Saturday, April 27, 2013

Starting on a new story...

...because what's the point of actually finishing one?

My Kuiper-Kuiper-Kuiper blaaaAAAAaaaades...


This is the rough-first draft of the opening for the story, which I hope to turn into something fairly lengthy, nerdy and full of something that may pass for the layman's version of accurate 'hard' science fiction.


__________________



     Late in 2342, the Titan based astronomer Ruth Lawrence was nearing the end of her term-of-duty on the moon of Saturn. Soon she would be transferred to some other outpost in the Solar System after a short re-acclimation period on Earth.  With just six-weeks of her eighteen-month assignment left, she had not yet received her next set of orders, which meant they were still evaluating her current performance.
    Exhausted and bleary eyed, she poured over the holo-plates beamed from the mega-telescopes orbiting overhead.  Titan’s thick, hazy atmosphere rendered ground based telescopes impractical very early in Titan’s colonial history.  For nearly one and a half Earth-years, she had been analyzing the still-mysterious Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud for city-sized or larger objects, as well as potential Earth-threatening cometary bodies.
    By her own clock, she had been at the desk for 16 hours and it was nearing midnight.  She exhaled with an air of stale boredom and absently sipped at her coffee, trying to pull together her focus for these last few plates.  As she glanced across the edges of each plate (she used the pattern she had learned during a childhood full of putting together complex puzzles by starting from the edges and working in) her eyes skipped quickly past a queer looking shape at the the far three o’clock side of the plate at the right of a line of six.
One thing she had never been told about the air of Titan, and this was true even in the airtight habitat modules, was that it smelled uncannily of pesto.  It was typically easy to ignore, but Dr. Lawrence’s lab wasn’t completely airtight.  Instead it used a simple airlock system more to compensate for the pressure differential than the contamination of the air, making the odor far more difficult to ignore. She sniffled suddenly fighting back the urge to sneeze (she had to get those filters cleaned).  Confident she had held back the tickle in her nose she lost her self again looking over the final details of the last plate.
Without warning, Dr. Lawrence’s body seized abruptly as her sneeze forced its way through her nose and down her spine.  She jostled her coffee, sloshing some over the lip of the non-lab-approved cup that dripped down the long, angular arm of her holo-plate lamp landing, by pure chance, on the object she had previously missed completely.
“Damnit,” she groaned reaching for her towel to dab up the small puddle that had formed on the plate.  As she wiped up the mess and decided to going back to her quarters for the night, she took one last look at the area where the spill had been.  Her eyes crossed awkwardly trying to focus on what may have been just more coffee.  To prove to herself that it was actually there, she wiped the spot again more aggressively.  
She pulled down her glasses and noted it’s location, then moved across the holo-plates, sequentially from right to left.  “What is that?” she asked herself in the dead, spiced air of her lab.  She immediately turned back to her console and began to overwrite the megascopes programing for the following cycle - she wanted the scope to stay trained on the same patch of sky to keep track of the anomaly.
Within two weeks of the end of her assignment, Dr. Ruth Lawrence had discovered the 32nd dwarf planet of the Sol System.  She was granted extended Earth stay after her re-acclimation, as well as the honor of naming the body.  Instead of naming after herself, or some obscure mythology of past centuries, she relied on her passion for collecting antiques from a particular electronics manufacturer of the 20th century.  And while she would never know it, the dwarf planet Casio-Beta would one day prove to be one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

The romance of Science and the material world

Far too often, I hear and read folks complaining about science 'ruining' things. That science is dry and soulless - somehow without wisdom due to it not being from some place in deep antiquity. Because it gives us answers to ancient questions, often contradicting the "traditional" hand-waving explanation of men and women that roamed homeless in the wilderness, it is somehow less worthy? No.

Science is better.


Does this mean we hate things like magic?

Saturday, February 2, 2013

And FAWM Begins!

Every February for the past few years, I have joined a mass of insane and amazing people over at www.fawm.org.  FAWM stands for February Album Writing Month whose challenge is simple: write an entire album's worth of songs during the shortest month of the year or, more directly, 14 songs in 28 days.

I will hopefully be posting updates throughout the month, starting with my first entry:

http://fawm.org/songs/473/

Let the FAWM begin!

Monday, January 28, 2013

An attempt to explain my 'cycle' of depression


First and foremost – I am not posting these blogs and statuses for your sympathy.  When I re-read this I tried to add some lighthearted jibs, so please keep that in mind if something comes across as shocking or offensive (unless you deserve to be offended, of course).

