Tag: the future

Some snippets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)

I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!

Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.

Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?

Shit.

Let’s be clear about something

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

I was gonna put this on Twitter, but suddenly I feel like putting it somewhere I can link to it later might be useful.

I have grown excessively tired of the (somehow, surprisingly) large number of people who are claiming that “no one could have predicted” COVID-19. In general, actually, I’m tired of the phrase “no one could have predicted” altogether, which generally means that plenty of people already did predict it and you just weren’t paying attention.

Y’all, damn near any educated person could have predicted this, and most of them have at some point or another. You don’t have to be an epidemiologist or even a doctor to realize that the most dangerous kind of virus for causing a pandemic is the type that 1) has a lengthy period where you are contagious but not symptomatic and 2) has a relatively high mortality rate once the symptomatic period begins. Literally everyone who has ever read The Stand or seen a movie about a disease could have put this together. Fucking Dan Brown predicted it in his last book, and he’s a damn idiot. It’s not that fucking complicated.

Furthermore, if the person currently running our country into the ground is able to fire something called a “pandemic response team” and if there is something called the Center for Disease Control whose budget he is able to cut … what that means is that yeah, people predicted this. There are entire fucking literal organizations composed of people whose actual fucking job was to predict exactly this and to notice it as early as possible when it (inevitably, because viruses evolve, which is also something no educated person is surprised by) does actually happen.

If something terrible were to happen and everyone were to look around and no one could figure out whose job it was to help fix that thing? That might be something that nobody predicted.

This? Everyfuckingbody predicted this was going to happen, sooner or later. Everybody who was paying the slightest bit of attention, at least.

Fucking stop it.

2:55 PM, Saturday April 11: 514,415 confirmed infections and 19,882 Americans dead.

Some book musings

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m basically done with the “break” part of my break; I have the weekend and then I’m back to work on Monday. Usually by this point at the break I’m climbing the walls and chewing on my extremities; for the most part, other than yesterday’s post, I’ve managed to avoid going slowly crazy. I’ve gotten a fair amount of stuff done over the break. What I haven’t done is any of Luther’s stuff. It’s all been Clark Kent nonsense over here for the last couple of weeks.

My first priority in 2019 has to be to decide what to do with Skylights. I have so many half-written drafts of the sequel, under more than one title, that it’s frankly kind of ridiculous. That may or may not be the cover. It may or may not be the title. And once I have the sequel written I have to decide if I’m doing a second edition of the first book. A second edition wouldn’t be too different, but the first book already mentions things that didn’t happen in 2018 (because 2018 was, comfortably, The Future when I wrote it) and the events of the book are at this point far too close to Now for comfort. If nothing else, I need to remove specific dates, and probably rewrite the prologue to give the story some breathing room. I don’t think I can tie the events of the story so close to something that happened in 1984, for example; it just makes Gabe too old.

(20-minute break while I research the FAFSA and explain how taxes work for a former student; I avoid using the phrase “this would be easier if I adopted you.”)

Anyway, point is I gotta figure this shit out. And I probably should have reformatted some of my books to get them away from CreateSpace and over to Ingram over the break. And maybe done a new banner, since the one vertical banner I have is Skylights-focused. I should probably have one for at least one more of my books.

Point is, I didn’t spend as much time being Luther over the last couple of weeks as maybe I should have. And now I need to figure some stuff out over the next couple of days. This week shouldn’t be too hard (he said,) so I should have some brainspace left to get things done when I get home from work. And who knows? The next couple of days might be hugely productive.

Just, like I said, I’ve got some decisions to make, and a weight to get off my back.

What have you been putting off lately?

GUEST POST: Science Fiction and 2016, by CompGeeksDavid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

It’s Monday!  And I’m home.  At least I hope I’m home.  And sleeping.  And hopefully not suffering from con crud after spending the weekend in the company of 70,000 unwashed nerds dedicated fans.  

I suspect today may be the day where I need a guest poster the MOST, really.  And looky!  David from Comparative Geeks is here to save me!

(And watch, this will be the post where I have to make sure people behave in the comments.  Do not make me smite you while I am crabby and tired.)

(Also, thanks to all of my guest bloggers for saving my butt while I was in Chicago!)

I started blogging back in the last presidential election cycle. And I started out with a crazy thought: what if the candidates presented their positions in the form of a science fiction story? A short tale of what they think the world will look like in 4 – or 8 – years, if they are president. Their stances are great and all, but between the balance of power between the branches, local versus federal, and the fact that they don’t want to fix everything or they’re not going to have anything to run on next time… well, their stances don’t necessarily tell us anything.

