Category: Uncategorized

Yikes

Everyone has been wondering where the anticipated inflation is.  The answer, it appears, is in Chinese bank assets.

Go to Zerohedge to read the whole thing.  But the key bit is this: “In the past five years the total assets on US bank books have risen by a paltry $2.1 trillion while over the same period, Chinese bank assets have exploded by an unprecedented $15.4 trillion hitting a gargantuan CNY147 trillion or an epic $24 trillion – some two and a half times the GDP of China!

 Putting the rate of change in perspective, while the Fed was actively pumping $85 billion per month into US banks for a total of $1 trillion each year, in just the trailing 12 months ended September 30, Chinese bank assets grew by a mind-blowing $3.6 trillion!“

This is going to end well. Real well. And here I thought things were bad just looking at the USA, Europe, and Japan.

Paying to give them money

This is a fascinating example of the potential consequences of American bank depositors failing to understand what their bank deposits are:

Leading US banks have warned that they could start charging companies and consumers for deposits if the US Federal Reserve cuts the interest it pays on bank reserves. Depositors already have to cope with near-zero interest rates, but paying just to leave money in the bank would be highly unusual and unwelcome for companies and households.

This is akin to the credit card company paying you for the privilege of borrowing their money. It should also eliminate any last vestige of belief in the idea that the Federal Reserve, the Congress, or the banks have any capacity for putting either the economy or the American people before their own short-term pecuniary interests.

Just to make it clear, your bank deposit is a loan you make to the bank. It is an unsecured loan that the bank can utilize in any way it pleases, and since it is unsecured, if the bank happens to lose the money by making bad investments or spending it on cocaine and expensive hookers, you have no legal recourse. This is why John Corzine is not only not in jail, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime; he didn’t commit one.

It’s not stealing if you’re dumb enough to give them the money in return for an unsecured promise to pay it back so long as you ask for it before they don’t have it on hand.

And note that this is bank industry opposition to a rate cut, not the much-feared rate increase.

John Scalzi is a “bourgeois pudding”

Inverarity considers the wisdom of boycotting authors of whom one disapproves:

Case in point: many of you are probably aware of the infamous “feud” that’s been going for a couple of years now between John Scalzi and Theodore Beale, aka “Vox Day.” John Scalzi is the bourgeois pudding of SF – nice, inoffensive, always triangulating for the “rational middle” of a political argument, writes decent if unexciting sci-fi.

Vox Day is… well, indescribable. Though there is a gulf between what he’s been accused of saying and what he has actually said, he’s way, way out there, and if he doesn’t make your head explode, his commenters will. Orson Scott Card and John C. Wright are mild gentlemen of moderate views compared to VD.

VD has written several novels, largely self-published. I am sure the thought of contributing money to him, or even adding to his download count, fills many with reflexive horror. But I am filled with a certain perverse curiosity (and a bit of defiance after the ridiculous spectacle of the SFWA booting him from the organization), and I downloaded a few of his novellas when they were available for free on Amazon. (Reviews forthcoming. If I ever get around to them.)

Would I pay money for one of his books? Probably not. Do I think I have an obligation to not support him in any way, shape or form by reading, downloading, reviewing, or giving him publicity? That is where I get off the Right-Thinking People Train.

This is a reasonable perspective and it is unfortunate that it is no longer the norm in the professional writing community. It’s also hard to disagree with the gentleman’s characterization of Mr. Scalzi’s fiction, although he omitted the phrase “derivative”, which is absolutely necessary to describe the genre’s great rip-off artist. In fact, I am given to understand that the award-winning McRapey is very nearly done with a new novel, which makes one wonder what the subject matter will be:

While I can’t disagree with Inverarity’s assertion of my immoderate views, I do have to correct the erroneous characterization of my novels as “largely self-published”.  [This has now been corrected – VD] While I do intend to “self-publish” through First Sword, precisely none of my books to date are self-published. It would certainly surprise Simon & Schuster to learn that they belong to me and I have no interest in Marcher Lord Press beyond the fact that I am one of their authors. The fact that I have been permitted a considerable amount of leeway by publishers from Pocket Books to Marcher Lord is of no more significance than the fact that Stephen King is similarly afforded a great deal of independence by his publishers.

I’m not one of the leading authors of SF/F… but my publishers, past and present, aren’t the only ones in the industry who harbor the suspicions I have the potential to become one. That probably wouldn’t have been possible under the old system, but now the gatekeepers are crumbling….

I tend to agree with Inverarity concerning the foolishness of limiting your reading to those with whom you agree, or at least do not disagree too greatly. Among other things, a refusal to familiarize myself with Marxism and the correct terminology utilized in two of its forms would have simplified the plot of QUANTUM MORTIS and severely crippled one character who is portrayed as neither a villain nor a cardboard cutout. That being said, I do think it is important to recognize that there is a cultural war being waged, that the Left is the only one actually fighting it, and the people of the Right will not see its views respected, much less held up in an exemplary manner, if it continues to support the artists seeking to destroy it at the expense of the artists seeking to uphold them.

I neither expect nor require support from the other side. I expect to be attacked, belittled, ignored, and lied about. I have been reliably informed by a recent SF convention-goer that I am the most-hated author in science fiction today. Good! Whether I am wrong or whether I am right, I am simply exercising my right to speak what I perceive to be the undeniable and demonstrable truth. If those who are openly attempting to spread lies and left-wing propaganda disapprove of me, I suggest that merely shows there is some substance, or at the very least, some rhetorical plausibility to what I am saying.  For years, they said I was irrelevant. Then they said I was ridiculous. Now they say I am too extreme and dangerous… and I’m sure every reader here is well-aware of Gandhi’s Progression.

I hope those of you on the Right who are interested in the genre will continue to support the efforts of me and other writers of the Right. Try Kratman. Try Correia. Try Wright. Try Walker and Williamson. If you haven’t yet, try Card. Preorder QUANTUM MORTIS as a Christmas gift and get the ebook free for yourself. I am confident most of you will not be disappointed, particularly if John Scalzi is your idea of “decent if unexciting sci-fi”. And I also hope those of you on the Left will consider extending the same courtesy to us that we have extended to you for decades, and judge our work on the basis of its merits and its demerits rather than the ideological views of the writer.

After all, do you really think your support for abortion, feminism, multiculturalism, and global dictatorship by a technocratic UN is any less offensive to me than my views are to you? In summary, I don’t avoid reading any author due to his views; I would quite happily read McRapey’s novels if they weren’t tedious works of derivative mediocrity. The Android’s Dream and Ghost Brigades were enough to cause me to lose interest in them years before the so-called feud began.

In any event, I am happy to offer Inverarity copies of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted and QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills. If he is interested, I would be happy to send him the pair of ebooks so as to save his conscience the burden of inadvertently supporting me financially. And who knows, perhaps he might even find it to be indecent, but exciting SF.

As a bonus, the link features our favorite literary troll, Andrew Marston of the New England Wildlife Center, attacking Larry Correia, Tom Kratman, and Dan Simmons in the comments.

Mailvox: an evolutionist response to Fred

An anonymous response to Fred’s long piece concerning his skeptical perspective on evolution by natural selection:

First let me say that while I do believe life on earth has evolved over a large period of time, I am not a militant supporter of TENS. Thus, I read the piece you linked to about evolution written by the gentleman Fred.

In summary, he appears to believe humans and other creatures are too complex to have – and here he repeats a sentiment that I can only assume stems from true ignorance or willful ignorance – “arisen by accident.”

Furthermore, he states something like “it would be easier for me to believe that a 747 assembled itself.” Again, a statement like that implies ignorance at best and use of a strawman at worst.

I’ll assume he is making the common mistake of confusing machines and organisms (life). While life and machines appear to be very similar, they are very different.

Organisms are complex systems which independently adapt and change over time. On the other hand, machines are systems designed and assembled by an intelligent being to accomplish a task. They (currently) lack the ability to independently adapt and change over time. (Is it possible that DNA and RNA were machines that were designed by an intelligence and loosed on Earth? Perhaps.)

So while both possess complexity, a human and a 747 are categorically different. A better comparison might be between a human and a city such as London or New York.

