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*Sorry guys.  I’m actually on the mend.  At least today, for the first time in three weeks, I woke up with a clear head.  But the overdue short story is still not finished, the house looks like Pompeii after the volcano, and I am trying to do three things at once, so I forgot this.  I have a couple of books to promo, but they’ll get done next week.  I just can’t do the finicky work right now. I’ll add them next week.  For now, here’s the vignette, and I’ll be back tomorrow – SAH*

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: mature.

Oh, yeah, and Happy Father’s Day!

*We apologize for the typos on this blog. Turns out that cartoon animals can’t spell. Also, Sarah is mostly blind and was doing this remote, on a small screen!

It is a part of my being sick that I get obsessed with the stupidest things.  This time, and thanks to a friend who also went down that rabbit hole, I spent days reading about the earliest traces of civilization and the oldest signs of humanity on the land.

Since I also recently started reading Campbell’s comparative religion books, what struck me most was how much the “history of becoming human” has changed.  We seem — now — to be talking of fully human creatures, or as human as any, far older than we expected.

And Gobeleki Tepe has pushed back our “could build impressive stuff” scale too, and there are murmurings of yet older and more impressive stuff.

Some of this is that we have the technology to scan land masses and to study our own genes such as never before.

There’s other interesting stuff lurking in the genes of the animals that are almost symbiotic with humans: dogs appear to have been domesticated at least twice.  Horses, also, are shadowy as to when precisely they were domesticated.  And as for cows, I was highly amused to learn they’re of relatively recent domestication and all domesticated cows come from populations in two neighboring villages in the middle East.  This doesn’t mean of course that they weren’t domesticated elsewhere.  Lineages might have died out.

There’s that shadowy part to this whole thing.  The thing you can see is so much smaller than what might be there.

Or let’s put it another way: if a discovery like Gobleki Tepe can upend all our ideas of ourselves, we really don’t know that much about our past, do we?

Now that we’re talking a full 400k years of modern humans, the idea of past civilizations isn’t risible.  It is perhaps inevitable.  And things like the study of the evolution of the last 10k years or the divergence of human races seems in turn risible.

Because really, what is ten thousand years?  And what are the present races.  There have almost certainly be others going back to the dawn of … to wherever we came from, which seems to recede in the fog the closer we get.

I presume most of our “civilizations” as such have been maybe Egypt/Rome level.  I could be totally wrong, of course.  There has been a recent paper about possible industrial past civilizations, even if it seemed to me that the men doing it put too much reliance on “global warming” as a mark of an industrial civilization.  However, even on skimming, they also seemed to study the dispersal of metals and such which are more reliable.  Of course, they weren’t looking for civilizations in what could be human times.  These would have to involve some other species.  Or we came from elsewhere altogether.

Then again they say something about how everything humans are and we’ve done, if we disappeared tomorrow, we might be missed completely in the fossil record by a future civilization a million years hence.  Which again means we know very little about who we are and where we came from.

We do know some things, looking back: there is a lot of human sacrifice and cannibalism as far back as we can go, and cruel inhuman religions.  Like all babies left with no trace of where they came from, Humans have a tendency to alternately revile and exalt themselves.

OTOH there is the valid question of how much of our present civilization and what we are now came from Judeo Christianity.  We know that it is possible to have a very high degree of civilization without it: India, China, the meso-American civilizations, but none of them seem to conquer nature/develop science as a useful thing the way the US has.

Which in turn leads to all sorts of plot bunnies about humans being “cultivated” — by G-d if you believe or by something at any rate — through 40 rises and falls of civilization or so, and trying to engineer the software in the mind to make it “stick” this time, to shepherd us to the stars, maybe.

But of course you can’t go wade through human evolution and ancient civilizations without coming across racialists.

No, not necessarily racists. just very invested in some races being better than others and everything being defined by race.

Like most such obsessions, they’re fed by two things: the fact that it’s forbidden to even mention differences between races/groups of people in any scientific group, even when it’s bloody obvious; and the Marxist lens that has infused the last 100 years.

Even people who think they’re anti-Marxists see the world through that lens.  Which means they not only think in terms of widgets with every member of the group being the same as every other one,b ut they also believe in hierarchies of groups.  Some groups are better than others.

This nonsense on the left feeds the idea that if every group isn’t precisely represented in the right “proportions” in every field of human endeavor, it’s discrimination.  On the right it feeds into crazyness about how some groups are “inferior” or “unfit for civilization.”

Except here’s the thing: we don’t know what high IQ is good for, other than working in scientific disciplines, but I’m here to tell you that high IQ by itself is not the greatest determinant of… well… anything.

Older son who has always been fascinated by the human brain and how it works says IQ above a certain amount is a handicap.  The same thing that establishes a lot of connections also makes simple things get lost in those connections.  Which explains why the most likely place to find a genius is working a menial job with no future.  Or in a mad house.  There is also a certain amount of neuroticism inhering to high IQ.

