The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Tale of Two Conventions

— by Wombat-socho Or, Taking Back SF One Convention At A Time. Every year in June, there’s a science fiction convention in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that is so popular, memberships sell out in a matter of hours when they become available. Part of this is because (thanks to some arcane rules I don’t pretend to understand […]

Fear And Loathing On The Intertubes

— by Wombat-socho Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam. I don’t follow VTubers because my attention span these days is short enough I have a hard time making it through a lot of YouTube videos, much less a three-hour stream, and I’m not in the target demographic anyway. However, when #1 Son threw me […]

Goering’s on the phone from Freiburg

— by Wombat-socho Silicon Valley delenda est. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…on the one hand, I am being paid a higher hourly wage than I have ever made in my life, being put up in a comfortable hotel not far from my office, and being reimbursed for my […]

Continuity & Tradition

–by Wombat-socho Conservatives tend to be traditionalists, by and large, preferring to preserve the past and look skeptically on the New Improved Billion-Volt Limitless Future. We also tend to get cranky when organizations and people who we thought were on our side start acting woke or kowtowing to those who are. So it pleases me […]

The Spring Break Book Post

— by Wombat-socho Tax season ended for me on April 14; this was the first time since I started working for H&R Block that I haven’t worked April 15, but to be honest, this season has been enough of a pain in the ass for me that I didn’t mind knocking off a day early…well, […]

A Farewell To Analog

— by Wombat-socho I grew up with Astounding/Analog SF, which for many years was the science fiction magazine, and am old enough to remember the end of John W. Campbell’s tenure as editor there. ASF and Campbell (and to a lesser extent, his successor Ben Bova) shaped my tastes in SF, as they did for […]

Fall Back To The Fortified Blogs!

— by Wombat-socho Given the ongoing “cancelling” of conservatives and libertarians on social media, I’ve been using the title of this post as something of a catchphrase, and occasionally educating random yoots on how blogs worked before Jack and Zuck enticed us into their walled gardens. The rest of us ought to be giving some […]

Death, Destruction, and the Dragon Awards

— by Wombat-socho I am probably the last person to find out that Dragon*Con, probably the largest non-comics convention in fandom, has finally bestirred itself and created its own set of awards – the Dragon Awards. This has been greeted with much glee by Sad and Rabid Puppies alike, with Declann Finn going so far […]

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