Life saving restrictions reduce us by more than we hoped

Before we start, an Announcement:

Nerd Party!

Join us for our Infinite Improbability Party

14 October 2023 at Casa Blanca

Doors at 6pm. Food at 7pm.

107 E Thunderbird trail – Phoenix.

This will follow our Open House Trunk Show for UnObtanium Bazaar which will feature costumes and garb.

We have refreshments but you are encouraged to bring your own and share. Cheryl is organizing a friendship salad.

I am organizing Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blaster mix-off for those interested. If you don’t know what that is, or imagine that you might drive yourself home – you are not interested. Warning: there may be no survivors.

Fire outside – weather permitting.

[You do not have to be a nerd to be welcome. We are very tolerant…]

If you read this blog – you’re invited.

The Phoenix Suns did what they had to do, and likely closed their championship window by doing so. And  I did what I had to do about nine months ago, and I am measurably diminished for it.

About nine months ago, the Suns changed ownership and almost before the ink dried, new owner, Matt Ishbia, pulled the trigger on a standing trade offer that previous ownership had balked over: they traded two starters and almost all of their worthwhile draft picks for Kevin Durant.

Ten years ago, Kevin Durant was an MVP candidate, a fixture to go deep in the playoffs, and reliably the guy pretending to guard Lebron James in the All Star game.

The current Kevin Durant literally limped into the Suns locker room – he came with an ankle injury – which he re-injured during warm-up on his first game back. Warm ups.

Ten months ago, the Suns were a likely second round playoff casualty with no cap space, but the normal ration of draft picks. A month later, they became a likely second round casualty (as they turned out to be) disastrously over the cap and with no draft picks. And everybody blamed…

DeAndre Ayton.

Let’s get this straight: is DeAndre Ayton the best player he could possibly be? Almost certainly not. But even with his goofy, soft touch, occasionally pouty approach to the game, he was the second best pure center the Suns had ever put on the court.

(Alvan Adams – if you’re wondering.)

We traded that guy for a center who would not start on most contending teams.

Not the problem, but too expensive to not be the solution.

Jusuf Nurkic was the starting center for the lottery-bound Portland Trailblazers, but other than perhaps interior passing, his game is inferior in every way to Ayton’s – including his reputation for checking out of games. And he’s older. And he’s had a lot of injuries.

But he comes at half the cost, and that was the real reason. The Suns were into double-jeopardy with the salary cap. They can’t move Booker – who IS the franchise at this point, and they can’t move either of their shiny new expensive trades (Durant and all-star guard Bradley Beal) so that left Ayton, who everybody whined about anyway.

This same logic sent Chris Paul packing. But unlike CP3, Ayton has been consistently healthy – even late into the playoffs. And we essentially got Bradley Beal, who, redundant as he might be with Booker, is a legit all-star.

It is likely true that they will not miss Ayton UNTIL the fourth quarter of a close game when they absolutely have to have that rebound. Ayton could get those in a way we haven’t had since Amare’ Stoudamire. Nurkic is going to be the other guy in the poster.

Had to be done, I suppose. Deep Sigh.

But the championship window has closed.

About ten months ago, we decided we were going to treat my prostate cancer with radiation. (More about this in the previous post). The worst part of that, long term, has turned out to be the Lupan injections.

Prostate cancer visualized

Prostate cancer feeds off testosterone. So, the theory, in addition to radiation, is to starve the cancer of testosterone. That’s what Lupan does – it suppresses my ability to make testosterone.

As a practical matter, that ahs aged me twenty years in terms of muscle recovery. I also get hot flashes. The effect on my sex life is predictable. Deeper Sigh.

Unlike the Suns, I will be out from under this in about 18 months.

The Suns will still be crippled by the contracts of their shiny sportscars. And likely remain second round play-off casualties.

Happily, the metrics for my success are not as stark. I do not need a whole lot of testosterone to program architectural lighting systems. The most physically aggressive thing I am likely to do on a jobsite is move a ladder down a hallway because the electricians have abandoned me, but I think I can solve this without them. And I’m not supposed to do that stuff anyway. Because our insurance thinks we are consultants.

An it hasn’t hurt word-count at all.

Through September I challenged myself to make word count for 30 days, and then didn’t actually keep good track. But I feel like I made my quota.

