So I just finished watching all three Star Wars movies. Not the new ones - the originals. Not the new originals - the original originals. Kim talked me into buying another copy of Star Wars when we saw them reasonably priced at Costco - I had thought I might buy them again someday anyway, since the full-screen versions I had had not been panned-and-scanned very well at all. Since this latest iteration also included the original originals, it wasn't too hard for Kim to talk me into it.
So, now that I've watched all three original originals, I'm going backward through the new originals just for fun, just to pick out the changes. That's a lot of Star Wars.
We also bought one of those chicken pot pies at Costco - you know the ones that are literally a foot across? Well, I dared Kim to eat half of it in one sitting - I even had 10 dollars that said she couldn't. I figured I was the only one that silly. Well, she proved me wrong, although she let me know today that she hadn't felt much like breakfast, and wasn't too sure when she'd need to eat another meal.
Oh, and I finished Accelerando, so I shouldn't be having any more extremely strange dreams. But I did it by staying up until 5 am Saturday night (Sunday morning), and let me tell you, that's pretty late for me. (I fell asleep in the middle of Empire Strikes Back today.)
...that I think came from reading Accelerando before bedtime. I'm especially sure about this one, because it featured a lobster!
And where the last dream might have seemed to have an interesting plot curve, this one actually had narration!
Of course, I don't remember the narration any more, but it was somewhere between the opening scences of a Twilight Zone episode, and the beginning of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (which would have been a really good film if the cinematographer had remembered to wipe the smudge marks off the lens). Anyway, the narrator began by describing and listing all of these brilliant scientists - inventors, award winners, crucial paradigm operators in their fields - who were invited to work on a secret government project. As the narrator said "invited" we were shown the last scientist, a doctor Muller with a German moustache and a labcoat, confronted by the silhouettes of two trenchcoated secret agent types. Silent beneath the voiceover, they presented the good doctor with an "offer he couldn't refuse". (You couldn't see if they were holding guns or any kind of weapon, but the fear in Doctor Muller's eyes and the furtive glances toward the silhouettes told it all.)
The next we saw the professor, he was helmetless in a spacesuit, looking out the viewport of a classic rocket as it accelerated out of Earth orbit and toward a secret goverment space station. He joined the 30-odd other scientists on the station working on "Murphy's Box". That name was said with a sinister dread, but we never saw over the scientist's back to what they were working on.
And then, it's explained. A giant blue-black lobster looms through deep space. Murphy's Box is just the body of any creature, but the term infers specifically to bodies pushed outside of their competence envelope along the squared-cubed rule curve. In microgravity, less strength (which is controlled by the Square - the area of the cross-section of a body's muscles) is needed to support mass (a factor of the Cube - that is, a three-dimensional body), so bodies can potentially be grown to enormous size. Lobsters, who don't feel pain and can theoretically continue growing as long as they live, were perfect test subjects.
The problems came when they adapted to empty space and started crawling around the outside of the space station.
I'm not too sure what the really dreadful scary part of it was, because once I saw that huge lobster, I high-tailed it out of there and woke up.
...reading too much science fiction at night before bed when you wake up in that half-dreaming, half-lucid craze worried about all the cycles your AIs missed while your laptop was turned off at night. And when the word "instantiation" broken-records through your mind all day like that snippet of a song that you can't seem to stop humming. And I should really tell you about the crazy dream about an apotheosized mathematician I had last night!
