There are good Animes being released that aren't getting any fanfiction and should because the endings were either not that great or the settings had all kinds of potential that got wasted by a rushed ending.

Rideback would have been a good sports anime focussed on racing the segway-like enduro bikes on mixed surface supermoto courses. Instead after ep 3-4 it went into "fighting wars with sports-converted practical wheeled mecha". If they'd stayed with the Demilitarization theme and "finding a new hobby after a crippling injury preveted pursuing the old one" and how that lead the heroine into joy once more, it would have been far better. The violence really ruined a great idea. I would have loved them showing off welding up repairs, putting in new parts, CAD designs and testing for future races, dealing with the segway electronics. Shouldn't have had arms on the bikes through. Cuts through suspension of disbelief a tad since there's no controls for them on the handlebars. If only it had stayed a sports anime. Sigh. An AU that does so would be welcome and would only improve it.

Sora No Woto is a great daily life story for a small group of useless girl-soldiers (some are women veterans too) guarding a useless outpost of nothing in the mountains and their daily interactions with the locals and each other. I really liked this one and it even had a decently good ending so I'm giving it a 5-star recommendation with one exception. The special Coda episode wants to ruin it. For one thing, the story clearly takes place in western Switzerland, but the Coda pretends its Japan. No, just no. Everything is built of European stone, stone everywhere. Won't happen in Japan, land of earthquakes and landslides. Also, the mountains are clearly Swiss thanks to the OBVIOUS sedimentary rock which they don't get in Japan. Japan is volcanic. Another problem is desertification without explanation, along with "dead ocean", which is ridiculous. Worst case you get monoculture ocean, but never "dead". Nature doesn't work that way, and neither does biotechnology. Japan is SO OBSESSED with "Japan was ruined in WW2 so the whole world has to Al-Gore apart in some ridiculous way" trope. Really crappy. Prior to the Coda its a good show and the daily life of a 1948-era village, post war, believable and the careful inclusion of war-flashbacks works well to remind the viewer that these happy times are a direct result of terrible atrocities. The first 12 eps suggest a world with lingering troubles and while there's some deserts, they aren't the dominant landform and its a matter of time before they're recovered. Deserts do that, btw. They contract and expand and contract again, based on rainfall for the most part. They're always ready to bloom and have some of the richest soil on earth (no joke). The Japanese mangaka don't seem to do their research and since they don't have deserts it keeps popping up uselessly in anime (Desert Punk, Trigun, The Third Eye, and now this one). The open ocean is largely empty of life, btw. Only the shoals where cold upwelling currents bring nutrient rich water into sunlight have any appreciable sea life. This is why fishermen typically go to specific places to catch fish (west africa, Newfoundland, Chile, California, Vancouver, Gulf of Alaska, Hokkaido) because the rest of the ocean has the wrong chemistry to support much life. Clear water? May as well be desert for sea life. Chemistry kicks ass. Someday we'll be farming fish in the open ocean because we'll use pipes and pumps to bring up the deep cold water and help the fish grow. It's the future, and irrigation has been our legacy for 9000 years. Anyway, continuing the story of the girls in that town with more normal rainfall etc and no desert nonsense would be best.

Demon King Daimao is crying out for a lemon. First, the Greenette "android girl" clearly isn't an android and is screwing with everyone around her. Total horndog too. Next, the dingbat redhead is sneaky by pretending to be dumb while manuevering those women around her into doing her dirty work. I love that nobody even notices she's tricked them. Third, the mafia girl has clearly got a thing for taming "monsters" with her body (typical japanese schoolgirl) and that deserves to be more of a punchline. The anime was good through ep 6 but falls apart in ep 7 and beyond as they've rushed the end. It would have been better if they'd taken their time there.

Nagasarete Airantou took the typical trope response instead of a more rational and calculating response of girls seducing the hero less aggressively and actually getting him to follow through instead of scaring him off like they did in ep 1. Imagine that anime if he'd actually serviced the girls and then enjoyed their company in daily life after, taking the edge off, so to speak. Women really do work that way, same as men. All the build up tends to distract and consequently hurts the outcome and the intimacy. Imagine the guy going off with the carpenter instead of her freaking out and losing track of him.

Vandread went to a dark place that could have stayed lighter, lemony, and humorous. There are lemons written about this already. AZ did a good one if I remember right. He needs to stop having "villain" complex characters and recall that there's plenty of women to share in that setting. The harvest arc was lame. Artifically lab grown organs, sans body, are simple in the real world. So are repairing organs with stem cells. The whole organ-jacker thing is a lame trope that went out of style in the 1990s and only peasants in Guatemala even believe in that crap anymore. Seriously lame.

