#friends and all and any independence you have managed to cobble together so i can treat you like a child and yeall at you

[drev-the-procrastinator]

love waking up to my mom giving me an ultimatum and ordering that i have to give up my (admittedly expensive) apartment 1n 2 weeks and move back home for good. i had stuff to do today but i guess being gripped by dread and anxiety works too

[archetypal-archivist]

My Beloved, Penis

Fuck it. I was infected by Penis SMP by @demonboyhalo reblogging a bunch of it and the lack of consistent lore bugged me, so I somehow banged out 2000+ words of fanfic about the Penis SMP and how it got started. Lots of internet humor and classic MInecraft shenanigans in this one folks. *slaps roof* This baby can fit so much crack treated seriously, lol. This is also up on my AO3, Zazibine, if you would prefer to read it there.

_-_-_-_

It was never supposed to get so big. It was just an SMP with a couple friends of his he had met from the Hypixel discord server, where he had logged on simply to trash talk the absolute asshole who had dared to kill him last minute in bedwars, only to stumble upon said asshole- going under the name shittyfartbaby69 of all things- complaining to his girlfriend(?) Milfboss in the voice chat. Thirty minutes later of awkward hellos and the manliest of bitching at each other (with Milf chiming in every once in a while to roast them both), and PenisUnavailable had perhaps his first Minecraft friend in, like, forever.

Then Admiral_Anus had entered chat, bitching about his competitor in ABBA Mining and his bullshit bad luck and the whole process repeated. By the end of the day, Penis had three new friends, a private discord server for the four of them, and a promise to meet up with them in Hypixel next Sunday for the ultimate round of bedwars.

The game went spectacularly. Somehow, Admiral had some of the best bridging skills any of them had ever seen, and between Milfboss' terrifying Scottish screaming and pvp and Shitty with his clutch TNT skills, the three of them almost made up for Penis' awful depth perception. They still lost around forty percent of their games, but that was certainly better than Penis' own abysmal record, not helped with his habit of walking off the edge at inconvenient times.

And it was... fun. Usually bedwars was just him playing in his bedroom alone for an hour before he rage-quit and went back to survival for a bit before he died to fall damage and rage quit that too. But shittyfartbaby69 would crack dirty jokes that he'd never even heard of before, and Milfboss would roast him for looking it up on reddit and Shitty would cuss her out as he tried to prove that no, he was being original- all while Admiral would comment of them as if they were a sideshow display. Then Admiral_Anus would turn around and knock an enemy player off their island with some clever pvp and they would all hoot and holler and swear for a while before going back to their conversation, joking about forgetting the topic and starting up a running gag about something new.

And their accents, mmm. PenisUnavailable would never say it, but he really was as American as white Wonder bread and Milfboss' Scottish brogue, Admiral's smooth British snark, and Shitty's shrieking in Australian, well. Ear candy, you know? Even if he teased them mercilessly for pronouncing shit wrong, like "buhguhr". Ppffttt, it still cracked him up how Milfboss had threatened to murder him after the dictionary app on his phone had proved him right that it was actually "Bur-gur", even if Admiral kept insisting it was pronounced "bruh-girl".

Four hours and twenty-eight wins later, they had agreed to meet up the next day to play again, preferably at an hour that wasn't two am for Shitty again. (It was two am for Shitty again, although that was because they played for six that time.) Eventually, it just became a regular thing, them playing bedwars and competing at ABBA Caving- the one game Penis was unnaturally good at, much to Admiral's annoyance- to the point where they ran out of funny jokes about their competitors and the game itself and started talking personal anecdotes.

Milfboss owned a motorcycle. Admiral, entirely independently, also owned a motorcycle, as that was the only vehicle of reasonable speed and style that could actually handle the London traffic. Shitty couldn't drive at all, something about never passing his driving test. Admiral ate cheese at breakfast. Shitty liked to burn his garbage in a metal oil drum in his backyard. Milfboss posted herself singing covers of shit over on Youtube. And it wasn't just real life stuff either- their minecraft skills were also on the table for them all to collectively roast.

Admiral had never seen a single Minecraft Championship. Milfboss thought a flat cobblestone roof was entirely acceptable. Shitty's favorite block was the flint and steel. (That's not a block, sixty-niner. Shut up, is too. OoOh, real clever, 'shut up'! Uh, how about no? How about I fuckin' make you, ever think 'a that? No nono nonono, I'm on two hearts! I'm on two hearts, stop!) It made him curious, honestly. He wanted to see Milf's builds for himself, get revenge on Shitty, see if Admiral really could beat the Ender Dragon with a knockback stick like he said he could.

So he made a minecraft server. And they all joined it. (And stuck PenisUnavailable with the bill, suckaaahhh~!)

Predictably, it all went to Hell in a hand basket pretty quick.

See, it's one thing to play with nutters like his friends in a structured set up like Hypixel games, it's quite another to try and keep a semblance of order in an open world survival server like the Penis SMP. The first five minutes had been him trying to explain the rules and teleporting everyone back to spawn over and over as they tried to "escape the cops," ie, him. The next five minutes was Shitty scream-laughing "scatter!" and other John Mulany references down the mic as everyone ran off to start their houses. Penis, as he was still "god" at that moment, used admin commands to find the closest flower field biome to settle into, hoping for some- ha- peace and quiet.

Shitty, inevitably, ended up trying to settle in the fucking Nether. Like a mad lad, you know, as you do when you are apparently obsessed with all things lava. Milfboss ended up making an oak plank box of a "tree house" in a dark oak forest, while Admiral_Anus picked a nearby swamp for his starter base. Outside of that, they just kinda vibed in discord as they tried to fend off the mobs and get enough resources to try and build up houses that were a bit more than cobblestone towers and wood boxes- er, mostly. Milf kinda just fucked off to go mining, found a skeleton spawner by chance, and made a set of iron gear to stand in the dungeon room with to just chill and kill mobs for a while. She ended up with something like 45 levels and burned her only diamond on an enchanting table so she could buff the Hell out of her iron weapons and armor.

Penis, rather typically, he though to himself, put together a basic sheep farm and started work on a cute little cobblestone cave base. He managed to get a whole twenty by twenty block room done and fully furnished before he noticed the chat full of Shitty's death messages and went to go investigate. After nearly dying in lava twice, he managed to find Shitty's pile of items floating on a basalt pillar about a hundred blocks out from his... base?

It was a soccer ball. Shitty's base was a perfect fucking spherical soccer ball made up of quartz blocks and basalt. Just. What. The Fuck??? Then out popped shittyfartbaby69 and it was PenisUnavailable's turn to misjudge a jump and plummet right into lava. Fifteen minutes and much shrieking later about losing his diamond pick, and it turns out that Shitty didn't really care about his lost items, as he really only had four gold picks, a stack of dark oak, two furnaces, a bucket, and thirteen cooked mutton to his name. Not even a bed, the fucker. He just ran back to his portal from spawn every time he just burned to death, taking the chance to gather resources on the way back each time.

And no, he wasn't following a tutorial for his "football" base. Jerk. (Although Penis did have to admire his determination...)

The day ended on Milfboss, Shitty, and Penis reconvening back at spawn to try and hunt down Admiral_Anus, who they found later having built a thirty block tall castle of all things. Out of cobble stone and the windows weren't quite even, but still, it was pretty impressive. And of course, when presented with a castle, what can what do but siege it? So they lay siege to the castle and Milfboss curb-stomped Admiral in pvp and laid claim to the throne, crowning herself queen before summarily throwing the rest of them out. It was a good day.

And the day after was a good day. They played dodge ball crossed with hide and seek in forest around Penis' house with arrows supplied by Milfboss. And the day after that, too, where they had a building competition using nothing but cobble stone, specifically to spite Milfboss, who had kicked all of their asses the day before. In fact, three wonderful weeks passed of doing normal Minecraft shit and being friends passed by, and every bit of it was great fun.

And then came the fucking role play.

PenisUnavailable would have liked to preface that with he only participated under duress, but really, Milfboss had been queen for too long and nobody wanted to risk TNT cannoning any of Shitty's nice builds, so. Well, the castle was better than his drafty cave, alright? It was cold and wet and didn't have a proper door because aesthetic (and because it usually took him several tries to work an iron pressure plate door), so there were far too many mobs wandering in at night and spawn camping him. He and Shitty had almost the same number of deaths and Shitty lived in the fucking Nether.

So yeah. Castle time, baby! Daddy needs a new home! And Admiral obviously wasn't happy living out of Milf's awful tree house hot box where they all did drugs together on day fifteen and it still smelled of burnt wheat seeds, aka "weed." It was only obvious that they teamed up to try and take back the castle.

The battle itself didn't exactly go great, but it wasn't exactly horrible either. A lot of shouting shit at each other for fifteen minutes, the majority of which he wouldn't remember until it was too late- something about server unity?- only to find out that it wasn't two on one girl boss, it was two on a girl boss and her "baked out of his mind" henchman, also known as Shitty in a squirrel furry skin.

The ears man. Those stupid (cute) ears.

And then they were running for their lives because Milf had somehow gotten her hands on a flame bow with infinity enchants.

It all culminated in a dramatic stand-off in front of Shitty's Nether Soccer ball, Milf on one side, diamond axe in hand, not a bit of armor on because of an unfortunate run in with lava, Penis and Admiral on the other, picks in hand, threatening to tear down shittyfartbaby69's base. Shitty wasn't online just then to comment, but they could all hear him click-clacking away on his keyboard so he obviously hadn't gone to sleep just yet like he said he had. At an impasse, and unable to justify letting her teammate's home be used as collateral, Milfboss stood down and gave up her "crown," an enchanted golden Prot IV helmet she had gotten off a skeleton from her spawner.