Like a human, a city is a mindbogglingly complex system (made up of millions of smaller, complex systems) capable of adapting and changing independently over time. And like a human, a city didn’t just pop into being one day. One can ascertain this by studying the city and discovering that buildings are built on top of roads that were built on top of canals that were dug through ancient farm land that was cleared from forests by farmers. Farmers that were merely being farmers and had no intention of building a city.

No one person (unit) did or could have conceived of and built the current cities of London or New York, as is, from scratch. More importantly, the “evidence” indicates they weren’t built as is from scratch, but rather “assembled themselves” gradually, and in many ways messily, over time. Furthermore, it would be absurd to claim that New York arose and evolved into its current form “by accident.”

Likewise, a human appears to be a complex system made up of billions of smaller, complex units, each of which is quietly going about its business with no awareness of the bigger – or future – picture of which it is apart, much like the New York farmers.

Could a theoretical super intelligence have built a human, as is, from scratch? Sure, just as one could have built New York or London, as is, from scratch. The evidence, in my opinion, indicates otherwise.

This is an unusual defense of TENS. It is also ineffective because it utilizes an example that is undeniably the product of intelligent design in an attempt to refute the concept of intelligent design. As it happens, one need only read a little about Christopher Wren to understand that the current city of London was, in fact, the result of not only intelligent design, but purposeful design.

The emailer makes two mistakes here. The first is his confusion of two distinct concepts, intelligent design and purposeful design. While there was never a single complete master design for London, and the current city is the unpredictable result of millions of different decisions, there was still intelligence behind every single decision. While the overall result was not designed, every element that comprises it was. I recognize that the emailer was only intending this as an analogical example of the concept of emergent design, not as a literal counterexample, but it is still misleading.

The second, and more important mistake is the claim that Fred is ignorant in pointing out that evolutionary theory requires the assembly of living beings by accident. While Richard Dawkins has convinced many superficial science fetishists that “natural selection is the exact opposite of random”, this is obviously and entirely false because the vast quantity of mutations upon which natural selection repeatedly relies are, insofar as anyone can tell, random.

Many people, both those who subscribe to the theory evolution and those who reject it, appear to be under the false impression that evolution happens in response to environmental pressure. But this is not the case; the famous Leiderberg experiment demonstrated that the mutations precede the exposure to the environment that causes the selection process to take place.

From “Understanding Evolution” at UC-Berkeley: “Mutations are random. Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but
mutations do not “try” to supply what the organism “needs.” Factors in
the environment may influence the rate of mutation but are not generally
thought to influence the direction of mutation. For example, exposure
to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause
more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In
this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.”

So, given that the causal factor is random, Fred is entirely correct to say the subsequent process is accidental. It cannot be anything else.

VFPL Week 11

97 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-2)
67 Bane Sidhe (6-5)

58 Fromundah Cheezheads (8-3)
49 Boot Hill Hangmen (3-8)

92 RR Redbeards (7-4)
71 Mounds View Meerkats (4-7)

75 Suburban Churchians (5-6)
43 Bailout Banksters (5-6)

90 Bradford Gamma Rays (4-7)
49 Mercury Marauders (4-7)

This is shaping up to be the least interesting Vikings-Packers game in ages. Two teams and no real quarterbacks between them. It may be time to consider running the single-wing.

Lions Den VII: Kiti Lappi

In addition to providing attention to standout authors who are already established writers, it has always been my objective for Lions Den to give a modicum of exposure to independent authors, particularly those who read this blog and are willing to avail themselves of the chance to have their books criticized by impartial reviewers.  So, I’d encourage you to get involved in reviewing the new authors as well, and to be very blunt and forthright with your criticism so they can learn how to improve their writing. Don’t be cruel or seek to provide amusement at their expense, nor handle them with kid gloves to spare their feelings. And whether you are praising them or slamming them, also show them an amount of respect for being willing to take the heat in a public manner.

Thanks, we now have the requisite three reviewers for Escape From Tekmar.

First, I want to thank Vox for giving me this opportunity. Maybe it’s an
opportunity to hang myself, who knows, but I’m grateful anyway.

