I learned at an early age that anyone who claims to speak “for the people” or do things “for the good of the people” is usually wrong.
In fact, the honest and earnest zealot who thinks he’s improving everyone’s life by doing x y or z if more of a danger than your average, run of the mill venal corruptocrat who merely wants to line his pockets and move on. (Note the current crop of corruptocrats are different. They explicitly seem to want to destroy everything while lining their pockets. I have theories about why this is is, but expounding on them would explode the post to five times its size.)
But there is a brand of “the people” that tends to get under the defenses of our side of the political spectrum aka those to the right of Lenin.
That brand is “the people don’t want freedom, they want to be looked after.”
Um… okay. Cozy belief you’re parroting. But why are you parroting it? And where did you get it? And didn’t your mommy never tell you not to put things in your mouth that you don’t know where they came from?
I know that right at this point some of you are inflating, puffer-fish style, ready to blow me out of the water with “history shows that people mostly want a leader on a white horse.”
Does history show that? Does it really? And have you accounted for the different conditions of those epochs, and the way the story was recorded?
Yes, history in general is a parade of various dictators and pseudo saviors, and some of them seem to have been beloved by the people.
Were they beloved by the people? Were they really? Even for the last 100 years mostly we know they were beloved by the press. Before that? How do you know?
Also, until recently in historic terms, people assumed those who were born with the right to rule them would rule them, and the best they could hope for was a semi-decent human being as leader.
Let’s leave history out of this, because at most it shows us what people are willing to tolerate, and not what people want. And history also has the tendency to hide the circumstances of people quite sternly opposing things that they’re supposed to be quite happy with. Not only is history a threadbare cloth over fractious peasant revolts, but those peasant revolts happened at all levels, from local to national.
I.e. people aren’t willing to put up with as much as you think they are. It’s just they didn’t tell you when they could sweep sometimes quite bloody revolts under the rug. Guys, I’m a student of history and until about three years ago, I wasn’t aware of the fact the Dutch had eaten their prime minister. And if you say “Yes, Sarah but that means you didn’t study very far” bah. I’ve spent years reading up on the history of Europe, sometimes under the color of research, and sometimes just because I wanted to. You often don’t stumble on these things unless you’re looking at some specific year or some specific and often odd incident.
So, history while in general an indicator of things that failed spectacularly, is not a good indicator of what people want or fail to want. Just of what they put up with, and the range of the possible at that time.
After that, how do you know? Well, sure, surveys, polls, etc. etc. etc.
But mostly — hear me on this — you “know” the common people want to be ruled by their betters because that’s what you’ve been told.
Because honestly the times we live in, it’s no wonder the price of gas is so high, they are gaslighting us 24/7 with the light of a thousand galaxies. I.e. if you believe 34% of the people in the land love them some FJB brand of governance, you might want to put down the pipe and stop toking. Yeah, he does have some who “approve” of him. I suspect around 24% of the people who are crazy or otherwise benefiting from his grift. It might be impossible to go below that.
If you believe that everyone likes and adores beloved leader, you probably also think that he got the most votes in the history of presidential elections. You might also have failed elementary school math.
Look, the truth is that since Obama they’ve been desperately trying to keep up the facade of “everyone loves this person.” And failing.
The reason they’re failing is that they already have lost control of the narrative. Their narrative is so stupid and bizarre that the only way they could push it is when they had control not only of all forms of mass news dissemination, but full control of the academia, and full control of entertainment with all the storylines following what the regime wants.
The truth is that it’s always been that way for totalitarian ideologues (and ours are as fully totalitarian as those of the old USSR, just not as coherent and not in command of the armed forces.) The old horrors of the USSR were brought down by fax machines and typewriters. Think about it a moment.
Now, while blogs and our little discussion groups on line seem totally ineffective to us, they are enough that under the greatest effort at mass brainwashing — the covidiocy — and with all the celebrities shilling for Joe Biden and accusing Trump of horrible crimes, people hunched their shoulders and went out and voted for Trump in such numbers that they ended up having to fraud at the last minute, implausibly, and in front of G-d and everybody.
Our blogs and our little discussion groups are enough that Facebook is banning images in the sharing of my blog and I remain throttled on Twitter. (TBF I believe Musk that if he tries to dismantle the architecture of censorship the whole thing will fall apart, but Mr. Musk, it’s time to get doing with a parallel architecture you can switch the service to. Build under, build over, build around!)
(For that matter not having a social media platform under their complete control is so scary that overnight they switched from Musk fans to trying to make him the world’s worst arch-villain.)
Our blogs and our little discussion groups are enough that the would-be masters of the universe of the WEF rated censorship as their vital necessity right now.
Let’s face it, guys, we: the hobbits, the deplorables, the contrarians are winning this fight and the other side is on the run.
Even in Europe, with their almost complete control of the news and information structure — they’ve managed to keep ebooks and self-publishing unobtanium and blogs out of the question, through mostly draconian speech laws — they are facing mass revolts of farmers and working people.
Do people want “freedom” as some abstract ideal? Maybe not, because “freedom” as an abstract ideal can be pretty insane. (Look at Oregon recriminalizing drug use.) “Freedom” can be interpreted as a total absence of police, for instance, which might sound great, until you find that this means citizen patrols have to learn the three Ss. (And are, in places in this country, I bet you.)
But people do want the freedom to go about their lawful occasions, defined as earning a living, establishing their own livelihood, raising families, determining their own fate.
Every person does. And once the “ruler” interferes too much with that, you get revolt.
Sometimes you get the loud in your face revolt. And sometimes you get wearing your mask with the nose hanging above it. Or leaving every other pew in church empty by ADDING EXTRA PEWS between the existing ones.
And in either case, you won’t hear about it, more than likely. If you hear it’s likely to be the first one not the second. In your face, not hooves firmly affixed and refusing to do as told. But most of the time you won’t hear at all, outside the small group be it region or professional. Even when you hear about it, you don’t hear when the rebellion wins. (The trucker revolt in Canada. They got all their demands met. Yes it cost them horrifically. Because liberty is so valuable, it must be dearly bought.)
Yes the people want freedom, or at least individual liberty. No, they don’t want to be ruled and commanded. They want liberty enough that the left is going to hurt us very badly trying to fight their final rearguard action to stay in control.
If you believe only the enlightened, or educated or whatever want liberty and everyone else wants “security” or “to be ruled” you are victim of a deception that plays on your sense of unearned superiority.
And your parroting this nonsense plays into the enemy’s hands. Because it is foundational to Marxism that the workers are too stupid to know what they want or need and must therefore be led by intellectuals.
Stop picking up opinions you find lying about and putting them in your mouth because they taste so good.
You don’t know where they’ve been, or where they’ve come from.
When my son was in the choir, he told me when you didn’t know the words, or if you’d lost your voice just before the number, or something, you could pass by just mouthing “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” and no one will know, in the choir that you’re not actually singing.
