We finally managed to get down to Tricities (Pasco, Kennewick, Richland) on the Columbia and visit Patty, who breeds (besides books) show horses. She has 8 babies. And they’re wonderful. Hand-tamed, so they’re willing to be petted, if a little shy.
And so tempting I walked more than I should on a newly PT’d leg, and gave myself problems which meant I didn’t get to go to Spocon this weekend.
Mostly we’re just writing and prepping the house (basement) for the next round of remodeling. Looking forward to getting Scott back.
We promised to have this next Alliance book ready by November, and we’re trucking. By turns.
Anyway, that’s what we’re doing.
Weather was brutally hot during the horse adventure, but has turned off chill and rainy, unusual for August in the PNW.
Hanneke, hearing that Amsterdam had a tornado, of all things! Hope all is well with you.
Oh, cool, does that mean the book goes to the editor in November, or is that a publication release date? That is, when should we all be ready to pre-order the ebook, hardbound, and/or paperback editions? November, yay, that’s soon!
My story-characters remain stubbornly unnamed, Ens1, Boy1, Cat1, and such. So far, nothing seems to fit. A random name generator I’ve used keeps turning up names from multiple languages, giving combinations that would hardly ever happen in real life. I keep running into the problem of English names which are either too uncommon or too common or carry associations for me of people I’ve known, and I don’t want some past friend to think it’s a reflection on, or based on, them, when it’s not. (Or those few with negative associations.) It also doesn’t quite make sense to me to use a name from a language / culture the character doesn’t seem to have a connection to. A few names feel too on-the-nose to work as character names.
I may just have to pick something and let it be and hope it sticks, or leave them like this for now, or rename them if something more suitable comes along.
Amsterdam had a tornado?? One doesn’t usually associate that with the Netherlands! Definitely hope Hanneke avoided that one.
I decided to try screenprinting some shirts for our annual gaming weekend, and discovered that the power cord and the screen were missing from the YUDU machine. It’s been in storage for at least 2 years at our house, so I have to find who used it last (not me!) and where the parts might have gone. If I can’t get them back by the end of the month, no shirts this year.
Patty’s had a couple very rough years; I hope she’s doing better now.
Huzzah! for the new book making progress.
Patty’s doing better. She said she’d indulged in baby horse therapy, but now she’s interspersing horse shows with cons and writing, keeping busy, and she has a lot of family and friends around her.
That is good to hear. Thank you for letting us know.
I enjoy her books, so even though I’ve never been a part of her blog community, I’ve wished her well and hoped she had plenty of support around her when I heard the sad news about her husband.
Try stencil and fabric paint if all else fails. Drips and spatters can be interesting.
Glad to hear Patty is doing better, especially that she has a lot of people for support when she needs it. “And horses!” — Oh, that reminds me of the sound clip that The Signal Podcast (sadly ended) used to start off with, a group at a con, singing the Ballad of Serenity theme song, with a little Browncoat fan at the end piping up, very earnest, “And Horses!” Which was very important, clearly to that little youngun. (Hmm, I bet they call them younguns in the Verse, too.) Anyway, one of the many reasons to like that show and fandom. — My goodness, that little kid could easily be…oh wow…late teens, early 20’s by now? Where does the time go?
— I’d say a little paint spatter or drips, call it that distressed, grunge look. Thumbs up. Very popular still. Suitable for gamers and fans. — Just watch out for that demigorgon and be careful if you drop the dice. (I’m still loving the geeky yet so truthful moment in Will’s scene in Stranger Things season 3.)
—–
I had to laugh, so I’m posting this. — Uh, writing? Story challenge? Well, I am still not sure how this thing is going, but I think y’all started something. What, I don’t know, but something.
I just reached a stopping point, a chapter end. Good thing, ’cause it’s later than I thought, and I have to do housework, plus groceries are due the afternoon, and apartment inspections from Wed. to Fri. (I’m presuming it’s not anything more than the last moth or two, hardly a glance.)
But uh, why am I laughing? Oh, that’s simple. — When I surfaced to end the chapter and save, hah, OMG, are you kidding me? — I am barely into this thing, I barely have the main character introduced and started off, still have some more to go with others introduced and people to meet, things to do, before we even get to the problem that started this off, the cat on the keyboard. — I looked up to discover I have, dang, 82 half-letter pages, four chapters so far, and about half that of story notes. Keeping track of a shipload of pesky people and critters is harder than it looks. I had to make sure how many cabin mates there might be, for instance. Who are they? I’ll have to figure out how these folks divide up the work day and free time and sleep, per ship’s watches. Meanwhile, it seems the main character has some other trouble going on too, which hmm, I think is good story material.
It’s a very rough first draft. No telling how much it’ll change when edited or rewritten, and it’s going to need some of that. Or a lot. But these characters are more individual than I’ve been writing lately, and I have a pretty good handle on the main character, including what he looks like. (And he’s not me, which is a good thing, story-wise.) He’d have to be a very alternate universe version of me to be a Mary Sue. At least I think so.
Yeah, four chapters in, 82 half-pages, meaning, I’ve set this up on half a letter-size page, to be closer to a larger format paperback or hardback. (I have, so far, found multiple sizes from multiple sites, all of which disagree on what any industry-standard publication sizes might be, US and UK…which all seems to go out the window anyway, with ebooks, such as on the Kindle. So each page is 5.5×8.5 inches, half a letter size US page, 3/8inch margins inner and outer, 1/4inch top and bottom with another 1/4inch for header and footer. (Paperbacks only have a header, not a footer.) This is in 12pt proportional type, but not Times Roman, although that’s fine. (At least it’s not Helvetica, with which I have a love/hate relationship going on, haha.) — so the draft is not double-spaced Courier / monospace, with 1 inch margins all around. So it’s approximately like a larger-format hardbound book or paperback.
I haven’t checked the word count, which includes title page and table of contents, besides the story text.
Uh…I think I haven’t even started good, and I think I’m beyond short story length, probably. Still have to get the main problem in, resolve the side problems I’ve got going, and find what all that is and find an ending. If they keep this up, I might have a setup for a sequel in the offing. — If I can get enough story out of this story, and get the dang thing finished. That would be quite a first. (I don’t think this is the most I’ve ever written on a single story. It isn’t the most world-building I’ve done.) Not sure yet, but this seems to be insisting it fits sideways in some way with what I’ve done before. Only this is definitely sideways, in the way that a couple of CJ’s early novels take wide detours from her early (pre-?) Alliance universe. Meaning, this would be possible but exceedingly unlikely in our normal universe, I think, except it’s an accident caused by a cat on a starship’s keyboard, which sends them…elsewhere…which I have to get to later. The idea has me excited for story possibilities in between hard SF and fantasy.
That stray cat is still stray on the ship. No one’s found him/her yet, and the narrative has been elsewhere, on the main character introduction, so, haha, presumably someone onboard the ship is looking for this cat who’s loose. 😀
So — dang, I think I have something here and I’m not sure what yet, but definitely something, and it’s growing.
I do have to figure out if they can get back to the original reality, once they get thrown into the alternate one. It’s funny how on Star Trek, they always manage to do that in one episode and everything is fine again. (I love Star Trek; I’m just saying.) Doctor Who doesn’t even worry about which reality or timeline they end up in. Sliders did try to deal with that uncertainty. Stargate, you had the Stargates to get you back to here and now, plus a Window thing in one or two episodes. But you were likely to get back to where you started from. — Trouble is, I am having trouble imagining how, in real life, a shipful of ordinary spacers, educated though some of them would be, would be able to figure out exactly what went wrong and how to undo it, when it’s something they would not have thought was possible, and they aren’t sure where they are. How do they get back? Can they? Would it be more interesting if they have to keep trying and miss? Or do they end up back where they started? Or something else?
I’m leaning toward something, and writing that, oh, there’s probably a way, if they work at it long enough or get help. But it’s not our reality or timeline, probably they land in.
Er, CJ, if I am giving away too much by being excited at my progress, please let me know to hold back on anything too plot/char related. I don’t want to cause you or myself or other writers here any problems in regards to story content or who thought up what. — I’m trying not to give away things. — Besides, I want people to have fun reading it once it gets done. I’d kinda like to be able to make some money from selling it, too.
Note: I am expecting to self-publish on Amazon, but I want region-free, global distribution. Why should people in Europe or Australia or any other continent (Antactica? Atlantis??) miss out? Heck, more profit’s a good thing. (I am just fine with selling my art for money, but not my intellectual rights. No author should have to sit there in their lifetime and not have the rights to their own work and where and how it’s published. IMHO.) — I do not have an agent and have never tried selling to a book publisher or magazine. — I am unsure if I want to do that, or self-publish, at present.
Gotta have a finished manuscript in final draft before I’m ready for that anyway, for a first real effort. All my prior stuff is on my website, which is all small stuff, or else all the megabytes of chapters, ideas, scenes, bits and pieces, in my writing folders on my computer. (I need to do a backup again soon.)
But…dang…I think I have a novel here and not just a short story. I think I’m past short story length, and it’s barely getting started. But I think (hope) it’s exciting, readable, engaging, interesting. — I am going to want a couple of beta readers, once I have a draft far enough along for anyone to read a full story.
(It would be just like me for some new idea to pop up too, or some other prior idea to get insistent again and need writing on. But this is going well enough, I think my working style might could manage that, just more slowly. I’d rather have it focused on this one to completion before getting to another.)