There's a surprising lack of exploration stories in anime, ones where the post-apocalypse has led to a new renaissance that involves the slightly more technological and ambitious but "nice" adventurers to go out into the hinterboonies and explore, trade, and make peace with the locals they meet. Anime does this with spaceships, but its been done to death that way since apparently anime space ships can visit a different planet every episode and fuel somehow isn't a limitation. Star Trek sucks. Bring it back to the wagon train level. I was writing a novel series on that concept. Gave it up 10 years ago, but I was writing it.

Just once I would like to see a Culinary Arts girl who hates being a homemaker and is totally in it to own a resturant or bakery, not to please a boy or be a good bride, but because she hated her Mom taking the abuse from her Dad or boyfriends and doesn't want a man at all. Way more honest story, btw. No bento for high school dork, sells them instead like the girl from El Hazard, only without the fantasy displacement.

Domestic News: Stock market crashed 500 points yesterday. Markets lost 5% around the world, direct response to new US budget which is the tip of the iceberg. The first cuts are going to lead to new cuts and probably repeat until there's really no genuine spending at the national level. Its going to get shoved onto states and counties. That's already happening in the USA, btw. Maybe you folks don't pay attention, but it is. States are largely broke and can't fund their new responsibilities until they collect taxes to pay for them, which means a fight over it, and a vote, which can be turned down. The upshot is spending on roads etc is going away. Do you like gravel? How about driving much slower? Get used to it.

Oh, and universities? Not so much. Good thing too, since education is worthless now.

The Derivatives mess still hasn't been dealt with. All those deadbeat mortgages are still waiting. At some point the US defaults, probably later this year or early next, when failing currencies in the EU and USA (via printing money) gets the world telling us to "go Fsk yourselves". Just because we have a budget doesn't mean we won't still have collapse. After all, the US Dollar is based on "faith". I'm not a fan of "faith based currencies". Aren't we required to separate Church and State in the Constitution?

On to the International News Roundup.

Greece is on verge of default, protests and general uprising still underway but news finds it boring so its mostly unreported. Isn't indifference great? This is what they get for having no industry but tourism and socialist education programs. A shame Greece doesn't value small business, huh?

Italy is about to default on its massive Debt. The very fact that Italy HAS a Finance Minister is laughable. I can see why slapstick is the preferred comedy there.

Spain is next. The banker who created the Euro currency says its all screwed. There probably won't be a Euro by 2013, and possibly 2012 the way things are going. I hope the new money issued in all those defaulting nations is pretty. Fiat currency is only worth what people will trade for it, and that's very much arbitrary.

So the upside is that even though the USA is going down the tubes, so is everywhere else. So, cheer up! We'll all get poor together. Its not like there's a safe currency to run to. The good news is with the US Govt defunding itself, states will have to issue currencies of their own just so things get done. Its not illegal to issue competing currencies, only to refuse to accept Federal Reserve Notes, which are themselves just Fiat currency from a for-profit corporation that operates without any real oversight by our country. I'm thinking arrests and treason charges would be a really good idea. Put Ben Bernanke in prison for life for inflating and destroying everyone's retirement funds? Probably won't happen because that makes sense. The world is completely mad.

I'm sure glad I'm a generalist so I can work anywhere, do anything (except positions limited by gender or nationality). Specialists get better pay, but they also get obsoleted and end up behind a counter selling fried potatoes. What is your next job? Will you be holding a broom, a hoe, or a shovel? Hurry or you might not get a choice.

Been busy with work and have a new PC. Haven't logged into this account in months, thus the silence. I note that many of my coworkers are moving closer to work to save gasoline. Some others are promising to get motorcycle licenses so they can ride scooters or motorcycles to work. There is noticeably less traffic on the roads, though that's mostly due to increased unemployment and carpooling. People adapt to the situation. I think that the just-passed budget is going to pretty well kill all frivolous R&D spending, as that's something for times of excess and this isn't one of them. A lot of indebted students are going to find themselves looking at Minimum Wage Jobs pushing brooms or standing behind a counter offering fried foods despite possessing MS Degrees in various esoteric nonsense subjects. This is the hard face of collapse, folks. It doesn't matter if you know the right answer and have the education if nobody cares enough to pay you for it. And at this point, nobody does. All that fine and fancy crap is going away. Enjoy.

Oil went down $13/bbl last week. It came back nearly $6/bbl today alone. So much for optimism.

