Writing news - April 2007

Hi again,

I hope everyone's doing well out there. Seems like most of my writing these days is describing things I'm selling on eBay, but I've managed a bit of real writing, including selling another offbeat story to Analog and posting some of my short films and outtakes on YouTube.


=====> BOOKS & CHAPBOOKS:

Poetry chapbook "Peripheral Visions" (NEW) now available from Assume Nothing Press for $6.
Here's the link: http://tales.scvs.com/bk_pvisions.php

Poetry collection "Appalling Limericks" now available from SamsDotPublishing.com -- I was the editor of this one, and it's a lot of fun.

My new story collection ("Blank Spaces & other dangers") is currently offline.
I'm working to get it setup again soon.

I still have a few copies of "Afterlife 9" and "the Other secret house" available for $5 postpaid in the USA.

=====> RECENT STUFF:

Recent works of mine can be found in Appalling Limericks, SciFan, Late Late Show, Star*Line FlashShot, Between Kisses, Sage of Consciousness, and Amaze.

My latest art pieces were: cover art & design for Ecotastrophe anthology, and cover design for Wondrous Web Worlds 6.

I wrote most of the game mechanics and character dialog for the video game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces", which was a fairly major release. But most of my contributions were replaced in the last year of production.

=====> NEW SALES:

An offbeat story "Jimmy the Box" will be appearing in Analog soon.

Poems accepted by Hahaku, SamsDot Publishing, and a few others.

Poetry chapbook "Jane Doe Discovered" coming in 2007 from SamsDotPublishing.com

A gruesome illustration has been accepted for the Hungur 2 anthology.

=====> MY SITES:

My active blogs:
"writer's life" blog ... http://www.authorsden.com/scottcvirtes
Unfuture Chronicle ... http://unfuture.blogspot.com

Thanks for your interest. Drop a line if you have any questions, or want to chat. Have a nice day.

= scott
http://tales.scvs.com?inw=blog

armed and maybe controlled

The Unfuture quote of the week comes from the show "Futureweapons:"

"Anything can happen when you give a machine gun to a robot."

I have to agree with the military guys who want little combat robots they can run by remote control. Never send men into a crossfire or a building full of hostile forces when you can send a little metal thing loaded with weapons. We're already programmed to play video games. How would it be any different to set a few thousand bots loose and let people go down to the local arcade and strike a few blows for their country?

Personally, I'd prefer a world where there was no fighting at all. But apparently, I was delusional all those years. It now looks like we will be at war forever. We can never let our guard down, because we would be trampled in an instant by all the people who want what they want, for whatever reason. Self-interest is our guiding principal, and apparently we all want to see how much we can get away with, from top to bottom. There are pressure systems, just like in the atmosphere, with all goods flowing from place to place driven by unseen forces.

I'd like to see a news service that only shows good news. Where we can see that people are still giving, caring ... but this doesn't sell, so it has been largely wiped from the big screen. I wonder if there's any good news at all, and hope like hell there is. Left to themselves, I've found people to be decent, and interesting. But as soon as they start to get together, they can destroy anything in their path.

So here we are, giving machine guns to robots and hoping they can clean up today's mess without screwing up tomorrow too badly.

the buzz about dying bees

Right now there are bees dying. They go out from their nests but never come back. There seems to be an outbreak of what entomologists are calling "colony collapse disorder," and a growing buzz over what's causing it. Possible culprits are cell phone signals, disease, and pesticides. We've got a definite "unfuture" coming if the problem gets out of control. After all, without bees, plants will stop producing seeds, including most major agricultural crops.

It's sobering to think that our actions or creations could have such a subtle, unpredictable effect on the world around us, and that the effect is hardly noticed until it becomes too vast to ignore. Or is that just the way we do things? All flowering plants could be wiped out, and the pine trees and ferns would return to carpet our dead cities. I'm just speculating, because that's my role. But let's keep an eye on this story. It will be interesting to see what's behind it all.

More reading ...
http://www.google.com/search?q=dying+bees+cell+phones

tuna guitar & the origami troupe

First there was a guy who tried to tune his guitar using the Doppler Effect. He figured that at some delta velocity the thing would sound right. Trouble is, he would never know. It sounded different to everyone he passed on the freeway, always different from the way he himself heard it, standing still with respect to the thnig in his hand. Still, he played in the half-shell house on the tractor trailer bad -- CAUTION: WIDE LOAD -- and people whizzed past and gave him the finger.

