Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Fame and Fortune

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So yesterday I finally got my book onto Kindle Unlimited.  Huzzah!!!

An then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  A day later the page counter for KENP stood at zero.  This seemed unpromising.  So, I closed down the laptop and did something else.

I took a juvenile milk snake that I found hiding under the famous copper sheet and shot a photo shoot of his best profile.  And then we had lunch and worked on some other projects.  I put an air conditioning unit in one of the windows and I started weeding the raspberry patch and I helped clean some kind of ooze that had accumulated on the new fish pond.

And when I checked the KENP after all that, the counter was at one!  Now that’s not one book that’s one page.  So, if a book pays me forty cents what does a page earn me?  Well, you can do the math.  If the book is about two hundred and fifty-two pages long then that page is worth 0.15873 cents in cold hard cash.  If Jeff Bezos took a penny and a pair of tin snips (zinc snips?) and did some rudimentary trigonometric calculations he could probably nip off an arc from the edge of the coin that would somewhat represent this hefty sum.  So, I shut down the laptop again and began to recalibrate my plans to purchase that summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

I began reading some more of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  You know this PKD is a very talented writer but I don’t think he spent a lot of his life smiling.  In fact, I think WWIII was probably one of the lighter topics he thought about.  He’s got the extinction of most animal species, widespread human chromosomal damage, widespread human brain damage and bizarre religious tendencies as the window dressing of his highly depressed main characters.  After a little of this I decided to take a break.  Apparently, this wasn’t going to be Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah.  It’s going to be a lot less chirpy.  So, I got in touch with the First Selectman and arranged a special meeting to discuss my succession plan as his special assistant in charge of burying the bodies.  Unfortunately, the committee was unable to locate anyone stupid enough to agree to the position.  I came home a few hours later and checked my KENP counter.  It was seventeen pages.  That’s 2.6984 cents.  Well!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  At this rate I’ll be able to afford my favorite Dunkin Donuts donut (an old fashioned) by Fall.

And I think my addition to the Kindle Unlimited rolls has netted me my first troll.  He was pretending to be a fairly successful non-fiction author but was unaware that he wasn’t supposed to be a fiction author so his answers didn’t track with that.  I brought this to his attention and he started making incoherent sentences.  Well, what can you do?  Now that I’m on the road to fame and fortune everyone wants a piece of me.  J K Rowlings eat your heart out.

What’s KENP?

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So, there are a lot of things going on.  I reached 500 reads on Royal Road but out of those 500 reads not a single comment or review was left.  And since I wanted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, I had to shut down any sites that had e-books other than Amazon.  So, I deleted “The Sniper” from Royal Road and BookFunnel so that I could test out Kindle Unlimited for at least ninety days.  And of course, I’ve been checking Amazon to see how many KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) of the “The Sniper” have been read.  And, of course, a watched pot never boils.  But I also wonder if Kindle Unlimited will lower the number of e-books I’ll sell on KDP.  And now I’ll also have to figure out how to set up incentives and other come-ons that Amazon has thought up for the poor confused authors out there.

I started reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” today.  So right from the git-go PKD’s dystopia certainly has a lot of drugs to control the emotional state of its citizens.  Also, Rick Deckard apparently has a wife that doesn’t seem to like him at all.  He also seems to have artificial sheep.  So, this isn’t exactly Blade Runner so far.  But I’m a patient man and I’ll plow my way in hoping that Roy Baty shows up and offs the founder of the Tyrell Corporation and talks about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I just hope it’s that cool.

I had my weekly coffee walk zoom with the boys.  One of them was inspired by my book and is now writing several short stories.  Kudos to him.  And we were talking about how the old firm has DEI’d itself into a disaster.  They chased out all the old white guys and now the DEI hires have had to hire them back as contractors because they don’t know how the systems work.  They waited so long to upgrade some systems that the hardware is now unavailable from the manufacturers and competency will be needed to replace it with currently available equipment.  But unfortunately, these DEI hires are completely incompetent so … “contractors!”  I told the boys to drive a very hard bargain and make sure the hourly rate is ridiculously expensive.  When the project shows up as a blinking red light on the C-Suite’s monthly checklist of “problems” it will be embarrassing and hilarious when they have to admit they don’t know how their own systems are supposed to work.  And that’s not going to be easy to explain to the FDA.  Being audited by the feds isn’t fun under the best of circumstances.  When you have to admit that product was thrown away due to out of spec conditions that’s a nightmare.  Well anyway.  We laughed and laughed.  The guy who got booted used to be a good guy.  Then he became a true believer in DEI.  After that he became intolerable and we all agreed that he got what he deserved.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Space Fiction in the Modern Age

photog photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy

With all the excitement about “Project Hail Mary” making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.  I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?    Yikes!