Yes- this counts towards word count. Okinushi and Xinji discover that Hippos are mean.

BEHOLD:

I have combined the Go Action Fun Time Basic Rules and the GAFT Setting Bible into a single document the Go Action Fun Time Show Bible, and I am on pace to have it available in PDF at least by Christmas.

It stands at just under 70k words, and with editing counting 1/10 that means 7k words.

 I got two playtests of GAFT in [1k each].

Two chapters of the 2^nd 64 book, which is likely titled the Secret history of the Lesser Ragnarok, so 5k for those .

I blogged about TV heroes trying to fight the future in Curious Continuity. [1k]

I made writer’s Group four times at 5oo words each [2k]

I drew and formatted four illustrations for the Show Bible. At 1k each [4k]

I learned some about Blender modeling at 1k.

That’s 21k. (this blog counts towards next week.)

My goal is 5k word/week.

Whiskey.

Refelections on accountability, radiation and defense with your feet.

We’ll get to all that, but first some announcements:

UnObtanium Bazaar will be at the Las Vegas Pirate fest this weekend!

We will be at London Bridge Ren Faire (in Lake Havasu City) next weekend.

I am watching the Suns with the sound off partly so I can write, but mostly because I am tired of the local commentators whining about the fouls. In basketball, the accountability is fairly straightforward for playing defense with your arms instead of your feet. You can make a case that the Suns have been unevenly targeted by officials, but that’s not why they are losing to the Lakers.

That is all tangential to what I want to write about.

There is a peculiar challenge when running an organization of human beings in balancing accountability with accurate feedback.

Long ago, when I was a theatrical rigger, a building TD recounted for me an event that happened on a previous show: a curtain had been fouled up in the neighboring lineset and was left that way for the next operator to find.

“If I ever find out who did that,” the TD told me, “He’s fired.”

Which guaranteed he’d never discover which of several possible operators was responsible.

The natural impulse to punish the stupid or the careless can actually be counter-productive if it drives the focus from preventing errors to hiding errors. What this impulse demonstrates is a lack of trust in the workers.

In my lengthy but unscientific experience, workplace errors are evenly divided among three causes: lack of training , lack of resources, lack of attention.  The first two are totally on management. It is the boss’s job to see that the worker knows what to do and has the means to do it. The third is 50/50 management worker, though that starts to tilt towards the worker the higher you go on the food-chain.

I could not, in my current job, credibly blame my lack of attention on my basically non-existent supervision. But it took me a long time to get there, including long stints as a supervisor.

I reflect upon this because I finally got around to watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl.

Let us recall Hanlon’s Razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.”

Now consider Fred Clark’s corollary:

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Chernobyl is three episodes of straight horror, one episode of post-apocalyptic horror and one episode of courtroom drama.

I leave it to others to summarize the events, or debate the show’s accuracy. You can find many other sites like these.

The show makes the case, among many other accomplishments, that the inability to take responsibility for disastrous decisions – at any level – destroyed the Soviet Union.

It will also full-on give you nightmares.

The Suns have now lost. The whining continues. I turn it off.

An update on useful radiation: I have a standing appointment in the late afternoon of every weekday from next week until the endo of fucking May for radiation treatments.

I am told the treatments do not last long: 20-30 minutes depending on how close I manage to park.

Many have it worse. But people ask so I answer.

Now we know.

What They Are Made Of

Pro sports may not be the most important endeavor we engage in, but it has its purpose. Besides giving strangers something to argue about without anyone getting actually angry, it offers some moral lessons. Teamwork, sportmanship, effort, preparation, all the things we value in productive citizens on display in coloring-book clarity by millionaires running around in shorts.

I speak, of course, of my Beloved Suns, who are demonstrating for the world what they are made of this week.

Let me catch you up on what’s been happening with my Beloved Suns over the past 50+ years.

Beloved millionaires in shorts

Robertson is lower right. You know who 33 is.

The Phoenix Suns and Milwaukie Bucks both entered the NBA in 1968 as expansion teams. Both have had two finals appearances since then. The Bucks are 1-1, winning it all in 1971 thanks to a dominant center (Kareem Abdul Jabbar) they took with their #1 pick (after winning a coin toss with Phoenix for it) (The league was very different in the 70’s) and trading for a legendary point guard (Oscar Robertson).

