Author: Andy Anderson

Last Bit of Administrivia…

I promise! (Well, at least for the foreseeable future.)

I finally copied the “Privacy Policy” and “Terms of Use” from one of my other blogs and created pages and links on this site. Check them out. Both of them are short, simple, and to-the-point.

Over the next few days I plan to move the “Assumptions” posts into pages so that they’ll be easy to find and update as time goes on.

Next week’s post will be the overall backstory for this site, which means it might span two posts if it gets too long for a single post. After that, I plan to begin actually writing content. Stay tuned!

Sadly, just spambots…

First of all, yes, this “week’s” post is a few days late (from Friday to Monday – sorry).

If you read the previous week’s post, thanks, but it turns out to be a wasted post. All of the “readers” that signed up for accounts were just spambots. Why do they want to do this?

I tried a couple of different plug-ins to try to subvert their malicious actions, but to no avail (some were slightly better than others, but non was what I’d call a success). So, I’m back to a “closed” subscriber base. That is, if you want to subscribe so that you can comment on posts, you’ll need to send me an email via the Contact page, which is protected by Google’s reCaptcha v3. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

I’d be happy to have human readers, and I’d be ecstatic to have some comments from human readers (as long as you follow the rules (see the “Administrivia” section of the “Civilization?” page). So get on the Contact page, send me a message with a little bit about yourself, and if you seem legit I’ll create an account for you.

Finally, I hope to be back on schedule this week with a post on Friday. If there is anyone out there, check back then.

Wow! And some admin stuff…

Readers!?

Holy cow! As of this morning, there are 27 approved users for this site. There are about 6 more that are still pending – I’m trying to discern which ones are legitimate and which ones are spammers. Of course, some of the users that I’ve approved might turn out to be spammers.

So, fair warning: if you post a comment on this site trying to sell any of the types of “meds” typically hawked by spammers, or if you post a comment about “get more traffic to your site” or “get better rankings in search engines,” or any of the other uninteresting and nonsensical tripe that I’ll need to mark as spam, I will immediately disable your account and delete the offending comments.

Now, to those of you who are legitimately interested in the subject matter of this site (more on that in a minute), I apologize for needing to write the above paragraph. You are more than welcome here, and I encourage your participation. In fact, if you’re reading this and your account has already been approved, please log in and leave a comment for me to let me know that someone is actually reading this. Also, if your account has been approved, please log in and then add some info to your account profile so I can get a sense of who you are.

What It’s All About

It may not be totally clear what the subject matter for this site will be, so let me attempt to clarify a bit. I created the domain name several years ago, with the intention to create and use a site to explore and write about two things that interest me (and that also happen to relate well, I think): post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, and “Space Opera.” Interwoven in both, of course, are the social, cultural, and spiritual issues that humans, and particularly groups of humans, deal with on a daily basis.

The “shipside” stories and musings will comprise the Space Opera content. I will soon write a post that will provide the backstory for the ship and the folks onboard, and then I’ll get started on some short stories about them.

The “dirtside” stories and musings will comprise the post-apocalyptic speculative fiction content. Again, I intend to write a backstory that details the return of the generation ship (see paragraph above) to an Earth much like the one we inhabit, but more-or-less devoid of human technology. In other words, an Earth that has returned to the Neolithic era, or New Stone Age. It may also be more-of-less devoid of humans, but that is yet to be decided. The flora and fauna will be the descendants of those which are extant today, with some mutations that have evolved to exploit niches created by the collapse of human civilization.

If there are humans, they will not be zombies or mutant vampires or anything like that. They will be the descendants-of-the-descendants of today’s humans; the descendants who were able to adapt to the demands of survival in a post-apocalyptic era.

Administriva

“Real soon now,” I’ll be adding pages with a privacy policy, terms of use, and other necessary “non-content.” I’ll also add a contact page so that you can send me email directly with any questions or comments. In the meantime, please be kind to each other (and to me) with comments and replies to comments.

Regarding privacy, I don’t, and most likely won’t, collect any personal information about the readers here, beyond that which is provided if you request an account (which is necessary to make comments). And I will never – not now and not ever – sell, give away, or provide any of your information to anyone (with the exception of any court orders or warrants that require me to provide any information, but let’s hope it never comes to that).

It is my intention to not monetize this site. I want this to be a place for folks to read and think and discuss the subject matter of the content and related issues. I don’t want to say “never,” but I also plan to avoid having any ads on this site. Also, I won’t create any posts or pages that start playing any type of audio or video when you visit them (I hate that on sites that I visit).

Finally, everything on this site is copyrighted by me. You all know what that means: don’t copy significant portions of the content and use it like you own it. I’m perfectly fine with the “fair use” exclusions, but I’d appreciate attribution, or at least a link back to the part of this site from which any quotes or citations are taken. I’ll be editing the site footer to include a copyright notice – I just realized it doesn’t have that already.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy…