All This Stuff and More
The latest number of The Big Click is out, featuring a rarity for us—a story with a police officer protagonist. We also have reviews, essays, a story by Jan Mantooth, and all that sort of thing. Buy an ebook copy to keep us in "business", or subscribe via Weightless Books. My main contribution this time was the cover photo:
It was taken at the lovely beer-and-burger-garden Telegraph Oakland. Sooo tasty.
The only "legit" source for the story of the missing Libyan airliners on the first page of Google results is this Daily Mail article and honestly the whole thing sounds like bullshit. (There is a neat video of militants using the very nice pool at the US Embassy though.) Not that the planes aren't "missing", but that the militants will, on 9/11, fuel, board, and fly them for use either as terror weapons or to infiltrate civilian airports. One, the militants are already winning—why do they need suicide runs? Two, 9/11 worked because the planes got into the air normally and were hijacked mid-flight. It's a lot harder to send a secret unscheduled airliner into the air and have it fly unnoticed for any period of time.
It's interesting to see which stories get picked up and which do not. I recently signed up for the Newsmax letter (to get "gold" for a Facebook game I ended up not playing much) and the remarkable thing to me is how closely this right-wing publication mirrors the left, including all sorts of dubious nutritional news about what to eat and what to avoid (e.g., tap water). There's also a lot of sound money junk being sold, and the ad copy for one book literally read, in part, "The point is, this guy is not a quack… a fear monger… or political extremist." Everyone thinks they're a moderate, of course.
This is obvious in the latest tempest over video games, and specifically the claims of journalistic "corruption"—most of which seems to fairly obviously be a function of small world syndrome, and the fact that service journalism for anything and everything has always been chockful of penny-ante circle-jerking. (I suppose these kids would be shocked to find out that in the world of books, novelists often write book reviews, promoting or attacking their own competition!!!!) Or in SF right now, there's literally serious debate over whether John Scalzi or Larry Correia sell more books. Who can tell overall given e-, audio etc., but I'll say this: Correia's last hardcover, out since the beginning of July, has Bookscanned 4842 copies. Scalzi's latest hardcover, out since yesterday, has Bookscanned 2,147. So, do the math, as we used to say. The market rules, unless political trickery means that it doesn't!
Why are our enemies always ever so possible, yet so completely obvious, eh?
It was taken at the lovely beer-and-burger-garden Telegraph Oakland. Sooo tasty.
The only "legit" source for the story of the missing Libyan airliners on the first page of Google results is this Daily Mail article and honestly the whole thing sounds like bullshit. (There is a neat video of militants using the very nice pool at the US Embassy though.) Not that the planes aren't "missing", but that the militants will, on 9/11, fuel, board, and fly them for use either as terror weapons or to infiltrate civilian airports. One, the militants are already winning—why do they need suicide runs? Two, 9/11 worked because the planes got into the air normally and were hijacked mid-flight. It's a lot harder to send a secret unscheduled airliner into the air and have it fly unnoticed for any period of time.
It's interesting to see which stories get picked up and which do not. I recently signed up for the Newsmax letter (to get "gold" for a Facebook game I ended up not playing much) and the remarkable thing to me is how closely this right-wing publication mirrors the left, including all sorts of dubious nutritional news about what to eat and what to avoid (e.g., tap water). There's also a lot of sound money junk being sold, and the ad copy for one book literally read, in part, "The point is, this guy is not a quack… a fear monger… or political extremist." Everyone thinks they're a moderate, of course.
This is obvious in the latest tempest over video games, and specifically the claims of journalistic "corruption"—most of which seems to fairly obviously be a function of small world syndrome, and the fact that service journalism for anything and everything has always been chockful of penny-ante circle-jerking. (I suppose these kids would be shocked to find out that in the world of books, novelists often write book reviews, promoting or attacking their own competition!!!!) Or in SF right now, there's literally serious debate over whether John Scalzi or Larry Correia sell more books. Who can tell overall given e-, audio etc., but I'll say this: Correia's last hardcover, out since the beginning of July, has Bookscanned 4842 copies. Scalzi's latest hardcover, out since yesterday, has Bookscanned 2,147. So, do the math, as we used to say. The market rules, unless political trickery means that it doesn't!
Why are our enemies always ever so possible, yet so completely obvious, eh?
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