is this thing on?

I got to talk to Cam Edwards on the NRA News show for a little while tonight.  A few of my loyal minions out there in Intertubes land actually listened in on that chat, so I’ll leave it up to those folks to decide if I sounded coherent, or merely babbled randomly for ten minutes.  In any case, it was fun.  (We talked about kids and toy guns—Cam read my recent blog post on the subject, and asked me to share my thoughts.)

I have some more items for the rest of the week: a look at our country’s utterly borked immigration and naturalization process, a brief review of of some gun leather I bought recently, and other odds and ends.  Stay tuned for Actual Content ™!

monday search term safari LVII.

bare chested adolescent males

And ten minutes after running that search term, Michael injected some Demerol, and fell flat on his face.

What? Too soon?

lord of the cheese

That’s my personal nickname for Michael Flatley, the self-proclaimed “Lord of the Dance”.  Lord of the fucking Dance.  You think that all the professional dancers who don’t put on a gauche little headband and prance around on stage like a spastic springbok may take offense to Michael Flatley proclaiming himself the supreme potentate of the art?

should i quit riding

That’s a question that only you can answer.  I quit a few years ago after Quinn was born, after some close encounters with idiot cagers.  I have to say, though—living in low-population rural New Hampshire, with all the twisty roads curving through the pretty landscape, I’m feeling the itch again.  (When I got my NH license, I spent an extra $80 to transfer my motorcycle endorsement as well.)  It all depends on where you live, and how attentive the cagers in your area are.  I’d not get back on a bike in Knoxville, that’s for sure.

corporate laptop policy porn

Here’s the general corporate policy on porn on corporate computers:

Boobies will get you fired.

Don’t be the sad sack who turns his laptop over to Tech Support for repair with a few gigabytes of meticulously catalogued porn on the hard drive, only to be walked out to his car with his belongings in a box a few hours later.  I’ve seen it happen more than once, and it’s never a pretty sight.

any way to suck up water from wood floor

Shop vac, or lots of paper towels.

beating spouse in marriage

There is absolutely no excuse for hitting your spouse—none whatsoever.  There are very few lifeforms that rank lower in my eyes than a wife beater.  Being a bully is not manly, and if you are looking for justification for ending your marital arguments with your fist, you won’t find it here.

flight simulator x samsung nc10

The Samsung has the same graphics processor as all the other netbooks on the market.  (Under the hood, they’re all the same: Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, XP Home, and 120-160GB hard drives.)  The graphics chip in the Samsung is the Intel GMA950 integrated GPU, which is a bit anemic, to put it mildly.  I was able to run World of Warcraft on my NC10, but the frame rate was usually in the single digits.  FS X wants lots of GPU grunt, and it’ll probably look awful and run very slowly on an NC10.  If you want to play a flight sim on your netbook, track down a copy of FS2004, which has much lower hardware requirements.  (You’ll need a no-CD patch, since the Samsung has no optical drive, and FS2004 requires a CD in the drive while playing.)

alphasmart neo backing up to a cell phone

The Neo has an infrared transfer function for sending text to computers with infrared capabilities.  I’ve heard of people using that function to send text files from the Neo to an infrared-enabled phone, for backup or remote filing of articles.

can you legally sell a kidney?

Sure, as long as it’s not a human one.  Remember: it’s better for people on the organ recipient list to die, than to run the risk of someone taking advantage of poor people by offering them cash for their kidneys.

batgrowl

That’s Christian Bale’s addition to the Batman mythos.  Tip: when you have to take four deep breaths to finish one sentence, you might be overacting just a little.

can you build up tolerance to thujone

Don’t know about that, but I know that you can build up a tolerance to iocane powder, which can come in handy if you ever find yourself having to go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

 

That’s it for this edition of the MSTS, friends and neighbors.  Tune in again next week, when we comb the blog stats for repeat instances of “pretty girl fuk” and other high-brow search queries!

on the general suckiness of sequels.

