The night we didn't see Tron (a dream)

Funny dream just now. We went out to the movies (Tron was playing), but after getting the tickets & popcorn and settling down, there was no movie, just a lecture on socialism. But even that was a lie. It was clearly just some new age babble, some darn cult looking for stooges. The audience put up with it, grumbling a bit and slurping their now-empty sodas with some disdain, but surprisingly okay with it. Then the cult guys in their silly cult outfits started passing around collection plates (old Jiffy Pop containers). When one got within reach, I grabbed it and threw it across the room, a wobbly aluminum frisbee leaving a trail of other people's pocket change.

"Hell no," I said. "You already stole our money, now get lost and show the movie."

Cult guy said, "We didn't take your money, the theater did. We're here to help you see the light. Our service is free."

I translated this for the crowd: "Well folks, that's all you need to know about socialism and cults that make you dress funny. Someone else took your money, and they'll help you for free, except that it'll cost you anyway. And I bet the doors are locked, too!"

It seems like my reveal struck a nerve. Ten minutes later the whole theater was on fire, and a week later City Hall banned movies from our town forever, citing some obscure precedent about how Hollywood is trying to subvert decency and family values, and how everyone knows there are no such things as cults. People dress funny and say uneducated things of their own free will.

Get yer tentacles here!

Here's an odd item ... The Book of Tentacles. It was my top-secret project of 2008 to 2009, edited with the help of Edward Cox over in the U.K. It's a fun romp, all kinds of stories, poems and sketches, from all kinds of genres, all centered on the theme of "tentacles."

The book is now available, and here's a rather cute website to tell you more. Enjoy.

Quantum beaches

"Quantum mechanics describes what a system might do in the future, whereas classical mechanics describes what it has done in the past." This is a quote attributed to Freeman Dyson in an early 1990's lecture. [CC, p.272]

Right or wrong, every now & then you hear a line that brings ideas together in a provocative way. One of the central quirks of quantum mechanics is that things are undecided until an observation is made, but it's not really clear what constitutes an observation. Surely there isn't a list of "valid devices for observation."

What if the elusive observer is universal? What if it is simply the arrival of the present moment? In other words, all quantum waves collapse at the present moment, making the past a deterministic record of what has happened. The waves crash on the quantum beach.

There are one other big idea here. One is the illusion(?) of the flow of time in one direction. This is now solved ... once the quantum waves have crashed, they are irreversible, there's no going back to an unobserved state. Water doesn't form itself into waves and rush off into the distance.

Food for thought.

Reference:
CC. Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, "The Collapse of Chaos" (Viking Books, New York, 1994)

End of Dark Windows

I'm calling it quits for a while.  That's the short version.  A few thoughts:

I reached my goal of sending out 80,000 words of my work for free.  I got maybe 3 comments as a result, so I'm pulling out my hair trying to find something -- anything -- that gets noticed online.  But it has never been clearer that we're tiny fish in an ocean of stuff.  Shouting in the wake of sharks.  People have said that you have to just sign on to a thousand websites and just keep posting posting posting posting posting things.  And what?  Still no guarantee of anything, other than the time lost.  There would be no time left for life, or new work, or important work.

So, I'm taking a break.  I need to get new things written & done.  I'd like to put all 40 issues into a printed volume, I'm shopping it around.  In the meantime, there are PDFs of #1-20 available.  I may revisit Dark Windows a bit later on, since things tend to travel in circles in the creative world.

I'm also wrapping up "The Book of Tentacles" anthology, which is full of fun stories, and coming in June from SamsDotPublishing.com.  I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Thanks for reading & listening.  Cheers.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #40, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Channel flipping, or something else?

It doesn't take much channel flipping to reinforce just how lame most supposedly factual TV shows are.

Late last night there was an episode of "The Universe" which was factually correct, but essentially just a narration on top of an endless series of graphics of whirling galaxies and zooming nebulae which were rarely related to the words actually being spoken.  The production process seems to have been: we're talking about galaxies, show some cool galaxy, cue a little whooshing sound ... oh, he mentioned a star, we have a picture of stars, right? can you make them move around a little?

