Larry posted this on the Book of Faces about a week ago and hoo boy has he heard about it. Brought here to archive . It all started with a meme someone made about how Qui Gon and Ashoka getting stabbed with lightsabers were like, totally different. -Jack

---

People are ignorant and need to quit making excuses for shitty writing.

A bunch of dumb people are saying crap like “it just cauterized the wound!” or “You don’t know how light sabers work so shut up your hater face!” or “you don’t even know if she’s human and maybe they are built different!”

Let’s break this down for the stupid people who will gargle crap on demand because they’ve learned to not expect any internal logical consistency in their world building. Thanks, Disney.

What do we know about light sabers? As in established cannon for the universe. They can cut through damn near anything in a flash. Like not just lopping limbs off humanoids, but cutting through steel beams, or chopping the wings off space ships. And we know they do this cutting action through heat, like Qui-Gon plasma torching his way through blast doors that appear to be battleship armor plate level thick, and turning them into sparks and molten metal.

So light sabers fuck shit up. That’s established.

For people who don’t grasp basic physics, units of measurements, or who’ve never used a branding iron, cauterizer, cutting torch, or plasma cutter (used all of those, and apparently nobody who writes for Disney has never worked on a farm) we are talking wildly different amounts of energy.

These numbers aren’t exact. I’m going off memory.

-To cauterize a wound, that’s around 400 degrees.

-A cutting torch is like 3000-6000 degrees, depending one what kind and what you’re cutting.

-A plasma torch is something truly batshit insane, like up to 40,000 degrees if I recall correctly. It’s truly fucking nuts. AND it cuts through stuff at a fraction of the power of a light saber.

As you can see, these are very different things.

So besides apparently being magic and having some kind of containment field to not roast the wielder, in order to slice open space ships like that you are using some sort of energy like on the upper end of things.

If you heat an object to 400 degrees and shove it into a human torso, they’re basically fucked, because congratulations, everything you know about cauterizing is stupid and wrong too. We used to burn the stump holes when we dehorned cattle. It’s good for searing shut little blood vessels in a small area (and burning hair, horn, and blood is the WORST SMELL EVER). Big blood vessels, it don’t do shit. And if you shove it THROUGH a human, great, you seared shut some little blood vessels, and ROASTED ALL THEIR ORGANS. Which is BAD.

Rambo pouring gun powder into his bullet wounds isn’t how that works. Rambo would still be bleeding out, only with the added agony of a third degree burn hole through him.

And that’s a candy ass blow torch temp, which doesn’t cut through steel beams. It gets worse from there.

Heat an object up to cutting torch energy levels and shove it through a human torso, and they’re going to die horribly and screaming, because humans are bags of water and that just turned rapidly into steam, and every cell anywhere near that 3000 degree shaft of death just exploded. And I’m talking like literal cooking off and detonating level of steam pressure. Ask anybody who has ever taken a welding class what happens when you then take the piece of metal and shove it into the water barrel. Now imagine that inside your lung and intestines. Realistically people standing five feet away are going to get splattered with a hot red mist.

And that right there is why all the mewling about “but you don’t know if she’s human like us” is stupid. Is she sorta mammal like? Does she have liquid and organs inside? Well, she’s fucked. Even if there was nothing but a decorative fat deposit there, she’s still fucked, because that’s gonna blow out the side, probably on fire.

Now, let’s move it up to plasma power, like chopping the wings off space ships and cutting armored metal robots in half with one swing, and shove that ridiculous bit of molecular fuckery through a human body. Like you’re done. As in done, done. And the fragmentation of your flaming bones will endanger bystanders.

So the only possible explanation here is that blonde sith chick has a variable power light saber, and she had it on low battery mode, and unless that was actually said somewhere in the show (don’t know, I gave up entirely on Disney Star Wars part way through Boba Fett and never looked back) then their writing sucks.

Or maybe that same containment field around the actual energy beam that keeps the user from cooking themselves, somehow also protects the organs on a puncture wound by containing the heat to the middle? But the containment field cuts through everything else, so only the death beam inside actually cuts, and Qui Gon just shut that off when he needed to melt through a space ship. Sure, that’s a way better explanation than the stupid “but muh cauterizing” bullshit, and it’s still a crappy handwavium excuse.

