wombat_socho

 Ate more moderately yesterday (hash & eggs at Peg's, Caesar salad from Chop Stop, and a Healthy Choice steamer from Walmart with additional starch components) and was rewarded with a drop in weight to 399. BG was on the low side of nominal and BP was normal. I think breakfast this morning will be from Dunkin', but with no doughnuts. Well, maybe just one plain cake doughnut.

Yesterday started out with a mostly empty schedule but filled in pretty quickly. I'm getting a lot of simple returns with a scattering of EIC/CTC returns; so far nothing terribly complicated or expensive. Still resisting the urge to see where I am on the curve. Looking at the schedule, I'm going to wrap up this pay period at 51 hours, which means I'm going to gross a little over $1500. Even after taxes, I ought to be able to punch quite a hole in my credit card debt with that, especially if I eat out less and nuke more food in my hotel room.

David Drake had some comments about milsf writers who had seen the elephant (himself and Joe Haldeman) as opposed to those who hadn't (John Scalzi) and I'm going to think about that a bit before I put any ink to paper (so to speak). 

I picked up ~$50 worth of various groceries at Walmart after work last night, not nearly enough of it meals. May go back tonight and get some brats and mustard.

My timeout from Reddit was over this morning. There are fresh raltsberries to feast on if things get slow today; also, I finished the event in F/GO and now have another cute female assassin for the collection. 

Time to put on my shirt and shoes, get my stuff together, and go pick up my laundry, which surprisingly is ready the day after I dropped it off.  

I was awakened around 1230 by a scam call, or at least that was what T-Mobile guessed it was. It was another one of those nights where I slept from 4-6 hours, woke up for a couple of hours, and then went back to sleep for several more hours.

Weight was down, BG was nominal, and BP was okay. Fixed eggs and sausage and hashbrowns and an English muffin for breakfast, and this kept me satisfied until after I was done with the blogging, at which point my BG was normal and I had some more of the chicken & sausage stuff. Tonight I'm going to go out, put a few gallons in the Kia, do some Ingress stuff, and throw out trash, not necessarily in that order. 

James was surprised to see that I had written Ranma/Utena fanfic. He managed to find the archived version of my old Geocities site, from which I downloaded a bunch of stories I'd almost forgotten about - and the Mother Of All Combat SF Lists, which I think I'm going to buff up and load onto the Wombat's Bookshelf site, since I haven't done anything with that in a while.

Quit the most recent iteration of Hearts of Iron, having reached April 1945 with no prospect of doing unto the Japanese for some time. I am currently holding off the Japanese in a historical game, using an old Reddit post as a guide. The RoC pretty much has the Japanese stalled on the Yellow River line, which is fortified with a bunch of L3 forts, and after a couple of exciting episodes, we've managed to kick the Japs out of Tsingtao (hopefully for keeps) while building up the industrial base, reforming the Army (we're now doing the Lessons of War after completing all three Army Reform steps), and we are now in the early stages of building a sub fleet with which to terrorize the IJN - mines first, and once the snorkel boats start rolling out in a couple of years, we'll be savaging their convoys from the air and underwater as well. 

 Well, I expected my weight to go up a little while I was in Las Vegas, but this was ridiculous - it shot up to 395, probably because I didn't pack enough pill boxes and so did without metformin, Lasix, and other meds until I got home Thursday. The lesson here is that insulin alone is not enough. Still, the waking BG was normal, and the BP was only a little above normal, so I expect the weight to drop some over the next couple of days. 

Didn't have enough eggs to do the flax muffin thing, but fortunately not all the English muffins were moldy, so I toasted the last one and had it with coffee and yogurt for breakfast. Maybe I'll get some eggs tomorrow. Maybe not. Fried and grilled the remaining pack of cube steaks for lunch, and whipped up some clam & onion dip for dinner. Also threw the last egg and other materials in the robot for a loaf of bread on the express setting, and it seems to have turned out well, better than the last one. 

Except for a quick trip to the post office to get my new Gab hat and a bunch of political ads (oh, and my sample & real ballots for next month's primary) I stayed in and played Civicrack and phone games. Noodled a little bit about "Wolfhound 43 Goes Dingo", which is the title I've assigned to the story about the food delivery cart whose CPU is salvaged into an anti-armor drone...which begins hunting trains instead of AFVs. I have several bad ideas already, none of which will probably make the cut, but one never knows. Forgot to note that I did bash out another 500 words or so on The Misfit earlier this week, so if I can pry myself away from the Mongols in Civicrack and actually do some damn writing, I might could make some actual progress on both stories. 

This weekend I need to book a room to hang out in before my flight leaves on Tuesday, and I also need to talk to Pep Boys about dropping off the Kia for an oil change, A/C and battery check while I'm in DC, which would avoid the hassle of leaving it in the ramp at the Strat or wherever I wind up Monday night (Maybe the Rio.) I chatted with someone about moving money from NSB to PenFed, and it looks like the least annoying option is to stop at their office on Jones Branch Drive in Tyson's Corner, which is about 25 minutes from the hotel off 495 and Chain Bridge Road. I guess after that I'll go and say hi to the folks at the Family Plot before getting my ass back to Chantilly before rush hour.  

Weight dropped like a rock today, BG went down a little.

Revised What Did You Do in the Cold War, Dad? for the last time and sent it off to Joy, Andrea and Rick for editing and beta reading. It'll be ready in mid-August, I guess.
Did the In The Mailbox post, went off to Palace Station to stuff myself at the buffet for half off, and then lost $3 at video poker.

