Category: Uncategorized

Rating the epic fantasies

After taking everyone’s opinions into account, I removed a few
series, added a few more, and came up with the following order. 
Underlining indicates an incomplete series, or at least one I deem insufficiently complete to conclusively judge, while italics indicates a series I have not personally
read.

  1. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
  2. The First Law, Abercrombie
  3. Malazan Book of the Fallen, Erikson
  4. A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin
  5. The Black Company, Cook
  6. Dragonlance, Weis & Hickman
  7. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Donaldson
  8. The Riftwar Saga, Feist
  9. The Long Price Quartet, Abraham
  10. The Demon Cycle, Brett  
  11. The Stormlight Archive, Sanderson 
  12. The Belgariad/The Mallorean, Eddings
  13. Codex Alera, Butcher
  14. The Prince of Nothing, Bakker
  15. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Williams
  16. The Deathgate Cycle, Weis and Hickman  
  17. The Wheel of Time, Jordan/Sanderson
  18. The Sword of Truth, Goodkind
  19. Shannara, Brooks 
  20. The Red Knight, Cameron

No doubt many will disagree with my opinions here, but they are
not arbitrary.  First, I’m judging the series as a whole.  One thing
I’ve noticed is a lot of series take a serious nosedive after a certain
point.  The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant would be number two on this
list if judged solely on the first two Chronicles, (six books). 
Bakker’s series would have cracked the top ten were it not for the
abysmal third book. And as crazy as it sounds, Martin could freefall if
he doesn’t turn it around in this next book; post Dance, the “American
Tolkien” already sounds silly.

I tend to suspect
Brandon Sanderson will move up and Peter Brett will move down.  Brett
started great, but his demon world is a boring hive mind and he never
got around to actually writing about eponymous Daylight War in the third
book.  I suspect that he may have fallen victim to Epic Author Disease
even faster than Jordan or Martin did.

There
are series that I love, that I consider much better than most of the
series on this list.  But they’re not epic, by which I mean I regard
them as books that on some level are doing something similar to what I’m
attempting to do.  The whole reason that I’ve been closely considering
the various epic fantasy series is to avoid the problems that have
plagued some of these series in the past.

It’s
too soon to judge ATOB, but good or bad, I can hope to keep improving. 
Some would even say there is considerable room for it….

Three landmark moments in pop

Several people have asked me to share my thoughts on the recent performances at the MTV music awards.  I have seven of them.

  1. Neither liked nor cared about Billy Ray Cyrus.
  2. Neither like nor care about his daughter.
  3. Michael Jackson’s televised moonwalk marked the beginning of the overt negrification of American pop culture.
  4. Madonna’s rolling around on stage in a wedding dress marked the beginning of the overt sexualization of American pop culture.
  5. Whatever it was that Miss Cyrus was doing the other night marks the moment at which those two forces, negrification and sexualization, combined to complete the enwiggification of American pop culture.
  6. Umberto Eco was correct in Apocalypse Postponed when he pointed out that “pop culture” is an oxymoron.  There is nothing cultural or civilized about pop; it is intrinsically anti-culture.
  7. Demographics is destiny. Don’t expect the plumbing to long outlive the melodies.

“When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.”
– Plato, Republic 

“The Battle of the Sexes” was fixed

This revelation makes the famous tennis match an apt metaphor for the intellectual and scientific fraud that is called “sexual equality”:

WHEN HAL SHAW heard the voices at the Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club in Tampa, Fla., on a winter night some 40 years ago, he turned off the bench light over his work table and locked the bag room door. He feared burglars. Who else would be approaching the pro shop long after midnight? Then Shaw, who was there late rushing to repair members’ golf clubs for the next day’s tournament, heard the pro shop’s front door unlock and swing open.

