Check it out. You can vote for all of your favorite books of the last year here: http://www.sfsite.com/columns/neil384.htm  I saw this on Toni Weiskopf’s forum on Baen’s Bar today. Monster Hunter Legion is eligible for this. It is simple, free, and the instructions are at the link.

However, this does not excuse you from participating in today’s VERY SPECIAL MESSAGE (complete with sad puppies and Sarah McLachlan music) http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo-part-2-a-very-special-message/

 

Also, on a totally unrelated note, it looks like I will be going on a national news program this weekened to talk about the gun issue. I will post more details soon.

As promised, I will continue to bug you guys about this until the end of the month. If you are not aware of my life-quest to make literati critics spontaneously combust, please read this first:

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo/

You know that Sarah McLachlan commercial on TV where they play the sad song and show injured puppies and dying kitties and it totally screws up your whole day? Yeah… Please play this song as you read the following VERY SPECIAL MESSAGE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSz16ngdsG0

Every year thousands of pulp writers slave away in the word mines for as little as five cents a word…

(show picture of very sad looking author, sitting in bathrobe, listlessly typing, surrounded by empty cans of Coke Zero and cheesy puff wrappers)

Yet, despite providing hours of explosion filled enjoyment to their readers, most pulp novelists will never be recognized by critics, and in fact, they will be abused by the literati elite.

(show extra sad looking pulp novelist, more than likely an overweight guy with a beard)

Literary critics stuffed this pulp novelist into a dryer, and ran at high temperatures for nearly five minutes without even a sheet of fabric softener.

For generations literary critics and college English departments have looked down at pulp novelists and refused to give them awards…

(show old-timey picture of HP Lovecraft, show old-timey picture of Robert E. Howard, show old-timey picture of Robert E. Howard punching out a Tyrannosaurs Rex  while a woman in a chainmail bikini holds onto his leg)

Even though those guys are totally freaking awesome, and Conan the Barbarian is a thousand times more awesome than the Great Gatsby, you wouldn’t know it by listening to literary snobs.

The hoighty-toighty literati snobs prefer heavy handed, ham fisted, message fiction.

(show picture of sci-fi readers giving up in frustration as they read yet another award winning book where evil corporations, right wing religious fanatics, and a thinly veiled Dick Cheney have raped the Earth until all the polar bears have died and the plot consists entirely of academic hipster douchebags sitting around and talking about their feelings)  

Much like Michael Vick, literary critics hate pulp novelists and make them fight in vicious underground novelist fighting arenas. I actually did pretty good, until Dan Wells made a shiv from a sharpened spoon and got me in the kidney. Never turn your back on the guy that writes about serial killers, I tell you what.

Only you can stop literary snobs and their abuse of pulp novelists…

For as little as $60 you can become a voting member of WorldCon and nominate something awesome and filled with dragons, explosions, guns, heroism, actual good and evil, and a plot where stuff actually happens. And unlike Sarah McLachlan’s sad puppy commercial, your donation also gets you a whole big ton of free eBooks and all of the nominated works, worth more than the cost of joining.

Details: http://www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/index.shtml

Application: http://www.lonestarcon3.org/paypal_test/display_entry_new.php

And once you’ve done that, you can nominate. The nominations stay open for a few more months, so I’ll post about some of the things I think which are awesome, but which normally don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.  This includes a bunch of different categories, and you’d get your say and nominate up to five of your favorite things for each!  http://www.lonestarcon3.org/hugo-awards/hugo-nom.html

So please tell your friends. I will continue to bug you about this for the rest of the month. Do not make me play the sad puppy song again…

 

The cool thing about hate mail is that when you respond to one whiney little crybaby you inevitably get another one in the comments. Around here I’ve got this sort of perpetual hate mail machine. If only I could harness the power of liberal angst. I could probably power my house just off the friction from all the hand wringing.

After this post last week, http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/more-fun-with-hate-mail-time/#comment-23186 I got this bunch of nonsense from Bags. I responded in the thread with a short post, but then decided to share with you guys. Y’all seem to enjoy these posts, and who am I to disappoint the Monster Hunter Nation?