I feel like I was hit over the head by a writer stopping a choir so he could sing WATERMELON at the top of his voice. This, of course, is a craft error and I covered that here. It is a writing mistake. Which is why I did that on that blog.
But on top of that I found myself thinking “Do you think?” — meaning the author — “In any sense of the word? Or are you just signaling with things you memorized and that you’ve been assured it’s what every smart person thinks? And even if you thought your lecture was on point and the matter is super important, what do you think it would achieve?”
I’m not going to tell you what the book or the author was. You can read the background details for why I started reading this book in the first place.
I hit a substantial portion of the book, and the character is making fun of the names developers give to developments and how they make no sense. It could be a good funny thing, but the writer couldn’t help himself and had to say “And that’s why when developers became politicians they lied so much.”
Uh. Look, guys, until that point I thought I was reading something 20 years old at least, but at that point I went and looked at copyright and, son of a bitch, yep 2020.
And you know what? That dig didn’t need to be there, and it totally threw me out, because why would someone 100 years in the future obsess on Trump? But TDS is a hell of a drug, so fine, whatever. I continued reading.
This kept on until in the middle of a tense situation and apropos nothing the character muses on where he could retire and decides that he couldn’t possibly go to the beach, because it “would be underwater by then.”
At which point I hit my first “do you even think?” because how many times have we been assured the beaches will be underwater? And yet it isn’t 100 years from now, and yet it would be in another… 12 years? What the heck?
What this told me is that the author was just “watermeloning” and not realizing that what he was saying didn’t make any sense in the book. It was a lack of respect for his character and his story.
At this point I had some trouble convincing myself to continue reading. I realized it when I found myself not wanting to pick up the book in the morning.
Still, even though it wasn’t rocking my world, the characters were not obnoxious and the story was at least somewhat interesting, and he had four more books in the series, and I didn’t want to go look for another series to start.
And then in the middle of a chase scene — A chase scene! — the character worries that his electric car is going to be stopped for the daily Earth hour.
The. DAILY. Earth. Hour.
He doesn’t even try to hide that this comes from the ravings of a autistic Scandinavian Teen. Okay, he didn’t mention that she was autistic and borderline illiterate, as well as a massive fraud — eating food that have to be flown in — when away from the cameras or thinking she was away from the cameras. But then again if he fell for the little Greta Mountain of Tuna act, how smart is he, anyway?
But in whose adult head does it make sense that this “great idea” for “slowing global cooling” came from a kid who is not a scientist or honestly — as anyone who hears her can tell — particularly smart. The only reason anyone paid attention to her was leaning hard on the myths of the holy child, who speaks for the gods, which is something that goes back to probably pre-history. But rational sense? Not a wit.
And then, beyond the massive disrespect for his own job of entertaining us, we get into the internal contradictions of this nonense.
He goes on about how stopping air conditioning or heating for an hour won’t hurt you, and it’s for the good of the Earth. Oh, come on. Do these people actually interact with reality, at any level?
Let alone that stopping your car in the middle of something can and will put people at risk, even if it’s a regularly scheduled event, because if all cars suddenly become disabled for an hour, you know there would be people who were caught in the middle of a traffic jam and delayed, or something, and in the middle there there would be an ambulance. People would die every day for this piece of nonsense.
But let’s go into the helping the Earth thing. HOW does stopping everything for an hour help the Earth? Cars are still going to go on their merry way, and use the same energy they would have used anyway. It’s not like people will go “Oh, oops, stopped for an hour. Won’t take that trip now.”
And the heating/cooling…. Good Lord. It’s the perfect “mouthing watermelon” but accomplishing nothing “solution.” In other words, it’s the same bullshit as all the “green” solutions that have us washing our dishes three times, and using at least twice the water we’d have used otherwise. Or having to buy plastic bags, because they’ve been “banned” and in the process using twice as many bags, because those are now crap. Or sucking a drink through a paper straw, even though all the plastic pollution in the ocean is a) grossly exaggerated. b) from third world countries.
BUT the heating and cooling…. What planet is this author from? Does he not realize that if you stop the heating or cooling, you’re going to end up using more energy to get it back up/down to temperature than if you kept it at a constant, which is how modern systems manage to save energy over older ones, by keeping a constant circulation, and giving it little jots now and then to keep it even and comfortable. I mean, who does it help, if after your “holy” Earth hour “Every day!” that you get massive fines for violating, you’re going to use MORE energy to catch up again?
This is why hotels who have to put in that green-signaling scam of putting the room key in the unit to make air-conditioning run, have just started as a matter of course to give you a card to keep in the unit. Because they’re not stupid and don’t want to increase their heating/cooling bills. (Unless they’re in Europe where apparently people don’t do math.)
Look, it would be okay, if this were, say, a romance, or even a contemporary mystery, but this was science fiction. I expect authors of science fiction to be minimally acquainted with science and how things work. Or to have first readers who are.
However, more importantly, holy heck, this author is at least ten, and I think fifteen years older than I. He has to remember the “we’re all going to freeze” hysteria. Has to. Absolutely has to.
He has to remember when it pivoted smoothly to “we’re all going to bake” over one summer. And he has to remember how it’s always twelve years away.
By Al Gore’s phony prophecies we should all already have baked. There should be no snow anywhere, etc. etc.
Instead, as far as we can tell, outside urban islands, the Earth has gotten if anything a little cooler, and we have a better chance of flipping to ice age than boiling. And if we do, it has zero to do with our tech or our “decadent” western lifestyle or any of that crap. If we do it’s mostly likely because of some cycle we don’t fully understand.
Most importantly, really, how can a science fiction author have missed the fact that nuclear energy would solve all of this without phony “Earth hours” and teenage recriminations, and there’s no logical reason not to use it, unless the goal is to take down civilization, not to cool the Earth?
But on top of all this? WHAT DID HE THINK HE WAS ACCOMPLISHING?
Did he think by doing this paen to “OMG the Earth is Warmering! We must follow St. Greta Mountain of Tuna and have a Holy Earth Hour every day to appease Gaia’s chafed vagina!” was going to convince a reader who, up till then had heard this same song sung in a million books, all school books for the last 40 years, most comic books and movies, popular songs, and of course Gretas Autistic Greatest Hits Tour and now, now, in the middle of this book which is not about St. Al Gore the Manbearpig, or the Prophecies of the Tuna Mountain, now, this skeptical reader — and let’s face it, that’s me — was going to stop and go “Oh, now, now that this character from an imagined future is telling me how important this bullshit is? Now, I’ll totally believe that 100 years plus another 12 in the future it will all come to an end if we don’t live like Neolithic farmers!
Pardon me for this rant. Unlike Bill Reader’s incredible post of yesterday, this is not carefully reasoned, or historical analysis. This is just me being so fricking incredibly tired.
I’d be okay if we were having an honest exchange of ideas, an argument on different paths humanity could take. I even understand some concern on the environment, because though I think they grossly overestimate our ability to affect complex systems like climate, I don’t think we should say put a shade between us and the sun (just to mention one of those ideas from the left) without carefully considering all the pros and cons.
