Okay, so (as well as starting with "so" again) this weblog entry
is the first attempt (or the first that I expect to work anyway)
to post a weblog entry from the new laptop here.
If you're reading this and I didn't change that previous sentence,
it must have worked (yay!).
All sorts of other things are being wonky: the laptop has apparently
changed its mind, for instance, about what resolution to switch to when
I plug it into the external display, and its new choice looks pretty
silly; the other main thing that I use ssh for still isn't working
even though the weblog is; I can only see the old laptop from the new
one for copying-more-things-over purposes about half the time, etc,
etc.
But hey, that's computers!
Did I mention that I
interviewed
Juria Yoshikawa (another kewl SL artist) for the VAA weblog?
Well anyway I did.
I also wrote the new scripts for the "light poles that move around and
change color and make noises when people collide with them" part of
Juria's latest show;
that was fun.
Pay it a visit if you're in the neighborhood.
In ol' Real Life, I hafta say that it's really amazing when one's little daughter,
because she needs some one-use cameras to take with her on the orchestra
trip to Virginia Beach or somewhere, drives the car to the drugstore
and back (with one sitting in the passenger seat being amazed).
I mean, wow...
Middle East Conflict
Intensifies As Blah Blah Blah, Etc. Etc.
From Bill, today's "Am I Parody Or Not?" page o' the day:
Heliocentrism
is an atheist doctrine.
(Your guesses welcome; I'm tending slightly toward the "really well done
parody" theory, but only very slightly.)
And here's a picture of Daisy Duck:
So I had one of those amazing dreams last night, long and
detailed and convincing and interesting and even semi-coherent.
And as usual I pretty much forgot it pretty much instantly
upon waking up, but as sometimes happens it came back to me,
more or less whole, sometime during the day.
In
the dream, there were these guys on a research expedition
somewhere, and one of them brought back from somewhere to
the shack that they were staying in, a little bit of waxy something.
And the next morning the little bit of waxy something had
shaped itself to mimic a little bat-shaped plastic toy that
was for some reason sitting there, and had a couple of thin
little antennae, and it was moving slightly, and it was
alive.
The research guys were amazed and astounded and
generally heart-poundingly impressed by this, because it
wasn't our usual carbon and DNA-based life, but another
kind entirely.
And (apparently never having heard of the Precautionary
Principle) they (or maybe only one of them at this point,
the one who'd brought it back)
nourished the stuff, and studied it,
and coaxed and petted it, and after awhile it
split in half, and the halves grew, and it
had reproduced.
(Rather comic little scene here where that first
anomalous living waxy thing splits in half, and each
half turns and sees the other one, and reacts in the
sort of startled way that only a cylindrical blob
of wax can react.)
And then is the rather blurry part of the dream (or just
the part that I don't remember as well) where the rest
of the research team and the surrounding folks are amazed
and fascinated by the waxy living stuff, and (typical
cinema suspension of disbelief here) they find that it likes
to flow into you and merge with or replace your normal
DNA-based substance, healing your wounds and making the
individual little bits of your body intelligent, putting
you into telepathic rapport with your fellow assimilatees,
and generally making things better.
(A representative scene in here, which some frightened guy
in some backwater somewhere has cut off one foot and one
arm or something because they started talking to him, and
a team of the enlightened come out to help him, and they
persuade him to let them spread this nice wax over his
wounds, and press the foot and arm back on, and the new
life flows into him, and he's healed and happy and calm and
invents a new kind of star-drive or social system or
something right there on the spot.)
And then the obligatory final third or so of the book
(story, dream), set
in and around the camp or camps of the last few unassimilated
pure-DNA holdout humans, who are convinced that Earth is being
conquered by scary aliens, and who have just invented a device
that can reliably detect the waxy life.
The efforts of the benign and so-intelligent waxyfolk to
sneak enough of their own improved stuff into the camp(s)
despite the device to finally enlighten these last pockets
of night, involving brave spies, perhaps one poor DNA fellow
kept from or purged of the waxy life and sent into the camp
to open the door from the inside, or waxystuff fired in from
a distance as an aerosol, or...
And at the end a happy ending with all of humanity (and
maybe also the birds and the bees and the monkeys) united
in the New Form, at peace, intelligent, sane, and generally
having a good time.
And nowhere in that any suggestion that maybe those last
few pure-DNA holdouts were right, and these really were
scary aliens taking over.
Because the waxy life really was good; or,
I suppose, perhaps because even the dreams are written by
the victors.
*8)
