Patrick Sean Tomlinson / @stealthygeek / "Torque Wheeler" / @RealAutomanic / Kempesh / Padawan v2.5 - "Conservative" sci-fi author with TDS, armed "drunk with anger management issues" and terminated parental rights, actual tough guy, obese, paid Quasi, paid thousands to be repeatedly unbanned from Twitter

[ShortBusDriver]

I can't tell glocks apart except by model number (and sometimes not even then). I know he has a .22- is THAT the handgun on which he has mounted a barrel compensator?

That's the firearms equivalent of screwing (not bolting) a massive wing spoiler on your Prius.

Edit: also, Rick, buy some clothes that fucking fit. You just make yourself look fatter trying to squeeze into sizes that are now way too small for you.

The pistol in the photo is a center fire for sure you can tell by the extractor.

The extractor and the slide profile of the .22 caliber Glock look very different.

 

[Meat Target]

Behold, a 5 lb. weight gain:
View attachment 2599944

Even before he was fat, his face pisses me off. What is it?

 

[ShinyStar]

So I figured it's time to continue my review of Fat's book, Starship Repo, that I began way back here where I analyzed chapters 1-3.

Today, I dive into chapters 4 and 5, and I hate it. I hate it all.

Spoiler: Fat writes like Russell Greer

If any of you have frequented the Greer thread, you'll be familiar with how Russ butchers common idioms and consistently demonstrates that he doesn't understand why people phrase things the way they do. Fat has that same problem.

"Calm!" First demanded of herself. Through a force of will, she steadied her ragged breathing.

It's not 'a' force of will, Fat. It's force of will. You can pretty it up and say 'sheer force of will,' but it's still not a saying that uses an article before it.

Twelve decks, stacked bow to stern...

The top of a ship isn't the bow, Fat! The top of the ship is 'the top' or 'topdeck.' The bow is the front of the ship, and the stern is the rear. If you've stacked decks from bow to stern, you'd have had to stack them sideways, and you should explain to the reader why this orientation doesn't result in everything just sliding to the bottom of the ship.

Spoiler: Fat can't write characters

Firstname Lastname is supposed to be a seventeen year old human female. She has run away from a home that seems to have been predominantly human (little alien exposure) and arrived at a far-distant alien space station.

This seventeen-year-old is a master hacker. Do we get any information on how she became a master hacker? Nope. Do any of her interests seem to focus in on that (i.e., she spends her spare time playing video games, she has no people skills and therefore loses herself in electronics, etc)? Nope. She just is. At seventeen.

This human female sex-talks cars.

First caught the line of drool running down the corner of her mouth before it reached her chin, but only just. She moved on the car like a lady, quickly but respectfully, knowing full well its suite of security sensors already watched. Instead of coming at the Proteus directly, she slipped behind a beige, entry level Guff...
She walked up to the Infinite and laid a hand on it for the first time. "Hello, beautiful, what's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
..."I'd like to buy you a drink, if you don't mind," First cooed at the car as he pushed deeper into its operating system's safeguards. On command, the seals hissed as the door peeled open like a wood shaving, revealing an interior of such decadence that First was tempted to pull out of her sublease with Quarried and move in.
"My, you are an eager one. My place or yours, darling?"

Can women like cars? Sure, but it's not common for women to like cars so much that they literally drool over them. If First is one of that rare breed, something in her character ought to have clued us in to her tom-boyishness before now. As it is, she comes across as a woman being written by a man. The flirting makes it that much worse.

First off, she's viewing the car as a female while hitting on it. Could First be a lesbian? Sure, but again, Fat hasn't demonstrated that to us before now. Instead, he's just having a woman seduce another woman as if she were a man. There's even the innuendo of her 'push[ing] deeper' into the car, as if she had a dick and were fucking it. Do women sex-talk things they get excited about? Maybe. But it's not common, and viewing themselves as the man in the scenario while they do so is even less common.