But dear lord. The complete lack of originality and thought in someone who is supposed to be a futurist! It’s infuriating and more than a bit scary.
My religion forbids me from assuming that some percentage of humans are really NPCs just put in to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise thin and threadbare narrative.
But sometimes… Sometimes the temptation is overwhelming.
Because here we are marshaling our best arguments, making sure we have the facts right and making sure the lecture is appropriate wherever we put it, and then double checking everything we say.
And there they are, apropos nothing, breaking into things where it makes no sense, and shrieking at the top of their voices: WATERMELON.
Only Nazis would oppose the systematic rape and murder of Jews. Only Nazis would oppose people who want to exterminate all Jews. Only Nazis would oppose people who want to subjugate the entire western world, especially America. Only Nazis would oppose segregating people by race. Only Nazis would oppose treating people of one race as inferior with no reference to their merits or character. Only Nazis would oppose censorship. Only Nazis would oppose covert surveillance. Only Nazis would support the individual right to bear arms. Only Nazis would oppose arbitrary expropriation of property from enemies of the state under color of law. Only Nazis would support election integrity. Only Nazis would, in particular, demand that election laws not be altered at the last minute by illegal means. Or ask for an audit when suddenly election tabulation happens in a way it has never happened in the past, resulting in multiple objectively implausible upsets at the last minute. Only Nazis would question a vote where the poll observers were kicked out in the middle of performing the count. Only Nazis would advocate for objective reality over the ever-changing whims and fantasies of the party and the state.
All these things and more you are told only Nazis would do. Of course it makes no sense. It’s not just untrue, it’s the opposite of true, like serving a person a cup of flaming gasoline and calling it ice-water.
It is time and long past time to speak truth. The Democrats are the Nazis. In every meaningful respect they are a 1:1 reflection—they are viciously anti-Semitic, power mad statists, no better than the ones America put down 80 years ago. History will eventually view it as an indictment of the breathtaking gullibility of man that the successors to the Nazis waltzed so easily into the corridors of power simply by insisting at every turn that they were not what they plainly were.
I will repeat again how this simple and stupid ploy managed to play out this way, in the prayer that maybe this time the signal will be heard. The “U shaped” political spectrum is a lie. It has always been a lie, and it’s a lie that serves the interests of the Left every time you repeat it.
Nazi is short for National Socialist German Worker’s party. They were named that because the Nazis were socialists—they were never, by any measure, excepting maybe the fucked up standards of Europe, “right wing”*.
The reason that “everyone knows” that the Nazis were “right wing” is because the main opposition to the Nazis in Germany as they were rising to power were “international socialists”, known otherwise popularly in America as communists—and more correctly and precisely, in their place and time, as advocates for Soviet hegemony of countries that communists organized in. In the years preceding World War II, what occurred in Germany was a fight between International Socialism and National Socialism. National Socialism won out in Germany proper—in no small part because Germans did not, in the main, want to become a Soviet vassal, and the Nazis were the most coherent opposition to that fate. But that wasn’t the end of the story, for two reasons. The most important of those was that Hitler and Stalin had a falling out. Their alliance up to that point, it must be emphasized, made perfect sense, because despite the fact that Hitler’s domestic political opponents had largely been pro-Soviet, the two totalitarian, statist societies had much more in common with one another than the Soviets had with any member of the allies. The other was that Germany was not the only place that far-left extremist groups had Soviet sympathies. Both Europe and the United States had the same problem, and such groups followed Soviet propaganda closely.
The standard smear that Soviet communists used against their opponents was to call them “right wing” (Like all Soviet propaganda the relationship to the truth was tangential at best— most right wing people did, in fact, oppose Soviets, but opposing the Soviets doesn’t at all imply that you are right wing. Note that modern day Leftists, by the old Soviet standards, would be considered rabidly “right wing” for arming Ukraine.). And shortly thereafter, American conservatives who opposed American Leftist groups that were heavily financed by, and compromised by the Soviets, began to be equated to the Nazis. That is why you may have heard Walt Disney accused of being a Nazi, for example—because Walt Disney opposed extreme Leftist union members who were not just Marxists, but Marxists with ties to the Soviet Union. In point of fact, Walt Disney was not a Nazi, and the accusation doesn’t even make superficial sense, but there was also no attempt to make it make any sense. It was simply repeated enough by Left wing groups that people assumed there must be some kernel of truth in it.
So of course your political spectrum looks “U” shaped. Both of its poles are left wing! That’s not some deep political insight: that’s you trying unsuccessfully to make sense out of competing propaganda. Nor is it an indictment of the “far right”, so much as an indictment of your historical understanding.
“Right wing dictator” in American terms is a contradiction in terms, a nonsense phrase. The joking tagline of this blog, “Taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone” is exactly why.
To be a dictator is to centralize all power in the person and agents of the person. All dictatorships are statist in nature.
Yes, there have been examples of countries rocking back and forth between “Left wing” and “Right wing” dictators, but the latter are simply the effect from above writ large—a combination of unimaginative one-note Leftist attacks of Soviet pedigree, and people getting so tired of the Leftists presently in power that people who oppose them begin to call themselves “Right wing” without remotely resembling the American conception if it. In such countries, both sides end up cyclically redistributing each other’s wealth through and to the state, imprisoning each other’s leaders, and imposing overbearing laws targeting each other’s supporters. Those dynamics are best understood as competing factions of Leftists. Your precious “U shape” was drawn with only half the graph. A more accurate depiction would be:
It was precisely because of the work of these groups that Europe went on to learn exactly the wrong lesson from World War I and II, embracing socialism and attempting to divest themselves of nationalism. Soviet-aligned groups—international socialists, remember—saw nationalism as one of the great obstacles to their success, and Europe fell for their bullshit, hook, line, sinker (rod, reel, fisherman, boat).
This despite the fact that both the socialist nation they stopped from conquering Europe by force, and the socialist nation they belatedly allowed to join the alliance to assist them in doing that, were examples of Hell on Earth—socially repressive, tyrannical, and eventually, genocidal (speaking of Ukraine).
That mistake has resulted in Europe as it exists today, lying on its deathbed, unable and unwilling to defend itself even as a war is raging closer to them than war has been in half a century. Their only pretense of defense is to whine that Americans are defending them inadequately—they will not shift a penny from the socialist state that they have built on, first, an ironclad belief in the accuracy of dusty Soviet propaganda, and latterly on simple corruption, cupidity, and avarice. Their farmers are strangling to death under the weight of repressive legislation and still their governments import every idiot third worlder with working legs to further overburden their collapsing welfare state.
