Sad Puppies: Why I Don’t Do Cons

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Sad Puppies: Why I Don't Do Cons

First, allow me to fangirl a little bit. Cedar just added me on G+ so I’m kind of doing this right now:

But then I started reading Sarah’s entry from today which led me to reading Vonda McIntyre’s entry which has led to a round of head-scratching, several cigarette breaks, a few consultations of Wikipedia’s entry on Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a lengthy session back on Khan Academy which involved a lot of swearing at parabolas (which seems to be the only aspect of algebra II I’m doomed to fail), and the realization that I’ve got a 2:30 appointment so I need to wrap this up already.

People: shit like this is why I don’t do cons. Okay, I went to BlizzCon (twice). I went to the WWI when it was in Paris. But for all of those — I worked for Blizzard and I was at the convention working. I’ve never been to E3, Gamescom, DreamHack, GenCon, IndyCon, any of the ComicCons, WorldCon, or WalkerStalker Con. I had wanted to go to LibertyCon this year but did not have the money. I may go next year if I can scrape together the funds and if work permits but that will probably be the only convention I’ll go to.

Why? Several reasons.

1) I hate traveling. Flying anywhere is a hassle. It’s expensive. Hotels are insanely overpriced and the food is crap (the Internet is generally shitty, too). Driving is a little better but the price of gas is insane.

2) So. Many. People. And you have to talk to them and you can’t hide from them.

3) Where there are a lot of people, there’s going to be a lot of noise. If I want a migraine, there are cheaper and more efficient methods to give myself one.

4) It’s become pretty clear that the people running these conventions don’t like people like me. If you think that the Sad Puppies had a point (that the Hugos were being given out based on the author’s politics and were going to sermon-fics that delivered a particular sermon instead of to stories/books that were well-written or told interesting stories with interesting characters regardless of the author’s politics), then you’re clearly not welcome at these conventions. At best, you’ll be just asked not to show up (and maybe made to feel like an unperson the way Johnathon Ross was). At worst — you get forced out for no reason with baseless and false (and malignant) allegations lodged against you (as happened against the Honey Badger Brigade). Being a minority, a woman, a lesbian, a non-American, or even all of the above does not protect you from this. You could be an African-born male-to-female transgendered post-operative black lesbian Rwandan socialist Muslim and if you happen to think “hey, Larry Correia had a point,” you might as well be a WASP man for all the good it will do you if you try to turn up at a con.

5) It’s actually getting borderline dangerous for those of us who don’t toe the SJW “Brianna Wu is our Goddessa and we shall sucketh Scalzi’s cocketh, Massa” line to live, let alone show up at cons. I really don’t want to get arrested, SWATTed, or have my car run off the road and die on the side of the highway.

So, I avoid them. I mean, why bother? The panels are just going to be about how people like me are evil, how stories I like are stupid, how I and my whole family should be killed, etc, etc, etc. It’s nothing I didn’t hear in the grievance-mongering circles at college. I’m not going to piss thousands of dollars away just to hear it while surrounded by cosplayers.

Still, it gets on my nerves. That one side or the other needs protection from the other. How about we all do the sensible thing and talk about the giant elephant in the room? The SJWs are crazy, they’ve got no problem with violence as a means to an end, they’ve got no problem with wishing death/torture/pain/rape/whatever on their political or philosophical opposition. It’s illogical to put yourself anywhere near them or in any place where they control ingress and egress or security. Not because they’ll kill you outright (they’re crazy, not stupid) but because they can make your life a living hell. Once you’re where they control the security systems, they can chose what the police see (and don’t see). They don’t need to win their cases in a court of law, people — for some things, the mere accusation is enough.

And you really want to go to where they’re going to be? Shit, I avoid being in the same ZIP code as them if I can. So long as I’m out in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere, Landmassia — and can prove I’m there — they can’t accuse me of doing jack to them.

So again — do you really want to go to WorldCon and give them the chance to accuse you of theft, harassment, rape, murder, human trafficking, drug trafficking, or whatever else they come up with? Or do you want to do the sensible thing and stay at least three ZIP Codes and a time zone away from any SJW/CHORF whenever possible?

— G.K.

