M T

It hurts my eyes to look....

... I guess we know the answer to this question...

*slams head into desk*

Moving day... taking down the wall.

Weekend in Providence

Crystal and I had the chance to spend the weekend in Providence. We had a gift certificate for a nice B&B on Benefit St. by RISD. Very nice little place. Here are some cellphone pics of our travels.

Went by this storefront on the way to see "Rent" at the Providence Performing Arts Center. Looks like a kind of children's performance group with wild, beautiful costumes. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the group now... The window was pretty cool with all the wild faces looking out at the street.

At the PPAC for "Rent". Nice theater. Decent show. Goofy pic.

One of the many good restaurants. This one was our favorite. 3 Steeple St. Where the service was excellent and the food phenominal.... and the lighting dim....

Should have brought our skates, but it was pretty cold out on the plaza. Very nice scene though. We ate lunch at the Union Brewhouse close by.

I've really got to stop constantly using the phonecam for posting. It just works so naturally. I like the crisper images from the Canon much better... if only I would train myself to carry it everywhere...

winter...

“The children with the goats reached the stockade and two of the prowlers, Fenrir and Sigyn, turned to see him standing on the wall. He made a little motion with his hand and they came running, to leap up beside him on the ten-foot high wall.

“So you’ve been checking up on how well the young ones guard the children?” he asked.

Sigyn lolled out her tongue and her white teeth grinned at him in answer. Fenrir, always the grimmer of the two, made a sound in his throat in reply.

Prowlers developed something like a telepathic rapport with their masters and could sense their thoughts and understand relatively complex instructions. Their intelligence was greater, and of a far more mature order, than that of the little mockers but their vocal cords were not capable of making the sounds necessary for speech.

He rested his hands on their shoulders, where their ebony fur was frosted with gray. Age had not yet affected their quick, flowing movement but they were getting old—they were only a few weeks short of his own age. He could not remember when they had not been with him….

Sometimes it seemed to him he could remember those hungry days when he and Fenrir and Sigyn shared together in his mother’s lap—but it was probably only his imagination from having heard the story told so often. But he could remember for certain when he was learning to walk and Fenrir and Sigyn, full grown then, walked tall and black beside him. He could remember playing with Sigyn’s pups and he could remember Sigyn watching over them all, sometimes giving her pups a bath and his face a washing with equal disregard for their and his protests. Above all he could remember the times when he was almost grown; the wild, free days when he and Fenrir and Sigyn had roamed the mountains together. With a bow and a knife and two prowlers beside him he had felt that there was nothing in the universe they could not defy together…."
Space Prison - Tom Godwin
=

Good stuff. Its really the last bit with him as a young man/teen and hunting with the prowlers. They kind of remind me of Herbert’s Laza Tigers from Salusua Secondus.
Overall the book was brutal but had a kind of triumph that was sweet after all the punishment delt out in the first half.

Below is the final graphs of the book (spoiler warning) and the image of the commander and his prowlers in the Gern battle ship bridge has stayed with me most.

"He stood in the control room of the battleship and watched Athena's sun in the viewscreen, blazing like a white flame. Sigyn, fully recovered, was stretched out on the floor near him; twitching and snarling a little in her sleep as she fought again the battle with the Gerns. Fenrir waspacing the floor, swinging his black, massive head restlessly, while Tip and Freckles were examining with fascinated curiosity the collection of bright medals that had been cleaned out of the Gern commander's desk.

Lake and Craig left their stations, as impatient as Fenrir, and came over to watch the viewscreen with him.

"One day more," Craig said. "We're two hundred years late but we're coming in to the world that was to have been our home."

"It can never be, now," he said. "Have any of us ever thought of that--that we're different to humans and there's no human world we could ever call home?"

"I've thought of it," Lake said. "Ragnarok made us different physically and different in the way we think. We could live on human worlds--but we would always be a race apart and never really belong there."

"I suppose we've all thought about it," Craig said. "And wondered what we'll do when we're finished with the Gerns. Not settle down on Athena or Earth, in a little cottage with a fenced-in lawn where it would be adventure to watch the Three-D shows after each day at some safe,
routine job."

"Not back to Ragnarok," Lake said. "With metals and supplies from other worlds they'll be able to do a lot there but the battle is already won. There will be left only the peaceful development--building a town at the equator for Big Winter, leveling land, planting crops. We could never be
satisfied with that kind of a life."

"No," he said, and felt his own restlessness stir in protest at the thought of settling down in some safe and secure environment. "Not Athena or Earth or Ragnarok--not any world we know."

"How long until we're finished with the Gerns?" Lake asked. "Ten years? We'll still be young then. Where will we go--all of us who fought the Gerns and all of the ones in the future who won't want to live out their lives on Ragnarok? Where is there a place for us--a world of our own?"

"Where do we find a world of our own?" he asked, and watched the star clouds creep toward them in the viewscreen; tumbled and blazing and immense beyond conception.

"There's a galaxy for us to explore," he said. "There are millions of suns and thousands of worlds waiting for us. Maybe there are races out there like the Gerns--and maybe there are races such as we were a hundred years ago who need our help. And maybe there are worlds out there with things on them such as no man ever imagined.

"We'll go, to see what's there. Our women will go with us and there will be some worlds on which some of us will want to stay. And, always, there will be more restless ones coming from Ragnarok. Out there are the worlds and the homes for all of us."

