Rule 34

I usually wait to finish the book before the review, but this one is good.  Rule 34, by Charles Stross, one of the writers I follow.  He writes SciFi, near present stuff.  And he is better than most, way better.  For people who liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, this one is for you.  For people who like intelligent depiction of lesbian lifestyles, this one is for you and so far there is no sex, perves and I don't expect any.  For those that have recently been traveling Scotland, this one is for you. If you want to get a glimpse of what the future work is going to look like in about twenty years, this book is for you.

Stross is my type of writer, he pulls stuff that is happening right now and extrapolates.  In his world the collapse of the US dollar is in the past, the collapse of the EU that is happening around our ears right now, is in the past; the EU survived by the way.  Technology is not campy and too complex to understand so it is not dealt with like vanilla SciFi; it is an extrapolation from what we have now.  Oh and it is quite clever.  As I write, California has just allowed the first auto driving car on its roads, Stross penned it into his story everywhere.  Internet connectivity is everywhere and it is part of everyone's life, seemlessly.

That is just setting, I LOVE settings.  

The thing about SciFi/Fantasy novels, the good ones anyways, is that the setting is the part that makes it that type of novel; the basic plot is something else.  This is a crime mystery novel, a Who Dunit.  I can't put it down.  I read at work yesterday.  Half way done ….  Hey I am a slow reader and some of the passages demand being re read.  Problems there is a lot of jargon, and there are a lot of acronyms, job specific jargon acronyms.  

Oh the cool thing is that this is the first book I have ever read, except choose your own adventure, written in Second Person.  You walked up stairs, you read a blog on e Internet, you surfed for lesbian porn evolving horses.  Oh last warning not for kids, there are too many glimpses into their own future, they might give up if they read this.  Oh yeah there are some adult kinky situations and some recent history lessons.  Some on former Romanian dictators kink.

Three SciFi books

Part of the reason I have not been blogging is that I have been reading, has my drought ended?  I don't know, we will see.  Three books read.  Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth, John Scalzi, Redshirts, and Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities.  All SciFi stand alones.  

Long Earth is a callaboration and thus pretty good.  Terry has done at least six collaborations three of them sciences books and one of the others Good Omens, so there was no hesitation.  A slight departure from most of his books this novel was aimed at a mature audience, no mature themes, just not the humour we expect from TP.  This is a novel that is lacking in serious plot, the one problem that I had with it, but not all books need a strong plot, sometimes it is nice to explore a concept that you have in your head.  This is SciFi, it is in the nearfuture.  Most of the characters were have been born and the store is in two distinct time periods, one in a few years time and the other a decade later.  

First someone invents machine that allows people to move to parallel worlds and then he releases the plans on the Internet.  The book is what happens and the problem with the other worlds.  Oh yeah there is a sentient soda machine too.

John Scalzi is this guy, actually he is a guy and an author, a really good author actually.  At this point I am not sure if I wrote on him before on his series Old Man's War and Fuzzy Nation, but I am here now writing about his new book Red Shirts.

This is Science Fiction and a comedy.  Really it is not Science Fiction … it is a Comedy ….  Okay the premise of the story is that the crew of a starship in a galactic empire.  The crew has noticed that people who go on away missions with the bridge crew die, usually in a horrible gruesome manner and the crew of the ship are clueing in; they are actively avoiding the bridge crew.  Only the new guys have no idea this theory but they do find out, the hard way.  This is their story.  

I found the novel very entertaining following the lead of the expendable crew members of the death ship loosely based on the starship Enterprise, first series, as they intrepidly attempt to discover the cause of the weirdness and death and try to stop it.  

But if you read the jacket it is an awesomely funny story, so said some really good writers that I like.  But I thought it was entertaining, but not hysterically funny.  

Time for some serious SciFi.

The Drowned Cities.  Paolo Bacigalupi does it again, his second book in this not so fictional Earth in out near distant Future.  Refresher— humans are stupid and global warming happens, oh wait it is happening, so humans are stupid and time has passed and the effects are here.  The sea level has risen, the climate has been radically changed, peak oil has come and passed, there is none left and America has collapsed, completely.  The last book occurred on the Gulf coast and this book takes place in another city.  Yes I know the city but I spent half the book trying to figure it out.  The only character that exists in both books is Tool, the augmented human.  