Peering through a diamond-shaped window, Shaw, then a 39-year-old assistant golf pro, watched four sharply dressed men stroll into the pro shop. He says he instantly recognized three of them: Frank Ragano, a Palma Ceia member and mob attorney whose wife took golf lessons from Shaw, and two others he knew from newspaper photographs — Santo Trafficante Jr., the Florida mob boss whom Ragano represented, and Carlos Marcello, the head of the New Orleans mob. Trafficante and Marcello, now deceased, were among the most infamous mafia leaders in America; Marcello would later confide to an FBI informant that he had ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A fourth man, whom Shaw says he didn’t recognize, joined them.

The Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club in Tampa, Fla., is where assistant golf pro Hal Shaw says he overheard mobsters planning a match fix nine months before “The Battle of the Sexes.” Courtesy Hal Shaw

Shaw’s workroom was about 20 feet from the men, who sat at a circular table. Through the window to the darkened bag room door, he could see them, but they couldn’t see him. Shaw says he was “petrified” as he tried to remain completely still, worrying that the men would find him lurking there. Then Shaw heard something he’d keep secret for the next 40 years: Bobby Riggs owed the gangsters more than $100,000 from lost sports bets, and he had a plan to pay it back.

Shaw, now 79, told the story of what he saw and heard that Tampa night to a friend late last year for the first time. This spring, he told it to “Outside the Lines.”

The men, Shaw says, used an array of nicknames for Riggs — “Riggsy,” “BB,” “Bobby Bolita.” Ragano told the men that “Riggsy” was prepared to “set up two matches … against the two best women players in the world,” Shaw says. “He mentioned Margaret Court — and it’s easy for me to remember that because one of my aunt’s names was Margaret so that, you know, wasn’t hard to remember — and the second lady was Billie Jean King.”

Ragano explained that Riggs “had the first match already in the works … and the second match he knew would follow because of Billie Jean King’s popularity and everything that it would be kind of a slam dunk to get her to play him bragging about beating Margaret Court,” Shaw says Ragano told the men. Shaw also says he heard Ragano mention an unidentified mob man in Chicago who would help engineer the proposed fix.

“Mr. Ragano was emphatic,” Shaw recalls. “Riggs had assured him that the fix would be in — he would beat Margaret Court and then he would go in the tank” against King, but Riggs pledged he’d “make it appear that it was on the up and up.”

Having played tennis at a very good school that won the state championship my senior year, (NB: I wasn’t part of that team, having switched from tennis to track the year before), I always assumed that Bobby Riggs loss to Billie Jean King was fake. I never imagined, however, that the whole situation was one big fix.  It never made any sense that the guy who crushed the world number one, a player who won twice as many Grand Slams as King, could somehow lose in straight sets to a lesser player no matter how “out of shape” he’d gotten in the intervening four months.

This should help you understand that equality isn’t merely a myth, it is a fraudulent myth that is pushed dishonestly by those with a vested material interest in it.

Facebook, free speech, and the FBI

Yes, American, you are now officially living in a police state possessed of an all-seeing eye the likes of which even the Soviets and East Germans never managed to achieve:

A
man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook,
he was being interrogated by police and the FBI. Blaine Cooper, 33,
contacted policestateusa.com with a concerning story about how his
sentiments posted on Facebook had drawn the attention of the federal
government.  He showed me the comment and told me that within 24-hours
of posting it, he was being contacted by the police and FBI.

His
colorful comment was in reference to what he believes is an “American
Police State,” in which the power of the federal government is growing
in a direction which may one day lead people to fight back.

Cooper,
who is training to be a wild land fire fighter, said that on August 23,
he was contacted by Officer Jason Kuafman of the Prescott Valley Police
Department and was told that he needed to come to the police station
for an interview with the FBI.

He complied with the
request for an interview, which lasted 45 minutes with federal agents
present.  He was released after apparently being determined to not be a
threat.

“They had every Facebook post I had ever made
in a huge file, along with all my wife’s information, and parent’s
information,” Cooper told policestateusa.com.

