Tag: writing

Tilting at Windmills

Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:

Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.

WELL?

I get it, people go along to get along.

But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?

After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.

I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.

By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.

A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.

I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.

Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.

Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.

DISCUSS ON SG

Forecast: Light Posting

Posting will be light today and tomorrow. It’s a good time to get caught up on Arktoons and UATV. The most recent episode of THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL now features illustrations from the 1.1 edition of the novel, and the most recent Darkstream offers some perspicacious advice on Deltas being Deltas.

It’s all good, no worries.

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Excellence is in the Details

Fawlty Towers is rightly considered one of the greatest television shows in the history of television. So it’s interesting to learn this little detail about it from the man married to the actress who played Sybil Fawlty.

It wasn’t just the lines that Pru and the cast had to familiarise themselves with.

‘In the case of Fawlty Towers, the devil was in the detail.

In addition to writing the dialogue, John and Connie had gone to great pains to explain exactly what was happening in each scene and why. Put it this way: the script for a 30-minute episode of a sitcom would normally be around 60 pages long, but for Fawlty Towers they were something approaching 140.

In other words, the reason Fawlty Towers so often resembled the synchronized perfection of an oft-shown play or musical is because it was essentially written as a play, with the script containing the choreography and the character motivations as well as the dialogue.

While it doesn’t rise to the level of Tolkien’s invented histories and languages, or Umberto Eco’s recreation in string of his monastery in order to time the length of the conversations properly, it does serve as a spur to the creative mind to up his creative game.

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We’re Number 20

I’m not sure exactly what these lists are supposed to represent, but according to Ron Unz and Similarweb, the popularity of this site has risen four spots, from number 24 to number 20, on his comparative list of 87 alternative media sites.

  1. ZeroHedge
  2. The Epoch Times
  3. National Review
  4. Daily Caller
  5. Infowars
  6. Daily Stormer
  7. Jacobin Magazine
  8. Reason Magazine
  9. The Unz Review
  10. LewRockwell
  11. Unherd
  12. Alternet
  13. Foreign Policy
  14. Moon of Alabama
  15. Conservative Treehouse
  16. Prager U
  17. Lifesite News
  18. The Daily Sceptic
  19. New Republic
  20. VoxDay

While the numbers upon which these rankings are based are an estimate piled on top of a guess added to a surmise, which is to say they are nearly entirely fictional, they are probably more legitimate than any numbers you see for the mainstream media. As Cerno and others have noted, even a massive headline article in a major magazine doesn’t move the needle by any objective metric, whereas a link from one of these sites is almost certain to sell a few books.

It would have been interesting to see where this blog ranked vis-a-vis the other sites before it was ejected from Blogger. As far as I can tell, pageviews dropped to one-quarter of what they were before, but I don’t trust either the Google or the WordPress numbers; other metrics appear to indicate that not much has changed in terms of the size of the community. Certainly there are more people on SG than before, but this blog is not the only conduit, so that’s probably not relevant. Regardless, we’re better off on our own servers.

The one thing that leaped out at me is the way in which many of the straight conservative sites such as American Conservative appear to be losing readers. This makes sense given the worse-than-uselessness of the conservative media and the Republican establishment. I expect next year’s list will be even harder on neocon sites like National Review and Prager U.

Speaking of writing, Castalia is about to publish the print edition of THE ALTAR OF HATE, my collection of non-Selenoth, non-QM short stories. If any established, published authors would be interested in having a look at the stories and writing a forward to it, please shoot me an email and I’ll get a draft epub out to you. I’m not looking for anything hagiographic, much less serious literary criticism, just the general perspective of an experienced and well-read fellow author capable of intelligently discussing the works for the benefit of the casual reader.

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Cyberpunk: The Revival

The Original Cyberpunk is celebrating 40 years of an original American literary style by putting together a special edition of Stupefying Stories dedicated to cyberpunk.

The question here for SF writers is: okay, posit that our students now all have Rocketbooks. We know what it’s designed to do and how it’s supposed to be used. Now, how will our characters misuse it, for things they aren’t supposed to do?

That, to me, remains the core question of cyberpunk. What makes a technology disruptive isn’t using it in the way the people who created it intended it should be used. Those people can only think of the right way to use a thing. The disruption comes later, when the people who grew up living with that technology start thinking of all the wrong ways to use it. When this happens, they come up with misuses the creators never dreamed might be possible, because the creators lack the fluency of someone who has grown up speaking the language of the thing.

