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Author: Marko

the government shutdown diaries.

Posted on by Marko

Tuesday:

Day One of the government shutdown. Park rangers are furloughed. The fires from the grizzly bear riots are painting the night sky over Yellowstone bright orange. Bald eagles are ditching their tracking collars and skipping the country. WHEN WILL THIS MADNESS END

***

Wednesday:

Day Two of the government shutdown. They have begun to tear up roads and dismantle all the utility wires. The garbage trucks sit by the side of the road, abandoned. We are freezing in the dark and can’t go anywhere. THANKS, NRA TEABAGGERS.

***

Thursday:

Day Three of the government shutdown. Marauding Canadians are crossing the unguarded northern border in large groups. For now we can placate them with hockey shirts and cheap LASIK, but I fear the worst.

The supermarket has no food left. Without anyone to tell them what size apples are safe to sell, they didn’t want to risk killing us all. At least SOMEONE is looking out for us.

***

Friday:

Day Four of the government shutdown. Without the FCC, everyone on TV and the radio is just screaming random obscenities. In the next town over, people drank raw, unpasteurized milk, and everyone died screaming.

Because there are no more grocery stores, we tried to go out to eat last night. Restaurant was gone. Some fool installed a bathroom urinal with unapproved water throughput and blew the place up when he flushed. SERVES HIM RIGHT, I SAY.

bad copywriting kills business.

Posted on by Marko

Why a good copywriter is important for your business, Part XXXVI:

Our fiber line is ready for service. We have two options for service providers at our location. As I can write off the cost as a business expense, I will order either 50- or 100Mbit service, at a cost of $99 or $199 a month. That’s a $1,200-$2,400 annual payment I’m willing to drop upfront so I can claim it on this year’s taxes.

Which company did I pick as a provider?

Not the one whose business FAQs read like this:

illiteracykills

They may offer super-reliable service and prompt customer support, but I’ll never know. That’s because when I read company copy that wants me to grab a red pen and mark up my screen, it’s a huge turn-off and a major strike against that company’s professional image.

Hire a decent copywriter, folks. That FAQ would have cost you a twentieth of what you lost from just one potential customer. (Bet you dollars to donuts that the kind of person who cheaps out on the copy for their company’s public face to the world has also used the term “grammar Nazi” disparagingly before, or told someone correcting their spelling online that “it’s not a spelling contest LOL.”)

the net is the word-killer.

Posted on by Marko

My brother-from-another-mother Chang has some thoughts on the proliferation of internet-connected smart phones and the way in which they have shaped our social behaviors.

This is a tricky subject to address without coming off as a Luddite. I love the Internet and the social and professional possibilities it has opened up. There are tons of articles out there about the dehumanizing aspects of our always-connectedness, and I agree with some of them on some points, but overall the Internet has been a good thing for me. Without the blog, Facebook, and Twitter, I wouldn’t be in touch on an almost daily basis with so many of my writer friends, for example. Without the readership of the blog, I probably wouldn’t have gotten that initial sales boost when I finally put Terms of Enlistment on the market, and it may not have climbed up the charts to the point where its visibility generated more sales. Without the blog and Twitter, I would probably still be looking for an agent, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have the agent that was at the top of my wish list from the start. I enjoy hearing from readers, and the Internet makes that easier than ever before. Twitter and Facebook are like my virtual water cooler during the day, where I socialize a bit and hear the latest snippets from my friends’ lives. It makes me feel less isolated.

But here’s the thing about the water cooler analogy: Much like you wouldn’t be able to get any work done if you set up your desk next to the water cooler permanently, Twitter and Facebook and the whole big Internet are absolute poison for productivity.

I have three different processes for writing. Most of the time, I work longhand, then transcribe the draft to the computer later and edit things on the fly. That’s my preferred method. If I need to write something on a tight deadline and don’t have time for transcribing, then I use the laptop and write into Scrivener or Word directly. And when I can’t or don’t want to write longhand but don’t want to have the Internet on my writing machine, I get out the Alphasmart Neo.

Guess which method yields the lowest word count per hour every time?