Fat makes sure to remind us on occasion that First is an adolescent, 17yo (below the age of consent), but he never writes her as if she's that age. She competently navigates herself around the galaxy, gets herself a place to stay and an income, and never seems even a little bit flustered by it. 17yo girls for the most part are vulnerable, and if she's putting on a bold face to try and hide her vulnerability, you'd have to show it. There's one point where some other characters remark that her obstinacy is characteristic of adolescents, but given that every character Fat writes seems to have the same smug superiority complex, it doesn't actually mark her as being younger than anyone else.

None of the other characters have enough of a personality to even critique yet.

Spoiler: Fat's a l33t h4xzor

Aircars in Fat's world have electronic security systems that must be hacked in order to successfully steal a car. Let's see First's l33t hacking skills in action, shall we?

First dug into her purse and pulled out her hacking deck. She had software patches and exploits for dozens of makes and models already preloaded, but only one for a Proteus and none for an Infinite.

She logged in to her /backnet/ portal under one of four burner accounts and hit the app market, search term "Proteus Infinite Exploits." Sixteen hits came back in less than ten seconds, each with a bid price in blue next to them. They weren't cheap, but this was nowhere one wanted to skimp on currency unless they wanted to get locked out halfway through a hack and have station security called. Then you were either running for your life or spending the cash you should have spent in the first place on bribes.

First ran the profits and losses in her head, weighing what she had to spend to boost the car versus what her payday would be upon delivery. In the end, she clicked on the fourth-most expensive bid. Not amazing, but a lot better than sloppy, and she had the skills to make up the difference.

First looked around once more to ensure she was still alone, then held out the last of the crypto-crystals she'd pocketed from Bleef that first day months earlier and transferred the credits. Bleef had been more than generous in repaying the burger he'd cost her, but his bleeding ended as the gentle blue glow inside the crystal went dim and it returned to being an unformatted quartz crystal valuable only as a bite-sized snack for her Grenic roommate.

She gave the patch she'd just bought a cursory exam to make sure she hadn't just gotten stiffed, left positive feedback for the programmer when it was obvious she hadn't been, then opened the file.

It goes on a little longer, but there's enough there to bore a person to death get the idea. The suspense-filled, edge of your seat scene where First shows off her savvy skills involves her... shopping for a program on an online market-place and leaving a review.

Dear Lord Nurgle, I want to kill myself. A.) it was boring, B.) anyone could do it so it required no skill and C.) it was stupid. Yes, law enforcement won't be all over a black-market hacking site. It's super-legit, bro.

And leaving a review? Just kill me. She's supposed to be trying to finish the job before anyone walks in off the street and sees her. I know Fat lives online, but IRL, this is ridiculous. If she really wants to tie her online identity to a public review of an illegal hacking program, then she can do it after the job is done. Beyond that, she hasn't even used to product. She looked it over, but what if it doesn't work? Please, death, claim me now.

Spoiler: Virtue Signal, to the rescue!

So, humans had a war with the Turemoks, and one of the characters First ends up working with happens to be a Turemok. When this causes friction between the two, the head guy says,

"Jrill was not involved in the decision to attack your home world. The Turemok who were are now all dead, either by the hands of your people or ours. That will be the last I hear about it. I will not tolerate racism in our ranks. If you can't accept that, I'll wash my hands of you, and you can march right off into the aircar outside."

This sounds like exactly what Fat imagines he's going to say to theoretical MAGA guy when theoretical MAGA guy shows up for Thanksgiving dinner. Being a criminal is fine, being a bitch is fine, but if your bitchiness has something to do with stereotyping another species (a species, not a race, you dummy Fatrick), then that, by Nurgle, is one step too far!

Spoiler: Nothing is Real

Fat likes to throw in little bits of alien flavor to prove that he's a really real sci-fi author, but he lacks the intelligence to do so in a coherent manner. Take, for instance, the (already done by a superior IP) instance of eating live beetles for dinner. Fat has them running around the plate and almost escaping, but then the character later totally forgets about his bowl. And the beetles just don't exist anymore, because if they did, then they'd be running around the apartment and that would be a problem.

