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I just read what is essentially a scene-by-scene analysis of Star Trek VI. It was quite interesting to read, because it examines the film in a way that I never have. This is my favorite Star Trek film, I have watched it many times, and I have long admired it for its economy of story […]
A couple weeks ago, I went to a meet-up of writers in Jefferson County. It was a small group, and I enjoyed it. A couple of published authors, and a fairly loose discussion of things we’re working on. I discussed the space station murder mystery I am planning, and while I didn’t receive a lot […]
I am forty-five years old, and until now I have had only an approximate idea of where I was born. When I was younger, I was told I was born “in St. Louis.” However, I grew up in unincorporated St. Louis County, and in our mailing address, the city was always given as “St. Louis,” […]
The voting skills of the American electorate have frustrated me for some time. Our Presidential candidates this year are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton of all possibilities, and now the UK has had Brexit. I have long wondered what to do about it. Restore journalism ethics? The driving motivator isn’t there. Educate voters about the […]
The Pawnee National Grassland is located in northeast Colorado. As the name would imply, it is a large expanse of grassland, relatively flat, set aside for public use much like the National Forest system. It is a very beautiful place, and very peaceful. Except, perhaps, for the cows. There are three small developed campgrounds at […]
At work, we use monitoring systems to alert us to problems with the system, so that we can react to them quickly. We take the monitoring systems quite seriously. Today, on one of my personal servers, I discovered that a service had crashed, and I hadn’t noticed for fifteen hours. It was quite a shock […]
A few years ago, my sister and her family lived in Denver, our whole family was making plans to migrate that direction, and my brother and I were talking about starting a business manufacturing firearms. Then in 2013, Colorado enacted a new gun control law which, among other things, banned full capacity magazines. This made […]
[Edit: Since posting this, I have gained more clarity about the definition of “anti-intellectualism”, which is hostility specifically and directly toward intellectuals, education, and reason. It is not merely the rejection of reason, facts, and scientific knowledge in the context of some other issue. That said, gun control is not anti-intellectualism. The rejection of well-established […]
It has been my experience that when intelligent people make seemingly stupid decisions, it is because they are following an agenda that is in conflict with reason. The case of Brock Turner raping an unconscious girl should have been a simple case with a simple verdict. Yet somehow, the judge seems confused. Confused about the […]
A defining characteristic of hard-boiled detective fiction is cynicism. The protagonist in such a novel has a necessarily cynical world view and makes cynical observations about the world. Many such novels are set in Los Angeles. I thought that was just a cliché trope, until I started thinking about how the setting contributes to the […]