Of course, by starting blogging with something like this – without actually having followers – you end up sitting by yourself pondering. And I couldn’t figure out myself what it would all look like. The easier one was actually doing the reverse: thinking of how the parties would write a story of what the country would look like in 4 years if their opponents won… The usual sort of negative politics were sadly easier to consider than a positive vision of the future.

With Jetpacks?Well, we’re in a new cycle, I’m guest-blogging on a blog where there’s been plenty of political talk, and there is a much more interesting presidential race going on… so what might the future look like if the different candidates win?

Drumpf is of course the one that makes this seem like an easy exercise. Because it’s science fiction, and if there’s something we love in science fiction, it’s dystopias. Because that’s where pretty much every non-Drumpf supporter in the world likely expects his presidency to be headed: global dystopia. Recession if we’re lucky; World War 3 if we’re not. And the most dystopian I can think is a World War 3 with the US and Russia on a side, with Europe and their ally China (maybe?) against. And nukes. Probably nukes.

Good God, ya’ll.

Unfortunately, I could also see – somewhere amidst the Drumpf followers – there being folks who might turn to assassination. I could also see, if one of the other Republicans somehow wins the nomination, that they might pick up Drumpf as a Vice-President, to bring the party together. Meaning, I could see someone “voting-in” Drumpf via assassination. So I’m not liking how things look with a GOP win at all.

Even worse, that same logic applies with a Hillary win. We’ve got people all riled up. And there’s a whole lot of anti-Hillary sentiment, built on 20 years with her in the spotlight. So it’s easy to see dystopia here, too: and the who’s-the-Vice-President here is a bit fuzzier, but important. Unless, in the same logic as above, it’s Bernie…

I’m not sure I see the same result with a Bernie win. But I also see him having a Republican Congress – and not a whole lot happening. But it would open our politics up, so that’s something… and maybe there’s an increasing relationship with Europe, with other socialists.

I think for most people right now, staring ahead at this year… the best result we can hope for might really be for nothing much to happen the next four years. But those are my thoughts. Now it’s open to you – what do you think the country looks like in four years? Whichever candidate. Let’s discuss in the comments below!

THE FARTENING, PART III: Holy Hell, that didn’t last long.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I am forced to announce, with no small amount of shame, that the experiment known as The Fartening has ended.  Because holy shit, this looks like nothing more than it looks like caked-on vomit on the side of the toilet bowl, the kind you didn’t clean off because you were sick as fuck and the best you could do was drag yourself to bed.
IMG_1528I was not expecting to make Soylent a lifestyle choice.  I was expecting to have the intestinal fortitude necessary to make it through at least half of the packages before giving up the ghost.  But no.  Sadly, I cannot do this.  That right there is exactly how far I got into my final cup of horror mud, and I done drunks all I can drinks and I can’t drinks no more.  I simply cannot get past the goddamn texture of the stuff, and I refuse to continue torturing myself with it in hopes that it ends up magically catching on somehow.  So I give up.

If anyone is interested, I’ll ship you my remaining six packages and six bottles of oil for $40, which is way less than they’ll charge you.  Just drop me a line in comments.

In which what’s old is new

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

PhoneTold my wife yesterday that if the rest of break was as busy as Sunday was, I wasn’t going to have to worry about going crazy to get back to school again like I usually do at the end of a long break.  So far today I haven’t quite kept up yesterday’s activity level– took the boy to the eye doctor’s office and puttered about in the house a bit but that’s been about it.  Hoping to get some writing done before my wife gets back home with him in a few hours but if I end up spending the whole day playing Dragon Age I’m not gonna feel too bad about it.

Have you ever taken a toddler to an eye appointment?  My kid knows the alphabet well enough to handle a standard alphabet thing but under six or so they all use pictures for the “identify this small item” part of the test.  They’re all black and white, high-contrast clip art pictures– there was a horse, a Christmas tree, a house, a car and a truck, things like that.

And, well, that.  The icon up there isn’t exactly the one in they presented him but it’s really really close.

See the problem?

It came up, and I raised an eyebrow at it.  The doctor happened to be looking my way at the time.

“We don’t worry about this one so much anymore,” he said.

“Phone!” my kid hollers.  The doctor is openly surprised.

This fascinates me.  A phone, to my kid, is a magic glass rectangle that isn’t attached to anything.  He’s three– he’s never seen a rotary dial phone.  My only guess is he recognizes it from one of his books or a TV show we’ve watched, because hell if I know how he knows that otherwise.

