Today’s thoughts culled from letters of comment, my fanzine column, my journal, and Facebook.
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I disagree with the assertion that electronic self-publishing is saturating the marketplace; no. It’s saturating the ebook zone, yes. Which is a hefty chunk of the market, but that’s all it’s doing. It’s quite possible for a Luddite to ignore ebooks and self-published material and not even notice any of it, in favor of trad pub books. Epub is allowing anyone who wishes to put work out for sale, that’s all. On offer. It’s like a street chock-a-block with prostitutes; how to pick the RIGHT prostitute as one cruises by? Epub is not evil. It’s simply giving readers a scad more choices. The reader’s dilemma, always the same, is to choose.
This means word-of-mouth, always vital, is more important than ever. It means discussion groups and short reviews from groups of like-minded readers will get the word out for this or that book. What to read, what to avoid, and so on, will sort itself out, as it’s always done, by being filtered through the readers.
Yes, Gresham’s Law applies to a degree: Bad can indeed crowd out good. But look back and ask yourself if the filters, the bottlenecks, and the arbiters from times gone by were doing such a great job, really. Look at the small fraction of worthwhile books, and the mountain of schlock and dreck.
Nothing’s changed but perhaps the sheer numbers. They’re daunting enough but can be overcome by maintaining one’s standards and by networking, by talking about what’s good and what’s bad and why. This lets others get the word.
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Is reality real? No. It really is a matrix of artificial projections. No kidding. Scared yet?
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Do not let the false equivalence meme deceive you. There is a tremendous difference between republicants and Democrats, and the former want only to destroy for their corporate masters. They serve the 1% only. The Democrats fight for We the People, the 99%. Stand with them and rid us of the psychopathic corporate scum.
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Writers and artists of all types have an uphill climb most would characterize as a vertical cliff without handholds we don’t make ourselves. And our pitons were taken from us.
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Juror B29, (bomb’s away, to her friends), has told ABC News that Zimmerman got away with murder but that the law couldn’t prove it. She then added that God would get him good.
So we live in a world of deluded people who make laws that guarantee miscarriages of justice, defend racist murderers, and enshrine unwarranted and unprovable “fear” as the key element in excusing violence and death, especially by gun, and yet we refuse to discuss gun control, we refuse to change malicious, harmful right wing laws, and we fall back on imaginary sky fathers for some vague sort of post-life retribution.
Still think America’s the best? In any possible way?
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Genetic engineering will not diminish our glut of stupid. If anything, it’ll increase or enhance it.
Civilization is counter evolutionary but is also a scam psychopaths run to let them feed off everyone else’s labor. Hence money, which exists merely to abstract labor so it can be stolen at a distance.
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Critics focus on SF’s poor and patterned — genre — writing while fen defend SF on the strength and influence of its ideas. Both have valid points yet neither get that art must blend with commerce to survive. It’s a spectrum. Nothing excuses poor writing but storytelling or interesting research nuggets can trump it at times. On one end of the spectrum we find fine writing without much content. On the other, we find all content without graceful, effective writing to communicate it. Somewhere in the fat part middle of the Bell curve is where the best stuff lies.
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Pareidolia is pattern seeking. We do this to sort the dance of energy around us, permeating us.
If you run from ten perceived threats and nine prove to be imaginary, you were still safer from having run from all ten because the tenth might have gotten you. This is why we project our fears and see demons everywhere.
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Please note: I detest skepitbunkers with their strident, hysterical rants. They are Puritans, literalists, and zero-sum fundamentalists, psychologically. As Carl Sagan warned them in Ch. 7 of The Demon-Haunted World, cheating, lying, and bullying to enforce a view is not skepticism, and failing to convince with facts does not excuse the cheats, lies, and bullying. They ignored this warning and are now rightly laughingstocks.
This does a disservice to the reality of the term they hijacked, skepticism, which is a necessary part of any rational person’s mental armory. Questions, not answers, is what to focus on. With each answer we should not pull up smug and sure we’re right, but instead we should press on and ask what ever questions this latest tentative step leads us to.
—Diogenes Trannel, keyboards, excerpted from a letter of comment
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The continued use of drones, assassination, war, surveillance, secrecy, and the curtailment of civil rights makes us wonder if the Obama administration, ostensibly a Democratic centrist-to-liberal group with a mandate from the people, was hijacked by the monied right wing from inception. That was the rumor, when Obama’s campaign staff were quickly ousted in favor of Wall St. criminals and old Jim Baker butt buddies. Looks like he’s been contained well and controlled perfectly. Charming coup, wasn’t it? Y’hardly noticed.
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Authoritarians operate from a basis of fear, mistrust, and sociopathy and should be quarantined from human society. There, I said it. For about the millionth time. GOP = Gang Of Psychopaths.
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Wait, you mean ALL cops aren’t self-important bullies armed to the teeth and seething with a fury to unleash pain and death on helpless people? Huh.
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Detroit is what the Gang Of Psychopaths GOP has planned for America as a whole. This is simply true, and has been for a long time. Why are we letting these criminals do this to us?
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I coined the word republicant both because they are full of nothing but cant, and to echo BLADE RUNNER, in that they are all artificial human-shaped things needing culled and quarantined from human society.
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Hemingway was an aesthete and his writing was humble. His bully came out elsewhere, in his persona and in his trying to live up to his stupid macho image. That’s why people piss all over him. It’s their flaw in not being able to separate the actor from the role, and the work from the writer.
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“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.” — Number Six.
Nor will I.
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Summon the beasts and raise the demons.
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