First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.  Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we’ve learned.  No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.  No asteroid miners in the Belt.  All just flights of fantasy.  What’s an American boy from the baby boom to do?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age’s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age’s measured recalculation.  Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.  Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the “bullet” was inside the barrel of the “gun.”  And yet these twentieth century engineers didn’t just throw their hands in the air and say “Impossible.”  They invented chemical rockets.

And maybe that’s what will happen with space flight.  Even in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.  Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.

Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.  Or maybe they’ll fall back on good old “psionics” to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.

Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.  And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.  We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.

Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even “experience” as transferrable memories.  Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.

And none of these things have to be proven science.  They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.  In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.  And so will what we find to be possible.  We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.  There’s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.

Recreational Time Travel

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

So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.  Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.  Now don’t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.  But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.  You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.  Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you’re not even qualified to use them.  As an example, look at the telephone.  If you had handed a smart phone to a person in 1970, they would have no idea what it was but they would definitely deny it was a telephone.

So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.  And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it’s even more disconcerting.  Your past has been basically erased and what’s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.

So, this is all true.  And getting angry or depressed about it won’t change anything except make you feel worse.  But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.  You get to use your memories and some touchstones (like people, movies, photos and music) and travel back to a magic place where you were a kid or a newlywed or a happy parent but definitely in the older world where everything was familiar and you were at the center of the universe.

So, you might be watching an old movie and suddenly a bus is moving down a street and it triggers memories when you were living there and were on an identical bus and you think of a day when you took a bus ride that was involved in an important event in your life.  Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.  Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.  And the memories come flooding back and you’re walking around in 1969 or 1987.  And your older relatives are still alive and none of your friends have moved far away and everybody you care about is a short ride away.

Sure, it’s a bit of an escape.  And it doesn’t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.  The country is still overrun with illegal aliens and gasoline is almost $5 a gallon and your bones are really creaky but for a few minutes or an hour you’re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.  Now, you can’t over do it.  If you spend all day every day in the past, you’ll lose the ability to cope with the present.  And you won’t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.  So, I plan to use it sparingly and save it for special occasions where I can share it with the other survivors from the golden age.  Just something I thought of.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall from Here – Practice, Practice.

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Dystopias seem to be the dominant science fiction type in the last decade or two.  And the dopiness of the ones ending up on the large and small screens doesn’t encourage much hope in the genera.  We have the ever popular “Handmaid’s Tale” that bangs away at the female victim of the evil patriarchy trope.  And then there’s the “Hunger Games” which I suppose reflects the idea that somehow resources on Earth are about to collapse and a zero-sum game will emerge where we all will be fighting for our lives to get a loaf of bread.  Wow!  Who knew science fiction could be so much fun?

I’ve recently heard that horror is becoming a big genre with young men (apparently written stories and video and also video games).  But that doesn’t alarm me.  I think this is wrapped up with the popularity of video games and I think that is more a matter of the desire to work through puzzles and shoot monsters with guns (which is always a good thing!).

I have a theory that the current science fiction publishing model will not endure much longer.  I don’t think they can make enough money from selling romantasy porn and feminist dystopia much longer.  Of course, it’s possible that AI writing will completely destabilize all fiction writing.  In that case the whole thing becomes academic.  That would leave us just downloading AI slop at virtually no cost.  But either way the world will be changing to resemble nothing like what we old-timers remember from the before time when books were an industry and grammatical sentences actually existed.

Of course, this is a hell of a time for me to become an author.  But in a sense, it may be the best time for me to write.  The barrier to getting published doesn’t exist.  The only barrier is figuring out a way to let the reading public know my book exists and what it’s about.  But that’s far from a trivial problem.  Key words and algorithmic search engines and Amazon ad management are complicated and confusing topics and I’ll confess that I know next to nothing about any of that.  But I’m slowly picking up some practical and painful experience.

For instance, so far today my Amazon ads have 23,417 impressions.  I believe that means, that number of people had the chance to see my ad on the search pages they viewed on Amazon.  Out of those thousands, only 16 people clicked on my ad.  Out of those 16 people only two bought my book (e-book version).  And that was with the e-book discounted to $0.99.  So, there was $1.98 worth of sales.  Of which I only get 30% (~$0.59).  Now currently the cost per click is $1.71.  Which means so far today I’ve been charged 16 X $1.71 = $27.36!

Obviously, this isn’t the way to become rich through writing.  But it is a very educational exercise to understand how the current self-publishing model leaves quite a bit to be desired.  But I still have few more ideas to try before giving up on my dream of becoming the next great science fiction author.  Excelsior!

