iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

The first clinic that led to the creation of Planned Parenthood was opened on October 16, 1916, 110 years ago today. Founded by Margaret Sanger, along with her sister Ethel Byrne and activist Fania Mindell, the storefront clinic was located at 46 Amboy Street […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

I'd probably argue that capitalism strongly regulated is still the best known economic system. (And indeed, that that's what the Scandinavian systems mostly are.) But I wouldn't argue it with my whole chest. Harnessing selfishness and greed is useful. Good […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

Two trains have collided. The train to the left is labeled the only planet we know of that supports life.

The train to the right is labeled an economic system that shares the same principles as that of the cancer cell.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Fragment, "Dragons" screenplay, mid-90s. Kevin's ear is bleeding from a gunshot.

SMART ASIAN BOB: You should be careful with that. I knew this Bad Canadian once who got his ear pierced and it got infected, and there was a blood clot, and the blood clot got free and moved up into his brain and killed him.

KEVIN: That is a ridiculous story.

JACK: I’d say it passes belief. Who ever heard of a Bad Canadian?

DUMB WHITE FRANK: Oh, Canadians go bad.

SMART ASIAN BOB: And when they do, they’re the worst.

KEVIN: A bad German, maybe.

JACK: “A Bad Australian.” Doesn’t that sound better? If you tell that story again, you change it to a bad Australian. Then people won’t doubt you so much.

SMART ASIAN BOB: That’s a true story!

JACK: Damn it, that’s not the point.

DUMB WHITE FRANK: Well, what is the point then?

JACK: Plausibility. If you’re telling a story, it doesn’t need to be true, it just has to *seem* true, to be believable. Plausibility is the essence of storytelling; truth has nothing to do with it. Plausibility, boys, plausibility is the key.

Kevin glances at his watch.

KEVIN: It’s about time to go rob the lizard people.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

I don't often disagree with Travis McGee. But sometimes. "Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics, smash the servomechanisms." In 1900, the population of the Earth was about 1.5 billion people. The well-meaning and innumerate would take us backward […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

Wait a minute! What am I supposed to be doing? Making up the slogan I shall paint on my placard and tote in the big parade? A parade is a group, and I’m not a group animal. I think a mob, no matter what it happens to be doing, is the lowest form of living thing, always steaming with potential murder. Several things I could write on my placard and then carry it all by myself down empty streets:

Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics. Smash the servomechanisms. Stop grabbing. Snuff the breeze and hug the kids. Love all love. Hate all hate.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

I didn't know, the first time Star Trek went into the parallel universe, that we were probably the timeline that became the Terran Empire, not the one that became the Federation.

Mister Rogers, with a Terran Empire insignia on his sweater, and a goatee, saying "Children are weak."

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

If you live in one of the world's great cities, you might have a better library than the Los Angeles Public Library. But there aren't many.

photograph of the interior of the Los Angeles public library. It shows four floors worth of library.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/09/2026

In most of my stories I look good. Partly because most of the time I do look good ... but also because I don't tell the stories where I look like a chump. I grew up in Los Angeles, have known a lot of actors. Close with a few. Have met in passing some extremely […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

It's fraud, yeah. Of course it is. It's funny, though. I know I am outing myself as an old man, but there did used to be a half honest business culture in the US. It's probably not 10% these days. This guy is just doing what the business culture taught him to do.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

This is every ethno nationalist movement. It's certainly Republicans, in the US. Ethnonationalism has genocide at its core.

Concentration camp guards laughing at Auschwitz.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Colonization off Earth (space habitats, I'm skeptical about Mars or anything else) ... *could* help rein in global warming, in the mid-term, by moving heavily polluting industrial activity off earth. I'd guess we're, best case, 200 years off being able to really […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

A chart showing what people thought (in 1950!) were the ways scientific progress would happen, showing various trend lines under various conditions. Heinlein states that the correct trend line is #4 -- the hockey stick curve, people call it, where progress becomes exponential.

... Heinlein predicted the Singularity in 1950.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Stupid child rapist asshole. Murderer. Grifter. Rapist of adult women. Sadist. The only reason he doesn't personally torture people to death, far as we know, is he doesn't have the opportunity. Fat Adolf. But sure, stupid asshole is in there.

Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social - 11h

The president is just such a stupid asshole. | know we try to ascribe motives
to this guy but he's at the end of the day, when the story is written, just a
dumdum idiot with a tiny brain that don't work so good.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

Always liked this one, only one note: "pause to appreciate a beautifully written sentence." I stopped trying to write great sentences very early in my career. That pause takes you out of the story. A great sentence, for my purposes, is invisible. A novel is […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

Things Book Lovers Do

Read several books at one time ... while also having a stack of books to read next ... and keeping a running list of even MORE books you want.

Feel happy when you remember you get to read your book later.

Feel sad and lost when you finish a great book.