I
sometimes feel as if I should take requests from the federal agents
charged with monitoring this blog.  I mean, if I knew the usual guy was a
Jets fan or particularly into Asian women, I’d feel obliged to
occasionally surf through a few Jets sites or hit up Hot Asian Babes
every now and then. While I’m obviously opposed to the universal spying
system and I think it is the very definition of the sort of fragile
system that predictably ends in chaos and tears, the actual individuals
are basically the Internet equivalent of the late-night security guard.

What
is there to do?  Either go entirely dark or flood them with
information.  Those are your two options.  Nothing else is even remotely
viable.

Torturing vibrants

Good intentions or not, that’s what collegiate affirmative action does:

Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, than had they been enrolled in schools where their peers shared their level of academic preparation.

But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.

It’s really quite ugly.  I saw this sort of thing with regards to around one-third of my black teammates.  Some were perfectly qualified for the university’s academics and did well, others probably should have been somewhere that covered material at a slower pace.  But there were some who shouldn’t have been permitted within ten miles of the campus, as they had absolutely no business being there and it was immediately obvious to everyone who tried to help them.

“His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to
comprehend the readings for [College Writing] and think critically about
the text….. ‘He would revise his papers and each
time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper
would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he
thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have
command of.'”

There is nothing more obvious, or pathetic, than a five-cent mind attempting to make use of a fifty-cent word. The problem is that this sort of “assistance” will probably not be abandoned so long as the official mantra remains “education is the answer”.  The idea that many individuals are simply ineducable beyond certain levels is just too frightening to be contemplated by everyone who subscribes to the mantra.

VPFL 2013 managers

Here are the new VPFL 2013 participants.  With the exception of Waterboy, each manager was randomly selected.  Each manager, including Waterboy, was randomly assigned an existing team.

VP-AFL Champion: Waterboy: DC Hangmen
iridium190: Bailout Banksters
onefiver: Lunar City Gamma Rays
John in Highland Park: SEND EMAIL ASAP
Buddy E:  SEND EMAIL ASAP
Revan: Fromundah Cheezheads

If one of these managers is not able to respond within two days, Slamdunk is on deck.

Remember, new managers can EITHER change the City name or the Nickname.  Not both. I hope to be able to pick a draft date soon.

Gotcha

I was waiting for John Scalzi to finally react to my exposure of his significant exaggeration of his average daily blog readers.  As I half-expected he would, he waited until he had a big day, in this case courtesy of an article in the Guardian, then responded by putting out a misleading tweet that didn’t actually justify his false claim to have “50K daily blog readers”.

All the dudebros who adamantly maintain I don’t get 50K visitors a day are totally right. #HaHaHa  

He then posted this image, which based on the numbers appears to be WordPress statistics. One could, of course, dispute them based on the fact that there is nothing to indicate they are actual Whatever numbers, to say nothing the fact of one day is not evidence of the daily average. However, I happen to know they are correct, so I will not do so. Instead, I will simply show how they are being used in an intentionally misleading manner.

That #HaHaHa  cracked me up. The triumphant pose is simply Mr. Scalzi’s usual posturing and the tweet is nothing but blown cover as cover. Despite what the graphic implies, I am totally right and Mr. Scalzi knows it. He does not get 50k visitors a day except on very rare occasions. I previously pointed out that he has, on three occasions, (now four), gotten more than 50k visitors in a day thanks to external factors such as yesterday’s Guardian article. That was why I noted how, after first being exposed, he backed down and belatedly modified his claim to “up to 50k readers per day”.

So, for no particular reason at all, here is the actual traffic data for Whatever from January 1, 2009 to August 26, 2013, adjusted to reflect the metric chosen in his tweet. In the interest of being perfectly accurate, I’ve even included yesterday, his latest big day.  During that 56-month period, the number of daily readers/visitors to Whatever has averaged exactly 2,972, only 47,028 short of his 50k claim.  If we limit the time scale to 2013, that still only increases his daily blog readership to 4,085, the figure I previously cited. Even during his very best month, May 2012, he never came within 35,000 visitors of the 50,000 “readers a day” he claimed.