Quit making excuses for stupid lazy writing. It just encourages more stupid lazy writing. They can do better.

---

Update:

People are still making excuses about the light saber post.

Apparently if I’d consulted with medical professionals I’d know that the thermodynamic characteristics of fat make it resistant to heat!

My entire response to this point is this hour long loop of Qui-Gon near instantly turning several feet of armored plate into lava. 😀  

Now I didn’t go to medical school, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that thing don’t give a fuck about your thermodynamic properties. 😀

Larry wrote this on Facebook. I saw it and thought ‘this one definitely needs to be archived on the blog instead of buried on the Book of Faces’ -Jack

---

I’m so weary of black pilled doomerism:

“Everything sucks. This is the worst it has ever been. Nothing matters. Nothing you do matters. Defeat is inevitable. Failure is inevitable. Everything used to be better. Nothing ever improves. Things only get worse. We can only lose. Winning is impossible. You can’t better yourself. Your efforts don’t matter. Everyone will let you down. Your only community is other people who are equally miserable. If anyone says there is hope they are a liar and must be attacked. If anyone else has made it, they cheated somehow. The lessons others have learned cannot be applied to you. Your situation is hopeless. If their situation is not hopeless, it is because their situation is somehow better than yours. You will never be loved. You cannot give love. Everyone around you is unworthy of love. Every person in the world is worse now than they were at some unspecified time in the past. The past was a rosy place and everything was comparable and better. You cannot find happiness. If someone else has happiness it is a lie. Or they achieved happiness at some time before and everything has changed for the worse since then making you achieving that happiness now impossible. Do not listen to real people. Listen to fake internet people only. The ones trying to sell you a seminar are the only ones who really care about you. Doom. Doom DOOM. DOOOOOOM.”

There. I just summed up several thousand social media posts for you.

What a bunch of miserable, bitter, loser ass cranks. Whatever the sub culture is, whatever their pet peeve is, it’s always this same schtick. Holy shit, it is tiresome. Get over yourselves.

Is life hard? Yeah. It’s fucking hard.

But you ain’t milking cows, so it could be worse.

You are the master of your own happiness. Me telling you that life doesn’t have to suck and you can improve your situation isn’t some Pollyanna nonsense. Shit is hard. Shit can be harder or easier depending on the choices you make. Some shit really sucks right now and is all sorts of screwed up… So?

Sometimes life kicks you in the balls. Sometimes you get hit by a truck or get terminal brain cancer. Most of you won’t.

Until then, do the best you can and look for opportunities to do better. Some stuff you can improve. Good. Improve it. Some stuff you can’t. That sucks. Some stuff is beyond your power to do anything about. Deal with it as best you can.

And now the doomers will yell at me variations all that bullshit I put in quotes. The details will vary, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. Insert DOOM here. Doom can be for any topic, from dating to politics to jobs to whatever. It doesn’t matter. Pick one and there’s gonna be somebody who is miserable about it and won’t be content until everyone else is just as miserable as they are.

They’re like CS Lewis’ demons.

I know it is unfashionable to be an optimist nowadays, but there are people in gulags who sound happier than most of the Americans you run into on social media nowadays.

Because honestly guys, life is pretty fucking awesome most of the time. Yeah, there’s a lot of bullshit out there, the world is really screwed up in a lot of ways, and if you fixate on those you’re gonna be pretty miserable.

Sarah Hoyt once referred to me as “a happy warrior” because I enjoy fighting. I don’t mind conflict. I know that some stuff sucks, but you can make it better if you club it hard enough. That’s probably why this perpetual whining defeatism galls me so much. It’s like the opposite of being a happy warrior, like bitter pacifist instead, moping and complaining, and worse, trying to discourage others from actively doing anything to make it better.

You guys know I’m right. Pick whatever topic it is you’re passionate about and you know exactly the kind of people I’m talking about. It’s cancerous.

Plus, the doomers are usually full of shit anyway. If they actually believed what they were selling online, they’d have checked out. Instead they are extra invested in the debate (getting back to the demons of CS Lewis there). If the topic was politics, if they actually believed what they were saying, they wouldn’t be on Twitter yelling at people that all is lost why bother… they’d be improving their apocalypse bunker and digging more booby traps.

