It’s a pleasant evening here, still warm but not oppressive, the sun dropping behind the hills to the west. I’m on the patio, enjoying new(ish), deep chair cushions, and a tasty malt beverage.
Nearby, a neighbor has fired up the grill, and has filled the gentle air with the sweet smell of barbecue. Thank you, neighbor!
HBO’s been pushing its new “Premium Television” series that takes place in the same world as Game of Thrones. I haven’t been paying attention, but I think it’s a prequel. There’s dragons and shit, so it might be cool. But…
The final season of Game of Thrones was giddily anticipated. HBO was on top of the world, producing the most talked-about show for years.
The final season of Game of Thrones also sucked. It sucked in very apparent and obvious ways, and also in subtler ways as well. From the writing to the CGI to the Starbucks cup, it was a train wreck. I say this honestly and sincerely: I could have done better, for half the cost.
The storytelling failure is the least forgivable. Sure, they were setting up for season after season that there was one human on the planet that could kill the crazy undead snow skeleton. And in previous seasons, we watch her journey into something incredible and we are FULLY ON BOARD.
Then in the final season there’s the big battle: slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, a few heroic deeds, a heroic death or two, then the girl kills the supernatural symbolic threat from the north and everyone says, “whoo, that was close!” They wipe their brows and ten minutes later the threat to the very existence of humanity is forgotten.
Before the first frame was shot, that story should have been challenged. But it wasn’t. The writers who didn’t care were given a free pass by producers who didn’t care.
Even before production for the season began, when people are reading the story and deciding their own personal goddam legacies in the industry, that story wasn’t challenged. The thing that (we thought) symbolized the extinction of the human race is beaten in an ordinary battle, and there’s high-fives and hugs and then it’s on to the absurd conclusion. It’s video-game logic; just another boss to beat, all the symbolism of life and death trampled in the rush to just get this goddam thing over with.
It’s pretty clear the whole production ran out both of money and the ability to care. I can hear the director say, “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post,” and move on — without considering that maybe post didn’t have the budget to fix all that shit. But no one cared. Not even the people who hoped to extend this dynasty into other shows.
I don’t know the specifics of why that production ran out of steam. Why they stopped caring. Money, exhaustion, boredom with the subject. But the last season of GoT was a sloppy mess, and the brand will never be the same. If the goal was to be Marvel With Swords, they fucked up.
I will not be watching the new production. I like the dragons and whatnot, but I will not invest any time in this show until the final episode of the final season is aired. I do not trust these people. “OMG OMG OMG that episode was so awesome” my friend will say, and I will reply, “that’s where they get you.” Unless they put Vince Gilligan in charge of the ending, I will wait.
I don’t know how to calculate the cost to HBO of that shitty conclusion to their biggest show ever, but I guarantee the cost to fix that season is less that what they have lost because their new show isn’t must-watch, but simply “whatever”.
I suspect, (but I don’t know), that there were people at HBO saying of the final GoT Season, “We have to push the release. This is shit.”
“Do you know how much that would cost?” is the obvious response.
But none of the big-wigs considered the cost of not fixing it. The cost HBO is about to feel, no matter how much they spend on marketing. We don’t trust them anymore.
I was reading a not-great-but-interesting science fiction story today, set in the far future. There was this line: “She might have been only a bit short of a meter-and-a-half tall, but she packed every inch of her frame with massive muscles.”
I’m hoping right now that people in that distant time are a little more settled on their units of measure. But there is a fundamental issue that speculative fiction especially struggles with: metric units are not sexy. Damn near every one of them is four syllables at least.
“I would walk one thousand miles” is light-years ahead of “I would walk one thousand kilometers,” or even, “I would walk a megameter.” (Hm. That last one has a little spark.)
Inch is cooler than centimeter. Mile is WAY more poetic than kilometer. But in science fiction writing, there has been a failure to give humanity credit for the ability to take the mundane and technical, and bring it to life.
In this case, the military has already started: Kilometer is ‘klick’. “It’s ten klicks out and coming in fast!” In some contexts, that’s better than “mile”. Such a hard-sounding word. It has an urgency to it. You wander for miles, but when the threat is coming in at twenty klicks per second you don’t fuck around.