Big head+Tiny arms = Sad T-Rex
While I do appreciate the sentiment behind your support, and it does give me strength at times, these posts are an attempt to make myself communicate with the ‘outside’ in a way that I can set the pace, subject and tone without feeling guilty.  Additionally, I see these posts as an opportunity to be held accountable and responsible – not for my emotions, but for the actions those emotions sometime aspire to inspire.  When I have the breakdowns that have plagued me for the past few months (at least with such intensity) the last thing I typically want is to talk to anyone about it for any reason.  But, again - accountability, responsibility and whatnot.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Pretty Pictures with Words: If (when) we create (and augment) life? Part 2

In a previous post, I waxed romantic about the possibility of humans both creating life and having some limited control over our own evolutionary future.  In the time since we have seen a double amputee, complete with state-of-the-art artificial limbs, compete as against more physically typical athletes in sport.  While this was surely a triumph for Mr. Pistorius and the creators of his incredibly blade legs, it also signaled the first salvo in what will surely become a theme as we move forward as a species: automatic prejudice towards that which is different from our everyday experience.

A turning point in human history.
Human beings are simply afraid of what is different, of change and especially of something that could possibly change us on a fundamental evolutionary level.  While Pistorius, the augmented man, was an amazing story of personal victories - his augmentations are purely physical - there is no direct connection or interaction with the brain.  He isn't a robot or an android - that's not possible, right?

Well... it just might be.  Seriously.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Trying to understand why I feel a little crazy sometimes

Sup.  Rough Day.

So, I’ve had a bit of a problem lately dealing with anxiety and depression.  Some prettymajor ones: inability to work, random unexplained crying fits, no sleep for days on end, strep, the flu and other infections FAR more often than prior.  While it’s true that all of this can probably be attributed to big life changes (getting married, moving, buying a house, changing jobs), I had only felt sad or maybe a little apprehension at times of big change in my younger years, and the feeling now is completely different.  The hole that gets dug between my anxiety and depression (whichever is in charge that day) is so incredibly deep that to ‘think happy thoughts’ becomes a fool’s errand, as there is no such thing as ‘happy’ to begin with when I’m in these states.

So how did this start?  How did I go from happy-go-lucky guy to the most depressed kid on your net-block? 

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Good morning, Sunset

As the Indiana Jones theme plays on...
Today, I share my second anniversary with my incredible wife, Michelle.  Yes, we got married on the dorky date of 10/10/10 - and let me tell you it makes remembering the date pretty damn easy!  The past two years have seen plenty of ups and downs already - and as I joked with her, we are clearly getting the 'for poorer' out of the way sooner rather than later.

When cast in the light of the past year, our wedding days seems like an eternity ago, when the biggest problem we seemed to have was not being able to buy EVERY video game that came out AND go out to dinner all the time.  Life has become much more intense at times, and others intensely mundane - but I'm so glad I've had Michelle with me every step of the way.  She's my wife, yes - but she's also my best friend and my biggest supporter.  


Sure, it was the only day we were able to gather such a rag-tag bunch of extraordinary people together to celebrate, well, US and we got all kinds of awesome food and attention that day, but it was also the end of one journey and the start of something completely different.  I'm beholden to her as she is to me and when one of us is down, the other always shares the burden as best we can - and she has out shined me in every way this past year.  I'm pretty damn lucky in that regard.  Not to mention that the very moment we kissed, the sun was in the the PERFECT spot to make our binding lip-lock seem downright explosive:

Yeah... it pretty much happens every time...
With all of that romantic stuff, you might thing the day was filled with nothing but kisses and flowers, candy, gifts and food - and you'd be mostly right.  I did a pretty damn good job of picking out my half of the wedding party, if I do say so myself:

Dave, Billy, Seth and Chris all beneath my balls.
There was a point before the ceremony when I was with the gentlemen above when one of Michelle's male friends from her time at Nossi College of Art approached us to find out where the ceremony was (as we were on a fairly large Boy Scout Reservation), and I directed him and the small crowd with him (Gabe and Eric were both in that crowd, I do believe).  As I walked back up to the chapel where the guys were waiting for me, they all wore slightly confused, amused and almost terrified looks across their over-dressed faces.  My brother, always the tactful one, asked "Hey dude - was that a dude or a chick?" to the utter enjoyment of my personal peanut gallery. 

Once the fine gentlemen escorted me back to the deck where the ceremony would be held, they led the parents and grandparents to their seats. A song that I had written for Michelle years before began to play, as a personal bridal march, from me to her - before we read the vows we had written for each other in front of our family and friends.



And at the end of the day, though, there was only my new wife and I driving home from a night I hope we never forget.

________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle,

We've had some adventures before and since we were married - and I hope we share a life full of adventures to come.  I love you.