Month: July 2021

I jumped over the divider, quickly eyeing whatever I could turn into a weapon. There wasn’t much. This wasn’t the sort of place to leave scalpels lying around. I’m no mage, so I couldn’t bring a spell to bear either. It seemed, in that long moment, that I was absolutely the wrong person for the job. Why had this magical creature come to me in hopes of protecting Choi? What advantage did she think I had over serious security muscle? While I was working to figure it out and darted across the short space between counters. The nurses were watching Choi screaming and fighting and didn’t notice me until I grabbed a chair and tossed it at the closest guard. It connected with his face and he staggered backwards bloody and surprised. The other one turned towards me, his face betraying confusion and anger. Choi broke loose of his grip and as soon as the man spun back to deal with Choi I leaped over the counter and drove my elbow into his temple.

It was a working plan. Not a very good one. Not working too well either.

He dropped to his knees with a grunt and I rode down to the ground with him, wrapping myself around him the way I’d trained to do. I had his airflow cut off in a matter of seconds, and I would’ve taken him down too had his partner decided to go after Choi right then.

He didn’t.

He tore me off his partner and slammed me to the floor. A gun appeared in his hand so quickly that it must have teleported there. Or maybe I was a little disoriented from being smashed to the ground. The security man screamed, “Don’t you fracking move!”

I didn’t.

I’ll Bloganovella tomorrow.

Today I was reviewing some student work and thinking about the concept of Adam and Eve. It got me thinking about how whoever writes the accepted history makes the accepted history and beliefs. We continue to portray Adam and Eve and God in a particular way. We continue to view God as a man, though the idea of a singular creator defies gender and, if it is gender based would likely be female as the female is the one who would produce in our biological stream. Specifically, I kept coming back to the idea of how readily students–religious people in general–accept the idea of Adam and Eve being white. It speaks to a larger belief of white being the ‘first race’ which flies in the face of science and hurts the prospects of science and faith walking hand in hand.

If we are to view the bible as an embellishment of things that happened, following the idea that we can find these religious sites and trace them back to Africa and the Middle East, then Adam and Eve didn’t look like Scandinavians. Jesus didn’t look like a dude from Santa Monica Pier. None of these things fit, which is what I suppose some people call faith. I have a different sense of what faith is personally, and I feel faith is linked less to belief in the specific words than it is in the ideas and beliefs behind the words. That is why I get upset when we speak of the King James Bible as the word of God and forget to mention that it is in fact the King James edit and nobody wants to talk about who that dude was and what he did.

Ideas are contagious. Ideas are viral and spiral down and across the centuries becoming the very fabric of reality in which we dress our daily lives. We don’t look too closely at these things on a daily basis, just as we don’t tend to consider the mundanity of our daily routine, because looking too closely can upset that routine.

I’ve been walking a lot over the last few days–more than I’ve walked in years, probably. That’s a good thing. I feel better. I feel healthier and more capable. I feel like I’ve earned an evening’s fatigue and that I can truly enjoy each day the way it was meant. I don’t know if I am losing weight–that is a complex formulae to crack. I do know that this is a better version of me and it comes from spending quality time with my partner and not sinking into the habits so fully. It is recommended.

I’m not writing though. I haven’t been productive in the last few days, and that does need course correction. It is one of those weird balance things that has to be constantly reassessed. I’m in the process of doing just that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Great finals series. Giannis is playing amazing basketball, but his team is struggling on the road. I suspect Game 3 adjustments will be better than Game 2 adjustments. I give the Bucks the next two and we are back to Phoenix to play a 3 game series for all the marbles.
2. Speaking of which, Marble race is back. It’s really fun and well done. It is everything houseofbeys failed to be. I lacked the production value and energy and following when I created that one. I wish there were a way to bring back something similar, but I suppose that is not to be. The beys are mostly gone and the stadiums are definitely gone. The desire to have these fun seasons as such is there. If only there were something worthwhile!

Peter Choi did not like going under the knife.

I heard his screaming from the room where I was sitting with Dr. Haresh. I stood up immediately. He stood too, which told me that he was nearly as suprised as I was that a patient would be freaking out.

“Don’t worry about that.” He lied, “Sometimes patients can be extreme and become frightened easily by the prospect of surgical work.”

I didn’t respond. Instead I moved towards the door opening it quickly to see who was out there. The space outside of Dr. Haresh’s office could be described as an office bullpen. Four nurses worked inside of a space bordered on each end by a high arced divider that served double duty as a counter. I could see Peter Choi on the far side of the bullpen. Two men dressed in suits were struggling to hold him and calm him down. Peter was short and visibly elven. His skin tone held a bluish tint I’d never seen before. He was red faced and screaming profanities at the men, interspersed with bits of dialogue. I could make out “This is not what I agreed to” and “I won’t do it!”

That was enough for me to realize whatever I was being paid to stop was about to start.

Let me be clear. I am no hero. I’m not Jaron BlackStar on your Saturday night shadwrunner trid. I’m more like that guy in the commercials for the MCT Commlink. No, not the one choosing his phone. The other one. The guy off to the left who looks like he’s freaked out to be caught on the trid and immediately dips out. I prefer the kind of physical confrontations that I know are coming but the other guy doesn’t. So, this was exactly my kind of fight.

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.