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It’s been a while, and well, that’s a reflection on two things going on at the moment. One is a sort of writer’s block for articles, normally I have a lot of things I want to talk about but lately I’ve been at a loss for words. Just sitting back and absorbing the noise and the world. Digesting it, slowly. Getting the good bits, trying to find the important parts, trying. The other thing is the book.
Monolithic Horizon started a long time ago, when I was around the age of twenty. Sure other stories have come along and I’ve worked on shorts and played with a few chapters here and there for the hell of it, for a break, for whatever. But the end result is that the book was never finished, I just sat on it. I’ve been delaying finishing it since I started writing it because, I’m dreadfully afraid of failure. It seems as though my preference has been been simply to not try. When you don’t try and you fail, at least it’s easier. When you work hard for something, when you… for whatever reason, actually care about something and it slips through your fingers or falls apart then it’s a lot harder to deal with. At least in my case.
My whole life has been like that. It’s something ingrained in me ever since I was a child. So I didn’t finish the book because if I did and it never went anywhere than I could tell myself it will some day, you know… have that little nugget of hope. If I try and fail however, then there’s no excuse. There’s no fallback plan. I’ll have to face a reality of being broke and probably working miserable fucking jobs I hate till I go mad. Though, I have decided to take my own advice. A person can’t live life in fear of something stupid like failure, or anything else for that matter. For all intents and purposes for the large majority of my adult life this cowardly excuse has dominated my rationale to avoid finishing something that could lead to something I desperately want. That’s why I’ve been gone for a month or so from writing here. I’ve been pounding away on the book.
There’s three acts to Monolithic Horizon, each with distinct themes. Act One is about the present. Act Two is the past. Act Three is the future. Well, this is the first time in the constant re-writes, losses, and frustrations I’ve had thinking about, working on, and conceptualizing this damned book that I’ve reached the final act. Normally around the middle of act one I give up and go into an infinite editing look. I’m actually almost done with this god-damn thing. The new method I’ve come up with to power through and resist editing anything till I was done has worked fairly well. Sure once I’m actually at the end I can go through and flesh things out and fix typos, etc, but that’s not the point. My goal was to get the rough draft done by the end of the year so I can do the final final final FINAL edit and then start sending it out.
Then I’ll re-post the first act, as the final edited version starting January next year. It’s been seven long years, a lot of things have changed in my life and in the way I look at things, this book has been sort of like the Sun … the common experience (or object) by which everything else in my life has orbited. In order to truly move on with my life I need to finish this once and for all.
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Somewhat recently I became interested in reading up on the Big Bang, the creation of the universe, and where this whole cosmic train is heading. The Big Bang, well all scientists can say is that they have no way of knowing how that dot of matter came to be or why it exploded. The big minds of that field, like Hawkings, say that because they cannot possibly determine what happened before that all they can do is work on what happened since then. A lot of them are even agnostic, claiming that the Big Bang is proof of something, maybe not an intelligent ‘creator’ but creation itself doesn’t follow a logical premise so there has to be more to it than that.
What I wonder is what is beyond our little universe, and a more prominent question in my mind is why we are here at all. It doesn’t make any sort of sense for there to be a universe or for there to be anything. When you think about it in the large-scale terms why is there anything at all? Why isn’t there just a vast never ending nothingness? The idea of an intelligent creator, or even a catalyst for creation doesn’t make much sense. If the universe had any sort of logic at all there wouldn’t be a universe to begin with. Or maybe it’s some sort of rule that there mush be something, that the universe cannot just be an empty dead space.
Last night my little brother was telling me that he had to attend a seminar about how it’s important to preserve the oceans, about how it’s important to save the whales and such. I found myself laughing. I said that the sun will become too hot to support life on the surface of the planet after a billion years. After two the oceans are going to be boiled and eventually dry up. After the sun turns into a red giant in another few billion years then world will be utterly destroyed, as it sinks into the enlarged sun. Pretty much our entire solar system will be annihilated when that happens. After another few billion years Andromeda, a nearby solar system like the Milky Way, is going to crash into us and merge with our solar system, probably destroying all the cosmos we’ve charted. If we’re a space-race by this point we will probably be in great danger during this event. Assuming we live we’ll start to see a lot of the stars die out and turn into black dwarfs, after an even longer period of time we’ll witness the universe tear itself apart thanks to the law of thermodynamics. Energy will continue to burn as entropy increases. The end result will be a universe that slowly over time uses up all it’s heat energy and begins to degenerate into a frozen wasteland of atomic soup. The Universe’s continued expansion will result in space tearing itself apart as things decay further, after about a few trillion years, we’ll be in a cosmological dark age where even the supermassive black holes have died out.