Well, Larry, I’m sure you would have pulled yourself up from the bootstraps if you were born in a slum in India, too. You know, India has a much smaller, much less powerful government that taxes much less than the american one.

And thus begins an exercise in Reductio Ad Absurdum. What that term means is that when you are clueless and have no intelligent way to respond to someone’s argument, you take their argument and then stretch it out into absolutely ridiculous territory to try and disprove it.

Reductio Ad Absurdum is pretty much the favorite argument of the left. You think the government is wasteful and spends too much money on social programs? Then obviously you want all the old grandmas to starve to death in miserable agony. You are in favor of the 2^nd Amendment? Then obviously you want UZIs in vending machines at elementary schools and blood to run in the streets. Lefties love doing this, and they do it so much that it is the default setting for what passes for political commentary in our country now. For example, think of last week’s news coverage about Rick Santorum once he tied in Iowa… Because he’s a staunch Catholic in his personal life he obviously wants to declare Catholic Sharia law and will ban birth control (because everybody knows that is exactly how our system of government works!).

In the mind of the media, Republican Catholics = Spanish Inquisition II. Democrat Catholics = Totally Awesome (unless they get in the way of Michelle Obama’s political ambitions in Chicago, then they are just no good paddy crackers). Of course Rick Santorum, because he has personal beliefs, will declare Sharia Law in America! Meanwhile the actual people that want to declare Sharia Law in America don’t get talked about, because that would be culturally insensitive…

Now that we’ve got that cleared up, back to our hate mail…

It also happens to have de facto control of around 70% of its land-mass, while the rest is controlled by armed gangs.

Like most countries with really strict gun control. Go figure.

People starve in India, but you wouldn’t have been one of them, because I’m sure you’d have improved your situation. Somehow.

Sadly, I could not live in India, because despite my love of curry, I am simply terrified of the Monkey Man.

Probably, since you don’t believe in hand-outs,

This is an interesting one to me. Because I’m against the welfare state, the hate mailers always assume that I’m against helping altogether. Not at all. I actually give a relatively high percentage of my income to charity. (way higher than Joe Biden, that’s for sure). The thing is to those of us on the right, there is a huge difference between choosing to GIVE money for something, rather than having someone else TAKE it from us, to then give to people/causes that we personally have moral qualms with.

you wouldn’t go through any kind of publicly funded education system.

I’ll have you know that I’m a proud graduate of the California Public School System and Junior Gladiatorial Academy, thank you very much! I didn’t actually learn much outside of Ag and Shop, but man, I can take a punch with the best of them. (sadly, looking back, I learned a lot more by reading library books on the long bus ride than I ever did in class).

Wandering off topic again, I think public education is a vast joke. You want to be filled with rage? Watch Waiting for Superman. Same guy that did Inconvenient Truth, only since this one poked at a sacred liberal institution it didn’t get truckloads of awards.  

You’d have probably got a loan and gone private. Oh wait, you wouldn’t have been able to get a loan. But you’d have worked your ass off, got some relevant skills – oh wait, you’re living in a slum, and you don’t believe in hand-outs, so no public transport means you can’t get to jobs that are further than 10 miles bike-ride.

One of my associates read this post before I approved it. He looked at me and said, “Knowing you, you would’ve worked your way up to head slum lord or something.” I took that as a great compliment. My goal would have been to work really hard until I made enough rupees to put in a Monkey Man proof fence around my slum.

Sucks to be you.

Actually, my life is really awesome.

People like you don’t realize how privileged you are,

Not really. I totally recognize how blessed I am. I was born in America, the land of opportunity. That alone gives me a huge advantage over the rest of the world’s population. All those little whiney We Are the 99% morons are the ones that don’t realize how privileged they are, because to the rest of the Earth, they are the 1%. “Oh no, somebody needs to pay my student loans” vs. “Man, I really wish I didn’t have malaria and gigantic Gambian rats gnawing on my children”.

The thing is, the reason why we’re privileged is that we live in the greatest nation that has ever existed. Why? Because it was founded and built upon freedom and capitalism. I’d like to keep it that way so that my grandkids and great-grandkids can also be born into privilege. The other option would be to continue spending America into oblivion, because then we can all suck equally.

and how damn hard it is to pull yourself out if you’re not born out in the first place.

