Plotter and Pantsers

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Here on the other side of the bright line of demarcation that is the post-2024 election decision I selected outlining the plot of my poor neglected novel “Sniper” as this morning’s project.  Last night was a long planned and greatly enjoyed family party celebrating Princess Sack of Potatoes’ sixth birthday.  It was a good-sized gathering of about thirty people and featured the Princess’s food of choice; multiple versions of pizza.  Now I personally do not believe that something called “mac and cheese” pizza could actually be considered pizza.  It is an abomination in the same league as anything called pizza that contains pineapple.  But I am a tolerant man.  If the children demand mac and cheese pizza then so be it.  I found a giant box that contained something that was garnished with sausage and pepperoni on it and so I was content.  And I even managed to introduce the grandchildren to a small snippet of the classic W.C. Fields movie “It’s a Gift” before it was drowned out by the torrent of talking that erupted when their parents followed us upstairs after the majority of the guests left.  Well, I’ll just have to wait for an opportunity during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to screen that cinematic gem for their viewing pleasure.

And because that gathering ended late, I had no time to look around for a theme for last night’s post.  And honestly, I was exhausted.  And if I had tried to post something in that state it would have been stale and derivative and a waste of everybody’s time.  And in this new regimen of mine that is anathema.  I’ll write when I have something I want to say.  And when I don’t, I’ll work on my projects.

And getting back to the theme of this post, my project for today is to review “The Sniper” holistically and identify plot line and character development and quality issues that need to be worked on.  And come up with an outline for the whole story and an outline for the series of stories in this “universe” and then a plan for completing this novel this winter. And then scheduling this work to be finished by some reasonable date.

And this is exciting for me.  It’s an intellectually interesting process that I’ve never tried before.  Up until now I’ve been what’s called a discovery writer or more colloquially a “seat of the pantser” or just a pantser.   This is the opposite of an “outliner” or a plotter.  A discovery writer just sits down and starts writing based on some idea or even just a gestalt of a story and keeps writing and let’s the story write itself without any direction from the author’s conscious mind.  I’ve always done this.  The positive side of this process is that the author’s natural creative instincts are in control and many exciting characters and plot events bubble up.  It is the natural method for producing realistic dialog and emotional insight into the characters.  The negative side is that the story direction is kind of random and you very easily can paint your story into a corner that can only be fixed by a massive re-write which is lethal for story-telling and for the morale of the writer.

And as someone who has run up against this dead-end scenario several times, I have decided to make the effort to do a formal outline and learn the skills it takes to plan my story in a disciplined way so that it won’t fly off the rails at the end and cause me massive mental anguish and confusion.  If I find that working on this outline is interesting, I’ll probably write more about and might even consult some of the sci-fi fans in the audience for their opinions on some of my story choices.

So here I go.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09NOV2024 – Soyboy Replacement

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war pig

 

The only way to survive is to breed better people. The child they refuse to birth may, Indeed, turn out to be a tyrant or a murderer. But then, it could also turn out to be the next Edison or Carver or Turing or Salk or Florence Nightingale. Odds are better they will grow up to be average people and live a good life with children of their own. People went on having children during WWII when things were one hell of a lot worse than they are now. They even had children during the Great Depression. You can’t change the world unless you breed.

I interacted with one of the zero population idiots. He said we should stop breeding. I asked him what human population he thought was sustainable. He said zero. So I drew my 1911A1, took out the mag, loaded it with one round and handed it to him. “Why don’t you start with yourself, then. The safety is off, just put it to your temple and pull the trigger. You won’t even feel it. Show me you mean what you say.” Of course he declined and ran off, more or less. This was about 40 years ago, in Del Rio, Texas.

Without children there is no future, good or bad. But I bet Asian couples won’t play the stupid zero population game. As a result, we will be invaded and the invaders will breed plenty of children to replace stupid Caucasians.

At my age, I can go to the Philippines, find a cute, fecund woman half my age and bring forth three or four kids before I die or finally become infertile. She would be happy with the widow’s pension from the VA and social security when I’ve gone. We don’t need the weepy, sub-beta fools who won’t have children. Bringing children forth and raising them is not for sissies. Not if done right. Our forefathers and foremothers tamed a continent and created the greatest nation. We need those people, not soyboys and soygirls.

Trump will hopefully end the department of education. That is the first step. Since it’s inception, educational standards have only gone down. Local people pay the taxes so they should determine what their schools teach, NOT the feds, or even the state. In fact, I’d prefer home schooling as the norm.

Angry Kamala Supporters and the 4B Movement

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According to Wikipedia “4B (or “Four Nos”) is a radical feminist movement which is purported to have originated in South Korea in 2019.  Its proponents refuse to date men, get married, have sex with men, or have children.”  During my recent over-indulgence in videos of despairing Kamala Harris voters I noticed that a number of the angriest screamers were women who kept shouting, “4B!  4B!  4B!”

I found this interesting.  Now even though most of these women were, to say the least unattractive, even the few who were somewhat telegenic were so obviously unhinged that I couldn’t imagine that a sane man would want to date them.  And as for marrying or having a family with them, that would be inconceivable to any but the most delusional.