I don’t think I have ever read a story that has reduced these units the way they surely will be. “Give them a cem, they’ll take a klick.” “I missed it by half a mim.”
And let’s face it, “a meter-and-a-half tall”, while getting high marks for hyphen usage, is not casual conversation. “She wasn’t even 15 dems tall, but she packed every cem of her frame with massive muscles.” Better, don’t you think? It’s not simply that the units are consistent; it creates part of a language that gives the world its character. And it’s just tighter.
I have often decried the dry, non-poetic nature of the metric system in literature. But now I see that that dryness is my fault. There will be poets in the future, long after miles are forgotten, yet they will still speak of distance, and they will not use four syllables just for the unit designation. Maybe they will be even more versatile. “A million klicks away” might mean one thing, while “A million kloms away” would connote something else entirely.
As writers, we can imagine how people in the future will streamline these words, and make the form these shortened words take be a subtle part of the world they live in. Natural to them, instructive to us. Fun for everyone!
The Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas has always had opinions, and she is rarely shy about expressing them. For this reason, she has always been diligent about reviewing the products she buys online. It is important to recognize the good products (and especially the good vendors), while warning folks away from the crap. It is simply a matter of good online-retail citizenship.
Plus, she likes to be creative with her reviews. Tell a little story.
Apparently sometimes being a good retail citizen pays. Some unknown robot at Amazon flagged her reviewing prowess and (I assume) some human subsequently decided that the OSoMR&HBI would be a good person to become a professional giver of opinions.
That is, it turns out, a real job.
It works like this. You select things from a giant pile, they send you the things, and you review them. And keep the things. “Influence” has now become a transitive verb where we used to use “buy”. As in, “I just influenced these jeans and they fit perfectly!”
It’s a good time to be turning half the garage into a workshop. Yesterday my new laser level arrived. Today it was the laser tape measure (that will calculate area and volume and do trig and save up to 50 measurements) and the bike torque wrench. The blocks for calibrating table saw cuts came yesterday; the router table equivalents arrive tomorrow, along with the rounded-edge router bit for my window sill project. The lamps for over the new workbench arrive soon. All for the cost of an opinion. (And income tax on the retail value of the item.)
It’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. I didn’t fully understand at first — it didn’t really sink in until the Official Sweetie showed me the new light fixture she was considering for the hallway. Sputnik! I saw the retail price and asked, “are they seriously sending that to us?” I kind of felt like the first time our little protector dog Lady Byng was barking at the intruder at the door until she realized he was BRINGING FOOD! Mind-blowing! The fixture arrived today, the bulbs arrive tomorrow, and I’ll put it up on Saturday. And help write the review.
We are required to either send an item back, use it, or keep it for at least six months before giving it to family and friends, so you guys are safe from being inundated with LED flashlights and solar-powered LED patio string lights and more solar-powered LED patio string lights and LED bulbs and rechargeable LED under-shelf lights and multi-color LED strip lights and LED wall wash light strips and LED flashing red hazard lights (with bottle opener) in your Christmas stockings this year.
If you would like to follow the Official Sweetie and learn of her many, many opinions, you can do so here. Does having more followers benefit us? Probably. Not sure. But probably. If you find any of those reviews helpful, go ahead and say so! Do more “helpful” votes benefit us? Not sure, but again, probably. Don’t perjure yourself. Who really knows what’s happening in the Amazon Artificial Intelligence. (Seriously good opportunity for crossover speculative fiction there…)
If there is something you are curious about — more a general type of product than a specific item, as there are about 45,000 items available for review at any given time and there is no search function, just filters to select for broad categories — let us know! If either of us are remotely qualified to render an opinion, and we can find an example, we’ll give it a shot. It you’re waiting for the verdict on a pneumatic drain clearing tool, we’ve already got you covered!
In sports news today, the San Diego Padres traded away a bunch of players — and who knows, one of those players might one day be as good as Juan Soto — for Juan Soto.
To KEEP the kid, the Pads will have to pay him a lot of money. I think they will.
Do you remember the movie Moneyball? In that story the bean counters show that with advanced statistics they can find players that produce more value than is revealed by the traditional RBI and whatnot. The good guys in that story found new ways to measure the value of a player, and used that knowledge to build a world series team on the cheap.