None seems to dare admit the obvious— that on long enough time scales, anti-nationalism and socialism, as ideologies, are not survivable, nor sustainable, nor even meaningfully sane; as well they shouldn’t be since they are aggressor ideologies, meant specifically to ripen up countries to be conquered by an empire that ironically collapsed under its own weight decades hence. T
he violent third world Muslims who are toppling the old, sick, and weakened European countries pay no homage either to socialism or to nationalism, will certainly not practice “cultural humility”, nor will they care about the complaints of those who have turned such things into a secular religion. Europe’s “progress” will end in their lands and descendants beholden to the mores of the 7th century, and all this they will tell themselves is for the best, because at least they didn’t repeat Nazism.
They will sacrifice all they have, all they have ever had, all they could have been, in return for a nod of approval from the ghost of Stalin. And the monsters that breed in their corpses will become the existential concerns of our children—but I digress.
Remember all of this. The person who calls you a Nazi online today is admitting implicitly that he or she is the inheritor of a party that was so compromised by the Soviet Union that it is still repeating its nonsensical slanders a century later. McCarthy was an optimist.
And Left wing puddingheads: don’t attempt to counter with laughable “white supremacist” groups that are supposedly right wing in the modern era.
The vast majority of these consist of three FBI agents and two men who are products of an American school system that isn’t even pretending not to be an indoctrination factory anymore.
There is an overwhelming chance that any “white” person participating in such groups has as many black ancestors as the average black person in America. (I remind you of the supposed kidnapping plot of a governor that, when all was tabulated and exposed, was composed of mostly federal agents).
The highest profile groups—like the very appropriately named Patriot “Front”—are almost certainly entirely composed of feds. To the extent that any of these groups are something besides yet another inappropriate and stupid use of Federal money, it’s a combination of ignorance about what Nazis actually were, and the same problem South American countries exhibit, cited above—namely, the Democrat party being so hostile, stupid, and evil, that some people actually begin to consider that an ideology that resulted in the death of millions might have a point, simply because the Left repeatedly assert that those are their opponents. Which is to say, that American Democrats self-consciously emulate the aforementioned suicidal ideology of Europe but lie more about doing it.
A gaggle of suspiciously crew-cut people in masks and professionally printed uniforms that by some strange coincidence include government-issue pants is not an example of Nazism, it’s an example of my tax dollars being wasted by an agency that stopped having a reason to exist after Prohibition ended. American college students coast to coast calling for Jewish blood in between advocating for Socialism—that is Nazism. That is obviously Nazism.
To my conservative readers, I will conclude with this thought:
2016 became, famously, the flight 93 election. I put it to you that this election is the Battle of Britain. We are going to decide in November whether the Nazis get to take over, by force, the bastion of freedom that they have relentlessly assaulted.
I invite you to consider it in that light when you are donating, campaigning, and voting—and to bear in mind that no incarnation of the Nazis, be they German Socialists or American Socialists, has ever cared much for conceptions of fair play or honesty. Do not assume, when you are making your plans, that such things will be sufficient. Leverage every ounce of power you hold over the Left, do anything you can to stop the corruption they are assaulting our system with. Be weary of dirty tricks, because they will certainly attempt some. You face a ruthless enemy who represent an existential threat.
But the horrors they will commit in the war are nothing compared to what they will do if permitted to win.
_________________
*That is also true of fascists, incidentally. Benito Mussolini was a socialist before deriving the political theory of fascism, which he saw as further articulating and perfecting of the principles of socialism. In fact the fasces (that’s fah-sees, not the plural of face), the eponymous symbol of fascism, is an axe with a bundle of sticks as its handle, chosen specifically because it symbolizes the strength of the collective bound together in service of the state.
THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS POST. THERE IS NO APRIL FOOLS. APRIL FOOLS IS A LIE. GIVEN THE CURRENT STATE OF THE CLOWN WORLD, I’D LIKE A SENSIBLE PEOPLE DAY – 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. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
For centuries the British Empire has ruled territories the world over, maintaining its grasp on its far-flung colonies by way of magic and brute force. Any successful attempt at rebellion is short-lived, as the rebels do not have the benefit of wizardy on their side.
The most recent attempt at secession happened in the New World in 1776, some two hundred years ago. General George Washington nearly succeeded at rallying his countrymen in a military revolt against the Crown. But disunity and infighting ultimately brought them down, and Washington was executed in a public spectacle.
Most people gave up. But not all.
The cleverest and most driven survivors went to ground. They learned from their mistakes. They planned, they plotted, they tinkered and they toiled. They began to develop new weapons and machines that would level the playing field. With technology at their fingertips, anyone could stand toe-to-toe with a British mage and come off conqueror.
The uprising has been a long time coming. The arsenal is as large as it’s going to get. Now all the “technomancer” army needs is soldiers, young patriots like Calvin Adler, who has had enough of the mages pushing him around.
Freedom beckons, if he will but pay the price in blood, sweat, and tears.
What happens when new communication technologies allow the drone driver to leave the drone’s zip code? Who develops the target deck for massive strikes against Russian targets? What does it take to counter a new Russian trick? Follow the drone drivers of the 427th Combined Effects Battalion as they answer all of these questions and more in this fast-paced novella of World War Three.
A once-in-a-lifetime experience! Adventure you’ll never forget! Irresistible – to some. In 1878 a solar eclipse was predicted, the shadow’s path to sweep from Alaska across the Rocky Mountains, promising an enthralling event guaranteed to strike envy into the hearts of others for the rest of your life. But how to get to the edge of the frontier safely? Victoria Bearskin of the Wyandotte tribe and a student in Vassar’s astronomy program is forbidden to go. Nofina Nolana, an oyster pirate scoundrel from San Francisco orders his crew to hijack a ship to Juneau – which turns out to be Captain Nemo’s long-lost Nautilus submarine. From New Orleans Lurie and Clark ride paddle steamers up the mighty rivers of America’s heart to preserve images of the event. While all eyes are on their sweet moments in moonshadow they overlook chance encounters with bad men, big animals and birthin’ babies. After all that, who would emerge from the mad gambles? All learn there are no promises in this life, but there are second chances and new beginnings are born from once-in-a-lifetime experiences. A stand-alone novelette of 14,000 words by Lindsay Petersen.
When Ellen Ballinger got abducted, she managed to turn it into a complicated scheme to end up married to Jeff Hale. Jeff didn’t much like liars, nor stubborn, wrong-headed women like Ellen… and yet, there was something about his new wife, something a good deal less complicated than the land-grabbing scheme that he was facing from skunks like Dallman and Kellis. And seeing justice done, while staying on the right side of the law, and the right side of his new wife, would be more complicated still…
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book historical and genre context.
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.
It is said that war is hell. But what of the Prisoners of War, or the war orphans who grow up amidst the chaos, and what of those who escape their enemy’s prisons?
In Halcyon, meet a man who has been abused in a prison camp for so long that he has forgotten his own name – but not the desire to survive. Follow the adult orphans Warlock Ruthers produced in his campaign for power as they protect two children whom he seeks to murder to defeat a prophecy of his downfall in American Mage.