I’d been wondering about the balance between humor and seriousness, or young adult readers (teens or kids) versus more adult themes, or how to handle that. But this story is writing itself the way it is anyway, regardless. I want it to be a good read, whatever it is, and not put off readers. But I’m new enough, and the story is going, and so it’s turning out with mostly a typical story with not too heavy / dark content, but with one of the side problems, and the world they live in, having some tougher issues. — But then, given what’s going on in the real world now, sheesh, maybe I shouldn’t be unsure about the story-universe or story conflicts. I tend to be very conservative in some things, which is, well, why I have some of my internal conflicts, I suppose. — So I’m going with what’s writing itself for now, and I may have to rethink and rewrite in later drafts.
This feels like it’s going right and going to keep on. Feels good so far.
Ugh. I’d rather write than do housework. But this place needs dusting, vacuuming, and mopping, in self-defense, never mind if anyone else sees it. (It’s not bad, but I have found cobwebs in two places, and there shouldn’t be any. It’s been less than a month since I last vacuumed and mopped. That’s not back to weekly, but it’s progress. I am actually sneaking up on making this habitual and regular again, routine. Want that to happen, for myself and the cat, whether anyone else sees it or not.
If the inspection is as we’re-running-through-and-hardly-looking as it was last time, I am going to have a really good private laugh. And be dismayed at it.
I’ve noticed, too, that the textbook rules I learned for writing — do not really work for fiction-writing; sometimes not even formal standard grammar. (In some places, it feels right not to use -ly, but it’s grammatically iffy, by textbook rules. Incomplete sentence occasionally in narrative. Things like that. However, other (published) writers do that with impunity, for a stronger story. So I’ve been stretching that a little.
If nothing else, this has pushed me past some plateau in writing. So…write more. 😀
Er, but housework first. Kinda want to have a dry floor and be better dressed when groceries arrive. Heh.
@BCS, about how they might figure out what went wrong and how to get back: would the ship’s log have a an audit trail of what was put in and what the machinery did? Or maybe something like a ‘black box’ like on a modern airplane?
Now ‘audit trail’ functions don’t always log everything, certainly not every keystroke, as that would demand too much memory space so they’d still have to figure plenty of stuff out from what did get recorded. Black boxes have looped recording of everything but that gets recorded over after two hours, IIRC; and security cam vids (in case you decide there’s one of those on the bridge) get recorded over after a day or two or five in most shops…
Plenty of ways to set up a variety of possibly incomplete information, or just-remembered-in-the-nick-of-time (before being overwritten) sources of tension.
Sorry, I don’t want to interfere with your creative process but I do like thinking of possible solutions to problems; do please say so if you don’t want me spouting a lot of alternate possibilities.
My thinking’s currently that they have some or all of the info, up to a point, but (1) possibly at the transition point, they don’t get information, it’s too garbled or the instruments glitch, partially fail, or fully fail at the transition point and a bit after. And (2) This is something they (and star drive scientists / engineers) never would have imagined happening, possibly thought could NOT happen, but some set of circumstances (not just the cat) did coincide, so that…poof, a result they weren’t fully equipped to record, because they didn’t think it could happen, they never imagined it.
However, I’d think a starship would need to be able to record and monitor as much of the electromagnetic spectrum, visible physical surroundings, real space / realtime and hyperspace / warp field manipulation, as possible. If your ship can jump past light-speed or it can warp space like the theoretical Alcubierre-White warp drive, then you’d have to have ways to monitor what’s around you, as well as shield the ship against oncoming debris, things like that.
I’m leaning toward the idea that they initially are baffled, they’d need to do some repairs, and then they have to figure out how to reverse the process, and hope they get back to their starting point or near it. It would be an untested hypothesis and a tentative theory they’d need to test. (And by the nature of the dilemma, if they send a probe or shuttle out to test it, a round trip, there and back, might not work the first time, and they’d have limited production facilities or need raw materials.)
I think I’m working through the problem, but also, if they can solve it too easily, then it doesn’t leave room for what happens while there, which I want to explore some. I’m leaning toward, they have to keep refining this to get it to work, so they may have repeated tries. But also, if they can avoid risking the ship and crew, they’d need to do that. So they’d do what testing they could before trying it with the ship.
There’s a basic problem with the alternate timeline / reality / parallel universe trope. — How would any of us know at a glance that we’d ended up in another reality / dimension / timeline, unless it was a large enough change and we knew something happened to make the change? How, also, would we know for sure we’d landed back in our original timeline? — In most TV/film shows, our heroes know almost immediately something is off and figure out by the end of the episode how to resolve it. But even if you have many subtle changes, would you notice right away? If you never thought that was possible, how would you measure it? — It seems like it’s a good basic science and philosophy sort of question.
I’m still trying to work through it all, and I know I haven’t come up with enough plot yet. I need to brainstorm and outline some, so I don’t wander too much with this, even though it’s likely to have a wild section or two.
(To be fair, most of the writers of those shows are/were very smart people and experienced SF writers. Some did try to bring up the problems, but they also had to tell a story to fit in a series. Several shows have tried to address the difficulty, but mostly, they end up with a quick fix.)
—- Really glad you’re OK, and I hope folks in/near Amsterdam and the harbor are all right.
—–
@Cathy in PA — While at a forum that used to be wonderful and busy and now is a cyberspace ghost town, I was surprised by a quote that is very fitting for the story I’m writing. — I don’t know that writer, but I looked up the author and book. It’s a poem in a larger work, in Spanish.
This is something your grandson might really like, and there are Spanish, English, and a Dual Language edition, all by Penguin or Dover.
(I had to look up one word I didn’t know, and one other to make sure I hadn’t forgotten or confused it. The English translation I’ve quoted is via Google Translate, and in this case, it’s accurate, though I might have gone with the word order used in the original, for the last line, which would still make sense in English.)
An Amazon lookup turned up several other books / plays and collections, so he is a noted author , playwright, poet, and I’m sorry I don’t know enough Spanish literature to have known that. But the quote struck me as very fitting. I would’ve liked it just as much as a college student when I was studying English and French lit. From what I ofound, it looks like his works may be used as intro pieces for students learning Spanish. So they should be readable for your grandson at his level or just enough higher to give him a good challenge. I’m going to see how I do with the book also. (I have not tried to read Don Quixote through, which, in the original, is one of those student texts, after going through short stories, somewhere around Spanish III or IV, as in the high school levels.) From the sound of it, your grandson will be at or beyond those soon. Anyway, the book might be something he’d like. From that quote, I’m sure interested.
No worries, it was more of a baby tornado, like a dust devil but mostly over the water of one of Amsterdam’s harbours, so it didn’t do much damage.
We had a stormy Friday and Saturday, more like an autumn storm than what is usual in summer here, and it’s still a bit blustery with occasional rain and thunder, but with sunny interludes.
I’m about 20 miles north of Amsterdam (near Alkmaar) so only had the regular stormwinds of about 8 Beaufort, with gusts up to 10 (>100km/h) from the (south)west. Amsterdam got caught at the point where the wind changed from west to southwest, which caused the funnel.
I thought at first it was a small waterspout, from the video shot by a skipper who saw it pass at close range, but apparently those are formed by different circumstances, so it’s a small tornado.
Such ‘tiddlers’ used to occur & touchdown briefly maybe once every few decades somewhere in the Netherlands, and cannot be compared to real (sub)tropical tornados in the damage they cause. They can uproot old trees if they’re still in full leaf, and send lots of rooftiles flying if they hit buildings, which causes more damage, so it was lucky this one was mostly over the water. That’s also what made it so visible it was filmed and shown on the news (disregard the header picture, that’s a stock picture, but the videos are from this Friday in Amsterdam); you can see it’s a thin funnel and dissipates quite quickly.
The last big storm we had was June 6th this year, with the strongest gust measured at 127km/h, which did a lot of damage to the 150-200 year old trees along the Amsterdam canals. It too may have formed a small funnel, some speculate (because of the damage), but as the damage happened in the night no-one got it on film, and personal injuries were luckily minimized.
For us, these stronger summer storms and heavier cloudbursts, as well as the unprecedented heatwaves in summer, are the most damaging consequences of climate change in the short term. Long term will be the loss of most of our country to the sea, if we don’t get it stopped before the tipping point.
Strong storms in our part of the world are a natural part of autumn and winter; summer storms should just be short sharp thundery showers after really hot days, nicely cooling everything down and watering the garden.
Our coastal trees all bend to the east-north-east, because they’re used to the prevailing winds; but they’re not used to such ferocious storms happening before the leaves have turned and fallen. Once the branches are bare the wind doesn’t exert nearly as much force on them, so they don’t get uprooted unless they’re rotten.
Now we’ve already had two such storms this summer in full leaf season, as well as two extreme heatwaves, breaking all temperature records for the country.
Our big autumn storms often are remnants of hurricanes which move up the US east coast and then veer across the Atlantic, following the warm water of the Gulf stream, but losing power as they move into colder regions. As your hurricane season gets worse and longer because of the increased heat-energy in the system, so will our storm season.
Climate change really has arrived already, and we can only hope to avoid the tipping point toward uncontrollable enormous damage by doing all we can now, not in 10 or 20 years’ time.
Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox now, but seeing the damage coming and people still not wanting to change a thing to avoid it, just to stay in their comfortable rut or to keep making money off increasing the damage can get me rather shouty.
Oh, kitty-cat. I will spare you the details. Let’s say the carpet was cleaner before I started vacuuming, and tomorrow, I’ll re-vacuum and shampoo the carpet in the two bedrooms. (I’d just vacuumed the bathroom and didn’t see something he’d done after I’d checked the bathroom and while I was vacuuming the rest of the apt.)