PS — If you must go, here’s a list of criminal defense attorneys in Spokane, WA. And, if you are going, add me on Facebook or Twitter and let me know. We can exchange contact info and I’ll volunteer to be your “one phone call” if you do get arrested on trumped-up BS charges.

Epic Fantasy: In The Shadow of Yggdrasil Updated!

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Epic Fantasy: In The Shadow of Yggdrasil Updated!

If yesterday’s update didn’t quite hit the spot for your epic fantasy fix, maybe today’s will. In the Shadow of Yggdrasil has been updated! This week we see a bit more of the rescued Jotun prisoners and some hope on the horizon for them. Also, more little brother adorableness! The war is going to be tangential for a few more chapters but, don’t worry — it’s still a-raging. The action is going to pick back up soon. Enjoy the calm before the excrement hits the circular ventilator!

As always, don’t forget that you can back me on Patreon or support my writing habit by getting a membership here today!

— G.K.

The Vicious Hamster Wheel of Credentialing

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The Vicious Hamster Wheel of Credentialing

…and how it impacts the publishing industry, the economy, and the rest of the world in general.

Okay, I swear, I am so not cyberstalking Cedar even though whenever I see that she’s posted something I drop whatever I’m doing and go read it because I’m beginning to wonder if she and I get messages from the same s00per s3kr3t radio station or something. We’re both evil unicorns (which is cool) and we’re both writers (though I think she’s more experienced than I am since I’ve only been in the game a few years) and we’re both nerds so there’s going to be some overlap. But when I read her post on the topic of credentialing, I had the strangest physical reaction (think full-body shiver and skin crawling) because I was thinking about this exact topic last night.

Eerie.

So, without further ado…

We live in interesting times. Really interesting times. In the past two hundred years, the world has flipped around in a lot of ways and some groups haven’t quite had a chance to catch up. The rate of change isn’t going to slow down anytime soon (if anything, the rate of acceleration is increasing) and it’s created rather a lot of chaos that makes it difficult for everyone. This started back with the Industrial Revolution but has really kicked into high gear with the Digital Revolution. However, for now, I want to focus in on one particular trend that’s been a particular nuisance in recent years and that’s the vicious hamster wheel of the credential chase.

Long ago, a young man would purchase an apprenticeship, serve a set number of years under a master craftsman, become a journeyman, then prove his skill as a master and be free to set up his own shop and take on apprentices himself. Credentials were reserved for things like the clergy (and thus controlled by the Church) or the universities (which meant they were for the aristocrats’ second or third sons). Very few people had them or needed them and thus, they were quite valuable. Then along came the Industrial Revolution and the modern education system with its assembly-line cookie-cutter approach and, for a short time, a high school diploma was sufficient for entry into the modern work force and could get a person a job at a factory or as a teacher, secretary, bank teller, or other office worker. College was for those who were going into more advanced fields.

But when everyone could get a high school diploma easily, the value of having one was lower and the credential was less valuable. Factor in that unions with their work rules, refusal to consider the impact of their demands on the business’s bottom line, and refusal to police their members and maintain high standards in work ethic to justify wage and benefit increases helped drive manufacturing jobs overseas; that globalization came in and cut out a lot of the protectionism the Industrial Era institutions relied on; and that things like the G.I. Bill started a very perverse incentive for colleges, lenders, and the government to feed off each other (and the taxpayer) and the credentialing hamster wheel started spinning. Suddenly jobs that once barely needed a high school diploma to be done now require a Bachelor’s degree. There are hundreds of professions that people used to freelance out of their homes that now require expensive (and extensive) licenses to perform (hairstylist, barber, masseuse, babysitting, tutoring, music lessons…) I’ve worked in the tech world for over a decade now and credentialing there is getting insane. Techies like to pride themselves on valuing knowledge over shiny badges but it is very hard to break into different fields without certain credentials these days and it’s very hard to obtain those credentials without already being in those fields because the certification tests are expensive.

I’m waiting for the day when the Bachelor’s degree I worked my butt off to get (I did a four-year in three) is as worthless as a high school diploma because everyone is required to have one. I’ve looked into getting a Masters degree but can’t afford one. And, to be honest, none of the jobs I’ve ever held have required me to use any of the crap I learned in college. I’m not saying that college was useless for me; I enjoyed it and learned a lot of valuable research information. I’ve just never really used any of it professionally. No, all of the skills I’ve used professionally are things I’ve either taught myself, learned on the job, or learned in high school and built upon in college.