Then the great betrayal, the beginning of the end. Shitty came back online. 96-Cam joined the game, not that they noticed in the chaos. Admiral-Anus cackled wildly and PMed Milfboss the message that Shitty had sent him, giving Team Gay Sex permission to tear down his base in the name of winning the war if it came down to it- making Milf's sacrifice worthless in the end. Penis gave another dramatic speech, circling around Shitty, who was acting weirdly apologetic to Milf about betraying her and still wearing that fucking squirrel furry skin.

"You see Milf, there's one thing more powerful than a girl boss, and when it comes down to wars between kingdoms, there's something you need to remember!" Penis got out his golden ax, helpfully labeled 'Piss Off'.  "And that's a dilf with something to lose!" An enderpearl in his off hand and he teleported behind Milf, catching on fire from the lava but still landing the last hit needed to finish her off. She puffed into a cloud of EXP, swearing up a storm, and then Admiral and Penis turned their gaze to the cheering Shitty.

"AAAAAYYY, LET'S GO DADDY!" the squirrel man screeched, wild laughter shorting out the discord voice chat, making him go quiet in patches when the volume overloaded the client. Behind him, Admiral quietly started building a chair out of birch fence posts and slabs.

"Not so fast, shit-ty-fart-baaaaa-byyyyy~, this isn't quite over yet!" Penis fucking chirped, barely holding back his laughter. "You're still a fucking traitor and we can't have you backstabbing us too. Get in the chair for Daddy, okay baby?"

Admiral finished the chair just in time for Shitty to turn around and see the completed monstrosity, shrieking dying off immediately. "Oh screw you, that's just mean. The Hell man? That's not a chair, that's illegal. If you want an electric chair or some shit, just ask. That's just sad." Mentally shrugging, Admiral lit up his work with a flint and steel while Penis pillared up above where Shitty was building an electric chair out of iron bars and trap doors. Admiral nudged Shitty into the chair, Penis dumped a bucket of lava over the edge of the pillar so it flowed over him, and Shitty started giving a soliloquy about how betrayal and how his love for his "Daddy" still "burned strong".

Like his dick. Apparently.

By the time the lava finally hit the floor and burned Shitty to death, Penis was crying with laughter, shrieking down the mike and banging on the desk hard enough to make him forget that his was still on the mouse, making him mine the block under him with the bucket and sending him hurtling to his fiery death too.

It was a good day... almost.

Because, as it turned out, shittyfartbaby69 was actually a tiktokker of some renown and his cam account had record everything. And he had uploaded the bit to tiktok, as you do, where it went viral, where it wasn't supposed to. And Milfboss, who had recently been uploading covers of herself singing old classic Minecraft songs, had attracted the Minecraft fandom kids to her twitter, where she had gone to post her rage about the events of her dethroning and Shitty's execution.

Penis SMP had gotten on. Fucking. Trending. And now everyone was demanding the full clip, their names, their Twitch streamer handles, their characters' backstories.

The masses wanted lore.

Penis watched in disbelief, head in his hands and mouth agape as sugar crash played over a clip of him killing Milf on loop.

They were making memes.

...Oh god. They were screwed.

[this-is-a-love-story-fleabag]

Fork you, then (9/10)

Fleabag saves her friend Boo’s life and earns a spot in the Good Place, but is everything here really so perfect? And what’s up with the hot priest next door? 2282 words. Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Also on ao3.

I spend longer than I'm proud of in front of the mirror making sure that my outfit says "I'm totally fine with whatever happens next because I am a chic, independent woman who is capable of dealing with rejection and not at all liable to start ugly crying." Only a red sundress can say this.

I head over to rap on his front door and what greets me as he opens the door takes my breath away - he's wearing his usual neatly pressed (delightfully form-fitting) black trousers, and shiny black shoes - but his top half is clad in a loose, open-necked shirt.

"You're not wearing your special priesty collar thing," I say in lieu of a greeting.

"Hello," he responds. "No, I'm not." He looks relaxed. Oh god, maybe he's winning at inner peace. Bastard.

I'm pretty sure I am nailing inner peace. I am a meditation machine, I've been eating salad like a motherfucker, and I have entirely sworn off casual sex, although that hasn't really had to be a conscious choice given that nobody in this godforsaken paradise will fuck me. It's fine. I don't do that any more.

I did have a little snog with my priest last night, but then we had to run and corral a fucking unicorn, which ruined the mood a bit, and we haven't really talked about it. I got to ride on the unicorn's back all the way home, which was cool right up until it bit me. It turns out, I hate unicorns.

We agreed to meet for brunch today after we'd managed to wrangle that horrid creature back into Eleanor's stable and then staggered back to our separate beds, bruised and grubby.

I spend longer than I'm proud of in front of the mirror making sure that my outfit says "I'm totally fine with whatever happens next because I am a chic, independent woman who is capable of dealing with rejection and not at all liable to start ugly crying." Only a red sundress can say this.

I head over to rap on his front door and what greets me as he opens the door takes my breath away - he's wearing his usual neatly pressed (delightfully form-fitting) black trousers, and shiny black shoes - but his top half is clad in a loose, open-necked shirt.

"You're not wearing your special priesty collar thing," I say in lieu of a greeting.

"Hello," he responds. "No, I'm not." He looks relaxed. Oh god, maybe he's winning at inner peace. Bastard.

"Come on in," he continues, ushering me through to his kitchen. The door to his bedroom is open and I can see that the sheets on the bed are mussed. I know for a fact that they weren't like that yesterday because I've been systematically sneaking all of the best sex toys out of his cupboards when he isn't looking.

He motions for me to sit down at the kitchen table, where there's a stack of waffles and bacon waiting, then sits down next to me and rests his hand on my knee.

"What's wrong with you?" I ask. "Did I solve all your hang-ups with my magic lips?"

"No," he laughs.

"Was it the unicorn? Did it poop on you?"

"You know it forking pooped on me, you were laughing your head off."

"Did the magical unicorn poop solve all your hang-ups?"

He makes a noise that is part-way between fond and exasperated. "Would you please take this seriously for a minute?"

"That's not really my strong suit."

He gives me a look.

"Fine, what?"

He takes my hand and looks me in the eyes. "I've just realised that for the first time since I've been here, I've finally started to feel hopeful again." His thumb traces over mine, warm skin brushing over warm skin. "I think that has... a lot to do with you."

I don't really know what to say so I shove half a waffle in my mouth.

"You've never really tried to follow half of the rules that I've spent so much time living by. You're so passionate and loving and uninhibited, and none of that has stopped you from being a good person." Wrong. "So maybe I don't need the rules or the collar, maybe I can let myself..."

I manage to swallow and cut him off before he can say anything else. "I am not a good person." Tears are pricking at the corners of my eyes and the guilt is gripping my heart like a vice.

The softness in his gaze is unbearable. "I know that you are."

"That is such bullshirt. You don't know what I've done."

"So tell me."

"I forked my best friend's boyfriend and then she tried to walk into forking traffic," I spit. "I lived my life all wrong."

He holds my hand tighter and doesn't drop his gaze. "Everybody makes mistakes."

"Oh, fork off."

"Thinking of yourself as a good person terrifies you, doesn't it?"

"It doesn't terrify me, I'm just not one."

"You're impressive," he says simply, with so much sincerity that for a second I almost believe him. He raises our joined hands to his lips and drops a kiss onto my fingers.

"Tell me about Boo," he says gently.

I sniff, a few tears having forced their way out of my eyes, and let out a breathless laugh. "I think she might have been my favourite person ever."

"How did she feel about that?"

"You can't just tell people how you feel, are you insane?"

He nods. "Right, good point, sorry." I laugh wetly. Sarcastic bastard.

"I should have told her."

"Who knows, maybe she'll end up here too. Maybe you can still tell her."

"Probably. She was always the best one out of the two of us. " I reflect for a second. "I keep meaning to ask if my mum's here. She died a while ago."

"Why haven't you?"

"I just..."

"What?"

"What if she doesn't want to see me?"

"She will," he says with certainty.

"I'm not ready to find out."

"I understand," he says, bumping me with his shoulder. "Now eat your waffles before they go soggy."

To my surprise, heaven is a terrible place to engage in a courtship.

After we finish breakfast, he cradles my face with his maple syrup-sticky fingers and kisses me fiercely, crowding me up against the cabinets. I push him backwards until he's lying on his back on the kitchen table and I'm looming over him on all fours, and he's just working his hands up the length of my thighs and rucking up the hem of my skirt when Michael knocks on the window.

"What?" snaps the priest, unusually irritated - which is quite a compliment, really.

"Oh, I'm so sorry to intrude," frets Michael, wringing his hands. "There's been an infestation of interdimensional termites and you need to evacuate the building right now before it collapses." On cue, with a creak, a ceiling beam comes crashing down, inches from my head.

One afternoon as we're camped out on my sofa arguing about Doctor Who, the pesky termites having been dealt with somehow, he pulls me onto his lap and we're just getting into a very promising make-out session when Tahani pounces, sweeping in through the door with a wicker basket. She pulls tall cake stands and the makings for an entire high tea out of the improbably small space, like Mary Poppins' handbag or possibly the TARDIS, then proceeds to ply us with scones, tiny sandwiches, and tedious conversation for the entire afternoon.