A lot of these guys get off on the doom. Doom is their identity.

And then there’s the doom profiteers. For only $19.99 a month you can subscribe to my newsletter of real secret manhood/success/knowledge/profit. These jerks are out there making a buck off of other people’s depression. Of course they’re gonna spread doom. Doom is good for business.

But Correia, you’re so full of shit! Why can’t you provide an easy answer to my specific situation of doom! Well first off, I don’t even know you J Rando Fake Name, or your actual situation. And unlike the doom profiteers, I’m not selling a self help seminar. I’m just some optimistic dork out there telling people that they have the power to make their lives better than they are now.

Larry shared an update on the Book of Faces recently- thought you might be interested… -Jack

---

This month I did the detail outline and planning for Graveyard of Demons (there are a lot of complicated threads to tie up!) and I just finished writing the first 20k words. The plan is to have the book done and to Toni by the end of the year.

I’m so pumped for you guys to see the end of this series. This story is so bad ass. 😀

(and because I know people are gonna ask whenever I mention this series, no, I do not know the Tower of Silence audio book release date yet! Balls were dropped and Tim Gerrard Reynolds is a very in demand narrator. As soon as I know when it’ll be up for pre order I will spam the internet!)

SPOILERS –

Like seriously, if you haven’t read Tower of Silence, stop.

SPOOOOOILERS!

As we left off at the end of Tower of Silence, Ashok had escaped the prison of Fortress, killed their Ram, and may have inadvertently made himself their ruler. He’s not sure. It is a strange place.

Now armed with a new Angruvadal– and we learned a lot more about the nature of Black Steel–Ashok is searching for his prophet Thera, who the enigmatic Mother Dawn told him that he would find her in the city of Kanok, in Great House Makao.

Except along the way, Ashok begins to see signs that the demons are up to something… and not just near the sea, but rather far inland.

After destroying the Capitol aqueduct, Thera was separated from the Sons of the Black Sword, and captured by the traitorous priest Javed, who was secretly an Inquisition Witch Hunter. Only she was then claimed by the Inquisition’s warrior caste escort, which happened to be led by her former husband, Dhaval. Who is really, really vengeful, and looking forward to her very public shaming and execution.

As Thera’s fate is being fought over, her only way out of the dungeons of Great House Makao is by getting executed as a rebel traitor, or getting sent back to the Capitol to be dissected by the Inquisition so they can rip the Voice out of her head.

Well, there’s a third option. And that’s trusting the false priest, Javed, who is now claiming to be wracked with guilt and truly converted after one of the gods appeared to him in person on the road to the Capitol. So he’s either playing mind games with her for some Inquisition end, or he’s quite possibly insane… or he might just be telling her the truth.

Grand Inquisitor Omand has taken control of the Capitol, while under the guise of fighting the demon scourge and investigating the pillar of fire in the north, his puppet king invades Vadal, the only Great House that’s got the political power to stop Omand’s goals. Only Omand is distracted, because his secret deal with a demon to exterminate the casteless has finally paid off, and the ultimate source of magical power and immortality is now within his reach, in the northern jungles of Gujara.

Meanwhile, his puppet king has a mind of his own, and Devedas, now crowned with the new office of Raj, has his own dangerous ideas of how to restore order in the north. It does not help that he believes the woman he loves, Radamantha, has been held against her will Thakoor Harta Vadal… Which is partly true, but Devedas doesn’t know that Rada also might have inadvertently just armed his enemy Great House Vadal with a weapon from the ancient world.

Defending Great House Vadal from the armies of Sarnobat in the east, Vokkan in the west, and the newly formed army of the Raj from the south, is Phontho Jagdish. The man who just wanted to be a good soldier keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time… And that’s not even getting into the complexities of his looming wedding to the Lady Shakti. 😀 (and everybody who was at the infamous Indian Wedding panel at LibertyCon knows what I decided to do there!)

The Great Extermination served its purpose for Omand to deceive the demons, but once a fire that big is started, it will not burn itself out. Now that genocide threatens to tear the Lok apart, and that was before Gutch started mass producing guns on the mainland and handing them out like candy!

