Perversity of Humanity – Page 5 – Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

Monday, 24 August 2015 12:17Monday, 24 August 2015 12:37

Hugo away now.

So, this year I joined WorldCon for the first time (as a supporting member) and got to vote on the Hugos.

I’ve been a science fiction aficionado most of my life. 50 years, or close to it; way back in the 1960’s, before I could even really understand what I was reading, I got hooked by a two-volume set of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher.

I was thereby introduced to A.E. Van Vogt (The Weapon Shops of Isher), Poul Anderson (Brain Wave), Alfred Bester (The Stars My Destination), George O. Smith (“Lost Art”, which is part of the great Venus Equilateral), and Nelson S. Bond (“Magic City”) among others. I later re-read them all in the light of somewhat greater maturity and understood that I had been reading classic SF from a golden age that had just preceded my own life. But that was the trigger that started me off reading SF nearly half a century ago. And it colors my appreciation of modern SF quite a bit.

You may notice that I have carefully avoided using the term “fan”. That’s because (and in someone else’s construction that I saw a couple of days ago) I’m a fan, not a Fan. I’ve been to exactly three SF conventions in my life, and I can name them easily: NorthAmericon in 1979, Rivercon V in 1980, and our local InConJunction 2 in 1981. NorthAmericon was as close as I’ve ever come to attending WorldCon, given it was held to give US fans something to do since WorldCon was being held in England that year.*

I stopped going to the local ‘con after one try because, frankly, I didn’t (and still don’t) like most of the people who were running it back then. Fen qua fen ordinarily give me the willies, and these folks were exceedingly strange, even for fen. (Some of us who were less than cordial about them were wont to refer to their SF club The Circle of Janus as “the circular anus”.) Anyway, as a card-carrying introvert even back then, I quit going to SF conventions about the time I was 22.** Fuck, I don’t even go to GenCon, and it’s here every year until the SJWs force it to move because they don’t like our governor. Which would be a pretty stupid reason to move it, but they’re SJWs, so I digress.

Over the years, particularly after Heinlein died, but moreso after Poul Anderson died, I sort of lost interest in “modern” science fiction, because most of it was new-agey, touchy-feely, socially-aware, globull-warmerongering-friendly feminist pap. And today, so much of it is post-apocalyptic “we’re doomed anyway” downer shit. (The Black Tide Rising series by John Ringo being a notable exception to the mill run of such.)***

But then I found Baen, and authors who were actually writing the kind of science fiction I wanted to read. Even if Eric Flint is a red diaper baby. I still like his stuff, and he has a good editorial eye. Plus, he likes a lot of the same authors I do 🙂

(Oh, and by the way: In the main, I hate fantasy, or what we used to call “sword and sorcery” (with a couple of significant, classic exceptions). I wish the fantasy genre had never gotten bound up with science fiction. They are completely different genres, with different sets of fans, and other than their common speculative nature, they really don’t deserve to be lumped together. But that’s a bone to be picked another day.)

So where am I going with this?

The year of the *. (No, that’s not a footnote.)

I admit, fully and openly, that I sided with the Sad Puppies, and voted as one (which is not the same thing that the CHORFs**** are calling “voting the SP slate”, since there wasn’t a goddamn SP slate). I have sat here for many years and idly wondered from time to time just exactly who the fuck decided that certain Hugo winners ought to have a Hugo. Finding out that the Hugo voting has been largely taken over by the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) crowd AKA CHORFs went a long way toward explaining that to me.

I was not aware of Sad Puppies, by the way, until this year, which was its third annual iteration. And I’m not going to get into the Rabid Puppies vs. Sad Puppies distraction; I don’t know who Vox Day is, and I don’t much give a fuck, other than that he seems to be a raging asshole.

And as I said on Facebook yesterday, I’ve never bought a book because it had a sticker on the cover proclaiming it to be a Hugo winner or nominee. Someone else (I think one of Hoyt’s Huns) mentioned dollars as votes. Just so.

The fact that the number of No Awards for the Hugo in its entire history just doubled over the weekend tells me that the CHORFs are fully in charge and have no intention of relinquishing their hold (or what they perceive as their hold) on SF fandom. While I agree that the Puppies won by losing (and thereby proving what a total group of childish assholes the CHORFs are), it doesn’t mean I have to like it. And I don’t.

