Author: admin

What is a vacation but a temporary hiatus from life. A rending from the daily grind to something foreign and new or even old and familiar in which you have a sense of connection and familiarity by means of purpose if nothing else. You are there to not be you. Not the you of the everyday responsibility. Not the you who is the parent or the worker or the child. This new, awakened, you wants to explore and to be in the moment of joy and, above all else, experience a power structure where you actually wield the power of the person who has things done for them. This is what a vacation looks like. I do this from time to time but less so. I am becoming a student of temporary relocation.

Jamaica Kincaid starts her powerful diatribe on tourism as such: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him–why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . .”

Yes, but I want to see and imbed and become used to the vibes of the city and the day to day of how people live and work. I will also work and do and be who I am when I am at home, for this is less a vacation but a place to temporary call home and to discover the beauty and strength of this new place with the fervor I should (or perhaps already have) given the place I usually call by that moniker.

Relocation in an entirely different beast and he wears the fabric of responsibility and walks the streets with the casualness of familiarity won by constantly walking those streets, as if reciting a mantra on what it means to be and to be a part and to be apart. I’m up for some relocation.

Some Thoughts:

1. I go off like that at times. It is sort of why the blog exists. It is here to help me stay on the write grind but also to say what enters my mind.
2. right now I feel like an explorer and I am excited about the new world within my reach.

At the end of the day there is always a pecking order. It can be mitigated by appointments and scheduling but some people are always ahead of others. Some people always wait. I suppose I will always be some people. However, it can be a good thing. The time I spent in the waiting room gave me plenty of time to understand how the system here worked. Take away the fancy AR overlays and pretty desk staff and the EBE operation ran like a clinic. There was a woman at the front desk who looked like she did this job between model shoots. The security, so visible at the entrance was invisible now that I’d passed through the gauntlet. As I waited I pretended not to notice the others going in for work. Most were unknown to me; people higher in the lattice work of corporate life and politics. There was a trid star who came in just before everything went to hell. Him I did recognize, which made what happened later all the more hard to digest.

The trouble started not long after I was let into the back. My appointment was set for 15 minutes before my target. Enough time for me to get in and start to be processed, but not enough time for the real work to happen and in that me be incapacitated enough to not be able to do my part. I went into the back area and was led down a corridor where the AR disappeared only to be replaced by art and photo prints of clients with high grade visible or not visible cyberware. The nurse led me to a small room where she weighed me, took my vitals, and several other tests focusing on my eyes. Afterwards, the nurse took me to meet Dr. Haresh, a reedy man with a thick beard showing more gray than black. We sat in his office and he began to ask me about the eyeware I was going to receive.

That was when the commotion started.

I’m not sure how I feel about hactivism. I truly do appreciate the upside of the hactivist behavior. It draws attention to situations that would otherwise be ignored. Hacking can be about voice or evil or boredom or any number of things. Today Respawn/EA’s Apex Legends game was hacked, primarily as a way to bring attention to the troubles of Titanfall 1 (and possibly 2). T1 has become a cesspool of hate activity to the point where it is impossible to play the game without being raked with hate speech. I don’t pretend to understand the motives of racism beyond hate, power, and fear. Multiple articles have come to light about this over the course of today’s hack. The hack itself switches users to a new ‘game mode’ which is unplayable and locks them out of all playable modes. The new mode is merely a renamed link to the firing range (which is unaccessible) which reads: Savetitanfall.com This site was created by the The TF Remnant Fleet and NoSkill communities, who have vocally argued they are not behind the hack.

Who is? That is unclear. It could be the same forces that exploited Titanfall having a bit of fun. It could be white hats bringing attention to the problem. What is certain is that the hack is being noticed this holiday by the massive number of people unable to play the game. I’m disappointed that I cannot play. I am more upset about how these companies failed to protect prior released material simply because it was old. That doesn’t justify the hack. It does mean that it is effective.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m just expressing some feelings about hacking. Don’t hack me, please.

