it is possible for us to have say a failure of the booster on landing, that’s not the end of the world. And then for Starship … is like the polar opposite of Dragon. We’re iterating rapidly to create the first ever fully reusable rocket… Orbital rocket. And fully and rapidly reusable, reusable in a way that is like an aircraft.” (5:34)

               Rapid prototyping is not a new concept and Musk did not invent it. While it is unusual to see something the size of Starship run through rapid prototyping, it’s a mainstay of engineering, and practical work of all kinds. Even people who follow makers and engineering YouTubers should be familiar with the process (But if you aren’t, watch any video by Stuff Made Here, Collin Furze, or even I Did A Thing. Or for that matter, CodeBullet, for the equivalent in coding. Or NileRed, for the equivalent in chemistry. This is a common process, commonly employed by people trying to do difficult things that don’t come with an instruction book. It is also a fundamentally scientific and empirical process. Empirical translates roughly as “guess and check while paying attention”.)

               Second, Musk knows that this will result in ships not coming back, and he is perfectly comfortable with that:

“But this is also a case where we’re intentionally iterating the design rapidly. And basically ships and boosters will either be amazing lawn ornaments which then have to be stored, and they look awesome, but you know, we don’t want 12 of them. It’s gonna look bizarre and where would we put them? So, since we’re making rapid iterations with each, almost with, basically every single ship and booster has had significant iterations. But you either want it to blow up or… The early ones… You want them to blow up or you’re going to have to find a place to store them. So we actually want to push the envelope. And frankly if you don’t push the envelope you cannot achieve the goal of a fully and rapidly reusable rocket. It’s not possible. You have to go close to the edge on margins.” (22:16)

               This goes to the question of whether the launch was a success. While I have somewhat more muted opinions than LaughingWolf (which I will get to in a minute, and explain why I think what I think) I think this article is an excellent and informed one. One point made in the article is that Starship is testing to destruction, and they are getting good data in the process. I concur, and I think Musk’s critiques of the shuttle program are extremely poignant to the discussion of the value in testing to destruction.:

Musk: “Space shuttle had almost no room for iteration because there were people on board, so you couldn’t be blowing up shuttles.”

Interviewer: “Well and they did very, very little iteration.”

Musk:”Very little. In fact a lack of iteration was the problem. Because they, a lot of the issues they were aware of, but people were too afraid to make change.”

Interviewer: “Cause the design froze.”

Musk: “Yeah ’cause (…) There was a risk reward asymmetry. So big punishment for… If you make a change and something goes wrong, big punishment. If you make a change and it goes right, small reward. So the issues with the “o” ring and then with the insulation coming off and hitting the wing were… They had seen this before. They were known issues. But it… Because it had worked before they were like ‘well, it worked before’. Eh. Russian roulette works before. So. ‘Look, I’ve pulled the trigger so many times and… There must be no bullets in this gun’. Anyway, it’s hard to iterate though when people are on every mission. You can’t just be blowing stuff up ’cause you’re gonna kill people. Starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up. It’s really helpful.” (7:05)

               Musk’s answer to the risk and difficulty inherent in making this rocket work is different from NASA’s. It is not to build in layers and layers of safety protocols. That was how Dragon was built, but Starship is a very different creature. Their plan is to fly the ship until they are familiar with every way it fails and have designed around it. This mindset is explained in more detail by Musk in a short conversation about launch escape and the lack thereof:

“Launch escape I think is… You basically just need to fly a lot and have a lot of redundancy. So if you lose an engine on the booster, it doesn’t matter, basically. If you lose multiple engines it shouldn’t matter. And you should be able to lose an engine on the ship and everything is okay. (…[substantial amount of technical discussion of launch escape] … ) you can’t have an escape system on the Moon or on Mars. You can’t have something pop off and then have chutes drop… there’s no atmosphere. And then Mars has a very low density atmosphere so it’ll just hit the ground supersonic. You know, it’s not going to save you. So the ship has to be safe enough for people without an escape system, because otherwise you can’t go to the moon, you can’t go to Mars. So it’s kinda pointless to do it on Earth. Just fly it a lot.” (8:51)

               To summarize all of the above—Starship is a program meant to rapidly prototype and iterate rockets. They are operating the rockets with thinner margin for error and as a result they consider rockets failing, and in particular, exploding, to be a necessary part of this work. In a sense they even consider it desirable, because the purpose of the testing is in large part specifically to determine how the rockets fail, since they are deploying them in circumstances where escape simply will not be an option and figuring out how to engineer around the ways they commonly fail is the only way to make them safe enough for use.

