Category: OCF

Emerging From the Cocoon

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Just finished up a large and annoying project at work.  So, I’m celebrating a day of freedom with a big mug of coffee that Camera Girl made for me.  To paraphrase a line from a movie, “What did people do before they had coffee?”  Someone once told me that the American Century was fueled on coffee and cigarettes.  I could believe him.  Could the decline in American effectiveness in so many arenas be attributed to the decline in smoking?  It’s an interesting idea.

I’m looking out the window at the grass growing and the first butterflies of the year.  Unfortunately, I’m also seeing the first carpenter bees of the season.  For anyone lucky enough to not know what these are, they look like exceptionally large, aggressive bumble bees that burrow into wood (such as the outside of my house) and make a nest in which they lay their eggs.  Camera Girl was picking some dandelions that were in one of her raised gardens when a couple of these destructive bugs started to buzz around her.  I warned her away from the garden and promised to find out where they were burrowing and use lethal force to settle their hash.

May will be a very busy month both at home and work.  And that’s fine.  With the longer days and hopefully the warmer temperatures there will be more time to fix stuff and set things up around the grounds.  Today I was reminded of another piece of carpentry that has intruded on Camera Girl’s sense of how things should be.  And with the price of lumber and hardware reaching astronomical heights, what a wonderful time it is to be a homeowner.

The first hummingbird sightings have occurred and Camera Girl has put up her feeders.  I’ll try this year to do a better job with the 200-600mm lens to get some really good shots of them.  Yesterday I went out to get a few shots of the big elm tree that grows around here.  The leaves were bursting out of their buds and the tree has a very distinctive appearance that I wanted to capture.

Another drama playing out this spring is the epic battle between Camera Girl’s pet crow Moe and his arch-enemy Poe (a newly arrived raven).  She leaves scraps out for Moe in the morning but lately Poe shows up and snatches them.  Just now Camera Girl called me over to the living room window to witness Moe dive bombing Poe and forcing him away from the snack area.  Secretly I’m a fan of Poe.  I’ve always wanted a raven in the neighborhood and this seems like my big chance.  Maybe it’s my fate to become the man who made peace between Moe and Poe.  I mean can’t they all just get along sharing the chicken fat?  Nobel Peace Prize?  We’ll see.

 

I think it’s time for a photo expedition.  I’ll have to make a survey of what the local environment has to offer.  There are usually some antique car rallies and such things but I was hoping for something a little different.  What I think I’d like to get to is a gun show.  I know very little about guns but I think they could make a very good photo opportunity.  I’ve contacted one of the bigger shows to see if they have any qualms about photography.

Well anyway, we’ve finally put the last vestiges of winter behind us.  I saw a spring peeper stumbling around after I raked up some leaves and he staggered away into the woods looking like Mitch McConnell blinking in the lights of the photojournalists trying to confirm that he is indeed still breathing.

This weekend we’re going to a lecture on the latest word on beekeeping.  It’s been more than a decade since my last hive collapsed.  I’ve watched a few videos on the “natural” beekeeping method.  I stopped trying to keep them when the varroa mites devastated the whole industry back fifteen years or so.  I’ve toyed with the idea of catching a wild swarm on the theory that these bees have come into equilibrium with the various pests and will fare much better than the heavily “medicated” hives that exist on the edge of succumbing to the very insecticides used to beat back the mites.  I’ll ask this local expert what he thinks and who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at beekeeping again.  Although I’ve been warned that between blueberries, raspberries and bees I’ll have every black bear in a fifty-mile radius lined up to clean me out.  Such is life.

Well in the immortal words of George Costanza, “You know, Spring! Rejuvenation, re-birth, everything’s blooming, all that crap!”

Talk the Talk

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

Regular readers of this site know I tend to make fun of H P Lovecraft’s prose style.  In his better written stories, it has a quasi-nineteenth century sound to it.  But in some of his less ably written material it instead just sounds kind of overblown.  But recently I’ve been listening to a YouTube channel called Horror Babble by some guy called Ian Gordon who sounds a little like the actor who played Jay Peterman on Seinfeld.  He provides an accent that, I guess, is supposed to sound like something between 1920’s Oxbridge English and possibly early twentieth century Boston Brahmin.

After listening to a few of these recordings I’ve realized that this presentation makes these stories incalculably more entertaining.  Let me qualify this statement.  It doesn’t make the stories better horror stories.  But the presentation is just more fun.  I think the accent makes the ridiculousness of the stories seem intentional.  It’s camp.

And maybe it works because that’s more or less the “voice” that Lovecraft was hearing in his own head.  It’s always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s work was sort of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe.  And because Lovecraft lived far removed from the era when Poe’s prose was contemporary and because Poe was a consummately better writer Lovecraft’s language always seems stilted.   But with a spoken word interpreter somewhat bridging the gap with his theatrical reading it somehow works pretty well.

Now most of you probably already listen to audio-books.  The only ones I’ve ever listened to were Larry Correia’s Adventures of Tom Stranger with Adam Baldwin providing the voice talent.  And come to think of it the specific voice really does make a big difference in the enjoyment of that story too.

Well, anyway, this little epiphany has got me thinking about the voice that you hear when you write something.  I mean, unless you’re writing a character that’s more or less you, how do you hear that character or characters speaking.  What do they sound like?  Is it a regional accent?  And that’s kind of a big deal.  If all my characters sound exactly like me that might make it hard for my readers to see these characters as real people.  Going back and reading some of my dialog I would say that there are definitely differences in speech for the different characters.  And this is most noticeable for characters that differ in sex, age and generation.  So, I’m not worried that I have to reinvent all of my dialog.

But it does occur to me that maybe I’d like to add some characters that have very flamboyant speech patterns just to give the story some extra zing.  After all, even Shakespeare added dialect characters to make some of the scenes comical or memorable.  His dialect characters were usually Irish or Welsh or Scottish.  I guess I could throw in a Southie from Boston or a South Asian character for good measure.  But if I really want to get exotic, I’ll throw in a Millennial Social Justice Warrior.  Now that’s a foreign language that’ll take some practice.

Could I Be an Engagement Farmer?

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I woke today to a panic on X.  Elon Musk threatened, “Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source”.

I thought, “Oh no, the jig is up!”

Then I thought, “What the hell is engagement farming?”

So, I did a search and found out, “Well, to a large extent, we all go to social media either for or to give attention. It is in this context that this phenomenon known as engagement farming crops up. It’s the art of cultivating interactions through cunning tactics rather than genuine content.”

It consists of, “ Leading questions   …  Inflammatory content.   …   Clickbait headlines   …   Desperate pleas.”

Let’s see.  Check, check, check and check!

Dammit, Elon Musk has caught on to me and is coming to get me!

Now maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t the internet, more or less, consist of nothing but those things?  You could say that clickbait is in the eye of the beholder but isn’t that also the basis of the whole news industry?  What is a 72-point headline but the paper equivalent of clickbait?  Now sure, the subject must be something important if you blare it out there but the motivation is the same, get someone to bite the hook and buy the paper.

Now sure, someone who actually cares about what they are writing has a somewhat different result.  Intelligent people respond to intelligent writing and idiots don’t.  They stop at the point where a girl in a short skirt walks by.  Now far be it from me to disparage girls in short skirts.  They basically make the world go round.  But there has to be something afterward to think about.

So, if Elon Musk is saying he’s going to remove the sex bot clickbait from his platform I applaud him.  There are already enough outlets providing that media.  But if he’s going to eliminate the engagement farming won’t there be nothing left at all?

And I appreciate his desire to improve X and try to elevate the content.  But in order to do that he should be working on his algorithms to find out how to differentiate actual engagement from bot traffic.  And I hardly think any of us can help him there.  It seems to me it will require the ability to differentiate AI from human responses.  And to my mind the only way to do that is to monetize the interactions.  In other words, people will pay to be entertained, bots by definition will not.

And that’s a good point.  The advertising model for entertainment has been blown up by the tech lords.  Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising to such an extent that newspapers and television have been effectively driven out of business.  The future will belong to subscription services.  And I’m sure Mr. Musk knows this.  His trick will be to make the transition.  His hope is to turn X into a one stop shopping location for news, entertainment and other information-based activities.  Since he seems to be friendlier to people of my political persuasion I am more or less sympathetic to his efforts.  I’ve even bought a lower tier subscription to X and watch hopefully for some future benefits that his enterprises may afford me.

But now I find Elon is gunning for me!  We poor farmers of engagement are doing our best to absorb what little nutrients we can squeeze out of X traffic.  And instead, we are hounded out of existence by the algorithm!  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the show must go on.

Could I be an engagement farmer?

I wish!

Of Raspberries and Road Work

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner

Princess Sack of Potatoes is on Spring Vacation from Kindergarten so she is visiting. And so, she and Camera Girl went to the local lakeside park to play on the jungle gym and swings with the other paroled inmates of the local centers of lower education.

They’ve left me on my own recognizance and I am reveling in the freedom and using it to inspect my domain in the cloudless sunshine of the day star (Sol, G-type main-sequence star, G2V; approximately 4.6 billion years old).  And right away my leisure is disturbed by the state road crew and their private contractors come to remove the dying ash trees that threaten the power and communication lines during wind and snow events.  Unfortunately, one of the largest trees along the road is an enormous ash that adjoins the west field.  And his last day is now at hand.  The crew has a machine of incredible strength and capability.  It’s a gigantic arm that grips the tree near the top of the trunk with hydraulic fingers and then brings into play an enormous saw that cuts off the tree below the grasping hand.

Then the arm, defying gravity and inertia rotates at the shoulder and deposits the top of the tree on the side of the road.  Then it takes a purchase farther down on the trunk and repeats this operation a few times and voila, no more ash tree.  Just a pile of logs.  The crew then takes a conventional but enormous chain saw to the stump and bring it down to the ground in a few minutes and then off down the road to the next victim.  Ah well.  These ash trees have been dying off for decades.  My area is relatively off the beaten path so I guess it’s finally caught up to us.  American Chestnut, Elm, Ash.  Good heavens, what will be left in another few generations, you have to ask.  But I guess there is some hope.  The project to restore the American Chestnut either by selective breeding of the survivors or by genetic engineering of a hardy strain is slowly (but hopefully surely) reaching the end point where the trees will be released in to the world for regeneration of that majestic species in Eastern North America.

The thornless red raspberries that I planted a couple of years ago are back in leaf again and spreading nicely in the bed where I planted them.  They have been a rare case where the product lived up to the advertising.  They produce abundant, large, delicious fruit and they seem to thrive enthusiastically in the very boggy spring soil of that part of the property.  And since both Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes are big fans of this fruit, I have gained great praise for my project in introducing them to the yard.  This summer I hope for a bumper crop of many quarts of the fruit.  The only real hazard is the local black bear population.  With both blue berries and raspberries on site an ursine prowler is something to consider.  Well, I’ve got my bear spray.  Yogi beware.

Well, the girls are back so I must adjourn.  We must be at play in the fields of the Lord.

Cthulhu Attempts to Swallow the Sun and Fails Badly

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

The First Selectman was miffed about something.  Maybe his shadow appeared a little too portly or his reflection in a dank lake was a little too unflattering.  Whatever it was he attempted to swallow Earth’s star.  Luckily he’s not the Elder God he used to be.  All he got was a nasty burn around his mouth tentacles, a case of butthurt and a dose of reality.

I collected this shot at the moment of maximum effort.

Lazing Away the Day

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The First Selectman Taking a Stroll

I couldn’t face talking about politics today.  I spent a good part of the day staring out a window at the huge snowflakes swirling around in the gale force winds that blew in circles around the compound.  At one point there was an inch or two of some combination of slush and snow on the grass and asphalt.  But by 2pm the driveways were miraculously clear.  So, I decided that my well thought out strategy of not doing anything had worked brilliantly and now I should go outside and take my victory lap with my snow shovel over my shoulder.  Hail the conquering hero!

These April snow events in New England are transitory oddball affairs.  The daffodils and hyacinths and hellebores can be buried in snow and ice but surprisingly these delicate flowers take no apparent harm from it.  Even the birds who you’d think would be devastated by the snow disrupting their feeding and mating activities seem unphased by the whole thing.  In fact, the crows almost seemed to be playing in the snow and clowning around.

Another fence post cracked in the fierce winds we had last night (thanks a lot First Selectman) and I made a mental note to fix the damn thing as soon as the snow retreats away from it.  Honestly, this winter has done a good bit of damage to the infrastructure, what with the pine tree landing on the upper driveway fence and the gutter cracking off of the pool shed.  My to-do list has been growing steadily.

And yesterday my laptop told me the battery is dying.  Of course, this isn’t one of those laptops that has the external battery, so now I have to do brain surgery on it.  So, I bought an electronics tool kit with the fifty screw driver bits, pliers, pick, static wrist band and two spudger tools.  Well, since I don’t know what a spudger is I guess I can’t let myself be caught short so two must be right.  Of course, the tools are going to show up a week after everything else so I hope the battery can struggle on for that long.  All in all, the world is crumbling before my eyes and honestly, I really can’t blame it.  Currently we’re being led by moochers and morons and it’s a miracle we haven’t gone over a cliff, lock stock and barrel.

