Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Author: UnCivilServant

  • UnCivil Cooks – Let Them Eat Cake

    I am legally obligated to inform you all that I, UnCivilServant, and a straight, white, cismale shitlord as part of a plea deal to avoid public ruination on the charge of transmisogyny. Turns out when your gay Nazi neighbors start talking about their daughter’s upcoming bar mitzvah, you should not ask if the surgeons were required to model a foreskin for later removal. How was I supposed to know there wasn’t going to be any surgery? Anyway, the other half of the plea deal requires furnishing the event with a cake. So that’s what we’ll be baking today.

    *sigh*

    Now, I don’t know kosher from vegan, so we’re not going to be all that fussy and if anyone notices, it’s their fault for not putting more specifics in the plea text. Since ‘cake’ is a very general term and I’m lazy, we’re going to go with a simple recipe, a basic sponge cake. A sponge cake is in the same family as the pound cake with one very basic difference. Sponge cakes are leavened with baking powder, while pound cakes are unleavened. Other than that it’s the same recipe. Well, it says it right there in the name, pound cakes have their major ingredients measure by weight, and as such so too do sponge cakes. So a kitchen scale is a must before we move on. I know a lot of people don’t bother to get one.

    Not really my fault there.

    So what do we need?

    • 1/2 pound eggs (usually 4)
    • 1/2 pound butter
    • 1/2 pound flour
    • 1/2 pound sugar
    • 4 teaspoons baking powder
    • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

    Oh look, I’ve gone and measured them out for us.

    Ready, Get Set, Cook!

    That chocolate bar there? Well, that will be turned into a garnish later on. [REDACTED] is a great local chocolate shop. This is just a basic bar of dark chocolate, and we needn’t worry about it right now. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

    So we need to start making the cake batter. I’ve already weighed out the sugar into the bowl for my stand mixer. That’s a clue – we start by whipping the butter and sugar together. I am using the whisk attachment for reasons that will become clear later on. After all, the hardest ingredient is the butter, and that should have softened up a bit by the time you’ve weighed everything out. After abusing the sugar and butter, you get something that photographs a lot like mashed potatoes.

    Not Potatoes

    It’s time to add our eggs. As typical, don’t get the shells in. This may be a grudge cake, but even I have standards. Be sure to scrape the sides often to make sure the butter and sugar mixture gets whisked into the eggs. Butter knife and plastic spatula both work for this – just make sure to stop the mixer before sticking anything that isn’t an ingredient into the bowl.

    Once fully integrated, we’ll end up with a uniformity our neighbors might not appreciate.

    Scrambled

    Return the bowl to the mixer and add small increments of flour, making sure it gets as fully mixed in as possible. Then add our vanilla and baking powder and keep mixing and scraping the sides until you get a uniform mass. Hopefully, you’ll have mixed in some air bubbles. Scoop this into an eight inch baking pan. With a half pound cake base, there will only be enough for one pan. If you’re generous enough to want to make a two layer cake, use a full pound base, double the baking powder and vanilla, and split the batter between two pans. Spread it out to cover the bottom of the pan. I ended up with something like so

    Sugar, Fat, Protein and Carbohydrates!

    Drop the cake into the oven and set a timer for thirty minutes.

    When the timer goes off, we have to conduct the dreaded ‘toothpick test’. I don’t know why people insist on using toothpicks. Not only are knives reusable, but the results are easier to see, and the damage done will not be visible on the finished product.

    Anyway, at the half hour mark, the top looked done, but our cake failed the toothpick test.

    Underdone

    As you can see, there is what looks like batter on the knife we stuck the cake with. So back into the oven it goes. Now it becomes a game of waiting a while, stabbing it again, and if it’s still battery, baking some more.

    Here’s what it looked like when the cake was finally done

    Done

    Don’t worry about those holes in the top of the cake. We’re going to frost it – with buttercream.

    Oh the screeching from the neighbors. Pound cakes are so often unfrosted. Oh well, that’s what they get for being nonspecific. We set the cake aside to cool and turn our attention to frosting.

    What do we need for a basic chocolate buttercream?

    • 4 cups powdered sugar
    • 2 sticks butter
    • 1/3 cup cocoa powder
    • 1-2 tablespoons milk

    Let’s wash up the bowl and whisk attachment we used on the cake. (I never invested in a second bowl for the mixer, silly me). And then dry them off. Cut up the sticks of butter into the bowl and measure out the sugar and cocoa powder. It will form an uninteresting heap of ingredients. see?

    It will taste better than it looks when we’re done.

    Alternate between slow runs with the mixer and scraping down both the sides of the bowl and the whisk. If you run it too fast, you get powdered sugar flying out of the bowl and it causes a mess. Once it won’t mix any further, start drizzling in a little milk. Until the frosting starts to clump up into a single mass, stay on the lower speeds for the same reason as before. After it gets clumpy, you can increase speed to whip it together. The key part here is to watch the consistency and to add as little liquid as possible to get the desired texture. Eventually you’ll end up with something resembling frosting.

    See?

    Now we need to wait for the cake to cool off. Ideally it should be at room temperature for the next steps. Why? Because our frosting is made from buttered sugar, and it will melt otherwise. Now, find the bread knife. You should have a bread knife from when we made sandwiches. Hold it parallel to the surface the cake is resting on and slice off the top. We’re not splitting it, we’re making a relatively flat surface. For instance, this:

    The closest we come to hat tips.

    This is not the surface we’re going to frost. Once we have the top level, we flip the whole darn cake over. There’s a reason for this. The part of the cake in contact with the surface of the pan will be tougher than the interior or top. This happens with all cakes to varying degrees. We’re using the fact to our advantage to make it easier to frost. These surfaces are less prone to tearing when you’re spreading frosting over them. Trying to plaster cake divots with buttercream is less fun than it sounds. So having it not rip is a good thing.

    Anyway, frosting a cake is an art – one I have not mastered. I can get it to the point where no one will comment on it at your typical get together. I don’t attend fancy cocktail parties, and if I did, I’d expect them to be catered by professionals. Anyway, after some effort, the cake looked like this

    You can’t even tell the cake is upside-down

    And so we come back to that bar of dark chocolate in the first picture. It was sitting in my cabinet for over a week, and was very much at room temperature. Room temperature being unfortunately close to eighty. In early October. Curse you unproven pseudo-scientific theories about anthropogenic climatological effects!

    Anyway, since it is soft, we can take a simple knife, say the one we tested the cake with, and start shaving curls off the side of the bar. Make sure you have a plate to catch them with, and be careful about the warmth of your hand melting the chocolate. Well, here’s what I mean…

    We’re not making a mess, we’re making ‘Art’!

    We take those little dark chocolate curls and shavings and distribute them haphazardly over the top of the cake. Dub it “art” and the neighbors will be forced to applaud it. It will bear some resemblance to this here.

    ART!