Maybe
I ought to tell a bit about myself first. I’m, in some ways, pretty
much like one of the caricatures for a liberal woman – fat middle aged
nerdy spinster who keeps cats and never found a man to have children
with, and people usually seem to automatically put me in that box,
somebody who donates to Greenpeace and marches for gay rights (okay,
that I might do if it was in support of, say, Iranian gays). But I’d
prefer being free even if I’m not quite sure whether I would be able to
handle it, I haven’t done exactly well with my life as things are (I
have lived my whole life in Finland. This country tilts pretty far left,
and I have to admit I don’t know what actual freedom might be like. We
are either somewhat coddled or somewhat smothered here, take your pick.
Or maybe take both.).

I enjoy creating stories, it’s something I
have been doing my whole life, so whether I can turn writing into a
source of income or not doesn’t really matter that much
on one level, I will keep on writing anyway. But when I finally caught
on about the ebook revolution it made sense to see if they might even
sell. On the other hand, if I am good enough that I might get where I
could live on it, especially if it might turn into something I could
make a good enough a living with that I’d be able to move somewhere with
more sun, well, time (seasonal affective disorder, I belong to the
small percentage who does get it bad so I could definitely use more sun,
problem with moving: SAD also derailed all my attempts to study when I
was younger, and while young manual laborers can get work aging ones are
not in great demand anywhere).

I am somewhat past 50 already,
and it would really suck if I actually happened to be good enough to
become popular only for that to happen around the time when I need a
wheelchair to go around. So in spite of being a coward I figured it
might be time to start taking some chances in hopes I
might speed things up a bit. Including this one.

I know this
may have been an idiotic thing to do since I don’t know, not really, how
well I write, and the end result could be getting this novel
eviscerated. The eviscerations I have read on Vox’s blog have been
enjoyable but I guess I would not like having one of my stories being
the subject of one. But the one thing I’m sure of is that I will not
have any success with anything which would require a sustained effort
throughout the year. Not this far north. Believe me, I have tried. And I
hate the idea of spending my entire life as a total loser. So what the
hell, might as well try. I don’t have that much to lose. Some pride,
maybe, but not much else.

The novel is a pretty simple story, an
adventure in which a young man finds himself solely responsible for
something important for the first time in his life. There is a girl who
is perhaps not telling him everything, and a world which is not
very nice.

I have had these characters for a long time, and
have some half planned stories of when the main character in this is a
full adult, but I felt I wanted to start with a few of how he became
that man. As said, no real idea of the quality, during the last weeks I
have gone from ‘ohmygod it’s awful’ to ‘hey, it’s pretty good’ and back
already. Can be damn hard to judge your own work.

It’s science
fiction, but more of the space opera kind, meaning what ‘science’ there
may be is at best rather fluffy. But we do have starships, colony worlds
which have been created by terraforming, and genetically engineered
humans, so I guess the genre is science fiction.

This is the
first time I have dared to try a male main protagonist. I have written
two novels with female main characters before (they can be found on
Amazon if you look for Kiti Lappi in Kindle books, along with a few
short stories). Frankly, I’m not sure how well I get
men, while I have worked in a mostly male work environments and have
had a couple of friends I have never had any really close ones in my
life.

Breaking expectations is one thing I like as a reader, so I
have attempted to do that a bit with the universe of this story, if not
so much with the plot or the characters. No idea if I have succeeded,
especially since this is just a first small slice of something bigger. I
have every intention of exploring this universe more.

Well, if
you read the story and think I’m the next coming of Bulwer-Lytton just
go ahead and say so, if I am I need to know (should perhaps adjust my
strategy of how to try selling my stories). But if so I would of course
appreciate if you say it politely, after all I’m not claiming to be
anything I’m not. But it won’t make me stop writing, telling stories is a
compulsion I have never been able to get rid of (I have tried). And
besides, you’ll never know. After all, good old
Bulwer-Lytton was a bestseller once. 