By all accounts, Toni Weisskopf really deserved a Hugo for Best Editor (Long Form), but because she was Puppy-tainted, she came in second to No Award.

And I read, critically, both KJA’s The Dark Between the Stars and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. (I tried to read Ancillary Sword, but the first chapter defeated me; I simply couldn’t be moved to care. The Goblin Emperor was crap from the first sentence. And I’m not a Jim Butcher fan; sue me.) Liu’s book was good, and I enjoyed it. But Anderson’s book was better and it deserved the Hugo. It didn’t get it because Anderson is smeared with the Puppies (plus he’s not a darling of the SJW crowd).

It just gets worse from there so there’s no point in discussing it. Then there was the just-plain-nastiness of the SJW crowd, starting with “you can cheer the no-awards, but you can’t boo them.” Fuck you, assholes.

The Hugo is finished as a serious award. It was finished anyway, years ago, because it was only voted on by a self-selecting group that either attended WorldCon or bought a supporting membership (after that became possible). When that group became slanted to the SJW/CHORF crowd, the awards started tilting toward the type of SF that I described as being distasteful to me, above. And now that the proggies have full control, they’re unwilling to let go of it, even when the awards they’re giving are going to pedestrian crap, or aren’t going to anyone (No Award) no matter how deserving.

There’s apparently going to be a Sad Puppies IV, but with all due respect to the organizers, I don’t think that’s the appropriate response. The Hugo is old and busted; something else needs to take its place. Whatever that something is, it needs to be disassociated from WorldCon (something else that’s old and busted), and made more accessible to the body of fans who actually buy and read the books. It’s clear that WorldCon and the World Science Fiction Society no longer represent a vital cross-section of fandom, and indeed, there seem to be a lot of fans out there who don’t know what either of them OR the Hugo are.

Regardless of the awe and respect that many fans have for the Hugo, it is clear that the sand of cultural progressivism has jammed its gears. When you’ve butted up against that immovable object with your irresistible force and still haven’t been able to budge it an inch after repeated tries, it’s time to walk away and try something new.

It’s a big multiverse. There’s room for more than one award in Science Fiction.

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* And at which it was my supreme pleasure and privilege to meet Forrest J Ackerman. And setup and run his slides of the Ackermansion, which I got to visit two years later.

** Which doesn’t mean I don’t go to conventions of any sort. I’ve been to national and regional conventions of my college service fraternity, and I spend far too much time going to Masonic events, and I haven’t missed a Grand Lodge convocation since 2000. In fact, my wife and I are getting ready to run the Indiana hospitality suite at the 2015 Supreme Council session of the AASR-NMJ. But that’s different; the people who attend such things aren’t fen. They’re grownups. Well, by and large, anyway.

***My preference is what Sarah Hoyt calls “Human Wave” SF.

**** Here, let me Google that for you.

Monday, 15 June 2015 11:55

People of Wal-Mart need to take a chill pill. (Try the liquor department.)

Saw this on Facebook.

Not sure I really agree without reservation. A friend replied to the post, “replace ‘fat’ with ‘lazy’ and I’ll be in 100% agreement.” Not really sure I agree with that, either.

My dad was 5’7″, 160 lbs, and looked perfectly healthy three months before he died at 76. And he had emphysema bad enough that he probably should have been on portable oxygen. Are you saying that because he looked otherwise healthy, he shouldn’t have been allowed to use one of these motorized carts to shop at the local big box store?

My 78-year-old father-in-law is a little skinny dude who looks healthy, too, but his knees are shot to hell. Going to tell him he can’t use a scooter? (He has his own, anyway, thanks.) My 92-year-old stepfather also looks healthy till you realize his knees are shot, too. No scooter for him, either? (He can’t use one because he’s nearly blind, but again, thanks anyway.)