    I hope Xe likes it.

  • UnCivil Cooks – Sandwich from Scratch

    I think I’d like a sandwich today.

    *Yells into other room*

    Oi! Make me a Sandwich!

    *Waits*

    Dammit, I live alone. I have to do it myself. Welp, I guess I’m going to talk the Glibertariat through a process again. Let’s see, do we have any bread…

    Nope.

    I guess that’s where we have to start.

    Garlic Cheddar Beer Bread

    We need some ingredients. What are they?

    • 3 Cups Flour
    • 2 Teaspoons Salt
    • 3 1/2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
    • 2-6 Teaspoons minced Garlic
    • 12 oz Beer
    • 8 oz Sharp Cheddar
    • 1 Tablespoon Butter

    Before we forget, lets make sure the oven is empty, then set it to 350 degrees. That’s Fahrenheit for anyone from a country that measures based on water rather than humans. If you don’t want to do the math that’s 1.77 times the boiling point of water.

    Let’s just toss the flour, salt, baking powder and garlic in the mixing bowl. There’s no special magic this early on in the process. We need to grate the cheese before adding it, or it won’t integrate too well. After that, it should look something like this:

    We’re still doing that cooking-show thing, right?

    Simple enough, now we mix those together. I have a stand mixer with a dough hook, but that really is overkill. We’re not going to knead the dough, the only reason I like the dough hook for this process is that it’s easier to clean in the end, and it still gets the job done. Now we have – mixed powdery substances in a bowl with some cheesy bits.

    Time to add the beer.

    Now Glibs have been known to have massive debates on the topic of beer, so I’m not going to bother telling you what you should pick. If you don’t have a preference, grab a basic American Lager, the cooking and the other ingredients will cover the flavor.

    With the beer added, we mix until we get a fully integrated dough. It will be a wet dough and will cling to pretty much anything. We need a loaf pan either greased with butter, coated with oil, or spritzed with cooking spray, anything suitable as a release agent that you’re willing to ingest. Get the dough in said loaf pan and relatively evenly distributed. I find hands to be the best implment for doing this, but don’t want to interrupt the cooking to wash the dough remnants off again. So I keep a box of disposable gloves in the kitchen for just this sort of thing.

    See:

    Ten cents well spent.

    We still have that tablespoon of butter. Melt it and get it across the top of the dough, either drizzle it, or brush it, or some combination of the two. Usually I melt it in the microwave because it’s fast and I’m lazy. Here, if you have extra cheese from the first grating, you can sprinkle it on the top. This produces an excellent effect when baked. Alas, I did not have sufficient cheese.

    Drop the loaf pan into the oven at about the middle of the space and set a timer for forty-five minutes. While we wait, we have to resist wandering off for a little bit. A proper sandwich deserves accompaniment. Lets put together some classic tomato soup.

    Simple Tomato Soup

    I haven’t got any of the canned stuff, so we’re making this from scratch too. We’ll need ingredients. Where are my handy bullet points?

    • 1/2 Stick Butter
    • 1 Onion
    • 28 Oz Crushed Tomatos
    • Oregano
    • Basil
    • Bay leaf
    • 12 Oz (1.5 cups) Stock

    There they are.

    We need to get rid of the onion skin and chop it into small pieces. Mostly because it would look silly to drop a whole onion in the pot. Cans of crushed tomato come in twenty-eight ounce sizes, so this is one such can. If you want to go through the trouble of processing your own, go right ahead. I’m in a bit of a hurry. Same thing with the stock. I used pre-made chicken stock because I had it.

    All right, time to get cooking. Find our trusty dutch oven and make sure it’s been washed since the fish stew incident. Put it on medium heat and melt the half stick of butter. Once that is more or less liquid, add the other ingredients. If you need to know what it might look like, here’s an example:

    That pan looks familiar

    Stir it up and bring to a simmer. Let it continue to simmer until the bread timer has gone off. That should be give or take forty minutes after it went on. It would be advisable to give it a stir every so often to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan. If it does, take the edge off the heat some and give it the occasional stir. Do not cover the pan. We want it to boil off some of the excess liquid. After it’s been cooking for a while, it will start to look a bit like real soup:

    Soupy

    Find the bay leaf and toss it. You don’t want to eat that now that it’s done its part. Now, the soup is perfectly edible as-is, but if you want to have consistancy closer to the canned variety, find a blender. Me? I just moved the pan to another burner and put a lid on it. My bread was done.

    The Sandwiches (Finally)

    Well, the bread fresh from the oven was too hot to slice. And since I didn’t have the extra cheese, looked a little pale. See:

    Just loafing around.

    But, once it cooled down, we could get on to the business at hand from an hour ago – making sandwiches. If you hadn’t guessed already from the tomato soup, I’m making grilled ham and cheese. Okay, the grilled cheese was probably obvious, the ham part is pretty common, too.

    The best way to distribute butter for grilling sandwiches is about as contentious as the appropriate type of beer to cook with. You do what makes you happy. I’m going to butter the bread so that the second side is guaranteed a dose of butter equal to the first. Then we start our construction. On the unbuttered side, we lay out a slice of American cheese (It’s traditional, any melting cheese will work). Then some cubes of ham. I stopped here to take a picture because the next step would be another layer of cheese, then the second slice of bread.

    Okay, so the bread was still a bit warm when I sliced it.

    Find a skillet or frying pan, or griddle, or whatever relatively flat bottomed, low-walled (or no-walled) cooking surface you want to use. Put it on medium heat and wait until you can feel the radiant heat a few inches above the pan. Gently lay the assembled sandwiches in.

    Here’s the hard part – we wait.

    We need the heat to brown the lower surface and conduct up into the cheese to turn it molten. This will inevitably take longer than I expect, leading to me standing there in irritation as thermodynamics thumbs its nose at me again. But once we do have it, we flip it over and…

    Browned on one side.

    Yes it is Browned! I know it doesn’t look it in the picture, that’s because it’s a low-contrast to the color of the bread. Take my word for it, it’s browned, and the cheese melted. We also have to wait for the same thing to happen to the other side. This is usually even more frustrating than the first wait, after all it’s been more than an hour since I yelled for an empty kitchen to make me a sandwich, and it’s still not quite done. But, once it is browned, we cut it on a bias (conservative in my case), array it on a plate and ladle out a bowl of our herb-laden tomato soup.

    Yum

    I need to get me a sandwich-making person.

  • UnCivil Cooks – Fish Stew

    Lets see how the resident Glib who doesn’t like anything cooks. We will be making fish stew. This is an improvised recipe that came out of trying to talk myself out of doing something stupid. More or less my first idea was Fish chili. This didn’t sound like it would turn out right, so I talked myself into something less outlandish. Visiting the local mega grocery (that is more than one mile distant from my food-desert located house), I picked up the following items (okay I already had some near the bottom of the list). I’ll start cooking, and sooner or later you’ll be compelled to follow along. Or I’ll randomly switch to first person plural.