               There is an interesting and related side digression here I think is worth mentioning. The rocket that exploded doesn’t appear to be the most recent version. According to the wiki maintained by the SpaceX superfans who spend their lives staring at Starbase, the stack that blew up consisted of Ship 24 and Booster 7. For simplicity’s sake (and because I find it funny), let’s dub the now-vaporized test ship 24/7 for short (Which reverses the nomenclature actual SpaceX fans use. Then again, given its definitely-not-intentional launch date, and fate, I would accept “420 Blazin’ ” as an alternative name. Incidentally, and apropos nothing, the first ship ever stacked by SpaceX—and fueled, but not launched— was reportedly Ship 4 on Booster 20 according to the same wiki).

               The presumptive successor to Ship 24, Ship 25, is built. In fact it looks like it has been sitting on the test site since January. Technically even Ship 26 has been built (though it looks so different that there is still speculation on what it’s actually meant for. Starship has many planned variants.).

               Booster 7 was also a few iterations back. SpaceX is currently working on building Booster 10. For complicated reasons Booster 8 was scrapped before completion, so Booster 7’s successor is the already-constructed Booster 9, which is, even from external inspection, heavily redesigned from Booster 7. Also— semi-famously in some internet circles, there is at least one substantial and poignant difference between the Boosters—Booster 9 uses an electric servo to direct its engines, while Booster 7 was the last to be produced with hydraulics. Why is that relevant? Because there is speculation that a small explosion seen on the side of Booster 7 during thrust was the hydraulic system.

               It is possible that the use of the older hardware is intentional, to try to suss out any fixable problems with the ship and booster waiting in the wings before deploying what would theoretically be the 25/9 rocket (Which I would like to vote, if it ever get stacked, be referred to as “Odds Squared”.).

               In light of that possibility it’s worth noting that Musk describes SpaceX as intentionally running old hardware on missions where they might be expended:

               “For Falcon Nine and even like the block 5… So called block 5, which is more like version 7 really… But we don’t even wanna use the early block 5s. So, like even those are a pain in the ass and we would prefer to retire them. So like when we have like a mission that requires an expendable booster we’ll put an early block 5. Because the early block 5s are not as good as the later block 5s, and they’re more of a pain in the ass to get ready for flight.”(28:34)

               And as a digression within this digression, Everyday Astronaut—who you might have guessed follows SpaceX closely— speculated during the livestream of the rocket launch that the prototyping and variation extends down to individual engines. Which is to say, it was his opinion that even the individual engines on the booster may have differed from one another, just based on how SpaceX operates. Of course, that is pure speculation, but especially if you view launches as an opportunity to investigate a variety of failure modes rapidly, would make a strange kind of sense, and allow you to gather much more data, albeit at the cost of increasing the risk to the overall launch. It would also recontextualize the engine failures on 24/7 if the engines had subtle variations.

               So now that we have this context, the obvious question is—why do I have a more muted take than LaughingWolf? Well, while I agree that SpaceX did say on the day of the flight that it was a victory if the thing launched rather than blew up, Musk had also previously addressed the question in detail during the above interview. And, yes, this was remote from yesterday’s orbital test flight, but on the other hand, this was also a less guarded moment where he seemed to be just saying what he honestly thought, before he was under media and investor pressure to manage expectations as aggressively. In response to a question on the goals for the first orbital launch, he said:

               “I mean our goal with the first one is, for the first orbital launch, our goal is to make it to orbit without blowing up. That’s our goal. And frankly if we even get the… If the booster even does it’s job and something goes wrong with the ship I would count that as good progress. Like basically, actually, to be totally frank, if it takes off without blowing up the stand, stage zero, which is much harder to replace than the booster, that would be a victory. Please do not blow up on the stand. That’s the number one concern.” (16:20)

               Musk enumerated three additional goals there and the launch only achieved one of them, sort of. The booster did seem to do its job, depending on how you define its job. It seems to have “only” gotten about 24.2 miles, or about 1/4 the way even to low Earth Orbit. You could probably infer as much from the fact that it was visible on camera the whole time if faintly. But that’s still a decent chunk of the way. It’s not clear why the ship went tumbling or to what extent the booster was malfunctioning to cause that. SpaceX’s stream of the event live didn’t really report any problems until the attempted separation for the boostback. The rocket was described as nominal to that point. It’s possible that boostback was supposed to start that early in flight, and that’s why the ship flipped. If it wasn’t—which seems equally plausible to me, but then I’m not a rocket scientist— perhaps the maneuver was intentionally initiated to try to get some data on the process even though they didn’t get to the desired altitude. If either of those is the case, the separation mechanism seems to have failed. It may also be that the ship was just tumbling. Starship looked visibly angled seconds after launch. The engines out on the Booster seem like obvious potential culprits.