The team in that story was the Oakland A’s. Since then, the ownership of that team has discovered an even more efficient way to run a team: lose. Pay as little as possible to stay in the league, and soak up the shared revenue from the TV deals. They don’t even pretend to be building for the future. Trying to win would cut into profits.
San Diego is one of a handful of teams that is actually trying to win. At some point in the post season they will go tooth-to-claw with the Dodgers —another team trying to win it all — and the odds on that outcome shifted today.
That’s all fun, but it seems like these mighty players the Padres have accumulated — Tatís, Machado, Soto, and many others — it seems like they enjoy playing baseball. Like if you gave them a day off from playing baseball, they’d spend it playing baseball. Guys like that are fun to watch.
And that’s my team. I seem unable to change that. When I heard they got Soto today, a thrill went right through me. A thrill I thought I was above after all this time, but that excitement for the future is the payoff for fandom. Hope lies dark and insidious inside you, a hallucinogenic vision of the future, and given even a glimmer of light will turn you into a gibbering idiot.
Go Padres!
It’s right there in the name! And that’s only ONE of the reasons people should avoid antibiotics:
There is the part of me that says, “Jerry, discouraging people from taking life-saving medicine is BAD! Capital B-A-D!” But maybe I’m saving lives here. The sooner people who act with no regard for the safety of their fellow citizens die off, the safer the rest of us will be.
So fuck it. I’m all about aiming an anti-antibiotic campaign tailored straight for the anti-vaxers. Use their words, make them imagine themselves heroes set upon in an egregious age, and let them die of a routine infection. Not so much murder as assisted suicide, and for the greater good.
* By massively increasing the average human life expectancy, antibiotics have increased the percentage of people past child-bearing age.
A source close to Twitter was heard by this reporter to say that Elon Musk is a weak-kneed little crybaby. That source went on to say that the only thing Mr. Musk was capable of doing was using a fortune built on the suffering of others to invest in things that appeared outwardly altruistic, and taking credit for himself. The source contends that in the end those efforts were nothing more than a pale attempt to appear cool while doing nothing to address the grievances of the families of the thousands left dead building his family fortune.
“It would cheapen the value of human life to only consider those who died,” the source went on to say. “There are plenty who still live, only to suffer. Musk is a right piece of shit.”
The source also pointed out that now that everyone was watching, Musk realized that even if he owned Twitter he would not be able to rewrite rules of common decency, let alone rewrite the legal limitations on fraud. “This isn’t fun anymore,” the source speculated Musk might have said.
The source went on to say many far less flattering things about Elon “weasel boy” Musk. I believe all of them.
I’ve been going to a Web site fairly regularly to check on the movements in the price of Bitcoin and other crypto tokens. This has exposed me to a lot of advertisements to invest in precious metals.
Most of those ads are for coins that are either one ounce of silver or one ounce of gold. Not coins in the “legal tender” sort of way, but round things made of pure metal that are struck with some sort of decoration.
While silver currently shows trading at $19.86 per ounce, I can buy a handsome silver coin for $24.27. The coin will have a picture on each side. Maybe liberty or the ol’ “Don’t Tread on Me” snake. That picture is apparently worth about four and a half bucks.
Unless that is, you want your coin stamped with the image of Donald Trump. In that case, the coin will cost you $25.78. Same amount of silver. Just a bigger markup because the buyer is making a value judgement with his testicles, rather than his brain. (I used the male pronoun intentionally, which now I see is a disservice to all the idiots who identify with different pronouns. But I’m leaving it, so I can keep this parenthetical comment.)
So.
There is a significant market in which people will pay extra for any random shit if it has Trump’s picture on it. I picture running a booth in a flea market, and buying shit from all the other booths, putting a Trump sticker on all that stuff, and selling it for 30% more. (Note: this blog episode is NOT filed under get-poor-quick.)
The idea scales. GMC Tundra Trump Edition. (Note to self: research what model of truck was used to commit murder by the “good people” in Charlotte.)
But in between those extremes is where the real money is. I’m sure most of this stuff already exists: Trump beach chairs. Trump shoes. Trump lamp shades. All that shit. Doorknobs, dildos, drapes. Trump condoms that are actually morning-after pills.
As I type this, I realize that all that shit is out there already. I’m not going to think of a new place to sell Trump’s face to his idiot idolizers that hasn’t been exploited already. But that won’t stop me from trying.