    • 1/2 lb perch
    • 1/2 lb shrimp
    • Bacon, 3 rashers
    • 1 onion
    • 1 medium or 3 small potatos
    • carrots
    • 1 bell pepper
    • 12-16 oz stewed tomatos
    • 4 cups vegetable broth
    • Curry Powder
    • Salt and Pepper
    • Corn Starch

    The shrimp I got was pre-cooked. There was a good reason for this – that was the cheapest. There is another good reason – it allowed me to not have to spend too much time cooking the shrimp. So I started out peeling the shimp, the carrots, the potatoes, and the onion. This was a good start, and I followed up by quartering and cleaning the bell pepper. Since I was prepping everything, I carved the perch into two-inch squares. Since it came from Soviet Canukistan, it was still rimed with native frost.

    Here’s what it all looked like before the chopping started in earnest

    Those veggies were too big for the task, to I chopped them into smaller bits, keeping the aromatic and root vegetables separate. This will make later steps easier. I followed it up by moving the pot into the front and cut the bacon into small pieces.

    Chopping Completed

    Now, we could do this next step in a frying pan and move it to the dutch oven, we don’t need to. It’s plenty easy to do all of this in one pan. Start the heat and cook the bacon. We want the flavorful grease to be released, and will be using it as our fat for this part. Once the bacon has given off enough grease, it’s time to add our onion and bell peppers. We cook until the onions start to brown, there should be some browning on the bottom of the pan, this is fine.

    Not Caramelized.

    We need to get that tasty material off the bottom of the pan. After all, it’s bacon, onion and peppers, but mostly bacon. We want that in the stew. We could do some fancy deglazing, or we could just use the next ingredient. Pour our can of stewed tomatoes into the pan, liquid included. We’re going to use the acidic liquid from the tomatoes to deglaze the pan and collect that bacony flavor. To make sure we get it all, let’s cover it with a lid and let it simmer for five minutes.

    After simmering and deglazing.

    All right, we need to start making soup before we can turn it into stew. Lets add the root veggies and three of four cups of the broth. The fourth cup of broth we’re going to reserve for later. This will make sense sooner or later. Some of you might see where this is going.

    Almost soup.

    At this point we have to turn off the burner frenetically, move the pot to another, and clean up a catastrophe in the kitchen.

    Okay, the catastrophe isn’t required, but I did reach into my cabinet, pick up a box of corn starch and promptly drop it. Worse, the lid wasn’t on all that tight and it went everywhere. Half a second of gravity and my kitchen looked like a party at Tony Montana’s house. So I spent too long cleaning up the wite powdery substance, you may see it in the later photographs, because corn starch is pernicious and stubborn.

    Once that diversion has been dealt with, we can re-ignite the burner and put the pot back on the heat. Put it on medium to medium high and set a timer for thirty minutes. Go watch some cat videos on YouTube or something.

    After our timer goes off, we want to check the potatoes. They need to be cooked now, or we’ll have problems. So if they’re underdone, let it cook a little longer. The carrots can be a little crispy, that won’t be a problem, they’re just carrots.

    The content of the pot should look something like this.

    Now the bacon is a nice little bit of protein, but it’s not the primary source for this. So lets toss in our shrimp and the perch. Toss in three teaspoons of curry powder and a liberal helping of black pepper. Mix it all in. The perch will cook quickly. If you have anything resembling a membrane on the fillet, it will curl into nice little tubes while it does so. This is all right. This is also why I’m glad the cooked shrimp was the cheapest, since it allowed this step to go fast.

    Almost there…

    Let’s leave the pot for a while and get a bowl, pour the reserved broth into it and start mixing corn startch in. We want the starch fully integrated and the broth near saturation with corn starch. Once this is done, we pour it into the pot and stir it in until the broth thickens to a gravy. The perch should be fully cooked by now and may start breaking apart while we’re stirring. This is also fine. We’re not trying to serve discrete chunks of fish.

    Here’s our stew.

    It should be done, we can’t forget to turn off the burner.

    We ladle it up into the bowl and … wait a minute…

    Gruel

    Oh, okay, I just mixed up the order of the photos, that’s the thickener from a few paragraphs back before we poured it into the pot.

    Here’s the real bowl. Sorry about the mess:

    Stew

  • Shamelessly Shilling Shadowbooks

    The book is done. The art is done. Thanks to help from the Glibertariat, the blurb is done. Now I come to the hardest part of writing – selling. In the spirit of free enterprise, this article is nothing more than an exhortation to read my books and tell other people to do the same. I’m not going to sneak around and pretend to be saying anything else, so let’s get that out there right from the start.

    The history in the real world:

    Comic books are strange places. You have aliens, magic, psychics and completely unexplained superpowers running amok alongside superscience and fantastical creatures. Sometimes they get silly, sometimes they get serious, but oh the tales you can tell. As someone who likes the art of storytelling, there was an appeal to the possibilities presented.

    Back before 2012, I had started work on a science fiction piece which drew deliberate inspiration from the superhero genre. With it I was trying to skirt the edges of the conventions, trying to not sink too deeply into them. This book had a working title of ‘Three of Swords’ and only got to about half-done before it stalled so badly I had to storm away. On May 8th I began working on a less dark tale that fully embraced the conventions of the genre. I spent every evening and weekend writing, as I kept up my day job full-time. By June 8th, I’d churned out over a hundred thousand words and had a completed draft of ‘Shadowboy’. I had no plan going into the book, indeed, I wasn’t sure I was even going to finish it. But I had a complete novel. It then sat on a thumb drive.

    Sometime around this time I was also trying to sell works to a publishing house in the UK. So I made two trips to attend conventions they were hosting. At the second convention, I got to attend a dinner with authors currently published by the company. Most of the discussions, while fascinating, are not relevant to this ramble. But one thread was. William King spoke about the changes he’d seen over the years in the publishing industry. He went into how even a reliable, established name like him had trouble convincing places to take his work because the big houses had started looking only for blockbusters. Anyone who didn’t reliably turn out blockbusters was quietly sidelined. Since he could still reliably move books, he had taken to independent publishing. Now, prior to this discussion, independent publishing still had the stigma of the old vanity press in my mind. If no one remembers vanity presses, they were companies who would print editions of works for a fee regardless of the quality and then the author could try to hawk them. Usually, it meant the work was crap because the publishing house standard was not “is this a blockbuster” but “will this sell enough to be worth the cost”.

    But technology and the shift in the traditional publishing houses had changed that. In chasing the blockbuster, the old guard was ignoring a great many otherwise worthwhile works. With eBooks and print on demand technology, these authors could still get their books to market, without the overhead of the old methodology. So, I went down this road. It did mean I had to find an editor and cover artist and foot the bill for their services out of my own pocket. But I did so for ‘Shadowboy’. That book had some pains, as I needed to expunge the typographical errors from the text, and even with two editors having picked over it, I still get the nagging feeling I missed some. You’ve seen me type, I’m lousy at it.