               But perhaps the most unfortunate of all these is that the launch site appears to have been seriously damaged. The launch tower looks intact, but it seems like in retrospect perhaps Stage Zero should have been more comprehensively considered the launch site in general rather than just the tower. Starship dug an enormous crater underneath itself. Retrospectively it seems obvious it would do this. The Falcon Heavy, which has six fewer engines and a lot less power overall, is seen in videos of its test flight being launched from Kennedy Space Center over trenches meant to divert flame and soaked in water. It’s not clear at the time of this writing why Starship launched off a flat, dry surface. Maybe SpaceX wanted to see if it was viable? They certainly have their answer! Some joke that they let the rocket demonstrate how big its minimum flame trench would be. This is an admittedly effective but kind of messy way of doing that. Whatever the reason, I would imagine— given the long term goal is to make the rocket rapidly re-useable, that maybe the biggest thing getting reworked after the launch is, strangely, the launch site, which at this point looks decidedly one-use.

               Some people are speculating the flying concrete chunks contributed to the engine outs and even to the failure of stage separation. While I’ll hold off on saying absolutely that that’s not the case until the final report is issued, to me it doesn’t seem very plausible. I just don’t think concrete chunks would be able to overcome the headwinds generated by 17 million pounds of thrust in order to strike the engines, no matter how they ricocheted. As for the failure of stage separation, well, forgive me for stating the obvious, but that’s way up at the top of the rocket. How exactly would that work?

               Lest I come off as too much of a negative Nancy, allow me to point out that a lot went right with the flight. It didn’t accomplish the things that Musk has described wanting it to in the past, and it only got through a limited number of mission milestones. But… they were big milestones. The biggest and most powerful rocket in history cleared the pad without exploding, in its first launch test as a full stack. It pushed through Max-Q relatively intact. It was also fairly stable (if canted) even with a few engines out, including being able to—presumably as a result of its onboard electrical igniter—relight an engine that went out in flight (it’s worth noting that Falcons have also had engine-outs on missions that were ultimately successful, and of course engine-out capability was specifically discussed as something the rockets should have by Musk above). And the biggest positive of all, SpaceX now has a ton of new data on what the rocket looks like when launched that it didn’t have before. And for a company that plans to fly the rocket until they know every way it’s prone to breaking, well, they now know several more ways it can break. And there’s a good chance those ways will be truly novel. Musk noted in part 1 of the interview:

               “If you look at like the various reasons why we blew up Starship and you looked at the risk list, none of the reasons they blew up were on the risk list. Maybe you could argue one of them, maybe, was on somebody’s risk list, but it wasn’t brought up beforehand, put it that way.” (32:58)

               I think we have good reason from the track record of the company to hope this test provided the necessary information to build bigger and better things. People forget that there was a time in the recent past that landing and refurbishing boosters was a pipe dream, and SpaceX blew up a lot of rockets learning how to do it, to the derision of the same idiots now perversely semi-celebrating the explosion of Starship and telling people this proves we should just stay on Earth. Now SpaceX is using re-useable rockets to beat all comers at launch costs. He who laughs last…

               In the final estimation, my own take on the Starship launch is that, honestly, it wasn’t a success, not on the day of the launch—but it could become a success. If SpaceX learns the things they need to from the 4/20 launch to either get closer to orbit in the next launch, or at least to discover a new and exciting failure mode, then the launch will indeed have been a success. As it stands today it is a potent seed for success. I hope we get to see it bloom. I hope that Musk isn’t being too optimistic—or overcome by bravado—in wanting another launch in a few months.

               But after all of the above, don’t be surprised if it blows up too. That’s what test flights are for.

