Be afraid, be very afraid

Because Texas is a gigantic state, and has an enormous amount of sway over the character and quality of our nation’s textbooks:

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children…

 

When the effects of climate change are obvious (even more readily obvious than they are now), this woman will claim it’s a punishment from God for allowing gay marriage and abortion. 

Hulk Hogan/The Situation 2016

This is quite possibly my favorite piece of academic trolling in the long and illustrious history of academic trolling. 

It’s been said many times, but it’s always worth repeating: Ninety percent of modern American conservatism is just about feeling like big tuff manly men. As an explanatory model for the winger psyche, it’s hard to find one better. 

Smokey my friend, you are entering a world of pain

As I am not the world’s greatest fan of our nation’s pathetic gun laws, and as I am a great fan of unintentional comedy/performance art, I love Charles Pierce’s occasional series “Today in Responsible Gun Ownership.” Even by the standard of industrial strength stoopid that typically presents itself on a sadly regular basis, this one was particularly awesome.

Take it away Walter:

Too also, take it away Boots:

I prefer to think of this numbnuts shooting himself in the leg in black-and-white, fast-forwarded for comedic effect.

Gettin’ By With A Little Help From my Friends

Siege of Antioch, 1098. (Image Credit)

So this is a paper I wrote for school about the Crusader State of Antioch (I tried to find an excuse to mention a holy hand grenade, but to no avail). It isn’t due for a few weeks yet, and I haven’t written anything of this sort in a few years, so my hope in posting it here is that one or more of you fine folks will look it over and give me some useful feedback. Really, any feedback is useful feedback. I have such a poor barometer for the quality (or lack thereof) of my own work, and obviously my fellow classmates are consumed with writing their own papers so I’m hesitant to ask any of them. I’m not expecting much, I realize the interest in this sort of thing is somewhat limited beyond the really intense history dork, but if anyone wants to read it and leave a critique (no matter how short or long, I’d take even general impressions) in the comments, I’d certainly appreciate it.

—

Koinonia Politike on the Levant – Crisis Management and Interdependence in the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1119

Scholarship concerning the crusader state of Antioch has tended to bypass the question of its relatively lengthy lifespan as an undermanned foreign colony amid an almost-uniformly hostile geopolitical environment.[1] Writers addressing the concept at all have focused on Muslim disunity and other external factors beyond the control of the crusaders,[2] or alternatively, have provided incomplete, unsatisfying explanations regarding the Principality’s stability. Asbridge, for one example, argues that Antioch’s early independence was a chief contributor to its long-term political cohesion, citing Bohemond I’s use of the title Princeps as evidence that Antioch’s first Frankish ruler was determined to remain independent from Jerusalem.[3]

It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few

You can get my first book in paperback now if you want. It isn’t perfectly formatted, per se – what can I say, I’m a writer, not a publisher – so if you do get it in this format, I hope you will forgive a few margin/formatting mistakes. As self-published books go, I was quite happy with the cover, but the interior will come across as a bit amateurish. Which it is. Which I don’t really care about too much at this stage. Right now it’s about getting the story and the words into as many different and diverse formats as possible. The publisher I currently work with only does ebooks, but not everyone reads ebooks, so I figure not doing this at some point was shooting myself in the foot.

It’s thirteen bucks, which is much higher than I wanted to price it. That’s one of the many shitty things about self-published paperbacks – if you print-on-demand (that is, print exactly one book for each and every sale), the costs run higher than if you just print a bunch in bulk ahead of time, expecting the sales to come. That is probably the reason you see a lot of absurdly priced self-published work – some paperback fantasy novel priced at 24.99, or something. Higher costs, so the author prices it optimistically, presumably so even if just their family and friends buy it they’ll still make a few bucks. I don’t have the slightest interest in just being a family-and-friends writer, though, so I wanted to be sure the pricing was in the neighborhood of what you could expect from a large publisher. I kept it almost as low as I could. I think at that price, for a book that size, I make about 47 cents per Amazon copy sold. The only two reasons I didn’t just price it at cost (that is, so I’d make no money at all, price to make = price to buy) was because 12.52 is a stupid price for a book, and there’s some element of a principle of the thing. Creating free content is for internet writers, not fiction writers (however small and unknown they may be). In any case, at my stage of the writerly profession, I’m not even close to the point where I care about how much money I’m making from it. I’m still at the point where somebody tells me they read my book and my response is ZOMG THAT IS FREAKING SWEET!!!!111!!1!! So, the pricing works.

I wasn’t that crazy about the idea of self-publishing anything, to the point that I’d earlier made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t publish until some publisher/editor – no matter how small – wanted to put their name behind it, and their company name on the title page. I changed that tune for a few reasons. For one thing, I figure I’ve already cleared that bar with my ebook publisher. He doesn’t happen to publish paper copies, but it’s an identical story. For another, I am functionally a dinosaur with most things technology. I still think of paper books as ‘books,’ and, while I do read on kindle, I haven’t entirely warmed up to it. I wanted a paper copy of my work, regardless of how it was published and by whom. For another, see above. When you’re a small fry writer working with a small fry publisher, it’s an exposure game, and you don’t willingly shoot yourself in the foot. It’s worth doing -if only- for the friends and family members who have told me they’d like to read it, but don’t read on a device.

