"I need a change of skin."
1. I'm sort of sorry we're not able to see the Winter Olympics, having chosen to forgo cable and all back when we moved in here. I haven't really missed television, and I generally despise sports, but I enjoy the Olympics, especially the winter games. I suppose, for me, it's closer to what I consider genuine athleticism than the macho parade of mainstream team sports.
2. Yesterday, we made it through the galley pages for "Sanderlings" and the typescript of "Untitled 35" (which I may retitle "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction [as Beauty]"). I'm very fond of both pieces, though they are very, very different sorts of things. In "Sanderlings," I'm sort of leaning in my Shirley Jackson direction (had she ever written Lovecrfatian sf), while in the latter I'm leaning more towards my William Gibson/William Burroughs/Philip K. Dick influences. Yet, both stories treat the pollution of the human body, as an extension of environmental pollution. They're almost the same story, told in radically different ways. It's hard to believe I wrote them only a couple of months apart. They sound like they were written years apart. "Sanderlings" is all soft-spoken, lonely despair, and "Untitled 35" is a clamorous, clanging cacophony of violence. I will say that I think "Sanderlings" is my best short story in quite some time, and I hope it gets some recognition.
3. Yesterday afternoon, Spooky drove over to the East Side, and I asked her to get more photos of the Bridge Street Bridge demolition. Andy Warhol and his soup cans are gone now. There are photos behind the cut:
View to the east.
View top the west.
View to the west.
View to the west.
View to the southwest.
All photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
4. So, as promised, I now have a transcript of one of my Insilico roleplays online. You may see it here. It's a very odd one, not the usual Insilico fare, but that's what you get when you trap an AI in a microcomputer inside a briefcase (in this case, Xiang 2.0a). So, here you go, "In Which Molly Longshadow Spawns a 'God.'" Also, the backstory for the Xiangs is up*. Of course, as these things go, I bother to put up all that backstory, and immediately things change. Last night, the Internal Affairs Director of Gemini Corporation decided X2.0b was too great a liability (i.e., she was incapable of reconciling her directives with the inherent contradictions of the Gem loyalty imprinting, looped, and went a bit bahooties; can't have a robot trying to enforce the letter of the law when you're not really trying to enforce the law, just trade one set of corruptions for another, more profitable, set). So...the X2.0b AI was shunted and boxed, and its body was...disposed of in a manner Gemini Corp. saw fitting. However...because plots must thicken...it is being replaced with a cyborg cloned from bits of Nareth Nishi's DNA (no, no connection to the old New Babbage Nareth) and an elaborate mnemonic imprinting and conditioning. A brain-in-a-bot cyborg built better suited to black ops (kept on a very short leash), the same serial killer that led to the creation of X1.0. Of course, Nareth 2.0 thinks it's the original Nareth, with it's brain in a robotic body. Round and round the mulberry bush....
* Note that it took me more than an hour to write this transcript, which is why I won't be doing much of this.
2. Yesterday, we made it through the galley pages for "Sanderlings" and the typescript of "Untitled 35" (which I may retitle "The Voyeur of Utter Destruction [as Beauty]"). I'm very fond of both pieces, though they are very, very different sorts of things. In "Sanderlings," I'm sort of leaning in my Shirley Jackson direction (had she ever written Lovecrfatian sf), while in the latter I'm leaning more towards my William Gibson/William Burroughs/Philip K. Dick influences. Yet, both stories treat the pollution of the human body, as an extension of environmental pollution. They're almost the same story, told in radically different ways. It's hard to believe I wrote them only a couple of months apart. They sound like they were written years apart. "Sanderlings" is all soft-spoken, lonely despair, and "Untitled 35" is a clamorous, clanging cacophony of violence. I will say that I think "Sanderlings" is my best short story in quite some time, and I hope it gets some recognition.
3. Yesterday afternoon, Spooky drove over to the East Side, and I asked her to get more photos of the Bridge Street Bridge demolition. Andy Warhol and his soup cans are gone now. There are photos behind the cut:
View to the east.
View top the west.
View to the west.
View to the west.
View to the southwest.
All photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
4. So, as promised, I now have a transcript of one of my Insilico roleplays online. You may see it here. It's a very odd one, not the usual Insilico fare, but that's what you get when you trap an AI in a microcomputer inside a briefcase (in this case, Xiang 2.0a). So, here you go, "In Which Molly Longshadow Spawns a 'God.'" Also, the backstory for the Xiangs is up*. Of course, as these things go, I bother to put up all that backstory, and immediately things change. Last night, the Internal Affairs Director of Gemini Corporation decided X2.0b was too great a liability (i.e., she was incapable of reconciling her directives with the inherent contradictions of the Gem loyalty imprinting, looped, and went a bit bahooties; can't have a robot trying to enforce the letter of the law when you're not really trying to enforce the law, just trade one set of corruptions for another, more profitable, set). So...the X2.0b AI was shunted and boxed, and its body was...disposed of in a manner Gemini Corp. saw fitting. However...because plots must thicken...it is being replaced with a cyborg cloned from bits of Nareth Nishi's DNA (no, no connection to the old New Babbage Nareth) and an elaborate mnemonic imprinting and conditioning. A brain-in-a-bot cyborg built better suited to black ops (kept on a very short leash), the same serial killer that led to the creation of X1.0. Of course, Nareth 2.0 thinks it's the original Nareth, with it's brain in a robotic body. Round and round the mulberry bush....
* Note that it took me more than an hour to write this transcript, which is why I won't be doing much of this.