One of the things I found interesting about the Whatever statistics is that contra what one might assume, the engagement of the Whatever warren isn’t particularly high. His readers average fewer than six pageviews per visit; better than average but hardly spectacular.  And their engagement is observably declining, as it has dropped from 8.4 in early 2009 to 4.1 this month.  This can be seen by comparing the daily average pageviews over the same 4+ year period seen in the chart below with the previous chart.

As you can see, at no point have Mr. Scalzi’s daily pageviews even come within 20,000 of the 50,000 daily readers he claimed.  While he can legitimately claim “up to 50k readers per day” on the basis of occasional bumps from the mainstream media, to do so in the pretense that those outliers represent his normal daily traffic is not only absurd, it is presenting the statistics in a completely deceptive manner.

Now, I can’t speak for any other “dudebros”, but I do most certainly continue to maintain that John Scalzi is not only a dishonest and fraudulent self-promoter, he is a serial bullshit artist and he does not get 50,000 daily blog readers.  And if Mr. Scalzi wishes to publicly dispute these numbers rather than continuing to present misleading one-offs as wildly exaggerated indications of Whatever’s popularity, I absolutely invite him to do so.  Unlike him, I do not bluff.

As before, I encourage him to come clean and make his traffic transparent to the public, as do I and many other bloggers. All this continued obfuscation, exaggeration, and denial accomplishes is to make him look desperate as well as dishonest.  Given that his derivative writing career was largely dependent upon the successful pretense that he was the most popular blogger in SF/F, it’s fascinating to discover that the whole thing was nothing but a house of cards from the start.

John Scalzi is the Bernie Madoff of science fiction.

Lions Den III: Kate Paulk

Along with Dave Freer, Sarah Hoyt, and Chris McMahon, Kate Paulk is a member of the Mad Genius Club. She is also a Mensa-qualified history buff and her take on Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula, Impaler, is based on the actual historical figure and military leader, as opposed to the caped seducer. Please note that we now have our three volunteer reviewers.

Not Another Dracula Book

I get that a lot, since Impaler is – as the title suggests – about Vlad Dracula. Except, well… it’s not “another Dracula book”. For starters there’s the barest hint of a nod to the vampire legends, and for seconds, he’s the hero. Not anti-hero and not some PC navel gazing everyone is horrible and it’s all awful hero, either, he’s an honest to $DEITY$* actual hero in the old style. Also, because Impaler is alternate history, he wins.

Now that I’ve covered the plot in a nutshell (I really do describe the book to others this way. “Yes, it’s about Vlad the Impaler. He wins.” I think it might be the big grin when I say this that causes the faint of heart to edge away. That and the badge proclaiming “Dracula NEVER sparkled”), I should probably add a little more about what else makes Impaler not your typical Dracula book.

I hesitate to say that I researched the hell out of it, not least because any time I hear someone say that, the end result looks like the research came mostly out of the strange inner curves of their cranium rather than any actual library. I hope I got reasonably close to accurate, given that nobody has written “Everyday Life in Late Fifteenth Century Wallachia” – or if they have, they weren’t considerate enough to publish it in time for me to use it. A heck of a lot of architecture has vanished since then, too, so I spent hours chasing around for weird stuff like “What did Varna’s main gate look like in 1477?” (I didn’t find an answer to that one, so I guessed), “Where was Mehmed II in the winter of 1477/1478?” (Another guess – this one unfortunately essential to the plot), “What state were Constantinople’s walls in by early 1478?” (That one, I did get a more or less useful answer to).

From this the astute reader (meaning most of the folks here) might have guessed that a good chunk of Impaler is in the alternate side of history, and they’d be right. By the end of the first chapter Impaler is out of our timeline and into what might have happened if the man who was at one time regarded as the possible savior of Christendom had survived what was almost certainly an assassination attempt authored by Mehmed II (from a very safe distance – Vlad was the only person who ever scared Mehmed. Which in my opinion put Vlad on the right side of the line).