Robertson was also head of the NBA Player’s Association at the time.

They returned in 1974 to push the Celtics to 7 games including a double OT. The Celtics prevailed, wearing the Bucks out in game 7.  Notable on that Boston team: a young guard named Paul Westphal.

The Bucks have not been to the Finals since – until now.

Phoenix, meanwhile, made an improbable appearance in 1976. The Suns, led by rookie of the year Alvan Adams and a hot-shooting Paul Westphal upset both the Seattle Supersonics and the defending champion Golden state warriors to face the basically same Hondo/Cowens Celtics – who beat them in 6 games including he 3OT Game 5 – which Suns fans forget they actually lost.

Paul Westphal

I was 9 years old and even I noticed how thew small city of Phoenix had shut down for a week during these finals.

Joe Proski, the Suns’ longtime trainer, told me that the best chance the Suns ever had at a championship was in 1979, when they lost the Western Conference Finals in 7 games to the Sonics. The Suns, who had added Walter Davis, lost the last two games in that series by a total of 5 points. The Sonics went on the beat the injury-riddled Bullets in 5 games.

The Suns would appear in the Western Conference Finals 10 years later with Tom Chambers and KJ and the Cotton Express. They traded half their starters for Charles Barkley, and that team, led by rookie head coach Paul Westphal,  made the finals, even winning their 3OT game, but lost to Jordans Bulls in 6 games.

Phoenix felt like Metropolis after Superman died.

Charels Barkley after Superman died.

The Nash-era, 7 seconds-or-less Suns made three appearances in the Western Conference Finals, but never won out.  They had the best offense in the league, but never had the defense or the rebounding to beat the best teams 4 out of 7.

Eleven years after that, here we are: the Suns are back in the finals with a veteran and legendary point guard (who is also head of the NBA Player’s Association) and a #1 draft pick center who is not as dominating as Jabbar was but is getting it done over and around league MVP’s.  

And My Beloved Suns are one more Milwaukie defensive collapse from overtaking the Warrior’s record for most productive back-court in the Finals.

We’ll see. I don’t think Milwaukie can be swept. But I thought Game 2 would be much closer than it was.

While we wait for game 3 some more thoughts about what we are made of:

At Fantastical History we explore weight ratios of golems.

And more solemly, at Are We Lost Yet we remember the Granite Mountain Hotshots as we visit that memorial.

Winning for Losing

You can’t win them all. In fact, most of us lose about half the time. It’s how you respond to losing that determines the cost of the loss. We’ll get into some examples, but first,  a self-serving announcement:

 

There is a new version of Are We Lost Yet? With content. Right now.

 

And more to come.

Anyone who feels sorry for poor Brett Kavanaugh should reflect that he is now on the Supreme Court anyway despite his poor performance in the worst, surreall, contrived job interview ever seen on non-fiction television. He won. Don’t feel sorry for the losers. That defeats the point of that sentiment.

The Suns fired Ryan McDuh a year too late. (Did you really need to keep him around to draft DeAndre Ayton at #1? My daughter could have made that pick, and she uses words likes “sportsball”.) The Suns went from having four starting quality point guards under cintract to having zero under contract – and no prospects of acquiring one. They have run out of time to rebuild. They must at least flirt with .500 THIS SEASON or even guys like me are lost to them.

As it stands, they have a 30 win season at most.

Our old friend Neil Patel blogs about his blog failures.

 

The big lesson I learned was that knowing SEO isn’t enough. Even if you can build links, write content, and climb to the top of Google fast, you won’t stay if people hate your content (or product/service).

 

On a more personal note:

Last Saturday [10/6/18] I wrenched my back but good trying to wrestle an 80 lb chain hoist back into its box. The box in question was above my knees, but below my waist, so I really had nothing to work with but my arms and my back, and despite what we may have learned watching the Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970’s ou can’t do much with your arms without involving your [crunch!]… OWWW Dammit!

I swear I heard a crunch sound.

Before anyone panics, it is my opinion that I strained one muscle, and aggravated my arthritis. It’s arthritis. It’s not a bulge or a rupture or anything of the sort.

One of my rules of this blog is that it is not for whining, but there are some aspects of dealing with lower back pain that are less obvious, and perhaps instructive.