The future!

In which the future is subtle

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

original(I pulled the sale post off of the front page because I’m tired of looking at it; the sale is still good at least through the end of the day and I might extend it through Monday if I make some sales today.  Yesterday went well; expect a roundup early next week for those of you who enjoy data posts.  Buy my booooooooks!)

I Tweeted about this yesterday, but Twitter is by nature kind of ephemeral and those posts are already off the front page, and also I’m inexplicably wide awake at 7:20 AM on my last day of Thanksgiving break, so I might as well write about something— I had two outbursts of The Future yesterday that struck me as interesting enough to write about.

Outbreak the First:  I am about to take a shower, but have a couple of random computer tasks that need doing on a desktop first.  I leave my phone on a bookshelf in the living room and go into my office to use the computer.  My mother calls.

My watch lets me know my phone is ringing.  My phone’s on silent.  I don’t hear it and neither does anyone else.  The phone’s a good fifty feet away and behind a couple of walls.

I proceed to answer the phone with my computer and have a conversation with my mother about having lunch today.  She appears to have no idea that anything is odd about the conversation.

I got my first cell phone fifteen years ago; prior to that, I’d always been tethered to land lines.  Now I don’t even need the phone with me.   That’s awesome.

Outbreak the Second:  We made the kieflies (I really need to find out how to spell that) at my in-laws’ place yesterday.  Or at least we put them together there; the recipe requires about 24 hours for the dough to chill before you can fill and fold them.  My mother-in-law and I were mostly doing the filling while my father-in-law and my wife alternately put things in the oven and monitored the boy.

At one point we had to explain to him that Grandma and Grandpa’s TV didn’t work like Mommy and Daddy’s does, because they don’t get to decide when to watch things.  See, we’re cord-cutters and we watch everything through Netflix, Hulu or iTunes on our Apple TV.  My parents have a DVR and have filled it with an assortment of kids’ programming that he likes.

Her parents, on the other hand, have the same kind of TV that everyone did prior to, oh, seven or eight years ago:  you get the TV that is being piped into your house at the time it’s being piped in and that’s all the TV you get.  And the boy just did not get it.  He wanted his Mickey Mouse show or the Winnie the Pooh movie he’s been into lately and just absolutely did not comprehend why the TV in front of him couldn’t produce it on demand.

Which, when you think about it, is awesome.  I like TV a lot more now that I don’t have to wrap my life around its schedule, y’know?  And he’s young enough that he has no idea that that ever happened.

The Future!

On doing the math

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy2 Comments

math-imageJust before going to sleep last night (and yes, we made it past midnight thanks to a three-episode binge of Orange is the New Black, which we’ve just discovered) my wife and I had a brief conversation about whether our parents/other people older than us had the weird feeling of Perpetually Living in the Future that we’ve had for the last fifteen years, except in the 1980s and 1990s.  While I haven’t actually asked anyone (because that would spoil my fun) I have to imagine that the answer’s yes, but that post-2000 This Is The Future Syndrome has got to be a lot worse.  With the obvious exception of 1984 aside, most speculative fiction, even from early in the 20th century, still used years beginning with a 2 as an indicator of The Future.  I’m sure there are more books and stories set in the near future from the perspective of the early-to-mid twentieth century, but there’s a lot more stuff set in the 2000s and beyond.

The other weird thing that living in The Future has done to me– and I really hope that I’m not the only one here, but who knows– is that it’s perpetually screwed up my perspective of how long ago anything happened.  If something happened in this century, I’m fine.  2005 was eight/nine years ago, right?  Got it, no problem.  But I still, fourteen years into the 21st century, am doing “subtract from 2000” whenever I have to quickly determine how long ago any event that happened in the 20th century was.  I referred to 1992 as “ten years ago” last week.  I just realized this morning that the hundredth anniversary of World War I was coming up in July.  I perpetually refer to WWI as “eighty or ninety years ago” (for some reason, saying “85” is too precise, but still wrong) during the rare occasions when I speak of it to my students.  The 1960s?  Forty years ago.  The fifties?  Fifty years ago.

It’s been the 21st century now for a bit.  I probably ought to stop this.

Also, judging from the math I’ve done during this post and corrected, I appear to be skipping 2014 altogether and going straight to 2015.  Sooner or later I’ll need to start rounding to 2020.  That’s fucked.  I can’t be alive in 2020.  That’s the goddamn future.  It can’t be the present; it breaks all of my stories.