Roads are made out of asphalt emulsion, using tar and local mixed gravel, the smaller sized stuff, to give it cohesion. The result is basically a waterproof gravel road which has low dust and won't usually wash away when it gets rained on. Being waterproof, it forms puddles and can cause fun hydroplaning above 50 mph for most types of tire.

The other kind of pavement surface is concrete. Concrete is made by heating limestone using lots of natural gas into a water-reacting mineral compound (calcium anhydride), then is mixed with the same kind of gravel used in asphalt. Concrete is not waterproof, breaks under tension, and is influenced by its curing conditions for its final strength. It takes compression well, and its reasonably strong, though acid rain or the carbonic acid falling from modern tailpipes can dissolve it. It is often cut with grooves to help avoid puddles and hydroplaning in wet conditions.

Both kinds of pavement use lots of energy and are dependent on fossil fuels to be produced. As the price of oil rises as its supplies dry up, we will find ourselves having to choose between having paved roads and having ambulances and policecars. While AZ doesn't need police, most suburbanites consider them a better way to deal with the nuisance of domestic violence noise (common) and reporting burglaries (useless). When Seconds Count, The Police are only Minutes Away. Ahem. Wish that wasn't a joke. Anyway, there are alternative forms of pavement, but they've got drawbacks. Mainly gravel and dirt. There's also cinders and kaolinite clay. Cinders are basically crushable gravel, but they wash away in the rain, can get your car stuck if they're too deep, and cut tires, so aren't widely used outside Southern India. Kaolinite clay aka "Decomposed Granite" gets some use in places which have it natively, and its main advantage is that it forms a weak seal on its surface to water once its to a gentle saturation point, doesn't make dust when damp like this, and is a reasonably firm surface if there's rock or larger gravel under the clay layer.

Sadly, in the real world there's good reason why gravel roads are more common, and why country folk own 4WD trucks and SUVs. Worse, with the end of cheap gasoline and the prevalence of service stations in easily accessible areas, country folk are going to find themselves carless and with their roads vanishing. Cost of living in the rural areas will go WAY UP. Folks may find themselves herded into the suburbs and cities by pure economics alone. Thanks to the FedGovt abdicating responsibility for the rest of Us to the States means lost funding and higher state taxes, and some states like the PRK pushing roads onto the Counties so they can shift budget to more important things, like Welfare for Crackhead Moms, and Extortion Rings. This leaves the Counties to find some way to fund road repairs handed down several steps from the Feds or State, often in ruined economies and no easy way to dodge the locals upset about paying triple taxes on their homes just so some Mexican truck driver can No Habla past town at an unsteady 55 mph towing 3 trailers. Nope, folks are going to push back on that. That means, hold onto your hairdo, roads are going to go to crap. Gravel, its the new black.

Now, I've made plenty of posts about motorcycles, particularly the enduro/dual-sport, scooters, and 250cc class bikes because they're light and get 70 mpg and will get you to work. Its time, however, to talk about 4-wheeled vehicles. I'll start with ATVs. This class actually races at Dakar, though they're deadly slow and break down like mad. Motorcycles at Dakar are twice as fast and noticeably more maneuverable, however this isn't Dakar. This is the morning commute to work. While they don't have weather protection, they're less tippy than a bike is, and slower, and heavier so harder to steal, and depending on the wheel setup and state laws, can go on public roads in traffic. Not commonly outside of agricultural areas, but it happens. It would be simple to pressure the local mayors and county supervisors to allow them on the roads in an oil shortage, especially as the roads are falling apart.

The class up from an ATV is the buggy, like a Dune Buggy. They were originally based on the VW bug chassis and engine with the body cut away and replaced with steel to reinforce it, basic seats and often special hand-brakes but remained 2-wheel drive and these machines raced the Baja 1000 year after year without much trouble. Lighter and cheaper than a trophy truck, they can be fitted with a weather cover and retain their light weight and manueverability. A modernized kit-car version of this, based on some of the tiny cars currently available, would probably help people get to work despite crap weather and crappier roads. You'd be giving up weight and protection from body panels, but it would get you there and depending on the engine and gearing, get you better than Prius MPG doing it. Not terrible. Probably the choice for someone like AZ, assuming he doesn't just do a WRX/Legacy trick and try to manage the fuel supply. I'm aware that Subaru is coming out with Diesel AWD sports cars. Considering the torque curve on diesel I'm curious how that ends up performing. Those might end up the hot car option for the post-paved road future. Rally cars are great in those conditions. A biodiesel rally car? Sure, why not.