A few days afterwards, after a lot of discussion and negotiation, the priest is strapping my wrists into a set of padded leather cuffs and fastening me securely to the posts of his ridiculous bed. I'm half-naked already, my tits exposed through the open buttons of my shirt (his shirt, I stole it), my knickers are most of the way off, and he's got his teeth sunk into the side of my neck, when Jianyu opens the door and walks calmly into the room.

"What the fork?" I ask, trying to shoo him away with my mind. Jianyu just bows deeply and settles cross-legged in a corner, then begins to silently meditate while staring directly at us. Honestly, I would be fine with carrying on, but the priest gets a little self-conscious, so he just unshackles me quietly and we leave the room. Total clit-block.

When Chidi interrupts us, we aren't even doing anything sexy - we put together a nice picnic basket and are comfortably ensconced on a large tartan blanket next to one of Tahani's enormous fountains, sharing a quiche and talking about everything and nothing. I'm staring into his gorgeous brown eyes like a complete sap as he enthuses about Charles Dickens and it's one of those perfect moments when it seems like you're the only people in the world.

"Hey, you two," says Chidi, plopping himself down onto the blanket and proving me wrong. "I'm so glad I ran into you, I have all these new books I want to go over with someone!" I groan and bury my head in the priest's lap and bid goodbye to our romantic afternoon.

A week or so later, we stay up late for a very nice dinner at the clam chowder brasserie, and walk home hand-in-hand through the winding, cobbled streets. I end up pinned into the alcove just inside my front door, being consensually mauled by my neighbour, who's sucking little bruises into my collarbone and pressing his knee in between my thighs in just the right way...

At this moment, Eleanor bursts in the door to tell us that the unicorn is giving birth and she needs us on hand to cut the umbilical cord.

Later, we fall asleep as soon as we hit the sheets, after taking off our elbow-length plastic gloves and showering off the amniotic glitter that somehow got into every crevice of our bodies. We wake up achy and exhausted, and he buries his face in my neck and groans.

"I wish there was some way we could just be alone for 24 hours," he murmurs into my skin.

I have an idea. "Janet? Is there somewhere that we can go that's not here?"

We alight the train in a huge empty field and trek for what seems like an eternity in the burning sunshine. The priest is fidgeting and rubbing the back of his neck - his skin is probably already starting to burn, so I bump him with my shoulder and flop my hat over his head. The big sunflower on the brim quite suits him, actually.

Finally, we come across a neat little house surrounded by flowers, and rap on the door. It's opened by a wild-looking man in a tuxedo, holding a martini glass full of fridge magnets.

"Good Derek," he says politely. "How may I Derek you today?"

"Uh-" I begin.

"Derek, go and stand in the closet and be quiet," says a sharp voice. A walking set of shoulder pads comes to the door and smiles at us insincerely. Derek stomps away, muttering "Maximum Derek" to himself, over and over.

"Is he OK?" asks the priest, peering around the corner.

"No, his brain is wrong and he has a musical instrument for a penis."

"Is that a euphemism?" I ask. I knew a guy like that once.

"No," she says flatly. "How can I help you fine people? Come right on in. Do you like cocaine?"

"So you're telling me, you're here on some kind of fucked-up honeymoon?"

"I can swear here?" gasps the priest. "Thank fuck."

"Too fucking right," I agree, and he cups my face and kisses me. Mindy makes retching sounds in the background, but she's coked up to her eyeballs at this point so I don't think much of it.

"We just need to borrow your spare room for a day," I say, as the priest rubs little circles over the base of my skull with his thumb. "Or maybe two days."

"I don't know why they keep interrupting us," he pouts. I want to bite his lip. "We're supposed to be having a good time."

"Oh my God," she drawls, sounding unbelievably bored, "it's as though you're not even in the Good Place at all."

We turn to her, wide-eyed and gaping.

"Oh please," she scoffs. "You would have figured it out ages ago if you weren't too busy-" She makes an obscene, but very accurate, hand gesture. "I mean, I looked it up, and there have been literally no Catholic priests who have made it into the Good Place. Ever."

"I wasn't the bad kind of priest," he mumbles, but my mind is too busy whirring to pay attention.

"We're being tortured," I say slowly. "That makes a lot more sense." We're just digesting this information when there's a knock on the door. Mindy frowns and strides over to open it.

"Hi," says Janet cheerily, waving at us. "I have a message for you from Eleanor - she says it's time for you to find out the truth. Please come with me."

Derek appears, walking backwards out of the bedroom ."Well, well, well," he announces. "Janet, Janet, Janet, Janet. Janet, Janet, Janet, Janet Janet."

"Go away, Derek," says Janet firmly. "I do not want to talk to you."

"Janet Janet Janet," he continues.

"Leave."

He deflates. "OK, Mommy-ex-girlfriend," he says, sounding like a lost little boy. "Take this, to remember me by." He hands her the glass full of magnets, which she grabs from him and stalks off towards the train station.

"We could just stay here and fuck forever," I say to the priest. I'm only 50% serious.

"Come on," he says, jerking his head towards the door and giving me one of his crooked smiles. After saying our goodbyes to Mindy, we trail reluctantly behind Janet and take a seat on the train. I toy idly with two of the magnets out of the martini glass.

"I don't want this all to end," I say quietly.

"Me neither," he says, taking my hand.

The train jolts as it rounds a corner and abruptly the magnets fly out of my grip and adhere firmly to Janet's forehead. She twitches and jerks, pulling levers on the control panel at random.

We watch in horror as the train speeds up and misses the next station entirely, careening out of control down the tracks.

[mathematicianadda]

The telescope

The telescope offered a shortcut to stardom for Galileo. We offer some fun cynical twists on the standard story.

Transcript

The year is 1609. What a time to be alive. In London you can go to the theatre and catch the fresh new play Macbeth. In Amsterdam you can make a quick buck trading in stocks—a brand new invention. Science is on fire as well. Kepler’s Astronomia Nova is published this very year—an exquisite masterpiece demonstrating that planets move in elliptical orbits among other things. Quite clearly the single greatest scientific work since the time of Archimedes.

So many exciting things happening. How will you keep up with this whirlwind of innovations and fascinating developments? Perhaps with the aid of another newfangled invention: the newspaper. The first of which comes out right this year, promising in its title to cover for its German readers all “gedenckwürdigen Historien”—thoughtworthy events. Truly it is a time of the new. The winds of change are blowing throughout Europe. Thoughtworthy events are everywhere you look.

What about our friend Galileo? What is he up to at this time? You won’t find him in any of those chronicles of thoughtworthy events. Galileo is already well into his middle age. He is a frail man of 45, not infrequently bedridden with rheumatic or arthritic pains. He is stuck teaching basic geometry for a pittance of a salary in some backwater town. Had Galileo died from his many ailments in this year, 1609, he would have been all but forgotten today. He would have been an insignificant footnote in the history of science, no more memorable than a hundred of his contemporaries. It has often been said that mathematics is a young man’s game. Newton had his annus mirabilis in his early twenties—”the prime of my age for invention,” as he later said. Kepler was the same age when he finished his first masterpiece, the Mysterium Cosmographicum of 1596. Galileo was already nearly twice this age, and he had nothing to show for it but some confused piles of notes of highly dubious value. In short, as a mathematician the ageing Galileo had proved little except his own mediocrity.

It is this middle-aged, run-of-the-mill nobody that first hears of a new invention: the telescope. Now here was his chance at last. He only had to point this contraption to the skies and record what he saw. No need anymore for mathematical talent or painstaking scientific investigations. For twenty years Galileo had tried and failed to gain scientific fame the hard way, but now a bounty of it lay ripe for the plunder. All you needed was eyes and being first.

The mysterious new “optical tube for seeing things close,” as it was called, was the talk of the town at the time. Galileo first hears about it in July 1609. A week or two later a traveller offered one for sale in Padua and Venice at an outrageous price—about twice Galileo’s yearly salary. This enterprising salesman found no takers for his offer. But the sense of opportunity remained in the air. And it was an opportunity tailor-made for Galileo: finally a path to scientific fame that required only handiwork and none of that tiresome thinking in which he was so deficient.

The design of telescopes was still a trade secret among the Dutch spectacle-makers who had stumbled upon the discovery. But acting fast was of the essence. Making a basic telescope is not rocket science. Soon many people figured out how to make their own. “It took no special talent or unique inventiveness to come up with the idea that combining two different lenses … would create a device allowing people to see faraway objects enlarged.” Reading glasses and magnifying glasses were already in common use: they obviously made text and other things appear bigger. They were used for thread count in the cloth business for example. So it was not a far-fetched idea to lenses them to magnify more distant objects as well. And the external shape of the telescopes people reported seeing suggested that at least two lenses were combined in a long cylinder. It didn’t take a genius, therefore, to soon strike upon the simple recipe Galileo found: take one convex and one concave lens and stick them in a tube, and look through the concave end. That’s it. No theoretical knowledge of optics played any part in this; it was purely a matter of hands-on craftsmanship and trial-and-error. As Galileo himself basically admitted.

About a month after first hearing of the telescope, Galileo has managed to build his own, with 8 times magnification. A bit later, maybe 12 times magnification, eventually 16 or so. If you go to a modern toy store or sports good store and but whatever cheapest binoculars they have, that will have the same magnification as a Galilean telescope basically. So if you have an old pair of field binoculars lying around, you basically have a Galilean telescope. So dust it off, why don’t you, and follow along with your own observations as we describe what Galileo found.