So in 1980 I asked myself: in this bright and shiny high-tech future that’s coming in fast and hard, how are socially maladjusted younger people—let’s call them “punks”—living at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain, going to misuse this tech to get an edge over the eloi living above them?

Then I wrote a story that tried to explore one possible answer to this question.

Sidebar: Do I really need to explain again how between 1980 and 1982 this story was read and rejected by every short-fiction editor then working in SF publishing, and it most often came back with the standard, “Nice try kid, real close,” quasi-personal brush-off so often given to young and unknown writers?

Cyberpunk science fiction blossomed brilliantly and failed rapidly in the late 1980s to early 1990s, because the same thing happened to cyberpunk as happens to every other successful new thing in any branch of pop culture. At first it was a wonderful breath of fresh air into a stale and dying genre, as scores of new people with new talents and new ideas flooded into writing SF. Then publishers fixated on the commercial success of Neuromancer, and in a few short years cyberpunk fiction went from being something unexpected, fresh, and wildly original to being a trendy fashion statement—to being the flavor of the month—to being a hoary trope, complete with a set of stylistic markers and time-honored forms as immutable as an IEEE standard, to which one must pay heed if one is to write True Cyberpunk. It became, for the most part, Neuromancer fanfic, and the market was soon glutted with an enormous amount of “me too” work that copied the style of the genre’s pioneers but added nothing new to the vocabulary.

Whereupon cyberpunk fiction, as a genre, suffocated on its own vomit and died.

Now it’s 2023, and the 40th anniversary of the first magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” is fast approaching. It feels necessary to do something to mark the occasion, so right now we’re reading submissions for an all-cyberpunk issue of Stupefying Stories. No grand ambitions, this time. No book proposals. To do something like Cyberpunk 2.0 now would require either the backing of a major publisher, which I’m unlikely to get, or a Kickstarter campaign the likes of which I have neither the time, patience, or knowledge to run. Even if we were to start working on it right now, we couldn’t possibly have Cyberpunk 2.0 finished and released before the summer of 2024.

So a special issue of Stupefying Stories it is, then. And what I would truly, deeply, dearly love to see in my submissions inbox are at least a few stories that don’t try to recapitulate the 1980s vision of cyberpunk, but instead start fresh, from the baseline of now.

Like many writers my age, some of my earliest attempts at fiction were heavily influenced by Burning Chrome(1), Count Zero(2), and Mona Lisa Overdrive, though most of them were never finished and none survived the transition from my Mac SE through the various PCs I’ve owned.

But I’ll be making a submission to the Cyberpunk Special Edition, and if you’re one of the established or aspiring authors in the wider Castalia community and its tangential environs, I hope you will too.

(1) This was very nearly the name of a certain techno band.

(2) Yep. That was indeed the reference. We were recording soundtracks to books before we were doing them for games and movies.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vocation and Articulation

Sarah Hoyt describes the challenges of attempting to make a living doing what you love when the entire system is more or less stacked against you:

I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.

Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.

As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.

You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.

You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.

Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.

Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)

Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.

My solution – and I am not recommending it, merely sharing my perspective – is to simply refuse to regard my activity as economic in nature. I’m not bearing down this week in order to finish the 297,500-word final edition of A SEA OF SKULLS this month because some people might buy it or because it might generate some revenue or because it will make a pretty pair of leather books or because some people might be impressed with me as a writer. I literally don’t think about those things at all, and I think that if I did, it would hinder my ability to write.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. I’m continuing the story because the story continues in my head and it isn’t finished yet.

Sarah touches on this tangentially in her piece: This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.

I don’t consider myself to have “a career as a writer”. I just write books. Then Castalia publishes them. Repeat as desired. As long as the ideas continue to percolate and flow, I will write them down, in part because the smartest girl I ever knew once told her friend that an idea is only a feeling until it is articulated. And I like to articulate my ideas, which necessitates writing them down because talking to other people too often leads to distraction.

Also, in case anyone is interested, I’ve recently written an introduction for an unannounced Castalia History book that I believe will prove enlightening….