We get to learn about a couple of different things in this book.  Good SciFi should not concentrate on the setting, but the setting should be integral to the plot in some way.  The setting is in Dystopia Future America and the themes that I can see are various aspects of human nature.  Who is more Human, the humans or the Mutant.  The nature of pacifism vs survivalism.  The psychotic nature of humanity.  

I took a course in University called Modes of Fantasy, we read a number of books on utopic  views and dystopic too.  This book would have worked far better than Heart of Darkness and Night combined.  This book is grim.  Grim and thrilling.  Grim and current with some of the fucked up things that are happening in today's dark societies.  There are several factions at war in this fucked up society.  This book makes The Hunger Games look like a walk in the park, and the kicker is that Paolo did not make this shit up.  Go look up the Lord's Resistance Army.  If you can stomach that then you should read this book because you are a sick fucker.  If it disturbs you, then this book will disturb you.  If you like good books then you should read this disturbing book.  

So in conclusion, Paolo Bacigalupi and The Drowned Cities five stars,

John Scalzi and Redshirts four stars.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter The Long Earth three stars.

Mental note, go read Stephen Baxter and see why Terry Pratchett likes him enough to write with him.

Politics and work.

My iPad tells me I have not posted in eleven days.  I am fine.  This will be my second work related post other than the last one.  

Work has become a lethal battleground.  I suspect that I will soon have to start packing heat and wearing body armour.  Seriously.  I work in a job that most people suspect, when you first tell them, is peaceful and calming, but the truth is: I work with people.

I know that there are some people out to get me at my workplace.  There are people that hate me.  Real hate.  I work with some real idiots too.  You see the problem is politics.  Politics happens when ever there are more than two people in an enclosed space.  Politics gets bad pretty quick in most jobs, but I have noted that it gets worse faster in a job that there is a lot of free time.  Free time and jealousy.  Free time, jealousy and a boss that encourages it.  In the Spring my job is busy; I have time to rest only when I get home at night.  I work easily sixty hours a week and if my boss had not forbid it I could easily work seventy and still not get everything done.  Yes I usually work between forty and sixty days straight in the Springtime and I enjoy it.  Long hours partly because there is a lot of work for me to do and because the boss will not hire anyone else to do it.  Also several of the other employees don't want to chip in. 

There are many types of employees in this world and I believe they are all represented at my workplace.  There is Bob, he shows up onetime every day, according to his time card, and has been working there for over twenty years, but the truth is he has a clone that does some of that time.  He fills out his time card everyday, except the days where his lunch was two hours or he was late by half an hour and then he fills it out three days later when he thinks people have forgotten.  He has an under the table cash business on the side that he constantly drums up business for while at work and he often does work for in lieu of his regular duties.  He regularly books time off during the busy season so he can work at his other job and when the boss forbids it, he falls down a flight of stairs severely injuring himself for the day that he wants off or he has a heart attack, two so far.  But he does do charity work, high profile charity work for the town so I guess that balances it all out.  While at work, when he is not skipping out or having extended lunches, he does as little as possible, sits down while others work, hands off phone calls to other people and avoids all his duties if at all possible.  When he does his duties at all, they are done at his own speed, some where between slow and very slow.  Except if there is talking involved, he likes to talk to customers, but if you ask him a question that he does not know the answer to, he makes it up; anything to get a sale and keep himself in the bosses good graces.

George, has been there longer than the boss.  He remembers when the bosses father was more kind, when there were employee benefits; the new boss took those away as soon as he showed up.  He has been working for over thirty years and is thus the highest paid, but it took him thirty years to get that pay.  He is resentful, because he sees people with less experience and less knowledge work for less than a year and earn only a dollar or two less than him.  He fights back by only doing what he is told and nothing more.  He once was told by the boss if he got his specialty license the boss would pay for the course and give him a raise, when he was near the end of the course the boss recanted, so George did not complete the course.  This is how my company works.  By-the-way, George is the only one who can repair most of the systems at the workplace.  The boss can't and none of the others can, when he leaves, either we will have to retrofit major elements of the workplace or he will have to hire a specialist several times a year.

