Running down John Scalzi

John Scalzi  is understandably pleased by Whatever’s 8 million views in 2012.

Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013.  But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck.  Thank you.

He is, of course, welcome, as a few of them came from various posts here.  Eight million is a certainly a lot of pageviews. It is an impressive number and clearly there must be a lot of Rabbit People who are fascinated by what McRapey has to say about life, the universe, and everything, or are at least interested in currying favor with the current president of the SFWA.  It will be interesting to see if his traffic continues to increase once he steps down from office.

What I found most interesting was his post about Whatever’s views from previous years:

2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000

Here is why I found it interesting about those numbers.  The combined Sitemeter pageviews for Vox Popoli and Alpha Game for 2012 were 5,023,130. (Sitemeter visits were 3,412,014).

2008: 2,713,293
2009: 3,396,001 +25.2%
2010: 3,713,218 +9.3%
2011: 4,463,247 +20.2%
2012: 5,023,130 +12.5%

Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to the Whatever readership?  No, I don’t think so.  I think Scalzi is using the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”.  Since, like many other bloggers, he elects to hide his statistics rather than permitting Sitemeter or some other service to display them openly, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples here.  Clearly some sort of scientific experiment is in order, which will require me to become president of the SFWA as well as the author of a NYT best-selling science fiction novel derived from a cancelled television show.  Does anyone have any ideas?  I’m thinking either ALF or CHiPs.

For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA.  Vox Popoli is 29,426.  Alpha Game is 73,183. Which makes it very clear that in the grand scheme of things, we are all more or less irrelevant.

Five lessons of the Newton shootings

Glenn Reynolds lays them out in USA Today.  The first one is particularly important.

1. When Twenty Minutes Is Forever.

According to the CNN timeline for
the Sandy Hook tragedy, “Police and other first responders arrived on
scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.” Twenty minutes. Five
minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes — a third
of an hour — means that the “first responders” aren’t likely to do much
more than clean up the mess. 

When seconds count, the police are minutes away.  Lots of minutes away.  That’s the primary lesson one should take away from the Newtown massacre.  Self-defense is no different than nearly everything else, if you want it done right – or at all – then you have to do it yourself.

This is #GunControlNow

If you’re not already following me on Twitter, this extremely illuminating discussion of gun control is the sort of thing you are missing.  Gun control advocates, note that this is what often passes for your ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’. Colleen aka @mushadamama is a perfect example of the dialectically challenged individual Aristotle described as being incapable of following a chain of reasoning and therefore ineducable by reason.  As you will see, it is literally impossible to reason with them.

Note that I did not expect to convince the woman that she was wrong.  Telling a stupid person precisely how stupid they are is seldom a successful rhetorical device. But I wanted to see how far she would go before retreating into her rhetorical tortoise shell.  As it happens, she was willing to not only defy reason, but deny math itself, rather than even consider the possibility – or in this case, the undisputed statistical and mathematical reality – that her position on #GunControlNow was wrong.

voxday: Those who reject their own God-given and unalienable right to bear arms reject their own status as adult human beings.

fmudd101: I know right! Those child-like Europeans and Japanese with their low gun crime and murder rates.

voxday: Europeans have higher rates of gun ownership and much lower rates of gun crime and murder than African and Latin countries.

mushadamama: You can not compare their gun laws to ours. They are MUCH more restrictive. Wikipedia link.

voxday: The gun laws in Brazil and South Africa are even more restrictive. Yet they have far more gun deaths per capita.

mushadamama: Is that where you want to be? US is not first, so it’s ok? Link to murders with firearms by country.

voxday: Don’t be stupid. You can’t compare absolute numbers between nations of vastly different sizes. Look at per capita.

voxday: Also, the nations ahead of the USA HAVE STRICTER GUN CONTROL LAWS. The problem is racial, as I’ve already shown. 

mushadamama: The numbers I’ve given ARE per 100k population. Perhaps the stupid one is one who doesn’t read fine print.

mushadamama: Stricter gun control=less gun crimes. #fact

mushadamama: You’ve shown nothing. 

voxday: No, you stupid, stupid woman, they are not. The USA is #4 in absolute terms, #27 per capita.  Link to gun homicides and gun ownership by country.

voxday: That’s not a fact, you stupid, stupid woman. That is absolutely and provably false. 