—–
The groceries arrived while I was dealing with this. The delivery guy couldn’t get in the gate. (Happens often enough.) He called me, I gave him the code (which I intend to recheck. Again.) He couldn’t reach the apt. offices to resolve it. He tried. He called me back and I met him at the gate, but meanwhile, he was able to come in following a resident entering. Which says any number of things good and bad about security versus emergency needs versus ordinary residents’ business, and delivery problems. I told him it happened regularly, and seems to go in cycles.
So my groceries arrived fine, but warmer than intended.
Consolation bonus prize: I received twice the amount of ice cream I ordered. I won’t need to order any ice cream next month, and possibly not the month after. Pints. Several. I know I didn’t order that many. I…am fine with it, even if I was charged for it. My inner five year old is probably running around rejoicing. Hah.
My cat is happily oblivious to the minor mayhem he caused. I can’t really blame him.
All in all, it’ll get cleaned up, things should be fine, and I have groceries for the month. Plus LOTS of ice cream. A bug in the cart / ordering? A substitution for some non-ice-cream item? Possibly. Well, I can eat it and be thankful, dang it. It’ll salve my feelings, dealing with the carpet. Ick.
Naturally, after placing my order last night, I thought of items I hadn’t ordered and wanted or was out of. Rather than create another order to confuse things, I’ll add that to the next order. Why is it that we humans do this all the time? LOL.
If the vacuum were not drying after cleaning it up, I’d vacuum and shampoo today. So, tomorrow morning. — I’m going to attempt fiction for a while.
Maybe I’ll have better luck with a fictional cat than my dorky, miscreant real one. Kitty, the box was clean. Please go back to good habits and keep them. The box was clean, darn it. I clean it every two or three days, often now every day.
Housecleaning might get to be a routine habit again soon. Tiny progress towards a normal, better life again.
“BlueCatShip”, a Ship for Blue Cats? a Blue Ship for Cats? a Cat on a Ship that has the Blues?
hmmm
Earlier you were talking about the Cat, and how did it get there? why was it on the Keyboard/ Touchscreen ? and basically, a whole world of worldbuilding still to figure out.
At the risk of plagiarism, I thought I might distract you, and in the distraction, allow shadows to coalesce, nebulous shapes to resolve into focus.
Cat books you might know,
The ShipCat Collection by Mercedes Lackey
Honor Harrington, series of books by David Webber
TreeCat Wars by David Webber
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
and of course the Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh
Other Thoughts on your world building, you were talking about timelines, alternate reality parallel worlds? Take a look at Richard Bach`s books, One, or A Gift of Wing’s. Two good examples.
Ok it’s really late here and I have to be up early
Hope some of that is helpful.
I read something interesting regarding ship controls and touchscreens. You may recall the two fatal collisions by US Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain. The Navy has decided that touchscreens are not as intuitive as actual throttles and wheels. In an emergency, the time to remember the touchscreen operating procedures is too long, and the possibility of mistake is too high.
I also read that, and glanced through the conclusions of the NTSB report on the John S McCain incident.
The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers
It shows that a video game interface isn’t the best for the real world, even for the video game generation.
The conclusions of the report were, in a nutshell:
* Inadequate training.
* Crew didn’t get enough sleep and were experiencing chronic fatigue.
* Bad design of controls.
The bridge crew lost situational awareness, lost control of the steering, failed to follow loss of steering emergency procedures, and failed to alert nearby ships to their loss of steering as they were required to do. No blame to the tanker they hit.
I need to read the articles. I’ve never read much on current navy ships, procedures, things like that. But it’d be good background.
That is, even without reading it yet…. Real world situations happen so suddenly. Navy personnel are trained extensively and generally bright anyway. And besides Joe here at the blog, I’ve had family and friends with navy backgrounds, as well as army, and one fan who was, IIR, Air Force. (Browser added capitals, I wasn’t playing favorites.)
Also, I went to one of the few universities with both civilian and military cadets, which graduates officers. (There are at least two besides the US academies themselves.) So I was familiar daily with cadets, young men and women, tromping around in boots and uniforms, dark-thirty runs with cadence songs, etc. — And they’re bright, earnest, want to excel and do good, real service, most of them. (I’m perhaps partial, in that I can’t see well enough to be eligible. I embarrassed one poor recruiting sergeant without meaning to, by saying so. Didn’t mean to. Not nice to see a tough army sergeant feel that personally bad, when he’s doing his duty to recruit good candidates. And my dad did his tours of duty in the army.
So here we have these well trained people on some extra high-tech modern ships, and an accident , emergency comes along, and they have a catastrophic failure and casualties on all sides. And it boils down to bad control design, as well as people forgetting or missing procedures, or maybe the procedures didn’t fit what they were facing, either. Then fatigue and other very human factors.
That’s got to be so disheartening for good people all around, working to keep those ships sailing. (And underwater, etc.)
But it highlights how easy it is for things to go completely off the charts bad, and how people, even with training, are only human. Throw someone off, and they may or may not be able to overcome it in the seconds needed. The ones who do, it’s a mix of skill and plain dumb luck, and maybe simply instinct, or the moral compunction to help, to do what’s right, and never mind the risk. — But they don’t have time to think, either. How can you account for that, when it’s down to seconds?
Plus, you know, even with training, a large number of any crew on a navy ship (or any military unit) are going to be recruits, or young men and women, 18 to 25 or so. Hah, you think at that age that you can tackle the whole world and you think you know so much, and yet you keep finding out how much you don’t know and how much you’re not ready and how much it might not make much difference, even if you manage not to screw up. (I am not dissing them. I’m saying, in general.) I didn’t like it when an older adult would call me a college kid, instead of a young adult. Oh, my. But I grew up enough to realize, hmm, I was so new at everything at that age, even into my 20’s. It’s good, a natural defense, to be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as most of us are in our late teens and early 20’s, not yet aware we have limits, exactly. (Heck, I knew I had some limits, but I still was pretty sure I could handle it all.) (I wonder, if I’d been able to solve one or two personal dilemmas then, if I would’ve done fine that first run through college, and graduated then and gone on to grad school and/or work, possibly overseas. Oh, I had some grand dreams.)
So, you have most of your crew, including new shiny ensigns, who are that age, mostly untried in actual emergency situations, used to video games where it’s all make-believe and no one really gets hurt. You have some more experienced, seasoned officers and senior crew who know better, or should. — Throw them into a real emergency and, is it a surprise things don’t go well? (Again, not dissing, being realistic, and sympathetic.) Because I’ve been in real life-threatening emergencies with real consequences, and I’ve seen bad outcomes up close and personal. (Though that was mostly health issues with family members.) So I can understand, how anyone responds is this mix of handling it right and really screwing up, and somehow, you get to the other side of it surprised if you’re still in one piece. Some aren’t.
I’m also old enough to have lost friends who passed away, one reason or other. Life is so strange when we don’t expect it, filled with great things and humor and awful things we have to face even so. And hopefully, we still give a dang.
There’s still so much we don’t know. We’re so high-tech and modern, we think we’re so smart. Then life comes along and well, we’re a little smarter than the other monkeys and we’re bald all over besides. heh. — And yet, there’s still something about being human,, and it’s easy to forget that among the bad news reporting.
I hope they’ll do better with it. Better controls, better training, and for pity’s sake, if you’re working your crew so hard they’re asleep on their feet, chronic, then that’s no way to have a good officer ready to give his/her best when it’s needed the most, in a fight or other emergency. I know they train you partly to get you used to being able to function when tired or out of sorts. But do that constantly, and you dull the edge of the sword. You want an officer / crew who can do their best when things go sideways. Work, but intersperse that with enough rest so you have a good functioning crew. Being hung-ho, overworking, too tired, won’t help if you can’t think and are ready to fall asleep on regular duty, or when faced with it going bad.
With regard to fatigue, the US Naval Institute (USNI) has been pounding the drum for quite a few years to get circadian rhythm friendly watch schedules implemented.
The historic Royal Navy enlisted two watch schedule–4 hours on, 4 hours off, with dog watches so you switched time every day–was more designed to keep the often-pressed men so tired they didn’t have the energy to think of mutiny.
The classic submarine schedule of 6 hours on and 12 hours off just didn’t account for circadian rhythms. In the surface fleet, “five and dime”–5 hours on, 10 off–schedules and blaring Reveille and Taps at fixed times were maybe worse.
However, work from USNI and some pioneering captains has established some better schedules. One three watch schedule has 3 hour watches in the middle of the night, then 5 hour watches at more normal times with at least 6 hours between watches; and everyone keeps to the same times. Some four watch ships are doing 3 hours on, 9 off (twice). And sleep periods are “protected”, not interrupted for anything but an emergency.
But captains have wide latitude to run their ships their way.
Here are a couple USNI articles that point to many more:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013/january/sea-change-standing-watch
https://news.usni.org/2019/07/15/fleet-finding-new-sleep-sensitive-watch-schedules-boosts-crew-performance-efficiency
Yes, but it’s not only that. The US Navy is seriously undermanned, so that the crew has to put in far longer hours than they should be doing, on a regular basis.
How the Navy got to be 6K sailors short at sea
Thank you for that.
Yes, thank you. If you’re minus enough sailors, then you’re short a man or woman for at least one watch in rotation in several posts. So the remaining sailors have to be divvied up for who does watch-on-watch. Although this might be a way to give junior NCOs and enlisted training towards officer candidacy or promotions, and classroom training also toward that, on the other hand, the practical effect is everyone gets tired, not as alert, shorter tempered, and so on. Over-fatigue and over-stress, worrying or frightening your crew, are not good ways to have your crew functioning at their best. The brighter or better suited to such situations cremates will do a bit better, the not as bright or not as fit for emergency stress people will have a harder time, but no one, suited to those conditions or not, will be able to maintain that for an over-extended period without relief.