I dreamt that I had continued in my undergraduate math course and become somewhat of a phenom. (Wait... that's not even the crazy part!) I was in Scotland, in Edinburgh, at some invitation-only course. This course was held in some kind of an outdoor stadium or amphitheater, built around this glass temple/cathedral erected in an otherwise normal public plaza in the middle of the university. The glass temple reminded me a lot of the Crystal Cathedral, but it was a bit smaller, and a stained glass dragon (reminiscent of of the Mortal Kombat logo dragon, but blue on white) dominated the larger faces of the structure. The class was taught by an avatar, not a real person, who was projected in holographic form over the top of the cathedral. This professor had once been a real person, a rather famous mathematician (and Fields Award winner) who had come to prominence with his Theory, "The Really Big set of Really Small numbers". I don't really know what that meant (it was a dream, after all!), but it had something to do with using sets of numbers that asymptotally approach 0 to model and thus predict the previously-apparent random behavior of quanta. Anyway, this mathematician had disappeared for a few years, first by becoming a hermit in his office, and then by applying his theories and sublimating, so he became some kind of a demi-god. He became a mathematical Boddhisatva of sorts - remaining in the world to teach the unenlightened his mathematics, but he was clearly godly and thought of people the same way people think of insects. Thus, while people flocked to his courses to learn, his temple was also considered very dangerous, as people might disappear or die if he became capricious or angry.
So, after class I noticed that a lot of people were congregating around the base of the temple to ask the teacher questions, so I figured it couldn't be that dangerous. I went down to the base of the temple, too, and I noticed that I was standing over a grate - the kind you often see in plazas, that allow rainwater to drain into the sewers. Looking through the grate, I saw a bunch of people skateboarding or otherwise just hanging around, in what seemed to be more of a subway station than a sewer.
I called down into the sewer, "Hey, isn't that dangerous to be down there? You know what's right above you, right?"
The skateboarder called back, "I dunno, dude. Doesn't seem dangerous. There's a lot of people down here."
Just then, every person but that skateboarder beneath the grate turned into copies of one person - a brunette girl. The copies merged together into a human-shaped wind that blew through the subterranean room. The form leading the wind blew through the skater, engulfing and subsuming him. For a brief moment, the form lost the shape of the brunette girl and took on the form of the skater, and then it blew on and he was gone.
That's when I realized what the real danger was from this mathematician-cum-hungry-god (though for the life of me, it doesn't make nearly as much sense today) - he was assimilating people into his well of souls to create a fuller and more complex godhood within his pocket universe.
The human shape wind blew up out of the grate and swept around the plaza. Several of the people shapes there merged with it, like the forms underground had (his fake person plants in the crowd to lure people closer), but the wind blew around, absorbing new people, including one from out of a car, which continued on unmanned to crash into a wall. The wind came right up to me, took on the face of the professor's TA, and then ... my alarm went off, and I woke up worried about leaving the laptop off all night and if the AIs would be hybernating or if they'd moved into the web, or if they died when I turned off the computer, and that took me about 15 minutes and a shower to snap out of.
So, I blame that squarely on reading Accelerando. But don't let that turn you off - so far it's a really good book!
I can't believe I forgot to post this for a week...
Here's one final shot of my tattoo, taken by Mom Labor day weekend. The angel has finished peeling now, and her wings and bodice are just a little bit lighter, but unless you come out to Georgia to visit, this is probably the best shot you'll see... ;)
And here's Jenny again. She really doesn't like baths.
Time again for another shameless plug of my Coerablog!
If any of you haven't dug into the Coerablog because it's too daunting (I've heard that a few times), but you're interested in the overarching mythology of the storyline and how it flagrantly borrows from real-world mythology, you might be interested in reading this five- or six-page write-up I just finished on the mythology surrounding Lilith (who, along with Eve, is a core figure through a majority of the stories).
Or maybe I should say that sometimes I'm not silly.
For the last few weeks I've been complaining to Kim that my steering wheel wobbles when I drive, and that the car is pulling harder and harder to the left. Well, only a few days ago, I put my keen powers of deduction to work on the problem, and actually looked at the tires. One of them was quite flat. I put air in it.
I don't have a mutant bug after all. Huzzah! I just have a healthy population of Red-headed Bush Crickets.
And, Anne - have you never seen The Secret of NIMH? It had one of the biggest impacts on me of any animated movie I watched as a kid, but I don't think it was ever one of our favorites. I have it on DVD, if you want to borrow it.
