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June, 2022:

The Other 70s

Jun 29th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
18 comments

70 today. Yeah, hard to believe. When I was 17 (1969) I found it difficult to imagine being 48, which was the age I’d be when we ushered in a new millennium. Moon colonies? Sure! We’d come so far so fast. How could we not? Having experienced the much-remarked phenomenon of time going by faster the older you get, I remember thinking back in 2000 or so that I would be 70 before I knew it.

Now I know it.

I have only one complaint: I won’t be around to see what great things happen over the next fifty years. I’ve said several times that the best thing about being 12 is that you’re not 13 yet, and the really great thing about being 14 is that you’ve already been 13. 13 was not my favorite year. The good thing about being 70 is that everything from 13 up until today has allowed me to put 13 in perspective, which I did while I was getting dressed this morning. And now, having put it into perspective, I intend to quietly forget about it.

In my view, the best birthday present is…the present. Sure, I could do without social networking and people whose highest aspiration is to be outraged about something new every day before lunch. And I have gripes about Amazon, but Amazon has allowed me to get a lot of books into print at a reasonable cost, something that simply couldn’t be done before 2005 or so–and never as easily as now. Smartphones are so good that we chose not to have a landline when we moved back to Phoenix in 2015. I continue to boggle at the sorts of things one can look up on a smartphone, from local weather radar to where traffic is congested between where I am and where I want to go.

No matter how bad the politics is (and it’s pretty bad) I’ve been able to keep myself from giving it power over me. I don’t do tribalism. The closest I come to a tribe is my circle of friends, now broader and more diverse than it ever was back in the creaky old 20th Century. We survived Woodrow Wilson, easily the most evil President evah. We will survive the one we have now, and whoever comes after. Politics is not worth the ulcers and heart attacks that are its foremost products. I simply do not partake. If I look younger than I am, that’s certainly a contributing factor.

I live in a benign climate (ok, it was 107 today; let’s call it mostly benign) in a quirky but comfortable house, with the woman I have loved now for 52 years. I have 75 feet of wire and an engineered ground, plus a low-band rig I’ve been using since 1995. I have a biggish swimming pool, which helps take the edge off the mostly benign days that occur pretty regularly this time of year. (I don’t have to shovel heat. So there.) I’m hard-pressed to name five things I want and don’t (yet) have.

The days are passing quickly. That’s nothing new. The real challenge is to summon the personal energy to accomplish things with the days that I have left. L-methyl folate wasn’t the solution, alas. I’m still looking. I’m reasonably healthy, trim, get my sleep, and am deeply loved. If I can’t consistently write a thousand words a day, well, I’ll write what I can and call it a win.

I look back across my 70 years, and remind myself that I know who I am and what I’m good at. All else will unfold as time and genetics permit.

Thanks to all of you for being my friends, and for the birthday wishes I haven’t entirely caught up on yet. As birthdays go, 70 is a good round number. 71 won’t be nearly as round, but every bit as welcome. Good luck to all and keep in touch!

Odd Lots

Jun 15th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
13 comments
  • I hurt my back and had to cancel a trip to Chicago to see family, and then to Chattanooga for Libertycon, which is the only con I go to anymore. Now, two weeks before my 70th birthday, I have to remind myself that, weight training or no weight training, lifting and carrying heavy things can be a hazard to your health.
  • Health, yeah. New medical research from South Australia shows a causal relationship between low vitamin D levels and dementia. Vitamin D has a number of benefits, most of which have been known for years. Carol and I have an ace in the hole: We’re in Arizona, where cloudy days are rare, so we get a lot more sunlight than we used to. And we take a 5000 IU supplement every morning, mostly because we’re not kids anymore, and D synthesis declines with age, sunshine or no sunshine. Bottom line: Don’t be D-ficient.
  • I dunno, but it sure looks like all the recent Corvettes we’ve seen here around town look like a car that some giant foot stepped on. Not to be outdone by Chevy, Cadillac is fielding the same profile. We giggle every time they go by.
  • I’ve never heard of “foot pool” before, but it looks like a lot of fun. Most of the activity I see mentioned online are from the UK.
  • Bet you never wanted to read the history of canned wine, eh? Well, here it is. I clearly remember drinking a can of white zinfandel among friends circa 1971. Nothing about it seemed odd to me then, as I had yet to encounter conventional wine culture.
  • New research suggests that THE MOST HIDEOUSLY DANGEROUS DEADLY DRUG IN THE ENTIRE COSMOS DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT has anticancer properties. More research is planned, if the poor researchers are ever allowed to lay hands on the stuff.
  • Can we literally throw things into orbit? A startup named SpinLaunch has built a small-scale proof-of-concept launching machine, and has managed to throw a 9-foot payload up as high as 30,000 feet. Fuel, water, atmosphere, clothes? Though the article does not state an acceleration in g’s, it’s gotta be intense, and way beyond what living material can stand. But for provisioning space stations it could be just the thing. Good luck, guys.
  • Wow. I didn’t know this: Big dust clouds near the center of our galaxy taste like…raspberries. Oh, and they smell like rum. Alas, it’s just the ethyl formate talking.
  • A new research paper out of the New England Journal of Medicine has found that in a small trial of a new drug called dostarlimab, with a cohort of 18 colorectal cancer patients, the remission rate was…100%. Dostalimab is a monoclonal antibody originally intended to treat endometrial cancer. Researchers think it may be a much more general cancer treatment, and new studies are planned.
  • And here’s another: A study conducted at the University of Toronto showed that toddlers who grew up with dogs (but not cats) appear to have some protection against Crohn’s Disease. The article doesn’t say that having a cat nullifies the protection, only that growing up with cats has no similar effects.
  • Finally, Amazon must have thought I was Geoffrey Chaucer. Or that the man was WAYYYYY ahead of his time. (Read the page closely.)