If you know you're going to be in a car crash, don't be in one with a car made with carbon fiber. Why not? Study a crash from formula one. Lots jagged spears of it tears apart and get between you, in the cabin, and whatever you've run into. Its like throwing yourself on knives or pungee sticks. This is the big danger of using the stuff. Someday someone will figure out how to fix it so it breaks more safely, less dangerously, in a crash. Until then, even thin aluminum would be preferred. There are cars made with aluminum chassis and body panels. They're very expensive, in the $80K+ range. See, fuel economy is mostly about power to weight ratio. You just can't beat a motorcycle for that. They're very light. But they're crap in the rain and only have the two wheels and if you're the type to carry a full weapons arsenal in your car (I'm not), a motorcycle is the wrong vehicle for you. However, every pound you carry that's not YOU is more energy spent moving you and it around. There are cars built with motorcycle engines on the road today. Some have been around since the end of WW2. The Fiat 300 was a 300cc 3-cylinder engine originally. Very light weight, basically metal foil body that would crunch up into a 3 foot block in a crash. Not good for crash safety, but it was light and cheap and easy to park and used very little fuel. Despite today's oil price drop of $10/bbl, it will inevitably climb back up past $113 again. There is nothing to replace it. And that's very important to remember.

Today's very small cars (Yaris, Fit, Fiesta, etc) are a good compromise of what can be done with maximum weight reduction while meeting US highway safety standards and still go 90 mph to keep up with traffic. That's not to say that such weight would be needed if speed limits dropped. If limits returned to the 1980's unpopular 55 mph, cars would need less steel to absorb crashes and thus weight hundreds of pounds less. They'd also not need to be geared to go so fast so their engines could shrink and get better fuel economy. This adds up to a cheaper, lighter weight car, that will keep the rain off and get even better than 40 mpg. That's not as good as a 250cc bike (at 77 mpg), but its a start. It is worth noting that modern scooters with 125cc (to climb any hill, with an automatic transmission) get 110 mpg. This is the sort of thing cars need to offer, and can't without getting very extreme. The VW 1L does 150 km/L, but its basically a superdiesel motorcycle with three wheels, 3 feet tall with a canopy, and costs a fortune. Oh, and not windshield wiper. Also, you have to keep the speeds below 45 mph to max that economy. Its got lots of carbon fiber too. Please note that the epoxy resin which binds carbon fiber together is NOT durable and falls apart after a few thousand hours of operation. Usually catastrophically. Like, under stress when it needs to work most: SNAP! Not a good thing. There's a good reason cars are built of steel. Its not just cheaper. Its also far more durable. The trick with steel is heat treatment, same as with aluminum. Good aluminum cars are glued together rather than welded. They often use different alloys, which matters hugely in their heat treatment. When I look at the Lotus Elise, I see a fun supercar made of aluminum, but I also see the potential for similar methods with a small efficient 1.1L honda civic or prius engine (not the batteries, just the engine) combined to make a modest but highly efficient car. Once the 55 mph national speed limit comes back, which I consider to be inevitable, supercars are only going to matter on track day, and only when you pay to use a track. We are literally enjoying the final months of high speed domestic personal transport. Better enjoy it while it lasts. Because it won't last.

For those of you who hate motorcycles, think sailboats are asinine for cargo transport, and dislike trains, you are left with two other post-oil transportation options: feet or bicycles. I'm comfortable walking a couple miles to work (and may have to do exactly that someday), but bicycling is more fun and considerably faster. I'm not in good enough shape to pedal a dozen miles then work a shift, then pedal them back in the dark. But I'm sure other people can do this. Younger and braver people.

Thanks to Peak Oil, there's a considerable number of folks who are so deeply into car culture's conveniences that they absolutely deny its existence, largely because it is inconvenient for their current investments. Survivalists are screwed the same way. Peak oil means that the slow decay will outlast their best food supply and claims of indefinite food storage reveals the root of their madness. The "hear fer da hills!" mentality doesn't work. It really doesn't. You must stay near the food supply, and make enough money to pay your taxes, buy the food, keep a roof over your head. That means, realistically, managing to get by working for a living, only without a car. For most people, with a 30 mile commute (according to AAA), that makes a bicycle a hard sell. Thus my harping on motorcycles and scooters because they'll do that 30 miles on very little gasoline. Not none, but very little, and without making you peddle. Most excuses about why a motorcycle sucks are excuses. Will your boss really care that its raining or will he fire your ass for not showing up? Better show up. No matter what. He doesn't care if it takes you 4 hours to get there, or that you have to rent a room near work during your work days so you don't have to peddle home 30 miles, or pay a taxi to take you there. He doesn't care. All bosses are assholes. You know this. He won't give you a raise because your transportation costs or time lost is hurting your lifestyle. That's not his problem. His problem is keeping the profit margin so he gets his bonus and doesn't get replaced by someone who thinks they can get the job done cheaper than him. This is WHY he's an asshole.