The Pursuit of Happiness – Part 1

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Over the course of human history, what civilization or society produced the greatest amount of happiness?  Now this is a hard thing to define.  What do I mean by “greatest amount of happiness?”  Do I mean that the highest number or proportion of inhabitants were happy?  Or would it qualify if some subset was incredibly happy while the rest of them were miserable?  And even if all of a people were happy but they achieved their happiness by immiserating some external human population such as marauding Vikings or rampaging Vandals did, would it qualify?  Could slave owning societies be happy if they treated their human chattel humanely.  And can we attribute the happiness of a people to their form of government or do we think it has more to do with the innate traits of a particular people?

So, let’s start with forms of government.  If we follow Aristotle, there are three main forms of government; monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.  Of course, every variation on these three classes have occurred over time but I think it’s fair to say that there has never been a form of government that over the very long term produced a stable happy society.  Instead, it seems that each type can have a “golden age” that eventually degenerates into a miserable failed version of itself.  So, a good king or emperor is followed by a monstrous tyrant (possibly his son).  Aristocracies can decay into greedy oligarchies that suck the wealth out of a society and turn their fellow citizens into serfs.  And of course, when democracy becomes mob rule, we have plenty of examples of mass murder from ancient Corcyra to the Terror of the French Revolution.  So, it does not seem that we have discovered a form of government that inevitably leads to happiness.

But maybe there is a condition in society that does contribute to greater happiness in a people.  Now I say this with great trepidation because this principle can be twisted into a weapon that has also caused untold human misery throughout history.  I hesitate to give it an old name.  It can be called religion, morality, law or even philosophy.  What it amounts to is a way to direct the way humans interact with each other and the universe around them.  It might even be called science or knowledge nowadays.  Because sociology tries to turn human relations into science.  It is interesting that the American Founding Fathers thought that in order for their republic to flourish the citizens would have to be religious and therefore virtuous.  And by the same token if they weren’t, then no constitution would be able to keep them well governed.

So, maybe the only way to ensure the happiness of a people is for them to believe in the same god or philosophy or code of behavior.  In some sense they would have to be one family (or tribe).  But does that mean that any empire or mega-state like the United States cannot expect a happy polity?  Well, I think this is actually the truth.  Over the course of the last hundred years the people of the United States have more and more divided along ideological lines until at this point it is more or less at the point of a cold civil war.  And soon it may be hotting up.  So maybe we are seeing an unavoidable consequence of trying to force people who believe in different things to live together.

It seems to me we will have to figure out a way to give each other space.  What occurs to me is some changes to the constitution to give the states more power and the federal government less.  This would allow the different states to diverge toward the practices they favor without the constant battle to control the behavior of the “other side.”

But how do we get there?

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

A Good Day to be a Writer

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Today I went to my tax accountant to discuss my “royalties.”  I waited until now because tax season is much too hectic to talk about 2026 issues to people in that profession.  I have had a few unhappy incidents with the tax man and I go way out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Now this is my new accountant.  In fact, he’s the grandson of my old accountant.  His grandfather is retiring soon so I’m sort of an inheritance.  When I arrived, I saw a kid walking in the front door and after waiting in the waiting room for a few minutes that same kid turned out to be my accountant.  But despite his youthful appearance he proved up to the job of assuaging my fears about ending up in an IRS gulag for high crimes and misdemeanors against the tax code.  Specifically, I was worried that maybe there was some kind of monthly reporting and payment I needed to perform for both the state and federal systems.  I remember when I was dealing with a state agency that required businesses to collect and pay sales tax monthly.

He explained to me that unless I was profiting to the tune of several thousand dollars a month, I wouldn’t need to send any money to the feds but even if I did, I’d be getting it back if I had enough “expenses” (like Amazon Ads and marketing fees) to cover the royalties I received.

At the mention of expenses, I barked a bitter laugh.  I told him the idea that I was profiting from my sales was laughable in the extreme.  Basically, a first book (barring some miraculous viral publicity) was a loss leader for the rest of the sequels.  He agreed that his other author clients had told him about what it took to grow a book business but he also warned me that the feds only give you three years to turn a profit before they stop considering it a business and declare it a hobby for which expenses are not credited.  Well, we’ll have to see about that.

So, we agreed I’d check back with him in June to see if I was any closer to needing to send some cash to the feds.  And he didn’t want to take a fee for his services today but I insisted.  The information I got had so eased my mind that I felt I would be robbing him of a well-earned reward if I didn’t give him fifty bucks.  I mean people who go to therapy to ease their minds pay their psychiatrists many hundreds of dollars and get less peace of mind than I did today.  I would have felt like a thief if I walked out for nothing.

And looking at my book’s Amazon page, I had two new very complimentary reviews.  One was from a friend of mine.  He disclosed our relationship but it was still a very good review.  And another one was from someone who was an Iraq War vet who enjoyed the scenes in the desert.  That kind of made my day.  So today is a good day to be a writer.