In any case, Galileo’s first goal is to leverage the telescope into a more lucrative appointment for himself. He gives demonstrations to various important dignitaries—”to the infinite amazement of all,” according to himself. So on the basis of this Galileo enters multiple negotiations about improved career prospects. Between hands-on optical trials and lens grinding, these showmanship demonstrations, shrewd self-marketing and hyperbole about how “infinitely amazed” everyone is by him, Galileo must have had a busy couple of months indeed. And on top of this marketing campaign and juggling potential job offers, his regular teaching duties were just starting again in the fall.

So we can easily understand why, in these hectic days, the scientific importance of the new instrument for astronomy was not realised right away. At first neither Galileo nor anyone else thought of the telescope as primarily an astronomical instrument. Galileo instead tried to market it as “a thing of inestimable value in all business and every undertaking at sea or on land,” such as spotting a ship early on the horizon. But the moon does make an obvious object of observation, especially at night when there is little else to look at. Perhaps indeed moon observations were part of Galileo’s sales pitch routine more or less from the outset, though as a gimmick rather than science.

But this was soon to change. In the dark of winter, the black night sky is less bashful with its secrets than in summer. It monopolises the visible world from dinner to breakfast; it seems so eager to be seen that it would be rude not to look. In January, Galileo takes up the invitation and spots moons around Jupiter. Yikes! Other planets have moons?! This changes everything. Suddenly it is clear that the telescope is the key to a revolution in astronomy. Eternal scientific fame is there for the taking for whoever is the first to plant his flag on the shores of this terra incognita.

For the next two months Galileo goes on a frenzied race against the clock. He writes during the day and raids of the heavens for one precious secret after another at night. In early March he has cobbled together enough to claim the main pearls of the heavens for himself. He rushes his little booklet into print with the greatest haste: the last observation entry is dated March 2, and only ten days later the book is coming off the presses. Remarkable. It’s a turnaround time modern academic publishers can only dream of, even though they do not have to work with hand-set metal type and copper engravings for the illustrations.

It was a race against the clock and Galileo won. “I thank God from the bottom of my heart that he has pleased to make me the sole initial observer of so many astounding things, concealed for all the ages.” So wrote Galileo, and his palpable relief is fully justified. Little more than dumb luck—or, as he would have it, the grace of God—separated Galileo from numerous other telescopic pioneers who also produced telescopes and made the same discoveries independently of Galileo. For example, Simon Marius in Germany who discovered the moons of Jupiter one single day later than Galileo. As one historian observes, “a delay of only three or four months would have set [Galileo] behind several of his rivals and undercut his claim to priority regarding several key discoveries with the telescope.” Perhaps it was not the grace of God, but Galileo’s desperation, born of decades of impotence as a mathematician, that drove him to publish first. Being incapable of making any contribution to the mathematical side of science and astronomy, Galileo needed and craved this shortcut to stardom more than anyone else.

Accordingly, Galileo greedily sought to milk every last drop of fame he could from the telescope. “I do not wish to show the proper method of making them to anyone”; rather “I hope to win some fame.” Those are Galileo’s own words. His competitors quickly realised that, as one contemporary says, “we must resign ourselves to obtaining the invention without [Galileo’s] help.” Still six years after his booklet of discoveries, people who thought science should be a shared and egalitarian enterprise were rightly upset by Galileo’s selfish quest for personal glory. One writes as follow to Galileo: “How long will you keep us on the tenterhooks? You promised in your Sidereal Message to let us know how to make a telescope so that we could see all the things that are invisible to the naked eye, and you haven’t done it to the present day.”

Meanwhile Galileo never missed a chance to mock stuffy Aristotelian professors for thinking “that truth is to be discovered, not in the world or in nature, but by comparing texts”, Galileo wrote in scorn, adding that “I use their own words.” His opponents themselves had stated that “comparing texts” was their methodology. But if Galileo genuinely wanted them to turn to nature he could have shared his techniques for telescope construction. In truth it served his own interests very well that these people were left with no choice but “comparing texts” while he claimed the novelties of the heavens for himself.

Let’s look at Galileo’s professional situation in a bit more detail. You may have heard that Galileo was a “Professor of Mathematics.” Indeed he was, for twenty years. But we must not let the title fool us. The position had nothing to do with the research frontier in the field. In modern terms Galileo’s position was more comparable to that of high school teacher. Galileo taught very basic and practical courses. His lectures were unoriginal and usually cribbed from standard sources. His mathematical lectures went no further than elementary Euclidean geometry. He also had to teach a basic astronomy course “mainly for medical students, who had to be able to cast horoscopes.” They “needed it to determine when [and when] not to bleed a patient” and the like. Perhaps Galileo didn’t mind, for he seems to have been quite open to astrology judging by the fact that he cast horoscopes for his own family members and friends without renumeration. Alas, he did not enjoy much success as an astrologer. Here’s a quote from The Cambridge Companion to Galileo: “In 1609, Galileo … cast a horoscope for the Grand Duke Ferdinand I, foretelling a long and happy life. The Duke died a few months later.” That’s great, isn’t it? Such a nice bit of deadpan there by The Cambridge Companion.

Galileo was eager to get out of his lowly university post. Now with the telescope he was in a decent negotiating position. After much scheming he resigned from the university and took up a court appointment. You would rather work for some rich guy, a patron, than at a university. That was how it went at the time. Some decades later Leibniz for example did the same thing. He could easily have taken a university job but who wants to be an academic when you can be the resident scholar in the gilded halls of some prince?

So Galileo got his wish. His new appointment freed him from teaching duties and boosted his finances. But Galileo also had an additional demand. Here is what he says:

“I desire that in addition to the title of mathematician His Highness will annex that of philosopher; for I may claim to have studied more years in philosophy than months in pure mathematics.”

This is traditionally taken as a request for a kind of promotion: in addition to being a great mathematician, Galileo also wanted recognition in philosophy, which in some circles was considered more prestigious and in any case included what today is called science (then “natural philosophy”). But I think a more literal reading of Galileo’s request is in order. Galileo is not only declaring himself a philosopher; he is also confessing his ignorance in mathematics. Taken literally, his statement that he has spent “more years in philosophy than months in mathematics” implies that he could not have spent more than two or three years at most on mathematics—which indeed sounds about right considering his documented mediocrity in this field.

Anyway, back to the telescope. So Galileo had some success with it clearly, but not everyone was convinced.

Some believed “the telescope carries spectres to the eyes and deludes the mind with various images … bewitched and deformed.” Perhaps these peculiar “Dutch glasses” were but a cousin of the gypsy soothsayer’s crystal ball? The “transmigration into heaven, even whil’st we remain here upon earth in the flesh,” as Robert Hooke put it, may indeed seem like so much black magic. Add to this the very numerous imperfections of early telescopes, which often made it very difficult even for sympathetic friends to confirm observations, not to mention gave ample ammunition to outright sceptics.

Indeed, we find Galileo on the defensive right from the outset, just a few pages into his first booklet. Seen through the telescope, the moon appeared to have enormous mountains and craters—a big deal, allegedly one of “Galileo’s” monumental discoveries. This was based on shadow effects. Looking at the moon when it’s half full, you see that the surface is uneven because of the shadows cast by mountains and craters. But already there are big problems. The boundary of the moon was still perfectly smooth. A crazy inconsistency. How can there be big mountains in the middle of the moon, but none along the edge? It doesn’t make any sense, yet that’s what it looked like.

Here are Galileo’s own words in the Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, his famous booklet and first claim to fame. “I am told that many have serious reservations on this point”: for if the surface of the moon is “full of … countless bumps and depressions,” then “why is the whole periphery of the full Moon not seen to be uneven, rough and sinuous?” Galileo replies that this is because the Moon has an atmosphere, which “stop[s] our sight from penetrating to the actual body of the Moon” at the edge only, since there “our visual rays cut it obliquely.” So when we look at the edge of the moon our line of sight spends more time passing through the atmosphere of the moon and that’s why it’s blurred. Hence it is “obvious,” says Galileo, that “not only the Earth but the Moon also is surrounded by a vaporous sphere.” This is of course completely wrong.

So already we see that there were serious problems with the telescope. It’s not as simple as saying: the telescope showed everyone new facts. What was a fact and what was an inference or an illusion? Not a trivial question, and as we see Galileo himself got it wrong right off the bat.

And there’s plenty more where that came from. Another puzzling fact was that the planets were magnified by the telescope, but not the stars. The stars remained the same point-sized light spots no matter what the strength the telescope. Some even mistook this for a “law that the enlargement appears less and less the farther away [the observed objects] are removed from the eye.” Galileo tried to explain these things, but once again he gets it completely wrong. A correct explanation was given in 1665, it’s a technical optics thing.

Clearly, then, in light of all these challenges to the reliability and consistency of the telescope, it was important to understand its basis in theoretical optics. That is why, presumably, Galileo felt obliged to swear at the outset, in the Sidereus Nuncius, that “on some other occasion we shall explain the entire theory of this instrument.” To those aware of his mathematical shortcomings, it will come as no surprise that Galileo never delivered on this promise. Kepler—a competent mathematician—took up the task instead, and in the process came up with a fundamentally new telescope design better than that of Galileo. That’s in Kepler’s Dioptrice of 1611. Kepler’s telescope uses two convex lenses instead of Galileo’s pair of one convex and one concave lens. According to Galileo, Kepler’s work was, in his own words, “so obscure that it would seem that the author did not understand it himself.” A modern scholar comments that “this is a curious statement since the Dioptrice, unlike other works by Kepler, is remarkably straightforward.” Apparently still not straightforward enough for a simpleton like Galileo, however. Indeed, Galileo’s naive conception of optics was still mired in the old notion that seeing involved rays of sight spreading outward from the eye rather than conversely. He repeatedly gave statements to this effect.

