Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 392

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear — Complete short story

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

The pounding on the doors, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”

Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—

And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him...

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

The pounding on the doors, the words, “Open up in the name of the law.”

Juan Johnson who had been lying in the dark, in his little bed at the back of the house, half asleep, retained only a sense of explosions, a smell of something burning, papa up front saying he didn’t know anything of these Usaians and besides, he was a honest carpenter and what could they—

And mama! Mama, who had never left dad alone in any difficulty, Mama who rarely left the house without him...

And Lo, the Free Range Oyster Did Bring Forth A Promo Post

*blows dust off of computer* Oh look, it’s still here! I was afraid I’d left it in the Diner and Rex had gotten ahold of it! Let’s see, where do I… Aha! Welcome, welcome, O Huns, to the Pre-Christmas Promo Post! We’ve had a bit of a drought of submissions the last few weeks, and I ended up saving the trickle I had (with one colossal exception) for this post. I hope you’ve all just been too busy reading, writing, and feasting to send things in! I do want to publicly apologize: our own Mary Cat...

Big Prizes for Good Little Girls!

The other day, someone got me mad on Facebook. I know. How shocked are you?

Except that the person didn’t intend to make me mad, and what made me mad was a slow burn before I realized what was upsetting me, and also what the person thought he was doing was sharing a nice and encouraging meme on “yay, women.”

This was one of those “Ten women influential in technology” things. There were apparently the usual collation issues. Some people were given extra attention who didn’t deserve it, and other...

Let’s Call It Friendship

They say people in the arctic have a hundred words for snow. Maybe they do. I’ve also heard that debunked, which is the times we live in.

What is probably not immediately obvious to non-linguists is that word drives perception. For instance, while learning Swedish I learned there was no word for (I think – it’s been over thirty years) “orange.”

If that’s true and I haven’t remembered wrong, then Swedes won’t SEE orange, not as an individual color. They’ll see it as a funny reddish yellow.

Of cou...

Straining the Quality of Mercy – a Blast From The Past Post December 2012

We live in very odd times. A conversation with a friend who has a Pit bull dog, yesterday, led to his saying casually of course he couldn’t have a pit bull in Denver. I was aware of this, but had never given it any thought. Mostly I come across it on Craigslist as people who MUST move to Denver are getting rid of their dogs so they can move.

And here we come to my experience with the dogs. Like everyone else – though this happens mostly on TV it leaks to real life as well – I’ve seen pit bulls...

I Feel The Sky Tumbling Down

As a few of you know one of my favorite Heinlein books is Puppet Masters and part of the reason for that is the idea of a hidden world under the world we all know. This has been an attraction of mine since at least 12, when I began living in a secret world. I.e. the things I read in the paper, the person I had to pretend to be at school to get good grades, the things they “taught” me that I had to pretend to believe were the daylight world and what could be shared with everyone else.

Underneat...

It’s All Over Bar the Shouting – Kate Paulk

*Note by Sarah — oh, h*ll, so I published this early. It’s okay. It’s a good post and it deserves it. BTW, I disagree with Kate. We should consider legalizing prostitution. After all, politicians go free in the light of day. One of these professions deserves to be in jail, and it ain’t the hos.*

It’s All Over Bar the Shouting – Kate Paulk

But not for us. For the SJW crowd. Yes, there will be a lot of really ugly shouting, and some of the people who are incorrectly labeled vertebrates will proba...

Ruled by the SMART people — Smash the narrative I

Yesterday someone on facebook linked an article that illuminated something for me. And it’s stupid that I hadn’t seen it before.

Yesterday here someone asked about the narrative, how liberals feel a need to control “the narrative” and how everything that runs counter the narrative must get pounded.

I thought I’d posted here, before, about the narrative but it turns out it was in a private facebook site, and one of the members took off from that post and started a podcast series called “Shatter...

Egalite!

*Wrote this very late last night after a day of writing. Equalite looked wrong but I couldn’t figure out why. That’s because it’s egalite, of course. Apparently my half-asleep “wrote a lot” brain is illiterate.*

People aren’t angels. No matter how oppressed they are. Not even considering if they’ve been victims or not.

I’m trying to finish Through Fire and on limited time. Oh, yeah, and the two main leads in Through Fire – I re-wrote an emotional pivot and now I have to rewrite other stuff – ar...