Another year is nearly at an end.  I am happy.  My kids are growing.  They are happy but difficult at times, as they assert their independence.  My older one decided she would make a test to see if Santa Claus was real.  Based on her questions, I can tell she is leaning more towards him being real, but obviously she wants to test it, by seeing if ( Read more... )

By now I've listened to all of the seasons of Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast.  You can notice some patterns.  While the French and Russian Revolutions mostly proceed with new leaders knocking off old leaders in succession until things eventually settle on a new new new leader, the Mexican and Haitian revolutions were longer, and bloodier, ( Read more... )

I've been catching up on the Revolutions Podcast by Mike Duncan as it goes through the history of the Russian Revolution.  I've learned many new details.  I didn't realize Lenin was not involved in issuing Petrograd Soviet Order #1, nor did I realize that the order was improvised and only intended for the soldiers in Petrograd.  I didn't realize ( Read more... )

Today they announced a settlement between the Remington Rifle company and the families of the victims of the shooting at a high school in Parkland FL.  The gun manufacturer chose to avoid asserting their rights and their dignity in the courtroom and instead elected to give money to make the problem go away.

In most countries, weapons like the one ( Read more... )

Sometimes it's best to begin a big discussion with definitions.  The word "government" is used many different ways.  For instance, in countries like Canada and the UK, they might say, "Mr. X has just been elected Prime Minister, and he now must form a new government."  But countries like this don't descend into anarchy and chaos just because a ( Read more... )

Of the sci-fi audiobooks I've downloaded in the past 4 years, Altered Carbon came the closest to creating the world I saw in my dream.  Interstellar travel takes place at less than light speed.  Colony planets are disconnected and primitive.  People cope with these realities with the help of magical machines.  Instead of magic devices that keep the ( Read more... )

As I thoroughly enjoyed The Worthing Saga, I thought I should pick up Orson Scott Card's more famous Ender series.  Ender's Game is the story of a boy coming of age in a world that is already at war with an alien species.  Ender's Game is an adventure story of this extremely precocious and charismatic boy becoming a genius and a leader among his ( Read more... )

Dune is a very readable and engaging story.  It takes place on other planets, but like Star Wars has very little to say about the challenges of interstellar travel.  The characters seem to travel between stars in a matter of mere months, not quite as fast as Star Wars but not long enough for the delays to be of interest to the story. The first book ( Read more... )

The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card is a novelization of a series of short stories that began 11 years prior.  These short stories were never really meant to be published together, so Card writes a framing devices of a boy being initiated into society as a man in a primitive setting on a distant world, and then flashbacks to explain how people ( Read more... )

I had a vivid dream at some point in 2017.  I don't actually journal so I can't pin down the date closer than that.  But in the dream, I had quit my job and become a successful sci-fi author, of a series called "The Deep Ones".  These were people who had preserved their brains and conscious minds with machines to the extent that they could survive ( Read more... )