               I will leave you with a final quote from Musk, from part 3 of the interview, because I think understanding what drives him may be the biggest reason to bet on SpaceX over other private aerospace companies.:

               “I think if we operate with extreme urgency, then we have a chance of making life multi-planetary. Still just a chance, not for sure. If we don’t act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably zero.” (13:11)

Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein is one of my favorite novels.

Yes, I know. “It was just a metaphor for communism.” This is usually said with a superior air, as though the idea of communism as brain bugs that control the unwilling is such a ridiculous thing. Fine. You be superior. Me, meanwhile, am looking at the brain infestation of Soviet communism still wrecking the world after the Soviet Union was relegated to the midden of history, and I reserve the right to laugh at you for being an idiot.

Or “It was just a gimmick story, about a space invasion.” Sure. And most of Shakespeare is just gimmick stories, often told.

You can pose and strut as much as you think adequate to salve your intellectual pride, but I’m going to be here giving you raspberries. When you’ve produced anything half as good as Puppet Masters, and particularly anything that applies as a “make you think” story in so many dimensions, you can critique some aspects of it. Until then you will abide in patience.

Me? I’ve never written anything half as good. And I like it anyway. I don’t care if it’s a metaphor for communism as a brain virus, because I’m simple enough to think communism IS a brain virus. (No? Convince me.) And it has caused me not just to think over, but to become informed about “how things work” which in turn made me a better writer and a better citizen.

So–

It started with that opening, when I was…. somewhere under 18. I’m still a sucker for secret entrances, and passwords to see the hidden/access the unspoken. I know this shocks you, right? At least if you haven’t read my books.

That’s all that grabbed me, to begin with. And then….

And then things came long, like the idea that if you could get in under the procedures and rules, you were safe, even if you were an enemy in the nest. The constitutional Republic has that weakness. If you appear to follow the rules, you can get in and destroy from the inside, and the rules don’t allow the good guys to get rid of you.

(As we have proof daily.)

But the thing that sticks with me and keeps coming back again and again is the corruption of information.

You see, in the novel — it’s okay to have spoilers for a more than fifty years old novel, right? — humans controlled by the alien brain bugs pass on corrupt information. So, for a long time most of the nation doesn’t even know that the invasion has happened, much less fighting it.

And this insidious corruption of information costs lives.

It preserves the idea that nothing is wrong, at the expense of losing the fight. The reality is so huge and scary people won’t believe it, unless confronted with it, face to face.

And here we are. Because most of the US — the world, really — media is infected with the brain bug of communism from their education (A lot of them unknowingly. A lot stupidly. For a while now it’s been fashionable to say something like “Of course, I’m not a communist, but Marxist analysis is just so useful for….” This is kind of saying that alien brain bugs are so useful for all sorts of things, even though they don’t in any way belong to or apply to humanity.)

So all our information is “filtered” through this complete lack of reality and truth. Which means what is true is distorted, but most of it just ain’t true.

Which gets us to “test, test, test.”

It is important to remember various things, one of them being Occam’s Razor. Sure, Covid-19 really might be the first bug where a)natural immunity doesn’t work b) masks miraculously protect from tiny viruses c) the virus can hang suspended mid air, outside, ready to infect you when you walk by hours later. d) locking up the entire population will cause the virus to stop being infective and just go home to sulk or something.

It might. Or you know, Occam’s razor: it’s all a big government/media propaganda operation centered around a bad flu. Looking at the case studies and casualties, starting with Diamond Princess seemed to support this simplest hypothesis, too.

Or you know, it’s entirely possible that suddenly in the dead of night after the count stopped, all votes found were for Brandon. It’s possible. It’s just highly unlikely. More likely is that the count was stopped and in the dead of night the brain bugs Marxists with the dead-alive candidate were frauded in. The fact this has happened all over the world and that the “victors” felt the need to be inaugurated behind barriers seemed to confirm this most likely hypothesis.

Another thing to remember in this day and age is that very seldom can they hide all sources of information. Some rando will have seen and blogged something.

So, you know, BLM riots might be perfectly spontaneous, but isn’t it weird that pallets of bricks “suitable for throwing” just show up?

And isn’t it weird that Antifa has to be bused from town to town, almost like there aren’t enough of them?

And on and on and on.

The thing to remember is that your sources of information are corrupt. And that whatever the mass-industrial-complex — aka the mind-control bugs — want you to believe is probably not true.

If you eliminate that, what remains, however unlikely, must be the truth.

I think these days the difference between conspiracy theory and proven truth is two weeks. Sometimes less.