Then I was at an odd stage play. The crew came out and setup a man-sized wooden dog, then walked off stage. The planks that made up the dog began to unfold and twist in slow-motion transformations, soon becoming a lion in a classic stalking pose. Then the gears turned again, and the wooden surfaces moved, and it was a caribou. Someone began to chant "Hakuna Matata," and when the whole crowd was spouting that vibe, the production had to fight back. Someone slapped on "Animal Magnetism" by the Scorpions. The guitar crunched out the chords, then the cast came out and began to frolic and devour each other.

Of course, that's when my cell phone rang, which was surprising since I don't have one. But there it was in my pocket, ringing. I picked it up, covered one ear. "Dammit, I told you I'm trying to get out of building websites for people. Right now I'm at some kind of off-off-broadway cannibal party, gotta run."

But by then the feast was over. Later I was told that the blood was symbolic, but there wouldn't be a repeat performance.

--- dream 4/18/07

getting into 9th gear

Lots of vivid dreams lately...

I had a car with a 9-speed stick shift, where the very last gear will teleport the car up to a mile away in a random direction. The non-space bubble would float up or down to the surface of the earth before collapsing and bringing the car back to reality. Someone stole the car when I was in the city looking for clues ... I saw her go around a corner, engine sputtering. She obviously wasn't used to a stick. Then she vanished.

Nobody in their right mind would do a random teleport inside a city. It was made for places like Kansas with long straight roads and square miles of corn to hide in. I took out my keys and pressed the emergency button, hoping I wasn't too late. The car should have teleported back to the dealership and sprayed knock-out gas on the driver. Fun times. My phone rang less than a minute later.

On a good day, technology does work as advertised.

a final fire

day after day of pushing buttons. never knowing which one will start the reaction, the mixing of fuel, the runaway implosion that forces the core inwards. he sees the gauges behind closed eyes, glowing. they will not let him sleep. the stress in unbearable. alarms go off. temperatures rise, the damned gauges react, the all-or-nothing pressure reaches ALL then releases its rage reducing the world to NOTHING.

but not today.

another day, no faces, run and hide. shift after shift, shifting but never changing. wars imagined, made real, fought to the death. the banks win every time, quietly behind the scenes, laughing between piles of infusible irrefutable gold. the buttons, pushed. hidden codes shuffle. thunderstorms pass far overhead. what if the power fails? all the codes would fall to the floor like last week's rose petals. and without the codes there is nothing to stop the irrational, irreversible reaction.

the end of 10,000 years of arts and invention. maybe plants will survive and inhabit our bones when we're gone. things will scurry and tunnel and dine on our silted-over credit cards, take a bite, spit it out, inedible garbage. the sun will continue to pump energy into the earth. we were just a side effect of that energy. may the next creatures rise and be all we wanted to be, and more.

--- daydream at 1am, 4/17/07

felons in limbo

I just saw a short piece on CNN about some sex offenders in Miami who are forced to live under a bridge and actually had a parole officer who went under the bridge at 5 a.m. every morning to check up on them. The laws which said they couldn't live within half a mile of any place that "children might congregate" meant there was no place left for them to go.

Link here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/wplg/20070323/lo_wplg/11346356

Obviously, these are dangerous people, and there's no good way to know which ones will repeat their crimes. It's a strange situation where the people can't be held in prison forever, but can't be set free either. New legislation may result in tagging the felons with radio transmitters, and one can picture a scenario where computers track them and sound alarms if they leave their prescribed area or enter some forbidden zone. It's almost a scenario for shared computing -- I'm sure there are people who would sit around all day watching little blips on a map and firing buzzers every time they saw something they thought was suspicious. Even easier, why not just tag everyone, and then we can zap each other and penalize each other for fun, or send anonymous drug tips about ex-boyfriends just for kicks.

