There is no room for false modesty

Not where genius is concerned:

Keyboardist Morris Hayes arrived at Paisley Park as a production assistant. Under Prince’s tutelage, he eventually became not just a member of the New Power Generation but the band’s most senior member.

“I was just one of those church cats that played music by ear, so at first it was very difficult for me to keep up. We wouldn’t just learn one song, we’d learn a string of songs, and when we’d come back the next day I’d forget some. I remember he pulled me to the side and said, ‘Are you a genius, Morris?’ I said no. ‘O.K., then write it down. I don’t write it down ‘cause I’m a genius. I’ve got a million of ‘em, and I can remember. But unless you’re a genius, write it down.’ He gave you that extreme focus, where you knew you had to really come with it.”

It’s fascinating that unlike so many gifted individuals, Prince was able to coach less talented and help them improve. I wonder if that might have had something to do with his early relationship with Andre Cymone, his friend from junior high and member of both Grand Central and The Revolution, of whom it was said that he could play everything Prince could play, but only if Prince showed him how to do it first. Speaking of which, this article about his performance at the 2004 ceremony honoring George Harrison tends to support that anecdote as well as put both both his performance and his demeanor in context.

I had no idea that Prince was going to be there. Steve Winwood said, “Hey, Prince is over there.” And I said, “I guess he’s playing with us?”

So I said to Winwood, “I’m going to go over and say hello to him.” I wandered across the stage and I went up to him and I said, “Hi, Prince, it’s nice to meet you — Steve Ferrone.” And he said, “Oh, I know who you are!” Maybe because I’d played on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You,” which is a song that he wrote. I went back over and I sat down behind the drum kit, and Winwood was like: “What’s he like? What’d he say?”

Then I was sitting there, and I heard somebody playing a guitar riff from a song that I wrote with Average White Band. And I looked over and Prince was looking right at me and playing that song. And I thought, “Yeah, you actually do know who I am!”

I was actually more surprised that Prince had ever heard anything played by a band called Average White Band than at the fact he would remember a riff from it and be able to play it from memory. But then, they were pretty funky and even I would recognize “Pick up the Pieces”, so I suppose that makes sense.

My favorite part of the Harrison tribute article is how the clueless lead guitarist kept playing the Clapton solos in rehearsal and Prince didn’t make a fuss. He just strummed along, waited for someone else tell the guy to back off, then waited until they were on stage to show him how it’s done. Prince being Prince, I strongly suspect it was his quiet annoyance at the guy’s earlier failure to know his place that drove the unusual nature of his performance that night, particularly because he told the producer to let the guy go ahead and play the middle solo.


“Look, let this guy do what he does, and I’ll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo.”

That wasn’t just genius being expressed on that stage, it was also the contempt of a genius for mere talent and skill. Hey, even geniuses sometimes require motivation.

Book of the Week

War to the Knife is the first volume in the Laredo Trilogy, and it is a fascinating tale of a war that is already lost before the book even begins. The author, Peter Grant, is a fascinating man of much wider experience than most, having been a member of the South African Defense Forces with combat experience in various African nations prior to becoming a pastor.

In War to the Knife, he draws upon aspects of both his past professions; unlike many authors of military science fiction, he truly knows whereof he speaks, both in terms of the technical issues as well as the emotional costs that affect victor and defeated alike.

The trilogy begins with the defeated military remnants of the planet Laredo coming to terms with the fact that their resistance movement is on the verge of being wiped out by the occupying forces of the much wealthier, and more technologically advanced Bactrians. They decide that rather than surrendering to the merciless occupiers, they will attempt to go out in one last defiant bang that will give cover to their attempt to break through the planetary blockade and get the evidence about the Bactrian occupation out to the rest of the Thousand Worlds, who have been kept largely ignorant and misinformed about the true state of affairs.

Grant is a good writer, and the unusual situation he presents, in which the good guys are beaten from the very start, is given additional depth by Grant’s South African perspective. And yet, War to the Knife is not even remotely depressing, it is rather optimistic and inspiring, being a testimony to the indomitable human spirit and its ability to defy even the certainty of death as well as an intriguing war novel full of intrigue and action.

For those who find the name familiar, Peter Grant is, in fact, the leader of the Tor Books boycott. He blogs as Bayou Renaissance Man, a not unreasonable description given his wide range of life experience, and is not a Rabid Puppy, being too fundamentally decent a man to run with our slavering pack of virulent slaughterhounds. But one might not unreasonably describe him as being sympathetic to Puppydom, as well as fully cognizant of the true nature of the SJW enemy.

