I made a clock in a book. It’s for sale on etsy: http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=24706808
I’m waaaay too lazy to write more about it right now.
Have a photo:
I updated my main page (finally). It’s in no particular order. Future updates will be chronological.
I challenge you all, every one of you reading this, to a contest of witt, cunning, and speed. Ingenious and simple.
You have 1 (one) lifetime in which to live more than the other contestants. Finishing first does not guarantee a frist place victory.
Prizes will be announced and awarded at the finish line.
Start!
It has been a while since I posted here. A lot of things have kept me busy since I moved to San Diego.
Haven’t found anything to be dissapointed with yet, but I’ll keep looking and update you all when that happens.
I picked up a cheap bass guitar in bad shape from a pawnshop today. It sounds fine, but the body has been knocked around a little. The plan is to sand it down, repaint it, and maybe get some new hardware for it. I’ll post photos as I progress.
And now, the photos of BMWs. The majority were taken by myself, some were taken by Erik and Delia.
So, for those of you just tuning in, I’m moving out to San Diego.
Now, because I’m exhausted from driving for 11 or so hours, I’ll make this a brief image dump with some explanations.
The first stop on my way out of Colorado. The (very) small town of "No Name" was a great place to stretch my legs.
Snapped this from my car window on my way between No Name and Grand junction. Really a beautiful drive.
Who needs Wendy's when you've got an enourmous sandwich? Not I.
Goodbye Colorado. You can sorta almost make out the "Welcome to Utah" sign down the road.
San Rafael Reef. This landscape was massive! (see following pictures)
Same Reef, different direction. There's a tiny person hiding in this image.
I need to get better camera/lenses. There's a tiny moon and road system off in the distance.
And now, for sleep. There will be more photos tomorrow.
Continuing the story. Again, this is very rough. Enjoy it or don’t.
–
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Edward Ravenhearst is exceptionally tall. At nine feet and 11 inches he is nearly a half-meter taller than the average man. Yet still, through many years of careful practice, he goes unnoticed about his city. Being of this particular height affords Ed an unusual talent. Many years back, a doctor was able to slide his vital organs to his right side and install a large copper cabinet in the left side of his chest and abdomen. It took a great deal of talent to build a cabinet that would bend and sway with Edward’s often non-conventional movements, but Dr. Vrach doubles as surgeon and engineer. This cabinet is by no coincidence the precise size to fit the folded-down case of Ed’s favorite girl, Delilah.
Having timed his entrance to fall just between the well-regimented patrols of the metal giants that guard New Hilaani, Ed approaches the airlock cautiously. It was The Harbingers of Regulation that first installed the giants. THOR built them centuries ago when the Separation War with earth had turned ugly. Since then, the giant’s endless milling about has worn a great trench encircling the city’s dome. Two sharp knocks opens the door and Ed steps in.
“Card please Denizen.”
Passing a green bit of plastic card through the small slot in the wall, he contemplates if scientists knew martians would eventually grow this tall. Certainly they must have, for doors around the city were built plenty high. The airlocks though… Always so dark and so confined.
“Craig Anders?”
“Problem?”, Edward replies.
“Are you aware you died last week?”
“Died you say?”
“Seems that way Denizen.”
“You would think time could be found to inform me of such things, but such is the bureaucracy of THOR.”
“You need to be more careful, love. We aren’t all on Big Jim’s payroll.”
“Corp Betty? Is that you in the wall?”
Ed now hears the vaguely british accent and is rather certain it is indeed his old friend.
“Should it be anyone else, love? I’ll let you through this one last time and tell the boss-man it was another lock fuckup, but don’t count on it again. That’s the third time this year.”
“I’ll keep that in mind Betty.”
A *click* and a clattering of gears precedes the rush of fresh air that floods the tiny compartment. A second or two later, a large door opens onto one of the cities many parks. It has its usual flat-gray dullness and grime-backed lighting that gives one the distinct impression of having never left, but having always wanted to.
Edward is walking away when he hears Betty shouting from her booth in the wall.
“You fuckup lummox! Get yer plastics in order!”
He shrugs it off, waves, and continues across the park towards the darker portions of an already dark city. In them he will find his world again, and seep semi-translucent back amongst it.
Of course, not before remembering to pick up a choice cut of meat for his whirring and gently flapping companion slowly circling down on him. Reaper has over the years proven himself time and time again to be his second largest asset. While many of the other For-Hires could match his skill with a gun, ingenuity with a disguise, or dexterity with a lock pick, he was the only For-Hire with a trained falcon for a second set of eyes. The others certainly tried to find martian men comparable to Reaper’s talents, but found that martian men are frail and not particularly well adapted for flight. One unfortunate man tried to steal Reaper from Ed while he was knocked-out for a maintenance surgery on his chest. The unfortunate man was found mostly on the opposite wall from the cage, but also on the ceiling, side walls, and floor of Ed’s small room.
