Tab Clearing...

• Leadership lessons from Star Trek: TNG.


• Facebook Destroys Everything.


• Clothes With History.

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Star Wars Memes

Nostalgia...

Last night's Svengoolie double feature had the classic Jim Henson flick The Dark Crystal, and I'd forgotten what a fun romp that was.

Combined that with last week's Labyrinth and you have a bangin' GenX Nostalgia Machine...

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Memes... In... Spaaaace!

When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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Some Links...

• Marko's writing update...


• Bobbi's omelette tips...


• I updated my older posts on the 1967 Plymouth GTX and 1968 Plymouth Road Runner with period road test data.

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AttackBot

A robotic scout dog that cops can use to knock the various "Internet of Things" devices in your house offline in preparation for a SWAT raid sounds like something out of a Terminator sequel, but here we are.

“NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment,” Huffman said, according to the transcript. “NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a ‘denial-of-service’ (DDoS) event to disable ‘Internet of Things’ devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made.”

DDoS attacks are a type of cyber attack where a website, server, or network is overloaded with traffic until it is knocked offline. Huffman did not provide any specifics about how a DDoS attack like this would work. But he said DHS wanted to develop this capability after a 2021 incident in which a man suspected of child sexual abuse crimes in Florida used his doorbell camera to see that he was being raided by the FBI and began shooting at them, killing two FBI agents and injuring three others.

At FLETC they even have a training house set up with various web-enabled devices like crib monitors and "nanny cams" so the Feds can practice working in that environment for entries, which makes sense, I guess. Wonder if they have a practice claymore roomba?

The DDoS scoutbot dog is based on this model:

Meme Dump...

"This was your father's weapon. I took it after I chopped his legs off and left him in a volcano."

Tab Clearing...

• The Connoisseur's Glock.


• The pitfalls of using blanks in scenario training.


• Marko is giving away ten signed copies of Descent. (Or you could preorder a regular old un-signed copy here.)

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Meme Dump...

The Titanic kills an average of 13.4 people per year.

Ouch.

Something had my back all jacked up last night. I didn't get a lot of really good sleep.

Hopefully tonight will be better.

I did have a really long detailed dream that was likely caused by watching The Three-Body Problem before going to bed. Very science fictional dream. Lots of space kablooie.

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Fingers crossed...

Looks like it's time to reread Neuromancer. (Just kidding. It's always time to reread Neuromancer.)

And so it goes...

Via Facebook I learned that David Drake passed away yesterday. His website confirms the sad news.

The sheer number of times I referenced him on this blog should tell you what a loss this is. Other than a few fantasy series and some of his "co-authored" stuff (meaning Drake sketched the outline and the junior author did the grunt work of writing), I have pretty much nearly everything he wrote.

I think I'll re-read With the Lightnings in memorium.

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It's got aliens, German Shepherds, and a very important knife.

Alex, the protagonist of Marko's latest novel, Scorpio, was born in Pennsylvania but doesn't remember it because her parents relocated to the colony world orbiting 18 Scorpii when she was only two.

Unfortunately, when she was still a tween, the giant extraterrestrials known as Lankies got there, too.

Alex and a couple hundred other colonists were near enough to the underground shelter known as The Vault to barricade themselves in semi-safety as the Lankies set about systematically destroying the colony and setting up their own atmosphere processors. Alas, her parents were not among the ones that made it to shelter.

We learn all this retrospectively, because the novel opens with Alex spending her twenty-first birthday riding in the back of an armored personnel carrier with some of the surviving troops of the colonial garrison, who she assists by working as a dog handler. 

That's an important gig because Ash, the squad's military working K9, can sense approaching hostile aliens through the humid, unbreathable soup of the Lankyformed atmosphere better than any human.

The little group is on a salvage mission, hoping to scavenge something usable from the colony's wreckage to keep the little group in The Vault alive and thriving as best they can.

And then the dog starts growling...

Read the book! I just finished Scorpio and really enjoyed it.

Return to the Lanky Wars!

Marko's latest novel set in the Frontlines universe is an Amazon First Reads selection this month, meaning it's free to read for Amazon Prime members!

Dive in to Scorpio...

Brrrr...

It is nineteen degrees fondly Fahrenheit* out there right now, with a dusting of snow blowing through the air. It hasn't been this cold since last March, so winter is definitely about here.

It is the time of year for long sleeves and thermal underwear, waterproof Merrells instead of the airy and ventilated kind, wool socks instead of cotton.

I also need to think about dragging the daylight spectrum lamp down from the attic and clearing a space for it on the corner of the desk.

*In case you didn't know the origin of the phrase, it's the title of a novella.

