A building burned down Thanksgiving evening in Astoria, Oregon; where I live. There were two restaurants, a bank, and a few other stores operating from the building.
A guy died in the building too, they're guessing he lived in the building when it was closed. Doesn't surprise me. There are a lot of poor people in Astoria, and I'm sure that a few people live in their stores they manage to operate.
One of the restaurants that burned down was Tokyo Teriyaki. It's too bad, they had some really good Japanese food, and one of the few places I felt comfortable ordering food with "extra spicey" on it.
An art studio was also located in the building. Hopefully it wasn't really expensive art. That could ruin an artist's career.
November 28, 2008
November 25, 2008
And Thus We Become Gods...
There's a new video circulating Digg, and websites showing a process in Africa where they turn literal bull shit into pure drinkable water. Here it is.
Here the lines begin to blur between what is magic and what is technology? Well, I guess it's still technology but do the tribes in Africa know that? For some of them they may just know that some white men showed up, and transformed shit into water.
I always thought, man alone will never 'transcend' and become gods. But like a hive of bees, or a hill of ants, we will together develop the means to have godlike powers.
Pretty awesome stuff. I wonder how it tastes.
Here the lines begin to blur between what is magic and what is technology? Well, I guess it's still technology but do the tribes in Africa know that? For some of them they may just know that some white men showed up, and transformed shit into water.
I always thought, man alone will never 'transcend' and become gods. But like a hive of bees, or a hill of ants, we will together develop the means to have godlike powers.
Pretty awesome stuff. I wonder how it tastes.
NaNoWriMo is Over
I kinda panicked this morning when I found out the busses were going to be closed the next few days because apparently everyone will be too fat and happy to do anything?I don't know, but they're not running. I realized I wasn't going to be able to update my nanowrimo count, and I still had over 8000 words to go.
Luckily I had another book-related document running. So my novel at the moment is not 50,000 words, but I merged the document with "A Brief Look at the Solar System" which had some history stuff and info on planets and things going on in my world which I planned to tack on at the end anyway.
That left me with only a few thousand more to write which I crammed out this morning while the mountain dew was still coursing through my veins.
My rough first draft of "TIDES OF HUMANITY" is mostly finished. I need to tie up the story though, because right now they're still drifting in space. Wandering_Nomad gave me some ideas yesterday that I can implement and expand it.
Here's to Fix-Up-and-Edit-Everything-December :D
November 21, 2008
poem[?]
peanut butter flavored soda
there are four lines on my orange
evenly spaced across it
they bulge out a little like keloids
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there are four lines on my orange
evenly spaced across it
they bulge out a little like keloids
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November 20, 2008
Four Philosophical Questions to Make your Brain Hurt
A great way to start the day. Start questioning reality.
This was posted on BBC this morning, check it out and expand your mind. But then again... is it even your mind to begin with?
Four Philosophical Questions to Make Your Brain Hurt.
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This was posted on BBC this morning, check it out and expand your mind. But then again... is it even your mind to begin with?
Four Philosophical Questions to Make Your Brain Hurt.
-------------
November 19, 2008
Anti-Matter Reactors
Apparently, a lab in California recently discovered a way to make massive amounts of antimatter. The antimatter is a significant enough amount that using the technique, they expect they will be able to finally begin making great strides in antimatter research.
Antimatter reactions release tons of energy, and just a tiny bit can release energy equivalent to giant nuclear weapons. So far I don't think we know how to tap that energy but now we can cheaply create enough to do some experiments on.
In the future, a single anti-matter reactor could power entire countries. And since antimatter destroys itself during the process and turns into regular matter, clean up is easy. We could have just stepped into the greatest clean-energy source in the universe.
Cool.
Anti-Matter Chernobyl
-------------
Antimatter reactions release tons of energy, and just a tiny bit can release energy equivalent to giant nuclear weapons. So far I don't think we know how to tap that energy but now we can cheaply create enough to do some experiments on.
In the future, a single anti-matter reactor could power entire countries. And since antimatter destroys itself during the process and turns into regular matter, clean up is easy. We could have just stepped into the greatest clean-energy source in the universe.
Cool.
Anti-Matter Chernobyl-------------
November 18, 2008
Death and Destruction [Novel Spoilers]
--------NANOWRIMO NOVEL SPOILERS--------
I'm busy typing away at my NaNoWriMo novel and sometimes I get sucked into the universe I'm creating.
It's a sci-fi that involves asteroids and mass extinctions.