A good night’s sleep is about the worst thing I can do for my aggravated back. It stiffens up to wrought iron, and every move hurts. I have to psych myself up to put on socks. Worse, getting ready for work involves standing for 30-40 minutes, and bending slightly to deal with this or that on the dresser or counter or desk.

But Ibuprofen, and an ice-pack for the drive in help a lot, and by the time I get to the job-site, I have been able to get out of the car with less drama than it took getting into it.

This situation, and the single malt scotch I bought to “medicate” it with, not house guests have helped the word count. Low level pain will absolutely compound exhaustion. Leading to that good night’s sleep that is nearly the death of me every morning.

Can’t win for losing.

I don’t know what that says about my character, but that is how I’m dealing with it. It has been getting a little better every day – so I continue.

Now we know.

 

 

Briefly resurrecting old jokes.

I have recreated my dead(ish) hiking blog Are We Lost Yet?. Sometimes I can access the ghost of it’s presence on my publisher’s site. Sometimes I can’t. I have yet, after six mnths of promises, been able to add to or modify the site, so I am pulling the plug on my end as well.

New hiking content (as well as some old retreads) will appear at Arewelostyet.blog.

Who knows? I might even make a dollar or two.

Old Suns joke:

Why haven’t the Suns ever won a championship?

Because Alvan Adams is still the best center they have ever had.

But I saw the Suns preseason opener tonight, and I believe DeAndre Ayton could get there. As a raw rookie, I yet disbelieve he’s going to be the 20/10 all star he has been projected to become, but he is already starting quality.

Wasted, of course on a team that is still painfully young, and has a 30 win ceiling, despite any of Ayton’s heroics, because they neglected to trade for or sign a starting quality point guard.

In other news, I need a pirate costume by October 12th because of my girlfriend. I just like having that sentence not be random gibberish in relation to my life.

In particular I need a shirt.

Worcestershire sauce, spilled all over the floor, is disturbingly like blood.

Word count is 3000, mostly on the new blog, which is remarkable given my distractions of late.

But … oh my lookit the time.

Now we know.

 

Moving forward is hard enough without looking back (with maps included)

I don’t apologize for long droughts of posts. If you don’t like it, here’s yer money back.

Due to the lock-out shortened-no camp-compressed nature of this NBA season*, we could see a record in 20+ point victories per game played. While that’s better than no basketball,t should not be confused with good basketball.

*It’s not a real season.

Don’t spend money when you’re drunk. What I’mabout to describe are not bad decisions, but I still kinda wish I was sober.

I’m going to Darkcon – which is the pirate/party con of the now 4 major Spec Fic cons in the Valley. And the one I would normally be least tempted to spend money on. But we were at a party at CopperCon, and a bit drunk, and I had cash in my pocket and I got a really good rate – but yeah. We shall see. Spent the money. I’m going.

I also own the domain sillypenguin.com. Don’t bother checking it out today – there’s just a GoDaddy placeholder. My wife wants to make and sell custom greeting cards. I’ve fancied the notion of doing a webcomic of some sort, just to force myself to get back into drawing.So the Plan is to post comics about a silly penguin as a lead in to the greeting card page.

Silly Penguin was a whim. I searched the term and saw that ti was open. I was a few beers down and didn’t want this “unique domain opportunity” to be lost. As if random gibberish is somehow challenging for me to come up with.

Now we need a webhost. My front-runner is Fat Cow, but I’m open to input if any of my IT buddies has a strong opinion.

And I signed up for Code Year – because I’m tired of having no clue about things that are becoming more and more important to my work.

Now some links (we have a few backed up here):

A Slate case study on how Second Life failed the milk-shake test, and how this informs the theory of marketing.

“Neuroscience is still unable to provide a clear and direct explanation as to how the microcircuitry of the brain actually functions,” says Hugo De Garis, a cognitive science professor and director of the Artificial Brain Lab at Xiamen University in China. “We know that the basic circuitry is the same all over the human cortex, but just how the circuitry works is still largely unknown.”

This from an article in Sloan Science and Film about the frustrating future of artificial intelligence. The authors go on:

One main sticking point for AI research is the idea of consciousness or emotion—vague concepts that aren’t easily quantifiable or scientifically proven but are essential for creating a supermachine because, many scientists claim, feelings are integral to handling our thoughts.

