Monthly Archives: January 2020

Aviation, Historical, Military

Midway – a Review

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The Japanese could have taken Midway almost unopposed on their way to attack Pearl Harbor. That oversight fit into a larger pattern of miscalculations that spelled doom for the Japanese Empire.

But America’s victory was far from a foregone conclusion by the time the Japanese got serious about capturing the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was Midway Atoll. The “sleeping giant” Admiral Yamamoto feared was just awakening and the limping American Pacific Fleet was outmatched going into the battle. It was rather miraculous that we even had three carriers to throw against the Jap Navy. What happened once the forces squared off might be even more miraculous.

 

What’s nice about this film is that it builds a fairly thorough picture of the early phase of the Pacific War. It’s not just about the battle of Midway, but goes back to cover Pearl Harbor, and even ranges as far as Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. It spends time on junior and mid-level officers I don’t remember seeing portrayed in any other movie, including a couple pilots who were instrumental in winning the statistically unlikely victory.

My apologies for writing this review too late for you to see this film in the theaters–because it was worth the ticket price. If you’re sick of most the garbage Hollywood spews out, and would like to see more good flicks like this one, then I encourage you to spend some voting dollars on your own copy of Midway as soon as possible.

Non-Fiction/Documentary

Audio Book Follies

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Followers may have noticed I haven’t been all that productive for a while. Aside from my contribution to Appalling Stories 4, I haven’t had anything published for years. Seems like all the bloggers at Virtual Pulp have stopped blogging, too. There are several reviews we’ve been meaning to write and post for months, and just haven’t been able to find the time.

I can only speak for myself. I’ve been going through a process of change in my professional life that has contributed to my decreased production. I’ve got a job that I really like now, probably my best civilian job ever, but I’m still running like crazy to keep up with it and might still be for a while. I’ve got creative irons in the fire, but can’t make predictions about when they’ll be done. And one of those projects, sucking up a good portion of my life outside work, is an audio version of False Flag.

The audio versions of Tomato Can Comeback, Hell & Gone and Tier Zero were all produced via royalty share using Amazon Audible’s ACX partner. For a few reasons, I plan to go a different route with the third book in the series. A fellow writer suggested I record it myself. I don’t have a great voice, but that voice comes at exactly the right price: free. So I hired myself.

The recording phase of the project was bad enough. I guess most people hate the sound of their own voice played back on a recording. I was no exception, but have come to be able to live with the embarrassment. What is worse, though, is the editing.

I like watching rants by Razorfist on topics that interest me. He’s pretty funny, but what impresses me the most is his ability to rapid-fire monologues for minutes on end without getting tongue-tied. I trip over my words constantly, mispronouncing things I know damn well how to pronounce; adding extra syllables for some unknown reason; and stopping because I thought I read something wrong but actually hadn’t. So there’s a lot of editing just to get rid of that. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

While recording, one of my dogs will invariably walk into my “studio,” loudly flop on the floor, start licking himself, and/or bang his tail or leg against the desk. Cut! Quiet on the set! Take Two… The microphone I’m using now usually doesn’t pick up the loud traffic going by on the road, but a dog’s ears sure do, and Rover wants the world to know about it. Cut! Take Three… Sometimes my voice just stops while my mouth keeps moving. Maybe that’s from not enough water. Take Four… I’m hydrated now. I could go for 72 hours without any gastro-intestinal anomalies whatsoever, but try to record something, and I have to belch every few sentences. Take Five… Some days my sinuses act up and I’m really nasal. It’s okay! Keep rolling! Just keep rolling… I do my best at setting up the mike and the shield, but still wind up popping my “P”s most of the time. Being especially talented, I can also pop “B”s and some other letters that just make no sense. Take Six… Speaking of pops, my lips and tongue are prolific at producing pops, clicks, clucks, and all kinds of annoying sounds, sometimes in the middle of a word.

You get the idea. All of that makes editing a chapter take about 3X longer than recording it did. And it’s tedious work. I’m oblivious to some mistakes until I’m in the middle of editing, so I didn’t repeat the line during a recording session. I’ll have to go back and re-record when the wife and kids are gone again, to reduce the ambient noise levels in the house.

So currently, I am less than halfway to having False Flag ready for publishing.

Why am I bothering to make an audiobook? Well, the publishing gurus out there will tell you it’s a promising new market for indy authors. I guess I’ll see. But I got into this corner of the publishing biz because I personally found audiobooks to be a godsend. I haven’t had time to sit down and read recreationally for a long time, but my previous jobs usually involved a lot of travelling. Audiobooks made it possible to read by proxy.