It bears mentioning that his foremost asset, and the only thing to have ever been more reliable than Reaper, was blind luck. People who see luck will mistake it for skill until such acts can’t be repeated. Thus far in Ed’s life luck has made a fine substitute for every skill he has ever needed. He suspects it will remain that way until it runs out and kills him, at which point it won’t matter that it ran out.
“Thank you again for the business Denizen Ravenhearst. See you again next week?”
“Perhaps Butcher Saul.”
Reaper gets a full share of the job’s payment. This week’s share is in the form of a large chunk of illegally imported cow known to the few locals who can afford it as “Third Rock Veal”. No sooner does the chunk leave Ed’s hand into the air than is it snatched up by a large contented shadow.
I intend to write a story. I will post it here as I go. Instead of chapters, it will be broken into posts.
Enjoy or don’t!
–
Reaper soared effortlessly around the higher reaches of New Hilanni’s aging dome. Even as a large falcon he had no trouble gliding in and out of the enormous rusted support structures. He searched for the target his falconer had spent the last several weeks teaching him to find. With a promise of meat, eyes scanned and wings flapped in a methodic and thorough evaluation of the city. Particular objects caught his eye, causing him to terry on them a moment longer than the rest of the rolling scenery. Bright park benches and well kept plants speckled the flat red-gray of the local concrete buildings. The people of New Hilaani in their stoic black and white suits bustled through their ancient’s mazes. One person stood out against the rest. One woman broke stride from the crowds. She wore a flowing purple dress and a wide purple hat bearing the beautiful white feather she’d recently received as a gift. She ducked into an unusually dark alley. She stepped into an awaiting copper coach.
Reaper saw this and let out a long and lingering scream that many mistook for a train whistle.
Miles outside of New Hilaani, one man did not mistake the noise. He lay in the deep red dust on a low ridge overlooking the city. Twilight was coming quickly. His ears perked up at Reaper’s cry and he began stoking the boiler on his rifle. Pulling a small screw driver from his white great-coat, he made precise adjustments to the scope. As he pulled the fire out from under the large gun’s boiler he smiled widely to see the pressure rising to where he’d marked for this occasion. His gun, Delilah, was his pride and joy. The daughter he’d never had. The soul compression of necessity and engineering. 12 tubes leading from boiler to barrel in varying sizes and shapes. One for each year it took to build. Each one placed exactly. Each one functioning beautifully. Never had this world or any other seen such a fine piece of brass and wood elegantly shaped for the execution of deserving targets. He had used other guns but found them intolerable. They lacked finesse. They were too small or too cumbersome or too slow. On one occasion, too fast (the boiler exploded before he could remove the fire). Beads of sweat were forming on his brow below the large glass bubble of this helmet. He squinted repeatedly to shrug them off but they wouldn’t shake. He would be able to brush them off by hand soon enough, so he worried no longer about it.
The woman in the purple dress stepped back out of the copper coach after several minutes with a passenger in tow, just as she had every Tuesday of every week for more than a year.
The man on the ridge witnessed this through his spy glass and prepared himself. He wrapped first his arm and then his consciousness around Delilah. Edging his gloved fingers through the tangle of hot tubes and whirring mechanisms, he sought out the trigger in a well practiced manner that left his index finger resting gently against it and his thumb on the small lever just above it. Throwing the lever released hot steam into the pre-chamber where it quickly heated the 212 gram slug which had “Lana Pyetchov” etched lightly in scroll around the edge. A second, maybe two, later, he flexed every muscle in his body bracing for the impact. An immeasurable length of time after that, he squeezed his index finger.
With a lion’s roar the slug traveled the two yards of barrel in less time than it had taken for Delilah’s release valve to flip. Along the way each of the 12 pipes added either speed or rotation depending on its need and placement. It closed the 1.4 kilometers between the muzzle and the glass dome of New Hilaani in less time than it took Lana Pyetchov to blink. It traveled the rest of the distance down the narrow alleys and past the small markets with just enough time for Lana Pyetchov to say “wha-” to the man in the orange suit next to her who would, seconds later, be wearing a gore-red suit while holding her misplaced jaw and weeping uncontrollably.
Edward Ravenhearst picked himself up and walked back to Delilah, dusting himself off as he went. She’d kicked him hard, but Ed figured that’s what he deserved for skipping cleaning between this job and the last one. He began to pack Delilah back into her case and thought about what cut of meat to buy for Reaper when he got back into town.
A group of specially cultivated glass-spinning spiders quickly repaired the hole in the glass dome and life for most went about as usual save the small group who could have sworn they’d heard a long-extinct animal cry out in the distance.
I’ve been meaning to post something more to this blog for quite some time, but every time I start my brain flatlines. I’ve started a dozen or more blog posts on here that get about two paragraphs in, then die like a one-winged butterfly cought between two panes of glass. Beautiful, but incomplete and doomed.
So, now we have this post. About nothing in particular. Again. Perhaps a discussion about hexopedal robots dancing to late 90’s techno music. Perhaps not. Perhaps a long discourse on the finer points of what it means to convey streaming conciousness via archaic mediums such as text.
