So this site has been up and active since about the end of May and I am little surprised at the amount of traffic I am getting. I really expected nothing until at least I sold a story to a national market of some kind, and even then I expected no traffic for a while.
I am right now averaging about 30 unique visitors per day. Now in terms of the internet that is nothing. It is not even a speck on the google-dar, but it is a lot more than I expected before any sales.

To those people dropping in, Welcome! Please feel free to poke around and read the stories in the trunk it is why they are there.

We’re home and safe from westercon 62.

I will return to regular blogging Monday July 6th.

We’ll be leaving about 2pm today. I had a lot of good lit panels yesterday meeting with editors and authors and getting good advice for my writing career.

I have several panels lined up for this morning and expect to have a good time before our 2 pm departure.

The fireworks last night were very good but watching them in a room packed full of punsters trying top each other was quite an experience.

Things have turned for the better here as Westercon, Tempe. I had better luck with panels in the afternoon and the parties worked out really well. I was more outgoing than usual and had a decent time.
There are lots of eateries near the hotel so there isn’t any problems in finding food and usually at a good price near by. The biggest problem there is that Tempe is really hot in July. (Today they expect 106) Even a jaunt of just a few blocks can be quite an expedition.

We’ve arrived at Westercon in Phoenix adn I’ve started forming opinons. Sadly these are no good opinions. The organazation of the convention is as though it was put together by epileptic monkeys working a jizsaw puzzle that was missing a few pieces while aboard a storm-tossed steamship.
We checked into the hotel, and then went to registration to pick up our badges. Ha! That’s what we thought we were going to do. We paid for our memberships on line (Paypal) more than a week ago, but they had no listing for us in the membership roles. It was a clusterfuck getting them to recognize we had membership and issuing them.
The program grid does not match up with the Programming booklet so good luck on finding the panels. The programming booklet lists the panels by TRACK. So you have all the Lit stuff together, all the Media Stuff together, but it’s only partially arranged by alphabet.
The size is the convention is small. Sort of like a suped up ConDor or a downgraded LosCon.
I’ve attended a few interesting panels and there’s lots of places to eat.

I will be spending the 4th of July weekend at the Westercon SF convention in Tempe Arizona. If you;re there stop by and say hi!

If there is internet access I’ll check in and up date from there, otherwise see you next week.

So I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, the episode in particular was The Menagerie: Part I . I was watching it on blu-ray with the updated digital effects and the bonus material turned on. During a break in the bonus material one line came through from the Commodore asking Kirk hows does he know that Spock hasn’t gone mad?
That got me thinking. What would insanity look like in a Vulcan? Of course the easy answer is that he starts getting all emotional and such, but I think there is a more intriguing answer to the question.
Vulcan are all about logic, but logic is only as good as your premises. If you have a false premise you will reach a faulty answer by logic. (this may be part of the Vulcan tradition of foregoing lies. A false premise is a very dangerous thing.) What is one form of insanity for Vulcan is being unable to determine what is a false premise and what is not? That would lead a Vulcan who thinks he is pursuing a very logical course to be doing almost anything.

The set-up for the story in the film Moon is rather straight forward. Clean fusion power is available on Earth due to perfecting a fusion process using Helium-3. The He-3 is mined on the moon by automated harvesters which are monitored on station by a single astronaut. Sam Rockwell plays astronaut Sam Bell who is just completing his contract defined three-year tour of duty on the lunar mining station.
Sam’s situation is complexed by a long malfunctioning communications satellite that requires are message traffic to go to Earth via Jupiter so he can have no real-time conversations with anyone other than the base’s AI computer, Gerty. (Voice by another talented actor Kevin Spacey.) Sam’s marriage is sinking due to his long absence and now with his tour nearly over Sam has begun to see things.
If you watch the preview then you already know that things take a turn for the stranger after Sam Has an accident and wakes up in the base hospital with an extra Sam Bell running around the place.
The film is essentially a one-person character study and while the science of the film has a few holes it gets a lot more right in the science-department than 95% of SF films. Of course this isn’t an action SF film and is a much slower movie, more on the line of Solaris than Star Trek.
The movie only partially worked for me and it worked primarily because Sam Rockwell is such a talent and diverse actor. The central mystery of the plot was poorly handled though I cannot speak to that here without presenting spoilers.
Over all It really wasn’t worth full price of admission and I would suggest if you want to see this film in the theaters do not pay more than a bargain price or better yet wait for Home Video.