NASA's Twin Spacecraft on Final Approach for Moon Orbit

NASA's Twin Spacecraft on Final Approach for Moon Orbit

GRAIL-A is just now slipping into lunar orbit.

GRAIL-B will be arriving tomorrow, New Year's Day, about 2 pm PST.

Then the fun begins. Studying the Moon inside and out. This is simply wonderful stuff.

It's making me want to work on Revisitor. It'll come. Other writing projects are more pressing.

Evil? Moi?

Tonight, I shall be evil.

Yes, after three hundred hours of playing Mister Goody across the vast wastes of my well-enjoyed Game-of-the-Year Fallout 3, tonight I shall start...playing evil.

I haven't completely finished every side quest in the Goody playthrough, not quite. But I've maxed out my stats, acquired more abilities and exotic weaponry than ever I could use. Frankly, it's become boring, inevitably the champion of any fight now. And there's something horrible in my good-character's ability to obliterate even an adversary composed of pixels with a single shot.

I'll return to the Goody game, I will. I am a completionist.

But how now to Be Evil?...Hmmm.

Ugh, if it's as simple and mean as killing every friendly soul my bad-guy comes across, that isn't going to keep me playing more than the weekend. I can see I'll have to reach down inside me, find the evil place. Steal kiddies' teddy bears, perhaps.

That wasn't so hard. Hmmm...I'm somewhat disturbed at the revelation.

Perspective

WOO’HOO! Happy Winter Solstice!

Well, it will be at 9:30 tonight, Vancouver time. Paper lanterns are glowing even now, downtown, within the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese Garden.

I feel like, I dunno, rolling a wheel on fire down a hillside, or something similarly festive.
I’d probably be arrested, though. For being pagan without a permit, perhaps.

No. I’ll remain properly urbanized, unimaginative, unmoved.
Earth may be tilted just so tonight. But I shall sit up straight, behave. I am just finishing off work. Perhaps I’ll flick on an extra light or two, in marking this especially long night, and the sun’s return.
Tomorrow will be 1 second longer. I can imagine summer already!

Right right right. Some folks on our big blue world don’t have to imagine summer. I’m referring to folks some folks might say see things upside down, of course. Really, though, it's a matter of perspective.

Hang on a sec while I Google them…

WOO and HOO, again!
I’d just like to wish folks in currently drizzly and tropical Fiji a very Happy Summer Solstice. Yeah. Wish I was there, too.

Not that I’m stuck here…

O' If I had an Extra Kidney

Among current writing projects I'm hoping to return to, now the weekend's here at last, Saturday groceries gotten, and Christmas gift-hunting done, but for the bills to come, there's Revisitor. A spacey tale. Only the central character doesn't know it at first. It's being re-worked.

Awesome and inspiring spacey photos, such as those from HubbleSite, transport me to a place perfect for pre-writing sci-fi of the spacey kind. I've already saved to the story-inspiring screensaver one spectacular pic released by HubbleSite this week, of nebula Sharpless 2-106, I saw first as a thrilling little video modeling the nebula in 3-D. Shrouded in red glowing dust and gas, and afire inside, it really resembles a nest of stars. Here, stars are born.

Actually, there's one central fierce star firing up the heart of this blue beauty. Also, hundreds of brown dwarf stars, too small to turn on and shine, and surely other stellar curiosities I'd gladly take a long break from the job to go see.

I'd pack extra lunches, of course. And the Thermos. Set the email auto-reply at work...Will be away for a couple thousand light years. And head out immediately.

Only the ship's in the shop, awaiting a drive doohickey, from outta town, as Fred my mechanic put it via telepathy. Ship would also need better shields anyway. Shields aren't cheap, everybody knows that. I'd have to sell another kidney. Left one hasn't grown back yet. So, that's that. I should probably just get a new ship.

Pre-Triggerin'

I’m tapping away at this just to be writing something.

Long day.

Had an idea fully fleshed this morn and zero opportunity to jot any of it down.
It’s gone, of course. Only fragments of remembering I had it this morning.
ALL the chapter.

I’m not going to jot the bits down here. It’d be too messy. I’m about to go home. I’ll map it out, scribble and draw the bits, branch and-or connect whatever. It’s how I re-construct, too often these nights. It can be a better way to work up plot and all, though. Funny thing is the map will probably trigger other ideas, other maps. That wouldn’t have happened this morning, rushing breakfast, hurrying out the door to work.

Early to Rise...Nuthin' t'see

The less said about the entire workweek, and yesterday...night especially, the better. So, to this Saturday morn!

It's cloudy. That's keeping me indoors and tapping this over the keyboard. Somewhere, other than Vancouver, there's a total lunar eclipse happening. Ah well. Any lunar eclipse is only the good Earth passing between sun and moon, anyway. Just a small wow event for the skywatchers.

Right right, I'm a skywatcher. When local skies cooperate.

I'll go visit skywatcher sites around the web later. Do my oohing-aahing then. Have a list of Saturday doings to get at first. And early. I might as well get to the chores, seeing as there isn't anything wow to see...over in the west...as the sun begins to rise in the east.

Charlie Brown Theme (Array Mbira)

I wrote last night. After dinner and friends and over-analyzing someone's American Beauty dvd. I wrote when I got home. I only planned on jotting something, anything. Xbox 360 and Mass Effect lay waiting. Instead, I wrote. Early into Sunday morn, because I could. And...stuff had connected in my brain and it felt like there was no stopping me.

I'm careful not to get in my own way when all my lights are flashing green. I didn't stop me.

Turns out it was Space Week over on Marc's Daily Writing Practice. LAST WEEK. I felt as if I had missed the last ship away. So I wrote him a little something about how I felt about that. IT WAS FUN writing it, too.

---

I'm restarting Revisitor. POV's wrong. I started into it with less idea than Snoopy exactly what the Big Music's all about. It's kinda important I know, at least.

To keep me in the mood for reworking it, and to return me to the right mood, y'know, during the work week, I've picked this reminder, this moodifyin' version of the Charlie Brown theme.

It's being played on an array mbira. Picture the African mbira, plucky thumb piano, flying to California and having a makeover.

Repose

Just fifteen wants I want. One for every day and eve the second half of this past NaNo lost to the job I must love so much I simply couldn't tear myself away from it.

I want rest.

I want to play again, Fallout 3, or Mass Effect, or Dragon Age Origins, or good ol' Morrowind, or just four or five Sudoku, or hunt the skies over Europe in a Hurricane in IL-2 Sturmovik.

I want Protagonize, and to protagonize with protagonizers I know and the new ones I shall meet.

I want my Music Mondays, and Melody Gardot singing Baby I'm a Fool in a bubble bath with her glasses on.

I want those fifteen days back, you hear!

I want a time machine, yeah.

I want to wink back and forth through time and take notes, and snap pictures, and have lots of batteries, a solar charger in my MEC knapsack, and megalo-terrabyte memory cards for the camera, o'yeah.

I want to meet famous people, and be an inexplicable puzzle across history's portraits and black-and-white souvenir snapshots.

I want to be Zelig, or Woody Allen, only taller.

I want to drag young Adolph from 1919 along with me, back-packing India, to broaden his mind, and convince him his future lies in commercial art.

I want a Swiss bank account, which has been amassing interest for as long as those Europeans have been honouring Switzerland's unique standing of neutrality.

I want world peace.

I want something Chinese for dinner tonight.

I want a really nice tea.

I want to write.