If you reject the smug people telling you things like “Oh, that’s just a metaphor for communism” as if no one ever should be afraid of cuddly, fluffy commies, you’ll be ahead of the game. These people also tell you a load of nonsense, like that you’re just racist, or you just don’t want women to achieve, or that civilized habits are “White supremacy” or– If you ignore their supercilious air of unearned superiority and examine the arguments, you’ll find they have none. Just hectoring and posturing. Bah. I don’t have to listen to that. And I can turn it right around and laugh at them for being fools.

So, go forth. Laugh at the smug superiority of idiots. Test, test, test. And continue fighting the illusions of the Puppet Masters.

They hate humanity. They want to destroy us.

Unfortunately for them, we don’t destroy easy. And we’ve had just about enough.

Be not afraid.

The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”

However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.

All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control.”

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

If their plans were working perfectly, each of their “let’s ban guns’ would be having an effect.

If their plans were working perfectly, their attempts at grooming people’s kids would be ignored or applauded.

If their plans were working perfectly, they wouldn’t have needed federal agents in twitter, to make sure the narrative didn’t break. They wouldn’t need armies of Chinese and Russian commenters in blogs, trying to paint the idea America is what it isn’t. (They’re very distinctive too. Russians will never understand we’re not as racist or anti-semitic as they are. Their idea of America is just Russia, but with more territory. Their view of us and what they think they’re playing to is as obvious as their screwed up syntax. As for the Chinese, they just tend to be repetitive and extol the virtues of China. Much big, so strong.)

If their plans were working — I remind you they’ve been at this for A HUNDRED YEARS — twitter as it appeared to be would be the real America. The real Britain. Etc. But it’s not.

If you think any of those are aberrations, you’re falling for the narrative: for what the media pushes and showcases.

This isn’t going their way. They have the levers of visible power. They have the big megaphones. They have the narrative.

We have…. everything else. And the more they push things that will outright kill us, like idiot fuel bans, the less their “levers” will work, because people have a self-preservation instinct. People will want to stay alive, and will do it by any means possible. Which means, largely, ignoring the “official power.”

Those who will wail and say “but that destroys law and order” aren’t precisely wrong. but they aren’t precisely right either. Americans have a very strong instinctive grasp on “legitimate authority” and seem to bounce back to it when the illegitimate one is disassembled.

They aren’t winning. They’re dangerous as heck, don’t get me wrong, because they keep insanely grabbing things and making them not work, both to try to save themselves and frankly to punish us for not loving them.

It will hurt. But they’re losing.

The image you should have of them is not of the careful planner in the shadows — they ain’t that. Look at their luminaries — but of the falling monster, grabbing at chunks of the building to prevent his fall, and inevitably breaking things.

It’s going to hurt. It might even take decades of pain. I don’t think so, because America is not that patient.

But their control is breaking.

If it weren’t they wouldn’t need ever increasing levels of fraud just to keep control of the bureaucracy and the “obvious” power.

The problem is they keep thinking they’re masterminds. Their self conceit is staggering. But in everything else? They’re petty small people, each of them obsessed with his tiny fiefdom, and willing to knife their best friend in the back to keep it.

In fact, they are the current incarnation of a very old evil. An evil we keep defeating. An evil that America stomped on very decisively just with its founding.

They’ve grabbed hold of us again — spits on the graves of Wilson and FDR — now and then. But we always punt them. Because they’re not natural here. They might not be natural anywhere in the West.

They’re a disease. And we have an immune system. Even in the rest of the world, they’re in increasing trouble — though you’ll never know it from mass media — because they don’t work. They never have. All they have is the narrative. And the more distant the narrative is from reality, the more obvious the break is.

Be not afraid. Don’t fall for the narrative. The way to defeat them is not to try to follow them into their house of lies.

The way to defeat them is to ignore them, and build what works.

Build over, build under, build around.

Be not afraid.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I was born less than twenty years after the end of World War II. It hit me as an anvil the other day that when I was bumming around Europe with an Eurorail pass in the early eighties, the people I ran into had been children in World War II. Like my dad, who, back then, was in his late 40s. Or even adults, for the older people.

Those guys in the back of the bar in Germany, saying nasty things about the American tourists? It’s entirely likely they’d fought in the German armies.

