Appropriate assumptions about guns

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, news, projects, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 302020
 

It is well understood that you assume that *every* gun you come across is loaded. Make that assumption and keep the weapon pointed only at things you are willing to blow holes in, and you – and those around you – will be far safer.

A new assumption to make: every “protestor” should be assumed to have a gun. And each of those guns should be assumed to be loaded. And pointed at *you.*

Antifa and Burn-Loot-Murder terrorists are out in the streets shooting at people. The same jackholes who under other circumstanc4es would be whining about the need for gun control laws are happy to plink away at people who dare disagree with them. Be forewarned.

 Posted by at 7:09 pm

Email troubles…

 AARRRGH, news  No Responses »
Jun 272020
 

It’s been a few hours since I’ve been able to access my main (netcom) email account. It’s run through Earthlink, and they seem to have completely vacated the internet. No variation of their website (earthlink.net) seems to be accessible, and their support phone number (along with several others I’ve found) rings once then goes silent but doesn’t actually hang up. With luck it’ll all be resolved shortly, but if you have attempted to email me recently, of if you’ve purchased something from me recently, there’s a reason why I’ve not replied.

 

UPDATE: seems a water main break took out an “upstream service provider” at Earthlink. Things are coming back and I have access to email again, though there seem to be a few gaps. So if you’ve not gotten a reply you think you shoulda, send me a note. And assuming I get *that,* I’ll get on it.

The break seems to be fairly substantial…

 Posted by at 11:26 pm

Do Not Apologize

 blather, politics, science, wisdom  No Responses »
Jun 272020
 

It has become a sickeningly predictable event: someone says something that upsets the unthinking unteachable mob, and then they – and pretty much anyone even tangentially associated with them – issues some sort of public apology. The apology is usually a combination of lame and embarrassing. But does it actually appease the mob?

Survey Sez: Nope.

Does apologizing work? An empirical test of the conventional wisdom

Overall, the evidence presented here suggests that the effects of an apology are close to neutral or negative depending on the context and the demographic group. If this is the case, we may wonder why public officials do in fact so often ask for forgiveness in the face of controversy. It is possible that they apologize in order to receive better coverage from the media or even to make a story go away. In one experiment, individuals judging performances in a presidential debate were influenced by the nature of commentary they watched after the fact when compared to a control group not exposed to the opinions of pundits (Fridkin et al., 2007). Likewise, if an individual apologizes for a comment that the media finds offensive, future coverage of that individual may be better than it otherwise would be. This requires the assumption that while members of the public are hostile or indifferent to those who apologize, members of the media will provide better coverage of an individual who shows repentance. There may be little reason to assume that this is the case, however, especially considering that most of the media lean to the left (Groseclose & Milyo, 2005; Groseclose, 2011) and that liberals in this study appear to be those most likely to want to punish individuals for apologizing.

Emphasis mine.

Sometimes people do or say some reprehensible things, and in those cases an apology *may* be appropriate… *if* the person in question is actually sorry for what they did. And “sorry” because they realize they did/said something bad, not because they’re being forced into an apology. But then, it certainly seems like the bulk of the calls for public struggle sessions these days are driven not because someone did something objectively bad, but because they did or said something “offensive” (example: the artist who recently groveled because racists were tearing her down for having painted herself as a comic book superhero… with a *tan*). In which case an apology is not just bad for the apologizer, it’s bad for society in that it helps to feed the beast of fascistic cancel culture. Respond some other way.

 Posted by at 4:17 pm

Went woke, went broke

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., news, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 272020
 

The SyFy channel just cancelled the show “Vagrant Queen.” The only really surprising things about that are either:

1) “What took so long?”

or

2) “Vagrant what? Never heard of it.”

I watched the first episode when it first aired and it was… half-assed. *Everything* about it was half-assed, from acting to makeup to dialogue to plot to especially production design and VFX, which made it look like a stablemate of “Andromeda.” The first episode was in the end utterly forgettable, and so I removed it from my watch list and promptly put the series out of my mind.

Now, the history of sci-fi TV in general, and SyFy in particular, is replete with crappy shows that last half a season or a full season, then quietly slip into the abyss. That’s just the way it goes: most shows are at best “meh.” You roll the dice and take your chances. But sometimes, some shows seem to be pre-doomed to incompetence and fail. Some shows, the suits should be able to determine to *not* go with before spending a dime. And “Vagrant Queen” is one such. How should they have known to pass on this? Simple… it was based on a comic book. More specifically, it was based on a comic book that failed spectacularly. It began as a six-issue miniseries. The first issue sold only 2,000 issues (“sold” meaning “sold to comic book shops,” not “sold to actual customers,” so the actual number of people who bought that issue is of course lower) in June, 2018. The second issue sold only 1,200 in July 2018. Issue 3 dropped to 993, and issue 4 fell to 769. Issues five and six? Apparently never actually printed, because in the comic book industry anything that sells below 5,000 or so is on the chopping block. Selling in the *hundreds* is laughably low. But the issues got reprinted as a bound “graphic novel” in February 2019… which sold only 200. And *then* SyFy decided “hey, lets spend buckets of cash on THIS property.”

Guh.

I cannot mock the creators of the comic book for their low sales… their lowest sales figures would make me giddy if *I* could reach those numbers. Their high numbers,  failures by comic book industry standards? Inconceivable for my piddly ass. Selling two thousand issues of, say, US Fighter Projects #4 would make me thrilled beyond the capacity for rational thought. Might even go out and buy a pizza or something. My issue here is with SyFy, spending money on something that has *already* demonstrated a stunning lack of audience. It’s not just dumb, it’s insane. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. The only thing that seems to justify the decision is the creator: a woke intersectional SJW who seems to have made a career out of that, and little else. Did SyFY think that the SJWs of the world would actually watch the show? Seems they didn’t watch… something that SyFy should have seen coming. SJWs scream for properties created by others to include quotas of inclusion… but when those properties bend the knee, the SJWs still don’t watch or buy. They care about the details of things they don’t care for.

If SyFy wants to spend a lot of money on a property with a very small existing audience, I’d recommend they go after “War With The Deep Ones,” “Pax Orionis” and the Zaneverse stories. I can guarantee these would be better received than “Vagrant Queen.”

For further details:

 Posted by at 1:46 pm

And here we go again

 blather, Book X  No Responses »
Jun 262020
 

In January I signed my very first book contract, for a heavily illustrated aerospace history text Yet To Be Publicly Described. The manuscript and all the diagrams were due to be turned in to the publisher in July. And then… Commie Cough comes along, book stores close, supply chains collapse. Perhaps surprisingly, the book was not cancelled, but instead delayed by one year. Sigh, oh well, okay.

So today, I signed a *second* book contract with the same publisher. This is for a slightly smaller text on a different subject, but similar in idea: a boatload of aerospace diagrams. Book One looks to have around 180 diagrams; Book Two will top out somewhere in the area of 120. This one has a  due date of January, 2021.

If you like the US Aerospace Projects publications I’ve put out, then you’ll go bonkers for these books.

An aside: for public discussion purposes, the first book is “Book X.” The second book would thus be either “Book Y” or perhaps “Book XX.” In which latter case if and when I sign a third book contract, that would should prove quite interesting.

 Posted by at 9:28 pm
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