Frankly, in the constant chase after credentials, the only ones coming out ahead are those who grant the credentials. Employers can’t be happy with it because the greater a credential they require for a job, the more they’re going to have to pay that person (and that’s another vicious cycle all its own). Regular folks aren’t happy with it because it gets tiring having to chase credential after credential just so we can check off boxes from an HR flunky who doesn’t know what she’s doing (really — I filled out an application a week ago that had listed as a requirement for the job “10+ years experience in PHP5 and HTML5” when PHP5 just celebrated a decade this year and HTML5 isn’t even a year old. Topping that, I’ve seen requirements for “At least 10+ years development in Ruby on Rails” when the framework is only nine years old!)

So, what is to be done about it? Well, first of all, fire all the HR departments. Then fire all of the politicians. Maybe consider setting them on fire while firing them? Or fire them into an orbital trajectory or something. Regardless — fire them a lot. Then shut down the entire education system, redesign it so that it actually creates a literate society instead of turning out factory workers, re-instate vo-tech-like schools for skilled trades and quit looking down on people who do that work because they’re cool people and smart as hell. They’re just smart in a different way like we’re smart in a different way, okay? To them, I’m as dumb as a box of rocks because I can’t unstop a toilet and I’m weird because I remember a particular cardio-arrhythmia that I read about and was able to deduce someone’s wife had based on a conversation they were having with the check-out clerk when they were at the grocery store the line ahead of me.

Not everyone needs to go to college. Not everyone is smart the way I’m smart and that’s okay. But we’ve really got to end the constant credential chase because, if we don’t, eventually Ph.D.s are going to be required to work the drive-thru at McDonalds. Unless, of course, we’ve replaced the entirety of the McDonalds staff with a robotic restaurant and the drive-thru is a voice-activated kiosk with a debit/credit card reader which is a distinct possibility.

— G.K.

Epic Fantasy: The Search for the Seven Scepters Updated!

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Epic Fantasy: The Search for the Seven Scepters Updated!

Epic fantasy fans, rejoice; The Search for the Seven Scepters has been updated. This week’s chapter finally sees our brothers reunited and Blade is there, too! Also, a very fun pledge gets made that gives the story both its title and its purpose. And, we learn a bit more about why Blade is so resistant to taking the throne and about her family and her family dynamics. The next few chapters will reveal even more as well as picking up the action a good bit so stay tuned!

As always, don’t forget that you can back me on Patreon or support my writing habit by getting a membership here today!

— G.K.

Politics and Television

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Politics and Television

Or “Why G.K. Didn’t Watch The Debate.”

Oh dear Lord, we’re going into another active phase of the perpetual election cycle, aren’t we? Last week we got to see the spectacle that was the GOP debate and, while I didn’t watch it live because I knew that, even with it being on Fox with supposedly “friendly” moderators, the talking-heads weren’t going to be able to resist their chance to ham it up for the cameras and that the entire thing was going to be more about ginning up the ratings for the sponsors than it was going to be about the candidates actually, you know, talking about the issues and debating different approaches following set logical rules and avoiding logical fallacies such as strawman, reductio ad absurdum, tu quoque, ad hominem, appeals to (false) authority, special pleading, No True Scotsman, post hoc, and more while presenting actual evidence and solid reasoning for their beliefs or policy.

Can you tell I’m a bit of a throwback and a cynic? Television has ruined a lot of things and debate, argumentation, and critical thinking are among those things. It’s a great medium for entertainment and it can be used for education, yes, and story-telling. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not one of those who thinks that television is completely evil and has no redeeming qualities. I enjoy it — I have an active Netflix account and I’ve got Criminal Minds playing in the background. But, when it comes to journalism, television is the worst medium that could be used. It doesn’t allow for truly in-depth coverage, cross-referencing, citation of sources, or deep thought. Newspapers are the best medium for daily coverage and bi-weekly or monthly magazines are great for bigger events or more thorough coverage of events or technical issues. Radio can be a passable medium so long as the moderators and the debate format are agreed to in advance and the topics are adhered to. Television, however, will never make a good medium for political debates or journalism.