For instance, I can write books in a couple of weeks, but I spend most of my time spinning my wheels and lost in my mental underwear.  If one could pare down some of the uneeded connections…

Perhaps it is not a coincidence I only became regularly published once I’d had major concussion.

 

There is a lot to be said for intelligence.  I’m not knocking it down, me.  It could be said in my case, a certain quickness of thinking and a boundless intellectual curiosity might be the one thing I can contribute to the world, (the Petersonian highest good I can pursue.)

But even in a scientific, western society, it’s not the be all end all.  Older son and I joke that our ancestors must always have been odds in normal tribes.  They couldn’t be just a tribe of their own, because it would die out, between the fact no one would do as told, the fact that we find say new forms of basket weaving far more fascinating than having babies, or the fact that we can get lost in completely unproductive side lines for years.  One or two people with our obsessive nature in the middle of normal people would help, sure.  We come up with a new perspective or really strange stuff, but ah… a lot of us becomes counterproductive.

And the same goes for every level of IQ.  Look, guys, I’d go boogaboo if I were forced to do a lot of the things that people do for fun.  I have a very short patience for repetitive work, and my manual hobbies either are things I can do while watching a movie, or things I do while listening to audio books.  This is not a brag.  It leaves a ton of unfinished things in my wake, as I get bored.  Also, once I really master a skill, I get bored doing it.

It’s not a recipe for civilization, and I’m not the worst of my kind.  I can stay with things long enough to have a career.

Are races different?  Sure.  In the aggregate — which tells us nothing about the individual, btw — they are.  They have different abilities, and yeah, IQ is a part of the picture.  Though it’s almost impossible to extract the shadings of ability from the culture.

Take me, for instance.  I have the greatest trouble with organization.  I come from a culture that values haste (despacho) over planning.  My kids, too, have the same problem.  Which could be because it’s genetic.  Or it could be because they grew up with me, where meals happened when there was a break in the writing, and projects wold strike suddenly.

I noted that my older son, when he won most of the departmental prizes for chemistry at graduation, was up there with people with MOSTLY German last names.  And yeah, chemistry tends to be a German thing, as does btw, grammar in my field.  (Philology tends to be a thing of Latin breeds, though.)  But note that if my son has German ancestry it is minuscule on my husband’s side, and on mine it would go back to the wild tribes who descended on the Roman peninsula, and I’m not even sure how genetically related they are to present day Germans.

Again — culture? genes?  Who cares?  Who is deciding that a race, a purpose, an idea is inferior.

My guess is that if we’ve climbed the civilizational slope again and again, the secret to perhaps staying on top, perhaps getting to the stars, is the variety of us, not everyone fitting the same narrow niche.

And if you think a technological/scientific civilization doesn’t have any room for non-abstract thinkers you’ve been drinking the elitist leftist koolaid again.

Humans are clever apes.  This means we make niches that fit our abilities.

We should be more concerned with cultures holding people back than with genetic abilities.

And as for you — and yeah, me also — as fascinating as all this “where did we come from?” and “what is human?” is, the important thing is to make the best we can of what we have.

Note that older son, for his rabbity Latin disposition, chasing off after enthusiasms, and forgetting odd little things, and not organizing (note this goes back very far.  Romans built to last but they seem to have sucked at the fundamental maintenance of things built which requires the daily, mundane stuff.  Of course they were slave owners, so application to daily tasks was not needed.  Did they not select for it?  Or was it just culture?  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  You lay down your money and you take your winnings) still beat the pants off a few hundred people in the chemistry department and won all the honors.  Now, he was probably doing it on “passion” not obsessive organization.  (We always give birth to strangers.  I have no clue what he loves so much about fussy, minutious chemistry.  I hated the stuff myself.  Physics was my meat.) Sufficiently advanced insanity can replace any kind of carefully planned sanity.

Are we races? Are there differences between the races?

Sure, but in most cases to observe real non-physical differences you have to define races as cultures, and then it all goes murky.

Back when we considered adopting, our pediatrician told us any kid we adopted would become — if not be — high IQ, and he told us of families he knew.  I suppose that fails at the extremes.  But again humans are plastic, adaptable apes.

What we need is for the right and the left to stop obsessing about genetics.  There’s a good chance that the races and cultures we see now are a minuscule part of what existed before, an echo of far more massive differences/ideas/cultures.

Make the best of who you are.  Plot a course for where you want to be.  Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as dispassionately as humans can.  And then work towards what you want.

And as for other races?  Let each person pursue what he/she wants.  Fight against dysfunctional culture, your own and others.  And let humans be human and climb, their dysfunctional, multitudinous way towards the stars.

This time maybe we’ll make it.

 

 

Owning stuff is soooo hard — Trekonomics 5 – by Amanda S. Green.

That sound you just heard was the sound of a book being planted against the far wall. I’ve managed to get through Shrillary’s rewriting of the 2016 election, Lenin’s pile of written excrement and more without doing so. Who knew something talking about Star Trek would be the first book I’ve thrown across the room in a very long time? I knew it was coming. From the first page of Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I knew I should look away, but I couldn’t.