So I hear the Transformers sequel is pretty good….if “good” is defined as “sucks only slightly less than ‘Gigli’.”

I have a pretty dim view of sequels in general, mostly because the majority of sequels merely tries to cash in on the success of the first movie, rather than offering something new and original.  The worst sequels, coincidentally, are those made after surprise indie hits like the excellent, creepy and claustrophobic “The Descent”—the follow-up gives us the very same storyline, disregards the ending of its predecessor, and negates everything that was laudable about the original.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course.  A handful of sequels managed to expand on the narrative of the original and surpass the first movie in both impact and quality.  The first and best example that pops into my head is Aliens, which took the horror template of its predecessor, and liberally blended it with military adventure, serving up a whole new meal instead of just reheating the leftovers from Alien.  Other than that, however, there aren’t too many sequels out there that are as good as the originals, much less surpass them.

(To yank the “sucky sequel” stats back in line, the third and fourth movies in the Alien franchise were once again forgettable, unnecessary, and underwhelming, especially Alien 3, which starts by killing off two of the three main characters whose fight for survival was the core dramatic thread of Aliens.  Way to alienate your fans right from the start.)

What other movie sequels are markedly superior to their predecessors? 

observation and emulation.

Meet American Bear:

American Bear is Quinn’s favorite stuffed companion.  She got her name from the knitted sweater she wears, which has an American flag on it.  (Quinn picked AB’s gender once he was old enough to understand the difference between boy and girl.)

A month or so ago, Quinn started to emulate Daddy’s kid maintenance tasks with American Bear.  He started dressing her in his clothes (the outfit pictured above was selected and put on American Bear by Quinn himself), and putting her down for naps.  The other day, we were driving into town, and Quinn had American Bear on his lap, pretending to change her diaper.  He’ll put pull-up diapers on his bear, and when I ask why American Bear needs diapers, Quinn informs me that “she doesn’t know how to use the potty yet.” 

(He also puts AB on Lyra’s training potty, presumably to wean her off the diapers.)

I know my old man would look upon such un-boylike activities as dressing and diapering a bear in horror, for fear that the kid will turn out gay.  Me, I’m rather amused by Quinn’s emulation of Daddy’s daytime chores.  One thing’s for sure—however that kid turns out as an adult, he’ll not only know how to change a diaper, but also consider it a perfectly normal job for a Dad to do.

ten books in ten years for tons of cash.

British SF writer Alastair Reynolds just signed a ten-book contract with publisher Gollancz.  He’ll be delivering one book every year for the next ten years, and receive a million British pounds in return.

My first reaction was “Good for him!”.  The second thing that went through my head was “Would I sign a similar contract for a million bucks?”

At first glance, it seems a no-brainer, especially for a writer at the very beginning of his career who is not exactly in the same writing income bracket as Orson Scott Card or David Weber, to put it mildly.  A million-dollar advance for a Decalogue would mean a guaranteed hundred grand per book—which is nothing to sneeze at, even after Uncle Sam takes his share.  It would mean financial security and income stability for a decade, which is a rare thing in the writing field.  A book a year, for ten years, and a million bucks in advance?  Most writers I know would sign their name so fast, the pen would leave a contrail.

But is that kind of deal really only positive?

I mean, I can do a novel a year—that seems to be my natural pace.  I’ve written one per year for the last three years, and there’s no reason to believe I won’t be able to keep that pace going.  In ten years, I’ll probably have another ten novels under my belt.  But tell me that I have to write those ten novels, at the pace of one per year, and I’d probably seize up mentally at some point, and start writing crap.  Right now, I’m on my own schedule, but a ten-year contract obliging me to write ten novels would feel like sort of a golden cage.  Being put on a schedule like that would mean a certain loss of creative freedom.  You can’t just take a year off for whatever reason, and you know you have no choice but to adhere to that schedule, lest the publisher asks for their money back.