I bought and listened to quite a few Audible books. But for a couple different reasons, I cancelled my subscription. Kobo’s got a cool app that will let you read ebooks AND listen to audiobooks on your phone…but it looks like their selection is even more pozzed than Audible’s.

Which brings me to Castalia House. They’ve built their own platform, and have audio books for sale. While I don’t agree with all their authors or their founder on several issues, I was stoked about the idea of using my “voting dollars” on products from a company that is not full-commie WOKE.

So I bought The Law Dog Files to listen to on an eight hour trip. Got through about half of it and my wife called me. After hanging up, the player went back to the very beginning of the audio file (the whole book is one huge honkin’ track). I could not fast forward. No matter what I did, it started me at the very beginning so I’d have to listen to the same several hours all over again before moving on. Same thing if I try to rewind (move the slider on the progress bar) and listen to a word or phrase again (I have pretty bad hearing loss and parts of human speech fall right into the frequencies I have trouble picking up). Nope, can’t do that. No matter where I put the slider on the progress bar, it ignores my input and resets all the way back to the beginning so I’ll listen to the same six hours of recording first.

I tried a couple different audio players and had the same exact problem.

Now, it seems logical that these players have sliders on their progress bars for the very reason that a listener will want to navigate to different parts of the recording. It does not seem logical that every single one of them has a progress bar/slider that doesn’t work and that 1. I’m the only listener to ever have noticed, or 2. these tools don’t work for anybody, but listeners continue using these apps anyway.  Therefore, it is entirely possible that there is something wrong with the file I bought.

I never had this problem with Audible Books. And if I had, at least their books are broken up into chapter-length files, so at worst I would have to listen to a whole chapter again. But I never had any trouble going back to the part I didn’t catch.

I guess I could sideload the file onto my computer and listen to it with a desktop version of Windows Media Player…but that defeats the purpose. I got the book to listen to while traveling. If I had the time to sit around the house or my job listening to a multi-hour recording, I’d just read the print or e-book version.

Since I ran into the same problem with different players on my phone, I contacted Castalia House and explained the issue, asking for advice. Maybe they knew of a player that wouldn’t force me all the way back to the beginning. Maybe they knew of a setting in a player I could tweak. Maybe the file they sold me was jacked up somehow.

Never got a reply.

Time passed. Still no reply, so I contacted them and explained the situation again.

No reply.

Was their “Contact Us” form malfunctioning? (I’ve had problems with some versions of those forms on this blog before.) But the trip was over, life went on, and I forgot about it.

The other day I was reading the comment section of a post on Castalia’s owner’s blog. While writing a comment, something jogged my memory about Law Dog.

Here’s what I tacked onto the end of my comment:

“…I bought the audio version of the Law Dog Files and have been having trouble with it. There might be an easy solution, but I’ve sent a couple requests for help or advice through Castalia’s help/contact us form, and never got a reply back.”

Here is the response to what I said:

“We don’t provide tech support for how to use basic file formats. We don’t have the time or the manpower to educate everyone on these things.

I’m not trying to sound sarcastic here, but would you contact Sony to ask them how to use the mp3 file that you bought from them?”

Translation:

“We don’t want or need your business. Don’t ever buy audiobooks from us again.”

Check. Anyway, below are the links to the Audible books I have out. The  exclusivity contract with Audible should be ending in a year or two. I don’t remember everything from the agreement and their policy changes since then. I’ll have to look up the info again and see if the existing recordings can then be released to the broad market, or if I’ll have to re-record those. Either way, False Flag should be available by then.

Intel, Politics/Current Events

Virginia: Heads They Win; Tails We Lose

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I’d love to be proven wrong this time somehow, but Virginians and all other Americans need to be ready for a major false flag and media blitzkrieg. Politicians in Virginia and DC have a message for the American people: “We are going to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. What are you gonna do about it?”

If Americans don’t show up to the scheduled protest in Virginia, then our domestic enemies win by default…as usual. Just as in every battle for the soul of our culture, evil wins without firing a shot when people on our side don’t even put up a fight.