Keith, is a diva.  Moody and righteous.  He is being groomed by the boss to be the foreman, except he will never be a foreman because the boss does not use them.  He is privy to the bosses thoughts as the boss takes him wherever he goes.  When he takes him out the boss fiddles with something and he works.  He is getting resentful of that, but he stays.  What ever happens at the work site he tells the boss.  People make fun of him behind his back and increasingly in front of him.  He has potential, outside of Smallville, maybe in the Big Smoke, but he is afraid to make the move.

Ann, was from the Big Smoke and moved here with her boyfriend and is now single and is regretting the move a lot.  She is the single most dangerous person besides the boss.  She is cosy with Bob, but that is on the way out, or not.  She is difficult to read as she changes sides regularly between the boss is an idiot, Bob is a lazy bum and this place could be better, to the boss knows best.  When the boss knows best, she informs him what she has learned when she was against him, a ploy to ingratiate herself with him.  She is not lazy, she is just run down, so she is no longer enthusiastic about her job and is bitter.  Add that she is naturally forgetful and arrogant, she is extra dangerous.  Last year she forgot to do a major aspect of her job at the start of the year so her product was crap, this year she forgot on half of it.  She has one speed: excellent job, but for her job she needs to work at good enough speed and get her job done, excellent means that most of her work does not get done.  Example: she can mould three products to perfection so that they sell, in one hour, while others can mould thirty in an hour so they will be perfect in a week and then after a day move one to another project, of which there are many.  She is best suited to customer service and not operations.

Sarah, knows everything in the business.  She spent her thirty years learning everything about it.  She is thus the most valuable member of the staff and everyone knows it, except the boss, she is a woman after all.  More, she is the hardest worker there and the oldest, besides the boss's father.  She does not like doing customer service or dealing with the public, but she is by far the most knowledgeable person on staff and so she must do so.  Bob calls on her when ever the phone rings and it is not about sales, his mother, his wife, his girlfriend, his business or his charity, so for all work related stuff.  Ann and I try to answer the questions ourselves, but she usually has the answer and is most able to explain it.  She is a designer and prefers to work that angle at the business, but she does most of the outside sales work and the operations; she is unofficially the onsite boss.  She complains to me often, why most of the work gets done by so few people.  She is including me as part of the people that get things done, but I know that she does more work than I do.  She is responsible for more money in the boss's pocket than anyone else, but if he would just allow her to do more, he would be earning even more than he is now.

I am the most dangerous employee at work.  Certainly the most unstable, but also the most technically able.  I virtually control the Spring aspect of the workplace, but in the Summer and the Autumn, I work on accounting.  Not actual money accounting, but accounting of product and when we have in inventory and what we sell.  This means I have a working knowledge of how much money is coming in and when and where.  I write up an analysis that the boss reads before making orders for the spring I make suggestions which he ignores for the most part.  I talk to Sarah and keep her sane.  I study problems and make suggestions which are usually ignored, suggestions that would make the boss money or make the business more customer friendly at a minimal cost.  I am really good at this, but I am ignored because the boss does not like to spend money.  I am cursed with common sense.  

The number one reason why I am the most dangerous employee is that I care.  I care that George is under appreciated and that because of this he is working below maximum efficiency; George knows more of the outside business than the boss and has more raw know how.  George has common sense too.  Sarah is under appreciated and utilized because she is a woman.  Every time she makes a decision the boss and his father criticize it until it makes money and even then they belittle her.  She was hired because of her fathers name, not because of her resume, because they did not read it.

I look at my workplace and I see unrealized potential.  

I did not say anything about my boss directly.  He is penny wise and pound foolish.  He cuts corners to save every penny but in doing so he loses dollars, thousands of them.  He has favourite employees, he does this to create conflict amongst his employees.  If they are fighting each other, they focus less on him. He is the boss, so he employs us, so I am the most dangerous person, but he is the king of discord.