If I don’t get an agent and make the big time before I finish this sci-fi quintet, I might just publish them all this way – digital copy created through my ebook publisher, self-published paperback. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve slowed down some on the sequel since moving and re-starting school, but I’ve surprised myself by still being able to make steady progress. Whether it’s any good, who the hell knows. But the quantity is there at least.

The good news is, now I can take copies of my own book to used bookstores and sell them without telling them I’m the author.** Just mix them into a big stack of used paperbacks, and they’ll be none the wiser.

(Image Credit)

**I’m kidding. Maybe. No, I’m definitely not kidding. I’m going to do this.

Nature Sucks

Like Ken Cuccinelli, that zebra was a big fan of things that comport with natural law. (Image Credit)

That Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is a world-class dick will come as no surprise to anyone possessed of even a passing familiarity with his political career. His Wikipedia page reads like a resume for somebody applying for the job of village asshole. He’s more or less your garden variety Talibangelical, a poor man’s Rick Santorum (and THERE’S a badge of honor), getting national attention by dropping birther dog-whistles, spending more time thinking about gay blow jobs than gay guys do, covering up the exposed naughty bits on 200-year-old state seals, that kind of thing. He has a pretty good chance of becoming Virginia’s governor, and that speaks poorly for us a nation. It speaks poorly for us as a species.

So I hesitate to take much he says very seriously, or give any of it much time and attention, but I came across a comment of his recently that got me thinking.

I’m not really qualified to discuss the ins-and-outs (sexual pun intended, in deference to Ken) of Cuccinelli’s defense of Virginia’s anti-sodomy law in the context of higher penalties for statutory rape. The evidence Think Progress cites is, in my opinion, fairly damning. After the SCOTUS’ Lawrence Decision the Virginia legislature had a chance to alter their bizarre and anachronistic “Crimes against Nature” statute such that it would cover statutory rape without restricting the behavior of consenting grown-ups. Cuccinelli helped to kill that bill. Why would he do that? Again, I’m no lawyer, but it seems pretty clear he wanted to protect the integrity of the Crimes against nature law because he liked the parts about hating on gay people. That law was only struck down last week, by the way. Cooch misses the law already – he claims – for the provision relating to stat-rape which he had a chance to save in 2004, but didn’t because it took away the gay-hating.

In 2009 Cuccinelli had the following to say regarding homosexuality: “My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. … They don’t comport with natural law.”

You hear this ‘nature’ argument from time to time. It’s stupid for a number of reasons, the first and most obvious of which is the frankly staggering number of species in which homosexual behavior has been observed. Obviously ‘natural law’ is whatever Ken Cuccinelli happens to think it is. Also, and maybe more importantly, where in the hell did he get the idea that this country – or any country – is based on natural law?

Who in the hell would want to live in such a place?

(Image Credit)

It makes a degree of sense in a world with stories like this for people to strive for a more natural lifestyle than the one we have. I have a great deal of sympathy for the natural, local/organic food and natural medicine (the ones that aren’t transparently obvious snake oil, at least) movements, for instance. What I take issue with is any mindset that states categorically “natural = good, unnatural = not good.” You know what isn’t natural, at all? Living in a house. Driving a car. Taking medicine. Making art. We didn’t map the human genome with nature. We did it because some really smart people got into their unnatural cars, drove to their unnatural office and got on their unnatural computers to do some unnatural experiments.

To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish and short. It sucks, and then you die.

Let’s say we make the argument that Ken is talking strictly about natural law as it relates to human relationships. Fair enough. You know what else probably isn’t natural? Monogamy. But somewhere along the way we decided it was a social good. Social goods that improve our collective civilization are steps taken away from a state of natural law. If Ken Cuccinelli is so concerned with natural laws, I strongly recommend he go try to make as many babies as he can.

I love the natural world. But I sure as hell don’t want to live in it. And nobody in their right mind wants to live according to anything remotely approximating ‘natural law.’

Fat, dumb and stupid is no way to blog

A move/new job/new university later, and I suddenly remembered I have a blog that nobody reads. I am a lazy, lazy blogger and likely always will be, but I suppose since I keep coming back to it even after the multiple failed attempts I might as well post a semi-annual (or so) update just to keep the thing alive and kicking. 

I’ve meant to link everything writing I do here on this blog, and I missed one thing. Better late than never. The Sideways Tower is a fun little podcast about fun dorky things. I can’t say enough good about those guys. Plus the great fantasy author Dennis L. McKiernan is fairly active in the forums. Well worth a listen (to all the episodes except my interview, of course – avoid that one at all costs).