My chaotic evil knee (the left one) decided to act up last week, and for a while it was so swollen I couldn’t fit into a pair of jeans and was reduced to wearing sweat pants — oh, the shame of it all. Today, as I expected, the swelling is pretty much gone. The knee just does this, randomly deciding to blow out and spew lubricating fluid all over the joint, and then eventually resorbing everything and acting as if nothing is wrong. This is why it’s my chaotic evil knee.

Unfortunately, now I have to deal with the sequelae of gimping about for a week. My right knee, the lawful evil one, is resentful of having to do more than its fair share of the work, and is showing well-earned signs of stress, so I’ll have to molly-coddle it for a while to make sure it doesn’t revolt. My lower back which, appropriate to its central location, is neutral evil, is also unhappy because it detests asymmetry and gets extraordinarily annoyed when I favor one side over the other, and is now twinging painfully.

This is the way I cope. My body is a coalition of bitter, resentful parts that have to be coaxed into reluctantly cooperating.

All these routine genetic testing services are having an interesting consequence: people are discovering genetic connections with all kinds of strangers. For instance, I was contacted by a woman who is about my age because 23andMe said she was my second cousin — she’d been given up for adoption as a baby, and so was looking for information on her biological family. I passed the word on to my mother, who asked around a little bit, but it was awkward. You can’t very well press your elderly uncles & aunts & great-uncles & great-aunts if they knew which of our relatives was secretly pregnant in 1958 and traveled to southern California to give birth. I learned nothing. But I’ve got more relatives submitting DNA samples for these tests, and maybe somewhere along the line some embarrassing history will be revealed. I feel for all parties involved.

But what if you innocently submitted a sample and then discovered that you had 50 or more half-brothers and -sisters? That’s what happened to a group of people, mostly in Indiana, who discovered they all shared the same father, a man named Donald Cline, who was (you probably won’t be surprised) a fertility clinic doctor. The secret to his success was that he used fresh sperm for insemination — really fresh sperm. Apparently he’d masturbate in his office and then come into the examining room where his patient was exposed in the stirrups, and he’d have in his hand a still-warm vial of his secret sauce.

This, it turns out, is not illegal in Indiana. They have no laws regulating ethical insemination policies, so there was nothing he could be charged with, except obstruction of justice. He’d lied to investigators, initially claiming he’d used med student sperm, then that it was only a few patients, and then as the numbers racked up, he was rather flexible in claiming that he’d only done this as many times as there were offspring with evidence in hand. So they couldn’t get him on abuse of his responsibilities as a doctor, but only on the charge of lying about it. Oh, Indiana.

Wanton insemination of multiple women in a community has other consequences.

The donor children have begun cataloging the ways their own paths have crossed, too. White went to Purdue at the same time as one of his half brothers. One sibling sold another a wagon at a garage sale. Two of them lived on the same street. Two had kids on the same softball team. They’re worried that their children are getting old enough to date soon. “Did you not consider we all live in a relatively close area?” one sister said she has wondered about Cline. “Did you really think … that we wouldn’t meet? That we wouldn’t maybe date? That we wouldn’t have kids who might date? Did you never consider that?” Cline now looms over their kids’ every innocent crush, their every prom date.

Yeah, those kids might want to demand genetic testing of potential spouses before they marry.

But Lyin’ Donald Cline has a defense. It’s religion, of course.

What particularly galled some of the siblings was how Cline used his faith as deflection. By all accounts, he is a very religious man—for his sentencing, several elders from his evangelical church wrote letters attesting to his character. After the restaurant meeting, Cline called Ballard to say her digging up the past was destroying his marriage: His wife considered his actions adultery. In the call, which Ballard recorded, Cline told her he regretted what he’d done—though he admitted to using his own sperm only nine or 10 times—and quoted Jeremiah 1:5, in which God lays out his plan for the prophet: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.” Again, Ballard felt he was using her faith to try to manipulate her.