After spending time explaining that the Trek universe has capital but not money, Saadia reminds us that those wonderful replicators aren’t really owned by those who use them. You remember the replicators. They can make you anything you want, as long as it isn’t something unique like a piece of art or that last bottle of wine from the Picard winery. But they can make you clothing, food, pretty much anything else you want. But you don’t own it. Very subtly, we’ve learned the truth – the state owns it.

Guess what, that pretty much means the state owns whatever you create using the replicator. Not that Saadia is going to come right out and say it. After all, that’s not the point of indoctrination. You don’t tell the sheeple the unvarnished truth. You tell them the wonderfully enticing parts and let them discover the darker side of life on their own, when it’s too late for them to do anything about it.

[C]apital, whether in the form of tools or machines or in the form of education or talent, does not yield any exchangeable value.

What? Isn’t this the opposite of the example Saadia gave earlier about that last bottle of Picard wine? Wait. Here comes the handwavium where the goal posts get moved again. You know, if this keeps up, those posts will be better traveled than most of us.

Now Saadia clarifies – or maybe simply muddies the water some more. You see, we’re talking about replicators. People don’t use replicators to create things that can be used to drive their personal capital. Remember, these are the enlightened folks of the Federation. They don’t sully their hands with currency (mainly because they threw out canon and uplifted the Federation in the whale movie). But then, Saadia seems to contradict himself:

You do not derive any excess wealth from the ownership of your home replicator.

Take this statement out of the Trek universe, place it into something written by Bernie Sanders or Vladimir Lenin. Now ask yourself this: what is “excess wealth”? Further, now Saadia says you own the very same replicator he said mere paragraphs earlier that you didn’t own. Which is it?

Confusion and obscuring of facts are wonderful tools to pull the wool over the eyes of the unwitting.

But the writing in circles and moving of goal posts continues. You see, according to Saadia, if you lived on a faraway outpost and had the only industrial sized replicator (and again, after saying no one owned their replicators, he says you own and operate it – Gawd, I had inconsistency), you’d have no reason to charge anyone else on your faraway planet money for the use of your replicator. Why? Because there is no money.

So, what about charging “in kind” for its use?

Well, according to Saadia, you wouldn’t do that. It’s not the way things are done in the Federation. After all, they’re really nice people who are willing to do whatever it takes to improve the lot of everyone in the Federation. Remember, they’d even be volunteering for their turn in the dilithium mines because that spirit of community is soooo strong.

But here’s the kicker – and the proof that, despite his previous comments to the contrary, the state owns the replicators. According to Saadia if you did do something so crass as to demand payment in kind for the use of your replicator, you’d probably find the courts acting to take it away from you.

Wut?

Your replicator, located on your property and that is under your control and used for you enjoyment and survival. But, if you dare tell your neighbor he can use it if he does something in return, you will see the court swooping in and taking it away from you. But what if your neighbor abuses the privilege – sorry, the right – to use your replicator? Are you still obligated to let him do so? My guess would be yes. After all, you are an uplifted member of the Federation. You aren’t worried about such silly things like ownership, control, personal freedom.

In fact, “private ownership of capital (the replicator) implies service more than anything else.” Your cost, according to Saadia, is only time. Of course, this is a simplistic version of the same sort of argument you get when unions go on strike for higher wages or activists start demanding a “living wage” of $15/hour. They say it will only cost the business owner. They don’t think about the fact those costs will be passed on to the customer and on down the line. The end result is that cost increase will increase the amount of money needed to make that so-called living wage. But that reality doesn’t fit the narrative. Reality rarely does.

But it gets better. Going back a paragraph in the book and you get Saadia’s argument for why you wouldn’t want to own the replicator anyway. After all, ownership would mean you would be responsible for its operation and maintenance. “You must use your knowledge, your capital, to maintain the contraption.” It is a “burden” to you and a “service” to the community.

What. The. Fuck?

Using that same argument, why does anyone want to own their own home? Hmm, maybe they don’t in the Trek universe. Maybe all housing is owned by the Federation. That means no one would have to worry about finding a plumber when the toilets back up, etc.

Remember when Saadia said a program about women going about their daily lives would be boring? Maybe now we have our answer about why we never really saw what happened on a daily basis inside the Federation. Talk about boring. No one is inspired to do anything creative. Why would they? No one is encouraged to use their replicators to form something new and distinctive.

I am reminded of being behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the old Soviet Union. Block after block of boring, bland buildings. Men and women walking along the streets who were more automatons than humans. They were beaten down. There was little joy seen in public. They didn’t dare. It wasn’t what was expected or encouraged. They had money, but it had little value. Value came on the black market, something it seems the Federation doesn’t have. Creativity behind the Iron Curtain had to be approved of by the State. If not, you faced everything from being denounced to being imprisoned to worse. But, on the black market, you could buy and sell just about anything. It was how many found a way to survive. Smuggling was how works of art, of literature found their way out of the country and into areas where they could be made public.