voxday: You’re either lying or stupid, Colleen. White US rate=0.32/100k. Black US rate=12.5/100k. Link to US firearms homicide rate by race.

mushadamama: Yes, my chart is total gun murders @ 9369. Does not count accidents or suicides. US ranks 4th! My crime rate chart was per 100k.

mushadamama: Your chart, however, uses some kind of fuzzy math to come up with that
ridiculous #. I can only assume it is more of a probability.

mushadamama: Of which, I am not interested. We’re not playing lotto. People are dying. Your comments on race, I’ve tried to ignore…

mushadamama: Are we supposed to be relieved or delighted to know more black people are killed by guns than white people? I don’t understand.

voxday: NO! The math is 9,369 gun murders divided by 310 million pop, multiplied by 100,000. That is the correct per capita number.

voxday: You are supposed to understand legal guns are not the problem. So banning them, as they are banned elsewhere, WILL NOT WORK!

mushadamama: You’re a fool. If manipulating numbers makes you feel better, fine. But, it’s not the truth.

mushadamama: We are not going away this time. Those babies did not die for nothing. We’re going to stay loud until something changes.

voxday: Excellent. The more you talk, the less credible your position is. Everyone should read this exchange. #GunControlNow

Merry Christmas

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
 
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
 
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
 
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

A MAGIC BROKEN free on Kindle

A MAGIC BROKEN is free today from Amazon.  If you already have a copy, you may wish to go ahead and grab the new one as it fixes six errata found in the previous version.

There are still some spots left for those interested in reviewing THE WARDOG’S COIN.  So, if you wish to do so, please let me know via email.  However, just to be clear, I’m not sending out the books for at least a month, because I’m not finished with the second of the two stories.  A few of you will have already read one of the two, as an earlier version of QALABI DAWN used to be posted on my old Eternal Warriors site.

UPDATE: A MAGIC BROKEN has cracked the top 100 Free on Amazon and is now at #3 in Fantasy Epic, #97 overall.  It will be interesting to see how high it can go, and if this will spark any consequent interest in A THRONE OF BONES.

UPDATE 2: Black Gate informs its readers about the Amazon offer and includes a mini-review of the novella.

UPDATE 3: As does the indefatigable Instapundit.

WND column

The Mystery of Christmas

This Christmas is a season for despair and disquiet for many Americans. Approximately 47.7 million of them, one in every six, are on food stamps.  That is 16.1 million more than were being fed by government assistance in December 2008. More than 100 million working-age Americans do not have a job. The U.S. share of global wealth, as measured by GDP, has fallen from 31.8 percent to 21.6 percent in the last 10 years. A full 28 percent of Americans have no savings, not even for emergencies.

Most of us are having smaller and less luxurious Christmas celebrations this season. We are buying fewer and less expensive presents for each other. What has been a vague feeling of uncertainty has given way to the sober realization that we are facing more than an economic bump in the road; many are beginning to recognize that the decades-long party has ended, and the consequential hangover is just beginning.

VPFL 2012 Championship

77 Moundsview Meerkats
56 ’63Mercury Marauders

66 Bane Sidhe
63 Fromundah Cheezheads

Despite being favored by nearly 10 points, I thought the championship game was over before it started after Roddy White – who was questionable – scored 19 points and Tony Gonzalez scored 0 in the Thursday Night game.  That put me 19 in the hole versus the projections.  But Aaron Rodgers went for 30, Reggie Wayne defanged Andrew Luck, neither Arian Foster nor Adrian Peterson showed up in their big face-off, so now it’s going to come down to the question of whether Peyton Manning is going to throw to Thomas or Decker, and if the Giants’ Wilson is going to outscore the SF DEF.

Right now, the score is Meerkats 68, Sidhe 67.  It’s far from over.

But secession is unpossible!

Events are making it increasingly difficult for the anti-secessionist scoffers in the USA to credibly claim that secession is unthinkable and impossible, either here or anywhere else in the world.

Separatists in the Spanish region of Catalonia moved one step closer to independence on Tuesday when the two largest pro-independence parties announced their intention to form an alliance and push for a referendum in 2014. As the New York Times notes, these two parties hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have failed to see eye-to-eye for years. The fact that they are now uniting suggests that Catalonia is getting serious about independence.