Why? Because it’s commercial. And, that’s good for entertainment. Hell, it’s great. It means that businesses and consumers are free to reward shows and sponsors and channels that entertain them or tell stories they like or support or whatever without having to directly own the studios or airwaves or whatever. There’s no real need for government intervention, censorship, or anything like that other than “truth in advertising” laws (you can’t advertise that your wooden spoon is actually made out of marble) and possibly some kind of daytime/child-safety advertising laws (you can’t run alcohol ads or other adult ads during certain hours or on channels aimed at children — not that most marketers would sell or buy there anyway because it’d be stupid). However, it’s an undeniable fact that you don’t piss off your sponsors and you don’t piss off your core audience. Just look at GamerGate. Intel pulled their ads from Gawker when Gawker’s articles pissed off a sizable portion of the GamerGate audience and they threatened to boycott Intel. And that kind of pressure is fine for entertainment shows and even educational shows. But it is not fine for journalism. It leads to worries about offending the corporate sponsors or the consumers which leads to spin, blacking-out of stories, and a focus on feel-good stories or the promotion of news items in a way that is guaranteed to keep the money-spigot opened.

Another reason television is a terrible medium for journalism is because it’s a visual format which leads to people judging based on appearances instead of based on the actual argument. Have you ever noticed that all of the news anchors are good-looking? And that none of them are terribly intelligent or creative? If they were trapped in the middle of a desert, they’d be screwed. Hell, if they were knee-deep in a river, they’d die of thirst. They went to fancy universities, yes, but that means nothing. Unless they graduated from CalTech, Standford (with a degree in hard sciences), or MIT, it’s worthless. These people were hired for their ability to look good on camera and read from a teleprompter or from cuecards. They were not hired for their ability to think critically, reason, ask difficult questions, or for their finely-tuned bullshit detectors.

A final reason television is the worst medium for journalism is because of its shallowness. Television is a very shallow, very short-form medium. Since it’s so visual and auditory, it’s easy to get overstimulated which makes it difficult for long-term memory to be engaged (which is why visual tricks and cut-aways can be used to deceive so easily — see below). The set-time format makes it impossible for any topic to be covered in real depth and the inability for there to be hard, permanent reference points for citations or notes makes cross-referencing difficult, if not impossible. Add in the general passivity it requires of the audience and it’s just a terrible medium for something as serious as news journalism and political debates.

There are other reasons television is a terrible medium for serious topics — it’s untrustworthy because it can be deceptively edited without the viewer being aware of it at all and, unless there are other recordings made, there’s no way to prove it (and there are never other recordings because of technical and legal reasons — no sound studio is going to let an interview subject bring in his own film crew and sound crew because not only will that cause phase cancellation issues, energy, and temperature issues but it sets them up for liability and insurance nightmares. The studio and journalists also won’t go for it because then they won’t have the sole copyright, there will be a plethora of distribution issues, and it would force them to be too damned honest).

Television — great for entertainment but a terrible way to receive information and select our leaders. Just FYI.

— G.K.

Police Thriller Readers: The Masterminds Updated!

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Police Thriller Readers: The Masterminds Updated!

Happy Monday all! I’ve just posted the latest chapter of my police thriller, The Masterminds, for your reading pleasure. We’re still going through a bit of a lull while team dynamics get established. This chapter isn’t just filler, though, so read it and enjoy!

Don’t forget that you can back me on Patreon or support my writing habit by getting a membership here now!

— G.K.

Techies And Writers And Herds of Cats

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Techies And Writers And Herds of Cats

One of my daily reads is Sarah Hoyt’s blog and recently I’ve been going through some of her older entries (I’m looking for a post where she was talking about the review submission process…don’t ask) and I stumbled over several mentions of how getting us writer-ly types to organize and do anything in a uniform fashion is kind of like herding cats. Especially those of us of what she calls the Odd bent (and what I call the “awesomesauce” bent because, yay, more fellow NTs!) I’ve noticed this myself — especially back when I was submitting to agents and traditional publishers before I realized that was a chump’s game and decided to go indie. Each agent or agent house and each publisher has their own guidelines for receiving query letters and manuscripts and none of them are the same.