At least those living behind the Iron Curtain had options. Those in the Federation, I’m not so sure. At least not as long as they remained in Stepfordland.

You see, in the Federation, your first requirement is that you act to better humanity. Then, you can figure out how to better yourself but only so long as that doesn’t run contrary to bettering humanity. Or, as Saadia puts it, “the biggest challenge for every Federation citizen resides in how to allocate his or her talents, time, and capacity for empathy, and how to best contribute to the common wealth.”

Common wealth.

Which answers the unasked question of “if the state (Federation) owns your replicator, who owns what is made from it?” Common wealth. Service. Burden of ownership.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on Team Ferengi all the way. Hell, I might even ask for the occasional trade to the Klingons or even the Romulans. Life might be hard but it would never be boring and it pains me to say it but life in the Federation sounds like a lifelong snoozefest. Maybe being on a starship would help. After all, you do run across the occasional alien planet whose development you can influence despite the Prime Directive. But I have a feeling I’d be tempted to hijack the starship to get as far away from the Federation as possible.

I’ve had a blast reading and snarking this book. Well, I usually have had a blast. I’m not so sure looking at the mark on the wall where the book hit it this morning. But, other than a few variations on the same theme, there’s not a lot of new material. So, I’m going to finish this up over the next week or two. The new material is enough to keep me going and snarking. Since I’ve told Sarah I will not, never or ever, read anything written by Michelle Obama, I’m looking for the next book to snark. I will, however, return to Sowell first. I love me some Thomas Sowell writing.

Now to find coffee. It’s too early for booze – unfortunately.

Most people have their heads stuffed with straw.  Particularly people in power in any field.  They don’t have to listen to anyone else, so they don’t.  And because most people want to be heroes — and because unfortunately for the last fifty years at least people have been raised to want to “change the world” — they make themselves important villains to fight.

It’s particularly convenient when you can convince yourself you’re doing good in the world by doing well.  I.e. it’s convenient to convince yourself that your pursuit for money and fame will make the world a better place.

And meh, if you’re a writer and you convince yourself your thriller is giving a message that it’s bad to abuse women, who are you hurting?  Pat yourself in the back all you want to.  It’s fine.

The problem comes in when you need to see yourself as heroic and you are really not doing anything that is particularly brave or groundbreaking.  I mean, sure, you can write a book saying “don’t beat women.”  But you know, that’s not a temptation of most males, outside certain ethnic and religious groups.

Then you convince yourself everyone is secretly beating women, and your book, YOUR BOOK, is the one that will change it.

This is also relatively harmless.  In my first writers’ group we had a lady who had been raised in an ultra fundamentalist, bible-literalist environment.  She was dissecting the Bible to find contradictions because she was going to write a book with them, and this would convince people the Bible was NOT literal and change the world.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, seriously, most of the world didn’t think every word in the Bible was the absolute, fricking immutable truth, particularly not in the translation of a translation of a translation.  Heck many Christian groups discard vast portions of it.

And besides, she was happy and it gave her life purpose.  At least she didn’t spend her time accusing us of having her for wanting to upend the inerrant nature of the Bible, or accusing vast groups of controlling the world and keeping the truth of contradictions in the bible from coming out.

The problem I have with the publishing establishment right now (and the political establishment) is that they feel a need to fight these invisible enemies, but also to make other people into their invisible enemies.

There is a guy, very publishing establishment, although they’ve tried to shed him a couple of times, but he crawled back and licked their feet and begged to be let in, who comments regularly at MGC.  He’s a good example of what is going on in publishing (and politics) even though he’s low level and probably believes every word.

I didn’t even know — or care — that he was gay and apparently in a relationship with a non-white gentleman.  And if I’d known, I’d care about the same as any other commenter’s orientation or sexuality.  Except that one of the other commenters found out he’s been going — note — TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POLITICAL FENCE to ask if he should go to Liberty con with his partner.

The answer of course was that they’d get abused, possibly attacked.

Bows head and pinches nose.  Guys. There are several gay couples at Liberty con every year.  Some are part of our (yeah the evil “Puppies”) inner circle.  As for race, the first year I attended LC I ended up leaving the GOH talk to rock a baby outside the room.  Mostly, because my kids had just outgrown my arms, and I really missed babies.  I’m still amazed the family trusted me, because total stranger, but I was one of the guests, so…  And mom really wanted to hear the GOH.  That baby was bi-racial.  He’s now a teen.  I catch glimpses of him, though teens and later run in a pack at LC, and adults don’t have much to do with him.

Now I don’t care, except it would be good for this man to see no one cares, and that people are decent to him despite political differences (which are more likely to come up than orientation, because no one cares about that) and to have a conversation with people who are completely different from what he expects.

But for him, this is very real.  There is a vast right wing conspiracy who hates him for something he can’t help, and who would attack him and his partner for no reason.