    I didn't know where this was going...
    The first book

    But apparently, I spin a good yarn as even people I didn’t badger into reading the book were bugging me for a sequel.

    I started on ‘Gruefield’ immediately after having finished the draft of ‘Shadowboy’. It took a year to finish and got a name change to ‘Shadowdemon’ along the way. I made a big mistake in storytelling, as my focus in the story was inside the narrator’s head. The tale I thought I was telling was about Travis’ character, and I treated the day to day hero work as things that were happening while the story was going on. I should have made a greater effort to at least echo some of what was going on inside Travis’ head, along with more adequately covering the All-Star Elementals. Most only got Cameos despite the entire separate story circling them. Perhaps I can revisit their tale in a future spin-off.

    That’s when Travis’ tale hit a snag. I had too many contradictory ideas for tales to tell, and being contradictory meant Travis couldn’t follow them all. I also had ideas for yarns not involving Travis. So while I tried to put together a third book, I was also writing a mess of other works of varying lengths. It was a good way to use ideas that didn’t fit for Travis. So while content piled up for an anthology, I struggled to get the third book together. I tried to tell Doctor Rudra’s tale of revenge, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t get my head around the plan or the sequence of events it would unfold. So, I set that aside and started another. ‘Dirge of Carcosa’ was supposed to be book three, and I sliced out pieces from the previous draft to add to it. But the tale ran its course, and I ran out of ideas to continue it around novella length. It ended up as the tail end of the Anthology instead. ‘Lucid Blue (and Other Tales Too)’ was not intended to be book three, but Amazon doesn’t like fractional volume numbers, and it worked better tied to the other books. Besides, ‘Lucid Blue’ itself is more than forty thousand words, which is novel length by some metrics.

    A tangled tapestry of plots...
    The quick turnaround sequel

    So I went back to the drawing board again, trying to write ‘Book Three’ even though a third volume was already on the shelves. I took those pieces from Doctor Rudra’s tale that were not in ‘Dirge of Carcosa’ and reworked them with a new thread. I so wanted to have it out in 2016, but it was less than half done when the value of $CURRENT_YEAR changed. For the longest time it didn’t have even a working title, but eventually gained the moniker of ‘Shadowrealm’. As a story, I decided to make ‘Shadowrealm’ more streamlined, reducing the proliferation of side plots that had made ‘Shadowdemon’ a bit of a slog to write. The downside of downsizing the number of plots was that I couldn’t just start updating a different one when I needed to think on the current plot’s progress. But in the end, I think the book is better for it.

    The history in the fake world:

    Magic and the number of people with unusual powers has waxed and waned over the millennia. In some periods, both are scarce, and reports of previous centuries are dismissed as superstitious claptrap. In others their commonality increases so that people once again believe. In the dawn of the modern age, there was a rare confluence of both rapid technological advance and a resurgence of powers. Some who had remarkable ability decided to exploit it for their personal gain. Others concluded that the best way to stop the first was for similarly powered people to step up and intervene. In the mid nineteen thirties, a band of these vigilantes founded a mutual aid society for helping out their fellows who were not as solvent after the expenses of fighting crime. The Community Fund largely acted as an insurance company and resource pool.

    Initially, the Fund placed no rules on the membership beyond those of society at large. So long as they weren’t criminals, members could approach problems in whatever manner they saw fit. The use of lethal force was not expressly prohibited, though some chose to refrain from personal moral decisions. This was the Golden Age of the community. Members could and did operate under their own names, and the term ‘Hero’ got draped upon them like a mantle. When war broke out, many were quick to volunteer to fight the Axis powers. A “powers arms race” sparked renewed research into the source of these abilities, and new methods of uncovering people with latent abilities. Every one was needed to counteract the advances made by the other side. In the end, it was conventional arms in Europe and nuclear arms in Asia that ended the war.

    With so many returning Heroes bolstering the ranks of the Community Fund’s membership, the Federal Government became concerned about their potential as a seditious force. As such, congressional hearings into the activities of the Community Fund began, ostensibly to root out Communists from among their ranks. The Golden Age was over.

    Why don't anthologies sell as well as novels?
    A wider look around the world

    In the midst of the hearings, First Contact was made. It was not the first time nonhuman intelligences had visited the Earth, but it was the first recorded, open contact. The Scyan Theocracy existed to spread the faith to the unenlightened of the galaxy. Fortunately, the tenets of their faith required an open and honest embrace by the convert. Force could not be used as this did not save the heathen and sullied the souls of the Scya who’d done it. Thus they came to preach. Their arrival sparked a crisis of faith among many, and cults proliferated. Few were in any way tied to the alien religion, but the number of such groups was massive. Needing to deal with Communists, Cultists and Alien threats, Congress decided that killing the Community Fund would not be the best move. So they regulated it, and legislated the Bureau of Hero Affairs into existence. As an appeasement, the Community Fund issued its first code of conduct, with Rule One being a prohibition on the use of lethal force.

    The BHA took over the licensure and insurance of Heroes, under the pretext that there should not be a private monopoly on the matter. The Community refocused on helping with the Cults, Communists and Creatures of Extraterrestrial Origin, gliding into it’s Silver Age. Flamboyant and outrageous gimmicks became common among criminals. Sometimes edging into the absurd, and it became almost a non-issue to see young trainees in the field against such almost comical criminals. The sidekick became a semi-permanent fixture, with the apprenticeship proving useful for their later careers. This Silver Age died when the friends and families of licensed heroes stopped being out of bounds for criminals. A new defense was required – anonymity. Nicknames became codenames, and real names disappeared from the public discourse. A few had no choice but to retire, unable to put on a mask, and afraid for the safety of their loved ones.

    Darkness crept in as the colorful criminals of the Silver Age were captured or disappeared, and a more brutal set replaced them. There were some who agitated for a removal of the prohibition on lethal force, as their opponents grew ever more brutal. The worst of it subsided as the new millennium dawned, but there were few who would dare operate openly under their real names. Continuing it’s own scope creep, the BHA took over the regulation of codenames, and the registration of anyone who was powered, regardless of their interest in becoming a licensed Hero. At the same time, the Community Fund proper has diversified, expanding into finance, manufacturing, healthcare, research and development, real estate and a bevvy of other fields.

    Let's try this one more time...
    The newest entry (to date)

    It is into this world, with the following lament that we are introduced to the world:

    “Bureaucracy. I’d rather take a fist to the face than have to deal with the Bureau of Hero Affairs, but then I’d end up having to fill out one of the innumerable BHA forms” — Travis Colfax, Shadowboy, Opening Lines

    Final plea.