That said, writing’s a business like any other, and ten years of guaranteed employment/income means a security that may just crank up the creative flow.

Truth be told, 99.9% of writers won’t ever have to face such a decision, and this is a highly theoretical discussion that will most likely never occur in real life in this particular household.  But would I sign that kind of contract if someone were to put it in front of me right this second?  And more importantly…how would I best protect my head against the cast-iron skillet Robin would swing at me if I turned it down?

monday search term safari LVI.

“model m” blank keycaps

You’d have to either strip the keycaps from your Model M and sand off the lettering from each key top, spray-paint them, or buy a Das Keyboard, which is a Model M clone in black that’s available with blank keys.

(If someone in my old corporate IT team had dared to put a Das Keyboard on his desk to show off what a L337 h4xX0R they are, we would have fucked with that person on general principle.  For starters, they’d find their label-less keyboard remapped to a left-handed Icelandic Dvorak layout.)

toy guns being destroyed

The way my kids treat their toys, I have no idea why anyone would spend the time and expense destroying something that will break in a few weeks of regular use anyway.

cocked and locked tomcat

The safety on the Tomcat only blocks the trigger, not the hammer or sear.  I wouldn’t carry one with a round in the pipe and the hammer back, safety or no.  I always carried mine with the safety off, and the hammer down.

quiche-eaters

I’m going to guess that’s a term of endearment for Francophones.  Quiche is good breakfast/brunch food, especially the killer quiches Robin makes on occasion.

(She had a boyfriend once who asked her if “men were supposed to like quiche”.  You’re a sad, blubbering sack of insecurity when you make your dietary choices by their perceived gender-specific reputation.  “Oh, no!  This tastes good, but I can’t be seen eating it!  Quiche is for girls!”)

no such thing as collective right

That’s correct—there’s no such thing as a “collective right”.  The term is a fiction employed by people who want to restrict a certain right by making it dependent on group membership.  Rights are always individual, and there’s no right you gain by joining a group that you didn’t have already before you joined.

theocracy online

That’s TOL for short, and it’s the biggest ISP in Iran and Saudi-Arabia.  There’s no sex, nudity, political discussion, or access to movies or music on TOL.  It’s basically a really dumbed-down version of the Internet with all the fun removed, and tedious content controls in place.  In other words, it’s just like America Online in the late 1990s.

why can’t i buy a humvee

Because you’re sixteen, you’re living in your parents’ basement, and you’re broke as shit.  Also, the Humvee would take up both parking spots in front of the garage, and if you think your Dad will park on the street after springing for the insurance bill on that godawful monster car of yours, you have another thing coming, young man.  Get used to the idea of driving that ‘88 Chevette after your sister gets that cute RAV4 as a graduation gift.

beretta 93fs

There’s no such critter.  You’re looking either for the Beretta 92FS, which is the civilian version of the military’s M9, or the Beretta 93R, which is a select-fire machine pistol.  The number of legit, transferable 93Rs in the United States is in the single digits, which makes the accessory market for them a bit limited, to say the least.

(Random trivia: Robocop’s sidearm in the movie was a Beretta 93R with a lot of cosmetic add-ons.)

can fisher cats be kept as demestocated

They’re wild animals.  Not only are they wild, but the other animals in the forest consider them batshit insane.  Only a nutcase would try to tame what’s essentially a scaled-down Wolverine.  (On second thought, contact me if you manage to trap one, and you want to give the taming thing a shot.  I’ll show up in chain mail, tape the whole thing, and make a zillion bucks off the video, “When Mustelids Attack”.)

3 chiwawas dogs corner bobcat in garage

Let’s run that equation briefly:

This is a bobcat.  It stands up to 24 inches tall at the shoulder, and can weigh more than thirty pounds.  It can kill game up to the size of a deer.  Its main fighting technique is to shred its prey with its razor-sharp claws while biting it in the neck to sever its spine.