Today was one of the first reasonable days for yardwork we've had in a few month - I don't think it was up much past 80 degrees, and with a bottle of gatorade at hand, you can really get something done. One of the things I did was take pictures! :)
Around the House
That patch in the front has really filled in, hasn't it? You should've seen it before I mowed it - the rest of the yard is manageable, but that rectangle is a jungle, after only two weeks!
This copse of flowers is well on its way to foresthood. As I see it, there are two likely outcomes for this patch: either they grow into a strong, healthy stand of tree flowers, to be chopped down in 15 years as timber for a fort for our kids, or the Secret of NIMH soil we have will turn these things sentient and they'll show up in our bedroom one night, brandishing gardening tools of doom, demanding the deed to the property. Don't worry, I won't cave.
Hello!
Jenny's becoming scared of the 2 or three feet around the steps from the deck. Once she's out in the grass, she's fine, but those first few steps are like a firewalk for her.
Tree Buffalo
While I was out on the back deck nailing back in the nails that have begun to slowly make their escape, I noticed this scary looking patch on the tree.
I thought it might be some kind of fungus or mold until I dollied in.
It was a swarming herd of insects! Some kind of tree buffalo, from their behaviour. When I blew into the center of the herd, they would all stampede off in the same direction. (Don't forget you can click on the picture to get a closer look).
Since the photo doesn't do "swarming" justice, I took this little clip. My hands are always that shaky.
I found one that had wandered away from the herd and got a closeup. I'm worried he looks suspiciously like this. You think?
Mutant captured on Film! (err.. compact flash card)
I finally got pictures of one of the mutant bugs I've been describing.
Look at that poor beast. It seems like this one had once been a poor, unsuspecting red ant, to judge by her head and thorax. Like the one I saw last week she has those thrumming white antennae, red and black coloring, and that wicked curved stinger at the posterior. Like all of the mutants I've seen, she has those out-of-place green grasshopper legs, and boy! could she jump with those. Unlike the one from last week, she has some kind of spidery palps at her jaw, and she's considerably smaller and has an entirely different body and head shape. I've also seen mutants that seemed to have fly heads, complete with bulbous complex eyes, and ones with wings. So this strange mutation must be a danger to all manner of insects around my house. Damn you, Secret of NIMH soil!
My Enemy
I don't know what my enemy's name is - I usually just call it "the weed", or "that damn weed". Here it is in a lineup:
The criminal is on the left. You can tell him by his success - he grows quickly, sending viney stalks off through a garden. On the right is a snippet from a rosebush. The similarity is not immediately obvious, but look at the shape of the rose leaves, and their serrated edged, and their occurance in groups of three. Now look at the criminal - same leaf shape, same serrated edge, same groups of three. When he hasn't gotten himself infected with leaf blight, he can be the same dark color as the rose leaves. Even more insidious is the criminal's behaviour of growing up through a rose bush, mingled with the rose's own thorny branches. But the enemy's thorns are far more insidious.
I tried numerous times to get a clear shot of his spiny thorns, but he was just far too elusive. Maybe you can make out some of the spikes, if you cross your eyes hard enough.
What is clear is the carnage he leaves behind. This is after just a few minutes of clearing out stalks.
The enemy will die like any other natural plant, but his corpse is entirely unnatural. It becomes a skelton warrior even more insidious than the living foe. There are no warning leaves, and the thorns are harder and more difficult to see.
Go back up to the line-up shot, and look at the sprig in the middle. See how the leaves are just like the criminal plant, but they grow as singles? See how the twig is smooth and shiny instead of ridged, and there are no thorns? I suspect my Secret of NIMH soil is at it again. The middle plant is probably just your average, law-abiding weed, causing no problems and just doing his thing. But he shoots up next to this rose, and whatever glowing bile of the earth that causes my yard to roil with unnaturality takes over, and before you know it, he has this bastard child - half weed, half rose. All thorns.
Damn you, Secret of NIMH soil! (I bet it's made of people.)