Hmm. Has anyone thought to advertise navy life as not only a way to see exotic parts of the world and have an exciting life at sea, but also — as a way to get away from all the nonsense going on ashore, on the mainland, inland, to get away from it all, at home, crowded cities, political and religious and crowd-based foolishness? Maybe appeal to some of those land-locked farm boys and farm girls, aching to get out of their small towns and into anywhere better but back home? Or all those urban youth who need a way out of their dead end situations? — I mean, sure, that’s always been one angle of it, and poor folks have always been recruited for things like that, but…with how crazy the news is and how people are acting these days (not just the US and UK), possibly step up the angle of, get away from all the nonsense on land, have a life at sea, get to see the rest of the world, gain job training and experience, get a good paycheck.
Work things well enough, and you’re also advertising that to the less disadvantaged young people with more schooling and aspirations for degrees and professional lives. — And everyone in between; because you’ve got plenty of disadvantaged kids with good minds who could really come alive with a decent chance at an education and a paying job, a chance to make something better of their lives and get out of that cycle.
How did I end up sounding like a Navy recruitment ad? Haha.
(But I feel much the same for civilian life. Plus — Astronaut training. How many of those Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard people and potential recruits would make idea candidates for astronaut training? Somebody has got to be ready to fly and maintain those ground-to-orbit and interplanetary missions, mining, scientific exploration, trading and supplying, all those spacecraft and stations that need to get built in order to have a real space station and Lunar and Mars outposts / colonies, and asteroid mining. If we get enough international cooperation, including from opposing sides, then everyone has a chance to profit from and colonize space, and a vested interest in NOT blowing up or poisoning this little blue oasis in the star-desert. It seems to me like it could be a deterrent to war, an incentive to peace and trade.)
Also, as someone who does like culture and language and the “exotic” and the “foreign,” and as someone who has met real people from other countries — It seems to me one of the other best deterrents to war is to actually get to know people from other countries, religions, etc. Sure, some are not so great, just like some of our own neighbors are maybe not so great people, hard to get along with. But in my experience, by and large, people from other countries are just people, often very bright and friendly, with basically all the same needs and desires as our own people. In fact, some of them are the friendliest, smartest, hardest working, and most eager to embrace both the ways of the new country they love and their old mother country. Maybe that’s just giving people a chance. Maybe it’s getting to know them beyond a funny accent or habits or looks, to see the real person inside.
Make love not war? OK, fine by me. Make trade and commerce, tourism, information exchange, travel? Recreation, like music and movies and books and so on? Great, fantastic, the more the merrier. — It’s a heckuva lot better than hating and fearing and shooting at each other.
(And all this trade war and insulting the other side and saber-rattling and brinksmanship? Stupid, crazy, senseless, and likely to literally blow up in their faces. — If all those political and religious leaders would quit blowing hot air and falsehoods, and actually cooperate and trade, why, we might see less unemployment, more people with proper food and housing, education, and so on.) (And that is not some overly liberal or overly conservative idea. It’s just good sense. Instead, we have too many people on all sides, big business, governemnts, religious leaders, media pundits, acting like fools, on a path to harm our planet and all our people. Not just one country or group. All humanity. — Nuclear and chemical wastes and unrecycled garbage and things like bad mining and deforestation — do not play favorites with which deity you believe in (or not) or which political party you voted for, or which big corporation you work for or run. When that stuff hits, the whole planet and every human being and lifeforms here can be affected. Why oh why is it that it has become so popular lately to be so foolhardy and spout such nonsense in the public eye, in office, in a pulpit, whatever? Sigh.)
OK, that’s my sociopolitical rant for the week, sorry. (I grew up very conservative. I have become more liberal. But the current global nonsense baffles me. Old social ills and hate groups resurfacing, trying to turn your people against any other side you don’t like at the moment…. It’s gone insane, beyond left, right, conservative, liberal.) So — I want us out in space and I want us back to peaceful trade and cooperation. There’s six to twelve thousand years or so of civilizations on this planet with rich histories and worthy things about them all. Why can’t we find a way to get along and build on all that, and get into space without crowding each other into some nightmare scenario? And how did we get so many lunatic fools into positions of power and influence? Clean house. Vote ’em out. Don’t listen to their nonsense.
Meanwhile, why not work towards some skilled people to fly and maintain, build and crew, those spacecraft and stations and colony domes? Flight attendants, cargo handlers, mission specialist technicians, flight crews, pit crews? Fantastic, need ’em all. Scientists and engineers and biologists and businessmen and women, eager to find ways to live and work in space, create the tech infrastructure, engines, spacecraft, crew modules, etc. to do all that? Want to profit from all the side-benefit technologies created in the process? Want to be a space fleet merchant prince or princess? Excellent! Do that.
Oh yeah, and if someone plays YMCA’s “In the Navy,” complete with dance number and ambiguous subtext, well, fine by me. (There is room in the gene pool for whoever’s fallen in love with whom, for a night or forever, methinks. If two sailors like each other that much, well, I’m not knocking’ it, I’m kinda envious.) So, In the Navy, or some good spaceman song, go for it.
Eegad, I think I’ve become the looney old guy down the street. But I am not yelling at the neighbors or kids or fussing about the dog on the lawn, honest. I might even like that. Heck, if they can put up with me, I can put up with them.
@Deesha, thanks, some of those I have not read, and have been meaning to, and some are entirely new to me. I’d been trying to remember which author and titles went with a couple of books from years ago, and I think those are by Mercedes Lackey. — The Pride of Chanur and Downbelow Station were my introduction to CJ’s writing, in college, and I was hooked. The Chanur series, Downbelow Station, Merchanter’s Luck, and Finity’s End are particular favorites, and I loved getting back to Alliance-Union with Alliance Rising. CJ is an author whose books I can buy because I know anything by that author will be a good read. (I somehow didn’t get a few of her books in the late 80’s/early 90’s, budget or the blurb on the back of the book didn’t send me. I later learned, hey, I missed out, when I got those.)
My username, “BlueCatShip,” has a story behind it. Back when I signed up for an early forum, it rejected my first few tries, but I was determined. Someone had recently had a conversation in which they were bemused by a marketing try, the introduction of a very green ketchup by one of the two big ketchup brands here in the US. It was a very green dark green, somewhat brighter than spinach. Heh. We laughed. In this, I joked now they had everything except blue ketchup. It stuck in my mind. So, blue is my favorite color, I love cats, and a starship is a natural for science fiction fans, so… BlueCatShip it was, and I’ve been that on SF&F forums ever since, usually shortened to BCS. (I’m actually Ben, which has been out there so long, it’s fine.)
@Walt — I’ll check that. I don’t get the mania for touchscreens for everything. For some uses, they’re great. For others, I think you need real physical controls. — I never have understood why the iPhone led every other manufacturer to do away with cell phone keypads in favor of touchscreen-only. In bright light or certain situations, you either can’t see the touchscreen, it’s washed out, or it can lock up or go out. If you’re flying/driving/piloting a vehicle that travels tens, hundreds, thousands of miles per hour (OK, km/h), you really, really don’t want your controls to disappear or lock up and refuse input or not show output. You want some chance that manual controls will work. And at astronomical units or light-years distance…yeah. Or just a simple phone call in bright sun or the middle of the night, you want to be able to dial it. It ought to be simple. (And they could include that as a slide-out or flip-phone style, as some early cell phones did.)
Side Note: I use hex codes for RGB colors often enough that I wonder why computer keyboards didn’t go to a standard peripheral for a hex keypad and a few computer science operators, plus maybe a $ or # or both, for easy use. — But I sometimes get thrown by the reversed keypads for calculators versus phones and card PIN numbers. For some reason, instead of one standard, we have two.
Yes, IMHO, a starship or shuttle needs a throttle, joystick, or steering wheel. Adding a trackball and the handful of buttons for a game pad, hahah, “Ensign! Quit playing Tetris and fly the dang ship!” 😀
Also…I was in college before I learned the source and association of the word, “joystick.” I was sheltered and uptight enough at the time that it boggled my mind, although I had noticed a certain oddness in the subtext of the BSG pilots flying their Vipers…. (I didn’t have siblings or cousins around, growing up, and not much social contact with other kids except at school, so, ah, I had a lot of catching up to do in school and real life. Heh.)
Speaking of which — My cousins are all extended family, all over the country, and I never have heard from them much. As kids, we’d see each other once or twice a year and had a little connection. As adults, we’ve all been busy with our separate lives. And my generation of cousins and I are all old enough to have grown children and grandkids, or else high school and college age. A family friend I haven’t seen in ages had twins the year I graduated high school. They are now 35. — Why bring this up? Although I used to have strong extended family ties, I don’t anymore. (And the one aunt with the most kids and grandkids…is anti-everything, poor woman. (If, as is possible, any of her grandkids are LGBT, she is going to have a huge problem accepting them, or she won’t. I knew better than to tell her about me.)
This means that I have only school friendships and periodic extended family, but close-knit at the time, visits to draw from, for how most families operate in family life. I went to public schools in the US, which means the ordinary day school and you live at home. My only dorm experience was in college. (I believe in the UK, they have a different word for it and get confused about what a “public school” means in the US. In other words, it’s not a private school or parochial religiously-backed school or a boarding school. We have those, big or small, boarding or day schools, but most American kids go to public schools, run by local school districts, their own system not quite connected to city or county governments, but those and state and federal all get into it, which must create a mess for the teachers and admin staffers.