Just now, the "Ghost Hunters" found nothing again.  Though they make a good case for how suggestible most people are.  Flip, flip.  And there were the "UFO Hunters" with their usual argument of: some guy says he saw X, something else might be Y; X and Y sometimes show up in the same sentence, therefore we've proven all kinds of crazy things, and you're a fool for not believing it.  This time it was a deformed skull.  It couldn't be the skull of a poor human with a deformity, no, it has to be an alien-human hybrid.  Instead of going to a forensic facial reconstruction guy, they go to a Hollywood special effects guy who makes the face look like a character from Alien Nation.

Frankly, it's getting to where the travel shows have more useful info than the history shows.  The so-called History Channel is full of junk like Ax Men and Gangland.  I suppose that if someone's log truck rolls over or someone gets shot, it's "history."  At least it was fun hearing about the Ax Men being busted for illegal river logging.  And "Stealing Lincoln's Body" was interesting even if it did drag on for two hours.

Sorry, I forgot it's all just a vessel for advertising!  April Fool's, I guess ...

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #39, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Also, the "History" Channel has only gotten worse. Ancient Aliens is on season fracking 20.

Food for thought: DNA is not the whole story

DNA is not the blueprint for life. Sorry. If you put a piece of DNA in a jar, it will do nothing. It's only part of the picture. In order to function, DNA needs to be in a compatible living cell where all the required chemicals are available. But if you take a fertile living cell and put it in a jar, under most conditions it will die. Each cell can only survive in a certain range of temperature, pH, gravity and pressure, and needs just the right nutrients to survive.

Does DNA contain the information to create its own optimum environment? No. It is only part of the blueprint of life, and it has a lot of dependencies. It is certainly where most of the information is stored, but there's a bigger picture to ponder.

DNA is badly misused in science fiction, especially in TV and movies where everything has to happen in a hurry. If we beamed a human genome to an alien civilization, would they be able to make human? No. But if we beamed them a complete scan of a cell, and how to nurture it, maybe (just maybe) there would be a chance of success.

Food for Thought: Sex and mutations

Sexual reproduction is a line of defense against mutations. If one parent has a damaged gene, the other parent (hopefully) has an undamaged gene. If all genes had equal weight, there would be a 50/50 chance of the offspring getting the undamaged gene. In reality, genes can be dominant or recessive, and other factors are probably at work.

The natural next question is how creatures started shooting genetic material at each other in the first place.

There are many events in the ocean of massive releases of genetic material. That some creatures found ways to get up close and make a more personal delivery does not surprise me.

I have seen pine trees release clouds of pollen at the touch of the wind. It boggles my mind that some of those spores might land on a receptive cone and start the long process that makes a seed. It seems like such a waste to have the rest of the cloud fall dead somewhere. It is also pretty wild that I can pick up seeds when I walk in the woods, and hold entire potential trees in my hand.

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Note: "Food for thought" is going to be an ongoing series of speculations and science commentary.

Musing of music

I woke up this morning from an odd dream ... Mulder was running around in a business park where everyone was jacked in to a crazy computer.  He was looking for a plug he could yank out to get the people back to reality, but it was a wireless network.  Just as he was jumping off a third floor balcony to get away from the angry mob, I woke up.  The song in my head was a real throwback: "Cities on Flame with Rock n Roll" by Blue Oyster Cult.  Funny wiring, huh.

There's something unique about the way music is remembered.  It's stronger than almost any other form of memory (except for things like "Fire is Bad!"), and oddly sequential.  It boggles my mind sometimes that I know the words and all the musical parts of hundreds of songs.  Right now I can recall and replay them, and replay just the bass & drums if I choose, or focus on the guitar.  Yet they seem to have definite access points, where my brain naturally hooks into them, and it's not always at the beginning.  It's more often the chorus that gets recalled first, which is no surprise, since the more we hear something the stronger the memory gets.  And it's hard to say, "Verse 3 line 2" and have the words pop right up ... we usually have to play through part of the song to get to the right spot, or start at the beginning and work up to it.

Now, being able to track individual instruments may be the result of having played guitar for 20 years and being recording engineer on many projects.  When I hear a song, I listen to all the parts.  I know some people who apparently don't LISTEN to music -- it's just on and they talk over it, unaffected.  Weird.

Anyway ... how do brain cells remember so much music?  It's one of the big mysteries of life.  And a nice one, too.  It's quite possible that the earliest literature and teachings were done in song.  Well, let's start with the first verse then ...

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #37, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Also, I clearly remember than when I was younger, music was just a blur, but in my early teens the instruments began to separate out and I could hear all the details clearly.  I have no idea if that's a normal progression, but I do run into people from time to time who swear they cannot separate the notes and it's all just noise.

An odd sequence of cats

First I had to get a CAT scan of my head (over 2 years now of faint and dizzy spells).

Then my wife came home from her job all upset (hours cut back to almost nothing), so we went to go for a walk.  Usually walking helps.  Barely 4 houses up the road was a dead kitten in the road -- once a perky thing owned by a neighbor friend (whose son is still in the hospital after a major motorcycle accident) -- so we got to call her and ask what she wanted us to do ... not happy.

Then on the very next block, an abandoned cat we've been taking care of comes running over to say hi with its eye all puffed up and infected.  This poor cat was found with her eye actually blown out after the owner's house was gutted by a fire.  Long story.   Owners moved out, left the cat behind.  Nice cat though, orange tabby, didn't seem to care about her eye, she'd always see us walking and come over for hugs, I'd pick her up, she'd purr like crazy.  We didn't have room for a 5th cat in our house, but we fed her when we could.  A concerned neighbor took her to a vet as was told it's roughly $1,200 to fix the eye socket properly (more than anyone would sanely pay for someone else's cat).  Still, she had some bowls and people fed her ...

Then we were a block from 7-11 and thirsty but had only a dime between us.  So, that was the least therapeutic walk ever.

I mention this now, because I have more cat items:

The owners of the orange cat were said to have come to get her (finally!), though trying their best to dodge responsibility.  One can only assume the cat has been euthanized now, because humans (and/or fate) are just that cruel.

Oh, the CAT scan came back negative ... the natural joke would be "no brains detected."  Everything normal in there.  Still feel funky a few random hours per week.

On the up side, we just saw "Coraline" - an all-around beautiful piece of work where a stray cat helps save the day.  Wow, some of the backdrops and scenery are amazing, and the story is fun, too.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #36, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

2009 resolved

Comically, after splitting up my blogs last year, trying to make more sense out of them, I ended up with no place to put my sci-fi/fantasy/weird clips and news. Sure, the dark stuff goes in Dark Windows (which has now posted over 70,000 words!), and the "weird news" goes into Unlikely Times. But there's this big gap. And I resolved to resolve it in 2009, so here it is ... while I may still add strange science notes here, I can put futuristic/odd story, dream and poem bits here as well.

I also decided to be bold and launch my blog of word lore ... WordFixx!

I hope this whole mash-up keeps you entertained.

Just a Cheezburger

Oh no, if there's one thing you don't want, it's to give me a tool where I can add smartass comments to photos ...


moar funny pictures

Just a light moment. More of my oddities can be found here.

Are you still there?

I was just out at a local screenwriters group.  The usual mix of nice people from widely different backgrounds and different levels of experience.  Trouble is, I've been having some deja vu on writing-related topics lately.  It's just the same advice over and over, and debunking the same misinformation time and again.  Someone at tonight's meeting talked about having read dozens of books about screenwriting, and hearing all kinds of conflicting stories.  At some point it becomes counterproductive.  People are looking for some answer other than "work hard and cross your fingers," but there ARE no shortcuts.  Work doesn't get done by wiggling our noses and wishing real hard.

It turns out that writing is the easy part.  Who knew that it would be so hard to get anyone to listen to our words?

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #35, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Getting out more?

Since my last newsletter, I have been trying to get out more.  It's part of my New Year's resolution.  Seems I got stuck in a rut, settling for the same old activities, while my business clients moved away one by one, and writing started to feel like a pointless routine.

So I found a good local writing group.   Very nice people, very supportive, and within 10 miles.  Also a screenwriting group that is meeting next tuesday (Jan 20).  I found both on meetup.com, and was pleasantly surprised to see a website actually produce results.  I guess I've gotten used to sites that promise a lot but nothing ever happens.  I tried a business meetup, too, which turned out to be about 50 people getting together for 4-minute one-on-one quick interviews ... every 4 minutes the guy in charge would blow a whistle and we'd move to the next chair down and meet someone new.

These experiences of meeting people face-to-face really impressed me in an odd way, by showing how weak the internet really is.  In person, you can get 90% of a person's attention, really hear them, and see their reactions to you.  Online, you can get maybe 5% of the attention of millions of people ... but they all have other places to be, and can get there in an instant.

I keep hearing the same rehashed advice for writers about promoting our work online, but I keep trying things and checking my page stats and seeing no results, a flat line.  Then again, the same thing happened in person, after all those public readings and conventions and open mike nights ... so I'm not sure how to get people interested in my work.  I'm painfully aware that, whatever I do, people can get vast quantities of more or less the same thing, somewhere online, for free.  All I can promise is that my work is the most "me" you can get.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #34, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

New Year, Same Year

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day is my favorite holiday.  There's no religion or politics involved.  We're not expected to buy anything, send dopey cards, wave a flag, or cook big meals.  It's just a new year.  Simple.  The Earth is a year older (not that it cares), or the human race has survived another trip around the sun ... there's something relaxing and simple about crowds gathering to watch a number change.  And if the old year was rotten we can say goodbye to it and "start fresh."

I'm not impressed with the "get puking drunk" mode of celebrating things.  I've actually heard people planning ahead about how sick they're going to be, or justifying it saying that mass consumption is good for the economy.  Luckily, we can avoid the crowds and deal with it in our own ways, or find quiet people and watch the mob do their thing on TV.

The underlying reality, that we're alive and driven by numbers at some deep level, remains.  A few days later (right about now) we find that everything feels the same and it's all and illusion.

My kind of holiday.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #33, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Improbable Jane arrives

They're finally here, the first box of my new book "Improbable Jane."  It's a 3-in-1 chapbook of sci-fi longpoems.  I added it to my AuthorsDen book list, or you can find out more and read samples here.

Other than that, this year has been a pretty sparse scatter of published works.  Poems here & there.  Over 150 submissions, only 19 accepted/published.  But I've been ill a few random days a week, and rushing to pay bills the rest of the time, so it's hard to find any energy left at the end of the day for doing my "fun stuff", writing.

Strikingly odd combinations

Sometimes there are moments when I find myself doing some odd combination of things I never pictured myself doing.  Like hopping off a bus in Eagle, Colorado and running into Wee Willie Wonka's One Stop Shop in the middle of the night.  Or making bead earrings while watching football.  Or helping my wife sell candles at a Humane Society street fair while gusts of wind are ruining everyone's tables -- I ended up calling that event our blowout sale of the year.

Just now, another odd combination: watching a vice presidential debate while wearing a portable heart monitor.  Just gathering some data overnight.  Comically, after spending three weeks on a waiting list for a "loop monitor" to get a week's worth of data, I got hooked up with this 24-hour "Holter monitor" today, and was home for less than half an hour when the doctor's assistant called and said the loop monitor was available.  Those moments of medical comedy are far between.  Last time I was at the cardiologist's office, sitting in the waiting room with a bunch of much older, much sicker people, someone's cell phone went off, and the ringtone was ... "I Feel Good!" by James Brown.  Nice & loud, too.

Anyway, back to some of my more "normal" combinations.  Like playing monopoly online while mapping Phoenician settlements in Google Earth.  Or cataloging stamps with angry talk radio going in the background.  Maybe I'll listen to an MP3 lecture about Newfoundland geology instead.  They have some of the oldest crust on Earth, ya know ...

Strange world out there, in here.

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #27, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

That nightmare with the nails

Every now & then I have a nightmare where I have to get up and walk around the house or watch lame 3am TV for a half hour to clear my head.  This week there was a good one: something about being in an arena surrounded by barbed wire, with shattered glass and bits of once-living things on the ground, only to be tackled by two emotionless zombies who pounded silver nails up under my kneecaps with heavy wooden mallets; I'd wrestle a hand free, twist out a nail with a claw hammer, only to have two more driven into other joints.  No rhyme or reason.  I could see waking up and having a cramp in my knees, maybe, and that would have explained it away -- body signals intruding on dream-space.  But no, it was simply pointless, restless, and mean.  My brain acting up.  Not even a story to enjoy.

Still, night time is the right time for me.  Silent.  Nobody expects anything of me after midnight.  No phone calls.  I can surf the web, draw maps of imaginary places, scribble words in whatever notebook is at the top of a pile, plan out video games I'll probably never actually write.  Normally, after midnight is my time, and I'll take every hour of it I can get.  It's a finite resource, and there's a comedy factor: if I stay up past 4am, an unquenchable hunger sets in.  So I try to hit the sheets before that.  And every night I try to leave some traces behind.

Time fries when not having fun.  What is fun anyway?

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2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #23, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Hernia & Gaming

Still not feeling well ... the best fit is a hiatal hernia, but doctors would give me anxiety meds instead.  Rather than listening or thinking.  So, new doctor on Friday.  Some barium and a chest x-ray could clear it all up, but this massive system is in place to prevent solutions.  So it seems.

Skip all that.  I've been a role-playing gamer for over 20 years now.  May seem odd, since I may only sit in on a game a few afternoons each year.  But that methodical way of creating places and characters has stuck with me, with the comical side effect that I have pieces and drafts of a bunch of alternate worlds nobody has ever seen.  Just last week I sat down to make a quick fantasy town full of gags and clichees (for Risus), only to find that I had built a whole web of strange people, and I can walk the imaginary streets of the town when I close my eyes.  I will probably dive in and write some of the stories someday.

Finding markets for the actual gaming material is tricky.  Sure, just like for fiction, there are lots of little publishers building collections of short works.  The main issue is choosing a game system, but then if the market rejects the work, the whole piece may have to be rewritten using some other game system, which may lead to more markets that don't want it.  It's like switching languages, a strange process.  And the most popular game systems are so overbearingly complicated, the players must sit around a argue over numbers instead of enjoying a story.  The simpler systems are mostly free, therefore there's no budget there, and I can't spend a lot of hours on something only to give it away.

So many worlds, so little time.  ;-)

2024 note: this was the intro to my newsletter Dark Windows #22, but since that since has been gone for years, I have added it to the flow of this blog.

Giant earthworms threatened?

I have to admit a love of stories about new species being developed, as well as being reminded of some of the rare oddities in the world around us. Here's one that's probably endangered, though it's sighted so rarely it's hard to know what's going on ... the Giant Oregon earthworm.

They grow up to 3 feet long and an inch thick, and smell like flowers. And they can dig up to 15 feet deep. They were discovered in 1937 but have rarely been seen since 1985.

LINKS:
Sierra Club article "Digging for Giants"

PacificBio

OregonState.edu (with small photo)

An odd worm fact: Charles Darwin was an avid worm collector and his last book focused on these humble creatures: "In The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits" (1881).

Oh, in case you think a 3-foot earthworm is big ... the largest worm currently known is the Gippsland giant earthworm of Australia. Check out these beauties ... they grow up to 13 feet long!

The poop about old poop

Archaeologists studying a cave in Oregon have found fossilized dung (probably human) dating to 14,300 years ago. If the human DNA detected was real, and not a result of contamination, this is evidence for people in North America 1,000 years before current scholarship says they arrived.

LINK: Seattle Times, 3 Apr 2008