But the demons were convinced that the casteless–who are the descendants of legendary Ramrowan–have been wiped out. Now the army of hell is on the move. Why did the casteless matter so much to them? Why did they wait for them to be destroyed before using the ancient’s underground passages to invade the land?

The time of The Law is over. This is the dawn of a new age. But will it be another age of man? Or a time of demons?

Yeah… I’m pretty pumped about this one. 😀
If all goes according to plan, the 5th and final book of the series will be out right about ten years after Son of the Black Sword. That’s pretty damn cool for an epic fantasy series like this.

This one of Larry’s definitely needed preserving away from the Book of Faces- Jack

---

I see some dumb shit takes on Twitter but there was one this morning that made me snort laugh. One of those pseudo intellectual, wannabe philosophers (dork named himself “commodore”) was barfing up some hot takes about “warriors”, and said that the Amish and the Mormons can’t be leaders, only obedient peasants because we’re so peaceful that we don’t have warriors…

hahaha

haahahaaa

hahaaahahahahahaa

snort

Okay, I can’t speak for the Amish, but this dude has clearly never met a Mormon. We can be accused of a great many things, but pacifistic ain’t among them!

Commodore Dorkface is getting rightfully ratioed to pieces, but just  in case you guys don’t know, there is a deep and abiding desire to shoot stuff and blow shit up among my people. 😀

I looked.  The church actually has a FAQ for how to squeeze in your missionary service if you’re active duty or reserves.  

In my ward right now I’ve got a couple of rangers, former arty, infantry, engineer, a U2 pilot, and a guy who worked for an OGA, and one of my young men is currently in Basic. That’s pretty normal. I’ve met Mormon Marines, SEALs, Green Berets, EOD, pilots, tankers, artillery, drone operators, crypto-commo, combat search and rescue, submariners, and a whole bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.

I was merely a cake eating civilian contractor who made DoD spreadsheets not suck (and they ALL sucked) but if you want to get super warlike, my father in law’s (who served as a Mormon bishop) contractor career was in NUCLEAR MISSILES. When it comes to warlike, that’s pretty much top tier! Those of you who have worked in contracting, you know that it’s actually the Mormon Industrial Complex, there’s so damned many of us.

Because of the 19th SFG out of Camp Williams there’s a running joke that the Mormons are the only American religion with their own Special Forces Group… Having worked with those guys, that’s actually fair. I know when they first invaded Afghanistan, my friend the (Catholic) battalion commander called the church to see if Mormons would send like an apostle or something to give them some kind of blessing because so many of his dudes were Mormon that he figured it would be a great motivator.

Apparently we’ve got at least 10 Mormons with the MoH.

BYU has the largest ROTC program in the country. (and most of us think BYU is too liberal!) * EDIT: apparently this is for regular schools, and there’s some kind of tier system. I don’t know how it works!

Heck, in our current top senior leadership, our man in charge was an Air Force flight surgeon, and we’ve got another who was a German fighter pilot (and I believe he was crazy enough to fly the “erd nagel”). Way back when I joined the church one of the guys in charge had flown a B-29* over Germany and another had been a Marine on Iwo Jima. The next prophet after that had served on a destroyer in the Pacific.  EDIT 2: apparently that’s B-24 not B-29 but I don’t know my classic warplanes either!

Mormons being pacifists is one of those bizarre ideas that I just can’t wrap my brain around. On the civilian side we’re one of the most heavily armed demographics on Earth.

Hell, the number one movie in America right now is about a Mormon who decided to go to war against child sex traffickers. We really don’t have a problem if bad people get shot!

Dude… JOHN MOSES BROWNING.

This is a fundamental historical and deeply philosophical thing for us too. Our scriptures are full of wars and people willing to die for their beliefs, country, and family. We’re the only US religion that got INVADED BY THE US ARMY FOR BEING TOO UPPITY. 😀

The most prolific and successful gun fighter of the old west was Orrin Porter Rockwell, who was basically the living avatar of FAFO. He was so good at killing that he was once accused of trying to assassinate the governor of Missouri, and his defense was basically the dude lived so obviously it hadn’t been me shooting at him, and that was so obvious the jury ACQUITTED HIM.  😀

I’m not gonna debate religious philosophy on the internet, because whenever I mention my religious beliefs on here inevitably some dork is gonna show up and bark at me, but please, for the love of John Moses Browning, if you’re gonna say dumb shit about Mormons… at least get that part right! We’re used to being accused of all sorts of goofy nonsense, but we’re certainly not candy asses!