That would be “writing directly on the laptop”, the method that, technically speaking, should be the fastest. But when I write longhand, my word count per hour is often double or more. Call me weak, call me easily distracted, but writing on a machine that is connected to the Great Diversion is absolute poison for my productivity. WiFi can be turned off, but it turns back on too easily, and my brain is really good at justifying just why exactly I need to stay connected. So whenever I use the computer to do my drafting, I end up spending half my writing time checking email, doing Wikiwanders, or checking Twitter and Facebook.

Truth be told, that’s just about half the reason why I prefer working longhand. I do it primarily because I enjoy it and because it forces me to do a word-for-word revision when I type it up, but I also do it because it’s far easier for me to stay on task and get stuff done when my writing implement can’t also be used to check how many people found my latest Facebook entry amusing.

But Brother Chang’s blog post touches on something a little deeper than my boring inability to control myself when I’m hooked up to the Hive Mind. It’s the way in which our computers and cell phones have commandeered our lives. Go to a playground and see how many parents are sitting on a bench with phones in hand while the kids play with each other. (The other day I even saw a dad reading his cell phone while pushing his kid on the swing with the other hand.) People are just glued to their phones all the damn time now. The new place setting in restaurants is knife, fork, cloth napkin, phone. And don’t get me started on how many people I see texting while behind the wheel.

Don’t get me wrong—I love the technology. I love the way in which my phone lets me perform tasks that were not in the realm of the possible before we had smartphones. When I see an item at the computer store, I can scan the barcode and see which stores nearby have the same item for a lower price, and I can read the reviews of the gizmo to find out if it’s a piece of junk. My phone can direct me door-to-door if I have to go to an unknown address. It contains a high-definition video and still camera. And I have the whole Internet in my pocket wherever I go. If information is power, the smartphone is the single most powerful enabler I’ve ever owned.

But boy, does it have its pitfalls.

Brother Chang likens the compulsive check for email or Facebook updates to a rat hitting a lever for a pellet, and it’s very true that this steady stream of tiny rewards has done funny stuff to our brains, reshaped our behaviors in ways that are in many ways indistinguishable from drug addiction. I’m not proud of this, but I know I have lost entire days to the Internet with no productive output to show for it. Our brains have rewired themselves to dispense a little dopamine kick whenever we hear that new message sound or spot the little red number that lets us know others have commented on our Facebook post, and now we can’t stop pulling that lever. You know you’ve lost the ability to live in the moment when you see something beautiful or funny, and your first thought isn’t “That’s amazing!”, but “I gotta Instagram that for peer approval!” And when you can’t make it through a conversation with a friend over a meal without checking your Twitter feed, then yeah, I think it’s safe to say you have an addiction.

I don’t want to give up my iPhone, or the iPad, or the computer upstairs, or the PS3. I’m not going to turn into a Luddite, put everything on Craigslist, and move into a lakeside cabin without Internet access to bang out my novels on a typewriter. I won’t start delivering hand-written manuscripts to my publisher. But I’m going to be more mindful of the time I spend online. I think I’ll start turning the computer off after checking my email in the morning instead of leaving it on all day long. I’ll leave the gadgets in the car when I go out to scribble a page or three at the coffee shop. I’ll eat my lunches at the kitchen table instead of in front of the computer. And I hereby pledge to never even look at my phone when I’m sitting down somewhere with friends, unless the school is calling me to let me know the kids are bleeding from the eyes or something.

(But I’ll still sign up for the fiber-optic service we’ll be getting in a few weeks. I’m curbing my mobile social media use and online time, not going full-out J.D. Salinger. Daddy needs his megabits.)

from the desk of the ink-splasher.

Posted on by Marko

I checked Amazon over the weekend, and it looks like Lines of Departure is available for pre-order in all formats (Kindle, paperback, and unabridged audio) for the January 28th release. (Terms of Enlistment will also be released as a new, “Director's Cut” edition at the same time and in the same formats.)