I don’t know if the people at the top of the hierarchies on the left believe this.  They might.  It’s after all much better to say you’re corrupting an award and holding on to power and threatening to destroy careers because the other side is racisss sexissss homophobic, than to say you’re trying to save you little piece of the pie till retirement and after that you don’t give a damn.  So you might convince yourself that this straw is real, and everyone on the powerless, quixotic side is a black hearted villain.

But the problem is that a lot of the low levels believe that as received wisdom.  People they admire propagate this bullshit.  And so they grow up convinced the world is against them: that everyone hates them for being women, or gay, or whatever, and that they will never be allowed to succeed.

That’s a horrible idea.

The truth is, the right hasn’t been the establishment since WWII.  We have no power.  We didn’t use to have a voice.  And so the left built themselves a pretty little enemy, one that was easily defeatable once educated.

We were ignorant troglodytes, with little education, who were, ah, how did President Obama so eloquently put it?

We clung to guns and Bibles and were afraid of people not like us.

He might have considered he was afraid of people not like him.  If he took a minute to think.

Does the stereotype exist?  Well, there are 300 million of us.  Just about everything exists, including a one-eyed-one-legged purple haired women who is afraid of eggs because she thinks they’re space aliens.

In significant numbers?  Bah.  I know some people who fit one stereotype or two, but none that fit all three.

I’m tired o the straw-spinners making everyone who opposes them afraid of “women and minorities.”  Really?  That’s what they’re going to go with?  Like anyone can work without coming across women and minorities, in any field for the last fifty years.

Perhaps the straw is spun because they’re afraid of people who are not like them.

Or perhaps it’s done calculatedly to make themselves feel brave and special.

I don’t care.  I care that it stops.

There have always been women in fantasy and science fiction, and the only people trying to stop them were New York publishers who though that “the public” was made of woman-hating straw.  There have always been people of different levels of tan.  There have always been gay people.

We don’t care, so long as you can write.

And as for politics, no, the right is not “Nazis.” You can tell by how you’re not in a camp.  The more you build up the straw and scream this bullshit simply because we disagree with you on how to build the best society FOR ALL, the more you get ignored.

We’re well past the time now — in publishing or in politics — where we could avert  backlash pendulum swing.

We’re now in the place that I and people like me are trying to prevent it from swinging too far and bringing about that horrible straw world you fear.

I beg you, with tears in my eyes, stop stuffing everything with straw and start thinking.

 

Sorry this is so late.  I woke up dead.  Okay, okay, not really dead.  Though Dan has argued that my drive to write is so great I’ll become a natural zombie, it’s not that bad yet.  However, I’ve been up for two hours and struggling to stay awake.

This is a problem because I’m trying to finish an overdue short story.  It’s a difficult convoluted story because it’s a noir mystery, as well as a fantasy.  I know every step, but because of the nature of the beast I have to mind every word.  Which is difficult when you write 500 words and then have to sleep for two hours.  Yesterday I managed 2k words, but I have about 4k to go.

Also, Larry has sent me back Guardian for my part of it now, and I haven’t even been able to read it, because I conk out after reading anything mildly challenging.

Fortunately I saw older boy and his lovely bride to be, both younger and fitter than I go through this, so I’m not panicking.  It’s just a bad virus with a long ramp up and residual depression in its wake.

I’m about a week behind them, so much as I’d like to clean and finish writing Guardian (the story needs to be written today, even if I sleep in between) I might need to work relly hard to be health for Liberty con.

Speaking of which there’s a whole lot of evaluation and re-evaluation of cons going on in  the house.

Cons were never big marketing events for me.  Not that I’m not personable, and usually I make a few fans every con, but I’m… well… when I broke in the kids were little, so I couldn’t travel, and also we didn’t have a ton of money, and then when those improved I just seemed to have no immune system left (mostly because of thyroid issues.)

But thing is, I have a lot of very good friends who are wholly indie, and some who are amazingly successful.  Some of the best earners have never attended a con.  Some attend cons for fun, but see no bump on their sales.  My own indie sales show no bump when I attend a con.  Oh, ten or so extra sales, but even if all those people become lifelong fans it doesn’t pay for itself.

That used to be my check for cons “will it pay for itself?”  World Fantasy usually did, because I got enough invites to anthos, and sometimes invites to submit that I usually made more than I spent.  Worldcon was bigger and I rarely got work from it, so I went there less.

Cons were sales tools only to the extent that they allowed us to appear successful in front of publishers, who then put muscle into pushing us and made it so.  Since the push model only sort works-ish and most editors have become really sparing with the travel, this is not a viable strategy even for mostly-trad writers.

For hybrid or indie only, cons seem to have absolutely no effect on money/sales.  Which is why I say cons need us more than we need them, at least for those of us who are fine going indie.

And yet I told you I’m trying to be okay for Liberty con.  Well… That’s because there’s a high concentration of my fans there, and I like my fans, and I like meeting with you.  I’ve always been solitaire, partly because I was the much younger kid in the family.  (There’s nothing as sad as learning to play multiple sides of a board game because no one will play it with you.)  And then in school I found I was Odd and very few little kids wanted to talk dinosaurs and space or play at being Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers.