Of Pyramids and Pitchforks

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Like the Pharaoh Cheops I know the pain and exultation inherent in an enormous engineering project.  Yes, he built the Great Pyramid of Giza.  But I built the Great Pond of Camera Girl.  So, let’s just look at the stats:

 

Project Name Great Pyramid of Giza Great Pond of Camera Girl
Length of project 27 years (total) 27 hours (active time)
Scope 2.6 million 2.5-ton blocks 270 gallons of dirt
Volume of project 92 million cubic feet 36 cubic feet
Size of Crew 40,000 1
Total manhours 1,752,000,000 27
Significance of project Final resting place of pharaoh Husband making wife happy
Projected lifetime of structure millennia until roots from cherry tree puncture liner
Tools copper tools, ropes, levers, sledges shovel, pitchfork, rake, wrecking bar, wheelbarrow, 4″ level (plastic), good old American grit and determination

 

Based on scope I guess I’ll have to hand it to Cheops.  27 years is a pretty good effort.  Of course, if we count the fact that I’ve been throwing out the garbage and repairing stuff around the house for almost 50 years all of a sudden Cheops is coming up kind of short.  Isn’t he!

But I don’t want to overreach.  People have been travelling to Egypt for millennia to gawk at the pyramids and so far, Camera Girl is the only one who has praised my great engineering project.  And even though she has been quite generous with the superlatives I must admit that 92 million cubic feet of limestone blocks isn’t anything to sneeze at.  I mean I dropped one of the rocks I dug out on my foot and that damn thing hurt but a five-thousand-pound rock is a little bit more of a big deal if it ends up on your foot.  So, okay.  Cheops wins.  He’s big man on campus.

But let’s look at this from a different perspective.  What did Mrs. Cheops have to say about the whole thing?  Based on my research after watching “Land of the Pharaohs (1955)” she must have been buried alive with Cheops.

Now maybe she was down with this.  Who knows?  But my knowledge of Camera Girl leads me to believe that this would not be to her liking.  Now as a charter member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club you might think I would be an advocate for this kind of wife entombing.  But you’d be wrong.  By any objective measure she is very high in the ranks of women and hardly ever uses her feminine wiles and never takes advantage of the modern anti-male legal or social mechanisms to make my life miserable.  By my reckoning she is a good egg and fully worthy of this amazing civil engineering marvel.

Next, we’ll fill it with water and put in a bunch of water lilies and other plants and then buy some goldfish and sit around in the afternoon and watch these aquatic vertebrates do their thing.  And then one day the local Great Blue Heron will discover this little water hole and eat all of the fish in one meal.  But as Camera Girl always says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”

Movies, Taxes and World-Building

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Well, what’s to say today?  I was talking to some family and we were discussing this and that and I said that I wanted to see “Project Hail Mary.”  And some knew about it and some had heard a little bit.  Well, I think I talked them into getting together and going to see it.  Now I plan to see it this week with Camera Girl.  She’s not the biggest sff fan by any stretch of the imagination.  When I brough her to see the original Star Wars film she was not particularly impressed.  And come to think of it, she’s never been impressed by any sci fi or fantasy movie (or book) I ever gave her.  Well, I take that back.  She read “The Hobbit” back in 1975 and liked it.  But that was it.  When I told her to read the “Lord of the Rings,” she laughed in my face.  So, she may not be the most willing audience for this movie.  But since one of the characters is a puppet I’m guessing there may be an appeal there to her love of animals.  So, I’m going to see the same movie in the theater twice?  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever done that.  Well, I’m sure it won’t kill me.

The other thing I’m doing next week is go see an accountant about how to pay my taxes on the royalties from my book.  I have an inordinate fear of the Infernal Revenue Service.  I think they’re a malevolent force causing pain and suffering for ordinary people at every turn.  So, I’m going to find out what the process is for this kind of capital gain.  I don’t think I have to pay quarterly but you never know so I’m not taking any chances.  Also, I think there is a way to write off expenses like advertising and marketing so if I can find out whether it’s worth it I may even break even on this whole experiment (maybe!!!).

A friend was asking me about the sequel to the “The Sniper.”  He had particular questions about the back story for some of the characters like Connors and Cutter.  I said I’d love to tell him some of the details of their back stories but I still haven’t made them up yet.  I think he was a little shocked that these important facts didn’t actually exist yet.  Maybe even betrayed for investing in a story that was sort of a Potemkin Village.  But I feel justified in pushing out the corners of my little universe as the spirit moves me.  Although I will admit I’ve decided to do some outlining of the world, at least from a 35,000-foot height.  I need to decide what stories will grow out of the eucatastrophe I set off in the first book.  I mean, you don’t sink the White House, Capitol and Pentagon into the Earth’s crust without taking advantage of the elbow room that provides for political and social upheaval on a grand scale.