...unless I misremember--it's been 4 years since I was last in Iowa--Coralville is near Iowa City. And that's a reasonable place for AnimeIowa to be, unlike frickin' Des Moines.
I can't afford to attend a con even if I had known about this in advance, so it's kind of a moot point; but if AI is no longer a six-hour drive from home it might behoove me to begin attending again.
Then again, it might not.
* * *
Serious turn-off on the Diablo III front: it's "online only", meaning you can't play the game when you don't have an Internet connection.
WTF, if I'm going to play an online game, I'll play WoW.
* * *
Is the universe a hologram? The idea of the universe being a projection of information stored in a two-dimensional surface--I don't know.
* * *
The usual link to the daily Ace of Spades HQ DOOM! post.
* * *
Bush tax cuts expire December of 2012. There is your "deficit reduction" from the Boehner plan.
*sigh*
* * *
Last night I wrote eight pages of hard SF.
I blog too much. A writer must write, else he falls ill (read Heinlein's Expanded Universe) and I'm coming to realize that I satisfy this need almost entirely with the bloggeratin'. I write two, three pages' worth of material per day, usually, all posted here. But I steadfastly refuse to post the good stuff, the stuff I might be able to sell someday, because you never give away your "A" material for free.
Over the past week or so I've been giving thought to one of the alien races in my SF universe. There are four of them, and only one is really fleshed out because they're Mankind's primary antagonist in several wars over the course of the "future history" I've laid out.
No, that's not entirely accurate. Two of them, not one. The primary antagonists--a sauroid race, because SF guys can't get away from making bad guys of teh lizard men--and an insectoid race, though the latter is much less thoroughly developed than the first one. They appear in one story, the bug people do, and in fact I realized once the novel was complete that their inclusion in the story was entirely superfluous. (But I could pull that stuff out and make a short of it, I bet....)
There are a few others--a race of amphibians (frog people!!!) and a race of quadripedal bisonoids (cow people!!!), and it's the latter I've been thinking about.
My aliens are generally "funny-looking people" rather than truly alien, which is not a serious handicap considering that plenty of other writers do exactly the same thing. The bisonoids are taking some effort, though, because they lose their sentience for five months out of their seventeen-month year. It makes for an interesting society but it's taking some serious effort not to derail the story they're in, turning it solely into an examination of their biology, history, and culture.
My SF world is human-centric and the aliens do not play much of a part in it; but if this story pans out the way I expect it to, this particular novel may be a departure from that trend.
* * *
Anyway, it's encouraging that I have the urge to write fiction again. I'm not sure why it strikes (nor why it leaves me) but writing fiction is usually a sign that I'm starting to get motivated again, and that's never a bad thing.
I do want to get this stuff written down, because you can't sell a story you haven't written; and in fact I need to start moving forward on seeking publication for some of this stuff if only because it's better than some of the crap that's out there.
* * *
Miscellany:
This morning I couldn't sleep because my legs were hot, so I had to turn the thermostat down two degrees until it cooled off. Then I conked out. *sigh*
*
I doubt I'll make it to cruise night tonight. It's too damn hot outside. I noticed, by the way, that the summer was cool and damp until I got the Fiero back on the road; at which point it turned hot and humid nearly all the time.
There are things that need doing on that car, and I don't want to do them when it's 90° and humid, because it's supposed to be fun. There's a car show this month in Beecher or Peotone or some damn place that I was thinking of attending, but if I can't clean the car I don't want to enter it, and I don't want to clean the car if I'm going to sweat myself half to death.
*
I do get very tired of having songs constantly playing in my brain. Maybe that's why I don't need background music for everything, the way many people do; it's already too damn noisy for my taste.
* * *
An image from the Fractale soundtrack libretto:
The world of Fractale is set hundreds of years in the future. Having only seen through ep 5 of it, I can't say for sure, but the setting appears to be Earth.
This image--which I think is gorgeous, BTW--shows a few bright stars showing through the blue sky of day.
...in his book Time Line Michael Crichton mentions that--back in the Medieval era, before industrialization and widespread human habitation--the skies were so clear that you could see the planets and a few of the brightest stars in daytime. It's because there was no pollution; the human population was thinly spread across the land because it took so many acres to feed a person. (No pesticides, no artificial fertilizers, no real scientific knowledge of agriculture; just "we always did this and it worked well enough.")
It stands to reason that once we get our collective head out of our collective ass and start using truly clean power sources (nuclear, both fission and fusion, comes to mind) our atmosphere will naturally clean itself up, given time, and return to that pristine state.
* * *
I'm totally out of words, smart or otherwise, so I think I'm just going to stop wri