In writing and planning for other stories, but more for this one, I’ve had to think of how they’d really life on a starship, an extended family and non-family crew hired on, all working and living together, 24/7. I did grow up with my mom owning a small business, so this gives me a little background there, and I grew up with stories from my farmer grandparents and my dad growing up a farm boy. But writing the story means figuring out who’s where doing what, where everything is on the ship, how their world and world-view works, what the social conflicts are, good and bad about how life is there. — Where is this or that? How do you get there? What do they do for X, Y, or Z in daily life, work, play, etc.? How do people get along aboard ship? How do they form relationships outside the ship, for trade, family, friends, work, etc.? And while Char1 and Char2 are talking and working, is that taking too long, and is it true to how people are in real life? And for the under-18 characters, they need to be doing chores and learning, like pioneer and factory and farm/ranch kids did in earlier centuries, plus they need to play, and they need to act their age, they can’t be little adults, even when they are doing adult work on the ship. Because they are mentally and emotionally and physically not quite there yet, and each one develops differently, at different speeds in each aspect of themselves.
Writing that, working it out in my head, planning ahead, is…really complex, and more than just pretending. (And any storytelling structure or artfulness, philosophy, or science and technical, that’s a lot to put into a story. Pro writers get to do this stuff for fun and (small) profit. You get paid to do that? Dang, I like that. (Also still love fonts and art, wish I knew music better.)
I am trying hard to be original and NOT borrow from other stories, series, authors, because if you do that right, it’s original and fine, if you use your own ideas and build on, allude to, but don’t just copy. If you do it wrong, it’s copying or theft of ideas and lying, passing them off as your own, plagiarism, a writing and intellectual sin. Heh. Which I don’t want to do. For one, I like those writers and their stories so much, they’re so iconic and influenced so much, those need to stand on their own and keep on inspiring people. Two, a writer is supposed to be creative enough to come up with his/her own things and make something as original as others, and just maybe unique and amazing. (Also, at least one very public case is out there now, in which a studio team may have (I think definitely did) somehow plagiarize an individual small creator’s work, with no compensation, permission, or acknowledgement. Awful. I’m hoping that will be a win for the little guy, one-man business and creator, rather than the giant media corporation franchise and their lawyers — and the writers /producers who should have known better. You’re supposed to learn not to do that before you get to high school, let alone in college. In college, you can be expelled for it, dishonorably discharged too.
And — I’ve had to think about what a spacer kid (or adult) knows, versus what a planet-side kid or adult knows. Things we think nothing of, since we’ve grown up on a planet, would seem very strange or dangerous to a starship or starbase person, and normal to a colonist. Vice versa, if you’ve spend your whole life on a planet, even if you ‘ve had training, that must be different than growing up on a starship or space station.
I’m having to thin about what to call things, and what forms their technology, their gadgets, take. I’m torn between “space station” and “starbase,” and both seem unwieldy, and so does “station.” (In Australia, a “station” is about what we’d call a ranch in the US, a large or small, usually family-owned, farm and ranch spread. Americans borrowed the word ranchero and didn’t quite borrow the word hacienda, and so we have ranches and the Aussies, without Spanish / Mexican influences, have stations.)
I am also trying to account for, this is hundreds of years in the future, and if we get into space, then people will intermarry (or at least have kids together, married or not) and so those world-based national and other ties won’t mean as much, for most people, out of necessity. They’re in space, off-planet. What does one dot on the home planet mean, when they were never born there, don’t live there, and don’t see what all the fuss is about between all those fussing sides. Two hundred years was enough to create US and UK and Aussie and other flavors of English, dialects we can mostly understand with a little bit of work. Four hundred years, and you’re into Shakespearean and King James and Elizabethan English. There are a few things we have trouble with, British or American, with that version of English. (It’s like an outdated, early software update, heh.) — Past that, to when the printing press was invented, and you’re nearly back to Chaucer. Even a dedicated reader / booklover, and fairly educated, needs lots of help and notes for that, and can’t pronounce it without training. That’s between the Norman Conquest and the invention of the printing press, and after the Magna Carta. But Chaucer still spoke and lived with “Englische” and “godely Frensche” (goodlyc French, not godly or godlike). I can read that, with notes in hand, and I can speak it, thanks to teachers who insisted I did, plus a love for languages. (It should be a bit more Norman French and a bit more Saxon English than most people pronounce it. One of my junior high teachers used a much more Middle French accent for it.) Also, I have the advantage of French. Back to 1066 and earlier, just a thousand and fifty years, and we’re into Anglo-Saxon Old English and Beowulf and the Wanderer / Wayfarer, which looks like something else, not so much English, unless you look very hard. The pronunciation is unlike modern English, and sounds more like…well, not really like Vikings.
So in a quarter of a millennium, the age of the US, in 7 more years, 250 years, you get American and British and other English dialects. (They all diverged from Shakespearean English, and people in his time were already starting to colonize the Americas (and most of the rest of the planet). 500 years, half a millennium, and you are more than past the time needed for a new language stage. (We are at that point now, with English, and seeing it, with a re-merger of dialects and mass media into it, in ways that haven’t happened before.)
so — Language, culture, attitudes, beliefs, traditions, fashions in clothing or favorite foods — In a few hundred years, the people in these future stories are as different from what we think and do now, as we are from people in the 1500’s or so, give or take a few centuries, perhaps. — Those early printing press samples I was looking at this month and last? Those were from 1475 to 1495 or so, from Nicolas Jenson and Arrighi and others (Claude Garamond was later), and this was during the Italian Renaissance. The invention of printing was a major cause for literature, from the Greeks and Romans and their present 1500’s thinkers, like Dante and others, to become widespread. Heck, they still hadn’t fully adopted Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals. — And they were split between blacklister and early Roman and Italic writing styles. They used all those, separately. — In other words, their world was significantly different in nearly every way from ours, yet it was a very early form of what we know. (And yes, Shakespeare and the King James Bible were a century in the future. I can’t recall if the Wycliffe Bible had been produced yet.)
So — I am not reminding myself of this enough. The people In the story are probably too much like 21st century people. Hmm. That means maybe a rewrite, with some ideas on who they’d be different, more than what I’ve got.
And yet they also have to be realistic people, with everyday, believable problems and all the good and bad, the very civilized and the very barbaric or backward, which, be it noted, we have today, as modern as we like to think we are.
OK, I need to see if the crew have found the stray cat yet. Or how long that goes on before they get the cat. Hahaha. — The main character is not perfect, by far, but he’s trying. Having him purposefully written as still making mistakes and learning, not always the hero or the know-it-all, I think makes for a better story, and it’s something I need to keep in mind more in the future.
In other words, I’m having all kinds of fun with this. I do hope some people will want to read it, will like it, and will want to buy it. I am still new at this. But I can tell I”ve tased a plateau. I’m doing better with this one.
@BCS: Cat on a ship – see British comedy SF series Red Dwarf. Well, it’s a cat of a sort! 😀
It’s been way too long since I’ve seen Red Dwarf. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d stumbled onto when I first saw it after college. Let’s say I still needed to loosen up. A lot. But I got a kick out of it. It’s been ages since I’ve watched.
There is something wonderful about British comedy and drama, something just that bit different in national character. American and British and Aussie, three great flavors, but all a little different.
@BCS — Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about a star base culture too — metal hulls and extruded plastics and black, colorless space — a lot of visual sameness. Would humans in that environment lose a feel for bright colors? Would they crave color? Would they invent ways to add visual stimulus to their environment, both in color and movement — color the walls of their cabins — like a cling skin that could be removed easily from one cabin to be used on another, that could be changed easily in terms of color and design, or a little device that would project pictures as well as do a light show of colors and motions according to program? Recognizing the need for visual stimulation as a way to avoid the boredom of space, would they wear colorful clothing, or develop a wearable holographic projector that could visually simulate whatever clothing they could think up and program into it. VR technology (“holodecks”) could become cheap and portable, where the VR rig was very affordably priced and the company made their money on various preprogrammed scenarios that could be purchased and downloaded. Like 19th century sailors carving scrimshaw, would space farers maybe develop VR scenarios or write music, or learn hand crafts to do in the tedium of long space flights and to earn extra bucks once they made stationfall? (Something hand made would be one-of-a-kind, exclusive, desireable, expensive . . .)
When your time keeping has to cover not only a multitude of different and unique star systems but also orbital and nonorbital stations and space ships in “hyperspace,” how does that work? How does station life and ship life that goes on 24/7 affect the language in terms of “day” and “night” as well as “week,” “month,” and “Year?” Is a “Day” broken into three parts (1st, 2nd, 3rd, shifts) instead of “nightime” and “daylight?” In the circumstance where “Night” and “Day” are not physical phenomenon, would it make more sense to use another term such as “shift cycle” What if a week had 8 days or 9? What if a shift was 9 hours, and a “day” was 27 hours long? Planetary “days” would be sidereal — planet/starsystem dependent — and “time” in space would be a universal constant, like “zulu” or Greenwich Mean Time, maybe? And maybe ship time would have to resync with “space” time each time a ship emerged from hyperspace.
So many thoughts.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is natural selection. How would space “select” individuals? What physical traits would be prosurvival in space? Would an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat like Inuits and other arctic and antarctic peoples have developed be prosurvival in space? Would short, thickset body types (like Neanderthals evolved) be better suited to space than tall slender bodies that lost heat rapidly?