Just a few bad apples

We hear that all the time from friends and family of the police. It’s simply not true. Even the officers who, outside their job, seem to be decent men, are wholly corrupted by the system. If they were genuinely good men they would not consent to look the other way, they would be whistleblowers and they would already be fired. And the police are not only corrupt, they are unaccountable.

They do not even pretend to hold their “brother officers” to the same standard they violently hold everyone else. That’s as true of murder as it is of speeding:

At 11:25 p.m., the three St. Johns County officers arrived at 4700 Sherlock Place, a one-story suburban house in this historic seaside community. A young deputy, Jonathan Hawley, was already there. “Oh my God,” he cried, seeing a young woman he knew lying on the bedroom floor, an inert, bloody mess.

Michelle O’Connell, 24, the doting mother of a 4-year-old girl, was dying from a gunshot in the mouth. Next to her was a semiautomatic pistol that belonged to her boyfriend, Jeremy Banks, a deputy sheriff for St. Johns County. A second bullet had burrowed into the carpet by her right arm.

Ms. Maynard quickly escorted Mr. Banks, who had been drinking, out of the house. “All of a sudden he started growling like an animal,” she said. With his fists, Mr. Banks pounded dents in a police car.

“I grabbed him and tuned him up,” another deputy, Wesley Grizzard, recalled. “I told him, I don’t care if you’re intoxicated or not, you better sober up.”

Within minutes of the shooting on Sept. 2, 2010, Mr. Banks’s friends, family and even off-duty colleagues began showing up, offering hugs and moral support. He huddled with his stepfather, a deputy sheriff in another county, before a detective interviewed him in a police car.

With his off-duty sergeant listening from the front seat, Mr. Banks gave this account: Ms. O’Connell had broken up with him and was packing to move out when she shot herself with his service weapon. He said he had been in another room.

Ms. O’Connell’s family, immediately suspicious, received a starkly different reception from the authorities. Less than two hours before she died, Ms. O’Connell had texted her sister, who was watching her daughter: “I’ll be there soon.” Yet when her outraged brother tried to visit the scene, officers blocked his way. The family’s request for an independent investigation was rebuffed, as was one sister’s attempt to tell the police that in the months before she died, Ms. O’Connell said she had been subjected to domestic abuse by Mr. Banks.

Before the sun rose the next morning over this place that calls itself “the nation’s oldest city,” the sheriff’s investigation was all but over.

Note that the corruption runs so deep that even the brother of the murdered young woman has ultimately sided with the department. But it is a huge mistake for the police to try to put themselves above the criminal justice system, because all it means is that everyone now knows that there is absolutely no point in turning to the police-corrupted system in search of justice.

By refusing to police their own and refusing to hold their own criminals accountable, the police have very stupidly painted a target on all their chests for the rest of the civilian population. I would not be at all surprised to see an increasing number of attacks on the police and on their families by those whose families are the victims of police crimes; I suspect the shootings in California and Colorado were a harbinger of future crimes to come.

It’s fitting, I suppose. What kind of declining empire would America be without corrupt and venal police forces?

Mailvox: a more reasonable vaccine schedule

CM asks what is a more reasonable vaccine schedule than the current US one:

I have followed your blog for quite some time now and have come to really value your opinion on a wide variety of topics. I recently had my first child and my wife and I have already resolved to home school (largely because we looked into a lot of the information that you discussed on your blog). I want to know what in your opinion would be the ideal alternative vaccine schedule.

The first thing is to understand that many European and Asian doctors think the US schedule is insane. Don’t be moved by the rhetorical appeals to the US medical industry; remember the same people are also telling you to fill up on carbohydrates and fructose to lose weight. The second thing is to realize that your primary responsibility is to your children, not to the collective. If something is better for your child than for the community, then you put your child first.

That’s called being a good parent.

Of course, if you are genuinely more concerned about the community, then go ahead and get yourself sterilized. Because global warming or whatever.

Anyhow, in my opinion, no vaccinations need be given until the child is walking. Then the tetanus vaccine is a good idea since tetanus can’t be treated. Polio is probably the next concern, given its seriousness, and should be addressed some time before the child is likely to come into regular contact with large quantities of people.  If you’re homeschooling, this probably means sometime between the ages of three and five.