I made sure to straighten my jacket before walking inside Executive Body Enhancements. I was wearing a sports coat, slacks, and a black tee underneath. It was, I thought, business casual, surgery appropriate? I wasn’t armed and my pockets were mostly empty, save for my commlink, and a pack of gum. I was chewing on one of those chunks of gum when I passed through the doorway sensor. It helped me look casual. EBE’s security was dual-level. There were a pair of uniformed security officers flanking the entrance, but the entrance itself was a weapons and ware scanner. It hummed over my body as I passed through. I know what it saw. I was a patchwork of cyberware cobbled together from years of service. Most of it was run of the mill stuff, but one piece was rather high end. The guards stepped forward and stopped me. One studied my hand carefully. I said, “I picked this up a few years ago. Not here, of course, but I expect that sort of quality from your people today.”

My cyberhand is deltaware. It’s loaded with razors and offers me a series of functions outside the range of normal operations. It’s useful in my line of work, especially given the mutable nature of its fingerprint readings. However, based on the scanner they knew the hand was fake. Still, I had the credentials to be here. I didn’t need the misdirection. I explained who I was and why I was there and the guards let me pass through into a large waiting room adorned with hyper-realistic AR imagery of cybernetic parts fusing with statuesque men and women.

I took a seat along the side wall opposite a young woman sitting with a much older woman that might have been her mother.

I know, I should be writing out the bloganovella. More of that to come tomorrow. I wanted to be meta today and talk about the craft of writing, pitfalls, and what I’ve learned about having multiple projects going at once. I think there are good and bad aspects of this, and I believe I’m expanding myself as a writer by trying things in this fashion.

So, I’m working on an NDA sourcebook, a bloganovella, and a sci-fi novel that feels more like a collection of short stories that are connected and swirl around a single point. All of these ideas are also in the same head as a growing fantasy series. In other words, I am doing a great many things at once. On the one side of the chart if one doesn’t pop that day I can turn to another and work on that. On the other I am not pushing myself as hard on any particular thing and forcing that level of creativity that comes when you go beyond what you think you know and what you think you can do. That aspect is extremely important to growth. I feel like my brain has shriveled over the years and lost that ability to hold so many ideas at once and juggle them and get them all out on paper.

No, this isn’t one of those: do it like this moments. I’m suggesting you try everything you can and figure out how much growth you can get from both ways of doing things until you find the balance that grows your mind in both how much you can do at once and how much you push yourself on each thing. I’m still seeking that growth balance.

The triangular Flatiron building is nearly 200 years old, and only 22 stories high, taking up more real estate space than it probably should in a city this expensive. It overlooks Madison square park, which is where I posted up, waiting for the hour of my appointment. New York City is awash with a mixture of old and new. The park is flanked by skyrakers belonging to one corporation or another and housing dozens of high-priced storefronts. One of these towers running along 5th avenue housed Executive Body Enhancements is flanked by clothing and lifestyle shops, offering a full block of personal transformation. Despite its remarkably small footprint, EBE also offers overnight and recovery suites in the upper level of the skyraker. I wouldn’t be able to get inside and get the layout until I signed in for my appointment in two hours, so I spent that time watching who went in and out, what kind of security came with them, and how much of their weaponry got inside.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Ms. Johnson said to watch out for her kid, but wasn’t very forthcoming beyond that. She was clearly worried about his getting through the surgery. She was also worried about the people watching after him. That last bit made me more nervous than the first. It meant I needed to watch the docs and and the security. As I watched the scene I started to come up with a clearer picture of who these clients were, and that led me to a clearer picture of how to act when I went inside. Choi would be on his way shortly, so I stood up from my spot in the park and casually walked towards the building.

Humanity is fragile. Metahumans get a bad shake of it. If you believe the newsfeeds then Orks and Trolls die early. Dwarves are, well, dwarves, and Elves might get to live forever. Truth be told, I’ve never seen an old elf, so maybe there is a thread of anecdotal truth to that one. Truth also be told, I have a fascination for elves that stops short of fetichism because of how prominently they are displayed in the fashion and beauty world. In other words, its not a fetish because the media says it is okay to salivate over hot elves.