    Even if you don’t want to read my stuff personally, should you happen to know anyone who might like some literary entertainment, point them in this direction. Also, feedback is much appreciated, even if it’s negative. I’ll bask in the positive, laugh at the abusive and contemplate the negative.

    Random un-Fun Facts

    • The Greelers with speaking parts were based on pastiches of internet communities, but their actual words got toned down because they were unrealistic.
    • The acknowledgments were deliberately made somewhat odd because I didn’t expect anyone to read them – then someone lamented their absence in Lucid Blue.
    • You lot got acknowledged at least twice…
    • I had to cut Birdstrike’s takedown of his mother’s behavior because it distracted from the tone of the story.
    • Doctor Lindenbaum’s office was visually inspired by the office of a similar professional in the series Monk.
    • I didn’t even know the name of the city in Shadowboy until about the halfway point. I still don’t know the state.
    • Doctor Omicron was hard to write for because I wanted him to avoid the classic villain mistakes.
    • I wish I could write more scenes of Hephaestus III snarking at Social Justice types.
    • The character of Shiva was based entirely off a bad joke – one which the Shiva itself makes in Shadowdemon.
    • Dan Fullbright has found a supplier of audio cassette tapes…
    • …and was inspired by a mystery-solving gentleman burglar, though he is no gentleman.
    • No one has yet pointed out that the time of Shadowboy was obviously not the first trip the Ygnaza made to Earth. The evidence is in the text.
    • I did not expect the audiobook narrator to be able to pronounce Uta|la||tek|li, but he managed.
    • Ranger Roy is afraid of robots.
    • The UnCivilServant avatar is the Shadowrealm-era Doctor Omicron.
    For those who don't have everything
    E Pluribus, Omnibus. From many, for all.

  • Royal Tea – Thoughts on International Trade

    When running into a bout of cognitive dissonance, the choices seem to be: sit and think it through; or shout slogans and ignore the contradiction. I have long held opinions on trade that border on the mercantilist. While puttering about, I spotted a box of “Royal Tea” sitting atop my refrigerator. Putting a kettle on, I got together the things I’d need, and waited for the water to boil. That’s when I started thinking about the items I’d gathered.

    And the tea leaves say…

    Despite the Cyrillic letters on one side and the Imperial Russian motifs (including portraits of Nicky II and his Tsarina), the tea had probably never been to Russia. It was Ceylon tea from Sri Lanka imported by way of a company in Sacramento. The kettle had been made by robots in Japan and ordered via computer. The teacups were actually crafted by Russian hands. The spoon was one of thousands stamped out en masse in China. The gas I was burning probably came out of a fracking well in this country, but not from anywhere near as close as the honey, which was collected at a maple farm two counties over. But I didn’t go there to get it. Even that was shipped in to my local store. All while I sat on my fat ass complaining how this country doesn’t make anything anymore.

    I composed a quip to share with the Glibertariat, with the ending being a play on the line “It’s good to be the King.” While I cleaned up the wording and contemplated the response I’d get from known personalities, the dissonance set in. While some people far richer than I hollered about the ‘evils’ of capitalism elsewhere, I was contemplating a cup of tea. Aside from the fact that it needed more honey, the mere fact that it was in my hands at that moment was a silent testament to the good of capitalism. More specifically, the fruits of trade. I will still argue that Ricardo was wrong regarding comparative advantage (because he was), and I still hold that it is better to be the producer and seller of goods than the buyer. But these are details of nuance, separated from the base principle that it’s good to be a capitalist.

    My gut instinct is to argue against international trade. But that is a response born of emotion and not rational reflection. Too many people I know tell the same story – their job went away but their family is still here. It was my tale, too. I ended up in the Civil Service because there was nothing else around. Everything was being made overseas. Why was it cheaper to ship halfway around the globe than build locally? Many here will reflexively blame government. That, too, is an emotional response. While not completely false, it carries the same danger of becoming over-simplified dogma as blaming the corporation. The company that had sent my last job overseas had been skirting bankruptcy because it had decayed into a bloated, inefficient conglomerate with scads of redundant departments duplicating the same functions. So, they had to restructure or die. Bye upstate New York, hello Mumbai. This was not the fault of the government who had chased out the other opportunities.

    Did (relatively) free trade cost me a job?

    Yes.

    Should I be bitter?

    Not unless I forget to add enough honey to this cup of tea, I wouldn’t even have tea without the same.

  • UnCivil Reviews – Dawn of War III

    Hello, my name is UnCivilServant, and I have a problem with Plastic Crack – I simply don’t have enough time to assemble and paint the thousands of dollars worth of miniatures I’ve acquired. But that is not important right now. What’s important is that the latest entry in the long-running Warhammer 40k video game series Dawn of War has recently dropped. The first entry was released way back when I was still in college, and I own the whole set. It was the gateway by which I took up the tabletop game. Entries came out fairly regularly until Dawn of War II: Retribution. After which things went quiet, and the publisher THQ went bankrupt. Not because of Dawn of War, but because the people running the company were a bunch of gits.

    For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer, here is a quick exposition dump of backstory. In the beginning, there was a company that made miniatures for fantasy roleplaying games. Citadel looked at their books and went “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of writing a ruleset to fight tabletop battles with their miniatures. And thus Warhammer Fantasy Battles was born. People who wanted to have bigger armies would have to buy more miniatures, and most of their existing stock could be worked into the product line. At some point around here, Citadel changed their name to Games Workshop but kept the brand for some of their products, like paint.

    So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of “Let’s do more Warhammer, but IN SPACE!” And so Warhammer 40,000 was born. Being the eighties, there was a lot of cocaine-fueled insanity included, including outright rip-offs of other works given a new coat of Citadel paint, and it was good. Over the years they fed the Space Dwarfs to the Space Bugs and introduced the Space Weaboo Communists, but it developed an aesthetic distinct and yet familiar.

    So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of licensing their totally original and not a shameless amalgam of ideas to these newfangled video game producers. After all, gamers were the same geeks who buy their main product lines, so there was money to be had. And if there is anything Games Workshop likes, it’s money. Dawn of War was not the first of these titles. But it is a contender for having the most entries. It depends on how you count expansions and DLCs.

    Let’s get to talking about this particular entry.

    I open it up and find out that the opening cinematic was used as the announcement trailer. Disappointing, but it’s still fun to watch an Imperial Knight knock a Wraithknight off its feet like a linebacker that took a wrong turn and broke a referee in half. And then it asks me to either sign in to or create a Relic account. Being an antisocial git, I refuse and see if there’s a way to ignore it. Fortunately, this proved to be optional, and it hasn’t asked me again. Finding out there was a tutorial, I decided to start there. I always play the tutorial missions as it gives me an idea of the developer’s attitudes. We start out telling some Blood Ravens to wander about.