I would think “space stations” would just be known by their names, like any other city or province. They might use the name plus a qualifier like “orbital” for those that orbited something, “Stationary” for something that didn’t, “Planetary” for something on a planet, and “lunar” for something on a moon.
You’d have to have some sort of standardized general language, because different places — stations, planets, ships, –would inevitably form dialects. I would think the “standard” language would be either a function of government/polity — to make sure the whole political entity was on the same page and everybody could communicate intelligibly with everybody else — or economic, to facilitate trade. That way everybody would only have to learn the one common language to be able to talk to anybody who was not a member of their linguistic group. Maybe each ship would evolve its own jargon and newcomers to the ship would have to learn the jargon. Each homogenous linguistic group would begin to diverge and develop an “accent” as well as semantic differences. Compare to “family” jargon. If I say “I’m skoxless” to my mom, or “I did the bib-a-bib,” she knows what I mean because they are part of our common family lore.
You do point out the balancing act — strange and futuristic, but still relatably human.
Off topic, but I had a CT scan last week, and Monday, my oncologist pronounced my CLL/lymphoma to be in complete remission — for now. It’s a chronic disease and always likely to recur, but for the moment, I have it licked.
Good news, WOL, the complete remission!
Some form of skrimshaw, knitting, needlework, jewellery or digital program / ‘skins’ development seems likely as crew leisure hobbies. Anything made from small, light, portable materials needing time to make would generate personal ‘pocketmoney’ as well as serving as a downtime distraction.
I do think that as you are writing stories now, intended to be readable to audiences now, it’s important not to go to far in the extrapolation of future language changes. It needs to stay readable, just a few small changes for the future flavor will go a long way.
As far as a central lingua franca for trade or government, that does not preclude the survival of many other languages – the language is often seen as central to the culture, and many cultures under threat from globalization will cling the more strongly to their roots.
Certainly for family ships and ship clans they may have a defined culture and language separate from the trade language.
I rather expect something like the foldable e-ink screens will be developed capable of color, so at least the luxury cabins could have programmable wallpaper – developing wallpaper skins could be another hobby that creates income.
Yay, WOL!! The complete remission is super news!
Wow, y’all have been busy! 🙂 — WOL, very good to hear you’re in remission. Please stay that way. We like having you around. 🙂
Didn’t know I’d spark a creative discussion. Cool, as long as Herself is cool with us spouting fannish ideas.
Y’know, I had considered VR rooms or tanks, like a holodeck / funhouse / LARP thing. (I’ve never done a LARP or paintball game, but I’d think games and VR would be important for training; I’ve been covering that some, alluding to it, and did in previous story ideas / chunks.
I’d figured entire walls might be viewing screens, and there’d likely be a better way to have a 3D view of things. Seems like you’d need that for starlight navigation. — But why didn’t I think of wallpapers? That’s a fantastic idea. Seems likely, if you have e-ink. (I expect we’ll see something like e-ink in full color in our lifetimes, rather than… You know how your mother always told you not to sit so close to the TV and stare it, ditto for light bulbs? — So we all started staring at computer screens close up. My mom and dad did too. Heh. Life’s funny like that.
I don’t think civilian ships or stations would be so monochrome and industrial, battleship grey. People have this natural inclination for color and pattern, in decoration for where we live and work, for clothing, for dang near everything. Graffitti artists see a blank wall and they spray-paint it. I’d rather have murals, but it shows that instinct going. — In earlier stories, for a while there, I thought it’d make sense for people to be running around with uniforms and very military. You’d have some of that, at least for actual military. But civilians, particularly if they’re family, aren’t going to do well with that level of regimented behavior. You need some discipline and structure to run the ship properly. But hmm, is everyone going to say sir and ma’am like military school cadets?
Well, some, at least the cadets. But mostly, they’ve all got to live together. Plus that urge for self-expression, plus – a starship needs pretty smart people to run it, and smart people or people being self-sufficient or team-sufficient also tend to be independent-minded or think off-the-wall. If you’re running into aliens (or not) or going from star to star, I’d think you’d want to encourage that. (Maybe I’m naive in thinking so.)
Crafts and making extra money — If they’re a merchant crew, or just need to make extra money (who doesn’t?) then probably many hobbies would be there. Judging from college experience and what I’ve heard of ships, you typically have all sorts of hobbies and special interests going on. That’s healthy to balance work and leisure, it creates unique items for trade, and it’s good for that creative urge. (Somebody on the ship needs to cook, too.) — I haven’t yet gotten to people having downtime or galley / lounge time in this story. I’d included adults doing some crafts for added trade and personal income , in other stories. But that needs to happen here, and I need to have the cadets doing things too. — A small ship, and you’ve got everybody rotating duty shifts or watches, and the kids would have work and schooling and off-time, like the adults.
My dad and my grandmother both had stories of working on their farms from as early as they could help. As girls, my grandmother one one side and my aunt on the other were both proud of hauling 100 pound sacks of cotton, picking cotton, as capable as the menfolk, so this was a point I heard in stories. Things like that were common for girls and boys. — And yet some people had attitudes about women being weaker, physically and emotionally. My dad also said that, in one of the moves from Texas to Virginia and vice versa (they were from Virginia, but grandpa liked Texas too) that, at 12, my dad was left at the family farm in Texas, to hold down and finish up there while the rest of the family moved back to the permanent family farm in Virginia. (Huh, why did I not put this together and ask? My dad’s youngest sibling, his brother, was born when my dad was 12. so this fits into that at some point.) The highlight of this was, my dad, while alone at 12 on the farm, waiting for his dad to return to get him, decided to try to make some kind of cheese, maybe cottage cheese. It didn’t turn out. (They did make cheese and churn butter and so on, make Sauerkraut too.) But it strikes me that, at 12, you have this boy who’s expected to stay by himself on the property and wait for his dad to come back to get him. I don’t recall why, but there was some reason he was supposed to stay to close things down and wait for his dad to get him. Also, I can’t recall if they had a car then, or if that was later. I’ve seen the family photo of all the kids except my uncle, who wasn’t yet born, taken when my dad was about 12. Four white-blond headed kids, between skinny and pudgy in the way only kids can be, smiling country farm kids. Not really any different from how kids in my generation of city kids looked, aside from clothing. And that young boy was alone on the farm in the middle of nowhere, with neighbors some distance away, and he was already responsible enough that this could work without a hitch. I’m not sure I could’ve done that at 12, though I thought I was doing pretty good then. Heh. But it points to the pioneer attitude that has mostly been lost, at least for city folks now. The kids worked when they weren’t in school. (Big minus side: rural kids might not always attend school while in session. I think my dad and his siblings did, but they’d also work as soon as they got back home. They did have time spent with friends, though.
—–
It’s good daylight out. I napped yesterday evening. My sleep cycle is always wonky. I woke up during the night, and I just surfaced a bit ago from writing.
Uh, I think I”ve now exceeded all but one partial story, for amount written. It’s now up to 100-some pages, half letter size, five chapters. Some more introduction needs to happen before we get a lull and then the problem (cat meets keyboard) happens and things go sideways to elsewhere. — Whew, I’m tired, and may nap before more housecleaning.
Uh, still going fine on this. — Last night, writing a chapter, is either really good or really dismal in spots; mostly good, I think, and maybe something worked out in my head about things. I’m unsure about part of it, so it’s staying in until another pass for editing or rewrites. Mostly happy with it, I’m just not sure what I’ve got.
I’d realized something about how this is set up that I hadn’t planned how to deal with, but on a small ship, would need to be one of a few ways, all of which mean developing how the free kids like the main character get along, and who shares a room. That means developing other characters. — And last night, I forgot whether I’d said they are docked at a starbase / space station, or if they were docked downward at a colony. I think I had them at the starbase in Orit, and wrote it that way in the chapter. — My idea is, likely, a space station / stabs is built in orbit around the most likely planet. But human-habitable planets seem to be rare, even though we’re currently finding out planets are common around stars. So starbases or outposts are common, colonies are not often really that habitable, in the way that the Moon and Mars are marginally habitable, or maybe a bit better than that. I think I know how things are set up if I need to do more with that.
I didn’t even cover the search for the cat in that chapter, so I have to get something in on that and the other major character. I’m still not sure if that character should be who he is, or some other backstory, personality. And I need to get the main character in with the other cadets or cabin mates, so that’s established.
So far, the main character has a real knack for getting himself in big trouble, with good intentions, not quite thinking through things, and he’s a kid, so he’s still learning, growing, immature, but reasonably smart. Enough so he’s got workable flaws and I like how he is.
My real-life cat is objecting he hasn’t had breakfast or much attention, and what am I doing typing so much and not sleeping or spoiling him? LOL.
They are still at dock, not underway, and I haven’t figured out if another character comes aboard or isn’t in this story.
I wonder of how much I have written will stay in the final draft. — But I still have to get through the whole story. I haven’t yet stopped and outlined forward or written down new notes.
Haven’t figured out if there are any other cats aboard or dogs. The cat might be the only one. If the other character doesn’t belong in this story, then I have about a third of the crew accounted for, plus need to work out about pets / working animals.
I’m still amazed and happy with how it’s going. There’s a lot to go before it’s done.
If I can get this to whee I am writing productive story, and get a finished story, then get it through revised drafts to final, that will be a major undertaking for me. But yeah, if I can get past that hurdle, it means I should be able to do it again. We’ll see. That writing urge has always been there.