There is still that aspect to cons.  I get to see my people.

Right now I do Liberty con because so many of you go there, and I do Cosine because it’s close enough for a day trip.

In future we’ll try to see those of you in other cities.  We think once the boys are off the paycheck (Two years, G-d willing) and we’re doing a little better (right now ALL my income goes to boys) we’ll schedule weekends away every other month, and arrange to meet with you guys wherever, like we meet with locals at Pete’s Kitchen around 4 pm the first Saturday of the month.

Not for sales but because, I’m sorry, I think you’re my tribe, and even solitary writers need to belong sometimes.

 

 

Everyone is talking about suicide and the increase of suicide rates.

As everyone who reads here regularly knows, I suffer from — usually not severe — depressive episodes.  Most of my depressive episodes are not suicidal and have no suicidal ideation.  They just, for lack of a better term “disable the doing switch”.  So when I’m depressed I sit and stare at wars.  The kids used to rather like it when I was mildly depressed.  Partly because they could tell me all the things they’d been doing that normally would make me hit the roof and I’d just go, “whatever.”

It’s not good for me, though, and it’s certainly not good for my productivity.  Until the “cycle of illness” started about five years ago (yes, might be age, but you know it was probably the cancer thing destabilizing everything.  I just need to take steps to get better.  AFAIK the cancer thing was encapsulated and is gone.  So now I need to get my body to stop freaking out) depression was responsible for my only writing three or four books a year, even though they usually were written in two weeks or less.

And yeah, when you’re already on the slope and something hits you hard, be it psychological or physical, suicidal ideation sets in.

It’s not rational, btw.  There is nothing about “My friend is having a hard time” or “my relative died” that should make you fixate on “if I kill myself everything will be better.”  A psychiatrist friend says it’s “Odd Brain Math.”  I.e. you think “This is unsolvable, but if I remove myself I don’t have to solve it.”

I know everyone is looking at macro effects for why suicide went up… and there might be some, among them that the economy is getting better.

As I pointed out in my post on acculturation, change is hard, even change for the better.  (And this year is a hinge year for me, a year of rapid change. Fun.) And the economy after 10 years of puttering (since the dem sweep of 2006) is now moving.  There are people who have stayed in college because “what’s the point” and now have to find jobs that cover their debts.  There are people who have been living hand to mouth, but all their friends were.  Now as some take off and some don’t, there will be depression for some.

And there are the people terrified by propaganda.  If you really expected to go to the camps the day after the election, and it still hasn’t happened, you should relax.  But most people won’t.  They’ll get more tense and scared.  It’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So yeah, there are macro trends.

But there are other things.  Like, you know, recently I’ve had virus from hell, and the ramp up is really slow, which means writing even on blog post takes it out of me.  One logical, usual aftermath of viral infections is depression.  They used to tell you that.  Yesterday, I realized I’d been caught in that.  Well, viral infections sweep the nation, so…

Whether you have the tendency of not, things will happen, physical or mental that will make you feel like life would be better without you in it.  Sometimes you might even be right.  Yeah, it’s rare, but it’s the trap terminal patients fall into and why I’m not fond of euthanasia programs.

If you’re very ill, even if you’re not terminal, and you feel like you’re a burden on those you love it’s easy to persuade you to die to “make things better.”  And I won’t say it doesn’t, sometimes.  We’ve all see people who die after a long illness and the family is better off, both psychologically and physically.

But here’s the thing… once that slippery slope starts, it lends credence to the black dog that rounds on the perpetually depressed and says “Life would be better without you in it.”  And in most cases that’s almost certainly not true. In most cases you’re making life awful for everyone else and leaving a mess behind.

So, how not to commit suicide — look, I’ve had to develop these tricks, okay?  Deal —

1- Have something to live for.  This can be your writing, your garden, your cat, or obviously your spouse, your kids.
I don’t know how you live without doing SOMETHING with your life anyway, so you know, don’t.  Find something to do that you care about, even if it’s “just” giving amazon reviews to books you’ve enjoyed, or patronizing a little shop you like, or making people happy by making their favorite dish.

2- Have someone or some cause you care about.  Preferably not a hate-based cause.  Yes, you MIGHT hate people who dump unweaned baby kittens, but instead of devoting your day on Craigslist yelling about it, go and foster baby kittens at your local humane society.

3- Learn something.  Find something you want to learn, then learn it.  The upslope of competency will keep you focused for a good long while.  When picking something to learn, make sure it’s something that you can use/feel good about using.  Even if it’s “just” learning a dead language to translate from it.

4- If you’re completely and utterly isolated, this isn’t a good thing, of course.  We’re a social animal, even the introverted ones of us.  Find something that makes you at least see people several times a month.  It can be a charitable organization, a book club or some sort of class.  I intend to resume art classes ASAP first because they help with covers, but MOSTLY because I really need to see people, etc.