It didn’t feel that way. You see, World War II was long ago. Done and dusted. It had happened in the world of old movies, where everything was in black and white. And World War I, of which my grandparents had vivid memories (as children)? Well, that was… that was at least as far away as the French revolution. As old as a belief in the divine rights of kings. Done and dusted. Sleeping with the ancestors. No more affecting my life — perhaps less — than the edicts of Roman emperors or that Portuguese king who planted pines to slow erosion.

But it’s not that way. Of course not.

We’re all born into a world of ghosts, and raised with things no one ever says, because — well, it’s not even because we don’t want to. It’s more that it’s so obvious to us, who have been around a long time — it never occurs to us to mention it.

My parents mentioned being little and having government people come around to glue a film on the windows. In case of bombing, so it wouldn’t cause more death and destruction. (Yes, Portugal was neutral. Which was actually a really bad place to be when you’re a small and poor country. As was pointed out when I was little “well, if Portugal weren’t neutral, Spain would have invaded. The end. Unless it went in on Spain’s side and then England would have bombed it. The end.” So Portugal sent food to both sides, starved its people and apparently played brinksmanship games.) Mom talked of going hungry, and how expensive food was. Dad… well, his family always grew the food they needed, but there wasn’t much extra for anything.

But that’s what I heard of. And dad had books of military history and a lot on World War II. But I never realized it was that close, that it was not just living memory but “vigorous adult” memory. Until a few years ago.

I bet you my kids feel the same about the Cold War. They have no concept of growing up knowing at any minute the bombs would fly, and destroy all life on earth, and send the survivors to the stone age. (That this was never plausible or the truth, but another Soviet propaganda operation is something else.)

I was talking to someone slightly older than I about everyone being scared of nuclear war, and us sitting here, going “first time?”

But there’s more to it than that, of course. That thing I said above? “That was never likely?”

It was never likely. We know nukes don’t have the sort of range and effect we were told they had. We know nuclear winter was a crock dreamed up by people who wanted the west to voluntarily disarm.

At the risk of sounding insane, the entire 20th century is sounding more and more like the empires doing these plays to keep the crowd quiescent so they could continue ruling, centrally and very badly.

I hate to sound like the mid century communists — who were saying this for other reasons — but what did WWI actually accomplish? Well, getting rid of young men of a bellicose disposition. WWII also, to an extent. Also, allow governments to grasp more power than they ever dreamed of. Both wars gave centralized governments more power. In the US it pretty much shredded the constitution.

And the cold war? I didn’t even know this till I went through the Cosmosphere, which considering how much I read is amazing, but the soviets had nothing. THEY HAD NOTHING. In the fifties and sixties, when Heinlein was worried about nuclear war, in the seventies, when we were sure we were falling behind, what they had was mostly very long metal tubes, which they drove around the country to give the impression that they had missiles.

What do they have now? I don’t know. Do you? But one thing I know for sure: it’s in their best interest to pretend to have more than they have, and to have it in good shape. And as is, they’re not being incredibly convincing.

And why did our intelligence believe it? Well, now. Of course, more threat from the enemy meant more funding for our intelligence services. It meant more power to them and their masters. Why blow the illusion.

And that is part of it. I was talking to a friend today and he said pretty much everything is broken. All our institutions, all our professions, all our interactions. They’re all broken.

Now to some extent all human society is always broken. We’re not like unto gods, acting perfectly. Of course we’re not.

But it’s also that the more centralized something is, the less it works. And anything that tries to control a large area is just screwing up by the numbers. And any agency, any government body that gets paid to find threats, will find threats. If they have to create them themselves.

What I said above, about the 20th century being a play to keep the masses quiescent. Sure. but it wasn’t a centrally coordinated conspiracy.

It was more that when the idea that governments should be centralized, that EVERYTHING was more efficient centralized and standardized, had taken control, what followed was inevitable. Because once you create bodies to pretend to control everything, they will. They will also try to increase their control. And if it kills people, so be it. It’s for law and order or something.

This nonsense started with the industrial revolution and the idea if centralized production of widgets was better, then governing humans like widgets was just the ticket.

Only it doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It kept failing, and every time it failed, it grabbed more power to hide the failure.

Wars between powers? Well, they do help keep the population quiet don’t they? Not to mention getting rid of young men, that troublesome demographic. And also allows the central government to squelch dissent. You wouldn’t want to aid the enemy, would you?

Round and round it goes, growing and growing, and less and less capable of doing anything properly every time.