But all things considered I’m calm and relatively jovial.  The First Selectman was glad to hear that folks still remembered the good works he did back in the colonial era and that his chronicler Howard Philip is still remembered as a kook with an overactive imagination who did give Batman a place to warehouse the lunatic criminals that cropped up so consistently in Gotham City.  Although how that managed to be in New England I’ll never know.  Maybe they thought placing it far away from New York City would be good for their nerves.  Or maybe they just moved the whole darn thing to Gotham over a long weekend or something.  Anyway, all praise to His August Cephalopodliness and long may he reign over Dunwich and please don’t let him raise my property taxes again.  Amen.

Farmer Cthulhu in Hi s Fields

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 04APR2024 – The Witch’s Curse

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I grew up not too far from Dunwich; Danvers, MA, better known among the arcana-read as the real site of the Salem Witch trials. Back then it was known as Salem Village, while modern Salem was Salem Towne. Growing up I noticed that when a storm was forecast to bring, say nine inches of snow, we got 12. Or a Foot was forecast and we got 18 inches.

I finally had a chance to put this question to no less than Don Kent, meteorologist at WBZ-TV. He looked me in the eye and said “You’re from Danvers aren’t you?” I said yes, and just why is the weather so weird? He answered honestly “We don’t know…BUT…” and then he told me about how, during the Trials, one of the accused witches, on the way to the gallows, laid a curse on the town, that it should always suffer a harder winter than the rest of the county. And this curse WORKED! Even changing the town’s name didn’t help (That’s why the town seal says “Without the King’s Consent”. They did it without the approval of the Colonial Office.)
Best regards to the First Select-Entity. The Eldrich Powers are hard at work in other regions as well.

[Editor’s Note – The First Selectman sends his greetings to his cousins on the shore and hopes they are enjoying the weather they ordered a while back from his cousin.  Gurgle, glug, gurgle, gurgle glug glug glug.]

 

Reply from Tregonsee 314

I live just down the road from Danvers, Close enough that when the leaves are off the trees I can see the remaining building of the Danvers State Hospital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danvers_State_Hospital )

the alleged inspiration for Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum (amazingly there are now expensive Condos there, with only the historic main tower remaining as a shared space). Our little town was part of Salem Village but split in the early 18th century from Danvers. We also seem to share in that curse 🙂 . It has to be true Mr. Kent was one of New England’s top meteorologists for most of my life and if that was the explanation he had that is good enough for me, certainly nothing else makes sense,

Reply from photog

Tregonsee. there used to be a similar mental hospital in Worcester.

Likewise it was recently demolished leaving only a replica clocktower to mark its former presence. But when it stood it was an eerie reminder of a different world.

Voigtlander 10mm e-mount Clock Tower vertical angle

 

 

The Long National Nightmare of Me Being Way Too Busy is Over!

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Today I finished up a weeklong marathon project that really made my life a misery and seriously cut into my on-line time to the detriment of this site.

Whew!!!

So here I am looking around and I see…

The same crap as the week before!

Hmmm.

Okay, there’s a claim that Biden’s poll numbers have gone up a point or maybe two.  Let’s grant that.  But his swing state numbers, both with and without third party candidates are the same or maybe even a little bit worse than before.  And inflation has gotten worse but the disastrous housing market is forcing the Fed to drop interest rates to try and generate some good news for Biden.  Which will make the inflation worse still.

And the Zoomers are really angry about Gaza.

Apparently, the big tent party is beginning to turn on its Jewish contingent because of Biden’s support for the Gaza War.  And this is causing pundits like the Ragin’ Cajun James Carville to hit the panic button.  His exact words were:

“I’ve been very vocal about this,” Carville said. “It’s horrifying, our numbers among younger voters, particularly younger Blacks, younger Latinos … younger people of color. Particularly males. We’re not shedding them, they’re leaving in droves,” he added.”

So, Biden has lots of election problems because the country has lots of problems and it’s too late to fix them before November.

And the border crisis is worse than ever and the criminal aliens are in the news every day.  And the cities are becoming war zones.

And now ships are crashing into bridges and destroying them.  I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!

Sure, this is more of the same.  But it’s like a train crash.  Once you’ve discovered that you have no brakes and you’re closer than some minimum distance “x” then you can’t avoid the crash.  But the closer you get to the impact the more terrifying is the view from the engineer’s seat.  So, I’m sure whoever is running the Biden campaign is in daily contact with the voting officials in Pennsylvania figuring out if they can add an extra five million votes to the Biden total on Election Day.