5- If you’re going through one of those patches where there’s absolutely no extra (or sufficient) money and it seems like you’ll never get out of it, find little things that give you joy.  In a similar place, Dan and I found out that getting discounted fast food sandwiches and eating them on a hill overlooking the city made us happy.  So we did that once a week.  He bought me a very used book of DaVinci pictures.  That made me happy. Find something you like to read/look at/play with and schedule it in while you’re in a tight spot.  It keeps you from blowing your lid.  Hell, remember Heinlein “budget luxuries first”.  This is not an excuse to eat out every day when you don’t have money for rent, but in a very tight time, we scheduled a visit to the amusement park with the kids.  It meant living on rice for two weeks, but you know, we got a day out and it helped.  (The clue is “budget.”)

6- Even if you think you’re totally useless, do not be sure.  Sometimes just being SOMEWHERE will save someone’s life who will save someone’s life, who might do/father/be something important.

We’re not ponds, we’re ripples in the ocean.  Knowing or not you touch someone who touches someone who might touch many people in a positive way.

Remember the butterfly effect.  Sometimes you’re the butterfly,particularly when you try to live in a way that encourages/helps others.

7- Don’t be the awful example.  Every family or group touched by suicide sparks others.  Remember the thing about when you’re on the slope, it’s easy to push you all the way down?  That.  Don’t be what pushes people down.  Uplift them instead.  Find the good, then share it.

8- Now go and do something that makes you want to live.

 

 

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: doubt.

 

 

Yesterday on the net there was a kerfuffle with one of the snowflakes trying to ban Baen authors from conventions.

In it, one of them insisted that Larry is an evil man (and Ringo too) and when confronted by real life people saying that “No, I met them, they’re nice people”she said that’s how you know they are bad men.  She then unrolled a litany of “life experiences” that proves that anyone acting nice is a monster.

Um….

I fully believe some of her friends were monsters.  There is a type of “feminist” male who uses ideology to mask their evil.  It’s the same type who would have been overly pious when the marker for “good” was being religious. (And which led to the stereotype of good, religious people being evil.)  I found this stereotype in the sixties as “pacifist” and “anti-war” males, and it finally came into focus with me with Heinlein saying that any man with enough testosterone to sire a child would down the white flag and hoist the jolly roger at the first opportunity, because these guys were often public “good” (for values of what was considered “good”) and private evil.  A good example of this is Clinton in his treatment of women.

So, some of her friends are monsters.  Are all of them?  Well, when you assume if men act nice they’re monsters and if they act like monsters they’re monsters… where’s the falsification of your hypothesis?  And do you want to live in the world you created?

It goes with other things too: if all white people have “white privilege” to the point that you call concentration camp survivors privileged, but at the same time you point to people of color who succeed and say “but they’d books at home, so they had white privilege”… how do you falsify the idea of white privilege?

If people disagreeing with your taste in books makes them Nazis and white supremacists, even if they’re libertarian and not white… where’s your falsification?

If everyone on your side are “good people” even though you’ve uncovered a few of them as monsters, where’s the falsification?

It applies to our own side too, alas.

If you know everyone is out to get conservatives, and you wave away the fact tons of conservatives are still up on Amazon, even as others get taken down as Amazon being careful not to hit everyone… where’s the falsification?

If you think all gays are child molesters and when someone points out gay people who’d rather self-castrate than molest a child and you say “they must just be hiding it?” where’s the falsification?

When you, right or left, think anyone who deviates from your points and — for good and sufficient reason — disagrees with say 20% of your beliefs is an enemy and functionally on the other side… where’s the falsification?

Look, guys, for years, I’ve had reason to suspect things like shenanigans with my books, but I say nothing, because, you know, can’t prove it one way or another.  I’ll say most of my books get dropped on the floor, but so do most books ever, so I can’t SAY it’s political.  I can suspect it’s political, but I can’t SAY anything. Because I can neither prove nor falsify.

It’s like the “big conspiracy” theory of history.  How do you falsify it?  It might be true (though aspects of it are highly unlikely) but if you can’t falsify it how can you believe it?

On mom’s side we have an invidious legacy of incipient paranoia. I’ve seen relatives go down it.  If you think everyone hates you and you can’t do anything, it eats you up inside, isolates you, seals you inside your crazy believes and will make you a bonafide loony, instead of a charming eccentric.

The other side is fully there, drinking their own ink.  After the Soviet union fell, their big theoretical effort was designed to creating unfalsifiable beliefs like that we live in a patriarchy, or that women are always oppressed, or that there’s “invisible” racism, or that … well, whatever the cause du jour is.  They’re all unfalsifiable, because they have handwavium to explain away contrary evidence.

Which means their side is becoming more and more insulated from reality, and therefore dangerous and destructive when they get their hands on… anything.

We’re not there yet.  Most means of communication are on the other side’s hands, and we’re exposed more to their point of view than ours.