Froot Loops! Now with more Trump!
Tonight it hit me, as I was giving advice, that I was dispensing wisdom I would do well to listen to myself. It was a question about optimization. Whenever you use that word, you have to know what you are optimizing for. Sometimes I forget.
One of the approximations of social media I engage in is a place called StackOverflow.com. That site and dozens of its sisters are an indispensable resource for programmers and tech folk in general. Some nights, like tonight, when I’m a little adrift, I will stop by over there and see if there are any questions pending I am qualified to answer.
When you’ve been around a while, you realize that there are almost no new questions, and in the major categories there are semi-pro question-answerers who can swiftly point the new question to the ancient answer. For php, you will see the name Barmar time and again, always helpful, always gentle.
But there is a category of question that in general is found to be annoying on Stack Overflow, but that I can answer well. These are questions that go beyond the nuts-and-bolts of a language to get to the heart of what programming really is. I will see the code they post, often a mess, and I can sort through it and figure out what is the actual question.
While others will downvote the question for being a mess, I find an opportunity to teach. I see someone who, with a little help, will see the mess also. My answers are long, and meticulous, but if I feel like I’m answering a homework question I leave out the key stones in the path.
A recent example: Someone had code that took the result of a database query and built an html table. But the result of the query didn’t directly match what was to go into the table. So while drawing the table, the code was also trying to figure shit out.
I suggested that while there was no way I was going to figure out what was wrong with the code as written, I had a simple concept to apply: Think, then Draw. Get all the information set up beforehand so that creating the html was just a brain-dead loop.
I have discovered that I have axioms. One is “Keep the guards close to the gate.” Another, apparently, is “Think, then draw.”
Tonight I came across a question asking for how to optimize a data manipulation operation. Massive data in, then a rearrangement of the data to be more useful later. The code to accomplish the data transform included nested loops, but was pretty tight and pretty clean. “How do I optimize this?” was the question.
I have come to realize that optimization of code is an economic judgement, not a technical one. The most obvious tradeoff: You can use more memory to make your process run faster.
But there is another, more subtle, economic tradeoff. Tonight I answered the optimization question with another economic argument: that Engineer Hours are worth more then CPU milliseconds. I told that person that if their code worked, and there wasn’t a specific problem caused by it, then it was perfect and they should move on to the next problem. I told that programmer to value their own time. Not just for personal reasons, but to better judge how their time could best help their endeavor.
Value your time, but also recognize the cost of your time.
My friends, this is something I do not do well. Where I work, I am moving our stuff from an environment where it was hosted for free, to a place where we will have to pay for the resources. I am, at heart, a cheap bastard. While that does me well at the poker table, it may not always serve the interests of my employer. I am constantly aware that all resources I request will now be billed.
So I spend time, hours of my time, trying to guess how small a footprint I can squeeze into on behalf of our group. I spend hours on elaborate schemes to do more with less. But I am not serving my clients well. I’m not including the cost of my time in the value equation. Things are too slow? I could spend a week doing clever stuff, at a cost to my company of thousands of dollars in my compensation while I defer projects that actually will make things run better, or I could just submit a form and get more RAM for the database, at an incremental cost for the department each month.
In my defense, I HATE filling out forms. I HATE the call that comes after while someone else re-enters the form into a different system, and invariably makes a mistake. I will take a week with the code over an afternoon of nonsense any time. But that is a weakness, not a strength. That is me allowing my own preferences to make decisions that are not properly optimized.
I am, at heart, a person who can take a problem and slice it and slice it and slice it until each part is a simple question, and I can take the answers to those questions and combine them to arrive at the solution. While I’m at it, I’ll make tests so that each part proves itself. When you see my code at the flea market, it will be on the shelf behind the table, where you will have to ask to get a closer look. I am proud of this. But it is not always a good thing.
There was a time I was VP of Software Engineering at a small company, and I did all right in that role. During the dot-com boom I held a pretty dang good team together. I didn’t have to fill out forms then, either. We were all just building something awesome. The calculus of the value of my time was different then; Engineer-hours — my hours — were a commodity; the value only to be realized if the venture succeeded. (Picture Facebook, before Facebook, only far more dynamic, with the fatal flaw of being private.)