For those who hate motorcycles you can walk, bike, or quit your job. Or move into town next to your job and pay extra money in rent or reduce your lifestyle (into probable poverty) to manage. These are your choices in the real world.

Lest ye worry that motorcycles are all fuel inefficient gashogs, I offer proof: Honda Fuel Economy chart.

As best as I've spent educating myself on bikes (motorcycles), the ideal bike is 400cc, however those are rare and the power isn't really needed. A 250cc will work just fine and is much less expensive. It doesn't have to be a dual sport, but they do have the better ground clearance and if they fall over the exhaust pipe won't get bent.

We should honestly expect the current or next govt in the USA to cut speed limits back to 55 mph again. Remember that? This 80 mph thing was a temporary luxury which is clearly unaffordable now in the face of a very changed Arab world. They're getting Democracy finally. And that means modernization will finally happen and that means cutting oil pumping to raise prices. Its win-win for them. Lose-lose for us. Our job is fuel conservation without destroying so much of our economy that we go AZ-style Mad Max. The objective is transition out of SUVs and into small cars (happening) and from small cars to either light rail or streetcars (electric-grid based) and eventually heavy passenger rail to replace all the cars and planes currently used to move people around, and do it without destroying too much of the critical bits of the economy. We also need more manufacturing jobs in the USA. That can be accomplished by trade tariffs. Basically, ban most imports. The USA doesn't need to export anything. We've got 300 million people right here that need goods, even simple housewares. That's a lot of possible jobs. Additionally, once we hit bottom (when we realize the gas station is empty today and we don't have the fuel to get to work anymore so we're about to be unemployed) we'll finally vote to do something. Cue the fedgov being totally helpless at resolving anything fast. They'll discuss it in committee and subcommittee meetings, televised while America gets angry that there's no gasoline. At that point we'll turn to our state and local govt who can't back away from us because we live together here, not some remote distant agency of indifference inside the Beltway. And from the PRK, the Beltway is not where we're going to be looking anyway. We'll be looking at Sacramento to fix it. You'll be looking at your state capitol and your local city council/mayor to deal with local problems directly. That's when the fedgov dies, because they will finally be exposed as helpless and incompetent when it mattered. And once stuff is planned, budgets created, taxes paid, funds available, bids put in and selected, and contractors order supplies, supplies manufactured and eventually shipped (without use of gasoline or diesel so probably by train using very expensive diesel), contractor employees hired, trained, show up at the work site... only then will construction begin to repair the damage of life without gasoline. It doesn't have to take 18 months, but it probably will. So you'll find yourself responsible for getting yourself to work for a year and a half, and it will probably mean giving up your dream job (what you have now) and doing the job you can actually reach. This might be flipping burgers at the local watering hole because fast food has 6000 mile supply chains and uses a lot of diesel to get to your town. Fast food will die. The independent who buys from local farmers will thrive.

Lest ye be confused, the motorcycle is for commuting from your rural or suburban location to your job. At 70 mpg with a 250cc bike, this is a valid way to get around. Your alternatives are carpooling with 3 other people in a tiny car and combining your likely 2 gal./person/week fuel ration to provide the needed gasoline to get to work every day. The trouble is that ration will shrink, not grow. We are running OUT of oil, after all. The more we use the less there is of it left. Biofuels? Don't make me laugh. No, DO make me laugh. Someday they might be a small percentage of our fuel but they are going to happen a long time in the future. Not immediately when we need it, which is the day that the gas station is empty that first time. Considering the current officeholder of the Presidency of the USA is all about accusing the oil industry of overcharging for gasoline and profiteering (duh!) and his actions are likely to make things much worse, not better. Look what he did to the health industry. Made insurers nervous so they jacked up their rates and employers cut back on coverage offerings. Many jobs now have high deductible health plans instead of real insurance. Paying $5K before the insurance covers anything is not insurance. He made things worse by stinking his nose into it. He's going to get a similar outcome by stirring up big oil. The senate democrats are threatening to yank oil subsidies to get some votes this Fall, which will almost certainly mean that the companies will pass those costs onto YOU, and a buck a gallon rise in the price of fuel, almost immediately. Like that? Piss them off some more. The damages from hurricanes, the loss of oil infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa are making your gasoline more expensive. Duh. Of course, if it was merely EXPENSE that was the problem rather than the oil running out, we'd just bitch and moan and pay more. The trouble with it running out and the USA keeps screwing with the debt ceiling means we're going to go bankrupt, as a nation. The Federal Reserve is probably going to prison. Don't drop the soap, Bernanke. Each time Bernanke expands the money supply, you get poorer. And that ALSO means oil prices rise because the dollar is worth that much less. Its a type of inflation. Meanwhile, the Arabs know they can screw us and are going to do exactly that. Enjoy.

