Tag Archives: writing

Stealing the Lede

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So 2 of our most obnoxious ‘organizationoids’ Black Lives Matter (the Org not the concept) and Antifa (Anti-fascist, which is technically anybody not International Socialist[communist-marxist]) essentially stole the lede as I think of that term, which is essentially something like ‘mind share tag.’

When you steal the lede, that mind share tag, you make it very difficult for others to use certain symbols, words, phrases, ideas, against you. For Black Lives Matter it made it very difficult for the majority to point out that they were destroying little B black, little L lives, by destroying their neighborhoods and local businesses. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it made pointing out that Antifa is exactly fascistic in its heart and operations, impossible to make stick.

In both of those cases i think the evidence clearly shows that if you seal off some of our ability to communicate things clearly it in fact makes it very difficult to combat actions and ideas until the damage is obvious enough not to be obfuscated by ‘mere’ words.

Aliens? The Science Says no….but does it?

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Artist’s concept of interstellar object1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. The aspect ratio of up to 10:1 is unlike that of any object seen in our own solar system. Image Credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser
From NASA Article

The first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua, was discovered Oct. 19, 2017 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope, funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations (NEOO) Program, which finds and tracks asteroids and comets in Earth’s neighborhood. While originally classified as a comet, observations revealed no signs of cometary activity after it slingshotted past the Sun on Sept. 9, 2017 at a blistering speed of 196,000 miles per hour (87.3 kilometers per second). It was briefly classified as an asteroid until new measurements found it was accelerating slightly, a sign it behaves more like a comet.

This very deep combined image shows the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua at the center of the image. It is surrounded by the trails of faint stars that are smeared as the telescopes tracked the moving comet. Credit: ESO/K. Meech et al.
From NASA Article

The second image is to make you think. Given one of our very powerful telescopes that faint dot circled in the center is all we ever saw of Oumuamua. With our computational tools we could detect that it was accelerating and get an idea of the surface composition but the data we collected was negligible (though also amazing given the distance and velocity of this objectively tiny object.)

Image credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard file photo.
From Extraterrestrial, Oumamua as Artifiact

Extraterrestrial: On ‘Oumuamua as Artifact

by PAUL GILSTER on FEBRUARY 23, 2021

The reaction to Avi Loeb’s new book Extraterrestrial (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) has been quick in coming and dual in nature. I’m seeing a certain animus being directed at the author in social media venues frequented by scientists, not so much for suggesting the possibility that ‘Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial technological artifact, but for triggering a wave of misleading articles in the press. The latter, that second half of the dual reaction, has certainly been widespread and, I have to agree with the critics, often uninformed.

The article in CentauriDreams, as always excellent, discusses the reaction to the book which is very much in line with the arguments of the book itself.

The author of the Book a Harvard Astronomer of high repute, says that the data actually points to Oumuamua being an artifact and that since that theory best fits the data…then it is/was an extraterrestrial visitor. He then goes on review other theories and the way that the science community came together to present a ‘consensus’ that was more about PR and making the life of the average person in the broad community of sky explorers easier rather than doing the hard work of explaining multiple theories and sets of data that left the question very open and leaving a starkly amazing option in play.

Essentially this is about the science and the science community but also about Journalism in its debauched epoch. Many of us grew up with science being pushed as a noble, maybe the last noble, adventure. With heroes and a few villains. Heroes of the mind and of letters and video who didn’t get shot at or mugged or even have to live rough. Carl Sagan, Attenborough, many other names come to mind.

The problem is that these men and women were scientists, academics, with deep knowledge, if often deeply attached to one trope, and great communicators. Far too many of those who followed were/are attached to a trope and its alignment with their desired outcome. Without the background/willingness to understand that even the most beautiful theory may be utterly wrong and always HAS to be able to stand up to any counter evidence presented.