Did a little ingressing at the casino as well as some drive-bys on the way home; rebuilt Landmark and the Convention Center, which were missing some of their resonators. Linking and fielding ensued.

Posted a bunch of military life events, including my assignment to the 331st, to Facebook and found several people from that unit I'd lost touch with or hadn't known that well to begin with. Also got friended by Asia Carrera, who I can add to Claudia Christian and Patricia Tallman as awesome women I'll never actually meet in real life.

Started reading the massive Churchill bio by his son Randolph. The structure reminds me a lot of The Patton Papers.

Well, I got most of what I wanted to do done; may have overdone it with the chikuns, or possibly I was hungrier than I thought by the time I got to Boston Market. About the only thing not done was laundry, and since I have a clean shirt, pants, and undies for tomorrow I don't really care. It'll wait until Wednesday.

Picked up The Last Centurion at the library after dropping off my finished books since the other volumes in the Drake/Flint Belisarius series weren't in. Also picked up The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley and Sam Schall's Vengeance from Ashes as my Amazon prime freebie.

Added and formatted essays to What Did You Do In The Cold War, Dad?; all I need to do is finish up "Highest Octane Nightmare Fuel" (hopefully about eight thousand words there) and tuck that in before I send it off to Andrea for beta reading; after that, to Joy for formatting and submission once I have Jen's cover art. Backup plan will be to have Joy's graphic artist friend do a shoulder patch collage and slap a title on it.

Recently Neal Stephenson, who used to be a science fiction writer but isn't so much any more* complained about the depressing nature of most contemporary SF and the need to rally writers to write optimistic SF that would inspire people to "get big stuff done". Thus, Project Hieroglyph and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, which at over $14 seems a bit pricy for something that's supposed to inspire the masses, or even the Glittery Hoo-Ha crowd that currently infests the SFWA.** Given that most SF fans come to the genre through movies and TV these days, the notion of writing stories to move them to think big also seems a bit archaic. Finally, as Michael White wrote in Pacific Standard, the assertion that SF helped scientists to think big is rather questionable and not clearly supported by history. Sure, SF has "predicted" all manner of technological advances, but as John DiNardo points out, Sf is not in the business of predictions, it's in the business of entertaining people with stories based (sometimes loosely) in science.

For what my opinion is worth, Golden Age SF, and the current Human Wave are rooted in optimism to begin with, and I think if you don't have that optimism about the future, you're going to have a damn hard time faking it. Unless you want to spend your career filing the serial numbers off dead writers' works, slapping the plot and characters into a Procrustean bed of political correctness, and making people regret they ever picked up your book³ - but hey, it's your career. Do what you want. Just don't bitch and whine and snivel when other people don't find your remakes inspiring or entertaining. On the other hand, if you want to take the old stories' plot and characters and bring them up to date so it's not obvious the story was originally written in the 1940s, that's different - and, IMAO, better.

To sum up all this, art is the product of a society, and great art has an impact that stretches across the generations. This is the greatest sin of the Left, which has tried its damnedest to destroy the legacy of Western Civilization by refusing to pass it on to those they claimed to be educating and by claiming it was worthless since it was all written by "dead white European males". As if nobody but Anglos could appreciate Shakespeare, nobody but Germans could appreciate Bach or Beethoven, and nobody but the French could appreciate Delacroix. Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke inspired a generation of engineers and scientists, and twenty years later, Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the stars" sparked a cultural revolution and eventually a quiet victory in the culture wars that made SF and fantasy acceptable fare for everyone, not just the socially awkward outcasts who'd once found refuge in "escapist literature". If Stephenson wants to inspire people to do great things, he needs to pitch his inspiration at the part of society most receptive to it, the subculture of geeks and nerds and ordinary folks who want to live in the billion-volt limitless future with Klingons, Vulcans, a Terro-Human Federation - and above all, hope.

*Something I'm going to address at length in next week's book review post, which is why I'm not going into it here.
** Which I frankly don't think is going to happen, given that they're all besotted with Intersectionality and probably regard "getting big stuff done" as just another excuse for Patriarchal Oppression.
As if the whole push was a cover for building a mighty space-going dreadnought to be named the Enormous Patriarchal Tool. (h/t Larry Niven for the ship name. I think)
³Fuzzy Nation, I'm looking at you.

This seems like a good place to pause and take stock of things, being the Official Beginning Of Summer (TM) and all that.

Didn't attend Balticon this year because, as they say on Gatmander, unto me is an occasion of penury. For a while I had been thinking of joining the Hammers and Mr. Taylor this morning to sign up for next year, but I don't have either the gas or the cash to make that happen, so that too gets left undone; I'll just have to scrape some shekels together and register for before the end of the year. The same applies to getting a room; I waited far too long and screwed myself out of cheap rooms near the Hunt Valley.

Physically I'm in much better shape than I was last Memorial Day. Weight popped up a bit to 380 this morning, but that's 10 pounds less than last year, and the general trend this month has been down. The leg wounds seem to be continuing to shrink and dry out, so I may actually get to use the pool pass Landlady gave me last month. Mentally and emotionally, I'm in a better place, so on balance everything is better.

Finished up the edits on The Last Falangist before going to bed last night instead of leaving it for this morning and fired it off to my editrix. I have a faint hope that she can whip it into shape so that we can have it out to some reviewers/blurbers before the end of the week, but that may be overly optimistic. In the meantime, I need to work on recovering the parts of What Did You Do In The Cold War, Daddy? so we can maybe push that out the door before the end of the year.

But first, I think I'm going to screw around with Civicrack, because I can. :)