I know that a lot of you were hoping for an earlier release, but after comparing the Before and After versions, I am quite glad that 47North got their hands on the novels. It went through several editorial passes by very experienced and sharp-eyed editors, and the version about to be published as a 47North novel in January is quite a bit better than the original. In addition to tightening all the nuts and bolts, they suggested several changes that, in retrospect, make it a stronger novel. I'm very happy with the end result, and I think that if you like Terms of Enlistment, you're going to really like Lines of Departure.

In other news, my friend Peter has a new book out. It's a non-fiction memoir of his former profession as a prison chaplain. Peter is from South Africa, and he has had a rather interesting life. Go check out his publication announcement and pick up Walls, Wire, Bars, and Souls if it sounds interesting to you. (Peter also has a military science fiction novel out on Amazon, called Take the Star Road.)

This concludes the self- and friend-promotion this morning. Now I have to get back to work on that novella so I have something from the Terms of Enlistment universe to offer up before Lines of Departure comes out. (I expect to finish Measures of Absolution this week, and because I've been editing it on the fly, it should be available on the Kindle and directly from me by next week. Because the novella doesn't fall under my contractual restrictions regarding distribution, I can offer the EPUB and PDF versions directly, just like I did with Terms of Enlistment before it got picked up by 47North.)

Busy week ahead. I guess I best get to it, then…

 

yes, but how is his therapy going?

Posted on by Marko

On court-sanctioned liberty from prison, a convicted rapist in Switzerland killed the therapist who was accompanying him to reintegration therapy, fled the country, and was eventually captured by German police just across the Polish border a few days later.

Let’s see where the Swiss court system could have possibly gone wrong, and play “spot the error”:

  1. A 39-year-old man close to his physical prime, with a history of several violent rape offenses, gets to leave the prison for court-approved therapy.
  2. The therapist they assign to him is a young, attractive female.
  3. The rehabilitation therapy sessions take place at an equestrian center, to which the young, pretty therapist drives the offender without any police escort or other chaperone.
  4. On the way to the equestrian center, they stop at a knife store, where the convicted rapist has been cleared to purchase a hoof scraper knife, to be used for care of his therapy horse.
  5. Instead of a knife suitable for hoof-scraping, the violent rapist purchases a knife better suited for cutting and stabbing.
  6. They never arrive at the equestrian center, and the body of the therapist is found a short time later near Geneva, her throat cut.

Sending a known violent rapist out for reintegration therapy with only a pretty female therapist and then allowing him to purchase knives? Holy shit, Switzerland. I grew up in Germany, so I know a lot of “judicial offender mollycoddling” stories, but this one takes the cake.

How do they treat alcoholics there? Letting them drive to their therapy sessions in a car where “Rehab” plays on repeat, then allowing them to stop at the liquor store (“…but remember, only buy a bottle opener!”), and having them escorted by a giant anthropomorphic martini glass?

at least we didn’t fit naugahyde upholstery to the thing.

Posted on by Marko

So Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to officially leave the solar system and travel into interstellar space.

Anyone else bothered by the fact that we sent a thing into space that contains a map to its origin planet and an open invitation?

“Hi, we’re a barely space-faring civilization that you could probably conquer and subjugate with your equivalent of a Boy Scout troop! Here’s a map to our home planet. Stop by anytime!”

Of course, the biggest issue is that we sent out Voyager 1 with an LP on board. We are intergalactic hipster scum.

“These are humpback whale sounds. You’ve probably never heard of them.” <derisive snort by Kurt Waldheim>

i’m all out of weiner jokes, and so is new york city.

Posted on by Marko

This just in: Carlos Danger will not be the mayor of New York City.

I doubt it’s going to keep him from trying to shoulder his way back to the public trough in the future. People like Weiner or Eliot Spitzer don’t really have any other qualifications or employment prospects. I mean, would you hire a guy whose judgment gland is so obviously defective or missing?

the most noble use for cowhide.

Posted on by Marko

Here are the two main carry rigs I use to comfortably schlep around the Beretta M9 (42oz. loaded weight) and two spare magazines (7.5oz. each):

022

Bianchi #3S “Pistol Pocket”

023

Gould & Goodrich “Gold Line” horizontal shoulder holster

Two holsters, both alike in dign…you know what? No. The belt holster is fine as far as reputation goes, but the shoulder rig has no dignity. Let your gun-savvy friends spot you with a shoulder holster, and you’ll have to endure a lot of “Miami Vice” or “Die Hard” jokes.