Basically, in a long enough time line, we are cosmologically doomed.
Click to continue reading “Fate”
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When you look at the sales pitch for Capitalism and how it’s supposed to function, it feels to me as though it were crafted in order to conjure up fictitious images that reflect the undisclosed desires of an individual. They want it to sound empowering and even morally righteous. They will tell you with hard work, you’re going to be rich! I’m sure, for the most part, that everyone is familiar by now with how the sales pitch goes. It’s usually something about the free market. A little about how anyone can be rich if they come out with a really great product. Something along those lines. Typically it doesn’t pan out like this. Hell even the pointless right-leaning version of Wikipedia acknowledges that, and they have a near 50-page long article about how homosexuality is the root of all sorts of social diseases. Consider this:
“One self-regulating feature of capitalism is competition, which helps maintain fair market value for goods and services. However, unrestrained or pure capitalism may sometimes create a positive feedback loop in which a small number of individual accumulations of capital grow ever larger, eventually becoming so few as to limit effective competition, thus ceasing to strictly be free-market capitalism. In this regard, pure capitalism is unstable.”
It’s not really unstable. It’s how the system was designed to work. You start a business, it gets big, you become a corporation in order to function at higher and higher levels economically, with one real goal in mind. The only goal of a corporation is to increase profits for it’s shareholders. That’s absolutely it. That’s essentially the nature of the beast, and it shouldn’t be really surprising when corporations begin interfering in politics. When you have the money, you can influence the power, and with the money and the power you can begin to stack the deck against anyone else coming to take your piece of the market. You can begin to eliminate competition, and you can ensure that only the people who play by your rules ever get to experience what it’s like to be one of them. Wealthy. Keep in mind that when I refer to wealth, I’m not talking about a couple of million. I’m referring to the type of money that grants you political power. That’s not something that’s obtainable, except on a small scale, to anyone but a corporate entity.
When a corporation’s activities negatively or positively impact a society they actually have crafted a term for this so that when they speak of it, anyone but those familiar with the term, will be unaware as to what they are referring to. This is an important function of what I have started to dub ‘corp speak.’ The purpose of corp speak, is to obfuscate the meaning of what they are saying so that the layperson will not be able to actually comprehend whatever point they are making. The particular term, in this case, is an ‘externality.’ Wikipedia defines an externality like this.
Click to continue reading “The Scorpion and The Frog”
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This may sound like a foolish thing, but I wasn’t afraid. Serra wasn’t either, she stood defiantly in the middle of the room, as though there was nothing in this world that could move her. She says, “try to keep up.” Then she sprung forward, the force of which made the Cicada dip slightly, she struck the door with enough force to rip it completely off it’s reinforced hinges, and rode it right into the side of the police cruiser that had it’s guns aimed and ready to fire, the magnetic lock cable it had anchored to us to halt our movement snapped off with ease, whipping back into it’s reel. The moment she struck it, she used her momentum to leap to the side and out of sight. The way she moved, the force of the impact as she hits the police cruiser, sending it spiraling off towards the ground. It looked ridiculous, spiraling away like that, it’s black gunmetal shape almost giving the impression that it were a large fly that had just been swatted away.
Cyborg. Probably high-level bionics. Military grade muscle fiber interlaced with a skeletal support system. Probably bone density supplements and nano-fiber. Definitely had spinal grafts, maybe titanium plating. Judging from the force she knocked that door off, I’d say she had the same treatment for her arms that she had for her legs. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an artificial body, but that seemed unlikely. Her touch was too warm, she still had human emotions. Something about taking the leap from human to bio machine did strange things to people. In my limited experience of it and what I’ve seen, the top police officers and some of the private security guys that go through the process lose their humanity in the process. They were perpetually on the net, never tired, never seemed to give a damn about anything. An emotional no-man’s land. Not her though. To be honest, I had expected to have been popped off by now. I confessed everything to her, not really out of trust, but because I thought that I was going to be executed any moment so I didn’t see much point in hiding anything. She said she was my bodyguard, and I laughed in her face. What a fool I was, she really is an army unto herself.
