Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 236

Without Law

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When I was little, my favorite folk hero wasn’t even from my culture — the one my region had that was somewhat similar was an out and out villain, who might have robbed from the rich to suborn the poor, but didn’t have the same streak of nobility — it was Robin Hood.

And no, I didn’t love him for the same reason the left does. They seem to think he’s some kind of Bernie Sanders in tights (pauses to try to make image go away) deciding who has earned too much (Oh, sorry, as Mr. Obama said, “...

This and That and Those

I am aware there is a last batch of books to send, and my only excuse is that January and more than half of February were a blurr of total tiredness and decongestants.

I have no idea what that bug was. Seemed to be an upper respiratory thing, but it just wouldn’t let go, and mostly it would make you feel terminally tired.  I got so scared I went to the doctor, but got told “yes, that’s what’s going around.”

And then Wedding things (I never thought the mother of the groom needed to be so invol...

The Flaw In Flawless

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Perfectionism should be classified as a disability.

It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than miss-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has.

I don’t know how we managed to infect both boys with it, though arguably both of us have it, and also arguably perhaps it’s genetic.  In their case it causes this weird veer between insecurity and what might come across as boastfulness: first by thinking...

Don’t Jump Off That Ledge II – A Blast From The Past From June 24 2013

*I’m hearing a lot of the doom and gloom again, and heck, I’m feeling the doom and gloom myself, partly because of the shenanigans going on in my state, and because I know better than most how deep the fraud is and how hard it’s going to be to get a victory against it in 2020 no matter what. And how we might not be able to, after which if we’re lucky — and it’s still awful even if we are — all hell breaks lose. If it doesn’t, we’re going to hit Venezuela before we come up for air.
These are n...

I Am Myself Alone

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One of the things I did a lot, growing up in a village and seeing the unending generations stretching back — some in the village, in various houses, some in the nearby cemetery — was to think about ancestry.

Oh, not in the sense of eugenics, though that too a bit, as anyone who grew up in farm country.  But in the sense of “who was here before me?”

I still think that way a lot, hence the interest in historic fiction/non fiction, and in alternate history.

As far as I can tell we live in the w...

Out of Time

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The most shocking thing my — admittedly very odd — sons ever told my brother was that the Beatles weren’t all that.  Imagine supercilious teens saying “oh, they were all right, I suppose.”

This tied in with something we were talking about here yesterday.  The internet, while seemingly innocuous and unobtrusive has changed our lives at such a fundamental level that even those of us who grew up through the shift don’t fully understand how different things are now.  particularly for writers.

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Changing Gears

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You know, I’m always surprised when I talk to anyone about how things have changed in the last 20 to 30 years and get something like “sure, we have computers, but that doesn’t make a big difference. It’s not like the introduction of the automobile, or flight.  Now if we had flying cars…”  It happens every time we’re talking about how technology has changed life, and yet it still puzzles me, because it’s a form of willful blindness.

I yield to no one in my disappointment that there are no fly...

Malice or Stupidity, Now Scored for History

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Robert A. Heinlein said that a society that doesn’t know history has no past and no future.  Of course, we don’t have to listen to that, because Heinlein was after all racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Just ask any college professor or any leftist talking head (but I repeat myself) and they’ll inform you of this.  And, if, armed with knowledge of the man’s books and biography and works you dispute this, and they can’t wave it away with “you don’t see the hidden messages” (which is like “y...

Agreeableness

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This is a wee bit — coff — late because a family member had a routine procedure which required me to spend a lot of time in a hospital waiting room.

And while waiting, older son and I got to talking, and what we got to talking about was innate versus trained traits.

The truth is no one knows what the cause of the way any individual is: environment or genetics.  I mean, we know both go into it, but not what proportions, nor how easy it might be to train someone out of really counterproductive...

A Myth of Humanity- A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM FEBRUARY 2011

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*I was looking for a BFP and this one made me sigh and think “I’ve been me for a long time. As you can see, I was groping towards being a wrong fan who had wrong fun already.”

A Myth of Humanity- A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM FEBRUARY 2011

Lately, partly because I’ve been trying to kick off whatever bug has got me since November – it keeps coming back – and because when I’m tired or sick I can’t read fiction, I’ve been reading books on the proto- Indo-European culture.

Now, you go back long eno...