Is Substack Special?

Jun 8th, 2022
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

Sometime very early this year, probably January, a reader asked me in an email what I thought of Substack, and if Contra would be better off there. She likes my work, and told me she “binged” on my old entries. At the time, I’d heard of Substack but never looked at it. Over the last couple of days I googled on the site, went there, and learned a great deal about it.

The answer is no. I’ll be 70 in three weeks, and I don’t have the stamina to try to blog for money. Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have been sorely tempted. No more. I have my loyal readers, and I don’t need the money that badly. But…but…if I were on Substack, I’d be famous!

No. Anybody can be on Substack. If I were already famous, I might try it. But I’m not. (I do have a certain fame. It’s five miles deep and three inches wide.)

Basically, Substack is Kindle for newsletters. And newsletters in this context are long-form blog entries. You can charge readers a subscription fee, minimum $5/month, or any dollar amount greater than that. (Newsletters can also be free if you prefer.) Readers can then read your entries on the Web, or on the iPhone app. (They’ve been a thing since 2017, and they don’t yet have an Android app? That’s just, well, stupid. They say they’re working on one. Sheesh, I hope so!)

Substack has thousands of newsletters, and as of the end of 2021, over a million paid subscribers. The top 10 writers in aggregate make $20M per year. That’s better money than I’ve ever made doing anything. But if you look at who the top ten writers are, it becomes painfully obvious: All of them were famous working in other venues long before Substack ever existed.

I’ve read Andrew Sullivan sporadically for a lot of years. I read him on the late suck.com back in the ’90s and lots of other places since. He’s the #5 writer on Substack. He’s interesting, funny, and doesn’t bend the knee to partisan bitchlords demanding unquestioning allegiance. I haven’t subscribed yet, but I may. He’s damned good.

Other writers I’ve heard of and read elsewhere include Bari Weiss, Matthew Iglesias, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald. (Greenwald is #1 on Substack.) A chap I know, Tom Knighton, has three different Substack newsletters. (You’re not limited to one.) I’m sure other people out on the edges of my circles have Substack newsletters. (Have one? Let me know!) However, I’m guessing that there’s an 80/20 rule on Substack (or maybe a 90/10 rule) stating that 20% of the writers make 80% of the money. That’s the rule in a lot of business models, Kindle included.

That may just be the way the universe works. You have to build a platform, as the agents put it. In other words, you have to promote yourself, especially if you don’t already have a pre-existing reputation and thousands of cheering fans. As some of my self-published author friends on Kindle have learned, you sometimes have to do so much promoting that you don’t have the time (or the energy) to write new material.

So I won’t be there. I’m having too much fun on 20M and writing new SF. What, then, do I think? No question: It’s worth it, if you’re young and energetic and can write interesting text on a definable topic on a regular basis that at least a few people might pay $5 a month for. I have one concern about Substack’s viability: They do not currently discriminate against conservative writers, or centrist writers who don’t care for progressive dudgeon. Apparently a number of progressive writers have ditched Substack because–the horror!–Substack doesn’t censor conservative viewpoints.

Not yet. If they ever start, it’ll be the end of them. In the meantime, you have your choice of a very broad spectrum of very good writers. A lot of the posts are free, and you can sample any author you want. I’m budgeting myself four paid subscriptions, not because it’s expensive, but because there are only so many hours in a day.

Go take a look. I was moderately impressed.