Sometimes I forget what a horrible and terrifying experience it is to see your death is imminent and to watch the world around you so utterly destroyed. I carelessly through around words like millions and incineration, and entire civilizations evacuated... I didn't realize the gravity of what I was describing.
Last night my dreams gave me a dose of what I was writing.
I was trapped in a city, great fireballs were raining down from the sky. I saw people burst into embers and ashes in front of my very eyes from the heat of the intense shockwaves. Buildings crumbled like sand castles.
Me and my family crammed into some sort of shuttlecraft and tried to get off the planet but our combined weight was too much for it, and it was having difficulty getting off the ground. We started to gain altitude and I saw planes trying to leave the city, some were crushed by the asteroids and burning bodies spilled out.
We barely pushed over a hill, families, holding their children, were chasing after us, begging to be let on. Everyone was covered in blood, some people had charred skin. The fireballs stopped falling for a moment. We dropped into some docks by the ocean.
Our engine had burned out. We were stranded on the docks with our damaged and sinking shuttle. The ocean was steaming and dead sea-life floated around us. A Sea-lion jumped onto the dock, its boiled flesh was hanging loose on its skin and it moaned and panted, trying to cool itself off. Its breathing sounded very pained and I had a feeling it would die soon.
But it was a wounded animal and it was angry. It tried to attack us, to protect itself. We backed far away from it and waited.
The sky darkened a little and we looked up to see one giant fireball cruising overhead. It would be the one to end our lives.
It was a chilling dream that shocked me back into reality. It scared me enough that this morning I even considered changing that part of my book. But it's important to the storyline so I can't. It was a disturbing feeling witnessing so much vivid destruction. I haven't had a nightmare like that in years.
Image links to a DailyMail article
-------------
I'm busy typing away at my NaNoWriMo novel and sometimes I get sucked into the universe I'm creating.
It's a sci-fi that involves asteroids and mass extinctions.
Sometimes I forget what a horrible and terrifying experience it is to see your death is imminent and to watch the world around you so utterly destroyed. I carelessly through around words like millions and incineration, and entire civilizations evacuated... I didn't realize the gravity of what I was describing.
Last night my dreams gave me a dose of what I was writing.
I was trapped in a city, great fireballs were raining down from the sky. I saw people burst into embers and ashes in front of my very eyes from the heat of the intense shockwaves. Buildings crumbled like sand castles.
Me and my family crammed into some sort of shuttlecraft and tried to get off the planet but our combined weight was too much for it, and it was having difficulty getting off the ground. We started to gain altitude and I saw planes trying to leave the city, some were crushed by the asteroids and burning bodies spilled out.
We barely pushed over a hill, families, holding their children, were chasing after us, begging to be let on. Everyone was covered in blood, some people had charred skin. The fireballs stopped falling for a moment. We dropped into some docks by the ocean.
Our engine had burned out. We were stranded on the docks with our damaged and sinking shuttle. The ocean was steaming and dead sea-life floated around us. A Sea-lion jumped onto the dock, its boiled flesh was hanging loose on its skin and it moaned and panted, trying to cool itself off. Its breathing sounded very pained and I had a feeling it would die soon.
But it was a wounded animal and it was angry. It tried to attack us, to protect itself. We backed far away from it and waited.
The sky darkened a little and we looked up to see one giant fireball cruising overhead. It would be the one to end our lives.
It was a chilling dream that shocked me back into reality. It scared me enough that this morning I even considered changing that part of my book. But it's important to the storyline so I can't. It was a disturbing feeling witnessing so much vivid destruction. I haven't had a nightmare like that in years.
Image links to a DailyMail article-------------
November 14, 2008
Time Machines
I've been reading about time travel lately. I had forgotten this gem of science fiction/fantasy for awhile and rediscovered it lately when reading about the future of human evolution.
I can't count how many times I watched the old Time Machine from 1960. My parents thought cable TV would rot our brains and we lived in the middle of nowhere. My awesome grandpa recorded some cable TV for us and we had some videos of several hours of nickelodeon, and a few other recorded channels I don't remember.
One of the videos though, happened to have the old 1960 Time Machine on it. I probably watched the movie 100 times or more during my childhood. When the new one came out, I may have been one of the few people in the theater who actually remembered how good the old one was.
This DeLorean kicks ass.
HG Wells didn't have a very glamorous theory on the future of humans. The 2002 version had humans that were sexy, smart, and just like us. They even spoke english. The 1960 version had a bunch of dumb blondes fumbling around eating plastic fruit and watching each other drown.
