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

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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

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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.

Michaelbrent Collings is a friend and author that I’ve mentioned a lot, and we’ve talked about him on WriterDojo a few times. He’s a horror author, has done screenplays, and most importantly for the topic at hand, makes his living as an indy author, and has done so for a lot of years.

He’s put together an online course for aspiring authors and people trying to make it in the business. Check it out and see if you’re interested. He even put together The Special Larry Portal for my fans, which he made as ridiculous as you can imagine considering my and your reputation. 😀

https://www.bestsellerlife.com/larry-correia-is-partnering-with-bestseller-life-

Normally I don’t plug things like this but I’ve known Michaelbrent for a lot of years, and we’ve done a ton of events and panels together, where he is always the other guy with good practical business advice, without all the flowery fluff and artistic mumbo jumbo designed to make writers sound cooler than we actually are. The dude treats it like a real job, which I respect.

I watched a bunch of these segments, and all the advice he was giving was solid and spot on. So take a look and I hope this might be of use to some of you.

Rescued from Larry’s page on the Book of Faces -Jack

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Just a random rambling thought from a writer about our characters.

Recently I saw my work getting compared to another author, who in proper literati snooty circles, is supposed to be so much better than me (he shall go unnamed, because this isn’t really about him, I’ve got nothing against the dude, and in fact thinking about it this could apply to a whole bunch of different authors too). We’re both fairly well known, only he’s got way more “prestige” (and marketing budget!), and both of our books get mentioned on the internet a lot, but I always get dismissed as the right wing, explosions and monsters and guns, pulpy guy. The other guy is always a *real* writer.

But then I noticed something else. In all those discussions, when talking about the *real* writer, nobody, none of his fans or readers, ever mention any of his characters’ names.

Never.

Meanwhile, any discussion of my stuff, the fans and readers are talking about Owen, Jake, Faye, Ashok, etc. They name character names.

Always.  

Not only do I not see people name any of the character names from those Great Works Of Literature, I kind of doubt that very many of his fans could even remember their names if they tried.

My stuff? Fans talk about the secondary characters by name, ten or fifteen years after the book came out, like they are real people they know. Most of my readers remember names like Milo, Dorcus, Gutch, Skippy, Ed, Gretchen, Melvin, or G-Nome, or they were secondary characters at first but you guys liked them so much they turned into main characters, like Earl, Franks, or Toru. Even in my lesser known works, I still see fans mentioning names like Cleasby or Lorenzo.

When people talk about my books they’ve read, even if the subject is something else, it is always ultimately about how the characters relate to that subject. And then you guys go nuts trying to cast them, because they’re vivid in your head.

Now to be fair to George Martin, who I think is a lazy sack of sloth, he’s good at creating memorable characters. When you see his books discussed, even for those of us who only read the first one and then got bored and didn’t read the rest, we know the character names of all the main characters in the series because when his fans talk about the books, they discuss the characters. There are lots of books I’ve never read, where I can tell you at least the main character’s name (and probably some secondarys) just off of the conversations I’ve seen on the internet.

With Rothfuss, you hear his main character name a lot (Kvote or something) so I know that’s the main dude even though I’ve never read either book. Couldn’t tell you any other ones.

I couldn’t tell you a single name from any John Scalzi or NK Jemesin novel based on that same criteria, even though you see discussions about their books online.

Jim Butcher is good at this. Even if you’ve never read any of his books, everybody who is into books and online with book reading friends knows who Harry Dresden is. Now obviously naming your series after the main character is cheating. 😀 But you get you point. Even if you’ve never read Jim’s stuff, you’ve seen names like Michael Carpenter or Bob show up in fan conversations enough that even if you’ve not read the series, you’ve got the general idea.

I’ve not read many of Brandon Sanderson’s more recent books, but when I see conversations about his work, every single time, fans are naming character names. I have no idea of the context, but his fans clearly do, and they talk like those characters are people they’ve met in real life.

Steve and I have talked about this on the show, but some books aren’t really character based. They are idea based or setting based, and the characters are just kinda there so the idea can proceed. Personally I find that sort of thing boring, and the idea/setting only becomes interesting if I care about the people who inhabit it.