Good times, good times. The sleep-optional days of youth. But if I’m going to justify that little walk in the past in this ramble, I have to tie it to the present.
Back then, I was paid well enough but there was never doubt that Engineer Hours were the currency we were paying to make our name. Our data center was a few racks in a room that had once been a bank vault (AWS was decades away yet). Everything, everything, was optimized for minimum CPU.
Tonight, while I was (very gracefully I’m sure) reminding a young coder about the relative value of CPU cycles relative to neuron flashes, I realized that I have not been very good at making that judgement myself. I need to do better. Not just for my team, but for myself. I need to fill out the goddam form, bluster my way to 4x the resources I actually think we need (magnificently tiny, in the scale of my company), and recognize that my time is better spent making new things, rather than helping the old things go.
It drives me batty to read respected people in national publications talk about the nosedive of Bitcoin and other crypto as a “market correction.”
A market correction happens when the price of a security or a general market of securities overruns any sort of historical baseline for value. When you talk about stocks, there are the simple metrics of how much money a company makes or the value of that company’s assets. There are metrics like that for real estate, municipal bonds, and even manufacturing.
A correction comes when the market realizes that the price has been bid up far past what the underlying value of the asset is. This happens fairly often: people buy stock based on what they expect the performance of the company to be. Sometimes people get excited.
When people say that crypto is no different than the stock market, they are either lying to you or to themselves. There is no P/E report on Bitcoin. No debt-to-asset report on Etherium. Because there is nothing there. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, supporting the value of those tokens.
The price is based on blind faith, sell-shaming, and billionaires spinning a story that ends with them having your money.
The tower is crumbling now; we have been on a roughly monthly cadence hearing about the failure of some sham company that banked everything on crypto always going up. The market plunges, then holds steady for a while, cryptobros in their executive suites sweating as the scam crumbles until they rush for the doors calling back over their shoulders “#HODL!” and another crypto company based on the “always-up” model craters, unable to even tolerate the market that is merely steady.
A true market correction would reduce Bitcoin to just a little bit over zero. I will grant the little bit because Bitcoin is just a little bit useful for things besides being a store of value. Oligarchs have to shift their cash, after all.
The temperature went over one hundred degrees here today, as it does sometimes (more often lately, but we all know that). At about 2pm the guys who messed up our ducts came back and fixed out ducts, and life was good — the best cooling this house has ever known. Until about 4pm. That’s when the AC shut down entirely. Hopefully it’s just a matter of replacing (again) the ridiculously huge fuses on the unit. (Although huge fuses mean huge power and BLOWING huge fuses means maybe it’s time to replace the damn thing.)
It’s warm in here right now. Warm enough that my laptop, already prone to run hotter than one would think necessary, essentially shut itself down to prevent it from burning itself up.
My laptop is a MacBook, and they are not generally considered good gaming machines for two reasons: one, the hottest games don’t run on Macs, and two, because Macs aren’t built to dissipate the heat that comes with the massive processing in a modern computer game.
But today I wasn’t running any graphic-intensive game. I did play NetHack for a while, but that is the opposite of graphics-intensive. And because I was playing on NAO, even that processing was happening in a data center somewhere (or perhaps, a linux box under someone’s desk).
MacBooks, when overheating, use a process to simply block out all other programs part of the time, to reduce the load so the computer can cool down. I reached a point today where the safety program was taking up all the time.
I quit any program that was even using the slightest CPU and the situation did not improve. I shut down the machine, waited a few minutes, and started it back up to the slowest reboot since DOS was on floppies, because the kernel task went straight to maximum protection.
Finally, I went to the freezer and pulled out a cold pack I use on my knee. I put the computer to sleep, and set the thing right onto the cold pack, and when I woke it up the machine was happy. For a little while, at least.
I have now used a second cold pack, which is why I’m able to write this right now.
If you search for “Refrigerated Laptop Cooling Pad” or any of a hundred permutations, you will get lots of hits, but none of them are actually refrigerated. They just have lots of fans. And while I’m sure that helps, I’m a little surprised that there’s no active cooling. The top-tier game machines have liquid cooling built directly into the enclosure. It doesn’t seem a stretch to extend the heat sink of a metal-hulled laptop with a refrigerated system to take the heat away.
