Month: April 2026

Thinking of Humor

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If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.  And that is counting sarcasm as humor.  I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual.  With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor.  But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.

But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories.  To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest.  And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.”  And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy.  I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown.  In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic.  He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone.  This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up.  But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself.  He was a slave to his craft.

Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up.  I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far.  As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool.  This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies.  For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome.  So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill.  And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man.  So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes.  Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures.  And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved.  It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.

Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story.  But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea.  Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting.  I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real.  Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.

It’s a Wonderful Life

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Since I’ve had to use YouTube to learn how to perform the various tasks associated with publishing a book, my YouTube feed has filled up with the various subjects that authors seem to get involved with.  So, I’ve been bombarded with videos on every aspect of writing, editing and marketing books.  But this week I seem to have arrived at the crazy outer reaches of the book publishing ecosystem; namely, sensitivity readers.  Now I had heard of alpha readers and beta readers.  These are the first people you give your book to in order to get feedback on the story from normal people.  This all makes sense to me.  But sensitivity readers are something entirely different.  Apparently, these are people who go through your book looking for reasons to be offended by your story.

Sensitivity readers will read your book and then provide you with hundreds of notes on all of the ways that whatever you say can offend a multitude of easily “triggered” types of people.  One video talked about how story lines and even characters can upset a whole host of fragile readers.  Women, minorities, blind people, deaf people, paraplegics, quadriplegics, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, “non-binary,” all the various kinds of “trans” people, women wearing septum rings, antifa supporters, pacifists, the homeless, meth heads, heroin addicts, other drug addicts, women with blue hair, the lactose intolerant, the gluten intolerant, vegans, poor people, pedophiles, other sex offenders, dyslexics, the neurodivergent, ADHD individuals and many, many more.  The only ones they left out were the red-green color blind.  That really ticked me off.

I looked at this list and realized that many of the people on this list might be offended by my book.  After all my protagonist unleashes a non-lethal chemical attack on an antifa riot that includes many blue-haired women with septum rings and several sex offenders in their ranks.  Without even trying I had unknowingly transgressed against the boundaries meant to be protected by sensitivity readers.

This made me sad.

Then I found out how much these people charge for their service (0.5 to 2.0 cents per word).  For my book that would come out to between $325 to $1300.  So, that’s a lot of money!  Plus, I read that they literally come up with hundreds of items that must be “fixed.”  Hundreds.  That would take weeks to edit.  So, I would be paying someone many hundreds of dollars to make even more work for myself at the same time as she made my book much less enjoyable for my target audience; normal people.

Well, I decided not to hire a sensitivity reader.  But I felt guilty.  So, to assuage my grief I instead watched a bunch of videos about sensitivity readers.  And it worked out great.  These videos are hilarious.  To hear the various absurdities that get brought up by sensitivity readers to these terrified writers is to experience comedic genius.  The things these people worry about are stunningly stupid.  They’re worried about elves and goblins in fantasy stories being mistaken as dog whistles for different races and ethnicities.  They worry about people being cured of diseases in the story making readers who have those diseases upset.  And the funniest thing of all, the readers and the writers look exactly how you would imagine people who worry about such things would look like.  It’s a wonderful life.

The Serenity Equation

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Modern human life is the story of increased efficiency.  Harnessing ever increasing amounts of energy and directing our enormously expanded knowledge of the physical world around us we have been able to change the way humans live.  We have produced enough food to make the whole world obese and we have created industries that provide modern wonders like cell phones and computers to virtually every man, woman and child on the planet.  We have invented medicines and treatments that have increased the average human life expectancy by decades.

But there is only one commodity that we haven’t been able to increase and that is peace.  And I don’t mean the cessation of war.  I’m talking about tranquility or spiritual serenity or call it just plain peace.  The amount of peace in our lives has been whittled down over the years until presently it’s only experienced for short periods when we are cut off from the world around us.

And that is profoundly wrong.  Human beings need peace to thrive.  And the way the modern world works is to strip away inefficiency from our lives.  But along with the inefficiency, we have stripped away the things that gave our lives meaning and a sense of belonging to something permanent and valuable.  We’re expendable and obsolete almost as soon as we’re grown.  And every day machines are produced that make us even more obsolete.  This isn’t progress.  It’s a death cult.  And it’s the thing that is convincing me that we’re approaching a breaking point.  If this goes on, we will very soon reach a point where human beings will have to destroy the system that is trying to declare them superfluous or they themselves will be destroyed.

Now that sounds melodramatic and apocryphal but I actually believe it to be true.  And it doesn’t mean we’ll have to rise up and smash the factories and eliminate automation with sledgehammers.  Political action is much more efficient.  The people who are automating out of existence the careers of everyone will have to retool to alter their projects so that their products provide resources for humans in their careers.

Now, you may ask how that’s supposed to work.  I really don’t know but that’s what has to happen.  Human beings will not go quietly into that good night.  This is our world.  Being replaced by AI isn’t something we should just sit back and watch happen.  And that is why populist politics is growing in strength.  Everyone is sick of the elites pushing for some sort of feudal future with AI replacing the middle classes and serfs kept around to cut the grass of the rich.

You know come to think of it, maybe sledgehammers are the answer.  A crowd armed with pitchforks and torches showing up at the headquarters of Google and burning it down would go a long way toward changing the way things are done in this country.  Or maybe we institute a “progressive” tax schedule.  It works like this.  If a tech company’s products increase the number of middle-class jobs in an industry within a certain salary range your taxes go down.  If they decrease the number of those jobs they go up.

There, that’s not so hard.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 06APR2026 – Old School Photography

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I remember helping my dad set up for shots with his Mamiya C330 TLR, no match needle, he had a Gossen Luna Pro light meter (considered one of the best of its day) that I still have (although it is inoperable as it uses batteries that are no longer common). My job was to run to various spots and get the values from the light meter. Similarly, he had a flash meter that you used to make sure the flash was providing enough light and to figure out what exposure you were going to use as the Light meter just kind of overloaded with the flash 🙂 . Modern cameras with a dozen exposure modes, built in fill flashes and all the bells and whistles you could want are amazing, but some days the shots taken on 64 ASA Kodachrome on 2 1/4 ” 220 film on the TLR are still astounding. I wonder what my dad would think of my Cannon Rebel let alone a modern Hasselblad 2 1/4 at 100 Mpixel.