My college-age self had the grand scheme of getting my degree, technical writing and translation and possibly working overseas in Europe or some other exotic foreign place. The plan was, I’d be some successful computer scientist or linguist/translator. (I didn’t want to be a diplomat in foreign service, though.) Business, programming, writing, languages, I thought. See, the other part of the grand scheme was, that would be my day job and at night, I could write the great American / not-so-American science fiction novel. Heh, until I could make enough at that to make that my career. During the same time, I also discovered I wanted to make fonts, do art and books.
Well, life happened. Oh boy, did life happen. So I ended up desktop publishing / graphic arts in a small business with my mom instead, and mostly, we did small jobs for companies and consultants, some larger stuff. I did lots and lots of proofing, very good at it then, but I could see better back then. I did the ordinary copyediting and occasional ghostwriting of copy for clients. I was amazed how often a business owner, skilled in his or her business, couldn’t tell me in a a few paragraphs what they did, and didn’t know to include the business name, a contact name, address, phone number, business hours, maybe a map to find them, de rigueur, at minimum to advertise their business. Uh, so, how are people going to contact you if you don’t put your phone or address? No, they are not going to look in the phone book. Your ad is your one chance to grab their interest. What? make it all bolder, all caps, no whitespace? Aargh, this is not a typewriter, and you won’t catch customers like that. I wish I had a nickel for every time customers thought they knew grammar and spelling, punctiona, style, better than a woman with a B.A. in English, or a young guy who didn’t have his degree to prove it, but was good at it.
I would have found out living out on my own, entirely, was much tougher than I thought. I also think I could’ve tackled it better then than later. That was before cell phones and the internet took off; in fact, mostly before Netscape even existed.
I am glad I didn’t know what was ahead of me. I also wonder if I’d come out, if I would’ve gotten through college fine the first time, or if I would’ve found myself entirely on my own with maybe support from a few family friends. — And the thing is, in any case, my life would’ve changed drastically in my mid-30’s, just like it did in this timeline / reality, and again caring for my grandmother. If my parents, one or both, had lived longer, they’d be in their mid and late 80’s today. My dad would be 89, my mom would be 86. So even if everything had gone the way I wanted, that first go-round in college, I would be in something like this situation now, but maybe a bit better off financially. I think I would’ve made mistakes from being so inexperienced, and so who knows.
So…I’m closer to 54, I’m rebuilding my life, my savings and income are too shaky, and I am just now getting really productive again on fonts and writing. But OK, that’s progress. If I can get things out there producing income, that’s a big improvement. If it’s enough to live on, save from, oh, wow. So…progress.
I’ve been on my own so long, I am not sure I’d know what to do with myself if I had roommates and (wow) a special someone. It doesn’t feel likely anymore, but I wish that part of my life would improve. Not having a good group of local friends for support, or just hanging out, is not good for you. — I would be so amazed if I get roommates or a significant other. I don’t see that happening any time soon, though.
So, just the usual me, muddling through. Never thought my life would be how it’s been. Wild, bumpy ride for so long now. — But I’m happy to see some progress recently, and to see it might be staying more. — I still haven’t got the hang of this thing called life yet. I almost think I was doing better at it in high school. But nope, if I had, then college wouldn’t have worked out like it did. So, just me. — 10:23am? Lord, no wonder the cat’s complaining!
I believe that Anne McCaffrey had cats in space in some of her works.
Cats in space – are there mice or rats in space?
Hep Cats in space?
Bulldozers in space?
Multihulled boats in space?
And of course Broadway Musicals in space?
Maniacal laughter.
Andre Norton — Star Ka’ats.
I remember reading about Eet and the Zero Stone. I _think_ Star Ka’at was a juvenile novel about a couple of kids, a boy and a girl, and an ester cat in a future, science fiction but almost enchanted world. Gosh, it’s been too long since I read that one.
One that hasn’t been mentioned so far is only loosely cat-connected:
The Jargoon Pard, by Andre Norton. A boy / young teen has shape-shifting abilities and there’s a belt involved. I know I’ve read it two or three times, but so long ago. I remember one scene where he’s just discovering this, and he’s up on a table with a vase of flowers in the middle of the night. I read it first when I was around 12 to 14, I think.
One of the first books by Andre Norton I ever read was Daybreak 2250 AD, also titled Starman’s Son. A young man goes around with a cougar-sized mutant housecat Siamese, in a future Earth post-apocalyse, on a quest. He’s got a pendant and there’s a connection to space colonists (those starmen) who had left Earth beforehand. There’s also a rival species of mutant rat-like creatures, unless I’m mixing that up with the Iron Breed, I think it was called, where she has a race of humanoid / bipedal cat-people, who are becoming civilized, tribal, in another post-apocalyptic setting. — Those were all good reads.
(I’m still really partial to her Solar Queen traders and her Time Agents / Time Traders, and really enjoyed her Beast Master books. Unrelated to the 80’s movie with Marc Singer et al., running around in loincloths, heheh. But those movies were likely inspired by her books.)
— I am going to need to write down the recommendations here. Some, I haven’t read, and others, it’s been so long it’ll be like reading them brand-new.
As for cat stories in space, I can remember “The Game of Rat and Dragon” by weird old Cordwainer Smith, and “Ship of Shadows” by Fritz Leiber. Both short stories and very much recommended.
(“Resspectfful greetingss, ssir,” he hissed. “Name izz Kim.”
Doc answered, “The same to you, sir. May mice be ever abundant.”)
I found the Cordwainer Smith story, and will look for the Fritz Lieber story.
I remember enjoying other Fritz Lieber stories.
Also, welcome or welcome back. 😀
Hahaha! Let’s Do The Time Warp Now!
OK, it was the only immediate reference I could think of. — Although there’s a Hollywood channel thing on YouTube which does a really fine Doctor Who musical parody number. Worth looking for, and work-safe and kid-safe.
I would bet that, against all odds and safeguards, somehow, rats and mice and all the usual insect and other pests, and probably fungi, will make it into space with us, snugged in among cargo in places where they can survive the trip, in people’s baggage, or more, ah, personal rides with humans and our animals and plants and fungi we purposefully take into space. Fertilizer and potting soil, also sources for that, and necessary for plants for food production. — But, people being people and class distinctions and social problems being what they are, some people get called dock rats or rodents too, instead of being called dockers.
One of the problems in space would be, how do you truly get rid of an infestation of vermin or parasites? Oh, you can vent a compartment to space, even, but things like dust or clinging objects / critters / burs wouldn’t just whoosh out into space. So they’d have to be careful about it. — And I’m having to consider what level of concern a starship crew should have for a stray cat that’s gotten loose in the ship, from a starbase dock or a colony spaceport. It’s a cat. But are their regulations for health and safety so stringent as to be overdoing it, or are they lax enough to introduce a serious problem? I’m opting for a fairly common-sense approach, but I found myself having to consider that as a problem in space. (The cat does have to go through quarantine after he/she is found.)
Funny: Apparently, my browser’s built-in spellchecker is fine with starships, but it wants to change starbases to staircases! Not the same things! Hahaha. — I’ve located, finally, how to add the word to its spellchecking dictionary.
Word for the Day: Lagnappe – 1. a small gift, esp one given to a customer who makes a purchase. 2. something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus. [C19: Louisiana French, from American Spanish la ñapa, from Quechua yápa addition]
I had to look up «lagniappe» to be sure what I thought it meant was really what it meant. I had it almost right but not quite. But what really struck was, look at the etymology, the word-origin-history. Louisiana French from American Spanish from Quechua Indian source, and American English borrows it from Louisiana French. Notice how the word changes just a little with each borrowing, but stays almost the same, over whatever few tens or hundreds of years along the way. The basic meaning changes a bit more, but still has a path of associations (there’s that word) that make sense along the way. So Lagnappe has a really multi-cultural history, and such a neat thing.
Rendered into another form of English, it would be ‘to boot’.
Tommie, I’m not following the connection there. You mean like, the whole thing, to boot? I don’t see how it would be, to boot up (start up) or to boot out (to kick out). I’ve gotta be missing something. How is un lagniappe related to, to boot? Merci, ma chère amie.
…you get all this in the bargain, and I’ll give you that to boot…
or as a sweetener
LOL! Amazon? Y’all done lost yo’ mind. So, I’ve had a craving for peach juice for some reason, and didn’t get it on my grocery order. So I saw an OK price (Goya Diet Peach Nectar, 9.5oz, 24 cans) and ordered it.
Then comes the funny, lost-their-minds part:
Why on Earth would I get a suggestion to buy a… sheer ballet skirt wrap for adult/child ?! I mean, really. LOL, how could Amazon possibly think that fits my buying trends? Er, so, do a lot of young girls (or boys?) taking ballet, also drink a lot of peach nectar? I have no idea.
I will, however, admit that, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, my best friend did a modern dance recital, outfitted in a Star-Spangled Banner leotard, to the funky disco dance version of Also Sprach Zarathustra. I was thrilled, clapped, cheered, gave the other boys who whispered mean comments a dirty look. (I later learned my best friend was really embarrassed and caught a lot of teasing/bullying comments from other boys about it, and he hadn’t wanted to do it.) Uh, I thought it was terrific. Made me feel great, and he looked great, and he was, after all, my best friend, so why wouldn’t I be thrilled. — I had no clue at the time, and it wasn’t anything more than that, an exhilarating feeling, very happy to see my friend dancing like that. — It wouldn’t be until later, when my feelings began to be more apparent, that I would figure out, hmm, that was an early sign I liked guys instead of girls. At the time, I was too young and naive and immature to know it as more than a thrill for my friend, feeling that happy, seeing him dance, made me feel good too. And I think I was noticing, without really being aware of why or how, that I liked how he looked and moved. But we were best friends, so at the time, it seemed just natural.