Slate is furious about the “virulent” Rabid Puppies

Oh No, the Puppies Are Back for the 2016 Hugo Awards—and As Angry As Ever

The puppies have returned. How could that sentence portend anything foul or wicked? And yet it does—science-fiction writer and publisher Vox Day’s followers are the least cute puppies that ever puppied. You may remember them from 2015, when they hijacked the nominations for that year’s Hugo Awards, the closest thing the sci-fi and fantasy community has to the Oscars. Convinced that the genre had eschewed swashbuckling space opera in favor of politically correct, scoldy garbage, these “activists” proposed a slate of “corrective” titles and whipped up enough support among a conservative niche of Hugo voters to get them on the ballot (pushing more “literary” and more “progressive” nominees off).

Campaigns for individual books or authors at the Hugos are nothing new. Yet the puppies’ ideologically driven movement, which drew on the tactics and talking points of Gamergaters, struck a lot of people as unprecedented. When the pups positioned their nominees as a rebuke to the women, people of color, and LBGTQ folks seeking a place in the science-fiction/fantasy world, that coalition struck back. Voters opted to give “no award” in the five categories wholly overtaken by puppy nominees.

Unlike men, not all puppies are created equal. The especially virulent Rabid Puppies, led by unsavory bigot Vox Day, who is extremely paranoid about Aztecs, have made it their mission to boot SJWs (“social justice warriors”) out of science fiction and fantasy….

So now it is 2016, and the saga continues. This time, in an effort to distance themselves from last year’s bad press, the Sad Puppies have published a list of “recommendations” rather than flogging their own ballot. But the Rabid Puppies are madder than ever. Their campaign has resulted in 64 out of the 81 titles they put forward being shortlisted. One of these books is called “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” by erotica scribe Chuck Tingle, author of such science fiction pearls as “Taken by the Gay Unicorn Biker” and, most recently, “Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination.” (Audible narration is available for all three. For the more politically-minded, Tingle also offers “Feeling the Bern in My Butt.”) Writes Day on his blog: “Let’s face it, there are just three words to describe the only event that might happen in 2016 that I can imagine would be more spectacularly awesome than ‘Space Raptor Butt Invasion’ winning a Hugo Award this year, and those three words are ‘President-elect Donald Trump.’”

As Michael Schaub observes in the Los Angeles Times, the Puppies’ self-mythology here as Hugo provocateurs doesn’t totally hold up. “Tingle is a popular figure among a wide range of readers,” he notes, “not just Puppy-affiliated ones.” A fair number of science fiction and fantasy folks seem delighted, not offended, by the Butt bard’s success.

Awesome. Let’s see them prove it by voting “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” Best Story. But I suspect this is just hapless SJWs attempting to get on top of the Narrative with their conventional “the joke is really on you” tactic. Key word: “seem”. If they were genuinely delighted, NK Jemisin wouldn’t be making a complete ass of herself by trying to get Chuck Tingle to withdraw his nomination.

From Tingle’s reaction, she’d have better luck convincing me to withdraw. It cracks me up that more articles about the 2016 Hugos point out that Jemisin is an ignorant half-savage than mention her own nomination for Best Novel. I’d almost feel bad for her, if she wasn’t such a horrendously unpleasant affirmative-action monster. But SJWs will sacrifice anyone to maintain the Narrative, even their own pets.

It’s more than a little amusing that Slate claims I am paranoid about Aztecs, when I am part-Aztec myself. But you can always count on an SJW to stick with the Narrative, no matter how observably stupid it is.

It’s also interesting that referring to an idiot black woman as “an ignorant half-savage” three years ago is presently deemed more newsworthy than writing the best-selling political philosophy work of 2015, or than publishing four different #1 bestsellers in the Politics, Atheism, Philosophy, and Economic Theory categories in nine months.

No wonder the media is dying. Being converged, they’re much more interested in playing speech police than in simply doing their one job.

The cost of convergence

Target is learning that pursuing social justice objectives is not conducive to business:

Target’s corporate stock has plummeted significantly this week, after a petition to boycott the store crossed 1 million signatures.

The petition and subsequent boycotts are a result of Target’s corporate campaign to open up bathrooms and changing rooms in their stores based on internal gender identity rather than biological anatomy.  The new policy has sparked concern that predators will use the store’s policy to target others, specifically women, by claiming that they feel like a woman on the inside.

Just this week, a biological man was arrested after allegedly secretly filming a woman trying on bathing suits in a Target dressing room in Missouri.

Recent polls have shown that Americans’ feelings towards open-bathroom policies have hardened significantly in the month of April, with support for the open-bathrooms concept falling by more than 20 percentage points.