    After bossing around the generic, nameless tactical and scout marines for a bit, I get told to summon Gabriel Angelos to the battle. Gabe first appeared way back in the original Dawn of War. Where he proceeded to make an awful mess of things that the Imperial Guard had to come in and clean up. To be fair, he did try to make things right, but he got beat down by the mess he made. But since he was the last Captain left not interred in a Dreadnought or self-demoted to the chaplaincy, he became Chapter Master by default. Anyway, we teleport him in and he arrives wearing a shiny suit of Cataphractii armor – and he’s freaking huge! Now Cataphractii armor is bulky, but this is not Cataphractii big, he’s the size of an original XBox. Compare him to the regular tactical marines:

    I mean his head is bigger than their helmets. He’s supposed to be able to wear that same armor.

    I thought maybe this was part of the new visual direction for the game. Make the hero units bigger so they stand out. But here’s the Eldar hero:

    She’s the same size as the rest of her people.

    Maybe the artists Relic hired mistook Gabe for an Ork. Orks do allot authority by size, so it’s perfectly reasonable for Gorgutz to be three times the height of the boyz around him.

    This Git – Gorgutz

    Since I brought them up, let’s talk about the Space Elves and Space Orks. The Eldar are like politicians, they lie and change sides so much that no one trusts them. They’ve even been known to lie when the truth would have worked better. They also have a tendency to get eaten by a Chaos god after they die, so it evens out. The Orks are the exact opposite. They are direct – engineered for fighting they’re happy to fight anybody, including each other. There is one batch of Orks stuck on a Daemon world that gets resurrected each morning to fight an eternal battle against the native inhabitants. They’ve gone to Orky heaven.

    A thousand words in and I now get to the game proper. Outside of the fact that Gabe is fuckoff huge and somehow able to make giant leaps in Cataphractii armor (a suit which in the tabletop has the special rule “Slow and Purposeful”), I haven’t yet really had much to complain about. The first real irritant was in finding that you get one active campaign at a time. To start from scratch you have to delete the existing one. But there is not much reason to do so, since you can replay levels at will, and your advances are independent of the campaign. Indeed you can even get them through skirmish and multiplayer games. This still irritates me. It means that if you have a computer shared between more than one person, they don’t get to keep separate save games and thus separate progress. I don’t personally have this problem now, but I remember when I did.

    Anyway, on to the campaign. The next irritant is that it is only one unified campaign that rotates between factions. It had started with the cycle “Space Marine – Ork – Eldar” but on chapter seven, it skipped Space Marine and went to Ork. So I’m not even sure if there is a pattern. You can’t play just a Space Marine campaign or just and Ork campaign. The story bounces around between the factions and you have to play the other guys to unlock the next mission for your chosen group. Fortunately, it doesn’t pretend to be anything but linear. Despite being called a “Campaign Map” in the game, here is what pops up:

    The units depicted change by which faction the selected mission is for.

    Each of those flags is either a mission color coded to the faction or a cinematic. It’s not so bad since they admit it’s linear and don’t try to pretend otherwise. The interface remains consistently meh as we progress through the mission briefing to choosing which elite units we’ll be able to deploy.

    I have no idea where this room is.

    The screen is not terribly intuitive, and it took a while to figure out how to unlock the other elite options for each faction. Definitely a place for improvement. We’re finally to the gameplay proper. Base building is back, but there is a dearth of defensive turrets. And they screwed up the cover system. I didn’t want to complain about the bubble system, but there’s not even an in-game excuse for capturable cover locations. Earlier incarnations had dynamic cover systems where objects on the field could be used depending on where the enemy was. Now you have to capture a cover point, and it soaks up some incoming ranged damage. Anything else on the battlefield is just there to obstruct movement. Bolt shells will fly through it without a problem – for the shooter at least.

    The basics are stock standard RTS mechanics, with the attempts to be “more tactical” in terms of unit special abilities. The problem is the actual fights degrade into blobs of combatants. Figuring out who was in the correct position to use a special ability tactically is not terribly straightforward, so it ends up being hero abilities and items like jump packs for mobility assists. Personally, I don’t take umbrage at it, as even in earlier iterations I found that problems went away when locally overwhelming numbers were applied to the enemy positions.

    Why yes, I am an Imperial Guard player in tabletop 40k, why do you ask?

    The story is well, no more or less deep than other Dawn of War titles. The voice acting is middle of the road to decent. The change in voice actors for Gabe from the previous game is the most noticeable. But it’s not that the new guy is doing anything wrong, he just doesn’t sound right. In all, the game is just all right. The worst thing I can say about it is that it was too easy to get up and walk away. There have been times where I’ve had to call into work on the day after a release because I got hooked and could not rip myself away. There was no risk of that here. Given the addictiveness of other entries, this is a bit of a letdown. A low mark in the franchise, but not beyond salvation.

    I give it seven of ten skulls for the skull throne.

  • UnCivil Reviews – Mass Effect: Andromeda

    After complaining in the Lynx that I got a physical box with a digital code instead of install media for my preorder, there were those who suggested I review the game and give an opinion.

    First Caveat: I have, as of this set of impressions, thirteen in-game hours. On the plus side, it does not feel like the game is about to end. Though it also means I have not fully explored the character of all of the NPCs, which is an area that traditionally was BioWare’s wheelhouse.

    Second Caveat: I may end up with unmarked spoilers because of my style of writing reviews. I will try to avoid this, but mistakes happen.

    I took my code and typed it into Origin while the Lynx were going. After getting to 42% of the download completed, Origin installed the base game and said I could start playing. It then went on to keep downloading content in the background. So if anyone is already put off by the Origin requirement, there’s your answer. This isn’t an Origin review, so all I’ll say is that it’s a weak Steam rip-off, and I’d rather not have to have yet another sales platform installed on my machine to play games.

    One of the designers also supposedly said something racist about white people

    The first impression I had of the game proper was that it loaded to the main menu massively faster than earlier Mass Effect games. After poking around in the settings menu as per my habit, I dropped into character creation. There has been much said about character creation on other pages, including claims that it was difficult to make a white Ryder which prompted me to immediately try for that.

    The results were passable but there were a few things wrong when wandering about in-game. One, the hairline does not actually attach to the forehead. That gets distracting in close-up shots. Two, the face looks fractionally small for the head but proportionate to itself. That could just be me having screwed up in making my changes. But one thing that kept jumping out at me – all the restraints on the character customization are artificial. It is clear that the engine as it exists could easily handle giving a wider range of variation. Two, it is easy to see where the impression that there was a deliberate effort made to try to prevent people from making a white character. Whether there was intent or not is the question.