That’s when a more dangerous notion wormed it’s way into my head. I began to have a little bit of hope. It happened so fast, like a lightning striking, that I couldn’t stop myself. Once one begins to hope all sorts of insane ideas begin to gestate in one’s head. Ideas of escape, survival, even victory. In my experience hope was something that happened to other people, I never dared tamper with the stuff. That way I was never let down too bad.
Cicadas were piloted with an old control stick setup. Like you see in the ruined sectors of Europa, hovering around from landing to landing, scavenging old tech and fuel. There was a pain that resonated from the back of my head. Then what sounded like someone took an old circuit board and put it in a microwave. Then a flood of memories, reality and dream seeming to blend together in that moment. Zombie-like I wandered over to the control panel and pressed the manual override. With the magnetic lockdown the police cruiser Serra destroyed was placing on us gone, I could get the ship moving again. Outside I was half seeing, through the cockpit window, Serra holding on to the railgun mounted on the top of another police cruiser, and shadows of the past. The conflicting vision was of me piloting a helicopter away from a corporate strike team, you could see the logos on their body armor shinning brightly amidst the snow. They were firing up at me, but more to get my attention then to try and shoot me down, I must have left them behind. The image faded, but I found for a second I could think about it free of pain.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 6: Dead Man Walking”
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I took a picture of myself making a stupid face, a hobby of mine when I’m extremely bored. Which, thanks to ADD is almost every waking moment of my life.
This is the picture in question…
I told my girlfriend, that this is the face when I’m behind her… doing, well, you know.
Click to continue reading “Convos From the Dark Side: Mister Repose’s Final Form”
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Hey, you know what Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show all have in common? Assuming you’ve even heard of the Cleveland Show by now and have also NOT committed suicide knowing it exists, I’ll tell you: all three are the projects of a guy named Seth MacFarlane. Seth, after an attempt in the 90’s to make children’s cartoons (and failing miserably), was eventually responsible for Family Guy, a mostly garbled animated sitcom with a lot of pointless pop culture references and segues that veer straight off a cliff into the unfunny unknown. The show’s low percentage of actual humor is countered by shock laughs, sex gags, and uncomfortable subjects that kids shouldn’t be watching, but probably are because hey, it’s a cartoon right? Cartoons can’t be bad.
Warning: Cartoons can be bad. Very bad.
See, the thing about MacFarlane’s humor is that it’s funny to him and was never very funny to anyone but him, until he convinced a lot of idiots that his formula was a display of utter brilliance and laughs, the same idiots that still watch the Simpsons hoping it will ever be as good as it once was, and even then it was overrated. The allure of making an animated sitcom is hey, you can make your characters do practically anything without worrying about budget or props, and thanks to MacFarlane, they can say anything they want too, much to the dismay of people who aren’t impressed by constant flashbacks, and those who don’t drag their knuckles when they walk. Can anyone count the number of times in one episode without losing track, just how many times Peter “remembers the time” he <did something zany> with <famous person>? If you said yes, there’s a good chance you’re a liar, seeing as sitting through an entire episode of that shit means you probably can’t count nearly that high.
The sad thing is, Family Guy is his best show. It gets the most attention from writers and advertisers and as much as I hate to admit this, has a broader base to build upon than something like American Dad or The Cleveland Show. (Trivia: The theme song originally contained a line referring to Cleveland’s “happy black-guy face,” but this was replaced with “happy mustached face” to make the song more racially sensitive.[8])
They actually changed the song to an animated Blaxploitation sitcom to be more “racially sensitive”. Amazing. Even if by some miracle this show does not get canceled, its fans can feel dead on the inside knowing that they kept a humorless husk plodding along.
Click to continue reading “Seth MacFarlane, you’re not funny. Give it up.”