Amid the turmoil surrounding the new policy and the immediate abuse of it in Missouri, the company’s stock fell from $84.10 per share on April 19 to roughly $79.36 as of Friday morning. That loss of $4.74 per share, if constant, would represent a corporate loss of over $2.5 billion.

As a general rule, people support SJW nonsense in theory considerably more than in any form of practice that will actually affect their own lives. Once there is a cost to virtue-signaling, the average individual will back off. The SJW, on the other hand, will double-down, convinced that the sacrifice proves his superiority.

NFL Draft 2016

The Vikings select Laquon Treadwell, WR:

COMPARES TO: Dez Bryant, Dallas
Cowboys – Treadwell shows a Bryant-like skillset with his size and
athleticism combination to be a mismatch against cornerbacks on the
outside.

IN OUR VIEW: Treadwell has exceptional ballskills and
catching radius with strong hands to pluck away from his body or scoop
off his shoelaces – if the throw is anywhere within a few feet of his
body, he’ll attack it. He isn’t a sudden athlete, but plays with
athletic twitch and power to be a threat after the catch.

Immediately,
Treadwell should fit in as a possession type of receiver alongside
Stefon Diggs. With improved route-running, though, Treadwell could turn
into a downfield threat, even without top-notch speed.

With Teddy
Bridgewater, the Vikings offense isn’t built around the deep ball.
Treadwell should be effective in the middle of the field and, perhaps
most importantly, in the red zone.

The analysts seem to like the pick, anyhow. We do need another possession receiver; burners are wasted given the limitations of Bridgewater’s arm. I’m a little suprised at Goff going number one, but if you have the chance to take a top QB prospect, you simply have to do so in today’s league.

And word of warning, if you feel the need to comment about how you don’t like/approve of NFL football on an NFL post, I will spam the comment. I’m done tolerating off-topic narcissists who apparently believe anyone cares about their opinion.

SJWs ruin Watership Down

This sort of cultural and creative degradation is why I will never show even a modicum of mercy to SJWs. This is why there is no place for them in any civilized society. They are pure hraka. They are pollution. They infest every organization they are permitted to enter and they infect everything they touch.

It was the film that traumatised a generation of children, with its much-loved rabbit characters slain on screen in graphic and memorable scenes. But the story of Watership Down is to be remade for a new era, as programme-makers promise to tone down its most brutal images.

The BBC has teamed up with Netflix for one of the most expensive mini-series ever made for the small screen, and the first animated four-part drama of its kind.The show’s executive producer told the Telegraph the 2017 version will not just tone down the levels of on-screen violence to make it more appropriate for children, but give a boost to its female characters.

Female rabbits including Clover, played by Gemma Arterton, Strawberry, played by Olivia Colman, and Hyzenthlay, played by Anne-Marie Duff, will get a dose of doe power, as it were, to allow them to display their own heroics alongside their male co-stars.

This is why we need our own institutions. This is why we need to keep every single SJW out. They destroy everything in the interests of convergence. That is their sole objective and their primary activity.

This is also why I will never sell the movie rights to my books. I won’t risk putting them in SJW hands. In time, we will build our own studios. Castalia is just the start.

Interview with a Hugo nominee

In which Chuck Tingle, author of the Hugo-nominated “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”, is interviewed about his work being honored.

How did you find out you were nominated for a Hugo?

Got an email from some hot shot big timer said “hey Chuck we’ve got an award for you you want it?” I said “yes.” They said “Well okay Chuck here you go.” So thats how it happened it was a good day. Son even took me out for a big spaghetti dinner and I didn’t even spill, got two plates and a big glass of chocolate milk that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Were you surprised?

Well not really, because I know that love is real and when you write that love is real the world makes proof. This is the way that science works and is the true billings reality. So I always knew this layer of Tingleverse would prove love is real. I just didn’t know how and then when it happened, I remembered that that is why. Can’t wait to win big time award and put it in the window so Ted Cobbler sees it and feels like a big dumb idiot. He’s gonna look so dumb.

Do you know about the Sad Puppies, a group of people who try to disrupt voting for the Hugo Awards every year?

Don’t know about any puppies but it’s BAD NEWS BEARS if you want to disrupt awards. That is a scoundrel tactic and probably part of Ted Cobbler’s devilman plan. Ted Cobbler is notorious devil and has been seen using dark magic to control puppies around the neighborhood. I do not support the devilman agenda but i think that Space Raptor Butt Invasion proves that LOVE IS REAL and no scoundrels can stop that. Especially not some dumb dogs.

Do you have any comments about the speculation that you might be involved this year?