    Anyway, I had my soulless ginger, and I kept wondering – why doesn’t the hair color apply to the eyebrows? It makes it look like everyone has a terrible dye job. Actually given how the hair doesn’t connect to the forehead, it makes it look like he’s wearing a wig. This leads into the next distracting problem. I’d dismissed the fuss about facial animations, but there is indeed something seriously off about them. At times, the lip-sync is broken to the point where the Salarians have more natural speech movements than the humans. This wouldn’t be as bad, but being Mass Effect, there are closeups during dialog, and it’s right there, front and center where you can’t miss it. Speaking of dialog, the voice acting… is spotty. Some characters work just fine. No problems. Others, the voice just doesn’t sound right for the model. And then there’s the handful where the actor is just awful. The Salarian director is one such character, where I was wondering “did they leave in placeholder audio?” during his dialog. Decent voice acting is invisible, it blends into the background. Bad voice acting ruins the immersion.

    Will this cavalcade of complains end? Yes, but there are a few more to get to first. Coming from the voice acting, you get the writing. Whoever wrote some of this dialog at best half-assed it. Other writing is par for the series and not so much of an irritant. The problem is the juxtaposition of varying degrees of quality. There is a side quest where you investigate a murder which is actually pretty okay, but I was doing it in parallel to some of the main quests where the glaring mistakes popped up. Little flubs – awkward sentence structure and word choice unrelated to character proclivities, things like that, but being in cutscenes for the primary plot just meant there was nothing else to pay attention to at the time. I get the feel of several parallel writers, where the less experienced members got handed the main plot.

    Right, lets get on to the gameplay. Anyone who’s played BioWare’s work in the past decade will be familiar with most of the conventions. In fact, they will have played this exact game before. For some, what I am about to say is the most damning commentary I could make. For others, it’s a non-issue. But here it is. This game is really Mass Effect: Inquisition. Character picks up unique ability that requires them to personally attend to some vital task. They are dropped into a position of authority within an organization without any qualification – an organization which they have to rebuild from a shattered state and woo allies against a better-resourced foe. And they repeatedly return to the same locales to do side quests and harvest resources to perform upgrades. They even have strike team missions which fill the role of the strategic map in DA:I. These strike team missions are where the Multiplayer is slotted in, as any of them sent out using an “APEX” requirement is a multiplayer mission. I’ve not done any of these because screw multiplayer; I play video games to get away from real people.

    I was okay with Inquisition, and I’m fine with its reskinning. In fact, the reskinning is one of the best things because the Environment artists did a gorgeous job. Lets take a trip from the Citad- sorry, the ‘Nexus’ to the Desert world.

    The office view.
    I told you it was the Citadel.
    Even the star system is dusty.
    The pretty view.
    The Business View.
    We really should pave the parking lot.
    We did build that.
    Fun fact, the Nomad doesn’t float.

    Then we go and have a chat with an NPC and we get another good look at the character animations. And we see that there was a shortage of quality control

    She stood like this the whole conversation.

    Lets take our mind off that, here’s a view of the system on the verge of falling into a black hole.

    It doesn’t technically suck, but it won’t be fun.

    But that brings me to another problem. While exploration is explicitly a part of the game’s premise, the movement transitions take too long. You select a new celestial object to visit, the camera zooms in where you are, pans to aim at the other body, then flies over there, pauses for a full second, and finally reorients at the new location before giving you back control. You can’t skip it, and it does this for every transition. This wouldn’t be so bad, but when you’re doing stellar cartography, a lot of these planets have zero or at most one surface feature to investigate from orbit. You will be flying from world to world a lot. This gets tedious after a while.

    While we’re on the subject of transportation, the Nomad is a decent vehicle in some ways, it definitely handles better than the Mako, but cannot tackle anything approaching the inclines that the Mako could. It doesn’t jump very high, but it also doesn’t leap off of cliff faces and pirouette through the air like the Mako did. It has one seriously annoying drawback – no gun. You have to get out of the Nomad to shoot anything. I’m not going to compare to the Hammerhead because that was a skimmer, and the wheeled vehicles are more appropriate parallels. The Nomad apparently has an infinite supply of mining probes packed away in the back. These probes are as big as people and I’ve launched a number on a single run without resupply. I think I’d rather have a gun.

    While I joked about the aesthetic in the screenshot travel montage, I do understand wanting to keep the Initiative tech looking like what we saw in previous installments. Where the problem comes from is the lack of originality in the Andromeda aliens. I’ve seen two sapient species thus far. One looks like it got lost trying to figure out if it was supposed to head to the Star Wars set or the Star Trek set. It is an uninspired rubber-forehead design. The main villain race looks like someone tried to mix and match traits and animations from the Geth and the Collectors. They are the biggest disappointment thus far. We flew all of these light years for something that isn’t even all that alien. The ‘Archon’ has a comedically child-like face too. It’s just a bit embarrassing.

    The characters look like BioWare standard fare, and I could point to the archetypes from previous games, but as I said, at thirteen hours in, I’ve not had time to evaluate them all. Except I know I cannot stand ‘Peebee’. Immediately after the scene where she introduces herself, I emptied an entire thermal clip of pistol rounds into her because she was that obnoxious. Sadly, these seemed to have no effect. There were points in the subsequent mission where I was all but yelling “Don’t follow the moron” at the pathfinder, but the power of cutscenes compelled him. I cursed when I opened the wrong door on the ship and ended up in an inescapable conversation with her. Some of the other NPCs started out grating, but became less of an irritant over time. Liam was much easier to deal with after I replaced him with a Turian and he wasn’t constantly yapping on during missions.

    I am seriously distrustful of the AI, and I really wish there was a way for the PC to try to get it out of his head. That thing is just plain wrong and the first step down a lot of bad endings for humanity.

    So far, I give it three dead Reapers out of five. It won’t wow you, but it can be enjoyable if you liked Inquisition. You may want to wait for a sale if you’re on the fence.

  • UnCivil Doesn’t Like Anything – DRM

    Intellectual Property is a thorny subject around here. I have trouble discussing it from an abstract philosophical standpoint because I have a financial stake in the matter. Being a content creator, I like knowing there is legal recourse if someone began reselling my work or passing it off as their own. How likely this is to ever happen is unknown, and it is far more likely there will be pirated copies running around instead. It is the issue of content piracy that is central to my complaints today. Early copyright law was essentially an avenue of redress for content piracy, though when the concept was introduced, making additional copies required more of an investment of resources than it does now. As such, purveyors of pirated works would have to sell them to recoup their investment.

    With the insignificant marginal cost of digital copies, the financial element has largely receded into an equally insignificant fraction of the market in pirated content. However, the perception of lost revenue remains. Since the people who are doing the copying are difficult to track down and often have little in the way of money to extract, large content distributors have to look elsewhere to assuage their fears. Thus they invest ludicrous sums in Digital Rights Management technologies. DRM to anyone who doesn’t want to write out the whole darn thing every time. The premise behind DRM is that it will increase the opportunity cost to the pirates with regards to the additional effort required to make a usable or viewable copy.