Larry’s thoughts, scavenged from the Book of Faces- Jack

---

All this talk lately of what it really means to live in a “small town” because a bunch of dorks are outraged over some tractor rap pop song is causing me to pontificate about living in a small town.

I just looked up the census data for the town I was born and raised in, El Nido, California.

Population 331. 😀

Then my senior year I moved to Delta, Utah.

Population 3,436… which means it grew a lot since I was there!

Ironically, Delta felt a lot more isolated because it is way out in the west desert, while El Nido was only half an hour from an actual city, Merced, where I went to high school.  Delta has a handful of other small farm towns around it, and is an hour from I-15, and then an hour up that before you get to an actual city.

Then I lived in a small city for college (52k) and one big metroplex (116k suburb of a 1.25 million metro) for my business career, then promptly moved back to a rural area (pop 2,309) as soon as I had a commutable job, and then once I was a full time writer I moved even further out into the country to the lands too far for commuters to go. (which is too small to get its own census pop division!)

While I was a missionary I lived in small towns in Alabama and Mississippi, then in the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery. For business I’ve traveled to 45 US states (just need Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, and Maine) and every major US metroplex except Miami-Dade. Some of these big cities I’ve been to enough times I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on knowing my way around a few of them, and most of those have deteriorated badly over the last decade.  

I also recognize that visiting a place or being a tourist certainly doesn’t make you an expert on the culture. The shorter the visit, the less you actually know it. Judging by most of the dorky takes I’ve heard lately I’m assuming some of these people drove through a suburb in Connecticut once so now they’re experts on farm living.

So when I see all these provincial city dorks pontificating about what life is like in small town America, I laugh my ass off.

tHeY dOnT gEt mAiL! – Yes. We’ve had mail since the pony express.

tHe liBrary cLoSeD oN sUnDay! – A. You fuckers don’t read books anyway, so quit putting on airs. B. You know where else I found lots of stuff is closed on Sunday? Cultural backwaters like London and Paris!

(seriously, Paris was the worst. If you’re staying there over the weekend, buy supplies on Saturday!)

tHeRe r NoT pRomPT mEdiCaL cAre! – dude, even small towns usually have some kind of medical center, or we drive… You know what’s shit medical care? One time I was in Times Square in NYC and some dude had a heart attack. They loaded him in an ambulance and then for the next HALF AN HOUR I matched pace ON FOOT with that ambulance and its wailing siren because it couldn’t escape the Manhattan traffic, and New Yorkers don’t give a fuck if you die, they still ain’t gonna clear the intersection for you.  

My experiences with cities are that people are less likely to give a shit, and more likely to hate each other, and more likely to meddle in each other’s business. That’s for all of them, but the bluer the city, the more likely you are to have random hobos throw rocks at you, or have some psychotic lady stop your car on the way out of the parking garage because she’s taking a shit in the exit lane.

Cities are not created equal. Shit that gets taken for granted in New York would cause an apocalyptical freak out in Salt Lake. It is all about the level of bullshit, corruption, filth, and stupidity, the locals are willing to put up with.

And on the Bumpkin Pride side of the equation, small towns are not created equal either. Some are economically depressed, poverty stricken, crab bucket, hell holes of despair, where the number one growth industry is cooking meth or stealing copper wire. And others, like the one I choose to live in now, really are all that cool, America Fuck Yeah, mom and apple pie, places where the neighbors are actually cool and don’t put up with bullshit.

So I really wish people would quit taking a country with a third of a billion unique individuals, from a hundred cultures, spread across thousands of wildly divergent jurisdictions, and act like they’re all either an apple or an orange.

That said, I prefer apples, and you couldn’t pay me enough to move back to a metroplex. 😀 I’ll visit, see the cool stuff, eat at the good restaurants, and then happily go back to a place with more cows than people.