Well speculation is a good word. I can comment on that because it means knowing something is going to happen like with a spell to see the future. So thats an important spell if you want to battle devilmen like Ted cobbler or Truckman. If I had specilation spell when I battled Truckman I probably wouldn’t have had to go to the hospital with a tummy ache.

Love is real. The man is a philosopher. I think this settles the question of whether diversity is good for science fiction or not once and for all.

UPDATE: You will NOT want to miss Dr. Tingle’s Reddit AMA, which features questions from Phil Sandifer and Mary Pupinette.

What in the actual….

Cruz/Carly 2016: What’s the point, exactly?

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, in a last-ditch bid to slow front-runner Donald Trump’s momentum, named former business executive Carly Fiorina on Wednesday as his vice presidential running mate should he win the nomination.

After crushing losses to Trump in five nominating contests in the Northeast on Tuesday, Cruz praised Fiorina, a former presidential rival, as a principled fighter for conservative values who would be a valuable ally on the campaign trail.

“Carly is a vice presidential nominee who I think is superbly skilled, superbly gifted at helping unite this party,” the U.S. senator from Texas told a rally in Indianapolis, the capital of Indiana.

The Midwestern state is the next battleground for selecting the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates for the Nov. 8 presidential election and is shaping up to be Cruz’s best – and perhaps last – chance to block Trump’s march to the nomination.

Cruz acknowledged it was unusual to choose a running mate so early in the race. Traditionally, the winners of the Republican and Democratic nominating races announce their running mates in the period between clinching the nomination and summer’s national conventions.

I didn’t take seriously the claims that Ted Cruz might be autistic until now. Seriously, on what planet is anyone going to support HP-killer Fiorina, particularly in California? I have no idea what he’s trying to accomplish with this except perhaps to submarine his campaign without actually shutting it down.

They certainly make a fascinating pair from a visual perspective. Both their faces look about 15 percent melted.

As I said previously, it’s over. Like it or not, Donald Trump is the Republican Party nominee.

Gearing up for Vol. XI

I am very pleased to observe that Jerry Pournelle has pre-announced a new volume in his legendary There Will Be War series:

Shortly we will announce that There Will Be War, Volume XI will be published in November and is now open for submissions. It’s not the formal announcement because I don’t have the web addresses for formal submission. I don’t open attachments to emails to me (obviously with some exceptions which I’m not going to tell you) because I only read plaintext in Outlook, so sending me stories to Chaos Manor isn’t going to work; I’m sure I’ll have the web addresses very shortly.

Publisher is Castalia House. There will be an omnibus hardbound edition (with Vol. XII) and eBook editions. We buy non-exclusive anthology rights only: that means we buy previously published works, and if you send an original work – a lot of people do – understand that if it is accepted you still have first serial rights until after November, after which they no longer exist for anyone. Payment on acceptance is an advance against royalties: royalties vary in this strange age, so it’s hard to say exactly, but they are competitive, and contributors receive a pro-rata share of half what I receive.

My contribution is a volume introduction, and individual story introductions. I have been known to make editorial suggestions, particularly to original contributions. I have also been known to make other contributions, fiction and non-fiction, as I find necessary.

The series has done well, even the nearly thirty-year-old volumes. Three stories in Volume X were nominated for Hugo Awards.

We’ll get on the email addresses for submissions and whatnot this weekend. In the meantime, this means we’re going to need slush readers for it, so if you’ve got the time and you wish to volunteer to be the first line of defense, please email me with VOL XI in the title.  Last year’s readers did an excellent job, so the bar is high. Every reader should expect to read between 20 and 30 short stories in six months.

Nota Bene: If you’re thinking of submitting once the floodgates open, that’s great, but DO NOT SEND ANYTHING THAT IS NOT MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION. I cannot stress this enough. I couldn’t believe how many stories we were sent that were obviously and totally unsuitable for the anthology series. Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste our time. And keep in mind that Jerry is no respecter of persons. I’m the assistant editor, one of my stories, submitted anonymously, passed the slush readers, and Jerry didn’t hesitate to reject it anyhow. He rejected big names. He rejected very big names. He rejected unknown names. He has nothing left to prove and he has high standards, so keep that in mind before you send in anything less than your best.

And yes, we’re still doing Riding the Red Horse Vol. 2. Things have just been a little chaotic, that’s all. Tom and I need to sit down and figure out how many stories we’ve got already, and how many more we need.