Regarding the mountains on the moon, let’s look a bit more at the significance of that, which has often been overstated. So Galileo’s famous discovery is, as he puts it, that “The moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the earth’s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.” Now, it is all too easy to cast this report by Galileo as a revolutionary discovery. The “Aristotelian” worldview rested on a sharp division between the sublunar and heavenly realm. Our pedestrian world is one of constant change—a bustling soup of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) mixing and matching in fleeting configurations. The heavens, by contrast, were a pristine realm of perfection and immutability, governed by its very own fifth element entirely different from the physical stuff of our everyday world. If we are predisposed to view Galileo as the father of modern science, a pleasing narrative readily suggests itself: With his revolutionary discovery of mountains on the moon, Galileo disproved what “everybody” believed. Indeed this is a standard story peddled by many scholars. Let me quote two of them.

“Every educated person in the sixteenth century took as well-established fact … that the Moon was a very different sort of place from the Earth. … The lunar surface, according to the common wisdom, was supposed to be as smooth as the shaven head of a monk.”

Here’s another quote to the same effect. This one is from a Harvard University Press book from 2015, “Galileo’s Telescope”, so this stuff is mainsteam modern scholarship. Here is the quote:

“In those years virtually no one questioned the ontological difference between heaven and earth. … The difference between Earth and the heavenly bodies was an absolute truth for astrologers and astronomers, theologians and philosophers of every ilk and school. … If the Moon turned out to be covered with mountains, just like Earth, a millenary representation of the sky would be shattered.”

So in other words, Galileo sent an entire worldview crashing down by using data and hard facts to expose its prejudices.

The problem with this narrative lies in one word: “everybody.” The Aristotelian worldview is not what “everybody” believed. It is what one particular sect of philosophers believed. As ever, Galileo’s claim to fame rests on conflating the two. If we compare Galileo to this sect of fools—as Galileo wants us to do—then indeed he comes out looking pretty good. Members of this sect did indeed try to deny the mountainous character of the moon in back-pedalling desperation. For instance by arbitrarily postulating that the mountains were not on the surface of the moon at all but rather enclosed in a perfectly round, clear crystal ball. So that way the surface was smooth after all, even though there were shadows and stuff, because the shadows were in the interior of this glass sphere. If we mistake this kind of rubbish for the state of science of the day, then indeed Galileo will appear a great revolutionary hero.

But to anyone outside of that particular sect blinded by dogma, the idea of a mountainous moon had been perfectly natural for thousands of years. It is obvious to anyone who has ever looked at the moon that its surface is far from uniform. Clearly it has dark spots and light spots. If one wanted to maintain the Aristotelian theory one could try to argue, as many people indeed did, that this is perhaps some kind of marbling effect. The moon is still perfectly spherical, only it has some differential colouration like a smooth piece of marble. Or maybe it’s a reflection thing: perhaps the moon is so polished that it is reflective like a mirror. So the light and dark areas are not actual irregularities in the moon itself but just the mirror image of oceans and stuff on earth.

Whatever one thinks of the plausibility of such arguments, they are certainly defensive in nature: the Aristotelian theory is on the back foot trying to explain away even the most rudimentary phenomena that any child is familiar with. The idea of an irregular moon is an obvious and natural alternative explanation. Which is why we find for instance in Plutarch, a millennium and a half before Galileo, the suggestion that “the Moon is very uneven and rugged.” That’s a literal quote, from antiquity.

If we look to actual scientists and mathematically competent people instead of Aristotelian fools, we find that “Galileo’s” discovery of mountains on the moon was already accepted as fact long before. Kepler had already, and I quote him, “deduced that the body of the moon is dense … and with a rough surface,” or in other words the moon is “the kind of body that the earth is, uneven and mountainous.” Those are quotes from a 1604 work by Kepler. Before the telescope.

Kepler also points out that this was also the opinion of his teacher Maestlin before him, who, according to Kepler, “proves by many inferences … that [the moon] also got many of the features of the terrestrial globe, such as continents, seas, mountains, and air, or what somehow corresponds to them.” That’s from the Mysterium Cosmographicum, 1596, long before the telescope.

In a later edition of this work, Kepler added the note that “Galileo has at last throughly confirmed this belief with the Belgian telescope,” thereby vindicating “the consensus of many philosophers on this point throughout the ages, who have dared to be wise above the common herd.” Indeed, Galileo himself says his observations are reason to “revive the old Pythagorean opinion that the moon is like another earth.”

So, altogether, Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the moon was not a revolutionary refutation of what “everybody” thought they knew, but rather a vindication of what everyone with half a brain had seen for thousands of years.

The same goes for other supposed discoveries by Galileo relating to the moon. For instance the discovery of the phenomenon of “Earth shine”: like moon shine, but in the reverse direction. So reflected light from the earth lights up the moon to some extent. Galileo discusses this as one of the novelties made clear by the telescope, but in reality it had been correctly explained previously, by Kepler in 1604.

A similar reality check is in order regarding the idea one sometimes hear that Galileo’s discoveries regarding the moon instigated celestial physics. These people say: By revealing the similarity of heaven and earth, Galileo opened the door to a unification of terrestrial and celestial physics—in other words, he led us to the brink of Newton’s insight that a moon and an apple are governed by the very same gravitational force. In reality, though, a unity between terrestrial and celestial physics had been advocated since antiquity, as we have seen. You don’t need a telescope to realise that this idea makes sense.

Meanwhile, Galileo’s bumbling and superficial attempts to do celestial physics are an embarrassment to all, as we have seen. Remember his erroneous thing about planetary speeds being determined by falling from some faraway point toward the sun, or his completely wrongheaded calculation of how long it would take the moon to fall to the earth.

In fact, Kepler had already written an excellent book on celestial physics before the telescope: the Astronomia Nova of 1609. This is the work where Kepler explains the elliptical orbits of the planets (which Galileo never accepted or even mentioned). Kepler explains the elliptical orbits of the planets as the result of a quasi-magnetic force residing in the sun. So that’s certainly celestial physics in full swing before the telescope.

Ok, so that’s what I had to say about the telescope itself. Next we must turn to the impact of telescopic evidence on the debate between geocentrism and heliocentrism. That’s next time. Thank you.

from Intellectual Mathematics from Blogger http://bit.ly/2D0mRWy

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WRITING AND RISK

There's also a newer way to find startups, which is that it buys you time. If you tag along on a friend's investments, you don't have to do is help it. One consequence of funding such a large number of startups is that we shouldn't be afraid to call the new Lisp Lisp. YC is as high as on any forum I've seen. How much does an angel invest? Launch fast. Ultimately it doesn't matter much. I think the biggest danger is that series A investors often make companies take more money than they want. The language has a small core, and powerful, highly orthogonal libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. For boys, at least, I've thought of magazines like that more as guides to what ordinary people were being told to think than as sources of information.

If you're ramen profitable this painful choice goes away. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language must be good for writing the kinds of programs they want to. And if Battery Ventures hadn't turned down Facebook, Boston would be significantly bigger now on the startup. Probably the biggest danger is that it makes you more attractive to investors. And unfortunately there is a way to spend a lot of parentheses. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. If you're friends with a lot of code. With the rise of server-based application, this is the best short description we'll find of what makes a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. When I talk to don't know whether you're the right sort of person to start a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail. Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments. In retrospect that seems ridiculous, and we did; we still do.

Don't give up. I can call on any struct. A round. But not always: sometimes the startup cobbles together a syndicate of investors who approach them independently, and the company will do worse. But software, as a general rule, you can say things you wouldn't say, you'll hear the clank as it hits the page. They think the decline is cyclic, he said. At any given time get away with using fancy language in prose. She was ok with that. It's not as simple as picking startups that are already making something wildly popular. I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. But I think there is some important trend afoot. The syntax of the language.

I lived as if she'd always be there. The most famous example is Google, which initially made money by licensing search to sites like Yahoo. Being around bad people would be intolerable. The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just the cost of typing it. But startups aren't like that. And early adopters are forgiving when you improve your language, but they won't just crawl off and die. So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming.

And the culture she defined was one of the main things that separates the most successful startups got started. In the second phase, you look at what it's doing. It's an old one, as old as forums, but we're going to keep working on the startup, you are in big trouble. All we have to do anything if you don't care whether it closes. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. No one has to lose for you to win. His mom probably has it on the fridge. And this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear. Yes, prefix notation makes ordinary programmers panic.

[bartopwritingshit]

Chapter 3

Finally done with his reflection on the sad state of affairs that led to this kid losing his metal hand, North sped off down the road, the high pitched whine of his street bikes magic engine fading into the background as he pulled onto the cities arterial motorway, the cascade of neon brightness and noise causing a sharp pain to lance from his eyes into his head. He never liked bright lights, and this neon nightmare only made things worse for him. Weaving through traffic, he quickly reached the turn off to head toward his employers planned drop point, and after navigating the narrow streets for a while, he finally found the overweight slob and a couple other cops waiting outside an empty warehouse. Pulling up beside them, he stuck out a hand for his pay, and immediately felt the light credit stick fall into his palm.

“I suggest you go easy on the kid, officer,” he said as he unlocked the magnetic restraints, and pulled out the kids hand from his pocket, “Your goods are a little damaged, and might break if you’re too rough too quickly.” The two other officers dragged the kid from the bike slowly, carrying him into the warehouse, as the first cop snatched the kids hand from North.