Meanwhile, Allan Kearney and Michio Oshika work on removing the demon tattoos from the former’s back at the same time they seek the means to end the persecution of Allan’s fellow prisoners. But demons do not release their prey without a fight, as the young Torránese soldier knows all too well. If he is to survive, let alone help rescue his comrades, first he will have to face the monsters clawing for his soul. It will be a battle that will require all his strength – and more…
The Columbian Exposition has transformed Chicago into a vision of the bright shining future. However, the electric lights that turn night to day bring no joy to Kitty Hawthorne, and not just because they are the work of her employer’s chief rival. Now Edison wants her to abandon her investigation of Tesla’s alternating current system and look into a mysterious newcomer. Who is Samuel Gillian, who devises calculating machinery as easily as he builds flying machines?
A Letter from out of the Blue, a Puzzle with a Missing Piece, a Cat that’s not really a Cat. Do they mean more trouble than Nan can handle?
When Nan receives a box of wooden blocks and an enigmatic letter from a long-lost relative, she’s not certain what it means. There’s definitely something strange – one might even say magical – about the blocks, but what are they really for? And why is her newly acquired cat, Patch, so interested in them?
Patch has been tracking the blocks for over two hundred years. They’re the key to him becoming a man again and returning to his own time and place. If Nan can figure out how to use them.
But others are interested in the blocks, too. How are an inexperienced Keeper and a cat supposed to protect them?
The Empire of Humanity is locked in a war for survival with the Fractal Demons. Years on, the dice are still tumbling. Billions have died and planets have been destroyed. Meanwhile, an old loose end has resurfaced and forced Grace to confront a mistake from her teenage years – her son by a long-dead lover has lost his adulthood, and only Grace can save him from exile.
But the Fractal Demons initiate a new strategy, and are starting to turn the tide in their favor. Grace is unlucky enough to be assigned to deal with one of their first strikes under the new strategy, and she’s unable to prevent several million deaths.
But she’s learned enough to master her problems, both as the new mother of a two hundred year old son, and as one of those defending the masses of the Empire from assault by the demons. She has grown from her origins, and just because she seems to have a knack for attracting trouble doesn’t mean she can’t handle it. When the divine finger points at her, she steps up to deal with it.
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.
There comes a time in the life of every writer when, not matter how little inclined, in the name of human decency and health, some efforts must be made at cleaning.
With my faithful friend, squirrel, and what appears to be a… nutria or maybe a chinchilla (the cats are obviously off camera) I am engaged in that at the moment. (Indy is probably disassembling the vacuum as I type this, judging by… sounds.)
Do not be alarmed by massive cloud of dust rising from not-Colorado. It’s just me dusting the bookshelves. If you look closely, you’ll see cat hair is mixed with the dust.
And now let me go rescue the vacuum. Back with memes tomorrow.
*Note that was too pessimistic. Maybe. I thought just the lockdown would cause famines in the US. It just pinched us a lot. The rest… I stand by it – SAH*
Cures and Diseases – a blast from the past from 3/24/2020
Cures and Diseases
I’m sorry I’ve been largely absent from my own blog. The truth is that I’ve been largely absent from my own life.
It is a form of depression, but one I hadn’t wrestled with before. I’ve never before been THIS angry. Angry enough I had to shut my entire ability to work — including non fiction and short pieces down — in order not to live in a state of near-berserking.
And I’ve never before felt so impotent that it feeds into the depression. Of course I’ve never before watched the imposition of Cuba-style socialism on the bastion of free men (yes, women are included in that, and if you think I need to mention this every time you’re part of the people destroying civilization without realizing what you’re doing and one of the people I’m no longer in the mood to give consequence to.)
It doesn’t help that this dropped on top of other worries that were ALREADY consuming my life before: I appreciate the world’s and politicians attempts to distract me from a couple of things I’m waiting to drop to make sure the boys DO graduate this year, and from my fears the boob thing will be cancer by going completely insane. I particularly want to thank my state governor for attempting to crash the state economy in tandem with all the other crazy state governors, in what (if they keep it up) guarantees a famine event by next winter. I think HOWEVER you’re going overboard a little. Maybe it’s time to back up?
Okay, to be clear, the chances that the Chinese Virus was ever going to wipe out 1/10th of our population, let alone more, were very, very, very low. HOWEVER when this started out, we didn’t know that. We just didn’t. And the sh*t coming out of China, including the crematoria running day and night were terrifying.
The virus is still horrible in China. PROBABLY. I mean, the Chinese are still dying and a lot are still locked in. But is it the thing that has many names but which started out as COVID-19?
No one knows. No one really knows what is going on in China. Partly because, as a friend of mine who loves the culture and has lived in China put it “It’s not that they lie. It’s that they don’t really have a concept of the truth.” Some Arab cultures have similar issues. You see, truth that can be verified by other people, truth that is “scientifically testable” is not only not a given for humanity, it seems to be a really difficult idea. Judging from oour plague of irreproducible results, it’s really difficult for US too and being lost here. It might be something that came to the west, or solidified in the west with the scientific revolution.
In China “truth is what serves our purposes.” For everyone. Which is why medicines made in China might be full of plaster. If you’re lucky.
Anyway, the point is no one knows what is going on in China, and though we know that people are dying in droves, and that we’re not being told the truth, we don’t know that it’s caused by this virus.
In fact there are tons of reasons to believe it isn’t, including the fact that the virus isn’t that lethal anywhere else. And before you say “Italy” — Italy is cooking the books, including counting anyone who dies of anything else and had this virus onboard as dying of the virus — besides the fact that Italy has other, systemic problems, just as China does.
There were always those of us who suspected that some purging of political dissidents was going on behind China’s facade of virus attack, and some of it might be true. But there are a lot of other things going one. One of them is that China was hurting — badly — economically. The 8 years of Obama’s Summer of Recovery had put a dent in how much “cheap crap” Americans were buying. There were already parts of their economy dying. They compensated by stealing patents and frauding more (remember they have no concept of fair dealing, along with no concept of the truth. And no, this is not racist, though it might be “culturalist” but I don’t know how, unless you believe all cultures are exactly the same, in which the technical name for you is “idiot.” And yes, I know there are a ton of you out there who were taught that. You were mis-taught. There is no value judgement involved. Cultures are different. I think ours is more suited to survival and thriving of the human race, but that’s me. However, if you’re going to be dealing with other countries you have to be aware of the differences. This, BTW doesn’t mean diddly about the character of people of Chinese origin. It just means that people who grow up in the Chinese culture might have blind spots which aren’t ours and which make business affairs cross culture difficult.)
But then came Trump’s sanctions and attempts to stop our bleed out of jobs and currency. And no, he wasn’t wrong. But it put the hurt on China, MAJORLY which is why all our press — who knew they were in the pocket of the Chinese to that extent — squealed like stuck pigs.