Considering the uniformity of the end product (mass-market paperbacks have very specific cover and print-set specifications) and the general consistency of editing software and screen-readers, you’d think that there would be some consistency. But you’d be wrong.

The only other area where I’ve encountered such a dizzying array of sheer anarchy is…the tech world. I still keep a foot in that realm (because it’s fun) and anyone who’s actually delved into code very far knows what I mean when I say that reading someone’s code can tell you everything you need to know about them. If it’s not human-readable, you know that they’re using a graphical interface to drag’n’drop elements into place and that they don’t actually know what they’re doing. They might have a cursory understanding but they don’t grasp the fundamentals and the principles. Or, they’re not a coder (and they’re not pretending to be — I had this happen a lot in my professional life) and you get the fun job of digging through a single-line (that is actually several thousand lines) of nested HTML menu items to find the one that isn’t closed properly so you can make the document strict XML compliant.

If the code has function names that are the same as variables, you know you’re deal with someone who has some experience but is still new to the game. Their comments and documentation will tend to be hit-or-miss but at least it will exist. If the code has function names that are purposeful and unique, you know that the commentary and documentation will be fairly good (or they will have outsourced it to someone who will be better at it, you hope) or it will be non-existent. If the function names are vindictive and the documentation has you going in circles, you know that you’re probably better off removing everything and rebuilding from scratch because someone high up pissed this person off and you’re dealing with a BOFH type who has decided to extract a pound (or ton) of flesh. In this case, there’s only one thing to do:

The issue is, some techies are going to be die-hard Perl scripters and everything is going to be in that. Others will prefer Python. Some never moved past C++. You’ve got your K-shell users, C-shell users, Z-shell folks, and then a quick shout-out to my peeps out there in Bourne-Again land (BASH FOREVAH!). There’s the Xwindows folks who are all about some KDE while others are hung up with their Gnomes and the rest of us are wondering why in Torvalds’ name you’re running Xwindows on a server — it’s not secure. People will cling to their text-editors and bitter fights will break out over vi versus emacs versus pico versus nano at which point G.K. boots to Windows (hey, if you’re going to run a desktop, run a freaking desktop) and opens up Scrivener. PHP devs will say you can do everything with PHP and seasoned HTML coders will snort and think about all the times they had to implement HTML/CSS/JS fixes to deal with a PHPlib error. SQL DBAs will laugh at all of them while they work on their next round of fiendishly difficult certifications.

As you can see, though…techies and writers — none of us can agree on how things should be. Oh, we all have our opinions on how they should be. Techies will even form consortiums, conventions, conglomerations, conferences, and write out long RFCs about How Things Should Be. Enough others will agree and we’ll wind up with this situation:

Which, come to think of it, is probably what happened in the publishing world.

Now, do I think that writers are going to eventually get together and decide on a uniform submission process? Hell no! Do I think publishers will eventually decide on one? Nope. What will probably keep happening is what’s been happening. It’s just interesting to see that two groups of people the average Joe Public considers diametric opposites (writers and techies) are actually very much alike.

And it’s cool to be both of them at once, yo.

— G.K.

Friday Review: A Demon-Haunted World

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Friday Review: A Demon-Haunted World

If you get very deep into sci-fi — especially if you’re an INTJ — eventually you’re going to start getting that itchy-brain sensation where your mind starts going a million miles an hour, your neurons kick into overdrive, you start trying to grasp concepts you’ve got little background for understanding until you finally break down and say “is this really possible or is it a load of complete and utter horseshit?” Your intuition (N) will kick in and tell you most of the time but sometimes your thinking (T) will say “uh, wait, sometimes the counter-intuitive is actually true” and when that particular mind-screw happens the phenomenon of dog-chasing-its-own-tail-ad-infinitum-ad-absurdum really goes into overdrive and…well…if you’re anything like me, you prove that it is possible to go two weeks without sleeping and five days without eating (you live on the staples of your best friends C8H10N4O2 and C10H14N2) until you get enough of a grounding in the subject to determine that yes, it is possible or no, it’s not. Then you crash like Windows 3.1 encountering the Internet.