Before October 2013, my wife (who is pleasantly plump, but certainly not “fat” in that unique and appalling “people of Wal-Mart” way) had a hip that was so bad that she almost couldn’t walk to the store from the handicapped spot in the parking lot, let alone walk around on her own in the store. Would you say that she couldn’t use one of these carts before she had her hip replaced because, just by looking at her, you couldn’t tell she could barely walk because her hip socket had almost completely collapsed and the ball joint was grinding into her flesh? If you would, fuck you up the ass. Then maybe you’ll understand pain a little better.^*

In my own case, I won’t use the motorized carts on general principle because I’m too damn stubborn to admit that sometimes I really can’t walk very well. But I have bad knees and ankles from too many years working construction in my misspent youth. And yeah, I’m 100 pounds overweight because I sit at a desk all day and can’t really get enough exercise to work it off anymore. But I’ll sit on my ass at home rather than admit that I have to use the scooter.

I reserve judgment on “fat ass lazy” these days. Besides, it’s not for me to say; I figure folks who don’t really need to use the scooters will face a higher Tribunal, eventually. And as an old sinner myself, that’s OK with me.

____________

* By the way, her hip wasn’t bad because she was overweight. She had what was finally diagnosed as congenital hip dysplasia from birth that nobody discovered (or had any particular reason to be looking for) until she was over 50, when the weak joint finally failed. There was speculation that if she wasn’t a swimmer and spent much of her work day in the water, it would have failed years earlier.

Tuesday, 28 October 2014 11:57

Just a bunch of HOAs.

I see in the local popular media that the Hancock County prosecutor is telling a local homeowners' association that they need to back down from telling a Korean War veteran that he can't fly a flag from a flagpole in his yard. That's nice, right before the election…ought to give that fuckface prosecutor a nice boost for standing up for a flag-waving patriot.¹

The problem as I see it, however, is that the HOA's rules aren't negotiable in court. As the perennial argument regarding ham radio antennae in HOA-controlled neighborhoods goes, when you signed on the dotted line (the many dotted lines) to close on your home, one of the things you signed was your agreement to abide by the HOA rules. If you didn't sign that document then in all likelihood you wouldn't have been permitted to close on the house (or, in my case some years back, condo).

So other than grandstanding, I don't see where this prosecutor is going to be able to do much more than rant and rave. I agree with him that the HOA are being assholes here, but the problem is not the one little rule that says "no flagpoles in yards". And yes, yes, I get that many years ago (in years that I was alive, in fact) there were plenty of "neighborhood associations" and "civic leagues" whose only real reason for existing was to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. The Civil Rights Act pretty much put paid to that little conceit.²

No, the problem is HOAs themselves. HOAs are creatures of the general contractor and they are put in place to handle things that the city or county don't generally deal with and that the contractor doesn't want to be hung with forever after the subdivision is 100% sold. For instance, snow removal, garbage pickup, general maintenance of common areas, possibly ownership of a clubhouse, that sort of thing. As far as snow and garbage and road upkeep go, the subdivision might not even be in a city district to begin with, and the contractor may have received zoning approval only after agreeing to set up a HOA so that the city or county wouldn't have to worry about them. These are legitimate reasons to have a HOA, in my opinion; it is simpler and often cheaper to negotiate neighborhood-wide contracts for services rather than each householder contracting his own, and of course common property needs to be kept in good repair.

However, HOAs generally come with a generic set of bylaws and rules that are oppressive and (in my opinion) effectively constitute a "taking" of your right to own and improve property. While it may be appreciated that the association bylaws don't allow your hillbilly neighbors out back to run an informal auto repair and body shop in their garage and side yard (something that residential zoning rules generally frown on anyway), bylaws that disallow individualized lawn improvements such as flower beds, flagpoles, fountains, or even trees and mulching without association approval — which may or may not be granted — may not float your boat five or six years into your residence there. Oh, and that boat? Keep it in storage somewhere else, along with your RV, because it's unlikely you'll be allowed to park either of them in your driveway or back yard. And we'll not get into the whole "ham radio antennae and your HOA" business, other than to say that if HOAs weren't unreasonable, there wouldn't be a booming business in so-called "stealth" antennae among the ham radio set.³