Pause to appreciate a beautifully written sentence.

See the cover of an old book and be transported back to your youth.

Find joy and comfort in rereading a favorite book.

Walk into a library or bookstore and say ... "I could live here."

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

Someone pointed out I was using Fahrenheit the other day.

British: hey guys we developed a thing called the metric sy-

(picture of a deer)

Americans: Adult deer are as tall as a bicycle. They weigh as much as 800 hamburgers.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

This is funny, even if it makes me look like a putz. Ran across this art a couple years ago, cover of my novel "Emerald Eyes" without the text -- gorgeous colors and resolution. Asked Amy if she wanted to see something cool, something she hadn't seen before […] [Original post on mstdn.social]

Cover of the novel "Emerald Eyes" by Daniel Keys Moran, by Paul and Steve Youell. Shows a man in military gear holding a baby.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

Based on Paul Verhoeven's Nazi Starship Troopers unis. It's amazing to me that Trump hasn't grown the Hitler stache.

Photographs of the new United States space force service dress uniform. It is Nazi in every detail.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

John D MacDonald, One Dreadful Yellow Eye, 1966.

The wind began to search out my tropic bone marrow, and I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie. The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. Now the politicians were making the brave sounds the worried people wanted to hear.

Now they were taking half-measures. Scientists said that only with total effort might the process be slowed, halted, reversed. But total effort, of course, would raise havoc with the supposedly God-given right of the thousand lakeshore corporations to keep costs down by running their poisons into the lake. Total effort would boost the tax structure to pay for effective sewage disposal systems.

So in the night wind, the lake stank, and I went back in out of the wind, and thought of the endless garbage barges that are trundled out of Miami into the blue bright Atlantic. People had thought the lake would last forever. When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Going to be 113 today. But I have resources to get through it now.

Photo of Peter Parker passed out.

"In Spider-Man (2002) Peter has a radioactive spider bite the size of a golf ball but instead of going to a doctor he decides to sleep it off. This is because Peter lives in America."

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Haven't done one of these quizzes in a long time. Unsurprised by the result, which strikes me as inaccurate, but there's rarely a "you've missed the entire point of this" option on the questions.

Four quadrants, acts chud at top, acts woke at bottom; is woke on left, is chud on right.

FatSam is mostly non-chud.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

I mean, it's not remotely a coincidence that this shit is popping up like the measles as we approach the midterms.

Listen, you rancid bullshit artist, Nazi in hiding or actual Nazi Stooge, "both sides are the same?" Fuck out of here. California has an actual wealth tax on the ballot, and we already tax the wealthy: not heavily enough, but more heavily than any other state that's not run by Dems.

California *reduced* emissions after Dems took over -- not "per capita," though that would have been impressive enough: overall, even as the population grew.

What you mean, to assume you're emotionally four and intellectually twelve, is that some unknown but non-trivial number of members of the national party are compromised? Well, that one's true, but not what you said. Let me help:

"The only organization capable of beating the fash has been corrupted by the same money that took over the Republican Party. But in places where they're actually in charge, policy resembles Europe, not Texas."

You're welcome. Unless "Europe" isn't your target, and Cuba is, in which case, fuck out of here, no one is that stupid.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Amanda: “I’ll be the victim!” Wednesday “All your life.” - Addams Family Values (1993)

Photo of Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

Directly from Joe Haldeman, this one, back in the day.

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, a solemn and
totally false adage that is the reason there exist go many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.” — Joe Haldeman

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

I will trust the news again when the headline reads, "Canadians think Trump is a Nazi douchebag."

AP News

Trump mulls renaming Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America.” Canadians
balk at the idea

Yesterday By Bill Barrow, Rob Gillies & Mike Householder

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

In 1965, an American writer could look at other countries and see where they were broken. I don't suppose MacDonald would be shocked to find us in the state of Batista's Cuba.

“He was a womanizer. Always several mistresses in Havana. Many times they were foolish American girls he would keep there for a time. Big cars. A personal bodyguard. Another house at Varadero. A big cruiser. Also, a personal taste for gold. Gold fittings in cars and home and boats, gold accessories for himself and his woman, art objects of gold. A vulgar man, my friend. A dangerous and vulgar man, a kind we breed too often in Latin America.”

“Not just there. Everywhere.”

“But old Cuba was a place where such an animal can thrive. And the heart of it, always, is the corruption of the courts.”

John D. McDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold.

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Daniel Keys Moran @fatsam.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Man, I'm jealous of that. Diana Murtaugh, *well done.* Via @steveperry on the Bad Place.

John Wiswell @Wiswell

The Bulwer-Lytton Awards for Worst Opening Paragraph went out and,
man, | totally disagree. This openers hilarious.

Fantasy & Horror
Winner

Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren't kings and thus don't matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.

- Diana Murtaugh, Baltimore, MD

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