But I digress. Humanity is fragile. We tend to fight against that fragility with the help of science and technology. We fill ourselves with treatments, ointments, biotech, cyberware, even magic as a way to make us healthy and extend our lives past the point we ought to be living. This desire to prolong ourselves feeds the business model of places like Executive Body Enhancements. EBE makes its money putting high dollar, high grade cyber and bio technology into people. It’s all there on the net. They pitch themselves as a lifestyle company and do a hell of a job of it. No less than 5 AA rated corps are presently bidding to buy them out. Of course, EBE says it isn’t selling, but everything in the 6th world is for sale.

Day 3 of not writing this 10 minute bloganovella. I’m experiencing wicked back pain, and I suppose that is my excuse. It is only that though, an excuse. I am at that point where I am not excited about moving forward in the narrative and I need to change something to make something happen in order to jump start my joy for the story. I like the character and he’s building steadily, but I’m not quite where I need to be with it in order to make this a fun write and read.

Of course, that is all up to me. I’m absolutely a non-believer of some external writers block. That stuff is in your head. It lives in my head on occasion, but I can beat it. My demon is consistency. I’m Snowpiercer, The Engine Eternal, but if I stop I don’t know that I can start for a really long time. To continue movie quotes, I wind up in the Sunken Place.

Okay. well… on to…

Some Thoughts:

1. Here’s how I define my birth family: My kids are with my birth mom and I remain convinced she is straight up indoctrinating them to hate me and feel like they should never be in my life. It be like that. Some family exists in antithesis to the idea of family and she is that family.

I gotta get back to the Bloganovella. Don’t have the mind for it at present, so I am just going to reflect on the day, the week, the writing, etc.

I’ll start at the end. The new novel is going better because I created a few characters to fill in the blanks. Seriously. That’s all it took. Story begins and ends with people. Story is what happens to people. I knew this going in, but I was so caught up in the research that it didn’t register until it was nearly too late. With that revelation, the story is back on track.

I’m also thinking about the world of Shadowrun and specifically NYC in that world. We haven’t done a good job with the Big Apple, so I am deep in thought about how to reverse the field on that one. I am extremely interested in making that happen. So, life has become about love and stories and stories about what you love. I love New York, so I need to give it that loving treatment.

This is kick back week. I want to spend at least an hour a day playing Minecraft and listening to my audiobook. I want to chill and relax and enjoy. I want to feel like the time I spend is spent enjoying life both when I’m with my partner and when I am alone. Audiobooks and crafting together brings me joy. In terms of the day, I played way more than an hour. I only have 5 hrs left in my book and I expect to finish it this week.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m learning to ignore negativity. I feel like the house goes through cycles of judgement and negativity from the young for reasons I cannot explain. No reason for the hate but it walks hand in hand with the judgement. They want to judge all the things they see and hear–especially when it comes to sports and anime. I suppose those are the things that make them enjoy sports and anime. Not me though. Not me at all.

I’m doing this from my phone. It’s one of the rare occasions when I’ve gotten to bed and realized I need to blog. I suppose there is a legitimate reason for it. I didn’t write today. No bloganovella, as you can see, and no novel work. I took a day to recharge. I probably need two or three but that isn’t happening.

instead I focused on grading work and listening to my audiobook and hanging with the family… mostly I did the latter. It was a good Sunday for it and I find it time well spent. Tomorrow I’ll be back to the grind of writing and exploring story and developing the characters to breathe life into the scenario. It is ultimately about the characters, and I have avoided really diving into the ones of this new novel as I script out the facts of what is real and project that forward into fiction. Still, I should’ve started with the people. I have a few but not enough. Heck the last three chapters had no people with names… it’ll be several more rewrites before this one is able to breathe.

I am still looking forward to going back to fantasy after this. I have a story to tell there as well but I am not quite ready to tell it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Giants may be about to get a lot better. I’ve been reading articles about different aspects of the offense and it is clear that they intend to use new WR Toney in the stick routes. This means that Engram can do what he does best—stretch the field. It dynamically changes how the offense works. I’m hopeful that they’ll get it right.