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About Silas Humphreys
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Author Updates
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Blog postSo, my diabetes numbers are doing just great, thanks, I have now experienced the joys of colonoscopy, and oh yeah, Twitter has been bought by the worst billionaire. So I'm dusting off old places, and finding new ones (or at least new to me), because the guy is a complete waste of skin, and his fans are even worse. So this place is possibly going to see some posting action, I'm spinning up a
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Blog postSo, it has been a While. Life has been tricky, between terror at four years under a government which openly desired my death for multiple reasons, getting a kid through the early stages of a school system I don't fully understand, and the whole pandemic thing. We're finally starting to come out of that, though, and then when I finally managed to get my blood tests done (and there were plenty; it
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Blog postWe don’t blame the guns. We blame the shitty culture that equates gun ownership with masculinity and virtue; which tells boys that real men express their emotions through violence; which casts asking for help as unmanly; and which casts fear as equivalent to respect. We blame the shitty laws which make guns easier to buy than decongestant medication; the industry lobbyists who spend millions of
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Blog postPain is a very interesting subject to write about. People are often confused by it and the terminology surrounding it, so let's open with some definitions. Pain threshold is when someone starts to feel pain. Some people will fail to notice an injury that would immediately incapacitate someone else. As a chronic pain sufferer, people assume I have a high pain threshold, but that's not the case.
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Blog postWe've all encountered the person who says climate change can't be happening, the planet isn't getting warmer, because it's cold right now. I'm pretty sure we all know that that's a result of an overly simplistic understanding of what climate is, how it works, and we know that they're thoroughly wrong. Now, President Obama is handing over the strongest economy in ages - but Trump's voters are
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Blog postIn the news today, the US Department of Justice has announced that it intends to end its use of privately-run, for-profit prisons. There has been much rejoicing, but though this does represent a great step forward, offsetting the great retrograde step of using the damn things in the first place, it does not solve the underlying structural problem with the USA's system of incarceration. That
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Blog postIn voting to exit the European Union, the British electorate have killed my homeland. A manifestly imperfect homeland, but a land which strove to be welcoming, to learn from the new people it met. A land which acknowledged its bloody past as Not What We Ought To Have Done. The hope I knew has been swept away in a stream of fear, and of exploitation of that fear for personal gain. The
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Blog postThe title acronym is shamelessly stolen from Robert A. Heinlein; his aphorism was that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but it's just as true that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. All markets are unfree, and what we have to decide is how regulated they ought to be. But what makes a market unfree? The big one is coercion; no compulsory market can be free. That means there's
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Blog postToday, I had possibly the best reason to go to Harbor Freight, which is a seller of crap-but-cheap tools, hand, electrical, and even air-powered. I got my impact wrench there, after scoring a compressor for free when the people across the street decided they could get by with a smaller one. Today, I needed more of those blue rubber gloves (I use them when preparing chicken, since it makes
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Blog postI try not to be an asshole. Unfortunately, many culturally problematic things never really sink in until you're on the receiving end. Today, I learned what it's like to be on the receiving end of appropriation. Everyone assumes that using the language of other cultures is respectful, whether it's spoken language or nonverbal language. It can be - but sometimes it isn't. Some background: I have
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Blog postToday is April 1st, which is otherwise known as the worst day on the internet. Everyone thinks it's funny to tell plausible lies, and everyone thinks it's my fault I'm upset because I should have known better than to believe them. Fuck that noise, I say. Do not wilfully damage people's trust in you. Put on a silly hat, or make your lies so utterly outrageous that they cannot possibly be mistaken
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Blog postI play computer games with friends. We tend to go for co-operative experiences, and they're usually shooters. Currently, my friends' main game is Payday 2, which is morally reprehensible in that the players are acting as criminals, cavalierly murdering armies of police, security guards, and occasionally people who just happened to get in the way. However, we have a hypothesis, thanks to my
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Blog postIt turns out that Winter Bride is in fact eligible for a Hugo Award nomination, in the category of Best Short Story. I don't expect to even be nominated, let alone win, but I'm happy enough to simply be eligible.
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Blog postThe authors behind Sojourn volume 2 have decided to host a release party on Facebook. The way this works is that each author drops in with a post, a Q&A session, maybe a giveaway, at a scheduled time. The festivities run all day, but I'm not guaranteed to be there throughout. I will, however, be present; I plan to start my timeslot with a post explaining where my story, Winter Bride, came from,
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Blog postThe anthology containing my first published story is now available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and any bookstore which can handle ordering by ISBN: 978-0991487738
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Blog postI have now been provided with the cover art for the anthology containing my first published writing. The current plan for release, assuming all goes well, is early December for Amazon, with other stores to follow as soon as possible. Here's the cover:
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Blog postIt's been an eventful year. I became a father, I became a published author, and I discovered just how badly my brain had been screwing me over for about a decade. Anxiety disorders are really tricky to talk about; you're dealing with something that most people have no real referent for. That said, there are some notable improvements in my mental stability resulting from being properly medicated
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Blog postNow that I'm properly dealing with my brain's chemical imbalances, I've managed to get things moving in my life. Among the things I've gotten moving has been my education and job skills; I have finally learned to touch-type, after twenty years of bad habits, and a couple of months of retraining. I have also begun to learn financial accounting, on the grounds that no matter what, there will always
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Blog postRecently, causes I care about have been in the news. Sometimes for good reasons; the NFL now has its first active openly gay player (while numerous former players have been gay, none of them have been out while active; Michael Sam is out and has been drafted) and sometimes for bad reasons; the Supreme Court has expanded the scope of allowable ceremonial prayer, despite its previous
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Blog postI've been living in the USA for six and a half years now, and I'm used to much of it. I'd have trouble driving on the left, for instance. There are some things that still get to me, though. Here are some of them. Bread. American bread falls into two categories: sourdough, or sickly sweet. Americans don't notice this, but it really annoys me. I'd kill for a decent crusty white from England, and
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Blog postI've made oblique reference to this online a few times, and even told the story to people I know offline, but this is going to be the first time I've written it up. Technically, I didn't punch myself out, but it was unconsciousness as a direct result of body parts meeting each other violently, and so... When this happened, I was about 13 or 14. At the time, I was attending a private school, and
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Blog postEvery year, I get a physical exam. Nothing invasive, just a quick set of questions about my health and how I'm doing. Usually, it comes with a request to get some lab tests done, which until recently hasn't been a problem; the umbrella organisation of which my doctor is a part ran its own labs, they had reasonably convenient locations, and it was all nicely joined up. Now, though; oy. Sometime
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Blog postThe LA and No. 1 Daughter have been out socialising for much of the day, while I've been at home. I was supposed to have been writing, since I'm currently working on a piece which has a chance of earning actual money, but I've not had enough uninterrupted time all day, because I've been working through a backlog of laundry. Burp cloths and towels, adult clothes, baby clothes, and now sheets. It
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Blog postBack in November, I suffered a mental health crisis, and wound up in my local county hospital's psychiatric emergency room. I'm still dealing with the paperwork and financial fallout from that, which is a distinctly suboptimal state of affairs, but I've just realised that there is in fact a perverse incentive operating here; it's in the hospital's interests to suck at accounting. Now I should
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Blog postAs most of you will know by now, I have some health issues. Well, a lot of health issues; at 33, my daily prescribed pill count (when things are going as they ought, which at the moment is not entirely the case) is 9 pills. Five to adjust my brain in various ways, and 4 to allow my body to avoid tearing itself apart. And for all the pill-popping, sometimes I go out and have to deal with being
Titles By Silas Humphreys
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