“You did your job, what happens to the kid isn’t your concern bounty hunter. So fuck off,” the cop spat right in the hunters face before waddling off after the pair of cops that had the kid in their arms, flicking his arm outward to reveal a thick, telescoping baton. North knew all too well the kid would be better off in a ditch somewhere right now, but a jobs a job, and he started his bike up again, speeding off down the road toward the motorway again, returning to headquarters to receive his next paycheck from whatever corporate goon, disgruntled employee or middle manager looking for a promotion happened to be his next case. Once again, he was immediately assaulted by a neon nightmare, his head hurting, his eyes desperately trying to adjust to the brightness, while weaving through traffic once again, heading for the west end of the city, where there is no sky, only neon stars, on a backdrop of concrete walls. This was the new Sydney. Even an island in the pacific could become a corporate toy, and Australia took to its new role like a vr addict to the latest release.

Finally reaching his turn, North swerved sharply, narrowly missing a cheap, clunker of a car carrying several weres, now the side streets were also brightly lit with neon signs, and Etelä pulled up out the front of an unassuming ramen store, before turning down the alley between it and the next store, a video game arcade of all things, and pulled into a small garage. Hopping off his bike, he entered the building and rode the elevator to the third floor, the floor of his agencies offices. Stepping out of the office was like stepping into an armory. Guns, mod limbs, even a few military grade antimateriel weapons. And somehow there managed to be several computer cubicles, and even an administration desk amongst this mess.

“North, you fucking cunt, get the fuck in here mate.” The foul mouthed bat calling North over was Declan, his handler, the little bastard in charge of giving North his cases and digging up information on targets and employers, where appropriate of course. North stepped past the admin desk, ignoring the blatant sexual look that the girl behind the counter gave every hunter when they walked by, and stepped into Declans cubicle. “We hooked a good case. Independent type, loaded to the brim with credits, asked for you by name. You must’ve impressed someone.” He handed North a folder, and a small note. “There are apparently conditions though, you have a ride along for this bounty. A modified Werewolf, looking to break into bounty hunting himself. According to our employer, he’ll be a bigger help than you’d expect from someone who hasn’t done this job. I assume either security, or maybe he was in a gang. I dunno, but we’re getting paid a fucking shit load for this little job so we should be set for a wh...”

“Declan, focus,” North growled, “What’s the job?”

“We gotta find this guys daughter. Apparently she ran off with some boy, and daddy doesn’t like that.”

“Of course not. Got any leads?”

“Just the boys name. Oh, your ride along is waiting at reception, he might know a little more.”

“Thanks, Dec. Cunt.” North stepped out of the cubicle and set off for reception to meet his ride along. This was unusual, to say the least, and the fact he was a were only made it weirder. Stepping past the desk, North stopped to look for his ride along and realised the neon must’ve hit him really hard. Standing next to the desk was a 7 foot tall red wolf with an eyepatch and an obviously custom made mod, with wires, plating and screws seeming to have been cobbled together at random, for his right arm.

The giant reached out a paw in greeting, and as soon as North took it, he shook it while saying “The names Richard Fenris, you must be North...uh..your last name escapes me. My bad friend.”

“It’s just North, and you aren’t my friend, Richard, you are a condition of my job, and that’s it.”

“I can tell already we’re going to be great friends,” the wolf chuckled and stepped into the elevator, “Shall we?”

[readingactually]

Black Flowers, White Lies by Yvonne Ventresca

Black Flowers, White Lies

by Yvonne Ventresca

March 6, 2018 Book Blast

Synopsis:

“I raced through Black Flowers, White Lies in a single sitting. What a twisty thrill-ride!” ~April Henry, New York Times-bestselling author of Girl, Stolen LIES CAN COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU. Her father died before she was born, but Ella Benton knows they have a connection that transcends the grave. Since her mother disapproves, she keeps her visits to the cemetery where he’s buried secret. But when Ella learns that her mother may have lied about how Dad died sixteen years ago, it’s clear she’s not the only one with secrets. New facts point to his death in a psychiatric hospital, not a car accident as Mom always claimed. When a handprint much like the one Ella left on her father’s tombstone mysteriously appears on the bathroom mirror, she wonders if Dad is warning her of danger, as he did once before, or if someone’s playing unsettling tricks on her. But as the unexplained events become more frequent and more sinister, she finds herself terrified about who—or what—might harm her. Soon the evidence points to someone new: Ella herself. What if, like Dad, she’s suffering from a mental breakdown? In this second novel from award-winning author Yvonne Ventresca, Ella desperately needs to find answers—no matter how disturbing the truth might be. NOW IN PAPERBACK! Black Flowers, White Lies by Yvonne Ventresca is a 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Winner! Book Details: Genre: Young Adult Thriller Published by: Sky Pony Press Publication Date: Paperback March 6, 2018 (Hardcover Oct 2016) Number of Pages: 280 ISBN: 1510725962 (ISBN13: 9781510725966) Grab Your copy of Black Flowers, White Lies on: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, & Add it to your Goodreads list!   Read an excerpt: Chapter One, Beautiful Boy: I approach Dad’s tombstone with trepidation, then breathe a sigh of relief. No mysterious flowers wilt at his grave as I had feared. Last August, someone left fresh orange lilies for him throughout the month. I never figured out who. Then, in September, the flowers stopped appearing as suddenly as they started. I always wondered, with an odd mixture of anxiety and hope, if I would run into the other mourner— someone else who honored my father. But I never did. Usually, the ritual of navigating the same cemetery rows, visiting Thomas Darren Benton, and putting a small rock on his headstone calms me. Now, the heat is relentless and sweat trickles down my back as I search for the perfect pebble. It needs to be a nice, roundish one. Despite the lilies left last summer, Dad wasn’t a bouquet kind of guy. I know this even though I never met him. He died before I was born, so I have no memories of him, only stories from Mom that I’ve heard so many times it feels like I was actually there. I see him beam during his graduation from veterinary school and feel his hand pat Mom’s pregnant belly. I hear him pick my name from the baby book: Ariella, meaning lion, although Mom insists they nickname me Ella. I smell the damp on his clothes from the night he rescued Oscar the kitten from a storm drain and brought him home to stay. These recollections have been cobbled together into my own version of Dad for the last fifteen years. Today the sky is gray and foreboding, but the occasional burst of wind does nothing to cool me. I finally find just the right rock nestled in a patch of grass and rub off the dirt with my fingers. My friend Jana taught me the tradition of leaving a stone as a way to mark my visits with something more permanent, more enduring than flowers. I’m the only person who comes to his grave somewhat regularly, other than last summer’s unknown mourner. I don’t think Mom’s been here since her engagement to Stanley, a non-reading, self-absorbed, stubby man. With the wedding only days away, Stanley’s settled into our apartment, but each awkward conversation we have leaves me yearning for the father who painted my room a cheerful yellow, who created a mini-library of animal books to read to his future daughter. I hesitate before Beloved Husband and Father, rolling the pebble between my fingers, then place it in line with the last one, making it the eighth in a row. I let my hand linger against the cool granite. Next week is Dad’s birthday, August 8. That number has been lucky for me since I was eight years old, when I could have died, but because of Dad’s warning, I didn’t. The air gusts, whipping strands of hair across my face and scattering the pebbles to the ground. My skin prickles at the eerie timing before I realize that the wind has been stormy on and off throughout the day. Still, it spooks me because nothing has disturbed my markers in months. Until now. It’s almost like Dad is giving me another sign.   The cemetery turns out to be more peaceful than home. I’m lounging across my bed checking my phone with Oscar purring beside me when—bang—Mom pounds on the adjacent wall. Oscar scampers to the top of my bookcase, his favorite spot in times of trouble. The room next to mine serves as Mom’s office, and since my soon-to-be-stepbrother is expected to arrive later tonight, she’s fixing it up. Loudly. I give up on coaxing Oscar down and move to the doorway. “What are you doing?” “Look.” She points with the hammer at two new pictures of the Manhattan skyline where a framed print of The Cat in the Hat used to be. Besides changing the wall decorations, she also cleared out the closet and moved her many piles of papers from the desk. “Do you think Blake will like it?” I have no idea what Blake will like. The only photo I’ve even seen of him is one that Stanley keeps on his nightstand. It’s a faded picture of a young blond boy at the beach, smiling up at him. “The room looks nice,” I say. “But it’s not like he’s living here forever.” Blake would only be staying with us for a few weeks until he moved into his dorm at NYU. “I know. But I want this to feel like home for him.” She certainly cares a lot about this guy we’ve never met. The filing cabinet, the now-spotless desk, and the fax machine are the sole remnants of her office. “After we find your dress today, I need to buy some blue sheets and maybe some towels, too,” she says. “Are you ready to go?” “Sure.” I sigh quietly.   Our apartment building is directly across from the Hoboken PATH station. After a short train ride to the Newport Mall, I remember for the hundredth time why I hate shopping with Mom. Every dress she pulls off the rack is revolting. But the wedding is only days away. We need to find something suitable that won’t forever embarrass me when I see the photos in years to come. “How about this?” Mom holds up a mauve paisley thing with puffy sleeves, her eyes shiny with hope. “This color will look so flattering on you.” “Maybe.” I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I purposely drift away to shop on my own. And then I see it: a pale yellow dress, strapless, with a flouncy skirt and sequins around the middle. The dress sparkles when I hold it against me. I can’t wait to try it on. Mom will hate it. She’ll want me to look conservative for the small group of friends and family at her wedding. My strategy is to show her other dresses she’ll hate even more. I find a black mini she’ll say isn’t long enough and a floral sundress she’ll think is too casual. When I get to the dressing room, Mom and three hideous pink dresses await. I try on the minidress first, which she predictably declares too short. Luckily, the mauve one bunches at my waist. She likes the sundress, but not for the wedding. I put on a blush-colored one. “It’s not bad,” she says. “What do you think?” “Too much lace. It’s like wearing a tablecloth.” She nods in agreement. Finally, I try on the yellow one and giggle with delight. I come out, posture perfect, feeling like a princess. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Mom frowns. “Strapless? You’d need something over it.” I twirl. “I have that silver sweater at home.” “Let’s see the rose-colored one.” “Fiiine.” In the dressing room, I breathe deeply as I put on the last dress. Her face lights up when I step out. “Ella! It’s so pretty! It brings a glow to your cheeks. And it’s perfect with your coloring.” She calls it my coloring because I inherited Dad’s brown hair and brown eyes instead of her fairness. “The rose is all right,” I say. “But don’t you think the ruffles look too childish for a sophomore?” “Honey. It’s perfect for an almost-sophomore. And it’s appropriate. The yellow one might be nice for a dance, but for the wedding . . .” I close the curtain and put on my shorts and favorite T-shirt, the one with the tabby cat that says Rescued is my favorite breed. It’s her wedding, I remind myself. She should get to choose. I should be mature. I walk out and hand her the ruffled dress. “Thank you. It means a lot to me,” Mom says. “I’ll pay for this and go to the bedding department. Want to meet at the food court in an hour?” “Sure.” I shake off my annoyance and detour into the accessories section, where my friend Grace had seen a cute wallet with kittens on it that she thought I’d like. I’m sifting through the clearance items when this guy approaches me, holding a bunch of ties. Whoa. He’s tall and blond, and his white polo shirt shows off his tan. “Excuse me,” Beautiful Boy says. “I’m trying to decide between these?” His voice lilts into a question. His smile is friendly, his eyes deep brown and intense. “I suck at this kind of thing.” He somehow manages to look model-perfect and sheepish at the same time. “Would you mind helping me pick one?” I blink for a minute, staring at his face instead of the ties. My delayed response verges on awkward. “Okay,” I say. “What are you wearing it with?” “A gray suit.” I’m conscious of his eyes on me as I study the ones he’s chosen. It makes it hard to think. None of the ties have any yellow, my favorite color. Maybe it’s the dress shopping with Mom, but I point to the gray one with rose-colored diamond shapes. “I like this.” “Thanks.” I wish I could prolong our interaction somehow so that I can learn more about him. He lingers a too-short moment, then gives me another smile before he turns away. I can’t help feeling like something momentous has transpired. I’m a believer in karma and fate and the mysterious workings of the universe. As I watch Beautiful Boy walk away, I hope that meeting him again is meant to be. *** Excerpt from Black Flowers, White Lies by Yvonne Ventresca. Copyright © 2018 by Yvonne Ventresca. Reproduced with permission from Sky Pony Press. All rights reserved.  