The fact is that the vast majority of HOAs end up being little fascist neighborhood soviets with their spies out just waiting for you to violate the rules. It is often nearly impossible to vote the control freaks out of office, and even when you do that, it is usually impossible to simply let the HOA fold up and die.⁴ Because of that, it seems to me that the time is ripe not for prosecutors to be telling HOAs that they can't prevent veterans from flying flags, but for the state legislature to start legislating in favor of property rights and put the brakes on HOAs in general, spelling out in statute what they can and cannot do to their neighbors — who, after all, have a sizeable investment in property that the HOA is trying to micro-control. Most folks who buy and live in HOA neighborhoods don't have the easy option of saying to hell with the HOA, I'm selling and going somewhere else. After all, they have to find a buyer, sell, find a new place to live, often negotiate purchase of a new home "pending sale of other property" because you can't have multiple FHA mortagages…and believe me, I'm still trying to sell an FHA-financed condo after moving out nearly nine years ago, while still trying to buy the house we're living in (the move was not because of the HOA, but because we needed a bigger place after we got married). Buying a house is not like buying a car and trading it every two or three years. You are sort of stuck for a while, unless you are independently wealthy, or unless your friend who just moved back to town is looking for a place to live and your mother is moving into senior living and is willing to let you live in the house till you can purchase it from her. The latter being our case.

Bottom line, the HOA problem isn't going to go away without legislation. The Hancock County fuckface prosecutor can grandstand all he wants, but in the end, all he's going to get is a specific HOA to back down in this one single case — if that. Our legislators need to stand up for property rights and put limits on abusive HOA behavior.

UPDATE: Looks like the HOA backed down. I read the prosecutor's letter, and more or less I suppose his position is tenable, but IMHO, and all things being equal, I think the HOA should have fought him in court — a judge might have seen a certain amount of prosecutorial overreach. Now we have an unresolved issue that will continue to be unresolved until either the courts rule on a different HOA issue, or the legislature finally acts to limit the power of HOAs in such matters.

The assholes who wrote the anonymous hate mails are funny. "Now that you have destroyed Fieldstone, are you going to pay my mother’s nursing care costs when she is unable to sell her home there?" Yeah, right. Try proving your initial proposition first, i.e., that one flagpole flying an American flag and a POW/MIA flag has "destroyed" the subdivision. And, "You have caused immeasurable harm." Prove it.

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1 See here for why I consider the Hancock Country prosecutor a fuckface, and hope people vote for his opponent next week.

2 To this day I refuse to join or even go to the meetings of the civic league in this neighborhood, because they approached my father back in the early 1960s about that and he said, "What is the point of your association? What is your main reason for existing?" and they hemmed and hawwed and finally admitted that they were trying to keep the black man out. He told them to get the hell out of his house and off of his property.
While I understand that today's iteration of that civic league is more about neighborhood watch and that sort of thing, the very history of the organization prevents me from becoming involved with it. The least they could have done was changed the name. Anyway, it is not a HOA and can't tell me what I can and can't do with my property, so it can go fly a fucking kite.

3 And let's be clear here — by "unreasonable" I don't mean that they don't allow a guy to have an 80 foot guyed tower with a dozen different antennae hanging off of it, topped with a hex beam good to 80 meters. I mean not allowing things like a 27-foot ground-mount vertical in your back yard, because your neighbor might see it and have a heart attack. Or getting bent out of shape because you have some nearly invisible wires hanging in the air outside that run down to your eaves and thence into your home. This is why there is a bill in Congress right now that seeks to extend the "reasonable accommodation" already made years ago for TV antennae and satellite dishes to include "reasonable" ham radio antennae.

4 Although I was talking to someone recently who told me about his defunct, abusive HOA that had been taken over and then left to rot on the vine for the five years or so of inactivity that caused it to be dissolved completely, when all of a sudden, right before time expired, one of his neighbors crawled out of the woodwork and started trying to find candidates to run for office. He told her to fuck off, and so did the rest of the neighborhood who were happy to have the fascists off their backs.

Wednesday, 8 October 2014 17:04

“He ain’t smart enough to pour pee out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.”

The equivalent, today, being "He ain't smart enough to install a license file with the installation instructions written in the file."

ARGHHHH.

Wednesday, 24 September 2014 10:28

KidsSysAdmins today.

Customer writes in about using our utility that takes one of our encoded system files and translates it to plain text so you can view it.