If you hate a motorcycle, buy a bicycle or a good pair of walking shoes. Look hard at your neighborhood and think of how far you can walk to work, and what those jobs would be. And realize that your local boss is going to completely SCREW you when you negotiate wages. Its not like you've got a lot of options with no transportation. There will be a huge push for a higher minimum wage so bosses can't screw you forever and ever. I suspect there will be some violence over it. But that's not important. The important bit is if you don't get a bike BEFORE the fuel has that hiccup, you are screwed as far as your current job is concerned. You can get one later, but it will probably cost more thanks to demand. Right now they're reasonably cheap for the low-spec bikes. A high spec 250cc with good suspension and fuel injection costs as much as a 650cc with standard suspension and fuel injection. The 250 will get you around 20mpg more fuel economy and weigh around 50 pounds less. Or maybe 150 pounds less. Depends on the bike. Yamaha has a nice high spec 250 that AZ would like, and its more expensive. He likes expensive. Trouble with that is its worth stealing, so don't park it at the train station.

Remember trains! That's the future, but they have to be rebuilt to the 1960's level. Until the interstate highway system was constructed, passenger trains were king. Cheap oil made air travel possible. That's going away too. Bye bye jet planes! Bye bye paved roads! Bye bye interstate trucking!

Jim Butcher is an author I've read extensively, namely his Dresden Files series. His first 3 books are not great, but he gets better after that. His stories are formulaic, and are essentially the WASP version of Shonen Jump. Dresden is a Magical Boy, though at least he mostly earns his skills, but only mostly. The further you get into his story the more glaring and annoying the freebies are and I find myself feeling too old to read him anymore. His last book, Changes, is in retrospect, not very good. Its too heavy handed, but since I re-read the others to verify that I found all of them are. He's a professional, but he's taken up the snarkiness of JK Rowling, and is equally undeserved. This isn't literature. Its exploiting a market share. Professionals do that. He's never going to mature enough in his current audience to write serious literature. I will, but he won't. I feel sorry for him. Granted, I admire him bringing back the majesty of proper fairy tales and putting them in a modern context, far better than the extremely simplified version of JK Rowling. She could have made her tale much better if she'd gone beyond family drama and remembered the very rich history of the Gaels, the Fae folk, and the proper Dragons (not drakes) which fill the histories of Britain, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland for the last 7,000 years. That would have required work, and she retconned most of her stories together crudely enough as it was. Small wonder she was hardly writing them by book 5. Butcher is writing his own stuff, but the last novel felt rushed and I sense he's pretty bored with it, but slogging on for his mortgage and his kids' college funds. That's valuable too. Watching an author push on through clear boredom and lying about it to maintain the enthusiasm of his "brand", well, I respect that. He didn't bail out like Rowling.

Know how to tell if what you're reading is literature? Read it a second time. Is it better or worse? There you go. Literature has details, it has a sense of flow and the author's spirit in it, a sort of unspoken presence coloring every page a certain way. Dresden isn't literature. Neither is Harry Potter. They're popular for the Young Adult market for a good reason. These are people with a limited understanding of life due to lack of proper life experience. HP fanfiction is often better than the original source/canon and how sad is that? At least its spawning a new generation of writers who will do better than Rowling did. Probably not richer payment, but richer prose, certainly. Again, how sad is that? I look forward to the end of the Age of Heroes; the one we're living in. We let ourselves get shafted by thinking if we just trust this smiling con-man (politician, CEO, movie star, sports star, supermodel, heiress) we won't have to work hard or think. Instead we lost the family farm and ended up huddling in a hovel in a slum. Go us. Recovery starts with admitting our failures and means the end of thinking "heroes" are the answer to our problems. In the real world, hard work is the answer. Fiction can either lead or follow. Dresden is a bigger than life Shonen Jump kind of hero, always powering up and making friends of enemies in his hero's journey life. Its that whole anime market converted to Western context. Good for Butcher to spot the value. I wonder what he'll be writing as a side project to save his own soul? Is Butcher going to surprise me and show he does have a literature-novel in him? Time will tell.