His actions tell me all that I need to know about his character. His words now only tell me that he is a liar and a coward. I have more respect for his wife, though, and one way he might get punished is if his wife divorces him, using the voluminous physical evidence that he was a serial adulterer, and takes him for everything she can. Followed by civil suits from his victims that clean out the rest.

The statue of liberty looks fabulous in a kilt.

The 2019 Hugo awards finalists have been announced. Tragically, neither Vox Day nor Brad Torgerson nor Castalia House are anywhere on the list. Did I say “tragically”? I meant “hilariously”. I guess the gate-crashing Puppies made their last sad yelp in what, 2016? Instead, we’ve got a lot of books and stories that were chosen because people enjoyed them, rather than being forced on everyone by a lot of wanna-be Nazis. Instead, we get this:

The list is dominated by women, with 5/6 women finalists in Novel, Novella, Novelette, AND Short Story, and 4/6 in Best Series. That’s amazing and proves what all we Rioters already know—women rock at writing SFF. We always have, and we always will. And in these five categories, nine nominations go to authors of color, a decent amount, though SFF awards in general still need more diversity.

They’re good stories! I was skimming through the list, and had to stop and read “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”, just because of the title. Raptors are great, but there is, however, a shortage of cephalopods and spiders. Perhaps next year diversity will be extended to other phyla.

Something I noticed about the category of best long-form dramatic presentation…

• Annihilation, directed and written for the screen by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer (Paramount Pictures/Skydance)
• Avengers: Infinity War, screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (Marvel Studios)
• Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, directed by Ryan Coogler (Marvel Studios)
• A Quiet Place, screenplay by Scott Beck, John Krasinski and Bryan Woods, directed by John Krasinski (Platinum Dunes / Sunday Night)
• Sorry to Bother You, written and directed by Boots Riley (Annapurna Pictures)
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, screenplay by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman (Sony)

“Infinity War” is the weakest of the nominated works, and it still made buttloads of money (I favor Into the Spider-Verse or Sorry to Bother You myself). The amazing thing is how many high quality, and critically acclaimed, SF movies are being made nowadays. Fifteen-year old me is finally getting his day in the sun.

Now if only I had time to read all that…and you know, excellent authors keep pumping out new stuff for this coming year, too.

Except that it’s kind of firm and fluid filled. And it hurts. And it wobbles when I walk on it.

[Doctor shouts from stage left: “Then don’t walk on it!”]

OK, imaginary doctor, if you say so.

[Futurist shouts from stage right: “Would you like robot limbs, and a jetpack?”]

Yes, imaginary futurist, sign me up! Can you get me those before this sloppy aching mess heals up?

[Futurist whispers: “no.“]

Shut the fuck up, stupid futurist.

Now a military historian confirms it. Of course, if you view it as an opportunity for a lot of pretty people to pose dynamically as they converge on a foregone conclusion, then maybe it makes sense.

Perfection. I like both Movies with Mikey and Baby Driver — I thought it was one of the best movies of the last few years. And then to discover something new that I hadn’t noticed, even though it was pervasive in the movie, was a real eye-opener.

It’s about coping with being disabled? Yeah, now that you mention it, it’s goddamned obvious.

Also relevant, this past year I’ve developed a growing problem with tinnitus — getting old sucks — and I’ve been dealing with it by living with headphones on all the time I’m working in my office. And then we learn that my wife has been living with a degenerative hearing disorder all of her life that has only recently gotten bad enough that she’s needed hearing aids. It’s an odd one, too, where she’s slowly losing the low end of her auditory range, so in a few years we may have to learn ASL…or I’m going to have to start speaking in a falsetto all the time. (Don’t worry, neither of us are suffering horribly with this stuff, it’s all mild and we’re handling it as well as every other hurdle aging throws at us.)

Now I’m going to have to watch Baby Driver again, which is no hardship, at least.