COTTON THISTLE CLEARANCE
Random musings from the noggin' of Knolltrey (Best viewed on a monitor running Mozilla Firefox, with a brain running on a case of Grolsh...)
Thursday, 3 January 2008
...that 'type' of update Mood: a-ok
Shane has been wicked sick, lately...
That accounts for the lack of updates, 'natch, but I was also sanding down the next chapter of 'Typers'. What a way to work, huh? Spend five months worrying about the plot down the road, then a weekend of proofreading while one is sick as a mule.
My priorities are really screwed up, I think. But the chapter should be cogent, at least...
They've been done to death in fiction, in everything from Cowboy Bebop to SNES RPG's, but there's a reason they're so popular: they're f**king cool!
Wanna know the real reason they were created?
Why, to tell the story of the Novanjo, of course!
Yeah, I make 'em a plot point, too, but I don't mention them explicitly by name in the chapter (kinda like the way I cutely refrain from explicitly referencing the date in 'Typers'*, except in the odd piece of artwork...)
* (It's 2111 AD, btw...)
Keep your stockings out, too: if you didn't get anything good for Christmas, you might rake in something nice on New Year's...
Guess they started out by releasing half-a-dozen EP's at modest music venues before landing a big-name contract. Good for them. The song I've been absolutely smitten by is from their second album, Combinations; it's a little ditty called 'Invasion'...
Most of Eisley's songs are a little too mellow for me (but most have enough melodic resonance to keep my brain entertained, anyway). This dark-pop tune is somewhat atypical for 'em, although they're still (literally and figuratively) young as a band, and their evolution from their first album, Room Noises, to this point is, in my opinion, like changing from night into day.
Creepy video, huh? I think of it as a far more attractive version of Thriller, although without whacko-Jacko cavorting about in the frames it is far, far, far less disturbing (though I do miss the flustered discomfort of Michael Jackson trying to look convincingly interested in dating an adult female in that music video...)
hmm...this band's name is better without the 'Mos', too, I think.
"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.
For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."
Despite its aesthetic deficiencies, that curious little mammal is a damned important animal. After all it is, perhaps, the genetic precursor to some of the most intelligent creatures to ever grace the planet.
Jeez, guys! If you'd just stayed on land instead of traipsing into the seawater, maybe YOU'D be the ones typing these words right now (sadly for dolphins, keyboards don't work underwater, unlike some of their own tools...)
Anyway, this intelligent mammal is gettin' some sleep. G'night.
And Scientific Progress grooves out to some whale songs.
It's the perfect imitation of medieval music (you'd never guess that it was written in the 1930's, would you?) Most people come across it by playing it in some school-related function (orchestra, band, etc...) since even a trained houseplant can learn to play the thing (it's kinda like Messiah that way, except less good, shorter, and without the miracle of divine inspiration culminating in the greatest choral arrangement in history).
But it's still good...
The first movement, Basse Danse, is particularly keen.
I'm so fond of it that I'm gonna make it the 'personal anthem' of a character in TYPERS: a guy named Christopher (last name withheld for now, but he's already been introduced under... well, a different name)
Talk about an evil son-of-a-bitch. I plan on having him do something very, very... memorable... before he gets offed, anyway. He already tried to kill one of the main characters in the first book...
When I type in a flash-movie link I'm always tempted to put in a ".sfw" instead of the correct extension of .swf (quite ironic, too, since many flash files are certainly not "SFW".
No worries: this .swf is SFW, but it'll probably take forever to load on ya' (and if you don't even have flash, then you're SOL on viewing this .swf, for which it is absolutely SQN, regardless of its SFW...)
Right, I need to stop, now...
And, just like that, no more pictures for some time.
The next multimedia thingy I bloody friggin' post damn well better be the next chapter. And, as a matter of fact, it will be ;)
During the cutting of the cake Mister 2001 rattled off a list of wishes, and among them was the desire to live to see first contact with an alien species.
...yeah... good luck with that, Arthur.