Also the scientific community, once quite a small community is now huge, with all the pressures of a large bureaucratic endeavor to go along to get along; careerism; group think; cliques; etc. And especially in ‘charismatic’ endeavors like space the pressure is to be ‘in the consensus’ and ‘never be caught wrong footed in the lime light.’

Cheers….

NaNoWriMo 2012, water under the bridge and other thoughts…

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So obviously I dropped the ball on NaNoWriMo 2012, and I started out doing so well with all the best intentions.   However with a daughter’s wedding and thanksgiving to survive and real work requiring attention so we can continue to pay the bills (not to mention a semi major home construction project gone a lot over schedule) I just ran out of the mental and chronological resources to ‘get-er-done’ as it were.

Catching the Watcher is not done-fore however I have continued to work on it though at a lot slower rate.  Its now upwards of 40K words and (I think) roughly half done, hopefully I can wrap it up sometime in January.

So obviously I am not a ‘real’ blogger either  … real life intervened and I heeded the call.  Despite all my toys and channels of access I still could not find it in me to even put a few thoughts down, post a picture, etc.   Maybe I should blame it on the new iPad with its beguilingly sharp yet tiny text and butter smooth reaction to my every touch, along with the strikingly fast LTE link and up-rated WiFi.  But then again I can do all sorts of blogging from the iPad so it should really be an enabler of more doing not more slacking off.

I could blame it all on others or on my own failures as a person.  But the fact is that life is impossible to regulate.  There is only one me on this thread of time from past to future and a practical infinity of other threads are bustling against me at the wave front of now.  To change frames, the water is flowing under my bridge and it will never come back.  But its good to watch it slide past every once in a while and realize that in no possible world can I ever realistically aspire to perfection, let alone reach it, but in aspiring to do the best I can with the now I have, I at least make progress in a direction I get to call ‘right’ as in right for me and the world as I understand it.

Elgin : what the heck is QuantPunk?

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I have always loved Science Fiction, especially the ‘Hard’ sub genre (think Arthur C. Clark, Larry Niven, etc), as well as military and some adventure.  I’ve also liked ‘Hard’ Fantasy and books that in some senses combine SciFi & Fantasy. I started out writing SciFi, relatively old-fashioned Hard SciFi (which I really think should be more common than it is) and semi military SciFi, but I’ve always played a bit with Fantasy.

And to be honest I find it impossible to write good Fantasy even though some of my favorite authors have easily spanned the gap.  What I ended up writing every time was really SciFi in an Urban Fantasy or Steam Punk setting…and I kind of like the results though Elgin is the first that’s been completed.  But this isn’t SciFi in the ‘Hard’ sense, nor is it SteamPunk, RetroPunk, Urban pr Contemporary Fantasy.  It’s at an angle to all of those, I like to think of it as a type of SciFi, what I call Quantum Punk or QuantPunk based on the mind (and imagination) bending possibilities our quantum universe opens as a basis for something that is at once Science Fiction and Urban/Contemporary Fantasy.

Let me know what you think….its free try it.

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Elgin’s new life is….complicated.

Elgin’s old life was nothing much, Beauty Wyoming was as beautiful and remote as one could get, a town of cowboys and Indians, in a setting of rangeland, mountains and lakes. Elgin Chalmer’s was a cowboy and a part breed black-sheep slacker living with his huge Siamese cat Humph in a forty-year old trailer. Life was OK for Elgin, he didn’t want much and didn’t get any more. Then one raw snowy day he made the mistake of heading into the mountains with a gut full of whiskey and a head muddled by rotten drugs…death came easily considering.

And that was when things started to get really messy. A world of alien dangers and powers were waking up after two thousand years in hibernation and humanity’s protector needed a new helper. Now Elgin found himself dealing with flesh-eating lizard girls, ancient spider monsters, along with werewolves and vampires who didn’t always play by the rules. And on top of it all he had to get used to eating sharks, raw and still fighting.