The oil is finally running out. No more denials. Its $115/bbl for Brent Crude, which is what the Euro's use. The exchange I monitor lists that and the two kinds used internally in the USA, WTI and NyMex. Those are going for $101/bbl today, on unfounded optimism. Really, its nonsense. The price will keep rising. I would not be surprised if the price worked its way to $200 then "fell" to merely $130/bbl for a year. That gets us to $5/gal cheap gasoline, before taxes. As California and other states are mulling $1-2/gal gasoline tax to pay for lost property tax revenues. That's coming this summer for the PRK. For the rest of you, probably shortly after. Punishing? Hell yes. Immediately resolving budget crises in Democratically controlled Blue States without cutting their friends jobs services to the poor? Indeed. I am recommending friends stock 2 weeks of dried food in their pantries. Rice and beans, multivitamins. Flour and yeast packets. Stuff you'd actually eat. Crazy people can stock ammo but the deputies and police will still have fuel to come arrest your stupid a$$ when you fire off rounds at your neighbors so try and remember this mantra: just because there is no fuel you still have to get to work and pay your bills. I have personally lived through two periods of gasoline rationing in my life. It will happen again. Here's why.

Libya produces 1.65 million barrels of crude oil per day (mbpd). Saudia Arabia produces 9 mbpd of crude. They claimed they had spare capacity to replace Libya if Libya went down due to their civil war. Libya stopped shipping oil. Saudia Arabia stepped up its "spare capacity" and produced... 1 mbpd. This is 650,000 barrels per day deficit. This is abject proof that Saudi was lying and CANNOT PRODUCE THE OIL needed to prevent a new recession, or deepening the existing one. Europe is the primary user of Libyan oil. They are now bidding for oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Nigeria, which are the primary producers of oil for the USA. The USA uses 19 mbpd of oil and produced 5.5 mbpd. Losing 650,000 bpd to the EU means our own price rises to force conservation at Home, thus we see $3.75/gal for gasoline at the corner station and $4.00/gal at stations on the highway. This is just the beginning. I expect to see $4.25 in a week or two when Algeria stops its 2 mbpd due to revolution there. We'll also be seeing production hault in Yemen, Oman, and Iraq. Combined those add up to something like 7 mbpd, which is nearly as much as Saudi produces in total. And Mexico is going Dry in its single big oil reservoir, 97% empty based on calculations in the oil industry. Once that happens, Mexico loses the funding for its social services and they get to hunker down. The good news about that is the drug industry will largely stop because there won't be any money in drugs if nobody has any money to pay for them. This should do a good job of emptying the drug gangs out of the USA and send them back to Mexico to look after their families more directly. Mexicans are very practical, if you know any. I do.

Venezuela wants to contract all its oil supplies to China and has been negotiating with them for a couple years now. The primary problem with that is supertankers are too big to get through the Panama Canal. Smaller tankers can do it. If Hugo Chavez keeps mouthing off like the obvious moron he is, sticking his nose in OPEC and North African business, someone's going to give him a terminal case of Head Explody with a .308 at 2850 fps during one of his longwinded rants about how his socialist dreams for the Venezuelan people justifies ruining their afternoon TV time and removing half their food to rot in warehouses like he did last summer. Ahem. If Chavez gets knocked off, Colombia is ready and able to blitzkrieg into the Venezuelan oilfields by force and take them, leaving Venezuela high and dry with no income and Colombia, a longtime USA ally, able to deliver that oil on contract to US instead of China. A win for the USA, particularly since the EU will be squabbling over the Nigerian oil.

Unfortunately, this leaves the USA with its own oil supply 5.5 mbpd, Canada's oil 4.5 mpbd, Venezuela/Colombia's oil 2 mbpd still means we're missing about half of what we need to keep things going for a recovery. We're losing Nigeria and Mexico forever. Saudi Oil goes to China, not here. Oh, and a couple Iranian warships are also in the Med right now. Maybe Kadafi can ally with them? Or maybe they'll side with the rebels and be an influence in the new govt that will eventually grow up there once Kadafi is gone. The big problem for us is we're looking at aggressive conservation, which means ration cards. For guys like AZ, who won't drive anything that isn't at least 4 wheels, armored, and toting an arsenal, this is the end of the happy fun times. For me, I can bike it to work both miles indefinitely. Makes me glad I travel light, and planned for this years ago. I still have rent to pay, after all. So do you.

