Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 358

Virtue

Real virtue is hard. I was thinking about this as I was thinking the other day that I’m quite possibly the worst-practitioner-of-my-professed-religion-ever.

You’d not think that from the outside because I try to fit in with the obvious observances, and do the right thing… most of the time. Look, it’s not hypocrisy, it’s my way of keeping myself close to the straight and narrow.

But there’s a whole host of little things that slip by: times I’m unkind, times I don’t consider others and certainl...

The Slippery Slope – Amanda Green

The Slippery Slope – Amanda Green

I know, I know, this post is late. Blame me, not Sarah. When she asked for a post last night, I had just stumbled home after being away for most of the day and was about to fall face down in bed. So, here I am this morning, trying to get enough coffee into my system to make sense – and to keep reminding myself it isn’t good to throw my laptop through the TV screen because of the idiocy of the media and the double-standard of so many people.

I want to start by...

Stealing The Oyster’s Thunder

So, the oyster sent me the post but it’s a leetle one. And you know what, I don’t feel like writing a new one, because … well… I’ll tell you next week. If you noticed my absence as Instapundit’s late-night-DJ, we were out of the house from 9 am to 11 pm and most of it we were doing violent manual labor. So. I barely made it up the stairs before I passed out into a dreamless sleep.

However, I remembered that when I was recovering from surgery I desperately wanted to write stories, but couldn’t...

Whistling Past The Graveyard

*I accidentally put this post in Mad Genius Club last night. That’s how exhausted I was. We have a full day of work away from this house. But then we should be more or less done. I’m not removing the post at MGC because it has comments, but I’m putting it beneath Cedar’s.*

You know, it will never cease to amaze me how people — and by people, I mean most people, right, left or center — continue to swallow “surveys” and “statistics” that say what is plainly not the truth, and then entire busin...

Death in the Surprise Position – A Blast From The past from Dec. 2012

*Bear with me. By Monday I should have more time to spend on blogging and writing too. And if anyone has been trying to reach me via Goldport Press, be patient another couple of weeks. It’s been… interesting.*

Death in the Surprise Position – A Blast From The past from Dec. 2012

I have been reading in recent days and casual attacks on strangers (or even mass murder) don’t really seem to be getting more frequent. But people feel as though they are. People feel as though these are sitting RIGHT...

Holding Women Back

So there’s been an awful lot of talk about people wanting to stop women from writing (does sinal salute with thumb and forefinger on either side of the nose, head inclined.)

Since we don’t live in Iran or another of the places that legitimately make it difficult for women to write or even to learn to write, this was a bit puzzling. It was all the more so since the people accused of wanting to make “women stop writing” are people with almost no power in the traditional book marketplace.

I mean...

The rise of the Self-Insertion fic -Lawrence Railey

The rise of the Self-Insertion fic -Lawrence Railey

If you’re like me, much of your early childhood was spent pretending you were this or that. Perhaps you were a superhero one day and an astronaut the next. Maybe you were a Jedi or a captain of a starship. You were the hero in your own story.

But as you grew older, you became aware that the world wasn’t all about you. Your story was not the only story that mattered. Indeed, when you read a book or watched a movie, you understood that the ch...

Cruel to the Kind

Part of the reason we tend to stay in the shadows and say nothing, while philosophies like communism run abroad in the world killing people is because those philosophies – horrible and ridiculous though they are — dress themselves in the veneer of kindness and concern for others.

Because of this, we can’t speak without seeming uncaring or worse, veritable monsters of inhumanity.

This is why the other side, in science fiction or in politics, keeps calling us “haters” or “evil.” The fact the ot...

Saving this Union – a blast from the past post from May 2013

*Sorry, for the bfp guys. This week is going to be insane, as … well, I’ll explain later but I’m going to be AFK except mornings and evenings for most of the week.*

Yesterday I went downstairs to watch an episode of Columbo.

It wasn’t one of my favorites, since I rather liked the guy you know is going to get killed, and this one had way more lead up to the ‘being killed’ than most episodes.

It was the chess tournament episode, and here’s the thing: the challenger is clearly Russian. He was al...

Good Men

So, yesterday was a fun day. Actually it was a fun day in many ways and an unusual too. I got to meet a fan who is a friend of a friend and discovered she really is a “relative I’d never met before.” In the evening we hit Jeff Duntemann’s party very, very late, and kept the poor man up till all hours (we’re sorry!)

In between there was coming home to a spate of messages from you nuts asking if I was okay, because you heard about a shooting in downtown Colorado Springs and you have a vague ide...