Due to the potential risk of blindness and the way immigrants and travelers have been spreading it around so freely, measles is probably a good idea around the age of school, so sometime between five and seven. I would recommend a measles-specific vaccine and not MMR; mumps and rubella are much less serious diseases and the rubella vaccine is, as far as I can tell, completely worthless.

Not only is the disease less serious, but I know of several women who have been repeatedly vaccinated for it and still show no evidence of antibodies, hence the repeated vaccinations. If you don’t have pregnant women or infants around, whooping cough is probably not an issue, although it is a real bitch if your children get it. But if you can’t keep your kids home for two to three weeks straight without a problem, then you should probably seriously consider the vaccination around the age of seven.

Vaccines for chicken pox and other non-fatal diseases are a joke. Forget potential reactions, merely driving to the doctor’s office puts your children more at risk than the disease does.  The point is not to avoid all vaccinations entirely, but rather, avoid overloading the very young child’s system. I know vets who refuse to give dogs more than one vaccine at a time due to the negative effects they have observed over the years, so the idea that the current US vaccine schedule can’t possibly be harming children is ludicrous on its face.

As for the inevitable appeals to science, I will merely point out that no science – ZERO – has been done concerning the safety of the current US vaccine schedule. If anyone wishes to dispute that, I invite them to provide everyone here with a link to the published paper. And as for the appeals to the greater good of the collective, I first note that I’ve never been much moved by Leninist arguments, and second, observe that one could just as easily justify murderously culling the immigrant population on that basis.

Saving Science Fiction part 2

John C. Wright continues his series on saving science fiction from the barbaric scourge of Strong Female Characters:

What has the attempt to produce strong female characters produced?

On the one hand, I would be the first to say that the Miyasaki characters Nausicaa and Kushinada, the heroine and the villainess respectively of VALLEY OF THE WIND are the exemplar of perfectly strong and perfectly feminine women. Being in leadership roles does not strike me as unfeminine, not when we are dealing with princesses and war leaders. Nonetheless, the particular masculine characteristic of touchy pride, the desire to slit throats, machismo, vulgarity, roguishness, and the other one-dimensional stereotype writers who don’t know any real men use when trying to make their females more masculine are utterly absent.

Again, throughout the film (and manga) Nausicaa shows more concern for
the suffering of enemies, including horrid insect monsters and
radioactive biotech god-soldiers, than a man would. Her attitude toward
war is hardly the same as that of a Lancelot or Achilles….

I am calling such behavior feminine because I hold that femininity is more concerned with the doer than with the deed. Masculine approach is to be businesslike and curt, and not concerned with your emotions, only with our performance. This approach is useful both on the battlefield and in the marketplace. It is results oriented. It is concerned with duty, outward actions, not with inner motives.

Typical masculine thinking: I do not care why you salute just as long as you do salute. You are not saluting the man, you are saluting the uniform. It is impersonal.

The feminine approach, since females are biologically more suited to bearing and nursing children than males, and since females are given the infinitely important task of domesticating the male barbarian of her husband as well as taming and training the children, must be more concerned with the doer than the deed, because the women must train the children to volunteer to do the right thing, so that as adults, when she is gone, they do the right thing. It is character oriented. This is the more useful approach in peacetime and in cooperative rather than competitive situations. It is not concerned with duty, but with inner motives.

Does anyone serious, honestly think that a goals-oriented approach is always superior to the personality-oriented approach? Does anyone seriously think that we can treat squadmates like children or children like squadmates?

This part is considerably less coherent than the previous one, and I think the tangent into Catholic family-planning was ill-considered, but in addition to underlining the important distinction between the masculine and feminine approaches, Wright manages to successfully demonstrate that the more things have changed with regards to Strong Female Characters in the media, the more they have stayed the same.

Rules of Writing VI: nothing is better than cheap tricks

 6. Thou shalt not substitute mundane action for genuine character development.

This rule is as true of writing as it is of prostitution. Only when an author indulges in cheap character tricks, he is merely compromising his novel rather than his immune system.