Till now.

Now most centralized governments competencies are two: killing their own people and stealing money. (Not saying that some people don’t try to do good work, and that some isolated institutions/professions/disciplines don’t work. A lot of us are still trying to do good work while engulfed by morass. And a lot even work for government, which keeps grabbing more and more areas, anyway. What I’m saying is that it’s not only not the best way to do things, but it’s actively counterproductive.)

But there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the big centralized institutions and industries. And they’re fighting tooth and nail to survive; to have the institution survive.

Only… Only there’s so far you can run before everything is not just broken, but visibly so.

And we’re there.

The system is broken and can’t function.

What comes next, no one knows. Nor what the crash will look like, except there’s a good chance it will be first very slow, then very fast.

But all we can do is be aware of what the situation really is: not the destruction of some ideal system, but at worst the destruction of the patches to “centralize everything” applied during the long wars of the twentieth century.

Systems that never worked that well, but could pretend they did.

It’s up to us to build better. We’ll never build perfect. But let’s try to make what comes next scaled to the individual and local.

At least when we fail it will be small crashes.

Shoulder to the wheel. Let’s make what comes next better.

*I swear I did a promo post. Took me two hours. Then…. Well, then I went to make the house safe for Kittinity. Imagine my surprise when I found out the post had no content. WordPress Delenda est. And once more into the promo, my friends – SAH*

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 MAX BRAND, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Jim Curry’s Test (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Jim Curry was a loafer, but never did anybody any harm. Until his gun accidentally went off, and killed the most beloved old-timer in the area. It was an accident, but the sheriff isn’t overly sympathetic, and when Curry breaks the sheriff’s jaw escaping, the townsfolk decide that due process just won’t do…

    This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving genre and historical context to the novel.

FROM JL CURTIS WITH STORIES BY MONALISA FOSTER, CEDAR SANDERSON, TOM ROGNEBY, DOROTHY GRANT, AND OTHER MISCREANTS WHO SOMETIMES HANG OUT HERE: Twisted Tropes

Things are never what they seem, and on the other side of this cover, what you know isn’t so!

Plunge into eight tales of that will feel familiar, only to careen through more twists than a country road at night, and stranger turns: From noir private eyes, to Fae battles, to the cookies of the dark side, you’ll find a surprise in every story!

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last Pendragon (Legends Book 1)

“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke

Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.

Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…

FROM C. V. WALTER, CEDAR SANDERSON, JL CURTIS, BRENNEN HANKINS, BART KEMPER AND OTHER REPROBATES: Steam-Powered Postcards

Can you tell a story in exactly 50 words? The Three Moms of the Apocalypse went to Louisiana’s World Steampunk Exposition and Makers Faire in Lafayette, LA and issued a challenge.

Tell us a story that could fit on the back of a postcard. Use 50 words, no more, no less. We’ll provide the postcards.

The response to this challenge was huge!

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Other Princess

This time, they invited the last fairy to the christening.

Elise, uncursed at her christening, received strange gifts about castles and roses. With such good fortune, what more does she need? She grows up forever in the shadow of her lovely, cursed, tragic cousin.

Even when the curse falls, and Princess Isabelle lies in enchanted sleep, life must go on for Princess Elise. Despite the curse, the kingdom can not sleep itself, and neither can she.

FROM A. PALMER: Troubled Poems for Difficult People

This is a book of troubled poems
For difficult people.
The first of those people is me
I write them to myself
I write them about myself
But I don’t write them for myself.
If reading them helps, I am grateful.

“Troubled Poems for Difficult People” is a body of just under a hundred poems about philosophy, pain, and humility before God from a Christian perspective. It concludes with “Book of Weekdays,” intended as a meditation on mornings and evenings for each day of the week.

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Complete Interstellar Patrol (Annotated): A pulp space opera omnibus.

In 1928, Edmond Hamilton published Crashing Suns in Weird Tales magazine, at approximately the same time that E.E. Smith’s Skylark of Space was published in Amazing Stories, giving both men the distinction of creating the genre of space opera. Hamilton, however, was the first to create a series, writing further stories in his Interstellar Patrol Series in 1929 and 1930, then writing a final one in 1934.

Here in one volume is every Interstellar Patrol story Hamilton published, including the novel Outside the Universe. What the stories lack in characterization and scientific plausibility, they more than make up for in enthusiasm, spectacle, and sheer breakneck pacing.

