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Things that only exist in my head…

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Monthly Archives: April 2014

Flash fiction for Terrible Minds: Ideas, We Breathe

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in fiction, writing

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Chuck Wendig, concepts in retirement, flash fiction, small gods, terrible minds, war of ideas

This week’s challenge: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2014/04/18/flash-fiction-challenge-pick-an-opening-line-and-go/

I chose J. C. Hemphill’s line, which made Chuck’s fave list.

Ideas, We Breathe

I met a man made of smoke today. We talked for an hour, he and his friend and I, at Catteré, a cafe in the Third. The smoke from my cigarettes kept him aloft above his seat. Passers-by said hello to our little group; the residents of the Third know my companions well but were only being polite to me. A few might remember my face for a nauseous moment when I’m in front of them, but I’m as nameless in myself as the man of the smoke and the forge, Ogun Petr, is bodiless. Continue reading →

Flash Fiction for Terrible Minds: Z to A

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in fiction, scifi, writing

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Chuck Wendig, flash fiction, terrible minds

Another flash story inspired by one of Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenges. The theme? Life in hell. I’ve had a few false starts, but always started with a literalist confusion about the Sartre quotation. I ground this out today, start to finish, including edits.

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Let’s Dump Wednesday

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, tech

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LetsDumpWednesday

What room is there for five days of work and two days of weekend? We’re supposed to have at least two lives anyway, balancing work, life, school, and play. For any stage of life, we’re supposed to pick two, but seven divides by nothing but one. Seven days is completely arbitrary, a token of change from one calendar to another. That change in late Rome happened during a time when astronomy was suffering from a hiatus of official interest. It was also a time when six days of non-stop physical labor punctuated by one of devotion to a deadly dull religion was an improvement. Nuts to that.

Should we add a day or subtract one? Should we expand the week to nine to provide a potential to make thirds? That question might hinge most on how long our weekends should be, and how much of the week to work. Three days on and three days off is attractive from the point-of-view of a shift worker. Shift-working might go away, but the equality of week and weekend is what intrigues me. A three-day-weekend is long enough to provide rest without being so long as to ensure forgetfulness. Four days is just too long. Six days, total, still allows for two-day thirds, giving workplaces the ability to work even more schedules together (even four-days on, two-days off) without having to figure out whether to insert or remove that extra, prime-making day.

All of these alternatives mean more free time than we have now. My vote is for six.

So given my desire to contract rather than extend, what’s the most useless day, dedicated to a forgotten entity, that we can get rid of? Wednesday, of course. It’s holy for practically no one and represents nothing but the drudgery of the dead expanse of the middle of the five-day work week. Let’s dump Wednesday.

Liberalism Needs Leftism

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in no-category, Who's Shaming My Demographic

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conservatism, David Brin, leftism, liberalism, neo-paleo-classical liberalism, radical, red-baiting, scapegoating

Liberalism, classic 19th century liberalism, is being promoted by scientifically-minded Republicans as a way to pull their party back from its strange precipice of millenarian, racist insanity. The best parts of conservatism itself, an historically-aware aversion to risk, has been scuttling around under other labels for most of the past 50 years. Terms like “moderate”, however, have given over to “sane”, then to “former”. For those trying to resurrect the best of both conservatism and liberalism among the Fox Generation, leftism has become the third wheel they can distinguish themselves from, usually with cheap insults.

The problem is that like liberalism and conservatism, leftism also plays a vital role, and for the past thirty years that role has also fallen to ruin.

Leftism, at its best, organizes society against injustice, fighting the visible wrongs that society allows. At its worst leftism prosecutes a radical Jacobin urge toward revenge. At best, liberalism reforms onerous rules for individuals and applies those rules more equally in society as a whole. At worst, liberalism becomes a coöpted structure of rhetorical justifications propping up the authoritarian rule of establishment elites, the “most equal” individuals. Conservatism, at its best, argues for trying out new reforms in limited ways, risking as it were only a hidden corner of the upholstery. At its worst, conservatism throws itself wholeheartedly into radical, reactionary oppression of anything not aligned exactly with the long-established institutions of the ruling regime.

The worst of all three go together in a mutually supporting soup of discursive shit: the worst of liberalism uses caricatures of radical leftists and reactionary conservatism to label itself the responsible “third way”. In return the worst of conservatism and leftism portray liberals as venal if not explicitly corrupt and uncaring of What Really Matters. All three isms have their place and their dangers. Any public figure who cannot express the urge toward the best parts of all three impulses should be actively frustrated in their attempts to gain and exercise power.

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The Next Red Wedding(s)

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, horror, writing

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predictions, sympathetic characters

Not only does George Martin kill beloved characters and deny his heroes any real traction upon history, but he builds up the most sympathetic characters, tears them back down to the ground, and gives them permission to do terrible, stupid, destructive things. In doing this he links our favorite puppies back to the despicable characters of both yore and five-minutes-ago.

I predict another couple rounds of reaction shot videos this season. As books the story remains firmly in the tragic fantasy genre, but on the screen the story will do best if it slips into psychothriller and horror.

Land of Unknown Knowns

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Andrew Hilmer in commentary, writing

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john wesley powell, savagery, the unknown known, wariness

Errol Morris made the rounds last week to plug his documentary, The Unknown Known, about Donald Rumsfeld. In Rumsfeld’s famous press-conference response, Rumsfeld talked about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. From what I can remember, Rumsfeld didn’t mention the fourth combination, the unknown known. Errol Morris uses this fourth combination as the title for the doc, and goes into the background in a post on NYTimes.com.

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