So, on Ann's day off last week, Bob came back from a four week vacation paid by his under-the-table enterprise and I was left with nothing to do.  So I went out looking for work onsite.  I had walked by product all summer that was sitting deteriorating in piles all Summer long, because it was Ann's workstation, so since she was not there, I spent the day cleaning it up and ordering it.  When she got back she noticed, unbeknown to me the boss had told her to clean it up weeks ago, and she accused me of throwing away product and hiding the fact.  And I was shocked and angered.  She then said, wait Sarah probably told you to do it and she went and yelled at her.  Sarah was out all the previous day on a job site.  Later she told me that she felt violated that I had gone into her workstation and tried to undermine her.  She then asked me if I would like her to go into my work station and undermine me?  Then she said, have I ever done that, I paused remembering, then said nothing.  She then said see I have never done that. I did not say anything, because she had forgotten, reminding a forgetful person of the times she undermined my position is like starting a war.  Last spring I stepped into a room where she was showing all the work that I had not done to her level of skill, she was telling the boss that clearly was overworked and I needed time off and help because I could not keep up.  She nor he did not see me and I stepped out of sight.  Later the boss told me that I had to take a day off.  No, she has never tried to undermine my position.  The truth of the matter is that I took a year off to try other things.  In that year she did my job.  She could not keep up, Sarah had to help her with the work.  The Spring duties cannot be done perfectly; they have to be done quickly and efficiently, there are often four separate tasks that need completing immediately and with only one person to do them.  And it works that way, because two people have different visions on how a task should be done and when there is so much that has to be done, the quickest most efficient one must do it; she is neither.  Hell, she can't even do here job.  To make that point, yesterday I went out in the rain to clean up another work area she had been avoiding.  She saw me and told the Sarah I was destroying product.  Sarah came out and saw I was doing otherwise.  If she dares tell the boss, I will point out another work area where she has been falling down.

I hate politics, but I am good and dangerous at it.  Of course I will lose.  Ann has worked there less than me and has a higher wage.  The boss never looks at the quality of her work but is always looking over my shoulder.  And Sarah has decided that as a peace offering to Ann, that she would let her in on a few things, unfortunately the things she let her in on, Ann can use to hurt me more.  I pointed it out to her after, but the is no use in crying over spilt milk until you get fired over it.  

Then you can blog about it, publicly.

Angry

So I walked away from work today after only three hours.  Everyone was criticizing me today and I was about to kill someone.  It started yesterday, I went to Big Smoke with a friend and on the way back she started criticizing  me.  It was not criticizing it was giving me advice.  Advice always feels like criticism.  You are not doing this right you should do it this way.  That is what it feels like.  She did not say that, she said that I should do something.  But it feels like she is criticizing me and my life.  

I try to separate myself in two to look at things rationally, but it does not help and I can't do it; I am trying now.  Separating the emotional and the rational self is really difficult, especially when my emotions are so strong.  She tells me that I am using AS as a crutch, that I don't have to improve because I have AS. She tells me that when I go on dating websites I should pretend to be normal so that I can surprise them with the AS when they are emotionally invested.  I can't do that, because I am the one that gets emotionally invested early and it is they that leave me.  I asked Magic Eyes.

Magic Eyes has blocked me on FB, again.  She did not say stop this, or stop that, I just woke up with a message "I am sorry" and a blocked account.  She stopped following me on Tumblir, but she did not block me from her account.  She also did not block a FB alter ego, which is strange.  It leaves me feeling all dead inside.  I have no one to talk to about it.  No one would understand.  It is all my fault.  About I can't talk to anyone about it.  

All I feel is people criticizing me.  And I can't kill them.  I want to kill them, so I go home.  I want to kill myself.  I am constantly angry, but I can't explain it to people.

My friend tells me I am smart so I should be able to tell the difference between advice and criticism, just like I should be able to tell the difference between someone poking fun with me and someone trying to make me mad, just like I should be able to tell the difference between sarcasm and truth.  But I can't.  And it makes me angry.  I want to kill something, break something; I want to get it out but I can't, I have no valve to release.  I want to die.

I am not a Man

The other day I had the pleasure of sitting down to break with a couple of men.  They were crude and they were crass.  They were obscene.  They were ugly in their abuse towards women that they had seen in the street.  My stomach was churning, but after what I had done earlier that week I had to sit and endure it.  The two men were coworkers one in his thirties and the other in his fifties and the woman being talked about was in her late teens.  Both men are married, but the slime that was dripping out of their mouth was reminiscent of a pubescent boy trying to swagger like one of the older boys at the bus circle after school and a construction worker.  You can use your imagination effectively here and not get the depths of this conversation smut; I was ashamed of my gender.  Luckily my Asperger's came to the rescue and I did not show my emotion, which  is good considering what happened earlier this week.