But the story HG Wells wrote was so dark they actually censored him. After saving Weena [my old friend called her Weiner], in both movies, the protagonist fought the Morlocks, won, and went home. Except in the newest movie where the time machine fucking explodes and wipes out the Morlocks.
Weiner.
In the book, the protagonist doesn't care about Weiner, he wants to know the future. He travels into the future again and -snip-, sorry, the publishers didn't like what happens to humans and made him create a new draft.
In his original version, the protagonist goes into the future and kills some weird animal. Upon further inspection he realizes it was an evolved version of the Weinerhumans he had encountered earlier. They had lost their intelligence, and become mere cattle to the now arachnid-like Morlocks.
Clearly a race of Arachnids.
In the new version HG Wells wrote, he just gets rid of this scene altogether and the world gets dominated by crabs and then the sun starts eating planets. Hardly packs the same punch.
I like this story because it is a punch in the gut. So much sci-fi involves humans conquering the galaxy, evolving into über geniuses, or just becoming gods. And it happened to easily. We kept making our lives easier for ourselves until eventually we just hired an entire underclass to live under our cities helping us live out our awesomely leisure filled lives. We became dumb, weak, and a race of pussy communists. The underclass, apparently became dumb, savage, blood-loving hardcore republicans or something.
Then everybody became animals - there was no longer a drive for intellectual and physical development. It was as if McDonalds and video games took over one half of the world, and the blue collars took steroids and ate everyone.
I can kind of see that happening. People are getting lazier, and physically weaker. However, another trend suggests people are actually getting smarter. I don't exactly see how humans could evolve into a bunch of retards, but we could atrophy. If we don't use our upper brains would they atrophy and become vestigial? Could you imagine some version of humans in the distant future realizing that fat thick stuff in their skulls was for doing stuff with? It'd be like finding out that the appendix actually does shit.
-------------
I can't count how many times I watched the old Time Machine from 1960. My parents thought cable TV would rot our brains and we lived in the middle of nowhere. My awesome grandpa recorded some cable TV for us and we had some videos of several hours of nickelodeon, and a few other recorded channels I don't remember.
One of the videos though, happened to have the old 1960 Time Machine on it. I probably watched the movie 100 times or more during my childhood. When the new one came out, I may have been one of the few people in the theater who actually remembered how good the old one was.
This DeLorean kicks ass.But the story HG Wells wrote was so dark they actually censored him. After saving Weena [my old friend called her Weiner], in both movies, the protagonist fought the Morlocks, won, and went home. Except in the newest movie where the time machine fucking explodes and wipes out the Morlocks.
Weiner.In the book, the protagonist doesn't care about Weiner, he wants to know the future. He travels into the future again and -snip-, sorry, the publishers didn't like what happens to humans and made him create a new draft.
In his original version, the protagonist goes into the future and kills some weird animal. Upon further inspection he realizes it was an evolved version of the Weinerhumans he had encountered earlier. They had lost their intelligence, and become mere cattle to the now arachnid-like Morlocks.
Clearly a race of Arachnids.In the new version HG Wells wrote, he just gets rid of this scene altogether and the world gets dominated by crabs and then the sun starts eating planets. Hardly packs the same punch.
I like this story because it is a punch in the gut. So much sci-fi involves humans conquering the galaxy, evolving into über geniuses, or just becoming gods. And it happened to easily. We kept making our lives easier for ourselves until eventually we just hired an entire underclass to live under our cities helping us live out our awesomely leisure filled lives. We became dumb, weak, and a race of pussy communists. The underclass, apparently became dumb, savage, blood-loving hardcore republicans or something.
Then everybody became animals - there was no longer a drive for intellectual and physical development. It was as if McDonalds and video games took over one half of the world, and the blue collars took steroids and ate everyone.
I can kind of see that happening. People are getting lazier, and physically weaker. However, another trend suggests people are actually getting smarter. I don't exactly see how humans could evolve into a bunch of retards, but we could atrophy. If we don't use our upper brains would they atrophy and become vestigial? Could you imagine some version of humans in the distant future realizing that fat thick stuff in their skulls was for doing stuff with? It'd be like finding out that the appendix actually does shit.
-------------
November 13, 2008
New Toilet?
Yesterday I read this article about the space station getting a new toilet.
Last night, however, I had a dream that I was living on the space station and we got in an argument about where the toilet would go.
Damn remodeling arguments.
Eventually NASA got fed up and told us we couldn't have a new toilet after all.
Last night, however, I had a dream that I was living on the space station and we got in an argument about where the toilet would go.
Damn remodeling arguments.
Eventually NASA got fed up and told us we couldn't have a new toilet after all.
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