When I try to look at them using [utility], they scroll by so fast I can’t read them. Is there a switch or something I can use to view one page at a time?

Apparently nobody knows how to use the DOS command line anymore. There are at least two methods of handling this without needing a switch. Either redirect the output to a file, or pipe it to MORE.

Jeez. We are doomed. It's like in the Foundation series, where the soi-disant technicians and engineers who ran the atomic power plants no longer knew anything about the technology behind them, and couldn't so much as replace a part if it failed.

They were back in the office and Mallow said, thoughfully, "And all those generators are in your hands?"

"Every one," said the tech-man, with more than a touch of complacency.

"And you keep them running and in order?"

"Right!"

"And if they break down?"

The tech-man shook his head indignantly, "They don't break down. They never break down. They were built for eternity."

"Eternity is a long time. Just suppose—"

"It is unscientific to suppose meaningless cases."

"All right. Suppose I were to blast a vital part into nothingness? I suppose the machines aren't immune to atomic forces? Suppose I fuse a vital connection, or smash a quartz D-tube?"

"Well, then," shouted the tech-man, furiously, "you would be killed."

"Yes, I know that," Mallow was shouting, too, "but what about the generator? Could you repair it?"

"Sir," the tech-man howled his words, "you have had a fair return. You've had what you asked for. Now get out! I owe you nothing more!"

Mallow bowed with a satiric respect and left.

Two days later he was back at the base where the Far Star waited to return with him to the planet, Terminus.

And two days later, the tech-man's shield went dead, and for all his puzzling and cursing never glowed again.

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation, p. 176

Old-time ham radio operators who still remember homebrewing their own equipment snarkily dismiss this kind of thing as "appliance operating". While I think that may be a little harsh and overblown, when it comes down to someone who only knows how to manipulate Windows through the GUI, I do sort of get their point.

Friday, 29 August 2014 11:31

Gentlemen, we must protect our phoney-baloney jobs.

At least that is the takeaway I get from my wife's recent brush with the law in $COUNTY, which shall remain nameless for the protection of the innocent. It is, in any case, NOT the county we live in…nor has my wife ever lived in $COUNTY, although she did work there briefly a long time ago.

Last week, my wife received an officious…er, make that "official"-looking letter from the $COUNTY Prosecutor, informing her that she was a deadbeat check-passer and that the $COUNTY Prosecutor was requesting that the state refile a warrant for her arrest for same.

Now, my wife used to be one of those folks who thinks that if they have checks left in the checkbook, they must have money left in the bank. This has not been the case since we married and she was introduced to modern methods of accountancy.¹ She also had a somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward bills that she found herself unable to pay. So this has meant, over the years, that we have occasionally received officious, er, sorry, "official" notices of back taxes not paid, or old utility bills not paid and sold to bill collectors for pennies on the dollar, etc. One back tax notice was for failure to file in $STATE, where she lived for about three years, and where she would never have failed to file because she would have gotten a full refund…but I digress (and I think I may have opined about this particular idiocy before anyway).

But this is the first time she's been served with a warrant for passing a bad check.

Upon reading the particulars, we found that the alleged bad check was written CLEAR BACK IN 1998. That is, well over a year before I met her. Then, early the next year, the case was refiled and a warrant for her arrest issued, one assumes because they added "failure to appear". In neither case did my wife receive service of the complaint, probably because she lived in $OTHERCOUNTY at the time (again, not the one we live in now) and it was probably served by mail…and who knows what address they sent it to. If they sent it to her work address, the idiots she worked for at the time probably threw it away. In any case, that's where matters sat for over 14 years.

Note that $BIGBOX, the retailer who accepted the check in the first place, also appears never to have tried to contact her directly. I have heard in the past that $BIGBOX doesn't generally bother with that, they simply go to court immediately because it's not worth their trouble to collect on their own. Again, I don't know if that's true, it's just what I've heard.