Author Bio:

Whether the topic is psychological manipulation, ghostly encounters, or surviving a deadly outbreak, Yvonne Ventresca enjoys the thrill of writing about frightening situations. BuzzFeed listed her latest novel, BLACK FLOWERS, WHITE LIES at the top of their YA "must read" list for fall 2016, and this psychological thriller received an IPPY Gold Medal for Young Adult Fiction in 2017. Her debut YA novel, PANDEMIC (Sky Pony Press, 2014), won a Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Yvonne’s other credits include several short stories selected for anthologies, as well as two nonfiction books. She is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, SCBWI, The Authors Guild, and International Thriller Writers. Besides writing, she loves a good ghost story, and as a third-degree black belt, she studies Isshinryu karate in a haunted dojo. You can learn more about Yvonne and her books at YvonneVentresca.com, where she also features helpful resources for teen writers. Catch Up With Ms Ventresca on yvonneventresca.com, Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, & Facebook!  

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[a-badbowlofsoup]

Quantum Minako

Came across this in some old files. It’s a short drabble fic I’d written years ago and it shows., but what the hell, why not. I’m in a mood. 

Minako Aino sat up in bed and looked out the window at the newly risen sun as its light reflected off the facets of the utopia that was Crystal Tokyo. It was over, she realized. The prophecies and their foretellings of the future had run out. There was no way to tell what would happen from now on. 

"Gad, I'm bored," she said. ******* One week later... Doctor Conrad Howard raised an eyebrow as the stack of data crystals thudded onto the desk. Conrad was a tall, skinny young man with brown hair tied back in a ponytail and brown eyes. His lips were turned slightly upwards at some joke that only he seemed to know. He was a genius at creating new technologies out of seemingly irrelevant objects and energy sources. Technically, he worked for Ami, but Conrad was fiercely independent and Ami had long ago given up trying to actually direct him and had settled for trying to make sure he didn't blow up the palace. His lab was a hodgepodge of crystal devices and nineteenth through early twenty-first century technology. Parts and assembly equipment were scattered in a seemingly unorganized mess. On top of a computer tower an iguana perched. It's name was Iggy, which Conrad claimed was short for Einstein.

Conrad and Minako had a relationship that baffled the other senshi. It was more than friendship, but not romantic and as near as they could tell, never had been. Their conversations/arguments were often about things that apparently had happened in their mutual past while Minako was in England, and that they refused to explain to the others. The other senshi never mentioned it, but it bugged them that there was a part of Minako's past that they knew nothing about.

"Let us see here," Conrad mused, picking a crystal at random from the stack and reading the label. "Ranma, Tenchi, Utena, Ruroni Kenshin and...F Three?" Blushing, Minako grabbed the crystal from his hand. "A gift? I'm flattered, Mina-chan."

"It's not a gift," she replied. "I want to enter these."

"Enter?" He stared at the stack for a moment and then looked back at her. "No. No way in hell am I going to be responsible for another Cathedral."

"That was totally different!" Minako shouted. "The bear catching fire and the totaling of the Millennium Dome was a completely separate incident."

"If that's true, why did the bobbies keep coming by my flat to ask questions about it? Do you have any idea how long how I had to listen to my dad give me hell?"

"Bother the cops!" Minako slammed her hand down onto the table surface. "Now will you help me get into these?"

"Why do you want to get into them?"

"Because I'm bored. Almost all of these ended badly or ambiguously. Somebody should do something about it so that everything is fixed and all the wrongdoers have been punished."

"That's a novel reason to violate the fabric of space-time," he observed in a sardonic tone. "Why don't you go ask Ami to help you?"

"Ididshesaidno," Minako muttered.

"I see..." Conrad picked up a handful of data crystals and stared at them. "I'll think about it."

Three days passed and Minako returned to the lab to find Conrad hunched over a lab table, soldering a device about the size of a calculator together. Next to him was a large cylinder upon which was mounted a vertical drum. Set into slots were her data crystals.

"Is that..."

"Yep." He closed the device up and turned it over. The cover opened like a book, revealing a few keys, a small, two inch screen and a rectangular button. He pointed at the keys. "This one determines your location, this one allows you to call home, and the big one will get you out, or if you're here, send you in. In theory. It might also send you to another world. There's no way to tell."

"Great!" Minako said and transformed into Venus before mashing the button with her thumb. A glow surrounded her, the drum spun, Venus vanished, and then the drum collapsed into slag, scattering the thousands of crystals all over the floor. Conrad raised an eyebrow at that. He had cobbled it together from spare parts taken from broken equipment and hadn't bothered to test them. It was only for show, after all. But still...it was amazing what a teleporter, some crystals and a sense of humor would get you.

He chuckled to himself. Tearing a hole in the fabric of space time to travel to other dimensions/universes was only theoretically possible. Hell, even Crystal Tokyo technology could only warp space-time, allowing time travel or teleportation. But that was about it.

After a few seconds passed, Conrad picked a com off the desk and dialed Venus' private com code. "So, Venus, how do you like sitting in the cafeteria's sushi bar?" No response. "Venus? Minako?" No response. "Computer; Locate Sailor Venus."

"Working...Sailor Venus not found."

"System Wide Search."

"Working." Several minutes passed before the computer spoke. "Sailor Venus not found."

"Expand search. Widest parameters. Authorization is Howard Alpha One Cee." Minako had fought with Makoto like mad to get him that clearance, which was just a step below the Senshi themselves and two steps below the Royal Family. "Poke your nose into the Queen's private chambers if you have to."

"Working." "Almost thirty minutes passed before it delivered it's verdict. "Sailor Venus is not within scanning range."

Conrad stared at the spot where Venus had been, vaguely remembering, during a late night work session, of fashioning a crystal matrix and installing it into the transport device.

Was it possible? Could Venus have...could he have... "You have got to be freakin kidding me..." He flipped the switch on the com. It was after midnight, but there was no help for it. "This is Doctor Howard. All Senshi come to lab F Nine. There's...a problem."

******* Neo-Queen Serenity and her husband, King Endymiyon, were the last to arrive. Unlike the others, who were still rubbing sleep from their eyes, the royal couple was awake and one look at Endymiyon's face told Conrad why.

"Where's Minako?" the queen asked, looking around.

"That's why I called the Senshi together, My Queen. I wouldn't have interrupted your sleep, or," here he threw a look at Endymiyon that spoke volumes, causing the king to glower, "whatever else you might have been doing otherwise. To make a long story short, Venus has gone missing."

"Missing?" Makoto repeated. The others were instantly awake.

"How?" Haruka demanded.