Please recall the seriousness of the situation. Even if the Libyan situation resolves, they've lost some oil production. Saudi can't cope. Morocco and Algeria haven't finished their own revolutions, still in the early stages. Yemen and Oman and Bahrain are in full revolution, though its less well reported. Iran has been slaughtering its democracy protesters, just like always. Iran has 13% inflation, mandatory fuel rationing, and 25% unemployment, officially. Unofficially its probably more like 40%. A country just can't survive like that. It can limp. That's what the world did in the Great Depression from 1929-1945. WW2 was a distraction but the ration cards were no joke.

What will happen to you? You'll get issued a ration card which first will cover how much gasoline you can buy. Until the Venezuela/Colombia war gets oil production switched, you'll be looking at around 2.5 gallons of gasoline per week, and the ration will expire weekly so Use It Or Lose It. You could sell the excess, if you have any, or trade it out for a free rail pass. Most people will combine rations for carpooling purposes. This means the end of private driving, and short commute times. You're going to be spending time picking up other people, and finding out that some people can't do anything on time because they're assholes who like making others wait for status reasons. Those people are going to have a HARD TIME in the near future. They've gotten away with being assholes this long because it didn't really impact them. Now its going to cost people jobs. And it might be more than their own.

After gasoline rationing, you get food rationing, perhaps with the same card, probably a different one. Authorization as to what foods you CAN buy, just like in WW2. See, with half or 1/3 as much fuel to move goods and services around, and the grocery store back room a thing of the past, what you see on the shelves is all they've got. Wrap your head around that. Rice and beans, kids. Buy it while it lasts. Additionally, you may experience electrical power blackouts. Depends on the plants that supply your power. The East is mostly coal or nuclear. The West is mostly hydro and natural gas with some coal and some oil burning plants and a few nuke plants. Only two of those in California. One in eastern Washington state. Most of the hydro in California is dedicated to running water pumps to deliver water to LA. No really. That's what it's for. Disappointed? Only if you live here. There's likely to be a massive shift in population fleeing the Western States once oil reaches a high enough price to cause blackouts. All those dreamers disappointed by life coming to a town near you, bankrupted and bitter. Enjoy that.

I'm staying here.

I am a Science Fiction writer, somewhat published, long prior to discovering Fan fiction. I wrote back during college, over 15 years ago. Mostly stopped after graduation. Lost interest. Sometimes I re-read what I wrote and am impressed with bits of my writing and other times shamed at the factual errors, particularly with firearms. There wasn't any internet resources available back then because the Web either didn't exist or was new. One set of characters in my stories are well armed nomads cruising around the deserts of the Great Basin, visiting friendly towns and selling their services and gizmos for food and fuel. I'm a nerd/geek by choice, rather than a soldier, so my knowledge of firearms is limited to what I've read about or handled on the gun range. Its frustrating to avoid the typical Hollywood cliches and focus on realism, which is a hallmark of my work, being near future scifi (quite rare) and realistic full-immersion style rather than the typical "oh noes, its nuclear holocaust, head for zee hills!" crap that's been done to death. Don't like the zombie apocalypse much either. Bunch of silly nonsense. Lately I've been pondering non-violent apocalypse, meaning natural disaster which is disruptive rather than deadly and economic collapse associated with rebuilding or relocation costs. So my above heavily armed Gypsies aren't terribly realistic or interesting anymore. CCW is the way to go, if you must carry. I prefer to carry a smile and let people see my eyes. Hiding your eyes means you've got something to hide, after all, and that's a bad start to any introduction.

I'm fairly amused we're entering an Anti-Road-Warrior period, where there's plenty of ammunition, nothing to shoot, and no gasoline. That power blackouts are the next big thing to drive interest in PV solar panels, and mirror-sites will become really important as blocks of internet outages turn into a real nuisance. There's also that peevy little problem of hyperinflation, trade tariffs, and long term unemployment. Sigh. What can you do but roll with the punches, right? We're also entering the Post Higher Education era, where three generations of college has proven decisively that you can't make people think, and Pedigree is just another thing for sale. The rest of us will have to get use to continuous training on the job and working in manufacturing a few weeks at a time before retooling to another product, storing what's been made in various warehouses by the railroad tracks. Its going to be odd. Very odd. And I should write about it so people can see.

I'm also truly sick of fanfiction where the hero is absurdly powered up, all the chicks dig him, and then the story founders because its just a lousy fantasy and the author lacks imagination how the hero could deal with his problems. I happen to think "Almost A Squib" is the anti-fannon type-section hero, the greatest fan fiction ever written because it takes things in the opposite direction. Pity the author and readers forgot this immediately after. Sigh. The world is full of idiots. You too, might be an idiot. Consider that.