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Message Fic

A critique flung at authors of fiction who get too polemical, first recorded in use against H.G. Wells, is that they'd sold sold their artistic birthright for a pot of message.

There're right ways and wrong ways to write a philosophical tome disguised as a novel. Nobody comes away from, say, Atlas Shrugged thinking "What a great action romance novel, and oh how subtly did she slip her message into the plot!" Instead it feels like you've just been harangued by ol' Strident Ayn for what feels like two thousand pages (which is nonsense, since the Kindle edition is only 1188.)

Meanwhile, ask someone about Starship Troopers and they'll be like "Oh, that Military SciFi novel?" without it crossing their minds that the majority of the book took place in classrooms of one type or another.

Having just re-read 1984 as a followup to reading Julia*, I was struck how much closer Orwell's novel is to Heinlein than Rand in structure. It's tightly written and steps along pretty smartly and in retrospect it's hard to think that maybe as much as half of it takes place either as the main character reading a political treatise or getting interrogated by the Thought Police. (I don't mean to spoiler 1984 for you, there, but yeah, Winston does get busted by the Brain Fuzz and given a cerebral shampoo.)

*What was also neat was realizing how the author of Julia had picked up a few little details from the original book and spun them into much more significant plot points when seen through other characters' eyes. The scene in 1984 where Winston passes the site of a recent rocket bomb attack and kicks a severed hand off the sidewalk into the gutter takes on a whole new tone, for instance.

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Book Re-Report

I'd read Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksennarion trilogy before, back when I was still living in Tennessee. Call it most of twenty years ago. I remember really enjoying the first book, thinking the second was okay, and kinda getting lost in the third.

I figured I'd give it another whirl and see how well it aged, and was pleasantly surprised.

The three books follow the same main character, but have very different vibes. Reading them straight through, however (something I didn't do the first time around) makes for a much more satisfyingly continuous storyline.

In the first book, Sheepfarmer's Daughter, our protagonist runs off to find fame and fortune in a medieval-esque mercenary company. There's a typical MilSF-style basic training experience that introduces us to the world and its inhabitants.

It's definitely a swords-and-sorcery world that would be familiar to any fantasy RPG player, but our point of view character, Paksennarion, is a Level 1 spear-toter (well, sword-toter, technically) three ranks back in the second file from the left. Magic is rare and expensive and paladins are shining figures on horses maybe glimpsed in onesy-twosies, from a distance, during important battles.

But Paks gets some chances to shine and complete an important mission that brings her to the attention of the duke that commands her legion of mercs.

Eventually she becomes a trusted veteran and outgrows her role in the company, setting off to learn more skills, perhaps to come back to the company as an officer or squire.

If the first book is a grunt's-eye view of swords and sorcery battlefields, the second book, Divided Allegiance, is a straight up Dungeons & Dragons adventure, with Paks meeting friends and foes and killing orcs in a dungeon and coming to the aid of a village beleaguered by bandits in the forest that's come under an Inexplicable Shadow of Evil.

Having overcome that and gotten up to say, Level Three or Four, Paksennarion heads off to Paladin U., a sort of Holy Hogwarts of swordfighting and divine warfighting for the cause of Good.

As a baby paladin, Paks accompanies a bunch of higher level characters on a quest that ends up with Paks taking a possibly career ending setback.

The process of healing that damage segues us into the third book, Oath of Gold, where now a fully-fledged Paks the Paladin sets off on her ultimate quest, to find the True King and return him to his Rightful Throne.

I have to say that on re-read, it's really a good story and quite fun, and I owe the book an apology.

Fortunately the three books are available in an omnibus volume, which makes for a much easier read-through and I think that helps it immensely.

Recommend.

Automotif CD...

Here's something you don't see every day. It's a 1938 Packard Darrin Convertible Victoria.

"Dutch" Darrin had been a U.S. Army Air Service pilot with the AEF in France at the end of the Great War and went into the automotive styling business afterward. He eventually landed in Hollywood, designing coachbuilt bodies for the glitterati, which were assembled on Packard chassis in Connersville, Indiana.

The '38 Packard Darrin in the photo was built for actress/dancer Sally Rand* and is for sale locally.

*VFTP SciFi angle: Sally Rand was a guest of the Heinleins at Worldcon in 1976, and appears as a friend of Maureen's in To Sail Beyond the Sunset. You could drive a car that belonged to a Heinlein character!

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Reading Assignment

Because I know a guy, my ARC of Scorpio arrived in the mail yesterday. (I'd already preordered the Kindle edition, but it wasn't like I was gonna turn down a free dead tree copy.)

So I guess I owe you guys a book report.

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