This is a Chihuahua.  It’s about the size of an anorexic rat.  It weighs less than a baseball, and can be thrown or kicked into the next area code by anyone stronger than a toddler.  It’s high-strung, and generally not known to reliably bring down anything bigger than a cockroach.  Its main fighting technique is to annoy its prey to death with its piercing yip.

I don’t know about you, but my money is on the super-sized fucking wildcat that can kill a deer.

That’s it for this Monday morning, folks.  You may now safely resume your regular Monday activities!

the toughest job you’ll ever have.

A Father’s Day reminder:

Having sired a child doesn’t mean you get to call yourself a father…

…and not having sired a child doesn’t mean you don’t get to call yourself a father.

To all the real Dads out there, the ones who make the welfare of their children their personal concern every day, whether those children are theirs by blood, adoption, or mutual love and understanding:

Happy Father’s Day.

toy gun control.

I know there are parents out there who refuse to buy toy guns for their kids.

As a responsible gun owner, I’m of two minds on the issue.  On one hand, I don’t want to encourage or even tolerate picking up the habit of unsafe gun handling.  On the other hand, I don’t believe in the “pretend it doesn’t exist” prohibitionist approach to anything—guns, drugs, sex, or what-have-you—because those methods don’t work.

I got an object lesson in the futility of toy gun control the other day, when Quinn got up early from his nap, and caught a few scenes of Eight-Legged Freaks, the silly Giant Spiders movie I was watching at naptime.  For the rest of the day, and the entire next day, he was reenacting those scenes, shooting imaginary giant spiders, and talking about how “the spider wanted to eat the woman, so the woman shot the spider with her gun.”  He doesn’t own any toy guns, so he just used other objects as substitutes, even toys that bear no physical resemblance to any firearm, shooting the imaginary spiders with wind-up toys and Matchbox cars.

Isn’t it futile to “keep kids from playing with guns” by not buying them toy guns, if they can use any object and pretend it’s a gun?  Hell, they don’t even need objects—all they need to do is to make a gun with thumb and forefinger.

Now, what’s a responsible parent to do in this case?  He wants his own gun, and just yesterday, he was lamenting that he doesn’t own one.  The way I see it, there are several courses of action for me at this point:

• Total Prohibition: Don’t buy any toy guns, don’t let him play with anything that resembles a gun, rigorously watch his movie intake to screen for any use of firearms, and punish him every time he pretends to be shooting at something.
• Weak prohibition: Don’t buy a toy gun, but ignore the use of other objects as “guns”, because they don’t look like guns, and because rigorously enforcing the Total Prohibition would take up most of a parent’s day.
• Directed Interest: Buy him his own toy gun, but tell him that he is not allowed to aim it at people.  Teach him the basics of safe gun handling, trigger discipline, and stress that he is only to shoot pretend spiders and the like, not people.  Confiscate the toy gun if he violates the rule.
• Total Acceptance: Shrug, say “boys will be boys”, get him a toy gun, and let him go to town defending the homestead from imaginary monsters.
• A combination of any of the above.

So—what’s the right thing to do for a parent who believes in the value of responsible gun ownership, the futility of prohibition measures, and the right to self-defense (even if it’s against imaginary giant spiders?)  How do I reconcile my personal beliefs, the rules of gun safety, and my kid’s inability to fully understand the concepts of death and killing?

(For the record—the kid in question just turned four years old in February, and I fully intend to teach him how to handle and shoot a real gun when I consider him to be old enough to understand and internalize the basic safety rules.)

a free sampling of the wares.

I’m on Day Three of my self-imposed vacation, and I’ve spent the last three days reading books (currently on Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War), watching movies (today I’ll watch the Jason Bourne movie I inexplicably missed—no wonder I didn’t know what the hell was going on at the beginning of The Bourne Ultimatum), and playing with the kids.

When you’ve been writing on the same project every day for almost a year, you feel sort of rudderless when you don’t have a Novel In Progress.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I have to do the final editing pass and send this thing off before starting something new, I’d crack open a fresh notebook, fill the pens, and go to work.