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On my voter registration card is an acronym, it says ‘NPA.’ No Party Affiliation. There’s a reason I don’t support any political party, and that’s because it makes the most sense to me not to put my faith in the hands of complete idiots. Seriously, spend half a day watching house and senate meetings on CSPAN and you’ll see what I’m talking about. These are supposedly the best of the party, the winners, the people in charge of making laws to improve our collective lives. So why is it that the speaker from Tennessee or Alabama or one of those bible belt states is wasting the House’s time requesting that everyone stand up and sing ‘God Bless America’ and those that are opposed should be put on record as ‘hating America?’ Because he’s an idiot that’s why, and so is every single person that voted for him. Then some democrat from up north, I think New York gets up and starts singing it before whoever is in charge of this ship of fools stops this lame political stunt in it’s tracks.
These are the people responsible for passing bills and reforms folks, a room full of feeble old people who spend most of their time obfuscating every issue and delaying any progress to make some half-assed protests or to try and score some political points for their re-election campaign. That’s all it is really, these are career politicians. They have awesome health care (at taxpayer expense), their pockets are lined with so many backers and lobbyists, that to think that people in circumstances like that actually give a damn what happens to anyone else is almost laughable. That’s just rhetoric though.
It’s just humorous to me to see what these people do exactly. For example, just now I was watching this guy from Texas, one, John Carter, go on a speech in the House. This man, who looks like my grandfather, went on about the forefathers, and how they founded a ‘republic’ for blah blah blah morals blah blah blah. This went on for about three minutes. First, I don’t think the House needs a damn history lesson that serves as little more than an attempt to assert your party is right by simple virtue of the fact the forefathers founded a republic so republic-ans must be the chosen ones. Right, okay, whatever. Second, I’m not sure what this has to do with the purpose of the hearing, which apparently was to talk about the federal bailout money and where it went. I know why he said it, to fluff his point. To give whatever argument he’s about to present the presumption of correctness rather than actually making a point that’s significant enough to stick.
Click to continue reading “Right Wing, Left Wing Parasites.”
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It’s a fair question, isn’t it? While it’s true that many of these “authors” are not being paid for their work, and even the ones who are become uncannily lazy in the alluring bask of fame, that’s just no excuse to publish shitty content to your audience simply because you know they have no better expectations than what you have to offer. During an enlightening conversation with Mr. Repose, I decided I could do much worse than to expose some of the reasons that the vast majority of webcomics will probably always be lamesauce.
Sadly, the first word that comes to my mind when I think of webcomics is not “funny”, but rather “failure”. In a virtual world where most people have no personality decipherable from some other blockhead sitting two seats down on one of the other library computers, some of these boring, unfulfilled sheep use the vast array of 5 or 6 genuinely “unique” characters on countless webcomics to make themselves feel that they can identify with someone… even if they’re not real. Then when someone they met online asks them what they’re like in real life, they can have a lie at the ready:
Billyskater93: I’m like Brandon, the super cool guitarist in METALCOMIC. Here’s a link to his bio.
SallyJuniperxoxo: That’s so awesome! Do you play guitar? ^_^;
Billyskater93: I’m learning. Also I’m thinner than Brandon. LOL!!
One idiot lying to another idiot. The fact is that Brandon’s clone looks nothing like the character would look as a real person, and is in fact 260 lbs. and his knowledge of guitars is that he’s seen them on MTV. Oh and Sally is probably a guy.
It’s not a problem when you compare yourself to a fictional character, lots of people do that, but when you give someone an unrealistic outlook about you and start to believe that you’re successful and awesome simply by the virtue of optimism, this can only lead to disappointment.
Another strong selling point to readers and simultaneously, the most obnoxious thing about webcomics, is the attitude. Never before have cocky expressions and raised eyebrows received so much undue popularity outside of an animated film produced by Dreamworks. In some comics, that’s the whole fucking punchline! An “edgy” look of disgust, hate, and/or confusion. You know, if these guys just didn’t bother trying to come up with filler, we could all enjoy webcomics for what they really are:
Click to continue reading “Hey, why do webcomics suck so much?”
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(Headnote: You’ll have to pardon the relatively dramatic kick the goodship Nonpersons has been on lately, I usually rely on my ally The Warden to counterbalance whatever I’m doing, but with a tidal wave of words from yours truly flooding the site in the last month anything he could do would just end up getting buried into a fusillade of my textual fury.)