"Of course," Lake said. "Beyond the space frontier ... where else would we ever belong?"

It was all settled, then, and there was a silence as the battleship plunged through hyperspace, the cruiser running beside her and their drives moaning and thundering as had the drives of the Constellation two hundred years before.

A voyage had been interrupted then, and a new race had been born. Now they were going on again, to Athena, to Earth, to the farthest reaches of the Gern Empire. And on, to the wild, unknown regions of space beyond.

There awaited their worlds and there awaited their destiny; to be a race scattered across a hundred thousand light-years of suns, to be an empire such as the galaxy had never known.

They, the restless ones, the unwanted and forgotten, the survivors.

THE END
Space Prison - Tom Godwin

holidays...

So it begins....

I've decided that I'm going to participate in the National Novel Writing Month contest. Its a great excuse to get the juices flowing and try to actually bang out one of these ideas that has been bouncing around my brain for years.
On day two and 2,918 words in. Only 47,082 and 27days to go.

Here is an early excerpt...unedited mind you...

The Major squinted at the small capsule now just 50 yards or so below him and the com-link crackled again.

“…this really weird sound, I have to go closer… something up with my electrical going bat-sh*t. The ... thing is glowing... I have to get a sample…. are you seeing any of this… John?”

“Reed back away! That’s an order! What’s gotten into you?”

Abernathy was breathing heavy now. Something was happening. His eyes glared not believing what he was seeing. It nearly felt like his corneas would rip if he looked back at the command screen. He did, just to be sure everything was being recorded and set to the Darwin.

“… John it getting hot… holy sh*t! Ah no..!" Reed’s link blinked out again.

The green glow intensified and the object moved. Abernathy hit the reverse thrust and looked up to see if the Darwin had cleared the short horizon of the gray moon. “Sh*t!”

The glow became hot and a part of the thing seemed to detach or literally flow out from the spot under Reed’s capsule. Like a snaking tendril the thing wrapped around the capsule and flashed like a massive electric shock. The com system and all the electric glowed hot around Abernathy and then winked out into darkness.
The green white light from Reed’s burning capsule lit the Majors face as he gaped out at the scene of amazing discovery and destruction.

Reed’s capsule engulfed in the electric blue flame and Abernathy watched as the exterior hull simply pulled back and away from the point of contact. The capsule melted away rolling back around Reed's floating body. His simple white jumpsuit made a single silent puffy discharge as his body exploded in the vacuum. The light expanded into a flash as the machine and man were completely atomized and Abernathy uttered a single bitter bleating cry as the light splashed against his front window of his capsule and the heat hit him and he lost all feeling.

The brief wink of light scattered across the long massive arm of Saturn’s ring. And the A I navigator of the Darwin signaled a priority distress across the open sea of emptiness in the direction of Mars Command.

October in Cambridge

Phone pix taken around Harvard and the Yard. Nice to have mild weather so far... makes the transition into the cold dark time a little easier.

Lego Firemen

Cool new lego fireman minifigs that came with the fire truck sets Justin and I recently built. I've decided to start a lego blog for the projects we've done together. That can be found here.

Graffitti

One of my favorites from the trip to Amsterdam. This was on a borded up shop window across the street from where we ate breakfast on the final day. Something very cool about the stencil even though it has been scribbled over.

Reminds me of a quote from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

"The graffitti on the walls, the crazy shit that the bums and the crackheads and the wild kids come out with. This is the underground data exchange: The Infranet. The city is the hardware and people are the software."

Giraffe and Zebra

The coolest thing, to me, about Amsterdam was the bicycle culture. Everywhere you went there was the sound of bikes rattling along the lanes, and the ringing bells shooing pedestrians. Conversations between couples, or familys and friends as they ride along together. It just had a great feeling as you walked around. Of course the friendly bell had a different effect when you realized that it was for you.

Dawn over the North Sea

Shot taken out my window as we decended into Schiphol International in Holland, on the morning of Sept 13th. The clouds are like a frozen sea to me, dimpled with vapour waves. I always liked the feeling as we decend into this false ground/ocean then pass through the white grey shapes into the overcast below.

Rescue Copter

Lego Recuse Copter. Justin put together just before I left for a long weekend trip. He's really getting good at following the pictoral directions without my help. This set was small enought that he could search for all the pieces he needed himself. I really like this helecopter. It looks just like the big Coast Guard Copters that roar past the bluffs by our house.

Six years ago....

I wont forget the look on Craig's face when he walked up to dispatch after the second plane hit. A disturbing combination of shock, fear, and bewilderment had taken hold of him. I looked down across the service drive and everyone in the waiting room was standing. The service writers had stopped working and had come around the counter and stood with the customers looking in at the tv in the corner of the waiting area. I felt my own sinking feeling as I realized that something big, no accident had happened.
As I recall Crystal had just told me, less than 4-5 days before that she was pregnant with Justin. We had big decisions to make, and big things to think about. The sinking feeling went right through my heart and into my shoes as I thought about the worrisome possible paths that life would stretch out before us in the coming years. I was concerned, right from the start, that whatever reaction we as a people had, might make for still darker days ahead. Hundreds of Billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of Iraqui lives, thousands of Memorials to young American soldiers later... the overcast and darkness spawned from this day, still fills our sky.
I hope for a brighter American dawn. For Justin, and now baby Jennifer, and all of our sons and daughters.

Ive posted this shot before... it has a certain...weight.