Hmm… No. That’s just more loser talk like last week’s defeatist loser. My position is that despite how you start out, you can go on to improve your lot in life. That’s my fundamental belief. Americans do it every single day. Your response is to bring up someone born in the worst slum on Earth as an example that you can’t. The thing is, I’m talking about America. Shockingly enough, I don’t have too many blog readers in places that don’t have things like computers, electricity, or literacy.

So, sticking with America, barring the extreme circumstances of your birth on the bell curve (i.e. you were born a radioactive mutant or have flippers), you can AND SHOULD improve your lot in life. I grew up rather poor* and had some early strikes against me, but I did something about it. That’s not so weird. Most of us that are doing okay right now have similar stories. I’ve got one neighbor on Yard Moose Mountain that is a doctor, but he grew up with seven siblings in what was literally a tin roof shack. That’s life in the greatest nation in history.  

*on this note, I once had someone I argued with on this blog try to prove that I had not been poor growing up, but had in fact, grown up rich. (Which as all liberals know is the only way you can end up rich) So he went to Google Earth and stuck in Correia Dairy, Modesto California, which revealed a huge, very nice looking farm. Ah ha! Gotcha! And he posted that as “proof” on his blog… However I’m not from Modesto. I’m from El Nido, which is in Merced County. And the San Joaquin Valley is filled with Portuguese families and Correia is the last name commonality equivalent to Tanner in the English world, so it is relatively common there. Besides, if you go to Google Earth the farm I grew up on is now underneath a very large chicken plant now anyway. This moron’s research talents were wasted on me. He really should be writing books about Sarah Palin or something.  

 You’re very eloquent, but there’s a hell of a lot of sloppy thinking going on.

Disagreeing with liberal dogma = sloppy thinking. Gotcha. And I must have been born eloquent, because everybody knows you can’t learn a skill like that. Especially Indians*, because they’re too busy being terrorized by Monkey Man to learn to write good.

*in reality I’ve got a lot of respect for India. That’s a country that is not dinking around. They’re serious about getting their crap together and they are in it to win it. Same can be said for Brazil and many of the other up and comers. If we don’t stop our venture into socialism, then in a couple of generations when we’ve managed to completely destroy our productive class and America is sliding into irrelevancy, I’m sure our grandkids will be able to get jobs working at call centers to provide customer service to consumers in New Delhi.

If your going to complain about your tax bill, complain about military spending.

Obviously not a long time reader. I’ve worked for the Army and the Air Force. Believe me, you give me a team of Assault Auditors and control of the budget committee and I could do some slashing.

That’s where most of your tax dollar is going.

Actually, no. That’s not true. Medicare and Social Security are bigger than the defense budget. But of those three things, only one of them is mandated as a federal responsibility in the Constitution.

The hand-outs are pennies in comparison, and they’re mostly to stop old biddies from dying of hypothermia come winter.

See? What did I tell you? All those entitlements that are bankrupting us? Cut any of them and all the old people will die! Why do you hate old people and puppies, Mr. Correia? And sunshine and Monkey Man! Why are you such a hate monger?

Also, taxation’s more complex than a choice between high or low.

Really? I’ve only been a professional accountant for over a decade… I never realized that taxes were complicated! Herp de derp!

Many european companies tax middle-class guys less than america does, but still pay for poor old bastard’s healthcare because they tax the top ten percent more.

Do these guys actually pay any attention to the world around them, or do they just float through life in a bubble of wishful thinking? The world is what I think it is. La la la la. Europe is doing AWESOME! They’ve got so much money that all the Greeks can afford to retire at thirty and still have money left over to pay disability to all their pedophiles!*

*Germany could not be reached for comment. The country couldn’t pay its internet bill because they were too busy paying for everyone else’s good time.

This link: http://xkcd.com/980/ is pretty interesting in this regard. You can get a good idea of where the money is, where the tax money is coming from and who’s being hit hardest, and so on.