During my time on these tubes I have encountered an unusual amount of desperate, lonely, and in some cases, eccentric people. This is because, due to my nature, I tend to avoid websites and such that are extremely large and/or popular. In the more obscure corners these kinds of people thrive. One of the deciding factors for my leaving Open Diary ten years ago stemmed from the fact that the place was outgrowing it’s users. Now, this experience in dealing with these types of people, is that you find out something which I feel is extremely important in life… that your situation is not special or unique. Odds are, someone else has been where you’re going or has just crawled out of where you’ve been. I forget where this quote is from that summarizes that sentiment, but I think it was a video game. I want to say Max Payne, but I’m not sure. Anyway it goes something like this. “There are no apocalypses, just personal ones; and nothing is a cliche when it’s happening to you.”
In the process of moving around on the internet I’ve made several friends that I no longer speak to. That’s always been the way I’ve dealt with my life, in general. I’ll team up with someone for a while but when I feel that whatever bond we shared has been resolved or the common thread is severed I move on. This is a pre-emptive action on my part, since I’ve lived under the fatal assumption that everyone will end up leaving me eventually, so I make the first move. Hit the road, so to speak. Now, it’s not like this assumption is entirely baseless. As a matter of fact, nine times out of ten once someone has gotten what they want out of me, whether it be some advice, an emotional crutch, or simply a friendly ear to listen to them, almost invariably they stop speaking to me when the trouble passes.
This has not made me bitter, believe it or not, since I understand how these things work. Once the situation passes, once the trouble is gone, well what else is there for two people to say to each other? It’s not like I have a lot in common with anyone. In general my outlook is fairly pragmatic in terms of making friends. If they stick around for a long time, if we have a lot in common great, but you know that nothing lasts forever. It’s become increasingly difficult for me to trust anyone, or even get close to people. Instead I look for all sorts of reasons not to. I know that I should not be acting this way, but as much as I seem to enjoy saying ‘good-bye’ to people, one can only take so many partings before it begins to become extremely tiresome. Being left behind can do things to your ego no amount of insults or violence could ever hope to. And you know what? It’s my fault for taking these things personally, but I guess at the time I didn’t quite grasp the situation as clearly as I did then, looking back on it.
Click to continue reading “Light at the End”
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When I first met John Seifer, it was at a press conference. This was after a failed assassination attempt on yours truly. The speech was my glorious assurance to the people that those responsible were brought to justice and that the threat has passed, but my heart wasn’t in it. The speech was flat, but no one seemed to notice that I didn’t even seem to believe what I was saying anymore. This is because I realized that I had become so used to lying that it came natural to show the correct inflection and emotion at times, like a reflex. While I didn’t summon up any feeling, there was no difference. This made me wonder what the point in me being a figurehead was. It was clear no one really paid attention to the government anymore, the people more that likely felt that I was totally irrelevant. Therefore I eventually came to the realization that I was most likely going to die. It wasn’t, as they say, a matter of how but when. The Commission’s market research data showed that most people didn’t even realize the government was still in operation, and therefore my termination was inevitable. That’s what Seifer told me after the conference was over. Off the record. It was the first time anyone talked to me like I was anything more than a tool, so I suppose that my guard was lowered slightly. Maybe that gave me the false pretense that he actually cared if I lived or died. Which, I should have known was far from the case.
This was over a year ago.
We only met about a dozen times, and each time it was off the record. From what I was led to believe about that sort of thing, with enough money you could say and do whatever you wanted and it wouldn’t be used against you. Which, was rather stupid in retrospect, but I was desperate for someone to talk to. Desperate to speak about the things that concerned me after ten years, almost seven of which I felt like a walking corpse, barely capable of functioning without being told what to do and where to go. Over the last three years the headaches would get more frequent and more terrible, a cackling electric fire across my synapses, feeling like my brain had been replaced like a teeming swarm of fire ants. The thing about the noises, is that I could hear faint sounds, almost like voices. Yet, it wasn’t English or slang or anything human. It kinda sounded like a phone connection. A modem. You see some of those in the more low tech areas of Europa. For the like of me I don’t know how I knew that. There’s a lot of memories in my head, unbound like that. Little fragments of information, little factoids but they aren’t based on any experience of mine. This, combined with my normal experiences day in and out has accumulated over the years into this growing hatred for The Commission. Like lighting a waterproof fuse, once ignited there is only one possible outcome.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 5: A Better Future”
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