A few mostly unrelated items to address while I’m at it:

  1. Can someone email me the .mobi of The Return of the Great Depression? Update: Got it, thank you.
  2. We have some exciting new authors to announce at Castalia House very soon. Three, to be precise.
  3. Is anyone interested in a three- or six-month marketing internship? As you’ve probably noticed, I’m pretty good at that sort of thing, but my bandwidth is increasingly limited and I don’t do one-tenth the marketing that I should do. That’s about all the time that would be necessary to learn everything involved. My thought is to have a revolving marketing internship, in order to maximize the number of Ilk who are up to speed on these things.
  4. Four words: Brainstorm. Steve Keen. Soon.

“The big winners were the Rabid Puppies”

I always find it amusing how the media is always quick to point out that NK Jemisin is black, but they never seem to mention the fact that I am an American Indian. Perhaps I need to publicly exhibit more scalps. They also never get around to mentioning why I was criticizing the ignorant, half-savage Jemisin, which is because she is a) a low-IQ cretin, b) a liar, and, c) had repeatedly attacked me sans provocation or even knowledge of who she was.

Rabid Puppies leader Vox Day, a self-described libertarian, has criticized best-selling science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, who is black, as  an “ignorant half-savage,” writing, “Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.”

George R.R. Martin has criticized both the puppies’ agenda and their aesthetic. “When the Hugo ballot came out last year, it was not just a right-wing ballot, it was a bad ballot,” he told the Guardian prior to Tuesday’s finalist announcement.

The Rabid Puppies, the more extreme of the two groups, this year created a slate of potential nominees that they urged Hugo voters to nominate. Out of 81 recommendations on that slate, 64 ended up shortlisted.

Day, who calls himself “Supreme Dark Lord, Evil Legion of Evil,” wasted no time in gloating. A news release sent by Day reads in part: “‘I’m not even remotely surprised to learn that the Rabid Puppies did so well,’ said Vox Day, as he mopped his brow with the flayed skin of an SJW after an arduous night of celebrating his fourth and fifth nominations.”

That being said, full props to Mr. Schaub, who did his research, provided a grammatically correct quote about Jemisin instead of a cherry-picked sentence fragment, and actually quoted the Bloggerblaster.

He’s not on our side, obviously, and yet it’s a much better article than most. The only thing he really got wrong is the idea that I expected Chuck Tingle’s nomination to outrage my critics. I don’t give a quantum of a damn what my critics thought about it. Some things are worth doing simply because they are amusing.

I should also point out that I don’t call myself “Supreme Dark Lord”. That is merely how I am acknowledged by the Evil Legion of Evil, and, of course, the Vile Faceless Minions.

Meanwhile, George RR Martin completely fails to realize that he is already playing my game as he contemplates the 2016 Hugo Awards:

The big winners were the Rabid Puppies, whose choices completely
dominated the list. The Rabids had nominees in every category, I
believe, and in a few categories they had ALL the
nominees…. The Rabids used a new tactic this year. They nominated
legitimate, quality works in addition to the dross. Works by writers
like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds
(Reynolds went public well before the nominations asking NOT to be
slated, but they slated him anyway), Andy Weir, and several others. Some
of these writers are apolitical (like Weir), while others are known to
oppose everything that VD stands for (Gaiman, Stephenson, King). One has
to think they were deliberately targeted.

In some of
the online comments I’ve seen, these writers are being called “shields.”
I’ve even read some people calling for them to withdraw, simply because
they were on VD’s list.

Withdrawing is the LAST thing they should do.

I
urge them all to stand their ground. They wrote good books, stories,
graphic novels, they did NOT take part in any slate. In some cases they
were largely unaware of all this. In other cases they explicitly
denounced the slates ahead of time (Reynolds, again). Punishing them…
demanding they turn down this honor… simply because VD listed them is
insane.

Marko Kloos and Annie Bellet did the right
thing by withdrawing last year. Their was an ethical and courageous act;
I applauded them then and I applaud them now. But this is a different
year and a different situation. Given the well-known political views of
some of these writers, it seems plain to me that VD and the Rabids
picked them deliberately, in hopes they would withdraw, or would be
voted under No Award. They would probably have put Scalzi (VD’s best
bro) on the ballot too, but he outsmarted them and withdrew before they
could.

I am rather hoping that several of them win.
Based on quality alone, some deserve to. Sure, VD will claim that as a
victory, but as last year proves, he claims everything as a victory.
We’ll know the truth. The only real victory for him would be having any
of these fine writers pull out. Let’s not play his game.

It’s
always amusing to see people like Rape Rape, who has no idea
whatsoever  about my motivations, my strategies, or my objectives,
trying to declare what my victory conditions are, and how it is impossible for me to reach them.

I desperately want to win Hugos. I don’t care about the Hugos. I want to destroy the Hugos. It pains me to have to point out that they obviously can’t all be correct.