 

Coincidentally, among the four books I’m currently reading is The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. Within, DL asserts that western sience will never satisfactorily explain how consciousness works because objective measurements miss what is an inherently and unavoidably subjective experience. He argues that we must also consider the “rigorous, focused and disciplined use of introspection and mindfulness to probe deeply into the nature of a chosen subject.”

To put it another way, although the experience of happiness may coincide with certain chemical reactions in the brain, such as an increase in serotonin, no amount of biochemical and neurobiological description of this brain change can explain what happiness is.

[pg145]

For some people (myself included) true happiness can come from a really well-crafted map

And tying is all together, you can find this map of Scientific Exploration here.

Now you know.

And .. We’re Back

Once upon a time I made a New Years resolution not to make any more New Years Resolutions, and so far I have kept that.

I have an unrelated goal this year, however, of being a more disciplined marketer blogger. I write stuff, and I’d like people to read it. This is one of the ways to make that happen.

We left off last August, and I have learned some thing since then. I won’t try to recap four months of hard lessons in one post, so we’ll stick to what has been discovered recently.

When lighting for TV (I’ve been involved with this recently in my day job) remember that the camera doesn’t see light, only light bouncing off of something. That’s why they obsess over even washes – it really does matter. In the distant past,  up to say five years ago, you could blend the washes by adding a bunch of diffusion. With HDTV, diffusion looks like – diffusion. Hard light is better.

We still added a bunch of frost.

In theatrical lighting (and TV lighting uses the same toys) LED lights are now competitive in every area except price. And they are one generation away from digging into that as well. Nobody’s going to FEL’s or BHP’s. Honest.

The Droid is a good camera, but using it that way sucks up battery fast. It is a second rate GPS, and a clunky DVR.I ended up hiking with four separate devices.

The Hiking Guide is 90% in the can. Save your receipts, and write down contact info in two different places.

If you trade away your two leading scorers for spare parts, your team won’t do as well. It’s not so much that Sarver let Stoudemire walk away (though he shouldn’t have), it’s that he failed to replace him with anyone who would be a legitimate starter (not an all-star – just a starter) at the power forward position. They traded away their leading scorer – and they still do not have a legit 4. This current roster can’t make the playoffs. I can vaguely understand  that Sarver is maneuvering around the salary cap and the near-certain lock-out looming next season, but I really don’t care. The Suns were contenders six months ago. The owner squandered that. That’s why every game from here out will have more empty seats.

My wife and I were gifted with attending Dave Ramsey’s Fiancial Peace University. 80% of that course is the same information  you can learn from any other basic financial advisory course. Make a realistic budget. Stay in that budget. A couple of things Ransey teaches that others might not:

• If you don’t have $1000 in the bank, you are wasting your time trying to pay down credit cards. You’ll only end up running them back up for emergencies. So put that money in the can first, and if you spend it, make minimum payments until you’re back up to $1k.
• As you start paying off the credit cards, start with the lowest balance first, regardless of interest. Statistically, this approach has a better chance of success.
• Along this same line, you have no business investing until you have 3 months expenses in the bank (which is easier to get to if you pay off the credit cards).
• Any investment that doesn’t reliably return at least 6% won’t keep up with taxes and inflation.

Now Dave (as we call him in the class) also recommends mutual funds, claiming you should get 12% out of them. After all, the stock market has made money in any ten year period since the great depression. He’s out of date there (we were watching 2006 DVD’s). We are in a ten year period where the market overall has lost money.

Which brings us to the links:

The above from a long and enlightening article in Slate.

And fun with math and money from the BBC – who really likes this sort of facty-stuff.

 

Now you know.

Back from the Dead

This blog, that is. I’ve been fine – just busy. Really, really busy.

A rash of Rhino work coincided with the new hiking guide. I had to hold down my day job in the new economy (almost as much work – fewer people to do it) and hike while the hiking was good.

So a lot of things didn’t get done.  This was one of them.

What have we learned since May 9th?

Many things – too many to list here.  A handful of highlights:

No rebounds – no rings.

With blog updates, you get what you pay for. If you don’t pay the writers (I’m looking at you Examiner) all the jazzier new interface improvements won’t help you.

TV is the enemy of productivity – even more than cute animals or beer.