The thing is it might have caused FAMINE in China. China has a veneer of modernity and western civilization, but it is not. The average peasant in China still lives in conditions our 19th century ancestors would find primitive and stark. They might wear t-shirts, but they’re living in primitive, and close to the bone conditions.
When the sanctions cut into them, crematoria running night and day might be a sign of anything, including widespread famine. And Wuhan was particularly impoverished due to hosting the Military games, which means the government emptied parts of the city and destroyed people’s livelihoods uncaring of what happened. There were APPARENTLY a lot of people on the edge of starvation.
Which, yes, makes them more susceptible to disease. Or just dying of hunger.
On top of which, there have been rumors filtering out of a new bird flu, and worse of locusts in unprecedented numbers eating their crops. This comes on top of a swine flu that killed or caused them to kill most of their pigs, to the point rivers ran red.
So, you know, what happened with the virus and China is not a sign of anything.
But when I first became aware of this in January, I was briefly very worried. It looked like it would be bad, very bad indeed. And like everyone else, I kept thinking “Would China react like this if they didn’t have way more deaths/it weren’t way more severe?”
Well, yes, because as I’ve explained there are a ton of other (very bad) things going on in China, and blaming the virus is not as embarrassing.
Since then, despite various attempts to stampede us, from the incredibly stupid computer model, to the numbers in Italy (note that only 12% of death certificates that show Covid-19 as the cause are plausibly even close to true.), to our own authorities doing testing only on people showing severe symptoms, and publishing the number of infected as though it were growing and not more people being tested for it, to as far as I can tell, hospital administrations assuming when we first tested is when people were first infected and having decided (PFA?) that the thing has no asymptomatic infections, but that most infections “take 16 days” which is why the surgeon general (medical degrees apparently don’t mean you can examine assumptions) thinks this week will be “the worst yet,” the truth is that this virus is probably one of the greatest panics incited over absolutely nothing in the history of humanity.
In the magnitude of delusion compared to the actual effects/danger, it is the elephant that birthed a mouse.
I’m not saying people won’t die from the infection. We’re humans. People die from a hangnail. People die from getting too much sun. People can and do die from sinus infections. It’s just not common. Every year, I guarantee, several people die from the common cold. I once tried to die from a really simple virus my two year old shrugged off in a week.
People will die. But in terms of who dies of Chinese Virus, we’re learning they’re the people who would die of …. well, anything. Most of them will be seniors who would have died in less than year anyway.
And when you type that people call you unfeeling and tell you how would you feel if that were your mother, or your grandmother.
The answer is DEVASTATED. Very very sad. I’ve said in the past, and it’s true, that I’d give years of life for the ability to have tea with grandma once more, in her kitchen.
But my mother is eighty five. My father is eighty nine. Both of them are adults and cognizant that they are MORTAL. They certainly wouldn’t want western civilization destroyed to save them. Particularly because when global economy crashes, they won’t survive, anyway. Nor will anyone their age. Hell, it’s unlikely anyone my age will survive very long, because we get the maladies and the things that don’t work very well. People are only living to their eighties and nineties because we’re wealthy and stable enough to give them medicine and think nothing of the cost. And because they can be well fed, clean, warm.
The proof that this virus is probably less lethal than the common cold is hard to come by, partly because we’re still only testing people who are showing symptoms. And we haven’t tested that many people, as is. And as proven we can’t trust numbers from China or Italy, and knowing the games they play with numbers for infant death and murder, I’d be very careful trusting numbers from the EU.
So, we lean heavily on the numbers from the Diamond Princess, because it’s a closed test case. Iceland might also be trustworthy. And South Korea might be more or less straight up. And there are studies surfacing of what is really going on that confirm THE VIRUS IS NOT A BIG DEAL.
Don’t expect the media to tell you this. They benefit from the panic directly. Their almost gone influence has been revived. You see, most people don’t actually read news online. They learned to distrust the media from talking to friends at lunch/diner/office. Those are gone, and bored and scared people have the news on. And they BELIEVE them. So don’t expect the media to EVER give the all clear.
All the more so because they’ve seized on this to create a state of panic that will allow them to push their favorite political prescriptions. If you think your lefty friends saying that we’re adopting Bernie’s program is hyperbole, it’s not. The media has stampeded us into an horrendous recession, and the left is taking advantage of it.
The left will also never ever give the all clear. They’re seizing on the panic to create their socialist paradise by fiat. The fact it looks a lot like Cuba or Venezuela hasn’t hit them yet. And they might not mind, anyway. Most of them would rather reign in hell.
But I still think they have NO clue of the devastation they’re precipitating. Most of them are urbanites, work in offices, and have a degree in the soft sciences. Some are even extremely competent and successful in their own fields, but they are complete idiots when it comes to how the world works or what the economy is.
There are signs they are completely delusional. One of them is the charming illusion they can keep people in lock down for 18 months, and all that will happen is they “save lives” and “socialism.” Another is their uniform support for The Green New Deal, an underwear gnome solution based on wishful thinking and astonishing ignorance. Yet another is how they think printing money will compensate for everything. Yet another is an article I saw yesterday about how we recovered from the 2008 recession by 2009. Apparently someone REALLY believed those cooked numbers and the headlines on “summer of recovery” and didn’t have highly qualified friends unemployed for half a decade at a time.
And that’s the problem. It’s not so much the “enemies, domestic” though of course, it is a major problem. As is the fact these mal-educated emotional children have political power. I mean at the level of functionality and divorce from reality they’re the nobility of pre-revolutionary France. (And it would behoove them to remember how that ended.)
But the really, really major problem is that they have NO clue how their actions impact reality, other than what they want to see. It’s entirely possible they don’t believe reality exists. (College-educated people in possession of half-digested philosophy are apparently more dangerous than a buffalo in a china shop.)
What we have grown-size toddlers, walking around a room-sized computer, randomly smashing circuit boards with their hammers and giggling.
You see, they know the more functionality they take down, the more chance that Orange-man-bad who told them they couldn’t have whatever toy they wanted will be taken out.
BUT THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE DOING is causing IRREPARABLE damage, and that it might never be repaired.
If they understood the economy and its complexity they wouldn’t be socialists or communists. Because the reason socialism and communism destroys economies and kills people is that it ignores the complexity of economy and people.
They confuse symbol with reality (In this as in everything else, btw) so they think printing money creates value. They think that they can lock us in the house for eighteen months, and as long as they keep us in money, everything will be fine.
They miss not just that food/other necessities still need to be produced, but that they need to be transported. And that for them to be transported, there needs to be oil (no, please, this is not the time to have dreams of tech we don’t actually have) available to fuel trucks, and truckers willing to take to the road. They miss that just handing people money doesn’t mean they can buy food, even if it is available. They miss the interweb of value and interchange that keeps economy going, from building maintenance to paying your rent, to keeping the lights on.
They fail to understand you can’t stop the complex, chaotic system that is American economy and have it restart again. They are pampered and confident, and they have no clue there can be a world with lates, let alone a world without beans.