To this day, hearing that version (disco pop funky arrangement) of the classical piece still reminds me of him and that dance. This was before video recorders, and no one did a super 8mm home movie of it.
So, OK, Amazon, I sure didn’t mind a boy doing modern dance back then. But, uh, the sheer wrap? Not really my thing, there. LOL. I mean, I’m pretty sure theatre kids or adults could use that for, I dunno, Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as part of the costuming, or some other cosplay of some kind, but…. I’m baffled as to why Amazon thought I’d be that interested in buying that! Hahaha.
I wouldn’t think the connection between peach nectar and ballet / dance class for girls or boys either would be so major that peach nectar would automatically imply you’d also want to buy a sheer wrap skirt. But ooo-kkaayyy.
(On the other hand, Amazon does occasionally turn up some really odd, unrelated results in searches, so I dunno.)
It was so oddball and funny, I thought I might as well share. If anyone else (especially the guys) buys fruit nectar and gets a similar recommendation, haha, then I guess there’s some kind of trend connection? Weird….
So in the next few days, I should get a flat of peach nectar by Goya brand. And not a gauzy little skirt wrap. (sorry, y’all.) (huh, if anyone was hoping, maybe I missed a chance?) (falls over laughing.)
don’t blame me if a musical number from The Lion King or from Frozen follows. It wasn’t me! (“Can you feel the loooove toniiiight…?”) (“Let it go, let it go…!”) :: snicker ::
A classic and brilliant short story about cats in space:
The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith
I will have to seek that one out. I might have run across it before. I’d read a couple of his other “pin lighter” short stories.
I wish the 1980’s Catfantastic series (4 or 6 of them?) were republished in ebook format. I loved those, including the Renaissance and Old Master style cover art. There were shorts and a couple of novellas in those by a host of good authors, including some folks who were new (or new to me) at the time, as well as favorite authors. Those were SF&F, a range of subjects, times, situations, genres and mixed / hard to classify genres.
I also read Clifford D. Simak’s “City” short story collection dealing with humans, robots, and evolving dogs.
I am going to have to find where I put a juvenile novel called Star Dog. I don’t recall if the author was Alexander Key or someone else. I hope my copy did not get damaged when I’d had insect problems. — The story involves a mama dog who has an unusual puppy, and her owner (and the puppy’s owner) is a young boy. (I think I’m recalling the basics right.) I first read that as a young teen and remembered it and later got a used copy, hardbound. So I’ll need to see where I put it in the Great Reshuffling.
Game of Rat and Dragon — sounds cool; thanks!
@chondrite and @Hanneke — Request: In an effort to get a name or two for ships or crew characters, what are the Hawai’ian and Nederlands versions, masculine and feminine, singular and plural, for — Fisher, Netter, Webber (as an alternative to Netter), and Trader / Merchant, please?
I am going to guess that in Nederlands, Dutch, most of these are very cognate to English, probably Fischer, Netter, maybe Webber if it’s not something quite different, and Marchand or, hmm, Krofter, maybe? (I think I’m confusing Krofter from something else from German.) I’m guessing Dutch borrowed French Marchand, but Markt or Mart for a market?
Netter — would there be different words for a person _using_ a net versus a person who _makes_ or repairs a net, weaves a net? — I’m thinking of a net, to net, netting, netted, netter, in connection with casting and gathering in nets to catch fish, but possibly I’m off, there.
I still haven’t come up with character names that seem to fit, and hmm, all these people in the story are coming off sounding mostly American with a little period historical or folksy style in there. Only that doesn’t match what I think it’s likely to be, 400 to 500 years in our future, with people from Earth in the minority, and people in space or on colonies most likely a blend from all over Earth, intermarrying (or at least, having children and families) out in space. — I’m not sure I want to go with names from two or three different cultures together for the same person, although I know Japanese and Chinese Americans often give their kids an Asian name and an American name, to honor both cultures. (One of the random name generators I have tried has a bad habit of mixing names from multiple languages at will, and it doesn’t look too realistic to me.)
One of my characters is of unknown origin so far, but looks like he could be from Papua New Guinea (dark tan to brown skin, brown to blond hair, etc, typical of people there. It felt like a way to throw out a red herring or else suggest multiple origins blended, or else New Guineans in space, which is entirely likely.)
So I’m looking back at this and thinking I need to revise characters or make sure I have more of a balance with new ones. And so far, I’ve found I don’t want to get too much into inventing / respelling words, even though in 400 to 500 years, everyone would be speaking future versions of the languages that are around then. I’m still thinking over how I want to handle that. One way is to “conlang” a couple of future languages, to try to evolve existing ones to their future versions. But for dialogue and narrative and written text (what the characters have on their screens), so far, I’ve still defaulted to English with a few new slang words and hints that other major languages are around. So far, I’m not taking cross-fertilization, more borrowings into a lingua franca, into account. But my feeling is, there’d be an interplanetary stage where English, Russian, Chinese, and a few others would be the main basis for a standard, just like English is the aviation standard today, but we have several major space agencies operating, or about to operate.
And — despite current tradition, the military thing about not saying “ma’am” for a woman and using “sir” instead, just seems ludicrous to me. “Ma’am” is perfectly polite and respectful. Calling a woman, “sir,” seems…weird to me, even though it’s (US) practice in the military.
Other stories I’ve written chunks / drafts / pieces of have been way more ambitious about things like this, and it felt like it gave them a period historical style, which I liked. But this has been going without a lot of that. So I want to give it more thought towards which direction I think is best, for style and for conveying that these are future people in a real world, and not people from here and now.
BCS: with my definitely rudimentary Hawaiian, this is what I found in a Hawaiian-English dictionary —
Fisherman: Lawai’a, Wa’ewa’e
Net mender: ki’o’e There is a macron over the ‘i’. There are specific terms for types of net; for example a throw net is called ‘upena kiloi or uhina, and there are terms for the types of fishing as well.
Trader: Kalepa, ‘Oihana There is a macron over the first ‘a’ in kalepa.
Many Hawaiian names are more along the lines of a phrase. The name of the best known Hawaiian king, Kamehameha, means ‘The Lonely One’ or ‘The One Set Apart’.
@BCS
Fisher = Visser, a very common Dutch surname, also in use as Vissers (the -s on the end of a name like this signifies son of …)
Merchant = Koopman, also a regularly-occuring Dutch surname.
Trader = Handelaar; it’s not a surname I’ve seen, though it doesn’t look unlikely as a name.
Netter and Webber could theoretically be used in Dutch with the same meaning, but aren’t, to my immediate knowledge. Nets are “net” (singular) and “netten” (plural) in Dutch, but “net” also means neat, and netter already means neater, so isn’t used for someone doing something with nets.
Web also exists in Dutch but almost exclusively in the sense of a spiderweb.
A netmaker would be “nettenmaker”; I know someone with the surname “Mandemaker”, meaning basket-maker, so that construction with -maker is not unusual, though I cannot find it in use as a name. Nor does the alternative “nettenknoper” (net-knotter) appear to be in use as a name.
There are many specific words for specific types of (fishing) nets, but not in use as jobnames or surnames. The same goes for names of types of ships.
Some specific types of fishers could be used as names; I know Mosselman (mussels-seller) is in use, as is Paling or Palingboer (literally Eel-farmer, meaning Eel-fisher/-smoker/-seller).
Other ship-related names that are in use in Dutch:
Zeeman (seaman, name of a budget clothing store chain),
Schipper, and Schippers (skipper, Daphne Schippers is a well-known athlete that a famous bridge was named for a few years ago),
Admiraal (admiral, also used for navy ships like “Admiraal De Ruyter”),
Matroos (sailor, seaman),
Bootsman (bosun),
Loods or Loodsman (pilot, for bringing ships into harbor),
Touwslager (rope-maker),
Zeilmaker (sailmaker).
I’ve known someone named Flapper, who explained it was an old name for a duck-hunter; there may be more such names relating to things on ships that I don’t know how to look for or recognise.
@BCS, there are several Dutch historical admirals that every Dutch kid knows, like Admiraal Michiel de Ruyter, Admiraal Maarten Tromp (NOT Trump!), and Piet Hein.
There’s a silly kid’s rhyme about him that’s still sung sometimes in schoolyards at reces:
Piet Hein, Piet Hein,
Piet Hein zijn naam is klein (his name is small).
Zijn daden benne groot (2x) (his actions are large/great),
Hij heeft gewonnen de Zilvervloot (he won/conquered the silver fleet in 1628, i.e. the Spanish fleet bringing silver and gold from South America to Spain during the 80 years’ war between the Netherlands and Spain, taking the modern-day equivalent of half a billion euro from their war coffers).
Jan van Speijk, captain of a cannonboat, is most famous for his saying “Dan liever de lucht in” when he blew up his own ship in 1831 rather be captured.
These names are as far as I know in recurrent use for navy ships, as well as for streetnames and schools and such; as Hein is used as a first name as well as a surname we currently have a politician called Piet Hein Donner 🌝.
There was a very good movie on one of the cable channels called ‘Admiral’, about Michiel de Ruyter and his contributions to making the Dutch one of the most formidable sea powers of his era, defending against several invading countries. He was as notable as Nelson or Nimitz, but much less well known, who came from humble beginnings and returned there when his task was done (I believe he started as a trader).
I would not sully your national hero by associating him with our president — feh!