However, not everyone has the finely-tuned, well-used BS detector that comes built-in to the NT’s brain. Which is why God/Buddha/Fate/the Universe/the Flying Spaghetti Monster/Vectron/Zarqon/*insert whatever here* sent us Carl Sagan who wrote A Demon-Haunted World. This book is great at helping those who lack the BS-detector that comes standard among NTs/Rationals/Analysts to avoid being taken in by the latest hoax du jour or journalistic misunderstanding of a scientist’s finding (of which there are many).

This book is also great for us INTJs and other NTs/Rationals/Analysts because it can help us to understand why so many people get taken in by fads, hoaxes, things that are too-good-to-be-true, tricksters, half-truths, or other things of that nature (crop circles, UFO stories, alien abductions, the Satanic cult scare of the 1980s). And, believe me, if there’s one area where we fail epically, it’s in understanding why other people don’t get what we get so quickly and easily. I mean, for us, it’s normal to be able to figure out that there was no way that the crop circles were anything other than man-made, that Nessy was a trick of photography, that Bigfoot is a myth, that the pyramids really were an Egyptian engineering feat (and Stonehenge was the same for the Britons), that there was a natural explanation for the “canals” on Mars, etc, etc, etc. We’re hard-wired to be skeptics. Having better-than-average recall is an inborn ability for us. Learning new things is just what we do. But for the other 99% of the world, reality is totally different and we have a hard time getting that. We have a hard time walking in their shoes and this book can help us see things from their point of view.

    

Five rainbow-farting zebricorns. Everyone needs this book in their library and should read it at least once a year. If they did, the world would be a much better, more rational place.

— G.K.

Fanfic Friday — Star Trek Voyager: Inosculation Updated!

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Fanfic Friday -- Star Trek Voyager: Inosculation Updated!

So, fingers crossed because today is a big day. I have an interview lined up that could be interesting. And, while I’m off doing that, here’s the second chapter of my Voyager fanfic for those of you who have been asking me about it. Yes, Star Trek Voyager: Inosculation has been updated. I will be updating this story every Friday. If you’re curious, my current plan is to update The Masterminds on Monday, The Search for the Seven Scepters on Tuesday, In the Shadow of Yggdrasil on Wednesday, Risen Ash on Thursday, and Star Trek Voyager: Inosculation on Friday. A couple of people have been pinging me about getting Alayne’s Story (my insanely, epically-long World of Warcraft fanfic that I wrote over the course of five years) up on this site. A few others have been asking if I’m planning to put Adrift up here as well and a few are asking if I’ve posted it over at AO3. The answers to those questions are: yes. I am planning to add them to this site and I did post Adrift to AO3. No, I’m not going to put them up on Tumblr (the formatting is too big a PITA). There are a few problems with Alayne’s Story that need to be ironed out first but it will be up here once those are taken care of and I’ve had time to get a cover image done for it. I’ll also be adding it to Fanfiction.net and Wattpad as well as AO3.

I’ve had a couple-of-five of you email me via my contact form to ask if I’ll be putting any of my fanfics up on Amazon for 0.00. Short answer in universal sign language below:

I know that Amazon said they were working something out where fanfics could be distributed for free or sold if the rights-holders agreed. I don’t know what came of that (I’ve not kept up with it at all). In theory, I could *probably* give them away in Kindle format via Amazon (again, I *really* need to research the terms of that. I’m not promising a damned thing) or via this website (definitely could do that last one) so long as I credit the original source. The problem is that some places are pretty cool with derivative-work fan creators (Blizzard) and don’t mind too much if they have a tip jar or are selling other things or have a premium access area on their site so long as they don’t actually sell the fanwork itself. Other places (CBS, Paramount, Auntie Beeb) are a little less far down the “cool” spectrum and G.K. can’t afford awesomesauce lawyers. Factor in that, technically, fanfics are a form of copyright infringement and trademark dilution and if I were to profit from it those guys really have no choice but to come after me with a fifty-ton hammer of smiting and it’s just a headache I’m not sure I want to deal with.