Also, take the issue from the previous chapter about the alien shitting all over bystanders because it needed to relieve its bowels to fly. If that were a real thing, then there would be some sort of system in place to facilitate the alien's need to relieve itself without contaminating the station with biohazardous waste.

And, to go more in depth with a concrete example, let's look at the (re)introduction of the lead male character.

Reclining in a lawn chair turned away from her, an alien in a bathrobe sat looking at a handheld while drinking from what looked like a short martini glass.

Fat tells us we can't see the front of the alien (the lawn chair is turned away from us), but then immediately goes on to say what the front of the alien is doing (drinking, wearing a bathrobe, and looking at something). Fat wants to have a big reveal when he describes the alien's physiology. He spends several paragraphs after the above quoted line having the two characters talk, and then throws out the shocking description. The first time I read through it was jarring because I wanted to know why First hadn't reacted to the alien's appearance as soon as she saw it. I had to go back and re-read that first paragraph to catch that the lawnchair was turned away. By describing things the audience shouldn't have been able to see, Fat gave the impression that we could see them and made the whole scene unnecessarily confusing. I hate him.

So, what does this alien look like?

The alien was roughly humanoid in body layout--torso, two backward-bending legs, two big and two little arms, a head, and a plump, stubby tail that looked better suited to storing fat than correcting balance. After that, things got weird. They didn't have any skin, for one thing, and the various exposed pieces seemed to be held together by nothing more than collective agreement.

It looks hideous. This is our male lead, and if Fat tries to have some sort of romantic subplot with this guy, I'm going to shotgun my brain in minecraft. It's very clear that Fat is the sort of person who thinks that the prevalence of humanoid species in sci-fi is an arrogant conceit of egotistical, short-sighted humans who think they're the center of the universe and can't comprehend that aliens could take any sort of shape. I don't know if you've ever run into that type of sci-fi geek, but they're largely insufferably smug. Fat wants to populate his book with 'real' aliens. He's going to break the rule of human-looking aliens, but like far too many rule-breakers, he doesn't understand why the rule is there.

The rule is there because if you change too many things, it's going to end up affecting your setting and your characters in unforeseen, inconvenient ways, and it's going to alienate your reader who will have trouble connecting with your skinless ghoul creature.

To start with, Fat has described something you literally cannot picture in your head. What does 'exposed pieces seemed to be held together by nothing more than collective agreement' mean? Such a thing wouldn't work in reality, so it's not something a person can picture without resorting to some absurdist, cartoony nonsense.

Then it has no skin. Skin isn't like hair, where you can get along being bald just as well as having hair. Skin serves an important function, keeping your insides in and keeping bacteria, poisons, and irritants out of sensitive interior areas. Plus, it's going to smell awful. If the alien lacks skin, it's going to need to make up for that lack somehow. Actually, it won't because it'll be dead, as it should be. And so should Fat.

And then there's the part where it's absolutely, hideously repellant. Humans rightly associate a complete lack of skin with tortuous pain and imminent death. Such a sight would be sickening at a very primal level. Humans wouldn't want to look at it, much less be around it. Of course, the affect the sight of this alien has on First lasts for all of one sentence. One fairly mild sentence. First clearly doesn't believe what she's seeing, and therefore neither does the audience. No one is going to want to picture what Fat has described in their head, and so the book is going to have a male-protagonist shaped hole in it whenever that character enters a scene. Every time a reader wants to picture what they're reading in their head, it's going to pull them out of the book because they're going to be reminded that they don't want to see the male protagonist.

Spoiler: Kill me, kill me, just kill me now

So, how's the plot going, you ask?
First gets hired by a legitimate repo company. How does that company manage their hiring process? Let me tell you.