But now of course he had a chance to meet up with the cool girls; The Wiccan proprietor of the local New-Age gift shop, with an ancient Indian totem in her basement, the pistol packing deputy with a secret, and the beautiful Russian spy with a heart of gold and the killer instincts of a she wolf.

This book was started as a submission for the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo, (www.nanowrimo.org) is run by a tiny nonprofit called he Office of Letters and Light, an organization that promotes writing in all its glorious permutations among the young, young at heart, and not so young (among whom I fall in the right hand distribution tail these days.) I wrote the first 60,000 words or so of Elgin in November 2011 and finished the remaining half by February 2012, since then, among many other things, my father and I have been editing so I can submit it for publication at Smashwords, iBooks, B&N, etc.

New Book Published at Smashwords | Exotic Contraband: The Road Past Home

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The universe is infinite in extent and the Compact large beyond simple measurement. But the Starship Bostonian has found a road home for the few humans stolen from their home world. But the Compact has strict non interference rules and while returning the humans is allowed, contact beyond that is forbidden. The crew of an Air Force recon jet, kidnapped and sold as creature show exhibits want to go home though their commander, Major Sandra Sebastianii, might have made another decision if she had been alone.

The ancient human commander of the Compact Cartographic Cruiser Bostonian is less sure of his road home, because his birth world is an utterly unrecognizable and all he had once known is dust. Now his place and his friends all reside in the vastness of the Compact, all except for the one person he can’t live without.

Everyone starts out following the rules. But rules are meant to be bent especially when a civilization is on the edge of a war it does not understand the reason for. And while the Qang Smugglers might look cute and cuddly their ruthless arrogance is about to get them into deadly danger, and their stupidity may be the trigger needed to start an interstellar war of unthinkable destructiveness.

  • Science Fiction
  • Adventure
  • Hard Science Fiction
  • Romance

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National Novel Writing Month 2012, Starting November 1, at 00:00:00, a thing to do…

So once again November approaches and new fields of stress and invention await.  The Daughter (beloved I assure you) is getting married this November but still seems to think she may actually try to do this (again) and is (kinda) urging me to as well.  And maybe I should, a novel about  her driving her parents NUTS!!!  But besides that it might be an interesting challenge.  On top of all the other writing assignments I am getting from work and the attempt to get Elgin finally Finished and into Smashwords Premium Distribution.  (Elgin was last year’s NaNoWriMo entry…finished in December but a winner none the less.)

A world apart

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We each live in a world apart from all others with only limited senses, knowledge and above all time, to understand the worlds of others, we tend to associate with those of a similar mindset either on purpose or by happenstance [family, region, career, religion, etc.]  We associate with the similar because its easier and more effective than having to form a common base with someone whose world is very different.

Is the internet while making many things more common on one level, is breaking down some of the commonality that provided the ability to quickly relate to those you meet on a day-to-day basis?

With that rapid assimilation gone do we tend to live in a field of strangers who are getting less familiar all the time.  And does that limit trust, the trust that is so critical to the success of the greater American culture?

The above is just a restatement of concerns expressed many times before.  I guess I just had never thought through the ‘world apart’ metaphor and the reason we are worlds apart, even when we are touching each other.

 

Exotic Contraband – Lost among the stars…now on Smashwords and soon to be at iBooks, Nook Books, and more

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The blade Stonewall approaching the spindle Athena making for a sungate

The blade Stonewall approaching the spindle Athena while making for a sungate jump point

Exotic Contraband:  Lost among the stars:  Aliens are real and they’re here. Unfortunately they aren’t here for intellectual stimulation, they’re here to make cold hard cash. And they aren’t interested in letting the authorities, theirs or ours, in on their racket.

This is the story of survivors lost in a universe that they hadn’t imagined, and the story of their rescue and return.

It’s only 99cents and a steal at many times the price if you enjoy a good read with a mix of hard and space opera sci fi with a little action and romance thrown in.  And why is that ship called the Stonewall?

See it all at Smashwords.