If this goes on, we’re going to have a massive famine sometime next winter. Massive. People will die. Not just the very elderly people that the Chinese Virus targets, but people of all ages all over the world.
Even if we’re still producing enough food — we might be, America is a wonder, but I wouldn’t bet. Farmers needs seeds, fertilizer, maintenance for their machines, replacement parts, etc. — there won’t be a distribution network in place.
The stock market is not the way people who are very rich get money so they can build a money bin and swim in it. It’s the engine of the world. It supplies a way to move value around, so that farmers can borrow to buy seed, so that they can have tractors and other machinery. It is what allows trucking companies to operate. It is what keeps food on your table, clothes on your back, and the heat on.
Every part of the machine is interlocked. And what is happening is taking the wheels off. It’s smashing into the center of the economy with a hammer.
BTW when I say there will be famine and people will die, I mean in the US. PEOPLE WILL DIE. Of hunger. Of lack of heat. Of lack of medicine. PEOPLE WILL DIE. And not all of them the insane people who are instigating this.
In fact, most of the power mad governors will be just fine. And one can only hope that the idiots roaming facebook and saying this is their chance to smash capitalism get to FEEL what they’re encouraging. Dying of hunger ain’t pretty.
In the rest of the world? If people starve in the US, the rest of the world will starve worse. Russia thinks it can be resurgent. So does China. They’re going to find mostly they die. Their despotic systems only work in an hyper abundant world.
But what this whole thing adds to is that the Chinese Virus was not the problem. The people imposing crazy quarantines and measures are. The idea that you can shut the country down for two weeks is bad enough. The people trying to stampede us into doing it longer, are ignorant of the realities of economics, or indeed of reality.
Should you wash your hands and not slip tongue to total strangers? Sure, but you always should. Antibiotics have made us cocky and banished a lot of the social distancing and care of the past, but not only do they not work on viruses (viri) but are losing effectiveness.
IF you can work from home, you should work from home. If it’s possible to home school, you should home school. BUT I ALWAYS THOUGHT SO. And you shouldn’t go and lick doorknobs. Or shrines. BUT again, you never should.
Other than that? We need the restrictions lifted. Yesterday, if not sooner.
Listen to me, and start besieging your idiotic political leaders. WE MUST LIFT THE STUPID HAMMER FROM THE ECONOMY.
It will still hurt like a mother. Oh, it will hurt. The next two-three years we’re going to get hyper inflation, unemployment and it’s going to be really hard. But I trust you guys. You’re battlers. Build under, build over build around.
However the president is right. The cure is far far worse than the disease. In fact, the “cure” deliberate or not is an attack at the heart of the economic engine of the world. Which is to say it’s an attack on humans’ ability to lie at all.
And before the greens crow about this, oh, please. This type of thing is not GOOD for the environment (whatever that means. You guys are high on semantic stupidity.) The humans who survive are going to give fuck all for your precious “ecology.” They will do what they have to do to stay alive. Which means the end result will be like something of your worst nightmares, with wood fires everywhere, forests burned for the rich soil beneath, animals hunted to extinction. And yeah, there probably will be enough humans left to do really bad damage. Not that I care, because you see I’m for team human. I want humans to survive. But you idiots, who hate your own species, probably do care. And be aware you lose. In the end, you lose big.
If we continue with this stupid shit, and allowing marginally elected, probably with the help of fraud and disinformation ignoramuses to mandate where we can eat, where and when we can work, where we can walk, and what we can do, will only guarantee that millions die of starvation and disease within the next couple of years. And that’s JUST in the US. World wide hundreds of millions will die.
I beg you, with tears in my eyes, stop being afraid of the virus and start being afraid of the statists destroying our liberties, our economy, our society.
If we can save what remains of western civilization, in the end we win they lose.
They know that. They don’t mean to lose. And they have no idea that they can’t win.
They don’t know what they’re playing with, nor what they’ll unleash.
So, it’s 2024, and we know — we know — it’s going to be a hell of a year, unless several miracles occur.
But frankly, the way it’s been stacking up, and the way things have been going for 3 to 4 years (yes, before that too, but it’s been weaponized since) this was going to be a bad year either road: the increasing incompetence of the “elites”; the increasing panic of the “elites” as the system they’ve been relying on fails, the increasing insanity of their “solutions” and simply the culmination of a hundred years of having the “men of system” in charge, and their having way more control over the dissemination of news and ideas than they ever should have had.
Most of us who keep track of such things, and even those who don’t have been getting that bad feeling at the back of the head, the feeling of something wicked this way comes, and something is about to pounce out of the dark.
Actually most people who saw the rapidity with which the power-seekers moved to lock us down and the intensity with which they hate every smidgen of human freedom and enjoyment — truly. Who could have imagined under the excuse of a communicable virus they’d arrest people surfing, alone on the beach? Or the signs on the highway, directed at people in their cars, ALONE, saying “safer at home”? — are expecting things to go very very bad, very very fast at any minute.
I know I am. And if I tell myself not to think about it, it just means my subconscious worries about it, and it comes out in technicolor nightmares, which are always fun.
I’ve told you to prepare. I probably didn’t need to. I mean it might help someone who wanders in, unannounced, for the first time. But most of you have been on the edge of the seat and following this the same way I’ve been. Someone who shall remain husband asked me why I’m stocking up food in the basement if I don’t intend to eat it. Ah…. I wish I had that unsuspicious a mind.
Anyway, I was talking to a friend and I told her the happiest years of my life, in retrospect were in the late nineties. We weren’t swimming in money, but we had got out of the “can’t buy a paperback, or I’ll starve this week” phase. My stories had started getting accepted, and I was making about enough for a weekend in Denver a year. We had a group of friends and even we all had different politics, it didn’t seem to matter. The kids were small, and though the school could be annoying it hadn’t yet been fully weaponized against boys. We liked the house we lived in, even though I was rebuilding it from inside out while living there. And our first batch of cats was alive, so we hadn’t yet faced the fact they live such short lives and leave us bereft.
And then I said that despite everything we’re in what is starting to feel like that sort of halcyon times again. We have a little group of friends locally. I’m starting to write regularly again (having dealt with some long term health issues, which, probably, in retrospect were brought on by living about 20 years too long at high altitude, judging from when the symptoms set in.) The house ain’t ideal — we moved fast, and well, at the time no one was doing close inspections — but I can deal with most of it, a little bit at a time. And we’re not so old yet that I can’t deal with that stuff, and we can’t take the occasional weekend and go explore a museum or a thrift store, or just find a nice place to walk. The boys aren’t both close — which I’d love, but you know, they have their own lives to live and their own adventures to have, and it might be possible, maybe, but on the other hand, it might not. I have in mind the gentleman who used to comment here and who spent half the year with each son, in different states — but right now, they can sometimes both travel to our home for holidays, which is a special sweetness and joy.
If it weren’t for both of us working too much, and the looming sense of impending doom, we could be very happy right here and now. And I said how happy I was that at the end of the nineties I didn’t know 2001 and the complete mess of politics were in our future.