Let’s go through the advantages and disadvantages of each holster:

Inside-the-waistband belt holster

Pros:

–Comfortable

–Requires only a light cover garment to conceal

–Can be removed from the belt without having to take the cover garment off

–Fast draw

–Easy one-handed reholstering

Cons:

–Clunks into chairs when seated

–Difficult to access in a sitting position

–Slow draw when wearing multiple layers of cold-weather clothes

–May print when bending over or when the cover garment rides up

 

Shoulder holster

Pros:

–Easy access while seated

–Comfortable; distributes gun weight across both shoulders

–Keeps gun and spare ammo together in a grab & go package

–Doesn’t require a sturdy belt

–Doesn’t print to the rear when bending over

Cons:

–Requires substantial cover garment (an untucked t-shirt won’t cut it)

–Slow draw

–Muzzle safety on the draw (muzzle line crosses own arm if it’s not kept out of the way; gun points at stuff behind the wearer)

–Almost impossible to reholster with one hand

–Presents the firearm butt-forward; potential vulnerability to a gun grab by an assailant (see also: slow draw)

–Cannot be taken off without removing the covering garment first

 

So which one is the better holster of the two? The answer is a resounding “it depends”.

Today here in Upper Cryogenica, it’s 92 degrees outside. I would not be able to carry that shoulder rig very well. I could put on an untucked short-sleeved shirt over the t-shirt and shoulder rig, but that a.) looks goofy and b.) feels uncomfortable. The Bianchi IWB holster, on the other hand, tucks that Beretta away under an untucked t-shirt, and you won’t be able to tell it’s there unless you have super observation skills or give me a pat-down. In warm to moderate weather, doing regular everyday stuff just walking around, the IWB holster is the better holster of the two.

In January, it will be anywhere from twenty to minus twenty degrees outside, and I’ll be wearing an undershirt, a button-down shirt, a fleece shirt or vest on top, and possibly even a heavy jacket. Getting to that Beretta in the IWB holster will require unzipping the outer garment and digging through two more layers of clothing, or trying to yank everything up over the holster, full pockets and all. The shoulder rig, on the other hand, makes the gun quickly accessible merely by unzipping the jacket zipper halfway (or leaving it that way to begin with.) In cold to severe weather that requires heavier clothing, or doing stuff that requires sitting down or driving a lot, the shoulder holster is the better of the two.

The gun’s a tool, but so is the holster, and that’s why it’s smart to have a toolbox of various holsters for various circumstances. The tactical crowd will tell you that you should always wear your gun at your hip because it conceals best that way and puts it in the same position all the time, but life isn’t a shoothouse, and only the most hardcore dedicated operator types can tailor their clothing and lifestyle around just one carry method. I’m not one of those, so I tailor the carry method to my lifestyle on the fly.

(One thing I will not compromise on, however, is the color-matching. Black holster, black belt, black shoes. Brown holster, brown leather on the rest of the body as well. There’s just no excuse for being unfashionable.)

say it! say “under god”!

Posted on by Marko

Okay, friends and neighbors. Let’s talk a bit about the Pledge of Allegiance.

There’s another court challenge regarding the Pledge in the state of Massachusetts right now. Some atheist parents are suing the state over the recital of the Pledge in public school every morning because it contains the words “under God”, which they consider an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. Naturally, as happens every time when a court case regarding the religious component of the Pledge comes up, the comments of the “Under God” supporters take two very predictable thrusts:

“If those atheists don’t like saying ‘under God’, maybe they should just move somewhere else, because something something CHRISTIAN NATION.”

“The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion! It also says ‘…nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof!’”

Every single time, the comments are a variation of those two arguments. And every time, it makes me profoundly sad and upset that so many people who otherwise proclaim their love of freedom and constitutional limits on government are not only clueless about the implications of the Establishment clause, but actively in favor of government requiring the recitation of religious affirmations (as long as it’s the majority religion, of course.)