Well, enough election crap.  Instead something nearer and dearer to my heart; my novel (The American Archipelago: Book 1 – The Sniper).  Thanks to all who’ve been reading along and special thanks to those who have provided feedback.  Honest criticism is extremely valuable when you’re trying to make a story attractive to the publishers and compelling for the readers.

Anyone who has a taste for dystopian science fiction, I ask that you give it a whirl and leave some comments that reflect your take on the story, positive or negative.  And the more specific the better.

Here in Dunwich the weird is the rule and the weather is no exception to this.  It’s supposed to snow tonight and then rain will freeze up tomorrow night and create a Class IV Kill Storm. So tomorrow, after helping Camera Girl navigate the frozen tundra, we’ll probably hunker down and enjoy the sounds of squealing brakes and screeching cries on the road outside as the black ice claims numberless victims on the crater strewn back roads of Dunwich.  Afterward I’ll go out for the traditional gathering of the pocket change from the bodies of the crash victims and I’ll return as a conquering hero (of sorts) as I dole out this largesse to my minions (dog one and dog two) in the form of low-quality pressed rawhide that I purchase on the websites of third world competitors of Amazon dot com.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if a prolonged storm cut off the supply of these “treats.”  I fear that my minions might notice that there is a disturbing similarity between pressed rawhide and, well, me!  Me thinks Dog One has a lean hungry look about him.  Such minions are dangerous.

Well, anyway, enough yammering.  I’m back and on the job.

OCF Drought Warning – The Curse Has Come Upon Me

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Folks, the next nine days will be terribly busy ones for me.  I’ll be away from my desk and a virtual prisoner for most of the day during this period.  I will attempt to keep the quotes and photos stocked if I can.  And I’ll try to have some content available if time and circumstance allow.  But truth be told, things will be kind of quiet here at the site while I do penance for a decision that I am already regretting.  No good deed ever goes unpunished.

The Future History of the People’s Revolt

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, My Fiction, OCF, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews

Writing my sniper story has been an interesting project.  I’ve recently realized that it provides me with a way to escape from the repressive environment that we find ourselves in.  I can imagine a world where people find a way to escape from the Left’s stranglehold on our lives.  Science fiction was often described as escapist fiction; an escape from the real world.  Dreaming of a trip to the Moon or Mars was a highly enjoyable pastime.  I remember as a kid going to the library and taking out the Heinlein juveniles one by one and wishing there were a hundred instead of a dozen or so.  I guess it’s human to dream about a richer or more exciting or a better world.

And when I was a kid, we then got the Apollo program and we really did go to the Moon.  Well, maybe we actually will revolt from the Left.  After all, it’s been done.  The Soviet Union fell.  Communism or Wokeism or whatever anti-freedom regime we find ourselves under is no godlike entity.  It’s just people who crave control over others to enrich themselves.  Surely such an enterprise can be swept away if it ceases to provide the population with a reason to keep it going.

So, I don’t flatter myself that whatever MacGuffin I invent to carry my story forward; whether it be nuclear powered drilling equipment or fusion reactors or giant lasers; has any special rationale for really coming true.  But that’s not really important.  Just as the terra-forming capability that Heinlein’s stories are based on, is completely fictitious and the Earthlike conditions on his Mars and Venus stories are completely erroneous does nothing to ruin the enjoyment that these stories afforded and still allows a fan of these stories to imagine that actual planetary exploration is an exciting and worthwhile human endeavor.  After all, a manned mission to Mars is something being seriously discussed and planned.

So, I plan to write a series of stories in a fictitious future where a band of plucky heroes upset and upend the oligarchs who currently run our world and make a fight out of regaining their freedom.  As with Heinlein’s Future History, not all of the stories may be aligned with each other.  I can always cover up my mistakes by pleading alternate realities in the “multiverse.”  Sure, why not?  If Marvel can have multiple spidermen then why can’t I play fast and loose with the future?

Now I’m not doing anything that isn’t already out in the world.  In about two weeks a movie is opening up called “Civil War.”  And this movie has the United States broken into warring factions and a ground assault on the White House.  So, my stories will be well within the mainstream.  The only difference is that probably this movie and any other movies or “best sellers” that come out will cast the Left as the heroes and the Right as the awful traitors.  Well, that’s alright.  To each his own I always say.

So, thanks, to Uncle Bob Heinlein for his inspiration.  I’m officially in the future prediction business.  But in the words of L. Sprague de Camp “It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”  So, I better learn to be vague.