… And then she said, at the same time it occurred to me, that we should cherish the good times anyway.
And you know? She’s right. It’s not a pollyannish thing. We should still prepare, and we know there’s howling winds and snow ahead.
And I know that many of you aren’t experiencing halcyon times, or at least not most of the time. I know some of your struggles and I know what the job market looks like — yeesh — but–
But even in the middle of slogging through hell, while your galoshes get eaten by pesky duck demons, there are moments of peace and contentment and at times even joy. I know because I’ve gone through these times myself.
2018 between getting “fired” twice on the same day, and house repairs that let us strapped and much bigger than that troubles that are not (and were not back then) for public consumption, came very close to being annus horriblis.
But I had Greebo, you see. And in self defense, I started a prayer life. I’d start the morning by praying for half an hour to an hour. It was time alone, time to organize my thoughts, time to reach for something bigger than myself. It helped me face the rest of the day.
And I don’t remember how it started, but Greebo would come as soon as I was awake and praying, and sit by my knee, very still, not moving, just being warm and being there with me.
In that year of horrors, those hours in the morning, with my cat and praying became distilled sweetness, golden drops of happiness in a world that seemed grey and full of spikes.
Cherishing those brief moments, before the day’s slog began, gave me the strength to slog through the meatgrinder, and come through the challenges almost — practically — intact.
So… learn to recognize the good times. Even if it’s a few minutes with a cup of coffee, in a ray of sunlight, on your back porch. And relish them. Enjoy the heck out of them.
Even if you know they’re brief and limited and going to end permanently soon. Perhaps more if you know that.
Don’t mourn them ahead of time. Don’t anticipate the evil.
Sufficient onto each day the troubles, etc. Find those moments that are golden drops of sweetness and hold onto them, and enjoy them in and of themselves.
If they’re things you can make happen more often, at little sacrifice, do so too. Collect as many of them as you can.
And when they’re over, tuck them away in memory.
It should be considered part of preparing. We don’t live only in the rational side of life.
Stock up on happiness and joy, and carry it with you. Because we all know the road ahead is dark and dreary, but taking warmth and light with us will make us reach further.
And perhaps come through this more or less intact. And ourselves.
This conversation is not going to get into any legality issues revolving around the various model sets. If that’s what you’re here for, move along.
What I am going to talk about is why AI art sucks, and why it doesn’t. Get ready, this is going to offend some folks…
AI art sucks because it’s too convenient and makes things easier for both mass production artists and those with little to no personal skill. It removes the ability for people to suffer for their art. It also creates situations where some people may feel like they do not need to personally improve, to simply allow the machine to do the majority of work and then fix any errors.
This last point is probably the only one I can see truly being bad, and yes, the rest of the points were meant to raise hackles. Because all of the complaints coming from artists today against AI have already been dealt with and proven nonsense. Thirty years ago. Yes, that’s right. This problem is thirty plus years old and has already been solved and done with. Anyone remember Photoshop? What about Autodesk Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max? Yes, I know some of you won’t because you weren’t even born yet, way to make me feel old…
I remember when I got into digital art how much time it took to complete a single piece of work. You could draw something by hand, tape it to your screen, and try to use your mouse to draw the image as accurately as possible, but in the end, you’d have to zoom in and make manual adjustments for hours. And then there was the shading. Use of dithering allowed you to shade reasonably well, but it took soooooo long, especially when compared to shading on paper (scribble scribble, done). Then we got graphic tablets, man did that change things; that’s also when the real arguments against digital art started up. Why? Because it made things “too easy”. People who had spent years honing their skills were suddenly outshone by a new group that didn’t have to go through all the same effort the old group had to in order to make good quality products.
Physical artists complained that it wasn’t real art, but in the back rooms the real reason was they knew digital artists had a significant advantage over them. Make a mistake in digital art? Undo or reload the previous save. You might lose a little bit of work, but you didn’t have to start over from scratch. Want to try a new technique, maybe adjust the overall warmth of the image? Create a copy of the file or a new layer to test it on. Did you like that one? Make a copy of the settings and quickly and easily apply it to another piece of work.
The same complaints being hurled at AI art today are the exact same complaints thrown at the release of those programs and graphic tablets, about how horrible this new digital art and computer animation would be for the art world. How it made it too easy for anyone to become an artist. How it would destroy the effort required to be a successful artist. How it wasn’t real art. Sound familiar?
Toy Story killed those arguments really quick by showing what could be accomplished with an effectively used tool and good writing.
Oh yeah, do a lot of the people complaining about AI art understand that most animation (digital and computer) isn’t done by humans, and hasn’t been for decades? See, animation companies figured out fast how useful it was to only need to draw a few frames and then let the computers fill in the rest for them. That’s all this big kerfuffle over AI art is complaining about. You feed it the starter images (again, not going into any legality issues here) and it spits out the filler.
And plain old computer animation, not to be confused with digital animation, is even “worse” in that skeletons are rigged to the characters, start and end points added, and then they fill in all of that extra data as well (oversimplified, but you get the idea). Heck, the programs will even handle most of the lighting and shading for you once you set up a couple starting points; change the viewing angle, completely change how the lighting/shading looks and you didn’t even have to change files. All that work was taken out of the artists’ hands, making the job far too easy for people.
In the end, AI art is a tool just like any other tool. It is going to open up a world of options for smaller groups, or individuals, to complete work that never would have been possible before. Think of all of the complaints about AAA game studios churning out junk games while independent small studios release games like Palworld and outsell them in a week. Imagine how a tool like this is going to positively affect the gaming industry, or the animation industry, giving individuals the chance to release episodes and movies at a fraction of the budget or time it would normally take them. The innovation so-called AI tools can assist in is astronomical.
And that brings me to my last point. These tools that have everyone up in arms over? There is no artificial intelligence there. The intelligence involved is humans, directing machines to complete a task with a set of plain language terms instead of some deep knowledge of programming languages. It is no different than a person directing a mechanical arm in an automobile factory.
I often wonder if any of the folks complaining have really paid attention to who is publicly on their side of this argument. Hollywood and companies like Blizzard, Wizards of the Coast, and EA; they’ll go “oops” if they get caught using it, but you know they like it and will continue to use it to their advantage. Because people don’t like these companies, they’ll look at them using AI tools and think the tools are even more evil. That’s cost savings though, and if those companies can control who has access to it that also means no competition. They’ll tell you to your face that they stopped using it, but in the background, you know it isn’t true. Again, it’s just a tool. The same as any other tool, it is neither good nor evil, it just is.
Assuming the world hasn’t crumbled to dust, for completely different reasons, in another thirty years people are going to be looking back and wondering what the big freak out over “AI” tools was all about. Hopefully I’ll be around to see it, so I can say I was there for two major technological advances in the arts and the day that a few big companies controlling the entertainment of the world came crumbling down.
According To Hoyt 