I'm not trying to be facetious. We all should have our freedoms and rights, and each type of crime may properly result in loss of certain freedoms for the safety of the society. I'm just trying to point out one of those futuristic-seeming scenarios we never could have predicted, that doesn't appear to have a solution, now that Australia is off limits for all our riff-raff. Don't laugh just yet -- European nations used to send their convicts to remote islands, or the persecuted people could sail off to new lands, but the world is flooded with people now. Some of them even end up under bridges ...

welcome to my sandstorm

I was hiking somewhere near Globe, AZ and got caught in a sudden sandstorm. Any building looked good through dirt-crusted eyes. I felt my way around the corrugated structure, found an opening and slipped inside.

It was pitch black and there was a giant cartoon dog on the wall. At first I thought it was talking to me, but then I saw the three children sitting on the couch in the darkness, lit only by cartoon-dog-light. I kept to the shadows, found another door, then a black hallway.

A group of commandos came pounding up the hall after me. As they approached, images appeared on the walls around them. I pressed my body up against a tall curtain and they rushed right past me, barking orders and cusswords at each other. They went into a room up ahead and started shooting and shouting. I sneaked a peek through the door, and saw they were in a cave full of demons. Things rushed at them, they fired, things burst, but I could see it was all on the walls. None of it real. Of all the places I could have found shelter, I chose some crazy VR gallery, and unless the system knew I was there, I couldn't participate in any of the games.

I rushed to find the front desk, to buy a ticket. One of the games on the list was Sandstorm, which I thought ironic at first, but then I rushed outside and found that the storm was made of pixels about an inch wide. I wondered why I hadn't noticed that earlier. Maybe the reality server was having a glitch. I turned around to get a refund but the arcade was just a gaping maw in the earth.

I checked and double-checked my firewalls, then dove down into the emptiness.

--- from a dream 4/10/07

invitation to crime

Craiglist hoax
---

Here's a strange technology hoax ... someone posted on CraigsList that everything in a certain house in Washington was up for grabs. You could go take whatever you wanted for free. So people showed up, stole everything and gutted the place. They ripped out the water heater, sinks, even light fixtures, probably leaving dangerous bare wires sticking out. Some visitors filled up whole carloads, some even stopped to spray graffiti on the wall. I doubt the posting said that vandalism was okay, but you just don't invite strangers to a party.

How insane is that? It's wrong in every possible way: that someone could post such an invitation and have it go live; then that people would find the posting and think it was okay; then that people would show up and still think it was okay to grab whatever they want; that people are so desperate to make a buck any way they can; that the ransacking went on for hours before someone called the police; that people would leave trails of garbage all over the lawn ... apparently the posting was soon flagged as a violation, but the damage was done.

Disgusting behavior. This is what we get for giving the masses access to the internet, huh? We try to give everyone access to information, and instead we see a proliferation in crime, and whole new categories of crime being invented.

There was a clip on CNN of the investigating officer essentially saying that they're used to tracking down crap from craigslist, but this was a whole new kind of thing. Craigslist was reported as saying that they would not release any information about the offender(s) without a proper warrant, which is technically the correct response, but only if they're proud about sponsoring crime and scams. If I was running an online community, I'd certainly care about whether I was contributing to illegal activity, or at least becoming the laughing stock of the town. Craig himself always seemed like a pioneer, an underdog we could all cheer for, but you just can't hand technology to people these days without criminals and screaming heads finding a way to corrupt it.

I guess there will be a bunch of copycat revenges against ex-spouses now. More invitations to destruction and theft. Because there is no shortage of desperate people looking to get in on any action in an otherwise miserable world. Maybe the days of unmoderated forums and listing services are over, and clinging to the hope that people will use them honestly is just another Grimm fairy tale. On the bright side, the police could probably use similar invitations as a sting operation for petty thieves.

===

I'm thinking that news stories which suggest we're "living in a weird future" can find a home here from time to time.

at your disposal

I was on a ferry, working as the disposal guy. I tried for the cushy disposal job, the one where I could bale together all the plastic jugs and stomp the aluminum cans, but that didn't work out. My boss said that job was for newbies, and he had a related job that got much better tips. That's how I became the dead body disposal guy. Whatever dead bodies people brought me, I would wrap in black trash bags, then grab some ballast from belowdecks and shove the whole package overboard under cover of darkness. Strangely, the ship's ballast was almost entirely made up of old manual typewriters, the kind that an old Harlan Ellison novel said were by far the best things for weighting down a corpse.