    This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes new introductions that give the stories genre and historical context.

FROM KAREN MYERS: To Carry the Horn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 1

AN ENTIRE KINGDOM BUILT AROUND A SUPERNATURAL NEED FOR JUSTICE, ENFORCED BY THE WILD HUNT AND THE HOUNDS OF HELL.

What would you do if you blundered into a strange world, where all around you was the familiar landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but the inhabitants were the long-lived fae, and you the only human?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Day the War Struck Home

Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She’s to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts — but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF’s. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.

It’s the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it’s the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

However, the intelligence proves incomplete — the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.

It’s a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.

FROM EDWARD P. MOSER: THE OLD TOWN HORROR: Murder and Theft in America’s Most Historic Locale

A genteel Border South town not far from the nation’s capital is shaken by a series of vicious slayings at historic sites. These include a Civil War cemetery for escaped slaves; a burial mound of Confederate soldiers; a church associated with George Washington; and a museum on the Antebellum Era. At the same time, violent break-ins take place at venerable banks and townhomes connected with the lives of Washington, Robert E. Lee, and civil rights figures. The small city is already in the thrall of a frightening pandemic, disputes over the removal of historic statues, and nation-wide turmoil on alleged police misconduct.
Meantime, violent or offbeat characters enter the life of the town: an escaped jihadi terrorist; a neo-Nazi bomber; Woke demonstrators; a power-hungry FBI official; and a beguiling teacher obsessed with the afterlife. Fears multiply about killers on the loose. Law enforcement is baffled, until a relentless local historian and his intrepid, alluring lady friend start to uncover the horrifying truth behind the shocking crimes. They have grave encounters with a menagerie of villains who threaten to ignite a second Civil War. Leading to a showdown at a gruesome site symbolic of the town’s troubled history, and tumultuous present.

FROM RON CORRIVEAU: The Agent’s Daughter (Agent Series Book 1

Melina has been preparing for a future career as a spy.

She just doesn’t know it.

Legendary spy Evan Roberts always knew that his fifteen-year-old daughter
Melina also possessed the absolute lack of fear required of an agent.
Without telling her his real profession or his intention, he began to guide her
toward an eventual career as a spy. However, Melina’s world is shattered
after her mom is involved in an accident that leaves her mysteriously unhurt
but unresponsive. Her father’s plans on hold, Melina settles into life at a
suburban high school, immersing herself in a world of schoolwork, her
friends and a budding romance with Alex, the cute new guy in her class.

When Melina and her father uncover shocking new information about her
mother’s accident, Melina is pulled deep into her father’s shadowy world.
With Alex desperately trying to find her and only hours to go before it will
be too late to save her mother, Melina and her father work together using
their combined skills to find a way to reach her.

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: BOILING

This is a new trick of word press I DO NOT APPRECIATE. Took me two hours to do the promo post, and it ate it.

Sigh. Redoing.

We’re safe, kittens are safe, everyone is well.

We just let late, then had stuff to do when we got home.

I probably won’t post at instapundit till tomorrow, because I’m falling asleep on my face.

But I didn’t want you guys to worry.

Gathering of TX friends was FUN, but I’m glad to be home. Peopling is hard. However, I do feel better.

Okay, there’s only three of them. Helen and Pol, which we’re going to keep, and one for Marshall, little Harmony who look like one of those q-tips that’s starting to unravel and looks fuzzy.

This is Sweet Helen. We couldn’t get Pol to linger with us, though he played with Dan and let him tickle the little fuzzy belly.

Harmony was also really active, and didn’t linger, but I got a picture. She was determined to keep Cedar’s Toast stuck in a little Amazon box, so every time toast tried to pop up, she got smacked into cowering in the box again, which is very funny.

Here she was plotting how to steal the chicken treat from Helen. Um… she’s not bad but she’s very mischievous. She’s still a good and sweet kitten.

What surprised me was how tiny they were. I kind of expected them to be bigger from the pictures, but they’re not.

Anyway, since I’m in unreliable internet mode, I really cannot do the promo today. I’ll do it tomorrow, probably midday or something when I get home. We’ll be leaving very very early with kittens in the back. (Pray for us.)

Anyway, they were very cheering. We’ll see how the old sour pusses back home take to them. I expect Havey to be excited and adopt them, but Valeria might try to eat them, so we’ll see. (Again pray for us.)

See you tomorrow.