    There is just one not so tiny problem with this theory. With no financial gain from a successful crack, the motive for pirating has to be something else. Opportunity cost does not exist when the pirates tackle the task of cracking DRM for the challenge of breaking it. As a result, DRM technologies have ended up being measured in time to crack, with the presumption that they will be cracked and that this delay is the window of exclusive profits for the distributor. However, this does not hold true when the content market is examined. The content most commonly associated with DRM is video games. A number of publishers have re-examined the premise upon which the use of DRM has been predicated. They have distributed some of their top titles without DRM ‘protection’ and found no loss in sales. Surprisingly, the user base is still more than willing to pay for quality content from their favorite development houses. Most of the people who pirated these games were either never going to buy them in the first place or could not afford to. And the dubious protection of DRM was worth less than the cost to implement or license it.

    This piece was not inspired by video game DRM, however; it was Amazon’s streaming video DRM requirement. As a paying customer (both a Prime member and someone who’s bought digital video content through that marketplace), I have a contractual right to view the content I’ve paid for. The problem is, I am morally opposed to DRM. I do not like the idea of someone with a (metaphorical) boot on my back telling me what I can and cannot do with the copy I have purchased just because someone, somewhere, might try to distribute it for free. The irony is, after my spat with the computer screen, I ended up going to the pirates to get a copy of the content I already paid for because it was easier. What is the point when the people you are trying to shut out not only get the content on the day of release but provide a better customer experience?

    On a personal note, for as long as I have the option, none of the digital versions of my books will have DRM. If I could, I would also disable it on the audio versions, but Amazon does not give me that option. I’m not terribly worried about pirated versions wandering about. In fact, if someone asks nicely, I’ll usually give them a copy with the only caveat being ‘let me know what you think’. How does this mesh with the statement at the beginning? Well, as I said, digital pirates don’t typically sell it and don’t tend to change the credits.

  • Philosophical Ideal Versus Market Forces

    But definitely his mother. And his underage clones. And his adoptive daughter. And a whole bunch of other ladies.
    Lazarus Long has sex with those girls. And probably that computer.

    There is a Heinlein quote that often crops up in commentary by people around here. It comes from Time Enough For Love:

    A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

    Something about it always bothered me, though for the longest time I was unable to pin it down. On the face of it, there is nothing there but a statement of a philosophical ideal. One that was given the corollary of “Self-reliance is Liberty” during a debate.

    Much like the philosophical ideal of a hermit in his cave giving up physical comforts for spiritual comforts, it is one few actually attain. So why did it bother me? I finally figured it out. The issue is the last part “Specialization is for insects.” The quote itself takes the general philosophy of being well-rounded and self-reliant to the reductio ad absurdum limit and derides specialization. That was the irritant, the bombast and derision the quote taken alone carries. I think I might finally be able to articulate the key problem.

    A Saxon churl was a self-reliant generalist. If there was anything that needed to be done around his farm, he was the one to do it, he had no choice. So he could do pretty much any task needed well enough to survive, albeit in a precarious state of slightly above subsistence farming. In every task, he was limited to the capability of his own two hands, and in most tasks rarely went beyond ‘good enough’ because there was other work that needed doing and he didn’t have time to waste. The one thing he had to outsource because he could not reach ‘good enough’ without devoting far too much time to the matter was blacksmithing. The skills and tools required to reach just ‘good enough’ were quite an investment in time and capital and it was not the rational choice for most churls to invest in. Especially since one smith could supply a goodly number of farms with the ironmongery they needed. Thus you had specialists. It is just one example of a pattern that repeats every societal development starting from the birth of agriculture.

    There is a very simple reason specialists emerge and proliferate. The market in of itself incentivizes specialization. A specialist will always be more efficient on a marginal basis than a generalist in performing the same task. So the specialist will produce for the same effort a higher quality output, and often in less time. Thus specialization proliferates, and people drift away from churldom towards their own niche in a larger society.

    This does not invalidate the ideal of being capable of handling tasks normally handed off to specialists, but it does strain the “Specialization is for insects” assertion. I know the principles and procedures on how to process an animal carcass, but I’m terribly slow, so the rational choice is to let the slaughterhouse handle that most of the time. I have enough basic woodworking skill to frame and erect a simple building, but it would never be as plumb and square as one put up by a professional carpenter. I know enough to be able to build computers from parts and design my household network. This I do because it is a very basic task within my specialization.

    Now I can see a counter-argument that the quote is more about being a well-rounded person and insect specialists are incapable of even knowing the principles of other specializations. But it does not sound that way to me. Also, I can see how it might sound as if I am looking down upon those who strive for self-reliance as a principle. This is not the case. If you are able to live by your principles on such matters, I respect that. But, much like the townsfolk walking past the hermit’s cave, I could not live that way. I am a specialist because rational choices led me down that path.

  • UnCivil Doesn’t Like Anything : Low-Flow Toilets

    Once again a premature curmudgeon yells at clouds.  You have been warned.

    Always appropriate. -sloopy

    When I bought my house the toilet that came with it was too small, to the point of being uncomfortable, and prone to clogging.  So when I had a contractor fixing some exterior woodwork (I knew it would need to be done at the time of purchase, so this was not some shock) I inquired about people to replace the toilet.  (It was a general contractor, so they had plumbers either on staff or in their contact list).  The price quoted was cheap provided I got the actual replacement unit.  Fair enough, it would let me pick what I wanted in a replacement.

    Except for a proper water volume.

    It is illegal to sell a new toilet that uses more than 1.6 gallons per flush.  The canned answer I get to the question “Why?” is always “to conserve water”.  This annoys me on three counts.

    Low flow toilets: scourge of ISIS

    Count one – If a toilet clogs I end up cycling it three to four times in the process of clearing.  Meaning 4.8 to 5.6 gallons go down the drain.  This ends up using more water anyway while wasting my time unclogging the system.

    Count two – I live in New York.  New York is a literal swamp.  Admittedly, one that was drained before the founding of the EPA.  It gets more precipitation per annum than Louisiana (one of the random facts I learned in our less than stellar public schools).  My house in particular is near the confluence of two rivers.  Millions of gallons of water flow past it towards the sea each minute undisturbed.  (The Mohawk spits an average of 5,900 cubic feet of water into the Hudson per second.  Or 2,651,694.5 gallons per minute.  Then add in what’s already in the Hudson from up north…)  We have water to spare.

    Count three – I get billed by the gallon for my water usage and that amount is doubled to cover sewerage.  I am paying for what I use.  I should be the arbiter of how much gets to be allocated to what purpose.  A rule that was written by econuts living in a desert with no idea how physics works just isn’t appropriate to my circumstance in a swamp.

    The only upside of the tale is that innovators will find a way to work around horrible rules until they literally fly in the face of the laws of physics *cough*automobile emissions*cough*.  So the new Kohler is actually fairly reliable.  But just because there are people smarter than the regulators out there is no excuse for stupid rules to be on the books for stupid excuses.