Why do you think I’m not running ads on this site? It’s not because I couldn’t use the money. It’s because I’m fucking terrified that if I did, I’d have the BBC and Blizzard suing me for money I don’t fucking have and will never fucking get. We’ll ignore, for now, the fact that I’m also personally liable to David Tennant, Tom Hiddleston, Chris Helmsworth, Anthony Hopkins, AMC, Alexander Enderberg, Norman Reedus, Andrew Lincoln, Sarah Wayne Callies, Melissa McBride, and Eric Calderone (among countless others) for unauthorized use of their names and/or personal likenesses. Never mind that I took those likenesses from photos that were released to the public domain by their press representatives or publicists. Technically, the argument could be made and G.K. Masterson and family does not have the money to make a convincing counter-argument before a judge in the US or the UK.

I’m doing my best to stay well under the radar when it comes to my fanworks. I had actually seriously considered sending some of my legit work to a few of my favorite actors as a way of saying “thanks” for the countless hours of entertainment and inspiration they’ve afforded me. However, once I realized how trivial it would be for them to link my legit works to my fanworks (and that was a dumbass move on my part there) and just how liable I was on that, I ditched that idea. The repository sites like Fanfiction.net, AO3, and Wattpad can get away with it because of how they function and because of the terms they present to users. I can also post my own works here as an archive. But selling them, even at 0.00, via Amazon or anything like that…well, it gets really, really tricky when there’s a remote chance of “profiting” from the work at all even if it’s just “someone read my fanfic and bought my legit work while on my website.”

tl;dr — It’s a hassle and, tbh, I have enough stress in my life already so I’ll pass for now, thanks.

Anyway, go on and enjoy this week’s chapter of Star Trek Voyager: Inosculation!

— G.K.

Throwback Thursday: G.K.’s Vulcan Nerdcrush

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Throwback Thursday: G.K.'s Vulcan Nerdcrush

I think it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one at all that I have always been a Trekkie. I started watching it when The Next Generation began airing. My dad was a bit of a nerd and it was considered family entertainment so we watched it together. Of course, I got far more into the show than he did so I kept watching it even after he lost interest.

Now, I know what everyone’s thinking. No, I didn’t have a crush on Wesley Crusher. Ew. ST:TNG started airing when I was six or seven years old. I also didn’t have a crush on Data (though he was a favorite of mine) or Picard (though I thought he was awesome) or Q (though I thought he was hilarious if a little mean sometimes). It wasn’t La Forge, either (even though I liked Levar Burton because I was also a big fan of Reading Rainbow).

I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t anyone on the senior staff and it wasn’t anyone who was a regular guest or recurring character. At least, not on TNG. He also didn’t make an appearance until late in the series when I would have at least been aware of boys and mildly interested in them (albeit more in the academic sense because it took me a while to get into the whole “dating” thing and that was more the result of succumbing to peer pressure than any actual interest in the paradigm. Yeah, I did have interest in a couple of boys during my teenage years but it was always more a mental connection than physical or emotional. Kind of still is, now that I think about it).

And if that hasn’t given you all of the clues you need to figure it out, I don’t know what to do other than just tell you that the second major crush I had (the first being Haplo the Patryn from the Death Gate Cycle) was on Ensign Taurik from The Lower Decks (S7:E15) which aired when I was 13. The same actor who portrayed Taurik was cast as another Vulcan in Voyager — Vorik — who is also a character I really liked (though I didn’t have a crush on Vorik because, by then, I was way too busy with school and dealing with the soul-crushing grind of social norms that were alien to me to have much energy to spare developing a crush on a character from a TV show I was only half-watching while trying to wade through the mountains of homework I had. Yay for honors and AP courses that no colleges actually bothered to honor even when I aced the exams!)

Tell me he’s not at least a little bit cute. The actor is definitely not hard to look at. He’s probably married to some super model or something. That’s Alexander Enderberg, btw (and no, I don’t have that memorized. I just have amazing Google-fu).

So, there you go. For Throwback Thursday, one of my more embarrassing secrets revealed. I had a major nerdcrush on Taurik from ST:TNG when I was younger (kind of still do a lil’ bit). Nae worries, though. G’s Code is still in force (I will never go anywhere near anyone famous I like, admire, or respect unless I have legitimate business or financial reasons to do so which are beneficial for them because these people have enough fans who want a moment of their time and I refuse to be one of them). So help me Bob, we’ll never be in the same ZIP code and once I get my particle accelerator up and running, we won’t be in the same solar system so the chance of accidental interference will be less than negligible (I have done the math!)

— G.K.