In the case of the online comparison that got me to thinking about this, the *real* writer’s got some GREAT VISION the book is about, but it’s populated with cardboard people the readers will forget about fifteen minutes after they’re done. While the pulp hack knuckle-dragger also has nifty ideas, but then populates it with people the reader files away in their memory as if they’re actual humans they know.

*another one from the Book of Faces, moved here for discussion. -Jack

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Pro Tip: If you see a gun discussion on the internet, and you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, just chill and read, or comment truthfully. Don’t lie, wildly exaggerate, or just make shit up… Because everybody can tell, it is super obvious, you’re not fooling anyone, and it’s just pathetic. It’s funny when it’s coming from a young dude who’s dumb and cocky, but it’s just sad from somebody old enough to know better.

This advice is because I saw a post on a friend’s page, today who is a professional gun builder and worked in the industry in various capacities for probably three decades now, and some dude was telling him about how he routinely and easily uses his Yugo AK to hit soup cans at 200 yards… with iron sights. “it’s called practice dude”.

Now, is this doable? Sure. Just not on demand repeatable, because that soup can (why is it always a soup can or soda can with these guys?) is probably less than half the size of what even an exceptional example of that gun with the best possible 7.62×39 ammo is capable of hitting on its best day, and that front sight is covering up an area about 10x the size of the target at that range.

So it’s not bloody likely, internet rando, regardless of how many tens of thousands of rounds of ammo you swear you’ve put through it, (flawlessly, of course, as all cheap guns on the internet run Just As Good as more expensive guns).

Which brings us to part two of this specific subcategory of nonsense. The inflated round counts. My Brand Y is just as good as your Brand X and I’ve put TEN THOUSAND ROUNDS through it!

Because only on the internet do people buy $300 pistols or $600 rifles, and then put $3000 or $8000 worth of ammo through them. That’s super common behavior apparently.

In actuality guys who do actually shoot a lot know our approximate round counts, and some of us even keep exact log books (I don’t, I’m lazy, I just go by how many cases it is on), because that tells us when we need to do what kind of maintenance (it is amazing how all those 50k XDs on the internet never need new springs) and unless you’re shooting competition seriously, coin chasing, or a training junkie, you’re probably not putting up five figure round counts through a single gun. And most of us who do that stuff for fun, will have multiple different guns and back up guns that match the first one for when it breaks.

Really, most $300 pistols and $600 rifles could spontaneously combust once they hit 500 rounds, and 95% of the people who buy them would never know, because they never hit that round count. Move that to 1000 rounds and it would be like 99%.

The next reason this bullshit doesn’t fly anymore, is we’ve all got cameras on our phones, yet these guys never have videos of their super amazing feats.

My page is full of videos of me doing different drills and challenges. Some come out great. Some I come up lacking. But I post those too, because it’s still educational. There’s plenty of video evidence that I can shoot about as good as I claim that I can shoot. But these dudes who make the internet claims? There’s never video of them, go figure. They must be very private or something.

A little while back I saw where a newb put up a picture of his 10 yard pistol target, and it looked about like what you’d expect a newb’s 10 yard pistol target to look like. No shame in that. We all started somewhere. But along comes some random internet asshole, saying that’s trash, and how he could totally shoot a ten shot group that could be covered by a QUARTER, at 25 yards, FREEHAND, on demand, every time, using his Smith & Wesson Model 36… I shit you not.

And I was like, lol, the fuck you can. 😀 But the dude doubled down. So I said video, or it didn’t happen. Because either you’re a fucking dork ass liar, or congratulations, you are quite possibly one of the greatest shooters on Earth ever in all of human history. And I told him get me that video, and I’ll be happy to introduce him to the marketing people at various companies who would be ecstatic to sponsor him and shower him in free guns and ammo. But sadly his camera was broken or something. Oh well.

I’m pretty decent. I know I’m way better than average. I’ve got to shoot with guys who are actual master and grandmaster level shooters, so I know what really good looks like. We’ve all got actual scored targets, known distances, and shot timers, so what we can do is documented. Yet we’re all shit compared to these random guys on the internet. It’s a miracle such talent goes unnoticed!

Seriously guys, this isn’t the dawn of the internet gun forums anymore. Everyone is onto your bullshit. Shooters in general have gotten more experienced. The bell curve has shifted. Odds are there are several people reading your bullshit, who can easily outshoot you, and have forgotten more than you know. You can’t snow them. Stop trying. It’s just sad.