Point of interest: Word 100 in this post was “text”.
But I think, for this post, the subject of techonolgy would be appropriate. Specificaly techonoly and knowledge. A question presented itself to me today while I was looking for some information on google. It occoured to me that at one point I knew the information I was searching for by heart. I used to be able to walk backwards blindly through this information and talk at great length about it. I did find what I was looking for, but I was still troubled by having forgotten it in the first place. I felt stupid. But why? Why should I have felt stupid? As homo sapien we’ve gotten this far by using tools we found or made. The internet is just another tool. So why should I feel bad for relying on it? Why shouldn’t I leave my mind free to do other things while a tool collects knowledge for me. And the longer the tool exists, the more complete the knowledge. Well, of course this is not without risks. Misinformation or half-information is also available on the internet, and I must know enough to tell the difference. Risk though is part of any tool. For instance, tools to move you along faster/farther. We start with the bicycle, very minimal risk with a minimal assistance to the distance you can travel in a set period of time. Then there is the stage coach. Farther, a little faster, and slightly more risky. This is followed by trains, much faster, much farther, much more risky. There’s a reason people still call small disasters a “train wreck”. We can’t forget the automobile though! Faster than trains, and with proper fueling, much farther! Still one of the leading causes of death in the USA. Of course, there are planes. We seem to meet an intersection of risk and speed/distance here. Planes are relatively low-risk, but are the second farthest/fastest means of travel. They are followed by our riskiest but fastest/farthest means; space-fairing vehicles. Big risk, but they can cover quite a few miles.
This means our need is to not reject or deny that knowledge will in the near future be stored remotely for our immediate access from anywhere, but rather try to meet that plane-like crossroads of risk and reward. I see the next steps towards this involving breaching the barrier of tactile input for computers. We’re well on our way in the department, but not much for commercial use yet. This will be followed by managing, verifying, and regulating knowledge repositories. Not to say all cloud-content will be managed or verified and indexed. Rather that there will be reliable places to turn for information, much in the same way we turn to webster’s dictionary (or website even still) for the absolute definition of a word. After this, it’s just a matter of making it marketable.
Where that lead us, nobody knows. The elite class being able to afford it and becoming all-knowing? An entire species of wired hive-mind? It’s all open for speculation at this point. I feel it is safe to say though that classrooms will change radically as this techonology progresses.
If you’re still with me at this end of my post, then I have a treat for you.
You didn’t think I’d mention dancing hexopods and not deliver did you?
Enjoy;
I went a month without the internet. Frankly it was pleasant. At first I was frustrated but after the shakes subsided, I was able to more readily focus on tasks, read books for hours without thinking about what movies I should see, what news I was missing, or what TV shows I could be watching. It afforded me time to write. Time to exercise. Time to sit back and enjoy… well, I was in LA so there wasn’t a whole lot of nature to enjoy, but it was nice to enjoy the peace for a bit.
I suppose it’s only appropriate to address the matter of president-elect Barak Obama. I don’t like his politics. I’m sure he’s a very nice person, but that doesn’t count. I’m not a big fan of redistribution of wealth. I’m not a big fan of a nanny government. I’m not looking forward to paying taxes these next four years. So I’m not sure that I will. What the USA needs is a government suited for the modern age. We’re running on systems designed ages ago that are becoming rundown and inefficient. We need something new. Not change. Overhaul. New. What kind of system insists it’s not two-party, but leaves 2 candidates with 99% of the vote? Particularly when the majority of voters openly admit they dislike both candidates? We hate our options, have the power to choose something else, but don’t. It’s a strange society we live in. Very strange.
And for the love of Math and Science, STOP CALLING OUR GOVERNMENT A DEMOCRACY! I implore you to read an encyclopedia then ask yourself, do you really have a full equal share of the governments power? If you don’t think so, skim on over to the entry for Republic. You might find it enlightening.
Thankfully, no government lasts forever.
Regrettably, no government lasts forever.
Now for art. -Monkey Bee, A short film by Jamie Hewlett-
Wanted to write something really profound and enlightened here, but couldn’t think of what it would be.
Then I thought about stealing somebody else’s profound and enlightened statements by copying them to my blog and adding little comments beneath each block-quote as seems to be the trend in blogging these days, but couldn’t find anyone worth reading.
So finally, I decided to write a short blog about my innability to write anything in my blog today. So far, it seems to be turning out just fine.
Before the art plug today, I should clarify something. That last post was a short story I wrote in about half an hour. Didn’t do any post-editing. Went straight from brain to keys to blog, courtesy of the internet tubes. Seem to be short on commenters, but hopefully that will change.
OK, time for art. This is a rather underrated music video for the songs Parabol and Parabola by Tool. I could write at great length over every metaphor, twist, symbol, and nuance of the short film. I won’t though, because I know the few people that read my blog will not need it spelled out for them. I will say this, keep in mind everything from string theory to capitalism to truth of nature and don’t force the lyrics to mean anything in relation to the video.
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