Madrid did its best to spin the results of the Catalonia election as a defeat for the secessionists, but as we predicted, the new Catalan coalition has united behind the demand for an independence referendum that Madrid says is illegal.

Notice that Catalonia has not been independent of Castille since 1516, and lost its right to its own laws in 1716.  This voluntary union is considerably older than the federal Union violently imposed upon the southern States by Washington in 1865; the US union is younger, shakier, and much more morally suspect than the Castillan-Catalonian one.

Of course the government in Madrid says Catalonian self-determination is illegal.  Those who rule without the consent of the people always say self-determination is illegal; like the great dictator Abraham Lincoln, they will say anything in order to prevent those over whom they wish to rule from gaining their freedom.

The loneliest time of the year

A female commenter at Alpha Game describes how Christmas can be hard on the lonely:

This is my second Christmas with no family and no friends, and I’m at the point where I’d lay down my life for someone who made me feel like he or she cared.

This is one of the downsides of the secular aspect of Christmas that stresses holiday togetherness.  It can be very hard on those who don’t have friends and family to witness the merriment of those who do.  However, it is important to remember that in some cases, the apparent happiness is a mirage, or at least, a collective self-delusion.

When I was in college and for several years afterwards, my family had literally picture-perfect Christmases.  As the White Buffalo, an occasional guest at our Christmas Day dinners, once commented, the experience like living in a Christmas commercial for Neiman Marcus.  From the moment that the guest arrived in the beautiful white marble foyer amidst the softly falling snow and was immediately handed a hot buttered rum by my grandfather, to the postprandial arrival of Big Chilly and his family to partake in the devouring of the pumpkin and pecan pies, everything was aesthetically perfect and utterly enjoyable.

Those gorgeous images are now pleasant memories.  But the family is as dead as my grandparents, fractured by lies, greed, deceit, and sociopathic self-interest.

And yet, there is still no shortage of joy.  We have new traditions, with new family members who have never known what they are missing.  There is no snow; the grass is green as I look outside the window today.  Instead of the dulcet strains of Handel piped throughout the vast house, I hear Maddens on the PS/3 in the next room.  There is no one to serve hot buttered rum and no one will drink it.  No one will arrive after dinner, their eyes bright with anticipation and their cheeks red with the cold outside.

But the ham will arrive, massive and steaming and looking like something out of an Asterix and Obelix comic.  The wine will flow, white and red, and the egg nog will beat its predecessor hollow.  A dash of kirsch will enliven the fondue and if the presents are not stacked halfway to the ceiling, the good cheer of the recipients will be in no way diminished, not even by comparison.

And yet, these new traditions too are an illusion.  The children will grow.  The butcher will retire.  One day I will follow in the footsteps of that smiling server of hot butter rum.

The only thing that will remain, one thousand years from now, is the original reason for the celebration.  It is the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, we celebrate; that fact will remain as true tomorrow as it is today and as it was yesterday.  And no celebrant of that holy birth can ever be alone, because she is bound into the great shining web of believers, past and present.

So don’t allow yourself feel alone this Christmas season because you are not.  Buy some toys and sweets and bring them to a shelter.  Join the Salvation Army and help them feed the homeless.  Go to one of the midnight services that will be held around the world on Monday, preferably at a strange church where you know no one, and permit yourself to be engulfed in the worldwide joy at Jesus Christ’s birth.  Even if you have no hope, remember that the Word became flesh in order to bring hope to the hopeless.

Head’s up: free book

Now that A Throne of Bones is out, Marcher Lord Hinterlands has enrolled A Magic Broken in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which allows a publisher to give books away for free for a limited period of time.  So, starting tomorrow, on December 24th and 25th, Kindle users will be able to download the novella for free.  If you’ve been curious about my fiction but hesitant to pay the necessary price for one reason or another, tomorrow would be an excellent time to do it.

If you’ve already read AMB but hadn’t quite gotten around to reviewing it on Amazon, this would also be a very good time to pop your review up there.  In related news, if you’re willing to commit to reviewing The Wardog’s Coin when it comes out, most likely towards the end of January, please let me know via email.  I’ll be sending out review copies to the first 50 respondents upon the book’s release.  This will consist of two short stories, one of which features a character who is likely to be a new perspective character in the second book of Arts of Dark and Light.