I’m filing this episode under Get Poor Quick because this is such a golden opportunity for the right person. Get on that, right person! Make the Chill Spot. I’m tired of my laptop shutting itself down!
The price of Bitcoin is about 30% of what it was a few months ago. The other cryptocurrencies (note: they are not currencies) have been similarly battered. Crypto-based businesses are starting to fail. But if you read what the people still clinging to their vapor-money are saying, you will see #HODL, over and over again.
It is simply a typo for “hold”, that feels more insider-y. Like a secret handshake. The purpose of #HODL is simple: to prevent people from selling their crypto stakes. In itself, this could just be construed as financial advice. “This is a volatile asset, and if you panic you will lose.” And that’s good advice for all investors!
But #HODL and the community behind it use the phrase differently. Consider the company MicroStrategies. They have bought into Bitcoin in a big way, and are now using every resource they have to evangelize — to bring new, naïve money into the market. They know that the price of Bitcoin will only go up if they can convince more people to buy it.
Over the last couple of years, companies like MicroStrategies have succeeded in convincing the business press and the impatient segment of the investment population that Here be Riches.
Step 1: get the suckers to buy, to drive up the value of your holdings.
Step 2: prevent the suckers from selling even when it’s in their best interest to do so.
Consider kraken.com. They are a crypto exchange, meaning they make money when people sell or buy tokens through their service*. They recently declared, in the aftermath of the latest crypto price plunge (I’m paraphrasing): Bear markets weed out the weak. The strong will #HODL. We will also spend the money we take from you to lobby the government on behalf of our singular devotion to our mission, even if that means hurting others. And yay guns.” I cannot find articulated on their Web site what the mission is, but it must be important!
There is, from corporate communications right down to reddit, a culture of sell-shaming. The faithful shall come through adversity and inherit the wealth they deserve. Any so timid as to sell shall die in poverty and shame. This intimidation was necessary to keep the crypto bulge alive. In fact, the believers honestly thought that if they could keep people from selling, the price of their favorite crypto token would go up forever.
They believed, simply, that buying Bitcoin was buying into a sacred trust. That anyone who bought crypto was implicitly obligated to #HODL. For the common good.
But the buyers (I will not call them investors) those crypto-pushers needed to inflate the value of their coins diluted their cult. The new wave of buyers saw the historic rise of crypto, and didn’t understand their own role in causing it. But they weren’t part of #HODL; they bought at the worst time and sold at the worst time (until tomorrow), and broke the damn cult.
#HODL! #HODL! #HODL! the cultists cry as the crypto market spirals down. #HODL! These are the true believers, the ones who will #HODL into the ground, but I wonder how the ranks are holding up as airship Bitcoin plunges toward the 20,000 level after being at 69,000 a few months ago. How many people are crying #HODL as they strap on their own parachutes?
* One of the key features of cryptocurrencies is that theoretically there is no central authority. Yet almost everyone buys and sells their tokens through a trusted central exchange.
For a few days I was posting regularly on Facebook. Each night, I would look at the Gun Violence Archive, and then post on Facebook:
Days since a well regulated Militia mass shooting in the United States: 0 El Paso, Texas Phoenix, Arizona
The typography of “well regulated Militia” is to mirror exactly the way it is written in the Second Amendment. The cities are the places that had a mass shooting that day.
Had I posted a similar message yesterday, it would have listed seven cities. The day before, five.
The definition of “mass shooting” is one I’ve seen here and there: at least four victims, not counting the shooter. This includes those injured, not just killed. Their suffering in many cases is only starting.
There was actually a day when there was not one dang mass shooting in the whole country! Now there’s something to celebrate! It was a Monday. Today, also a Monday, no mass shootings have been recorded so far. Let’s hear it for Mondays!
I thought I might keep it up for a while, to maybe make the whole thing harder to ignore, to maybe open eyes to just how ordinary a mass shooting is in this country. I imagined myself making a difference by showing what the Second Amendment is actually accomplishing.
But I stopped, after only a few days. Tabulating the activities of well regulated Militias is not something to do at bedtime. Not if you want to sleep. Also, it meant I had to be on Facebook, which is unpleasant in it own right.
As a side note, the number of notifications I get when I visit Facebook has dropped dramatically. I wonder if a bunch of people unfriended me because of those posts. I hope so, but I don’t know how to figure that out.