Suspended?  It was not really as bad as the conversation in the lunch room, but it was.  I was watering out front and the real men were doing construction work.  It was a very slow day, so everyone was stretching out the work.  A woman walks by.  She was taller than average, square broad shoulders, pants, t-shirt, work boots, brown ball cap with pony tail sticking through the hole at the back, which was mid length and brown.  I thought she was attractive.  She walked past and a coworker began to say something and I was oblivious.  He was saying that she was a man.  I looked around trying to figure who he was talking about, because she clearly wasn't and I did not see anyone else around. I knew of her, she was More Passive Than Rain's friend.  She and her partner lived on the neighboring street with their two children that they raised together.  Yes she is a lesbian, but who cares about that and moreover who can tell that by looking at her.  Okay yes she works in construction and was not 'all dolled up', but other than that, nothing. 

She came back five minutes later, on the other side of the street, and this time the ass began to moan 'MAN'.  Then I got stupid, you see if you telegraph your anger to the obnoxiousness of an Asses comments, all you have really done is let them know what hurts you.  When I say Ass, you can substitute, Redneck or Bully; he is all three.  "What is your problem?" I demanded, and his response was that she was a man.  I ignored him for the rest of the day, I know he noticed, because he kept calling for me the rest of the day.  I know my response was lame and how I wished that I could punch him one in the nose, but you can't do what you want to do and calling a Lesbian a Man, is acceptable today.  

The thing is in this town thinking the way I think means I am not a man.  Every man has polarized the world into a place that is black and white.  A woman is a bitch or a slut depending on whether they will sleep with him or not.  A man is a man or is gay based on whether he thinks this or follows this idea.  For men in this town there is no middle ground and it is drummed into boys as deeply as pink princesses and dolls are drummed into girls.  Luckily conforming for boys means you get to be a troglodyte with privilege to act that way; conforming for women involves being dragged back into a cave by the hair.  Well not totally, because women are not polarized black and white, they are allowed to have a spectrum of views, as long as it serves their caveman husband.  Sensibly, I can't think of many issues that can be resolved with a polarized opinion, there are a few, murder is bad, rape is bad, genocide is very bad, Women's Rights are good and there are more.  But what I mean is a Man is defined by a list of qualities and deviation from the list means you are Gay or worse and this is not so.  

I deviate quite strongly in many areas.  I believe in letting a woman decide things, about her body and her actions, more I respect her decisions and choices, even when I don't agree with them.  I think that of everyone.  I have no problem with gay people, I even think some men are attractive and yes I would have slept with a few of them.  This does not make me gay.  Really I don't see a real distinction between straight and gay, I am only conforming to societies terms because it is the local lingua franca.  Magic Eyes said I was bisexual, just not practicing.  Magic Eyes also called me a feminist.  For the record, I would never use those terms, because I am not Bisexual, except in morality, and I won't be so presumptuous as to use that word that women have claimed themselves.  Most of the people who do not know me at work think I am gay, even the women, the ones that should know me suspect I am gay.  The ones that do know me, know I like women and call me at the same time, 'one of the girls.'. I think that last one is a compliment; real men think it means I AM gay.

I told people in the past if I were a woman, I would be a lesbian.  Magic Eyes was offended by that statement.  What I meant was, if I were a woman, I would be a lesbian, because I would not be able to go near those men, because they sickened me and also that I have no problem with people who chose to break society's expectations, not that if I became a woman ….  She told me later that most men who become trans-women, date women.