I think that, if we're lucky (or, perhaps, unlucky!) then my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will have a fairly good chance at making contact with someone in another goldilocks zone. (let's see: what is that? About 1000 years?... carry the one... factor in the 20th 'great'... uh...)
Well, it'll be a f**king long time, put another way.
What do you wanna do, huh? We've got a century's worth of electronic transmission currently hurtling through the void of space (so we've managed to cover, liberally, about 100 light years distance, but given signal degradation and everything else... well...)
So an alien race detects our broadcasts (being supremely optimistic and ignoring many of the tenants of the Drake Equation, the ones that depress me...) and then what? Assuming we haven't developed the power to hear THEIR broadcasts, then we'd be waiting for however many hundreds of years it would take them to send a focused, detectable signal in our direction.
(BTW: my grasping of general relativity is ridiculously shallow, but given the evidence, I don't see any way of surpassing certain limits as far as travel is concerned... sorry, but 3e8 m/s/s seems to be the limit for us)
Yeah, yeah, yeah: in my own (fictional) books I insinuate that raw data (energy) can be 'skimmed' out from point A to point B in an APPARENT violation of relativity (ie: about 60 to 100 times faster than light, give or take...) but, first of all, TYPERS is fiction, and second of all, the 'skimming' I describe in the book relies upon (fictional) interdimensional issues, so again: the data is only APPARENTLY going faster than light...
...that (fictional) plot point is the one I hate the most about my books' scientific rigor... (at least objects with detectable MASS do go much, much, much slower than the speed of light when they 'skim'...)
Fictionally speaking, of course.
(and don't rag on me that my own books detail an 'alien invasion war': ain't no alien invasion, since the BYDO are as home-grown as ma's vine-ripened tomatoes... probably don't taste as good, though...)
Back to the point at hand:
The romantic in me has always indulged the idea that, millenia from now, some alien race that's been listening to an odd smattering of organized data streaking though their territory (ie: Earth noise) goes out into the night and stumbles upon one of the Pioneer probes...
...I could see them hauling it back home and then getting to work; after several generations of toil and study they'd possibly be able to decipher the Pioneer plaque itself...
We could've made it easier, I think. Something like this:
And, after another 1000 years or so, something of theirs could possibly reach our home turf.
What the hell would they find in this Solar System after that amount of time?
I couldn't imagine.
But Mister Clarke did, once, and while that story ain't likely to pan out in the long run (remember all the people still using typewriters in '2001'?) here's to a legendary, visionary, and intellectually brilliant writer who dared to dream......
Hacks like me can only marvel at his work, and if we really try, we can learn as well.
Lazy Sundays, huh? Time for sloth, time for rest.... Who can get anything done, eh?
Well, today I figured out how to export Photoshop layers into flash movies, so there:
Hehehe: gives the illusion that I actually drew the pictures. Nah: it's all just Poser poses, of course. But the idea of 'breathing life into the lifeless' is kinda the name of these characters' games: the nature of the beast, yadda, yadda, yadda...
The mug-a-trois rendering is for a picture I was toying with. It didn't come out exactly as I thought it would, and I couldn't cut down on the sense of clutter within it (that's kinda generous: in many respects the thing's a mess). The color scheme is a little bit putrid, too, but given the low amount of time I devoted to it and all the things that COULD'VE gone wrong, it gets the Knolltrey Seal of Approval (which, in most cases, is usually a finger to the eye...)
Teh Caption: "Babes in the Woods" (...natch')
The faces themselves work well enough: undersized Mehta between comparatively taller/more-developed Quint and Ever, with Ever looking directly at the viewer (THAT little touch is most intentional, given that Ever is a full-fledged Bydo Core- while Quint and Mehta are merely cultured flesh from Ceresland- Ever has infinitely more potential power to develop, though she's limited by the interface with her own pilot: a limitation that Quint, on the other hands, does not share...)
And if you don't like it, well: you know what they say about "Styx and stones"...
a-ok
rushed
bright
lyrical
celebratory