Signs indicate that people on our side might not surrender as easily this time. But the globohomo Swamp no doubt has a number of contingencies to turn this into an excuse for more orchestrated infringements. Watch this video before it’s purged by CommieTube:

Here’s some important points to keep in mind, for any patriot planning to attend the event:

  • The Swamp is going to herd the Americans into a fenced area where they will be trapped.
  • Any patriots who park at the nearby, designated parking garages, will possibly be trapped in the area.
  • Antifa, disguised as patriots, intend to infiltrate the protest and create incidents that the Swamp Police can exploit. No matter who does what, patriots will be the villains in the official Narrative.
  • The Swamp has the ability not only to hack your smartphones, but jam any attempt  by you to video record what actually happens. So not only can they prevent you from posting any footage that challenges their Narrative, they can prevent you from recording it in the first place. In other words, what ever lie they choose to tell the population, you will have no opportunity to prove it is a lie. There is a reason they’ve been securing a monopoly on the flow of information.
  • There will probably be drones flying over the area with facial recognition software. So even if you’re smart and only bring a burner phone; even if by some miracle no pre-manufactured “hate crime” doesn’t take place…they will have a list of every American who attends. This will be recon-by-fire. They can arrest potential “domestic terrorists” in the dead of night, later on, at their convenience with no-knock warrants and terminate the resistance piecemeal.
  • In addition to the covert Antifa infiltrators, there will be the typical federal informants and other agents provacateur on hand, not to mention the usual lineup of tribalist alt-retards screaming racial slurs to make sure sheep watching their idiot box will believe that this is all about “white supremacy.”

I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’m afraid it will be ugly. I’d feel a lot better if some significant swamp-draining could have been accomplished by this point, but that isn’t the case. Trump is still surrounded by avowed enemies of your freedom, who hate him for interfering with their plan. Neither Sessions, Horowitz, or Barr have proven to me that the Swamp faces any serious challenges. I have no worldly advice to offer, because technologically (and in every other worldly aspect) the enemy holds every possible advantage. The only worthwhile advice I can offer is to trust in, and pray to, the God who is more powerful than everybody involved.

Reviews, TEOTWAWKI

My Lai by David Dubrow – a Review

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Back in the postwar years, there were several science fiction movies with a theme that involved powerful aliens using mind control on humanity. If you grew up watching reruns of old TV shows (before there were a zillion 24-hour cable channels), then you may have noticed the old “invisible alien entity takes over the ship via mind control of the crew” plot used a few times in the original Star Trek and nearly every episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

My Lai has no concrete connection to the atrocity in Vietnam, so far as I can tell. It’s got a similar theme to those old science fiction dramas, but with a twist: the sinister force taking over Planet Earth is neither alien nor invisible. In fact, most of us have probably encountered this villain at least once. I can tell you that a young, bored boy growing up in the backwoods with time on his hands and a rock or other potential projectile within reach is very well acquainted with this particular villain.

(That’s right: bees. Throw something into a beehive and find out how fast you can run…or how many bee stings you can tolerate.)

Bees have decided that it’s time to take the planet back from humanity. Much like a demonic entity, they start by possessing the body of a human, and can then control it from within. The method of possession is rather grotesque, but is similar to how parasites perform mind control in the animal kingdom. Using one human host, the bees can entrap and infiltrate others. The human hosts then become drones, nurses, or queens, just like their tiny insect puppetmasters.

When the story opens, the bees’ plot for world domination has been wildly successful, but there is organized human resistance. One particular guerrilla band uses guns, flamethrowers, and Molotov cocktails to bring smoke on a hybrid colony of bees and their human thralls. Hoowah! The mayhem is quite gratifying. Their destruction of a hive/village would no doubt be considered equivalent to the My Lai massacre by the bees and those controlled by them.

I haven’t asked author David Dubrow anything about this story, but I’d be astounded if he denied that it is a parable–probably on more than one level.

The way the bees spread their control smacks of “the domino theory,” for starters. For regular readers of this blog who have seen me refer to our collective enemy as “the Hive Mind” (when I write about the left wing, the SJWs; or the institutions they dominate like Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, the DNC, etc.), you might see this for the perfect metaphor that it is. Once a person is melded into the Hive Mind, any potential or capability they once might have had for independent thought is subsumed by whatever The Narrative is during the Current Year.

(For instance: the Leftist Hive Mind once vehemently defended the First Amendment, in order to push pornography, junk science, and Marxist propaganda. But now that they’ve transformed the culture, brainwashed the masses, and secured power for themselves, they are trying to eradicate the First Amendment [with “hate speech” legislation, selective application of “separation of Church and State” arguments, etc.] so that no thoughtcriminals can challenge any aspect of their Narrative.)

This is an overtly politically-focused review (shocker, eh?). But My Lai doesn’t sledgehammer the politics at readers the way I often do on this blog. The political message is there if you want to notice it, but it’s not overbearing and there are possibly many readers who would miss it altogether…just like how the last few generations have been unaware of the underlying messages in mainstream entertainment.

My Lai is one thought-provoking story in Appalling Stories 4–an anthology that is well off the beaten path.