1.) First decides to go steal a car from a garage outside an upper-class restaurant.
2.)The alien at the end of the line is a plant from legit repo co. who tells her there's a long line (which First has already declared was perfect because it meant the garage would be full and patrons would be delayed returning to their aircars.)
3.)Another alien exits the restaurant, launches itself into flight, and in the process, poops all over First.
4.)The first alien informs her that another restaurant is less likely to be busy.
5.)First throws away her soiled outerwear and goes to the recommended restaurant.
6.)At the other restaurant, First sees a very expensive car and steals it.
7.)After she leaves the garage in the car, the car locks itself, activates its anti-theft software, and transports her to the home of the business owner who then tells her she can work for him or go to jail.
8.)He then holds her prisoner on his balcony for 24 hours until she agrees to work for him.

So... That was a really, really stupid way to hire someone. Yes, they wanted to know if she could steal a car because the same skills would be used in the repo business, but they're a legitimate business who makes millions on any given job. They could use real hiring practices, like putting ads in the local paper... They could even let the applicants try to steal the car to prove they could do the job. They didn't need this stupid set up. This is the sort of thing that criminals would do because criminals need leverage to convince people to work with them. Instead of attracting a pool of highly qualified candidates, doing interviews, etc., the legitimate businessman kidnapped a thief and held her against her will for 24 hours. The fact that she committed a crime first doesn't make what he did legal. Just shoot me.

And what about the set-up in the first place? Let's see what it took to pull off that genius scenario.

1.) They had to know where First was going, get there before her, and be the one person she chose to talk to.
2.) They had to have an alien poop on her (there's been no suggestion that the pooper was in on the plot, so that seems to have been a complete stroke of luck).
3.) She had to decide that being pooped on was enough to give up a perfect mark in exchange for a less ideal one - which she did because she decided to throw away her cloak in a nearby bin, thus linking herself to the scene. She could have decided to walk a couple blocks, throw away the cloak, and come back. She could have decided to ball up her soiled cloak, do the job, and take the cloak away with her. But no, she did what was convenient for the author.
4.) She had to decide to go to the restaurant that the alien recommended.
5.) She had to decide to steal the car that the aliens had planted.

This was an unnecessarily stupid plan. The alien could have just left his fancy sportscar at that first restaurant and everything would have worked out fine. There would actually have been less room for First to decide to do something different that would have thrown off their plans. I hate Fat.

So First hires on with them, do things become more logical after that point? No! Of course not!

The team gets news of a very expensive luxury yacht they can repo. At the end of the briefing, they reveal that they need to be able to beat a rival crew to the ship down at the docks. ...That's not how that works. If multiple people know when something is going to arrive somewhere, they can't 'beat each other there' unless someone is lazy and doesn't show up on time. If one team arrives early, then they still have to wait for the ship to arrive and dock at the station. They're going to be reaching the ship at the same time no matter how early they get there. That's a problem, but it's not a 'how do we beat them there first' problem. Fat doesn't understand his own scenario.

So First reveals that the competition has men who work at the docks, and everyone reacts as if this makes matters worse. No. You're all still just waiting at the docks together. 'Beating each other to it' doesn't improve your odds. Eventually, they reach the conclusion that should have been plan A to start with; that they need to get to the ship before it arrives at the station.

A.) If the ship is going to arrive at the station, then the creditors don't need a repo team to get the ship for them. When a ship docks at a station, it is in custody of the station until it leaves. All the creditors need to do is alert the station that their property is on the way and have the station lock it down as soon as it docks. This whole scenario is stupid.

B.) The captain says, "We can't wait for Space for Rant to dock at Junktion. We have to intercept it in high-space, so when the moorings are cast over and Soolie's rented hands swarm the gangplanks, we already control the bridge." Um... If they highjack the ship before it arrives at the station, why would they take it to the station, knowing they're going to be attacked once they get there? Can't they take it directly to the creditors and just avoid the whole scenario? It really seems like it would be safer that way. And if the creditors are already on the station, why on earth would the person illegally flying the ship be taking it right to them? That's stupid. But let's say the creditors are on the station. Can't the team, say, arrive at the station, but send the creditors a message before they dock and tell them they're in control of the ship so they can get credit for it before the competition ever has a chance to cause them trouble? I hate Fat. I hate him so much.

