Tooth and Claw: Three Pair of Eyes, part one

Prologue, Alice Takes a Road Trip

Friday, July 6^th, 2012

                “So how much does a fake ID cost,” Della asks Jamie as they stroll East along Sahara Avenue.

                “Depends on how many you need,” Jamie answers with a shrug of her shoulders.

                “What do you mean?”

                “Well, if you just need the one, you’ll have to pay someone to do it for you.  You probably won’t know that person very well, so you’ll pay a premium for that.  But if you’ve got contacts in that line of work, you’ll probably need it pretty regular.  That drives the price down.”

                “I see,” Della says, thinking on the matter.  “And for us?”

                “Psh, when you need that kind of thing regular as we do, you score your own gear and do it all in-house.”

Random things and stuff!

My new computer, which wasn't "supposed" to show up until the 16th, actually got delivered today.  Hooray!  But now I'm moving everything over, which is gonna take for-god-damned-ever.  It's easy, thanks to the aptly named Easy Transfer, which more or less amounts to a magic spell:  I wave my hands around and say, "You!  New 'puter!  Be just like my old 'puter!  Go!"  But Christ on a bike, this spell has a long-ass casting time!  I'm gonna be watching the progress on my sweet fuckin' 23" monitor until the wee hours, and until then I'm instructed, "Do not use this computer during the transfer."  Huh.  I sure hope blogging and blasting mp3s doesn't count as "using this computer."  :\

Anyway, I'm not up to any super-creative writing.  I'd meant to write another vignette for Tooth & Claw, I have it all planned out (more or less), but I just can't stop wanting my new 'puter to be ready.  So here are a few neat tidbits with no central organization.  First, scientists are hard at work decoding the visual experience of dreams from brain scans.  Here's a link to one article, focusing mainly on Japanese research.  And here's another one from Gizmodo, focusing mainly on what's been done at UC Berkeley (with video!).  An important note is that the constructed video is not a reading of the visual cortex, but actually a composite constructed from pre-existing video clips.  I caught the headline over lunch in USA Today (I think).  Those articles above are just what I was able to dig up in two minutes, but I have some more to say below the cut.

Second, here is a cool little infographic submitted to me by Allison on the visual IQ of Americans, showing how well (or poorly) we can identify certain people, symbols, and geographic regions on sight.

I was able to identify Boehner purely based on hatred of him as a person,

pick out the Euro, the Star of David, and the Twitter logo.  That... was it.

Third, Amina Tyler recently went missing after posting topless photos of herself on the internet in order to show that her body was hers to do with as she chooses.  The going speculation seems to be that her family kidnapped her, in direct contravention to Tyler's thesis, out of some bass-ackward idea of honor where "tits is bad" and it's somehow less embarrassing to abduct a member of your family than to let her do her own fuckin' thing.  Because Tyler's disappearance is probably going to be tragic, but it might not necessarily be just yet, (NSFW photos!) FEMEN recently organized a load of topless protests at a bunch of European mosques in order to say, "You think photos on the internet are bad?  Wait'll you see this all up in your fuckin' streets!"  OK, I was paraphrasing there, but here is an actual quote:  "We're free, we're naked, it's our right, it's our body, it's our rules, and nobody can use religion, and some other holy things, to abuse women, to oppress them... And we'll fight against them, and our boobs will be stronger than their stones."

Actions such as this were described as "evacuating" protesters.  Boy, those men

with truncheons sure evacuated the living daylights out of those half-naked protesters.

Fourth, some scientists seem to believe that they're on the cusp of experimentally confirming the existence of dark matter, which would quite frankly be rad as Hell.  What gives me pause for thought, however, is that they're looking at positrons in space - and positrons are antimatter.  The difference, briefly, is that antimatter is normal matter with its polarity reversed (protons become antiprotons, same mass but opposite charge; electrons become antielectrons or positrons, same mass but opposite charge).  We use antimatter in routine medical procedures - the "PET" in PET scan stands for "positron emission tomography."  Dark matter, on the other hand, is simply stuff that has mass and takes up space, but "doesn't shine" in the way that everything else in the Universe does - it's there, it exerts gravitational forces upon whatever's around, but we just can't detect it since it's not shiny like "normal" matter.  However, this positron/dark matter connection gives me faint and tenuous hope that Douglas' exclamation that dark matter (rather than antimatter) cancels out regular matter is actually oddly prophetic rather than a stupid fuckin' typo on my part.  Whatever, I'll probably change it anyway because I also have a few other infelicities to remedy for the next edition.  They're the scientists, I'll trust 'em until I hear better.  :)

OK, by way of wrapping up, here are some of my thoughts on the decoding of the visual elements of dreams.