You see, real men are dying out.  They will have a long spiraling death and it will take a long time, and they will kill many people while they slowly cling to their dying lifestyle choices, but they are slowly losing ground and the evidence is there to see, if you can see.  Men are starting to respect women as equals.  They are starting to see women's choices as valid, they are starting to see that gender roles are dissolving and many others; men are slowly coming around to the fact that these things are okay, and it won't hurt them.  But, these men are not the majority in many communities, mostly small towns but also in conservative communities within liberal cities.  These men are getting mixed messages, it is okay to have these feelings of identification with women, but it means you are a woman.  Well not really, but that is the message that people tell you, they tell you that you are gay.  But you are not gay, you like women.  Then someone discovered that you can reassign your sex and become the opposite sex.  So a whole bunch of men decided that they could then be women and they became women, because society told them they thought like women.  But they were still heterosexual men, that believed in the things women believe in.  So they dated women who were available to them, lesbians.  Lesbians of course do not want to date men, and they rightfully think that men who become women to date lesbians is repulsive; it sounds repulsive.  It sounds like something the men in my lunch room would do.  But it is not exactly true, it is all a big confusion in society.  It is a sad result of the transition of our fucked up patriarchal society into one that is non gendered.

I am not a Man mentally.  Mentally I have the morality of a bisexual feminist who is a man and who loves women.  If someone reassigned my gender I would date women because men sicken me and I still love women, but I would never choose to become a woman, I know what I am.

Please leave slanderous messages and comments below, I can take it. 

Realizing I am a privileged male

I have not been writing as much as I wanted to, for a variety of reasons, like a new computer game, and traveling to Big Smoke to visit friends.  There have been some changes though and I wanted to get them down.  

Understanding that men in our society are the rulers; everything is positioned for their benefit.  Because I am a man this situation is not readily apparent.  I had to wake up.  It is always good to take the situation that you are in and change the denominators to see if it makes sense still.  Replace woman with black and if the situation looks racist, then the original situation is probably sexist.  But it is not always that easy to do.

I made a post a week ago where I stated that I think a situation should be one way rather than another.  And when I finished and published I started thinking about it.  Often when I write something my thinking occurs well before what I wrote gets written, but when I write something I also think about it again and make some changes as I go.  Sometimes, in addition to all this thinking, I think about what I said after I wrote it.  This is what occurred that last time.  I wrote something like my words should be imposed on society and for no clear reason and then I saw it, I was writing from a position of having something and I was advocating for another, women.  The trouble was that I feel I was doing it incorrectly, like a man and I was doing it from my elevated vantage point.

The trouble is that being in a position of advantage you can not see that you are advantaged.  I am not advantaged though in ways I can see, wealth, social skills, political Capitol, or anything that our society deems useful; I am even educated working way out of my field lost in near poverty.  I do not see my advantages because for me they do not exist, just as my well of friends do not see their own wealth and advantage.  

Magic Eyes made me aware that I had advantage over her, I did not believe it, but I listened.  I kept my eyes open hoping to see it, or rather not see it, but I did.  It is still hard to explain it, because I don't try to use it and I try to treat everyone the same way.  Her examples of what I did that prove her point had other explanations, most of which I could not explain to her.  The privilege I get as a male is codified in everyone's perceptions.  It is like a positive reputation, if you have one, people treat you differently and if you have a bad day, or do something bad they treat it as a lesser event and give you a pass on the day or the bad thing.  Men have an automatic pass.  It is like the "Man Cold"; men get a cold and get babied, anyone else has to go on with their life in misery.  Any tragedy that befalls a man is worse than if it happens to a woman.  

There is more.   Being a man means that you are not held to the same standards as women are.  No woman can a casual location in scruffy dirty clothing.  Poor grooming standards are a forgiven given for men, but a sin against humanity for women.  For women, crude behaviour is horrendous but the same behaviour in men is just lewd or crude.  Examples, women never fart in public and men can scratch themselves.  Women by social convention have to make an attempt to make themselves presentable.  But there is more; it is not just about what a man can get away with.

Women have a large and lengthy code to follow, one that has been impressed upon them by men, but is enforced by other women.  Seriously if you are a man, do you really care if a woman's legs are shaved?  Here is a fact, leg hair that has been shaved is prickly, but that is because it is short, long leg hair is soft, but it is often dark and noticeable, so women shave for aesthetics.  Aesthetics are contrived, if I love you, I won't care, if I am trying to date you, I am not really interested in your legs, I am interested in what is going on behind your eyes.  Other men are just trying to fuck you and the condition of your legs is not an interest to them.  I am probably wrong on this but I think shaving your legs is more about appearance to other women.