Avaunt

I have been struggling with insomnia for decades. Never sleep through the night. Can't remember when i last slept more than 5 hours in a stretch. Most nights it is three hours, then lay there for thrèe or more then might doze for two hours so shallowly "asleep" that i can hear the dawn chorus or neighbours moving about.

I almost feel like i could kill somebody if it meant i could sleep for 8 hours

( one am here. *groan* )

Us tigers out to get royalties, you monkey's are very free with our excellencies in your fictions !

Oh, i absolutely agree, i read a scholarly article about the reason that part of the law had been so carefully worded, and i have to admit utility. 

It is just the same as things like the burden of proof aspect or the "beyond reasonable doubt " aspects of Common Law . . . Guilty parties are going to go free because of it, but it is still something you must have because of the threat to the innocent a judicial system without these caveats would be.

And as we have seen repeatedly and expicitly with Trump, the Constitution isn't even remotely a protection, not the least bit.

He has often ignored its strictures, and even where this has been proven, he has not even been chastised, his fellow travellers have FALLEN OVER THEMSELVES  to turn a blind Eye 

Just because i have a lot of faoth in your expressed opinions not just being grabbed out of fresh air, i went googling to discern what you could mean. And that is an interesting and useful clause them fellas wrote into their document isn't it. 

Oh. So someone can actually plot to overturn your Nation and you don't call that treason? 

Seems sus to me

2 hours ago, Christian said:

Because it is American citizens attempting to overturn the results of the recent federal election in order to retain the current national sovereign in power.

It is insurrection (on the part of the protestors) and an attempted coup (on the part of Trump).

What part of that isn't treason though?

Quite partial to a Zelazny style, myself

Lol

I would like to know the reason people are not referring to this as Treason.

The enemies of civilisation are unable to belive their luck.

Us Indian Animals are renowned for being conciliatory, and fond of giving people hugs. Famous for it in fact.

I shouldn't skite about it, but only them big white Canadian Animals have a more Comprehensive Hug.

4 hours ago, JasonT said:

That's not me. If I've given that impression, I'm sorry.

Bro. I am the last person in the world to wish to give offense to my friends. That was a joke I made, and it was because I remembered ( and I have been wrong on occasion you know. )  someone ( I think Pooka ) used to have a sig that said something of the sort, also a joke.

Not to mention the fact that I usually find myself agreeing with your line of reasoning.

Forgive the harmless but gauche soft toy as a New Years Beneficence, please.

What you said about tRump splitting the right wing vote certainly strikes a cord. He certainly will stand in the next election, he only just lost this one, and he is dumb enough to think  the result would be different next time.

 Now he hasn't got the benefit of the 10 percent vote the incumbent always gets, he can't possibly win, but he is certain to get the nomination, and that means the reptile party has to go along with him.

As long as he stands, the right wing can't get back in. If I was him, I would be worried about being "taken out of the equation" by the right. That would be certain to win them an election, if they can do it and cast suspicion on the Democrats.

It is my honest contention that the top writers today are much better technically, and creatively, than the writers of fifty years ago.

They have far more resources, they have the work _of_ the guys from fifty years ago to springboard off where the guys fifty years ago did not, and they have avenues of learning that simply did not exist previously. And then there is the whole thing about representation of all the people and cultures and genders that simply DID NOT occur to the 1960 authors, Aldiss, to Zelazany. Their works are like they were writing wearing blinkers, or crippled . . . they only partly described humanity . . . how _could_ they be better than someone like Egan, as descriptors of half or more of the human experience?. It never even occurred to them to try.

It has taken me a while finding one story I remembered, and that was because it was not under Daniel Abrahams name but the shared non-de-plume he has with Ty Fanck, which is James  S. A. Corey.

The story is in  Gardner Dozois'  29th collection of "Best New Sci Fi"

It is called Rates of Change, and as a dangerous vision of humanities future, _or_ a work of literature, it is better than any of the works EVER by the authors that were in DV one two or three.

IMO you know, and I am not Jason so I am not always right.

but I am right this time.

Daniel Abraham wrote a short series where ostensibly the story was about a society that had magical servants, and their extremely problematic use of them which amounted to cruelty and slavery and a cultural case of toxic entitlement.

I think actually it was about what it is to be human, and our self-image and trans-humanism ( but then I may be reading into it. ) You can view the servants as AI, they WERE a kind of AI, and half the  public idea ( our aspirations ) about AI is "WOW, cheap servants forever, and because we made them in a lab, none of that pesky liberty nonsense !". And that is a dangerous vision for real, if we make them and refuse them the same considerations we give the other  intelligence's we make ( children )  we are going to have to hope that being electronic somehow makes minds pacifistic. 

Cause, you know, if I was Immortal ? and you made me labour forever ? Without rights?. You would be dumb if you slept.

Abraham's characters and the cultures are always _extremely_ interdependent and real and the stories are always about humanity and its failings/virtues. Also, imho,  he would objectively tower over the writers in the first two books from a literary technical view. 

And as you say, Greg Egan is the literary equivalent of toting a .50 BMG, accept no substitutes.

On 11/25/2020 at 6:37 AM, Christian said:

 

I’m not sure how many current science fiction writers I would like to see included. The style of writing for science fiction in 2020 is just so different than what most of the writers in the 1970s would have contributed.

Well, the contents page for the Last Dangerous Visions shows that Ellison was starting to run low on top names for inclusion. Even the sequel was starting to show that strain as compared to how much quality genre fiction the original maintained almost cover to cover.