Twenty extra minutes checking the gear at the house can save you six wasted hours on the trail.

And clean you camera lens once in a while.

There might well be a real quality difference between lenses from your optometrist vs lenses bought online, but there can’t be a 250% difference. I’ll know soon.

Put the campfire out all the way out – every time.

Pride is expensive. It’s the difference between a couple hundred dollars over a week, or nearly a thousand dollars over three days.

Once you realize you’re screwed – get help. No one appreciates, or is impressed by your stoic failure.

“The body can do a lot. It’s the brain that gets in the way.” – John Wooden

Now you know

Some quick notes before I pass out

If you’re just hiking for fun, all you really need is water and some idea of where you’re going.

If you are researching a guidebook, though, and you are not fussy about preparations at the trailhead, you end up with poor notes, bad pictures and incomplete GPS tracks. I’m tired of that, so I’m going to make a trailhead checklist.

Even if you’re an interested party, graduation ceremonies challenge anyone’s ability to withstand boredom. This is the best format we can come up with? Really?

The starters for the San Antonio Spurs could probably force a 7 game series against the Suns, if they could play 40+ minutes every game. They can’t, and the Suns bench (which is probably a play-off team in the eastern conference) has walloped them early in the 4th quarter every game.

Tony Parker is every bit the defensive liability that Steve Nash is. It’s just that Bruce Bowen isn’t around to make up for that anymore.

There is much talk through the media, mostly from guys who picked the Spurs to win in 6, about how the Spurs have too much “championship pride” to be swept. Pride is beside the point. What those championship teams had was better defensive speed, better shooting range, a deeper bench and younger legs. Why would these aging legends what to run themselves half-to-death to squeak one victory away from a Suns team that will only humiliate them back in Phoenix? Pride?

Pride can force a game seven. It rarely forces a game five.

You know that Goran Dagjic and Leandro Barbosa and Steve Nash would be in violation of HS 1070 every time they take the court at the USAC, right? There’s no place to keep your papers in a basketball uniform.

If you’re a German Tourist trying to decide between Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, how hard is that decision now? There are a lot of different languages muttered by the folks who crowd the uptown Sedona visitor’s center. They’ll be less and less now.

Much as I would like to T-off on the Show Me Your Papers law, it will not survive the court challenges.  By that time, though, it will be clear to all but the racists Tea Party ilk that this thing absolutely creates more problems than it solves.

Now You Know.

Finally coming up for air

Cause this blog isn’t dead. It’s just for the first time in 3 weeks, I’ve been able to come up for air. Haven’t been busy with one big thing. Oh no. A bunch of little things:

* swapped rooms in the house. My bedroom is now where the “family room” was. The “Office/lounge” is now where the bedroom was. The bedroom is functional. The O/L, where I now sit, not so much.

* Negotiated and finally signed a contract for Five Star Hikes in Flagstaff and Sedona and started work on that.

* Worked a selection of big, medium and small shows for Rhino. Then caught up with the install projects I had been ignoring because of those shows.

* Pushed forward on the space opera.

* Wrote a few articles for Fitness Plus

* Watched the Suns run over the Portland Trailblazers

* and played some Dungeons and Dragons.

I also kept falling asleep on the couch.

Did we learn things? Yeah

My house to the “Y” in Sedona is about 2 hours flat.

There is room in the market for a good hiking guide for Sedona and Flagstaff.

My old Garmin E-trex legend does not interface cleanly with the new Garmin Basecamp freeware. I need to upgrade. This is why I fear progress.

European power is all screwed up because of the French. (Of course, my source was British roadies).

There’s a swampy little lake near Casa Grande called Picacho Reservoir. And that’s about all I could learn about it. With 350 words t cover 20 lakes, that was all I needed to know about it.

This year’s  Suns squad is the best since 2004.

Good characters make even poorly designed systems (like 2nd AD&D) fun anyway.

Yeah, we’ll do some brazen wonk about immigration, but another night, ok?

Meanwhile, some links:

Strange Horizons gathers experts on zombies

What you always suspected, Jason Fried confirms: Why You Can’t Work at Work

Gamepocalypse chronicles how our culture is turning into one big collection of games

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is fairly close to how I’d like to present my space opera (except my subject is less satirical, and would be carved into bigger chunks).

And finally:

Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Now You Know.