But ours is starting to be AVAILABLE and that’s already winding up the more… ah… fragile members of our side.

Mind how you go.  This is a very premature warning.  Except for a few … fragile people, we’re nowhere there yet.
BUT the worm is turning.  The times are changing.  Let’s not look into the abyss and become what we beheld.

If a belief is unfalsifiable, try not to hug it to your bosom and pet it and call it George.  Chances are it’s not real. (Unless it’s a religion, and then carry on.) Chances are there are contrary examples.  And at any rate, you’ll be saner by remaining open to the opportunity of falsification.

Reality is that which bites you in the *ss while you’re sealed in your bubble.  Don’t seal the bubble.

 

Yesterday, driving around, we noticed a street named after a telecom company.  We’re not extremely familiar with where the telecoms were, partly because we lived in the Springs at the time (yeah, there were a few there too, including MCI that Dan worked for) but we suspect the (tiny) road was built to accommodate headquarters for the company, like, you know, Walmart being on Sam Walton’s rd. if they can get away with it.

The company, which was never one of the big players is long gone and in fact both of us had to wrack our brains to remember it.

And it brought to mind a beautiful day circa 1996, when Dan and I had left the kids with a babysitter and were out for a spin in his old mustang convertible (much like yesterday night.  Well, except the babysitter part.)  We were driving around, not up to much (I think we got ice cream, ate it outside the store and went back home) and Dan said “you realize that in tops 10 years, but probably 5 long distance will be worth nothing?”

I thought he was nuts.  Sure, we had cell phones (actually we didn’t, for another few years.  We had walkie talkies, because we lived in a tiny mountain town, and we could communicate with the kids from their jaunts downtown to home with a walkie Talkie.  It seems like yesterday the unit crackling on my desk, and Robert’s voice “Baby bird to momma bird.  Come in momma bird.”)  And those often had free long distance “in the tri-state area” (remember that?) But we were still paying a hefty every-month bill for my weekly one-hour conversations with mom.  And I thought “Dude, how?”

It’s twenty years later.  Long distance is still here, but it’s not a money maker for anyone.  I now pay an additional $10 fee a month for those conversations.  Only, frankly, because we’re so cheap that if we were merchandise we’d be out on a bin with “ten for a dollar”.  So our base plan is cheap as heck, and excludes international call.  We added it on to my phone only, because with my parents in their eighties it wasn’t feasible to NOT be able to call at the drop of a hat.

Twenty years.  The telecom companies got absorbed into bigger ones, and then different ones.  the landscape changed. Today only street names remain as the bones of great bit creatures that walked the Earth and vanished when conditions changed.

They collapsed… not gradually but invisibly.  Most people had moved on, and didn’t notice when they disappeared.

I predict we’re in for a wave of similar extinctions in the next five to ten years.  The first wave will take out publishing, a lot of the print media, a lot of written entertainment, some art.  They won’t disappear, mind, but what’s been happening with Indie will have completely replaced it, in anything that matters.

I’m not saying that book publishers will stop existing, but they’ll go more bestsellers-only, perstige-editions only, hard cover only.  It’s already happening in fact.  It’s sliding more that way every year.

I am predicting next will be schools.  I already have a friend making most of his living of what you could call “Indie school”.  It’s full time online tutoring to compensate for awful schools.

The tutoring to compensate for what the schools will not do is not news to me.  In most Latin countries, Portugal not an exception, schools have gone so bad that the only way to make it to college is with someone else teaching you.   (Not me, of course, because, well, we didn’t have the money.  So, uphill both ways.  I learned my own self, the best I could.  There are still weird holes.)  No, like publishing, I doubt schools will ever be replaced, or not for 20 years or so, but the revolution HAS started.

Look, it’s not just books.  It’s anything that’s information, including education. It’s cheaper on line.  It’s more convenient.The costs of delivering a lesson to new audiences is the cost of storing it on a server.

It will only take long (unless a catastrophe of some sort intervenes) for it to die because education is so regulated.  That’s all.  Mathematically, economically, technologically it’s already dead.

Movies… well, that’s harder and further off, because the tech is not quite there yet.

The movie industry is, however, doing to itself what publishing did to itself back in the nineties, so… when the tech is there for small companies to produce very professional, competitive movies?  It will be swift and terrible.

So.

The economy is getting better (thank heavens) but don’t be lulled into complacency.  The better the economy, the faster things will change.  It’s a catastrophic technological revolution.  It hits things no one even thinks of.  I just realized when writing this that I haven’t seen a walkie talkie for sale in years, because… well, who needs them?

If you’re in an artistic or communication industry, or one of the subsidiaries, you’re going to get hit.

Keep awareness of what is happening at all times.  Learn what others in your field are experiencing.  Prepare an escape hatch.  Ideally, prepare several escape hatches.

Learn to do other things, or to do what you do in different ways.  Be ahead of the change, not behind it.  For is it not written “Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark”? (RAH, PBUH)

Build under, build over, build around.

Stay alert, stay moving.

And be not afraid.