Now, I’ve been out of the dating scene for nearly fifty years.  So, I’m far from an expert on the current state of male/female relations.  But is it possible that most young women are represented by the kind of unbalanced harpies seen in these videos?  If that were the case, I’d have to say our civilization is doomed.  The level of dysfunction on display rules out the possibility that any of these women could participate in a normal marriage.  And under no circumstance should any of them be trusted to raise children.

But regardless if these women only represent 10% or even 5% of women, there is something terribly wrong with our society.  Even if only 1% of women believe these things we are in very serious trouble.  It means there is a force loose in our world that is teaching girls and young women that having children is a plot being foisted on them by an evil patriarchal conspiracy.  This way of looking at life is so twisted and nihilistic that anyone who espouses these beliefs should be kept as far as possible from young people as the law will allow.

As I hinted at near the beginning of this post most of the women who were screeching “4B” weren’t really in danger of attracting male suitors.  So 4B may be a sort of self-delusion to explain why they live alone with their cats.  But for the sake of the easily influenced it would make sense to have a public service program to warn young women what will happen if they head down the 4B road.

Of course, in the long run this is a self-correcting problem.  Women with this mindset will cancel themselves out of the gene pool and so reinforce the selection of normal maternal women as wives and mothers.  But it seems that society of late has encouraged feminist philosophies to spread unchecked in colleges and corporations.  And the espousing of things like 4B is the end result.

Some countries like south Korea and Hungary have begun to legislate incentives to couples to get married and have children.  And I think that is a very good stop-gap to prevent financial hardship from being the cause of a birth-rate crash.  But this is just a band-aid.  If people no longer have an instinct to marry and have children we have reached the end stage of societal collapse.

What makes sense to me is for those who want to avoid this extinction stage must separate from the mechanisms that indoctrinate the young with this mindset.  And the public schools and the colleges seem to be those mechanisms.  In addition, social mechanisms will need to be put in place to help young people to find marriage partners.

All of this seems absurd.  After all, it used to seem that nature had made getting young men and women together the easiest thing in the world.  But apparently our society has managed to screw that up royally.  And what this has to do with Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris in the 2024 election is more than any normal person can figure.  But it’s just one more symptom of how the Left has made normal life almost impossible.

So once again the important take away is protect your children from mentally ill people preaching dysfunction and nihilism.  Be aware of what passes for public education in your town.

Tom’s World – 07NOV2024 –

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Update:

I kicked this to the top of the site because I want it to get more views.  Tom has collected some wonderful photos of an iconic old military facility.  I especially like the shots of the interior masonry.  His use of HDR (high dynamic range) technique produces fascinating images.

 

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Ft Pickens is the site of a US National Park located at the mouth of Pensacola Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Historically it has been the site of military defences to protect said bay from foreign intervention. Other than altercations between Union and Confederate forces during the Civil War, I’m not aware of any military confrontations between US and hostile foreign forces since the original fort was established in 1830. At least in one instance, WWII, I’m fairly sure that was because of the deterrence of the fort. Especially in the 1st couple of years of WWII, the Gulf was lousy with German submarines, and absent the fort there would have been little to deter the Germans from coming into the bay and shelling the deep water port facilities.

 

Fort Pickens was active as a military base from 1830 to its closing in 1947 and it has abandoned facilities and gun emplacements from all along that time frame. This is just a few pictures and doesn’t begin to encompass the buildings, emplacements and facilities there.

 

Photos:

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Light at the End of the Tunnel: This is one portion of one wing from the 1st facilities constructed, in 1830, completed just 8 years after Florida was ceded to the US by Spain. It was constructed of brick using slave labor.

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This is a spotting tower used to spot and correct the shell fire from the two 6” shield guns featured in later picts.

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Another location in another wing of the 1830 fortress.

One of the 6”. These guns were 6” shield guns in use from before to through WWII.  These guns threw a shell weighing probably around 90 pounds to a distance of around 17,000 yards. There’s a picture of the interior of the shield further down.

Here’s a “disappearing” gun from the WWI era. Seems to me that would be an effective defense strategy since, any adversary unless at an extreme range, would have a flat trajectory to its shell fire.

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This is the 2nd shield gun at that emplacement. This picture doesn’t reveal differences from the 1st but I just like the photo as a photo.

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A 3rd shot of another location from in the 1830 building

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One wing of the 1830 building. It connects to the remainder of the building on the left but not the right side due to a “little” hurricane some time in the past.

View from behind one of the shield guns showing the interior. These turrets were fully powered, as they would be on a ship. You’ll notice that the breech block has been removed. Spoil sports! They never let us have any fun, pot shots at fishing boats 10 miles out would be great sport.

 

You can see that the breech design is of the interrupted screw type (no jokes please). This design is prevalent with American canon types of the time as opposed to the falling block favored by many other nations. Since, the US Army at least seems to use the falling block.

09NOV2024 – Quote of the Day

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The lives of all are in the hands of Him who knows best whether to preserve it or no, and to His will do I resign myself. My character and good name are in my own keeping. Life with disgrace is dreadful. A glorious death is to be envied, and, if anything happens to me recollect death is a debt we must all pay, and whether now or in a few years hence can be but of little consequence.

Horatio Nelson