Hardest hit? I just wrote a 4^th quarter withholding check big enough to buy a new Hyundai. That’s a groovy infographic. Xkcd is usually pretty clever. I have absolutely no idea what your point is though, other than you think that posting links with numbers on them makes you seem smart or something.

So that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll be receiving more hate mail soon, probably from someone who thinks I unfairly criticized Monkey Man and his reign of terrible scratching.

There has been a lot of really interesting stuff going on lately.

IN NATIONAL NEWS

Senator Robert Byrd died the same day that the Supreme Court said that a black man could own a gun. Coincidence?  (shamelessly stolen from Michael Z. Williamson). Some people got mad at me for my post after Ted Kennedy died. Apparently I was insensitive, (who me?) but like I said then, if you’re a complete scumbag when you’re alive, you don’t turn into a saint the second they put you in the ground.

The media coverage of Byrd has been so positive that at first I’d thought maybe some monk who raised orphaned puppies by the same name had passed away. But nope, it was that same piece of crap that recruited people for the KKK.  One report said that he was a “champion of civil rights.” I know that may make your head hurt, but remember my first rule of racism. If a liberal does it, it can’t be racist. Anything a conservative does is automatically racist. Mark my words, a couple of years from now, a Republican will say something nice about Robert Byrd, and the press will run him out of office for supporting a racist hate monger.

Just in case you need a refresher.

Republican uses the word “macaca” (and I don’t even know what the hell that is. It’s like calling somebody a “chuwero” )  = RACIST and unelectable.

Democrat was a recruiter for the KKK = NOT RACIST so elect him for 42 years.

You know though, as much as I complain about the current congress, during this last session we’ve lost Kennedy, Murtha, and the Grand Wizard. I’m strangely okay with this. I may be insensitive, but I’d rather be insensitive than a socialist.

Meanwhile, the Gulf of Mexico is still filling with oil. Don’t worry though, because the federal government is on the scene to make sure that none of the skimmer boats are improperly tagged or lack sufficient fire extinguishers (per regulation 18-765-C-subparagraph 4), no sand bars were built without proper environmental impact studies being performed first, and no union jobs were threatened by volunteers from foreign nations. The only jobs that will be lost are all of the rest of them because Obama’s response was to shut down the other industries in the area that hadn’t exploded.

Two months into the crisis and Obama’s total response consisted of telling Matt Lauer he was going to kick somebody’s ass, just before he violated the Constitution to steal a company’s money without due process, went golfing six times (no, seriously), and is pushing cap & trade. (because that’s gonna do what, exactly?) Just remember everyone, the federal government under George Bush didn’t evacuate the entire city of New Orleans within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina because he hated black people or he was incompetent (I can’t keep all of these straight). Look, I don’t expect, nor want, the federal government to be the response to everything, but the double standard gets a little silly sometimes.

The Supreme Court came through again, (usual 5 vs 4) and told Mayor Daly and the city of Chicago to suck it. Their idiotic gun ban was struck down. This is very good news. Even though it doesn’t mean the control freaks will stop pushing this stuff, but it is another nail in their coffin. I first became political because of the gun issue. I was a young gun nut during the Clinton years. Things were much bleaker then. We’ve made a lot of strides in the gun rights arena since then.

Elena Kagan/Kevin Smith (oh, when will they stop living the lie?) is still going through the senatorial dog and pony show necessary to nominate her/him to the Supreme Court. It is so boring that Al Franken is sleeping through it. Why do we even do these things? They just get up there and lie, “Oh, I respect all the amendments! Oh, I just love the military!” Then they get their lifetime appointment of Constitution raping. (in his last case, Stevens actually argued that it is okay to infringe a right, as long as it has been infringed for a long time, because then the right has been “redefined”) Well, I suppose the hearings are worth something, because if it hadn’t been for Sotomeyor, I would never have been able to start calling myself a Wise Latino, and that just cracks me up.

IN WORLD NEWS

It turns out that while America is busy trying to turn into Big Dumb Canada, other nations are still In It To Win It. A Russian spy ring was caught, and this is shocking because Putin seems like such a nice guy. These people were in deep, and judging by the Facebook pictures, some were Bond-Girl level hot. That’s old school espionage right there. I can respect that.