Comes now $COUNTY Prosecutor, who is apparently running for re-election according to $ATTORNEY, and has decided to clean out the courthouse attic so he can claim to his constituents to be Mr. Law and Order. So my wife, who wrote a check for $MISDEMEANORAMOUNT, has sat here chewing her nails for the past few days whilst her lawyers contacted the court and found out what she had to do to avoid being perp-walked in $COUNTY² (and probably losing her job in the process). This all concluded satisfactorily this morning when she went to court and paid for the check, the court costs, and the lawyer's fee, and promised the judge that she would be a good girl henceforward.

My question, though, kind of goes like this.

If a prosecutor timely issues a subpoena or a warrant for an infraction that has a statute of limitations, and then timely executes the subpoena or warrant, I have no problem. But I do have a problem when 14 years elapses between the paperwork being filed and anyone in the prosecutor's office arsing themselves to do anything about it. It seems to me that if you have a 10 year statute of limitations on the crime, then a like statute of limitations should apply to any subpoenas or warrants that are related to it that are not executed within that time (I mean, the statute would run for x number of years after the filings, not concurrently with the statute for the crime itself). And it doesn't seem to me that service by mail is appropriate, either, because mail can become lost or misdelivered through no fault of the court or the defendant. At some level the state needs to be prodded to do its job, not leave things hanging for years and then be able to, for little more than political reasons, revive them. Perhaps I need to bring this to the attention of my state representative and senator.

And by the way, you may be wondering how she managed to never got picked up on an outstanding warrant. She's been stopped a couple of times for things like her taillight being out. (Not for speeding, she doesn't speed.) She had an accident a couple of years ago when some idiot kid hit her in the ass at a red light. She's had background checks run for her job. Nothing ever came up about an outstanding warrant. The prosecutor had to ask the state to refile the warrant because the copy they had was unreadable. That's how fucked up this whole thing is.

The fact is that $BIGBOX is not getting their money, because they were paid what the original court filing demanded 14 years ago. So inflation alone has destroyed any value inherent in the amount they will receive from the Clerk of $COUNTY. Pretty stupid all around, and they upset my wife for no particularly good reason, since all they would have had to do was CALL US and we would have made it right. This was never a case of they "couldn't" find her, either — she has always had a current drivers license, and has filed taxes, and had bank accounts where the bank knew where she lived. They could have found her at any time. They just never tried.

But I did get to call her "my little Miss Demeanor" all week. 🙂

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¹ I have always paid the monthly household bills, because I want the bills to be, like, paid. I like having a roof over my head and heat and light and water and all those decadent modern comforts. Sue me. Well, don't. I can't afford it right now.

² They did, in fact, threaten this when her lawyer contacted them.

Thursday, 10 July 2014 17:49

Democrats are scum (but we knew that).

Do these people think that they are immune from the consequences of their idiocy?

Virginia Democrat Offers Reward For Nude Photos of Big Game Hunting Texas Tech Cheerleader Kendall Jones…

I noted on Facebook that I wished I were Ms. Jones's father. Because Mr. Dick, er, Dickinson would be a dead man walking if I were.

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that Dick, er, Dickinson would actually threaten to do something like this to a woman who, if she became irate with him, could probably put an arrow through him at a hundred yards and then gut him like the pig he is.

So, since he probably won't end up qualifying for a Darwin Award (because folks like the Joneses are probably far too polite to beat the life out of him as he so richly deserves), Mr. Mike "Little" Dick, er, Dickinson, receives the Tiger Taunting Award today for his inability to understand exactly when it's wiser to just keep your damn piehole shut.

Wednesday, 5 March 2014 14:10

There are days I fear for humanity.

Customer wrote in, one liner, nothing but the error he got when the application failed to start.

Engineer wrote back and asked for the console log, which the customer readily sent.

The failure here is that the customer could have looked at the log himself and immediately found out that the reason the application wasn't starting was because the license — which a couple of emails later he said that he'd received a couple of days ago — had not been applied.

Instead, it took a 10-email conversation to close the ticket.

Unbelievable. Do they think that only the vendor's engineers are allowed to look at the Holy Writ of the Logfile?

Friday, 20 December 2013 16:04

“…and more importantly, didn’t give a flying f*ck!”

I just saw one of those stupid photo ad links every news and commentary site seems to have at the bottom of their pages now — you know the ones, “This one stupid trick”, etc.

They’re all insulting to anyone’s intelligence, but this one is just offensive: