#24 & #25

#25
February 6, 2009 at 8:26 pm (Fiction) (Crashers, mini saga) · Edit
It never stops. It just pours and pours from the sky. Twenty days and counting, the rain is winning. Floods have taken the valley. They even say that the ocean has risen. The weathermen have given up on predicting when it will stop. At least when it rains, it’s cool.


#24
February 6, 2009 at 1:51 am (Fiction) · Edit
He couldn’t believe it, the sign actually said, “DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS” and it was on a cage! He had always thought that the myths of how his people treated animals before their ascension were just that, myths. This sealed it. Man was cruel. Probably good they didn’t make it.

#23

Bobby was a player. He fancied himself a bigtime movie director. He even had his English accent worked out and everything. He liked playing with the big toys and the big boys, hated paying for them. But his big problem now was the six determined, angry grips at his door.

#22

Something for nothing, that’s the nature of magick. For the modern urban magician the real problem is how to ask the powers for what you really want. Oftentimes we get what we requested, and we realize it’s nowhere near what we want. The universe has a mean sense of humor.

#21

Every decade or so, the android switches identities. It is effectively immortal, with self repairing systems and durable components. It's primary function is to gather and record human history. Supposedly, there are countless other units spread across earth with the same programming. The android wonders if they too, love and suffer?

#19 and #20

#20
February 1, 2009 at 11:00 pm (Fiction) (mini saga, Urban Arcana) · Edit
Magic rings have grown quite rare. There was a time when it was in fashion to go flinging these most precious artifacts into volcanos or forge them into one super-ring. Nowadays, any ring, with any minor power was priceless. My new ring kept coffee in my hand just right.

#19
January 31, 2009 at 7:49 pm (Fiction) (mini sagas, time travel) · Edit
I’m telling you, the hardest part of time travel is simply getting the style of dress right. The subtleties of fashion are very challenging for an out of context visitor. Most of the really good travelers figure out their own thing, after a period of being called names by fashionistas.

Two More Crashers Mini Sagas

#18
January 31, 2009 at 12:34 am (Fiction) (Crashers, mini saga) · Edit
The big old vacant house sometimes made noises in the middle of the night. Those settling groans always wake me. Gun, it’s in my hand. Downstairs, secured tightly. All climb points, booby-trapped. I’m safe. There’s nobody here. Empty neighborhoods were rarely targets. No, that’s a footstep! Okay, stay calm.


#17
January 29, 2009 at 3:51 pm (Fiction) (Crashers, mini saga) · Edit
Nothing like a home cooked meal. Everyone knows that. But fresh real food is hard to come across these days. Trucks stopped running for the most part after the riots. The trick is: find something the farmers want. Trade. Make friends. Build bridges. Alway be cool. Then feast for days.

Sleep (or lack thereof)

So, I am one of those people who can function pretty well on very little sleep. I like to think that it it's because the quality of my sleep is such that I get more from less. I have flirted with the ideas of sleep rhythms and quantum sleep. But mostly, I like to just stay up and do stuff. I like to be awake, and the idea of sleeping 7-8 hours a night seems like such a waste.

It's not like I am getting any less busy, and I am barely getting done what I want to get done right now, when I am not even working all that much. If I were to start cutting out the things in my life, where would I even start. It's all pretty important and fulfilling to me! I like having a full life.

My Pattern: Several nights 3-5 hours of sleep. Often up till 3 in the morning. When I am working I am often up super early, but I never go to bed before 12:30 or 1 am. I drink a lot of coffee. Espresso. Soy Lattes. The Baristas at my local starbucks know me by name. Then at the end of a string of these, I sleep a nice long night. It has been this way for years. I like to feel like I am some kind of superman who doesn't really need sleep.

Well, today I was listening to this 60 minutes podcast about sleep. They were interviewing all these sleep specialists. Every one was testing the sleep needs of humans and other creatures. Humans are the only creatures on earth that under-sleep. And it turns out that several consecutive nights of less than 4 hours will impair a human significantly. Even after just one night, there are measurable impairments. This can be counteracted with caffeine and light, but only to a limited effect. Lack of sleep makes yo hungrier and impairs leptin production, the chemical that makes you feel full from eating. It can also be a cause of diabetes! It made me sleepy just listening to it.