Thoughts on Virtual Worlds

So Guild Wars 2 recently released a fake April Fool's joke:  the Super Adventure Box.  I need to stress that this is a fake April Fool's joke, by which I mean that it looks like an April Fool's joke, but is actually entirely real.  I promise I am not making this up.

For the month of April, players will be able to use Moto's Super Adventure Box, a training device for young children learning to make their way in the world which uses games as a form of educating with entertainment - edutainment!  Of course, it's only "for young children" in the game world of Guild Wars 2; for players in the real world, it's a nostalgic romp through a neo-retro mashup of old video games united with a decidedly Minecraftian aesthetic.  Fuckin'... sign me up!  Why am I writing this and not playing right now?!

Look, they even made an 80s-tastic commercial for it!

Oh, right, because I thought about it for two seconds.  And now I have to write those thoughts down, or pretty soon they'll pile up and my head will explode (yes, this is actually why I write).  Then I can play.

And what will I be playing?  I'll be playing a game... which will be about my character playing another game.  I suppose this is just another mini-game in a way, but what got me thinking was considering it as not "just another mini-game."  Yes, yes, there are plenty of games with mini-games wherein the character you play then plays another game (a game within a game), and this is nothing special.  What's special about this is that I'm entering a virtual world, and in that virtual world, my character enters another virtual world.

It's not just a game within a game, this time; it's The Matrix within The Matrix.

Just gonna slip this under the door here...

Wow!  A lot happened last month, some good and some bad, and I wanna share some of it before returning to the subject of this evening's symposium.  Let's just dive right in, shall we?

First:  I got accepted into grad school!  Yippee!

So I'll be doing that in the fall, and then we'll see where that goes.  Suuuuuper excited!  Like, I can't write text that is me jumping up and down and whooping and giggling and pumping my fist in the air - but rest assured that I actually did that for a while when I found out.  :)

I'm also applying for assistantships, because I'm poor & stuff, and need to support myself as I work my way through.  I was doing that, and then I finished, and I was like, "Wow, I'm tired.  OK, bedtime.  Hmm... it feels like I'm forgetting something, though... what could it be?"

The second thing is that I discovered I have a hidden talent.  Well, it was hidden, and now it's not any more. You see, I can't dance.  I'm not merely bad at dancing, I mean that I physically can't do it.  I really don't know what it is, but in my more defensive moments, I claim that it's because I've taken martial arts since the second grade and I've been so thoroughly trained to break and interrupt rhythms that I can't really get into them.  But of course, that's not really true:  I do rhythmic things all the time, like sing, or play Rock Band, or go running.  For some reason, though, dancing has just never clicked with me, and it's not fun, so I don't do it.

Well, I was at an equinox party this weekend, and it turns out that I actually can dance - I just need a stick that's on fire at both ends.  My friend tried to hand it to me, and I was like, "No way, I'ma light my ass on fire," because I was in an altered state of consciousness.  He replied, "Just try it, I've seen you wave a stick around before, I think you'd be good at it."  I countered, "Yeah, but that stick wasn't on fire."  So I picked up a not-on-fire stick and went and waved it around for a while in the dark, and when I was satisfied that I could do that without clocking myself in the face, I tried it on fire.  And it worked out awesomely!  I can't wait to do it again!

So I guess if the goal is just "move to the music," well, I can't really do that.  But if the goal is "keep the fire moving and don't get burned by the fire," I can rock out!

This last one... is not so good.  It's behind a cut for absurd levels of racism.  Oh, also:  TRIGGER WARNING for racist slurs.  I'm not censoring it, because first, they're not my words and I'm simply reporting them; second, I kinda want you to get the "full impact" if you decide to read, which will help drive home the overarching point.

Hiatus, Schmiatus!

Yeah, I know what I said.  And I'll be back on point come the first.  No foolin'.  But in the meantime, one of my heroes actually engaged in some man-splainin' a faux-pas*, like, I don't even fuckin' know how.  Well, I mean, I do.  I spotted it.  And, to his fully-deserved credit, he seems to have caught on and everything is looking great.  But I had some other things to say to our new friend, Austin Green, so I'm going to say them here on my own soapbox.  Here we go!  :)

* - EDIT:  Goddammit, I kicked myself over this all day.  On the way to work this morning, I realized that this wasn't actually man-splaining.  Man-splaining is when a man "explains" something to a woman (who often already knows what's being explained) in a condescending way.  That's not what this was.  The pointing out of man-splanation will often result in backpedaling, digging oneself deeper, getting defensive, and so on... some of which I saw, and then I went and affirmed the damned consequent because it looked kinda the same coming out the back-end.  So yeah.  Yoy my bad.  Sorry, Adam!