It seems the Twilight series is out on a new print run, with a new covers. The covers are striking and pretentious and silly, and I am here to mock them. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.
I had not planned on going to the trouble to find an actual image of this thing, relying instead on my near-mystical abilities of description, but let’s face it, images get the clicks. Here’s the cover:
Full disclosure here; I have never read twiliight (apparently) and it’s pretty unlikely I ever will. I have read and enjoyed many things similar to this, even written for a similar demographic, but this whole thing seems pretty awful.
BUT! You will find millions of readers who disagree with me, and the last time I wrote something millions of people liked was never. So my hat is off to the writer of this yarn.
Who is that again?
STEPHENIE MEYER
AUTHOR OF THE #1 BESTSELLING TWILIGHT SAGA
In other words, “Author of the book you are holding in your hands right now.” Which… I figure is kind of implied already. If you decide to read twiliight because it’s written by the person who wrote Twilight— you know what? You’re perfect for this story.
Let’s spend gigantic dollars making it so every school in our country has only one way in or out, and let’s put people who aren’t actually cowards guarding that one door.
Where I went to fourth grade, it’s hard to imagine how one would even do that. I guess you could put up chain link and razor wire, so that the killer would have to buy both an AR-15, and another AR-15, and hundreds of rounds of ammo — and a bolt cutter! Terrorism deterred! And then I think of recess surrounded by chain link and razor wire.
The place I went to elementary school was not built for security. It was built in an irrational time when threats to society were handled as threats to society.
But for giggles let’s imagine if they could make a single point of entry at my old school. All those kids and parents hovering around that gate would be what the military calls a “target-rich theatre”. A golden opportunity. There is no amount of money you could spend to make schools safe in a world where some asshole can spray a crowd with bullets. Any crowd, anywhere. It might be your grocery store next.
The kickstand of the “well-regulated militia is everyone with gun” crowd is that these killers are a failure of the mental health system, and not an indictment of the industry that sells these people massively powerful tools of destruction. Yet, those same people will block any attempt to keep those same mentally-ill (by their own definition) people from owning guns.
The reason for this is actually pretty simple. Those mentally-ill kids are their children, and they’ve been fed the illness since before they could speak. Those kids slaughtering other children, that man spraying bullets around an Amazon warehouse, have one thing in common. They have unlimited access to extremely powerful weapons.
And while our gun pals would like to say this is a failure of the mental health system, this is exactly the system they prevent from ever being applied.
To get specific: if a kid comes into your gun store and arms up for a massacre, and you sell all that shit to him and also don’t maybe nudge the authorities — you sir, are guilty too, by the very logic of the NRA. Hang that arms dealer up for the buzzards to enjoy. Nothing is going to change until the people that sell these weapons are held accountable.
I’m not saying that all gun dealers are bad, but Jesus Fuck didn’t this dealer have the slightest impulse for social good? Was there not the least little warning sign flashing in the back of their head? Or is that gun salesman just a product of our time — cash the check and fuck the consequences?
And that guy is the true driver behind all this nonsense. That guy is making a lot of money off the second-amendment debate. His candidates and representatives are getting rich, too. Ultimately, there is a simple truth: there is big money in keeping America armed. If those same people could make money turning schools, hospitals, theaters, casinos, stadiums, bus terminals, taxi stands, restaurants, pharmacies, and sidewalks into “hardened” targets, then they will send out a few extra shooters to make sure we spend from fear.
Already we have that it was the school’s fault for not being ready for an armed assault. We have Ted Cruz saying it was a crazy person and simultaneously blocking any attempt to keep crazy people from having access to massively lethal weapons.
FUCK Ted Cruz. FUCK All the motherfuckers taking money from the NRA and bathing in the blood of their own constituents. FUCK the Democrats for not having the liver to face down these motherfuckers. FUCK the Democrats again for saying “vote for us and we will change this” when even when they have the fucking majority in every chamber they don’t change SHIT. FUCK especially Joe Manchin and his fucking fuckbuddy Mitch McConnel. FUCK the fucking filibuster, which used to require effort, but now even when you try to put it back to the way is was When America Was Great, all you get is diaper-shit hand-wringing. And, fuck the GOP especially.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the only time things get better is when people light things on fire.