I started this because Vlad himself has intrigued me for years. Here was a man who was quite possibly the only hope his small nation had – someone with enough strength of will to challenge the noble class who had been going through Princes at the rate of one every couple of years on average (some of them with reigns so short any official portraits would have to be taken from their death mask), the determination to turn what would be called a failed state these days into a law-abiding nation (he succeeded), and the audacity to challenge the overwhelming power of the Ottoman Empire – which had been seen as unbeatable since the fall of Constantinople.

There were also the legends that suggested he inspired extraordinary loyalty, enough of them that there had to have been something there, particularly when some of these legends were authored by his enemies (of which he had many – not helped by Matthias Corvinus betraying him so he could use the crusade gold to ransom the crown of Hungary and forging “evidence” to that end – just like modern politics only with more blood), and the hints that the man behind the legends was strictly moral, determined, and had a vile semi-berserker temper that led him to fly into uncontrollable rages if something hit one of his triggers.

So I started to play with the question of what would Vlad have done if he had survived the assassination attempt. The rest of the book followed on from that.

The Wrong Guy Game

Given the inability of the low-IQ set to learn from the mistakes of others, it would appear that there are going to be more and more Trayvons and DeAndres as time goes on:

DeAndre was part of a pattern of hundreds of examples of black mob violence documented in more than 80 cities revealed in “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it.”

DeAndre knew The Knockout Game was usually pretty safe. For the attacker, that is. In Meriden, victims aren’t likely to carry concealed weapons. Nor do they fight back: As one player said in Philadelphia as his victim begged for mercy: “It’s not our fault you can’t fight.”

So when DeAndre and his gang of eight to 10 left the parking lot in a Meriden mall just a few weeks ago – soon after the park beat-down – he was confident little could go wrong when he told his friends he wanted to “beat someone up.”

They found their victim a few minutes later. Soon DeAndre and his confederate, Deshaun Jones, were peeling off from the group, heading for a guy walking home from work. Alone.

We don’t know his name or race or much else about him other than this: He was The Wrong Guy.

With their friends lurking less than 100 yards away, DeAndre and Deshaun attacked The Wrong Guy. Then came the surprise: The Wrong Guy fought back. He pulled a knife. Soon DeAndre was dead, and Deshaun was on his way to the emergency room.

Feral vibrants are cowardly pack animals, which is why they only attack in numbers.  But their Knockout Game, or Polar Bear Hunting, or whatever overly dramatic name the media gives the activity, suggests the possibility of the existence of another, even more dangerous sport: The Wrong Guy Game.  Now, it is quite likely that in this case, The Wrong Guy was simply an average white man walking home alone from work, not looking for any trouble, but prepared for it.

But I wonder. If one was a violent sociopath with sufficiently light skin to attract this sort of attention, what better way to legally unleash one’s less civilized instincts than to just happen to take the occasional stroll at night through a neighborhood where these sort of attacks are known to happen? If I was a parent of one of these “black angels”, I would point out to my little angel that with 8 million conceal-carry permits issued across America, there is close to a six percent chance that the seemingly helpless Polar Bear is more than capable of ripping your head off.

As Instapundit points out: “And if your teenager gets shot while carrying out this kind of assault? He
deserved it, and you’re a bad parent for not raising him better. Don’t
complain about the gun laws. Hide your face in shame.”

Mailvox: John Scalzi IS Stuart Smalley

He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and DOGGONE IT, people like him! An acquaintance emails me to wonder if McRapey has finally jumped the shark:

But, here’s the thing. I may be a dirty dirty feminist, but I’m also a
feminist with five acres of really awesome lawn, on which rests a
lovely, large house, in which I have lots of very cool things. I got the
lawn and house and things by being successful — that’s right! I am
financially successful through work! It’s not like, say, I’ve generally
failed at everything I’ve done and am living off remittances from
family. Nope, I worked for this stuff. Go me.

