zarpaulus

As some of you might know, in July I lost my regular job of the past twelve years when the company ran out of money to pay my department with and laid everyone off.

Since then I've been trying to get a new job, unfortunately my last job used extremely proprietary software and everyone else doing something even remotely like it seems to be using LLMs. While the Biotech type jobs I actually studied for in college will give me an interview, and then pick someone with a more recent degree or non-academic experience in the field. I tried DoorDash and Instacart for a few months and even opened commissions for short stories.

Somehow I got offered a seasonal job at H&R Block helping people file their taxes, which pays almost as much as my old job, but only lasts until mid-April (taxes are due April 15th in the US, for those who don't have to deal with this byzantine nightmare). The first few weeks nobody was coming in and all I had to do was call up past clients asking them to make appointments, then people started receiving their W-2s.

For the past week I've been seeing clients back to back for hours at a time, working six days a week, about to start a 13-day streak with no days off. And I was originally assigned to an office just 8 miles from home but it's behind schedule for renovations so they had me bouncing between three of the other offices in the area for a while before assigning me to an office 21 miles away that takes half an hour to reach when traffic cooperates. Fortunately I was able to convince my manager (one of the few times I'm in the same office as her) to get rid of the split shifts that had me in two different offices on different sides of town in one day.

And then there's the clients, the majority of mine so far have been single mothers, caretakers of permanently disabled people, or both. I'd like to be able to help them, but half the time I wind up telling them they owe the government money, and H&R Block charges them $300+ on top of that.

I'm not going to ask for commissions, because I won't have time to write them, but if you can chip in to my Patreon or Ko-Fi or buy one of my published books every little bit will help. I've burned through most of my unemployment insurance already and I don't have any other jobs lined up. I was hoping to launch a Kickstarter for my Para-Imperium RPG later this year, but after receiving the first sales report for the print edition of Joanna: Ghost Hunter I don't think I have the fanbase to sustain such a venture.

As always, you can find all my links at Carrd: https://zarpaulus.carrd.co/

The large-scale multi-ship battles seen occasionally in interplanetary warfare are almost unheard of when the combatants are located in entirely different star systems. The main reason is simply the orders of magnitude difference in travel time and cost. Starships using reaction drives require many cubic kilometers of reaction mass just to get up to the speeds where ramscoops are effective, while gravity and warp drives require unfathomable amounts of energy and matter just to build.

Therefore, would-be interstellar invaders tend to adopt one of two strategies: The WMD approach is usually only effective against technologically inferior opponents, but if they pull it off a single starship can conquer a star. A G-Drive ship can dance around a fleet of reaction ships, slicing them to ribbons without even taking a hit, while even the least r-drive starship is a colossus compared to system ships. The power of their drives, combined with the purpose-built weapons that civilizations capable of building starships can design, means that almost any starship can lay waste to a defenseless star system in a matter of weeks.

Of course, if the invaders want to capture the biosphere intact (which most do, as it tends to be the most valuable part of a star system), they can’t simply throw nukes and c-bombs everywhere. Which means that the ship’s crew has to negotiate the tricky task of persuading the local governments to surrender with minimal devastation. Even if they succeed in this task, the resulting political arrangements tend not to last long. The elites and masses of such worlds tend to resent “quisling” leaders and efforts to depose them are soon to follow.
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