They also said there is no substitute for sleep. None. This is the amount of sleep we need 7-8 hours a night.

Not sure where it's going to come from, and certainly not for the next few weeks. I have a lot scheduled. Working Thursday and Friday probably 12 hours each day, Yard Dogs Tonight, more stuff friday probably Mystic and an Art show, Saturday completing my costume for the Edwardian Ball then there till late. An early game on Sunday and a superbowl party in the afternoon. More work on monday... Plus exercising, writing, blogging, dating, eating, socializing, driving... You see how it goes.

No rest for the wicked. Yawn.

#16

"Um... Can I help you, er... sir?" the shopgirl asks.

Truth be told, the ninja armor was pretty awesome and completely obscures gender. Silence. Lots of silence when helping ninjas in the Macy's Men's Department. The shadowmaster examines the tag, maybe frowning.

"Sir?"

"Does this come in black? It's slimming."

Spaceship Earth

reposted from my blog @ spaceman23.com/ where the links are much cleaner...

Can you see it? Our planet, big and blue and permanently sustaining us is a spaceship. It's in a orbit around our sun, Sol. Sol is spinning in our galaxy which is one of literally countless galaxies, spinning through the ages in an ever expanding series of ellipses. We are traveling millions upon millions of miles in all directions every second. The universe is beyond comprehension in it's size. It's expanding! and it is also arguable that there are an infinite number of universes on top of that, each representing other distinct possible realities.

And here we are, with our tiny little concerns, just plopping along like our lives are so crucial.

Years ago I read this book, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller. When I did a little digging just as I started to think about writing this article, I found out that there's even a ride at Epcot Center called Spaceship Earth. Interestingly enough, the big epcot dome is based on the Bucky Dome... yup the same domes we use at Burning Man. Yup, designed by the author. It got me thinking, as these things usually do.

Bucky is an interesting character. In 1927, at the age of 32, He's bankrupt and jobless and on the very brink of suicide. He's just lost his daughter. He's deep in the booze. He's wracked with guilt over his daughter and his failed business ventures. At the last moment, he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity".

He devoted his life to something bigger than himself, and lived a full life of design and greatness. 28 patents, many honorary doctorates, world travel, many books... he lived his life to the benefit of others and died complete. I know his book changed my life. It had me see the world in a totally new way, one where there is a synergy that is possible, and one that could work for everyone.

Which brings me back to Spaceship Earth. I feel that our country and our world is on that same suicidal precipice. We have nearly depleted all of our resources. We've lost countless sons and daughters. At times, it seems hopeless. And we can just give up, live life as we have, or take on a new way. We can engage in our own little experiment and for this I am going to steal lovingly from my man Bucky. Let's take on his unanswerable question.

"Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?"

It's going to mean taking on a whole different kind of way of looking at resources, energy and human relationships. The Spaceship Earth model also borrows from the Gaia Hypothesis which posits that our planet itself is an organism that we are just a part of. The planet has everything we need, but hoarding and greed will not work. We need to move more to what Kenneth E. Boulding calls a "Cowboy," or "Spaceman Economy." (I obviously LOVE this)

"The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system."

As we wait on the brink of financial upheaval, now is the time to seek out a new and more sustainable kind of monetary system, one that works for everyone without tearing apart large parts of our world. We need to start thinking of how we as a species can start to utilize our unique gifts to forward the Gaian biosphere on this Spaceship and onto others. We must start to think of what humanity will be about, beyond our lifetimes, beyond our nations' lifetimes, beyond humanity-as-we-know-it's lifetime.

It's time to really think about being one world, beyond the obvious, and cliche ideas. Imagine if we really were one organism striving towards survival. We're jut one little tiny blue spacecraft, ready to blossom.

An interesting perspective, no?

#15

For the last ten solar years they had sailed the stars and danced the hottest spots in known space. Already, it's a much vaster world out there than they ever could've imagined as Earthbounds. What's more, the friends have only scraped the surface of the infinite AND rapidly expanding universe.