Hiatus

I wanted to do something, some kind of pun with like "HI-YAH!" or whatever, but it just didn't work out.  Too much of a stretch.  Those words sure look alike, but they don't sound very much alike at all.

Anyway.

I need a break.  I've been working at this book since, like, late September.  I'm just not feeling it right now.  I get home, and it's like, "Well, I could just bang something out," but I don't want to "just bang something out."  Batteries need to recharge.  Plus, locksmithing is hard, and when I get home, I don't want to think, I just wanna fuckin' veg out.

So I'm taking March off.  Writers go on sabbaticals all the time, right?  Right.  I'll see y'all the first of April.  No foolin'.

A Ray of Sunshine

Long couple of days at work.  Brain full of lock stuff.  Not feeling the "writing" vibe tonight.

Instead, I give you something my little sister CJ wrote:

Is it just me or does anybody else hate those posts that are like "LIKE, SHARE AND COMMENT IF YOU LOVE JESUS!...if you ignore though u will die a slow, painful and miserable death. Also the devil will take your soul and you will go to hell...YES hell!" Isn't life about being kind and giving to the community, not liking someones status.

I copied & pasted that directly.  Her words, exactly as they appear.  She is eleven years old.

I could not be prouder.  :)

101 Interesting Things, part fifty-three: Resettable locks!

Yesterday at work, I had an interesting and exciting opportunity come up.  During my downtime, I read trade magazines and practice picking locks (by the way, I think it's so cool that I get to play around picking locks when we have no customers!), and one of the articles in this month's Locksmith Ledger (or whatever the magazine was called) was on opening & servicing safe deposit locks.  It included instructions and pictures on various kinds of safe deposit locks, including resettable locks, which I didn't know existed.

Lo and behold, just a couple hours later that day, a customer brought in a lock that he had no key for.  It turned out to be a Sargent & Greenleaf resettable safe deposit lock (though it only had the one keyway).  So, because I'm all excited about that now, I'm going to give y'all a crash course on locks (using information that is freely available elsewhere on the internet, just so's I know I'm not giving away any trade secrets).

What would I tell teenagers about sex? A response to Forward Thinking.

I read over on Daylight Atheism (note to self:  update sidebar link!) that there's a new blog carnival on the 'tubes called Forward Thinking.  This month's prompt is, "What would you tell teenagers about sex?"

My first thought on the subject was, "Shit, I am the last person who should be advising teenagers about sex."  My second thought was, "Wait, I have a fourteen-year-old brother and an eleven-year-old sister.  I will probably be talking to them about sex at some point."  So I decided to get some thoughts together in some semblance of order, and here they are.

Jesus and Gender

I was totally planning on writing some Tooth and Claw tonight.  But as I lay in bed this morning, drifting in and out of sleep among interminable Snoozes with NPR talking at me, I had something of a dream.  I was in an academic setting, probably informed by whatever was on NPR, and I realized at some point that I wasn't actually going to be able to talk to people about this in an academic setting.  At least, not right then.  So I'ma talk about it here.

In my dream - and maybe, possibly on NPR, I was half-asleep and I'm not sure - they/we were talking about societal happiness and well-being.  In my head, regardless of the scenario, I rifled through a pile of half-remembered statistics and surveys, as well as multiple pieces of writing on the two subjects and how they seem to maybe be the same thing but really aren't.  I mean, to a certain point, happiness and well-being are correlated.  If you're in a truly shitty situation, nothing going your way, everything flushing down the tubes, you're not going to be happy.  And if you're on a hot streak, yeah, you're probably going to be happy about that.

It's the middle thing that's kind of the problem here.

OK, this is a little much. Even for me.

I'm trying to make Tooth and Claw be Like Reality Unless Noted, because that will make filming on location easier when I get a movie deal for it.  Ha!  Ha!  No, seriously, it's because the mood is best served by setting it in a world that's just like ours, only slightly off-kilter.  Tee-hee, still lying.  It's actually something of a behind-the-scenes homage to the playstyle of my gaming group, where we'd take real details from the real world (culled from our knowledge of the town or Google Maps) and then just overlay our campaign on top of it.  Jeez, I need to stop this.

OK, so all of those are partially true (or at least, in the case of the movie deal, earnest wishful thinking).  But the reason that actually gets ink on the paper, as it were, is that I am lazy and know nothing; and "the internet exists" means that a bit of on-the-spot research makes stealing details from reality way the fuck easier than inventing plausible details from whole cloth.

But sometimes, reality is a bit... shall we say, "generous."

Excuses!

I should probably mention that I'm on a road trip this weekend.  So there won't be an update until Tuesday at the earliest.  Y'all have a great one!  :)