So, he’s denouncing white privilege?

I
am not saying that being a feminist is sufficient for having a
successful career, big house and a ridiculously large lawn that is the
size of a New York City block — but on the other hand it certainly
hasn’t hurt me in acquiring those things, has it.

So, white males have the privilege of doing things that are against the cultural norm, without hurting their privilege?

Or,
to put it another way, after some random dudebro has attempted to
insult me on the Internet by taking a photo of me in a dress that I’ve
already posted on my own site and slapping the word “feminist” on it,
all I have to go back to is a successful career, a loving family, a
circle of amazing friends and talented peers, and a social system whose
systematic biases favor me in nearly all cases as a well-off straight
white man. Even when I put on a dress.


So, he’s boasting of white male privilege now.  I DID say that would come out eventually.
I had no idea what my emailer was talking about, which turned out to be this post at Whatever.  And it appears that McRapey has the wrong idea about who produced the image that mocked him.

Over the weekend, some dudebro with a history of shitting on women took this picture of me (which you may remember from here) and meme-ized it, with the intent, given his personal history and predilections, of mocking me — both for my views as regards women, and for wearing a dress.

If McRapey happens to be referring to me or to Heartiste, he has it completely wrong.  Neither one of us had anything to do with producing or captioning his experiment in transgenderism.  Because he swims in a very small and self-selected pond, McRapey doesn’t seem to understand that he has literally become an Internet joke to many and my blog is only one of several better trafficked than Whatever that consider him to be a laughing matter.  As Heartiste puts it: “It’s telling that the triumvirate of Schwyzer, Manboobz and @scalzi are the best quasi-male tokens the feminist collective can claim.” And as much as I appreciate the descriptive phrase “scalzied manboob”, I can’t take any credit for it.

Calling anyone a feminist is a very serious insult.  As I have previously noted: calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Workers Party. Despite their many flaws, Fascism, National Socialism and Communism were all demonstrably more humane, more sustainable, more rational ideologies than feminism. Attempt to own the insult at your own risk.

He does it for you.

In answer to my emailer’s question, I don’t think McRapey has jumped the shark here. The feminist left has a very high tolerance for hypocrisy on behalf of those it sees as its male allies. See: Bill Clinton. McRapey’s primary problem is that he has never recovered from his Daddy abandoning him to be raised by a woman in poverty.  He’s constantly reminding himself, and everyone else, that he possesses the trappings of success because he feels like a fraud and a failure.  Which is understandable, because although he did find a surprising amount of success through his combination of hard work, stunt writing and relentless self-promotion, he is a fraud.

And that’s why his success will never be enough for him. I’ve seen his type numerous times on a much larger scale in both the game industry and in the tech industry. The car always has to be more exotic, the boat always has to be bigger, the lawn always has to be more expansive, and the readership always has to be 46,000 daily readers more than it is, because nothing is enough to erase that irrational fear of being found out.


That’s why I get under McRapey’s skin so easily and why he repeatedly announces that he doesn’t care, he’s henceforth ignoring me, and so forth, before launching yet another charity drive, attempting yet another surreptitious dig, or holding his breath and threatening to quit an organization if I am not expelled from it. Notice that someone else merely captions a photo and that is sufficient to provoke yet another Stuart Smalley outburst from the man.

And still some of you ask me why I continue to do this. Is it not self-evident?

On a tangential note, it is little surprising to hear that the liberal proponent of gun control has acquired some guns and is attempting to learn how to use them.  I suppose we can all look forward to seeing the inevitable picture featuring McRapey as Lara Croft.  Because charity.  In the end, McRapey is little more than a tragicomic example of how the absence of a father in one’s youth scars even the successful individual, as his Smalleyesque boasting shows that he never had anyone in his life to teach him this:


“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools….


“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”