Game of Thrones

Just watched this season's finale. The Hound was brilliant, his best scene ever. Martin has made clear why you don't write books in which the main characters die: because when you make it into a movie, you keep killing off the actors just as they hit their stride.

At least we still have Jorah Mormont to kick around. I wasn't that attached to the character in the book, but I am a big fan of Iain Glen ever since his bit part in Downton Abbey. This is another problem with film; a good actor makes his character more likeable than the plot expects. Sean Bean did the same thing with Boromir.

At the end, I was struck by the unhappy revelation that this book series will never be finished. The TV show is burning through the plot; they have maybe one more season and they'll be out of books. Martin will have to devote his time to script treatments to finish out the show. After that, he'll just be too tired of the whole thing to actually write the books.

On the other hand, as much as I like Martin's discursive writing, the show is dramatically and narratively tighter. Maybe they'll hire somebody to write the final books based on the show.

Paul Krugman has a more optimistic view

Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn’t matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.
Interests, Ideology And Climate 

In Krugman's view, the only real problem is ideological. I agree. All of my arguments with libertarians have gone the most screwy at precisely the moment when I point out that the looming environmental crisis cannot be managed by the free market.

These are data points that are unassailable: we are heading for disaster, and the only solution is collective action. Libertarians can only respond by ignoring the scientific facts, ignoring the consequences of their own ideology, or by embracing defeatism - essentially, our destruction is inevitable and inescapable.

Think about that. These people would rather see the world burn than admit that their governing philosophy is simply bunk. But that's not as defamatory as it seems, since it basically describes all people ever. It is only now, with the advent of science, that people can separate their personal worth and self-esteem from the factual positions they happen to hold at the moment. And even now, most people simply can't do it.

Because most people have built an edifice on those "facts," an edifice they know is unfair and unjust, and they rightly fear that if they surrender on those "facts" they will have to dismantle their edifice, and at that point they may well be required to account for the injustice they have done (or even merely be subject to someone else's injustice). By most people, of course, I mean the entire Western world which has consumed the lion's share of the Earth's resources for centuries.

An accounting is coming, either at our own hands or at the hands of Nature, in the form of brute reality; and as any biologist will rush to assure you, Nature is not by any definition merciful.

Blogging the end of the world

It starts here: Erza Klein lists seven reasons why it's too late.

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/5/5779040/7-reasons-America-fail-global-warming

1. We waited too long. Self-explanatory.

2. The people most affected don't get to vote. For those of you who read Collapse by Jared Diamond, this is the number one reason societies collapse.

3. We're bad at sacrificing now for the future. As Neil Degrasse Tyson and Thomas Piketty keep pointing out, that is a design feature of capitalism.

4. The effects are not reversible. It's not like if we just stop burning carbon, things will go back to the way they were. These changes are effectively permanent.

5. The Republican party. Self-explanatory.

6. International cooperation is too hard. Here I think he is wrong; if America were leading the way on this, we could actually pull it off. There is a value to having a military roughly equivalent to the rest of the world combined; people listen when you speak. If the USA were of one heart and mind on this, we could make it happen. But see #5.

7. Blind faith in magic doesn't work. But I guess this is really just #5, again.

What am I doing about it? I only had one child, we own a single car, and I will be buying a house at least 10 meters above sea level.

I should check my email more often

Just found a year's worth of fan mail. Also, less importantly, a request to enter the Compton award, and an inquiry from a movie studio on licensing rights for TKG.

I was sure my IT department set that account up to forward my mail. I would complain, but I don't want to have to sleep on the couch.

Lawerence Krauss agrees with me

Just saw him on the show Q&A; he said it seemed like Abbot was trying to make Australia into America.

And indeed he is, from regressive taxes, repealing regulation, and increasing the defense budget, right across to science denial. Krauss' best line of the night (said to a climate-change denier): "OK, so what does your model predict?"

Windows 8.1

Just when I had my XP box perfectly clean and functional, the motherboard blew.

So now I have a new laptop. I tried to convince Sara to switch to Apple months ago, but failed. As her partner it is my duty to follow her even unto darkness. Hence I have endured the maelstrom which is Windows 8.1

I don't get all the hate. I mean, sure, Win 8.1 is a gratuitously insulting piece of software that reduces people to incandescent rage whenever they try to do the simplest tasks; but that describes every version of Windows. As far as I can tell, same as it ever was.

The laptop came with 8; updating to 8.1 was free, if you don't count the nine hours of my life it consumed. The next day I was treated to the new, improved blue screen of death; after my laptop booted to the the desktop, a huge blue banner overtook the screen with the message "Please wait."

Chump that I am, I did wait for 45 minutes before going online on a different computer to see what nefarious update had effectively bricked my computer. After a few hours, I managed to boot to safe mode (so that virus protection was disabled) and then perform a restore point (the first restore attempt having failed due to the aforementioned virus protection. I would point out it was Microsoft's own virus protection, but that hardly needs to be said).

I cannot imagine what went through a professional engineer's mind when they were designing that "Please wait" screen; did the concept of a timeout (hey, we've spent half an hour at this and it's still not working, maybe we should let the user have his computer back) never occur to them? Is this a technology that Microsoft is unaware of? On the other hand, I can imagine a psychotic sadist designing it. Mind you, it's not simple greed or laziness; the lazy thing to do would to let the computer boot despite whatever perceived problem, and leave the user to the winds of fate. But no; Microsoft chose to exercise considerable effort in ensuring that your otherwise perfectly functional computer would be rendered useless, and they spent a lot of time making sure you couldn't sneak your way around it.

I have my limits, however; I shall not follow the wife into the screeching hell which is OneDrive. Manually backing my files up to the cloud every day is a right royal pain in the ass, but it doesn't leave me weeping with hatred on a weekly basis.

I do, however, envy GRRM. Not for his fame, which is a fickle favor bestowed by the gods; but for his wisdom in writing on a DOS box in the first place. If only my editor would accept Word Perfect files...

Photo shoot for SotBL

Here's an interesting You-Tube video: Gene Mollica shooting the cover for Sword of the Bright Lady. A chance to see a great artist in action - and a long-suffering model wearing the most confusing collection of gear. But he wears it so well!

At one point Lou sent me an email stuffed with incredibly gorgeous male models to choose from, and I had to ask the womenfolk for advice. If only they would show so much interest in my manuscripts.

Ironically, the sword itself did not make on to the cover, which I realized after the fact was perfectly appropriate. I must confess we took some artistic liberties: technically the revolving rifles don't appear until the 2nd book (and also my protagonist is not nearly so young and handsome until then), while this specific shot is from the long march at the end of the 1st book (where he's just about to shoot.... oh, wait, spoilers).

Oh, I guess you probably want to see the final product. We asked Gene to capture the same gritty drama he did for Promise of Blood, and he delivered. I love the white background, the gun (he had to buy it just for this shoot), and most of all Keithen's thousand-yard stare. Gene sure knows how to make a model look like he's been through hell and back. :D