TL;DR - Fat can't write. The fact that he is published is a black mark on the entire publishing industry. The fact that this book got published without massive revisions is a huge black mark against Tor. This book is in violation of the Hague conventions against torture. I hate it. I hate everything.

 

[Miles Peterson]

For EDC (every day carry) it is completely impractical due to the bulkiness and weight added to the pistol.

Eh, I wouldn't say it's impractical, as opposed to merely not practical. It doesn't really do anything, but it's not a major issue either. It makes the gun a bit larger, yes, but depending on how you're carrying it and how big you are, you could still conceal it.

For example, if you're a particularly large guy, or a particularly fat guy, the extra width of your body can easily accommodate a larger gun and you can still hide it.


That said, if that is actually a .22 Glock, putting a compensator on it is completely absurd. Though perhaps not as absurd as carrying a .22 glock for everyday protection.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

And that is why I never bothered to read Ricks books. He doesn't know what he's talking about, his characters aren't written well, probably because of his limited exposure to real people, and in earlier books, his characters can't shut up because he doesn't know when to have his characters talk and when to write about what's happening.

 

[TerminalTryHard]

I'm pretty sure the thing on the end of his gun in that video isn't a compensator but a threaded muzzle with the protection cap still on. Which is funny cause I'm sure Rick doesn't have a silencer or evens intends to get one but he has to have the manly tactical model.

 

[Arocyt]

His character reviewing the product before using it is hilarious given Pat begging for his followers to leave 5-star reviews of his book before it came out, and also on the other hand fighting over reviews left by people who haven't read his book.
The character being a badass, independent hacker at 17 "just because" and her test of skill that proves she's this great hacker being a fucking google app store search might say a lot too. Pat watches a YouTube tutorial when his bike makes a funny noise and fixes it through the videos instruction but comes out convinced he's a master mechanic afterwards.
What a silly man.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

His character reviewing the product before using it is hilarious given Pat begging for his followers to leave 5-star reviews of his book before it came out, and also on the other hand fighting over reviews left by people who haven't read his book.
The character being a badass, independent hacker at 17 "just because" and her test of skill that proves she's this great hacker being a fucking google app store search might say a lot too. Pat watches a YouTube tutorial when his bike makes a funny noise and fixes it through the videos instruction but comes out convinced he's a master mechanic afterwards.
What a silly man.

This is the same guy that thinks because he's been married twice he's the most desirable man in the world. Meanwhile his best friend cucked him and took his first wife and women on Twitter don't give him the time of day.

 

[AnOminous]

Yeah no. I'm just over six foot and 225lbs and I look far better than that. How a 6ft. 225lbs male looks (not me of course). He was never 220lbs. or even 225lbs.

Leave it to a big fat liar to tell big fat lies.

 

[Meat Target]

@ShinyStar: please do not post any excerpts from Rick's books again.

I would rather eat broken glass.

 

[Boston Brand]

I want to see him try to gun sperg against Larry Correia.

I'd pay money to see fat Pat even dare to try and snipe at Larry Correia over the Internet.

Larry would ass blast this joker so hard he'd start calling everyone "daddy" instead of "child".

 

[Melissa Sanchez]

holy smokes the irony of pat saying someone should have their daughter taken away from them. incredible. who else on the farms projects as hard as this guy?

