Writer's Block

I just saw The Killer Within, a documentary about Bob Bechtel, the man who was bullied until he snapped and shot a dorm mate in 1955.

As I watched the documentary, I found myself becoming disgusted - not with Mr. Bechtel, but with many of the other people in the documentary. Mr. Bechtel, at least, faced what he did, paid what the standards of the time considered to be an appropriate penalty for his crime, and has done something good with his life. The other people in the documentary, on the other hand, refused to accept any responsibility for their parts in the tragedy, and spent their entire time on camera trying to convince the filmmakers that Mr. Bechtel was a monster and that he should not be taken seriously, no matter what he has to say, on any subject.

Even those who were involved in bullying him, after admitting to committing some of the acts he had described as examples of the bullying he endured, refused to admit that what they did constituted bullying. What kind of low-life scum are they?

I am disgusted.

Title: Not Quite Marty-Stu (Chapter 7: Welcome to my Nightmare)
author: Bill Hartwell
rating: teens
fandom: Harry Potter
characters/pairings: Harry/Ginny, Bill & Fleur Weasley
disclaimer: If you recognize it, and it’s not from Knights in Tarnished Armor, it’s not mine.
author’s note: Don't you just hate dreams?
word count: 3956

title: Through a Glass, Darkly (Chapter Four: Breakfast and Planning)

author: Bill Hartwell
rating: teens
fandom: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Aa! MegamiSama!
characters/pairings: Usagi/Mamoru, Rei/Makoto, Ami/Fred
disclaimer: If you recognize it, and it’s not from Knights in Tarnished Armor, it’s not mine.
author’s note: I know it's taking a while on this, but after the last chapter, I had to take a break to mentally regroup.
word count: 5,000

title: Through a Glass, Darkly (Chapter Three: Terror and Tenderness)
author: Bill Hartwell
rating: teens
fandom: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Aa! MegamiSama!
characters/pairings: Usagi/Mamoru, Rei/Makoto, Ami/Fred
disclaimer: If you recognize it, and it’s not from Knights in Tarnished Armor, it’s not mine.
author’s note: What Ami sees and hears in Fred's memories are not made up for this story. They actually happened, and what his ex-wife says in his memories are as close to an exact quote as it is possible to remember after ten years.
Some people might disagree with my rating of this chapter. Tough! They probably disagree with the existence of sexual information in their school nurse's office, or the number of the local suicide hotline being posted in their school counselor's office, too.
word count: 5383

( Story Time )

title: Through a Glass, Darkly (Chapter One: Arrival)
author: Bill Hartwell
rating: teens
fandom: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Aa! MegamiSama!
characters/pairings: Usagi/Mamoru, Rei/Makoto, Ami/Fred
disclaimer: If you recognize it, and it’s not from Knights in Tarnished Armor, it’s not mine.
author’s note: This started as a dream....
word count: 6984

It seems that James Hansen (yes, the same James Hansen who accused the Busheviks of trying to censor his views on climate change) was using a secret algorithm for calculating the global temperatures that he reported as "proof" of "global warming".

Leaving aside the fact that a real scientist would never use a secret algorithm to produce the data he claims as "proof" of anything, we have now discovered that Mr. Hansen's algorithm had a very interesting Y2K bug. Thanks to Steve McIntyre, of climateaudit.org, who reverse-engineered Mr. Hansen's algorithm when Mr. Hansen refused to reveal what he used to calculate his temperature data, we have learned that no matter what data you feed into Mr. Hansen's algorithm, you will always get a sudden jump in global temperatures right around the year 2000.

After eliminating Mr. Hansen's Y2K bug, that sudden jump in global temperatures no longer exists, and we discover that the actual distribution of temperatures falls into the normal variances you would expect, without having to call upon "global warming" to explain them.

In fact, Microsoft is imposing a higher standard of security for premium content than what's been required in the past for any known secure computing initiative proposed for protecting data classified at TOP SECRET or TS/SCI levels (the closest that anything came to what's required in Vista was the LOCK kernel with SIDEARM and BED coprocessors (PDF link), which didn't go as far as the Vista requirements and after 17 years of development effort was a commercial failure to boot). Just to make this point clear, the level of security that Vista is trying to achieve to protect video and audio is more extreme than anything the US government has ever considered necessary for protecting its most sensitive classified data.