It was steady work. Every night we'd do five runs across the harbor, and on every run, at least one group of shady, jittery bad guys came to my tiny office dragging a dead goon by the hair. No paperwork, no questions, just my life on the ship of ghouls. The downside was not being able to tell my friends what I did for a living, so I had to say I was a bartender. Still, it put me through college, and then the ferry conveniently sailed into a fog bank and never came out. I had nothing to do with that, by the way. I heard the boss just got burned out and one night he called the disposal guy who made whole ships go away, not questions asked.

Fair enough, I guess.

--- from a dream March 2007

short-lived heroes

I think I killed all those annoying characters from "Heroes" last night. I tipped them off to a secret lab underneath an old brick building in Newark. They showed up in their usual ways, and spent hours talking about how they were feeling. Then they finally got their asses moving and went inside.

I wasn't planning on killing them. It was more of a "candid camera" setup, I just wanted to see the looks on their faces when they walked through the fire and did the puzzles and traveled through time and whatever else to get to the safe with all the secrets in it. Confetti was supposed to pop out, along with a note saying "Smile, you're on YouTube!"

But apparently one of them was allergic to confetti, and when he sneezed it caused earthquakes. Heck, I don't think he even knew it, because they're all such lame characters (except for the blond with the two personalities). All I know was, I was a few blocks away in my SUV, watching the video feeds, when he sneezed and the ground started shaking. A few minutes later the building did a perfect Hollywood implosion, and nothing was left but a roiling cloud of dust.

I stared at the wreckage for a moment. Various shades of Oops crossed my mind. Then I drove off slowly, thinking, "They're coming to take me away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho ..."

But they never did come.

===

a fun fever dream - 3/15/07
Apparently, I just don't like that show.

deserts of the mind

We did some driving in northwest Arizona in January. Our usual quick zip through a few too many places, not much time to stop. Still, there are moments. Like when we were in Chloride and ran into a guy walking his dog with a rifle slung over his shoulder. That's when I discovered that a few types of people should always get a friendly hello -- women with little kids, older folks, and people with guns. Road trips lead to odd discoveries. Almost every time we got out of the car there was a cold biting wind, up to 40 mph. The reality of January. But the cold part wasn't so bad for me, but the constant wind was like having someone following us around babbling; it got old after a while.

Cold midnight with stars, and the the sound of fine sand rushing across the pavement. There were probably tumbleweeds circling us, sizing us up, looking for the right moment to leap under the tires like scratchy lemmings.

Whoever planned out Route 66 was not in his right mind. It's fun trying to follow the thing. Almost any time there's a clear route ahead, it veers off in some direction or other, looking for obstacles to overcome. Interesting, though. The full spectrum of "historic" from run down rusty nothings to well-kept diners and hotels.

A funny moment when we walked up to a Sonic and couldn't figure out how to order, and the wind drove us to the diner next door instead. Now in their TV commercials they tell you how the weird machine works, and what credit cards it takes. Little too late.

No new writing of any kind in January, just these reflections on old roads and sandy wastes. Our roasted almonds from Oatman only lasted so long, but all the funny photos of us with the burros ... priceless.

The lecture on flatulence

Okay. Dreams can take us to funky places. I don't mind the nightmares, but sometimes there are all-out comedy moments there, too. Some of my favorites come from the body trying to tell me something.

For me, when I have to take a leak, my dreams fill up with mysterious tons of water. Elevators full, airplanes full, waterfalls in the desk drawer, suddenly pulled out of a car and dropped into a river. Sometimes they seem to go on for hours, drenching wet, until we finally get the message.

Here was a funny twist on this phenomenon. I woke up for a moment, had a spot of gas, rolled over, and my dream changed from something on a train to:

Boring lecture hall. Emotionless professor who looked like a character from a Monopoly game card, going on and on:

"Some primitive cultures would say a wish when they felt a fart coming on. And then they would blow extra hard to try and get the message up to Grandfather. I'm not sure these people really expected an answer, other than to be hit with whatever their wives had in their hands at the time. But the women would do the same thing in their secret huts, reciting cryptic spells and then blowing hard while their sisters beat drums to cover up the audio evidence. They could walk outside after a degassing ritual and actually appear innocent of the whole ordeal. The men didn't want to know what went on in those huts, I assure you. According to Al Gore, this was the beginning of the end of the ozone layer."

And there you have it. Dare I say it? My brain fart of the week.

Happy feet, sad reminder

We went to see "Happy Feet" last week. Figured it would just be goofy, probably some top-tapping in there. I was good to see a film that wants to entertain. There were serious bits, and the expected ecological theme later on. What was odd was that they put so much work into the graphics. If you can sit through the orca scene or the blizzard scene, or the chase scenes without at least thinking "Wow," I recommend checking your vital signs. Singing penguins with attitude? They could have been just funny sketches if that's all they were going for.

Oddly, one of the big walruses was voiced by Steve Irwin. I wonder if this is the last piece of new work he did? What a guy. I still miss him, but it's not the same when watching the Croc Hunter just makes me feel bad, now that he's gone. And where does that feeling come from? It's not like we knew the guy, but yeah, he took us places and showed us a good time. It's a little odd knowing that he's not out in the wild somewhere, cooking up a new adventure.

Still, I can conjure those Happy Feet when I need them, and mourning does go more quickly for these imaginary friends.

game madness

The past few months, I have been trying to do something other than fiction. But I find that nonfiction just bugs me -- I feel like whatever I'm saying is readily available elsewhere. It's an odd sort of dissatisfaction.

So I've been going for the middle ground: trying (again) to do some writing for the gaming markets. But the typical role playing game has so many rules, and I've finally come to the conclusion that there isn't a system I'd actually want to run a game in. Every system has some crazy problem, either too much detail or not enough, so I'm stuck again. The open calls for writers almost always require buying some new book, even though I already have a zillion of them, and they're not cheap. Likewise, a guy would have to be insane to try and introduce a new system at this point in time. A gaming book needs about a thousand killer illustrations before anyone will look at it.

I did send a bunch of work in to a project using the Savage Worlds ruleset, but the project itself seems to have fizzled.

It seems like it would take a computer to keep track of all the tiny little rules now. But when I start to sketch out code, it grinds up against needing thousands of little graphics ... or being a text-based adventure thing, which is old, old, old. Personally, I'd like an online game that allows a huge range of actions, instead of ones that are all pretty but only let you fight.

So, my endless quest continues. Madness for the holidays.

an odd kind of blowout sale

The local Humane Society was having a fundraising craft fair this weekend, and we had a table. It was an outdoor thing. We wrestled to get the canopy and tables set up on Saturday, and there were some gusty winds. Someone's whole canopy blew over and knocked an old lady down, then the society sent out volunteers with huge bags of dog food to use as sandbags to keep us from blowing away. We had a whiteboard to write a sales blurb on, and drew a blank at first, but then we realized it was an honest old-fashioned BLOWOUT SALE!

There was a funny mellow Persian cat in a chair at one of the tables. When whole displays were blowing down and things were breaking, it barely looked around to see what the fuss was about. Cute. Where do people find these mellow cats? Ours bounce off the walls for no reason at all. Forget about taking them anywhere.

We got out for a horse & carriage ride down on Grand Avenue saturday night. When the horses came around each time, they brought a strong odor with them. It took a while for it to register. It smelled like Iowa! When the guy asked which carriage we wanted to ride in, I had to shrug. "Don't care. They both smell like Iowa." Was a nice little community thing, and shops were open, families walking around. Finally some life in our little downtown. The place was like a ghost town 5 years ago.

Sunday morning 8:30am, there was about a 40 mph sustained wind with some nasty gusts, and nobody even tried to setup their stuff. In fact a few people had (duh) left their displays up overnight, and they blew away or got trashed. Not too smart. So we gave up & went home, watched some football, went back over there around 11am and it was still windy. But we got a little spot against the side of the building, and the wind went around us. Seemed like a good spot. Until we realized we were next to the raffle table, and people thought our stuff was part of the raffle -- but once we made a gap it went okay.

Not many customers. The weather probably kept the wimps away. But the Humane Society did raise some money, and people were going in and out adopting animals all day, so it worked out good in the end.

tangled up in goo

If there's one thing nobody wants a pop quiz in, it's gymnastics. So when the professor started singling people out and making them do athletic moves on the spur of the moment, I tried to sink into the floor. When it was my turn, I instinctively went into defensive mode and showed everyone how to wield a quarterstaff and a broadsword, using the broom handle by the door. Still, the guy complained it wasn't technically "gymnastics." Again, defensive: "Bite me, this isn't a gymnastics class. It's physics."

To which the other students gasped. They were all wearing tights, and what I had taken for the science lecture hall was, in fact, a gymnasium. But what was the proper defense for being in the wrong reality?

The building shook, the ground trembled and split open. The desks and stupefied students tumbled down through the crack one column at a time. Then there was no solid earth beneath me, either. It was about eight feet down into a stream of boiling goo. It wasn't "hot" boiling, just agitated. We watched the professor fail to make any athletic moves and within a minute or so only his hand was sticking out. Another crack opened and drained the goo away. Firemen came to rescue us, even though none of us was one fire.

Just one of those days in imaginary college.

two comedy shorts on YouTube

Here's a change of pace ...

I just posted two of our older short films on YouTube.

Check out
the Siberians
and
Psyched out

These two are quirky comedies. Enjoy!

talk is cheap

Communicating is a lost art. Just sit there and hear the words pouring out of people's mouths sometimes. It's a source of endless wonder. Now, try to identify the statements one by one, actually count the claims being made. Amazing, huh?

Here's one I heard recently: "The Knights Templar came to Canada in the 1640's and brought the Holy Grail with them -- it's buried in an old-style rock tomb in Seabury. I saw it on the Discovery Channel."

Seems simple enough, right? Believe it?

In fact, this statement claims ALL of the following:

1. A group named the Knights Templar once existed (okay)
2. The Knights Templar were still around in the 1640's
3. They came to Canada in the 1640's
4. The Holy Grail exists in some form.
5. They once had the Holy Grail
6. They still had the Holy Grail in the 1640's
7. They brought it with them
8. A town named Seabury exists somewhere in Canada (probably on the east coast)
9. There are "old-style rock tombs" (whatever those are) near Seabury.
10. The Grail is buried in such a tomb.
11. The TV show actually exists (instead of being used as a fake attribution)
12. The TV show was stating facts and not just perpetuating a fiction.

The problem with this example is that each statement is hard to prove. Instead of setting out a string of facts, it's just a lot of guesses. If any one guess should fail, the whole argument must be dismissed as false. You can look up Seabury easily, and search the web for tombs of interest in the area -- but you need to ignore any pages which tell the same story, because repeating a story does not make it true. Look for supporting stories, additional facts and clues, and then keep looking.

One trick with language is that it's easy to make big sentences. Lots of words must have lots of meaning, right? When we speak to one another, it's easy to get distracted or lose our train of thought, or have ideas come out in the wrong order. But the overall quality of information we hear is actually fairly low.

Sadly, even when we read written "facts", we often get caught up in the flow and fail to apply the proper analysis, though the statements are right in front of our faces. Practice breaking down some of the things you hear into logical components. If our goal in communicating was to share facts, this would be a skill everyone had. But in fact, most conversation fills a social need, and the "truth" of the words is not the focus at all.

dark road and missing time

Coming home from a Halloween Party in Long Beach, it was clear driving for the first 50 miles or so. Then the world got moody. There was a serious marine layer, with waves of clouds passing in front of the yellowish half moon. Looked like smoke at first, but it went on for too many miles. We stopped at a rest area to switch drivers, and there was the moon, low over the Pacific ocean, with it's reflection shimmering off into the distance on the sea that never ends.

We hit highway 78 and it was a wall of brake lights, then twenty minutes of merging lanes and selfish people not giving an inch of room, even though cooperation would actually SAVE time. Lost the two left lanes. The stink of flares. Bored highway patrol officers waving us over. We must look like an endless stream of idiots to them, but we didn't have the luxury of knowing what was going on. The whole highway was closed, and we were forced to exit. We got a glimpse of some line of emergency lights under one of the bridges, cutting across all lanes. Probably a ghost or two sitting on the median that night.

So we took back roads home, and there was a wall of fog covering San Marcos, waves of clouds scraping the ground, looking for souls to consume ...

... if only we could remember the spirit of Halloween, not just buy buy buy all the crap we can get. And not plastic masks and cheap scares? How about breathing some of the old spirit and realizing that we're powerless fleas on the skin of the earth, and there are secrets all around us?

I don't know. Maybe the magic is truly gone. The cure for cancer is probably waiting in plain sight, in some kind of crab grass that we never pay any attention to, because we're only looking for the big thrill of the moment.