This is one of the things that enrages me the most about the drivel he spews on Twitter. This guy acts like an emperor ordering peoples' kids taken away from them, ordering people to their deaths/prison/torture/rape, ordering people to be fired from their jobs. He has absolutely no sense of perspective of what the consequences would be if any of his "orders" were to actually be carried out. He doesn't think twice about the lives that would be completely destroyed. This is someone who has contributed absolutely nothing to society, has leeched off the taxpayer (me and you) for untold hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout his life, used $100,000 of other people's generously donated money to fulfil a personal vendetta against people who mock him on the internet. He is literally the last person that any sane person would go to for guidance on any issue. He is an absolute zero who has accomplished literally nothing in his 41 years on this earth despite acting like he is the shit. It is by the grace of God that he has never and hopefully will never have any kind of power in this earth over other human beings.

There have, however, been times in human history where rash, evil narcissists like Pat have been given absolute control over populations, and it has always ended in tremendous death and suffering.

 

[Meat Target]

There have, however, been times in human history where rash, evil narcissists like Pat have been given absolute control over populations, and it has always ended in tremendous death and suffering.

Never think "it cannot happen here". Hell, it's happening right before our very eyes.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

This is one of the things that enrages me the most about the drivel he spews on Twitter. This guy acts like an emperor ordering peoples' kids taken away from them, ordering people to their deaths/prison/torture/rape, ordering people to be fired from their jobs. He has absolutely no sense of perspective of what the consequences would be if any of his "orders" were to actually be carried out. He doesn't think twice about the lives that would be completely destroyed. This is someone who has contributed absolutely nothing to society, has leeched off the taxpayer (me and you) for untold hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout his life, used $100,000 of other people's generously donated money to fulfil a personal vendetta against people who mock him on the internet. He is literally the last person that any sane person would go to for guidance on any issue. He is an absolute zero who has accomplished literally nothing in his 41 years on this earth despite acting like he is the shit. It is by the grace of God that he has never and hopefully will never have any kind of power in this earth over other human beings.

There have, however, been times in human history where rash, evil narcissists like Pat have been given absolute control over populations, and it has always ended in tremendous death and suffering.

I thought he was 44.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

I thought he was 44.

I thought he was a fatass in his late 30s.

 

[lolwatagain]

This is one of the things that enrages me the most about the drivel he spews on Twitter. This guy acts like an emperor ordering peoples' kids taken away from them, ordering people to their deaths/prison/torture/rape, ordering people to be fired from their jobs. He has absolutely no sense of perspective of what the consequences would be if any of his "orders" were to actually be carried out. He doesn't think twice about the lives that would be completely destroyed. This is someone who has contributed absolutely nothing to society, has leeched off the taxpayer (me and you) for untold hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout his life, used $100,000 of other people's generously donated money to fulfil a personal vendetta against people who mock him on the internet. He is literally the last person that any sane person would go to for guidance on any issue. He is an absolute zero who has accomplished literally nothing in his 41 years on this earth despite acting like he is the shit. It is by the grace of God that he has never and hopefully will never have any kind of power in this earth over other human beings.

There have, however, been times in human history where rash, evil narcissists like Pat have been given absolute control over populations, and it has always ended in tremendous death and suffering.

He's a lot like MovieBob in that way. But thankfully, like Moviebob, he's too incompetent and uncharismatic that nobody, except for the few who are just as dumb and deluded, would ever support his policies.

Honestly, signing away his parental rights was the greatest gift he could ever give his daughter.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

I thought he was a fatass in his late 30s.

all indicators show mid 40's. Birthday should be 1977

Graduate from
Pioneer-Westfield High School
Class of 1998

At one time he actually had a neck and a visible chin.

 

[ShinyStar]

all indicators show mid 40's. Birthday should be 1977

Graduate from
Pioneer-Westfield High School
Class of 1998
View attachment 2601039

The OP has his date of birth as April 18, 1980, which would be the right year for him to turn 18 and graduate in 1998. He's 41.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

The OP has his date of birth as April 18, 1980, which would be the right year for him to turn 18 and graduate in 1998. He's 41.

I must be thinking of another cow who was born in 77. Yeah, 1980 would be the correct date.

 

[Illuminati Order Official]

another cow who was born in 77

Pam.