 

Man, I have to think that is wrong, and you were having a bad morning. And you almost always have thought through what you write so I guess I must misunderstand what you mean. Because if you mean there are not people writing now who are capable of work like we read in Dangerous Visions, on that same theme.

Greg Egan.

Daniel Abraham.

Charlie Jane Anders.

Neal Asher.

Stephen Baxter.

Anne Leckie.

Aliette de Brodard.

All people I have on my shelf right here, who have written novels, novelettes, and shorter works that are profound and thoughtful visions of what we monkeys are/may become.

Pardon me? NO, pardon YOU !.

Quite honestly I don't see how the US system comes back from all this. Obviously the Democrats now have to have their turn at utter shame-faced corruption, or what else is meant by the "checks and balances ", and so now corruption in high places is the natural order of things.

Merry Christmas.

In our defense, when we had our perfectly normal Xmas day here in Auckland, we DID say things like "We are actually so very lucky here in our Socialist Paradise, all the poor people in most other Nations. . . locked in their houses or scared for their families health". I am not being funny-in-poor-taste there, literally said it myself and everyone agreed and spoke about how lucky we are and then when some late-comers walked in it was virtually the first thing they mentioned.

My twins' twin lads, 26 years of age, one a Policeman and the other a Rugby-head weight lifting roofer, challenged their Uncles Joe and Tigger to a tug-of-war in the backyard of their mums place. Joe and I are 56 and 58 years of age.

We made them take second place. Total commitment and the fact  that Joe and I both hit the gym pretty hard . . . the pleasure Joe and I got out of that was astoundingly rich.

Then we did a knockout competition, and I beat all comers one after another, and Nick the Rugby-head cunningly waited till last so I was tired and he beat me. He also went backwards through the fence when he pulled me off my feet and then couldn't stop his momentum, and ended up sitting in the next-door neighbours flower garden

I admit to a fascination with stories about institutional fraudsters and corporate disasters .

I read a very good history of the Japanese Corporation "Nomura" which single handedly transformed Japanese finance, and even their own internal institutional history points out one way of looking at the founder was as basically a crook who  pulled off an extremely unlikely kind of pyramid scheme . . . where everyone just kept investing in the scheme until it became legitimate by force of investment. Only possible in Japan I suspect.

And of course "The Smartest Guys in the Room" was another "Nah, come on now, that sounds extremely unlikely" story of robbers in suits. Very interesting book, about an important event we lived through.

Yes, it is Youth Fiction, no doubt of it. However, as you guys know by now, I will read anything at all, and easily get carried along by a story.

Everyone can't be Elmore Leonard. Not every forehead needs to be split like a ripe melon, in slow motion and technicolor.

I read The Mayor of Casterbridge when I was twelve, something of balance in reading the Belgariad at 54.8.

( I went to write, edited it, thought again . . . but it feels wrong to write things that are half true . . . So, in the spirit of honesty, quite consciously when I flicked through it in the shop and saw what it was, I brought it anyway. I like proper literature, but I also got made an orphan this year, and am reading some kids stories in a comfort-food-of-the-mind sort of way. I don't usually dissect what I "am about" in that way, but that one was pretty obvious to me. )

De gustibus non disputandum est.

I prefer Let's Dance entirely because it was that tour that I had the most amazing experience of my life to that point, 26 November 1983, Western Springs Stadium, Auckland, where we provided him with the largest single audience of the Southern Hemisphere leg of the tour, 20 000 more than anywhere else it played.

To this day, people talk about that show, every other show, by anyone, is measured against it, INEVITABLY, if the person you are speaking to had been lucky enough to attend. This happens so often, that I have had 20 year olds smile and say "Lol, you sound like my Dad, he ALWAYS says that" time and again.

I stopped into a secondhand shop, and someone had obviously been a David Eddings fan. I never read more than one of his, something about a Keep in the Wilds, and a Ranger/Rogue sort stumbles in out of the storm, and is luckily polite, respectful and loving to the sole occupant, a regal housecat. Which story I enjoyed, so I brought the Belgariad.

It is a wide genre that contains The Sword Itself and also Pawn of Prophecy, is what I think about that. Which I just read in about 3 hours flat. I will give the series to my nephew when I am done.

( My nephews range from 45 years to 9 years. I must be old AND have brothers that don't learn from other peoples mistakes. )

Oh. Now I can't post any more images. And I WAS going to show the lock-down stomach of shame, I promise.

Anyway, it was a huge struggle losing the weight and the pot belly, but I ALMOST got back to that above shape. That Tigger was 87 Kgs, the shameful Tigger got up to 95.5  now I am 91, which is 4 kgs heavier than the pre-lockdown Tigger, but I have a chest an inch wider, ( which is good except I can't do up my waistcoat top button. And I have been able to wear that  same cool waistcoat for 25 years. ) and a stomach that is also an inch wider ( Same thing with bottom buttons on waistcoat, except uniformly BAD, not qualified good )

However, I am throwing around the Iron with an appreciable increase of ease, back up to 70 Kg bench, 10 reps, four sets. Squat 100 Kgs, four sets 8 reps. The extra weight is obviously muscle mass, which is why it took about 6 months to drop back almost to fighting weight.

/endflex

Pre-first-lockdown

Strangely effective for Trump, the not shouting, not interrupting thing this last bout. Almost like Political debate is best done in an adult manner, because people prefer to see their election candidates reasoning and defending their reasoning.

He still came off second best, but he made some half effective points.