For those of you who expressed an interest in the novel (and for those six or seven of you who can’t wait to see it on store shelves so you can buy a box or two and distribute them to all your friends), I have a bit of a freebie for you today.  If you’re so inclined, read past the split to find the complete first chapter of my recently finished novel.  It’s a Military SF novel, working title “Earthside”, tentatively retitled “Terms of Enlistment”. 

(For those of you who went to VP with me and critiqued the first chapter back there—this is the brand new Chapter One, and the original first chapter is now Chapter Two, so this will be new to you.  I’ll post something on our sooper-sekrit VP board once I get around to it later today.)

Anyway, read past the split for the first chapter, if you want.  (No, I’m not concerned about people lifting it for their use—it’s patently useless without the other twenty-three chapters, and ownership is easily proven by my brand new IP lawyer.  Just to spell it out, though: the stuff after the split is All Rights Reserved, and not authorized for commercial or non-commercial reproduction without express permission.)

monday search term safari LV.

proper past tense when writing first person

I don’t know about “proper”. Done properly, present tense first person works well, too, because it’s engaging and immediate, and draws the reader right into the action.  (Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club”, and Nick Hornsby’s “High Fidelity” are all written in First Person Present Tense, and they’re all highly-regarded books.) It is, however, dreadfully easy to bungle.

(The novel I just completed two days ago is written in First Person Present Tense, by the way.)

gun for hunting werewolf

After all the debates on the subject in this spot, and after having watched “No Country For Old Men” for the first time recently, I have to revise my opinion on the best gun for werewolf.  I think a semi-auto shotgun loaded with silver buckshot would be just the ticket for the job.  Lots of short-range ouchies, plenty of stopping power, and casting silver buckshot eliminates the biggest problem with using silver for ammo, which is the sizing of the bullets.

cluttered desk sign of genius

Part of my plans for today is the dumbification of my desk.  Apparently, I’m so damn smart, I can’t find anything in this mess anymore without disturbing elaborately balanced structures made of paper, RAM chips, firearms paraphernalia, memorabilia, trinkets, and medications.

what is the value of a smith and wesson

That’s like asking “What’s the value of a Ford?”

neo laptops battery limitation

The only battery-related limitation of the Neo is the inconvenience of having to change the three AAs after six to twelve months of constant use.

how to write a military novel

Same way you write any other novel: come up with interesting characters, and then confront them with some sort of problem.  The basic novel types and storylines have been the same since the days of quills and parchment, and everything else is just added local or cultural flavor. 

model m without numpads

Those are called “Model M Space Saver”, and like all other funky variants of the Model M, they’re hard to find.  Whenever one makes it onto fleaBay, it manages to command prices just a little less insane than those fetched by the black M13 variants.

nenas hairy armpits

If I ever start an Eighties cover band, that will be the perfect name for it: “Nena’s Hairy Armpits.”

russian special forces belt holster

I don’t know what they use, but the Russians aren’t exactly known for slick gun gear.  Let’s put it this way: “Used By Russian SpecOps” is not exactly a seal of quality I look for when I shop for holsters.  It’s probably big, bulky, and made of black nylon.  (Also, it will be able to hold Western pistols, but our holsters won’t be able to hold their pistols.)

munchkin wrangler fountain pen

I have a whole drawer full at this point, but the main pens in my writing rotation are a Parker “51”, a Lamy 2000, a Pelikan M200, and a Conklin Metropolis, all with fine or extra-fine nibs.

 

That’s it for this Monday morning.  Tune in again next week when I strip-mine the Blog Stats page for blogging material.  (I’m rather disappointed at the lack of moped-related search terms this week, I have to admit.)

Now back to work, kulaks!  With everyone pitching in, we’ll only need a century or so to dig ourselves out of this trillion-hojilion-bazillion-dollar hole all those bailouts put us in.