The problem with the Pledge as it is challenged isn’t that it contains the words “under God”. The problem is that the recitation is part of the public school curriculum—in all practicality a mandatory recitation—and that public school teachers, paid employees of the government, are required to lead it. They are the agents of the same state whose scope of delegated powers is limited by the Constitution. The State is not allowed to prevent students from exercising their own religion as long as it does not interfere with school business. (And don’t start the “ZOMG they kicked God out of school” tripe unless you want me to challenge you to provide a single documented incident where public school students aren’t allowed to carry Bibles in their backpack to read in their own time, or to form prayer clubs with other like-minded students.) The flip side of that coin is that the State also cannot compel the students to perform religious observances of any kind. And when you make the recitation of an oath with a religious component mandatory, you violate the religious rights of the students who do not share that faith.

(The objection that “nobody HAS to recite the Pledge” is irrelevant because it disregards that the State doesn’t even have the right to ask the student to choose when it comes to religious observances. And religious exercise must always be an opt-in rather than an opt-out.)

“But wait!” you say. “If the vast majority of students believes in God, shouldn’t the majority get to choose whether the class professes that we’re one nation under Him? Why should the irreligious minority hold the majority hostage when it comes to faith?”

The First Amendment doesn’t protect popular speech because popular speech doesn’t need a Bill of Rights to protect it. And it doesn’t protect the religious rights of just the religious majority. It protects the rights of the outliers, the oddballs, the religious minorities that would otherwise get overridden by the bigger religious factions on the block. When it comes to the Bill of Rights, majority preference is not only irrelevant, but the opposition of majority weight is the very reason for its existence. Our Founding Fathers knew from history that without strong minority protections of basic rights, fifty-one percent of the population would be able to vote the rights of the other forty-nine percent away. That’s why in our system of constitutionally limited government, we get to decide all kinds of things by majority vote, but not any of the basic rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. In other words, you and your street can’t gang up on that weird dude at the end of the block and decide whether he has the right to attend the church he goes to, or whether he has the right to not go to church at all.

This is quite simply not an infringement on your right to practice your own religion, which ends when it touches on someone else’s religious rights. Your religious rights do not give you the ability to use the state to make my children acknowledge the existence and supremacy of your god. You cannot use the state for that purpose even if nobody in the room objects because they all share your faith.

This is not a matter of majority will. It’s not a matter of degree. It’s a matter of principle—the principle that it’s none of the government’s stinkin’ business if you pray, how you pray, to whom you pray, or what the content of your prayer is.

Would it be OK for the local Muslim community to require the school to make the kids recite “Allah is Greatest” every morning? What if they allow you to opt out? No? (I can just imagine the heads exploding all over the country if anyone seriously suggested such a thing—the Muslims asking for the right that the Christian majority has claimed for itself.) Well, if they don’t have that right—and the Bill of Rights says they do not—then you don’t have the right to have the teachers ask my kids to profess that there is a God, and that this nation is subject to Him.

And yes, freedom of religion automatically means freedom from religion, no matter what those bumper stickers say. If you have the right to be a Christian, it follows that you have the right to not be a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, pagan, and so on. And whether the religious majority likes it or not, it means that you have the right to not be religious at all.

well, I’m glad it won’t be war-war.

Posted on by Marko

Secretary of State Lurch says that the administration isn’t asking Congress for permission to go to war in Syria because bombing Syria wouldn’t be “war in the classic sense”. You know, more of a Diet War. War Light. New War. Less filling than the old kind.

Trying to move goalposts by changing definitions—that’s pretty much the only thing both parties excel at when they get their hands on the Purple Robes of Power. That’s why everything is terrorism now, even stuff like raising concerns about water quality. (And before you Conservatives go all, “Well, that’s Liberals for you, nyuk nyuk,” remember that you guys put all those nifty tools in the shed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. after 9/11, ready for the next guy to use.)

War in the classic sense. It boggles the mind that anyone would think this class of people fit to run anything more complex and important than a porta-potty at the county fair.