What sort of cheap character tricks am I talking about here? What is “mundane action”? The easiest example to point out is the most commonly seen one, which is activity related to food. I don’t know the exact point at which it began to infest literature and film alike, but it seems as if there must have been an influential writer’s workshop somewhere that convinced a number of writers that showing their characters engaged in pedestrian tasks, particularly eating, was necessary for quality character development. It has become as de rigueur these days as the single sex scene in which the beautiful, large-breasted redhead inexplicably seduced the unsuspecting scientist was in 1980s SF.

(It would be interesting to research what percentage of female characters in 1980s science fiction are redheads, have improbably large breasts for their frame, or have sex with scientists.  My guess is 50 percent, 75 percent, and 85 percent.)

Gone are the good old days of classic SF when the only mention of food in the manly hero’s mind was when he absent-mindedly popped the Nutra-100 pill that provided him with all the sustenance he required for the length of his desperate rocketship battle against the dastardly villains on Bursalon IX.  Now we are treated to page after page of people going to restaurants, sitting at the table and engaging in trivial banter; every other character in the movies seems to be either munching on an apple or mumbling dialogue while spraying a mouthful of crumbs.

It is strange that they are so seldom seen with their hand in a big bag of Doritos, is it not? Perhaps some things strike a little too close to home.

The idea of portraying the act of eating, as far as I can tell, is to provide character depth by portraying their lives more fully. We can be grateful, I suppose, that this practice has not often been extended to include the copious time spent sleeping or on the toilet, despite the same logic applying equally well to either activity.

But whether this cheap and pedestrian device is the result of workshops or simply more female writers bringing conventional female interests to the fore, the point is that it seldom effectively serves the purpose it is apparently supposed to serve. While the food fixation does work for some authors, such as George R.R. Martin, whose feasts were the most interesting part of his recent crime against his own series, it should be kept in mind that Martin is a fat man who has an unusually strong interest in food. If you’re a fat bastard who daydreams about his next meal while still engaged in the current one, fine, devote 10 percent of your page count to meals. It may well work for you.

But just as people who don’t know anything about guns shouldn’t attempt to imitate Larry Corriea’s lovingly precise descriptions of projectile firearms, people who aren’t singularly obsessed with food shouldn’t try to make the cuisine an intrinsic part of their world-building or their character development. The reason is that what is an effective, colorful aspect of the fictional world for the genuinely interested author becomes a thin and unconvincing waste of paragraphs, or even pages, that add nothing to the story.

Yes, people eat. They spend a fair amount of time doing that. But eating is not much more interesting than sleeping or urinating, so unless the food is poisoned, the urine is radioactive, or the sleep lasts for 100 years – thereby making it an element that is relevant to the plot – don’t fool yourself into thinking you are writing a deeper, more complete character sketch by showing that the character does, in fact, do what everyone already assumed he did.

The error is in focusing on showing what the character does instead of showing what the character does that is of probable interest to the reader. For example, if a character is big and muscular, then he likely engages in an activity that enables him to maintain his musculature. Perhaps he lifts weights at a gym. Perhaps he wrestles Tigurleon space crocodiles. In either case, simply showing him engaged in that activity isn’t enough, the activity should reveal something about his character. Does he clean up the weights afterwards or does he leave them strewn messily about? Does he express himself politely or with violence when someone is hogging the space crocodiles and makes him wait at the crocodile wrestling ranch? Is he careful in utilizing the proper safety equipment or does he promptly get in over his head and require embarrassing assistance?

These are character-revealing depths that are very difficult to explore when one begins with “Mmm, pizza sounds good! I sure hope you didn’t order anchovies. I hate anchovies!” No reader, in the entire history of literature, has ever cared whether a character prefers ketchup or mayonnaise on their fries. The preference says nothing about the character. And the sophisticated reader will recognize what you are doing and roll his eyes at your clumsy ineptitude.

You have a limited number of opportunities to portray your characters in their natural environments that are not integral to the plot. Make the most of them. And if you can’t be bothered to not only make it real, but make it real in a convincing and interesting manner, it’s better not to bother at all. It’s better to focus instead on the other elements of the book rather than half-assing the character development in a cliched and predictable manner.

Trivial preferences are not character development.