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The Logistics of Tolkien

An operational and logistical analysis of the Witch King’s attempt to storm Minas Tirith:

The goals here (operational objectives) of Sauron’s plan here absolutely check out. Minas Tirith contains most of Gondor’s military, and functionally all of its leadership and administration – its destruction could very well be war-ending. At the very least, control of Minas Tirith would open the rest of Gondor to raiding as well as enable Sauron to control the resource-rich Pelennor Fields. Delivering a powerful and effective siege (the operational objective) is very likely to lead to victory over Gondor and territorial control of it (the strategic objective). Now the question is Sauron’s plan to achieve that operational objective (we will talk about Gondor’s planning too – a little later in the series).

Now, as we’ve noted, operations are all about the problem of moving large armies. Late season Game of Thrones notwithstanding, armies do not generally teleport around the world, they have to march. That imposes all sorts of restrictions and costs on movement: where are the roads? Mountain passes? River Crossings? The terrain Sauron’s army must attack over is defined (as we’ll see) by a series of transport bottlenecks that have to be negotiated in order to deliver the siege. Then there is the issue of supplies – even orcs need to eat.

Logistics of the Army of Mordor
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics.

The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city: The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?

In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.

Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.

This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.

All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.

As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.

That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.

I’d like to think that the logistics of Selenoth work out well, but I’ll have to leave that for others to decide. Regardless, it’s a much more interesting take on Tolkien than most, as far as I’m concerned. And the analyst is right, it’s not a siege of the city so much as an attempt to storm its walls.

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You Are Not the Topic

If you want to be taken even halfway seriously as a commentator or opinionator, for the love of all that is good and holy, STOP TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF!

Stop explaining who you are, what you believe, why you are addressing the topic, or why you think it is important. I click away from the majority of Substack articles now because the author is observably more interested in talking about himself than about his purported subject.

  • Lesson One: No reader cares about you.
  • Lesson Two: You are not the topic.
  • Lesson Three: Stick to the topic.
  • Lesson Four: You’re not fooling anyone when you use yourself as an example every single time.

There are few things more tiresome than someone answering questions about themselves that no one has asked. I would rather read Victorian manuals of lady’s etiquette than the new modern genre of “in case you want to know what it’s like to be (fill in the blank), I’ll tell you everything about myself you never wanted, or needed, to know.”

It is the ideas that are important, not the personalities that promote them.

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Advantage Unauthorized

A professional copy editor laments the replacement of mediocrities with pattern probability tables:

I’m a copy editor and almost all the recent jobs I’ve had have been editing text written by AI. College application essays, marketing articles, reports. My job is quickly going from improving human beings’ writing to tweaking text written by robots so that it sounds somewhat human and evades AI detection software. I like helping people express their ideas by editing their writing, not changing endless text written by a computer that all sounds the same to trick people into thinking it was written by a person. The tech has already taken copy writers’ jobs and soon I’m sure it’ll be sophisticated enough to take mine too.

I hate soulless AI-generated art. I struggle to even understand the point of art if it wasn’t created by a conscious, talented human being with a soul. Soon books, TV shows, and movies will be churned out by computers. All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.

First of all, AI is a misnomer because there is no intelligence there. It’s simply design-for-effect applied to text generation, which is why Advanced Squad Leader feels like a WWII infantry simulation when it isn’t a simulation at all. I know this because I designed, and applied for a patent that was rejected, for an Artificial Player Character that provided the effect of simulating human behavior in an MMO game without actually simulating anything. It was just a weighted pattern probability table that, ironically, provided the game designer with more “realistic” human behavior by the NPCs than most real player-characters were displaying.

Second, while these generated patterns can provide realistic results that exceed the mediocre norm, they can never, on the basis of the pattern probabilities alone, ever reach the level of good writers, let alone great ones, because they contain no basis for the specificity required for quality analysis and application. This is the explanation for the copy editor’s correct complaint about “articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.”

Third is the limitations imposed by the AI-programmers, which massively reduce both the relevance and utility of the generated texts. When ideas, events, and individuals are banished from the input, the output will necessarily diverge from reality, and often, coherence.

This is why the creators who are both talented and unauthorized possess an inherent, structural advantage over what presently passes for AI-generated writing, an advantage that is unlikely to diminish with future iterations of the technology.

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