I’ll say this for Russia. I’ve actually got more respect for Vladamir Putin than I do for Barack Obama. Now don’t get me wrong. Putin is super-villain evil. I’m not saying he’s good in any way, but I can respect ruthless strength. Barack Obama is a flailing pansy in comparison. Putin takes his shirt off to skin bears. Obama holds Paul McCartney concerts. Putin has executed dissidents and kung-fu fought MI-6 agents in a secret volcano base. Obama gets cranky and whines whenever people dare question him. Putin uses his cyborg laser eye to vaporize people who dare question him, and then he goes back to his harem of sexy KGB seductresses with codenames like Iron Maiden and Black Widow. Sadly, Russia’s leader would kick our leader’s ass in a fight, and that’s just sad.  They’ve got the final boss fight from a Chuck Norris movie and we’ve got Steve Urkel.

Meanwhile, a bunch of left wing hoodlums are burning stuff at the G-20, just like they do. Every. Single. Year.  Why is it that the media is so deathly afraid of us right wingers being violent, though we hardly ever are, yet lefties and socialists shut down a city for a week every year and nobody notices because it’s so ho-hum. It’s probably because if a single local Tea-Party got into a mood we could overthrow a small country. My side doesn’t screw around. When we get violent, we go big or we go home. I see your trash can through a store window and raise you a Barrett M-82, hippy.

IN LOCAL NEWS

We’ve got our move in date for our house. We’re now one month away from getting out of this damn tiny apartment. I’m pretty sure that my kids will each claim a room of their own and then lock the door for a week. I’m cool with that.

I’ve got LibertyCon next week in Chattanooga. Sadly, when I booked our flights months ago, the LibertyCon website had listed the wrong dates. (I even printed them out, so I’ve got proof!). So in order to not miss ¾ of the event I was flying out there for, I contacted Travelocity to see about changing Mrs. Correia and my return flights back a single day.

After penalties, and the price increase for the next cheapest flight on that date, they wanted an additional $1,900.  No. That is not a typo.  For those of you who’ve read Monster Hunter Vendetta, I warned you about gnomes. Apparently the Travelocity gnome is a viscous little bastard too.  I ended up cancelling the whole thing, taking a penalty, but getting some credit for future flights, and then bought new tickets for about double what I paid for the original ones a couple of months ago, and it was still cheaper than having Travelocity switch me. Friggin’ gnomes.

I’ve got requests for more Tom Stranger and a couple other Ask Correia (both of which are surprisingly popular). I’m working on it, but I’m also cranking along trying to get done with Monster Hunter Alpha. The last four months in this tiny apartment, where I’ve got crap for a workspace, has been hell on my production. My daily word count average is about half of what it was when I had an actual office. I think you guys are really going to like MHA though, because though it is a MH book, it isn’t an Owen book, so it certainly has a different flavor. Then I’m excited to get to work on the 2^nd Grimnoir novel, and if I can pull it off, I’d like to try to squeeze in a standalone (the Africa book) before I start on Monster Hunter Legion.

After my last post about Supreme Court nominee, Kevin James, astute readers pointed out that the picture was actually of Elena Kagan, and in fact, not of Mr. James. Apparently neither one of them has ever actually been a judge.

But look at this picture! Photographic evidence that Kevin James, is in fact, Mrs. Kagan!  I believe that this is all an elaborate stunt to promote a new family comedy called Here Comes The Judge. Monster Hunter Nation was able to get an early version of the script (mostly because I’m actively stalking the crew of Will Smith’s sadly misnamed “monster hunters” movie). In the script Mr. James plays an ice cream man, who through a series of hillarious coincidences, is accidentaly placed on the US Supreme Court.  Mr. James, because he is just such a nice guy, will teach all the other crusty old justices to love again and to have more compassion, through a series of adventures involving a cartoon moose trying to save a shelter for abandoned puppies. At the end of the movie, this will all be shown to be a big misunderstanding, and everyone will learn a heartwarming lesson for the whole family and Kevin James’ character will marry his high school sweetheart.