Conrad explained Mina's request and his intention to foil it by dropping her into the sushi bar. "I usually work at night and I guess my mind was wandering. Happens sometimes," he finished. "Anyways, we have to find her."

Rei leaned over to Ami. "Ami, is it possible to do what he said?" she whispered. "Breach the...whatever fabric?"

"Only in theory," Ami whispered back. "I couldn't tell you how he might have managed it though." She gave her friend a helpless shrug. "I'm a doctor, not a quantum physicist."

"What do you mean, you don't know where she is? I thought you knew everything," Haruka sneered.

"I told you. I created what was supposed to be a teleporter matrix. Maybe I misplaced a decimal point on the fifth line or something while I was thinking about something else. Genius works like that. The point is, I never installed any way to track her and the transporter has no guidance circuits." He scooped up a handful of data crystals. "Every work of fiction from every part of the world going back twenty-five hundred years in on these crystals. Every anime, TV show, movie, comic, manga, video game, short story and book. Even though some of them offer only a glimpse, each one is a world, a full fledged universe unto itself. There's no way to tell where...hell, when she is. I'm sorry, but I think she's gone."

"You little shit," Haruka snarled, starting forward, hands outstretched. She and Conrad had gotten along like Usagi and Rei had at first, but unlike them, whose rivalry had become friendship, neither one showed any signs of warming up to the other. In fact, Haruka was moving towards him more out of a desire to remove him from the world then any real anger at Minako's disappearance.

"Isn't there anything you can do?" Neo-Queen Serenity asked, freezing Haruka in her tracks. "Surely there must be something you can try."

Conrad stared at her helplessly, and then his gaze dropped. Not to the revealing cut of her gown, but to the scepter topped with a multifaceted crystal that she held. He stared at it a moment, then looked up and straight at Hotaru. His eyes took on a peculiar look and they could almost see circuits being designed in the brown orbs. "Maybe...maybe there is a way." He pointed at the crystal. "I'll need that, Hotaru, her henshin wand, and a whole lotta luck."

"What the hell does Hotaru have to do with this?" Haruka asked as Conrad began to move around the lab, taking items from bins and stacking them in his arms.

"Because she and Venus are linked," Conrad replied.

"Linked?" Michiru asked.

"Each of the Inner Senshi's powers reflect a particular aspect of the Chinese Elemental Compass. Fire, Water, Air, Wood, Spirit, and Metal, if memory serves."

"So?" Haruka asked.

"So, Venus is also known as the Senshi of Love and Saturn is the Senshi of Death."

"And how the bloody fuck does that make them linked?"

"Let me put it another way." Conrad set the stack down on a table. "Suppose your death would mean the difference between Michiru living or dying. Would you sacrifice your life so that she could live?" He took up a data pad and with quick strokes of his fingers on the keys, made a number of notes.

"Of course," Haruka replied without hesitation.

"Why?"

"Because...I love her," Haruka said, understanding dawning.

"Exactly. And since you're all linked by the Ginzinhozu or whatever you call it, there might be a way to piggy back a line of communication on that link. We might not be able to get her home, but at least we can talk to her...assuming this doesn't kill one or both of them because of the mental shock."

"What?" If you think we're going to let Hotaru-"

"I want to do it, Papa," Hotaru said. Her eyes were frightened, but she stood tall and was making an attempt to be brave.

"But...Hotaru..."

"My purpose is to destroy," the frail girl said softly. "Almost all my powers are intended to hurt...or kill. If they can also be used to help, I'll do it. Even if it means my life." She faced Conrad. "What do I have to do?"

"For now? Go back to sleep. All of you. Building this mother is gonna take a while."

******* Conrad hadn't been kidding. It was almost a week before he sent for Hotaru. The lab had been completely altered. In the center of the room was a long bed mounted on a pedestal. A large crystal disk mounted on a long metal rod jutted out from the pedestal and then curved up and over the bed like a vulture. At one end, Neo-Queen Serenity's scepter and Setsuna's henshin wand were mounted on a headboard and thick cables ran from the pedestal to other pieces of equipment scattered across the room.

At his station, Conrad was dipping a wire into a cup of tea, then removing the wire, taking a sip, then placing the wire back into the cup.

As Hotaru, Michiru and Haruka entered the room, Ami approached them carrying a tray of tools and equipment. "Sit down, Hotaru-chan," she said softly. Once Hotaru sat, Ami pushed back her hair and swabbed the area behind Hotaru's left ear, her jaw, and then down her neck to her shoulder with gel and then picked up a large plate that had been shaped to fit the space she had just swabbed and pressed it to Hotaru's face. The plate began to move, forming it's shape to the area Ami had covered in Gel. Then she felt pinpricks up and down her face.

"There," Ami said softly, "that will allow us to monitor your vital signs. Follow me." The blue-haired woman led Hotaru over to the bed and indicated that she should sit. Conrad set the cup down with the wire still in it, and came over.

"Henshin wand." She handed hers to him and he set it into the headboard opposite Setsuna's. Then he picked up a glove and a crescent moon shaped piece of red crystal. The glove was fingerless and on the back was a circular piece of circuitry. "Left hand," he said, handing her the glove. She pulled it on as he fitted the crystal visor over her eyes. "This is going to be a bit like virtual reality," he told her. "See that circular patch on your glove? Once you're in, it should look to you like a circular patch of crystal. Double tapping it like this," he tapped the circular patch twice very fast, "will bring you back here, so to speak. Once you find Minako, tell her to activate the transporter. With any luck, it should return her to her point of origin, which will be here." He picked up a wire and plugged one end to the headboard and the other into the crystal visor as he described the transporter's controls. Another wire he plugged into the glove itself. "Remember, we won't know what will happen until you come back. We can't monitor what you see and hear. You ready?" Hotaru nodded. "Lie down and get comfortable." Turning he moved back beyond the arms and sat down at a control panel. "All right, focus your thoughts on Minako and don't think about anything else."

Hotaru closed her eyes and pictured Minako in her mind. How she looked, sounded and smelled.

"You have it?" she heard him ask.

"Yes."

"Okay, now hold onto that visual, you're going in on three. One, Two,"

"We love you, Hotaru!" Michiru shouted over the rising hum of machinery.

"Three!" For Hotaru, a loud roaring sound fill her ears and she felt herself fall into a cold void.

For the others, the crystal flared with white light and Hotaru went limp.

"She's gone into a state of REM sleep," Ami said from another station.

"Now what?" Makoto asked.

"We wait," Conrad said softly. "Once she comes out of it-"

"She better come out of it," Haruka growled.

"-we should know more," Conrad continued as though Haruka hadn't spoken.

"Wonder what she'll find," Makoto said.

*************** Opening her eyes, Hotaru found herself standing in a room full of people. She was dressed in her Senshi uniform and holding her glaive. Glancing down at her left hand, she saw that the glove with the crystal disc was on her hand over the glove of her uniform. She gazed around the room once more. All of the people were dressed in strange clothing, many repeating the same action over and over, or simply staring at the walls, ceiling or floors. And then she looked behind her. Sitting on the floor, staring at her in wide-eyed terror, was Venus.

"Hello, Venus-san," Hotaru said, bowing. "What is this place?" Venus opened her mouth to say something when one of the other people in the room walked through Hotaru as though she wasn't there.

AHHHHHHH!" Venus shrieked and then began grabbing whatever she could lay her hands on and throwing it at Hotaru. Within seconds, two burly men dressed as hospital orderlies ran in, grabbed Venus and hauled her out. Hotaru stood there for a moment before realizing that she wasn't being taken with them and hurried out, following Venus' shrieks.

******* Hotaru stared at sleeping, strapped-down form of Venus as she lay on the bed in the small room. By looking around and listening to the conversation of the men, and other conversations she had overheard as the men had dragged the shrieking Venus to this room, Hotaru had determined that they were in America, a place called L.A. The year was nineteen ninety-seven, and this was a mental institution. She had also determined that she was invisible, inaudible, and immaterial.

On the bed, Venus groaned and her eyes fluttered open. Hotaru held her finger to her lips for silence. "Venus, what..." she trailed off as voices were heard from the other side of the door. Moments later, the panel slid back and they could see several faces peering in.

"And as an interesting parallel to Ms Conner," said an authoritative voice, "we have this young lady, a partial amnesiac, who answers only to Venus. In this case, unlike Ms Conner's Paranoia Dementia, which leads her to believe in the arising of sentient robots which will wipe us all out,  Venus has Senile Dementia, or believes she is a super hero." There were a few chuckles. "She was picked up in downtown Los Angeles attempting to stop a mugging by attempting to catch him with a 'Venus Love Chain'. Some kind of energy chain. Naturally, it didn't work. She is strapped down as she suddenly began shrieking during her recreation period and then began throwing various objects. When the orderlies came in, she became violent, insisting that there was a young lady standing in front of her holding a weapon. She was taken back to her room, sedated, and strapped down for her own safety. Treatment so far has been mild sedation and sessions with a therapist. Now in the next room is a young man who believes he is a creature known as an 'Arby Fish'." The panel closed and the voices faded away.

Hotaru stared at the floor for a moment, absorbing what she had just heard.

"Who are you?" Venus asked softly.

"My name is Hotaru. I am a Sailor Senshi, like you." Venus stared at her.

"Ho...taru?"

"Yes, yes."

"What's a Senshi?"

"That is unimportant. I am here to get you out of here."

"Out of here?"

"Yes." Hotaru looked around. "Where is your transporter?"

"What's a transporter?"

"You had it with you. It opens like a book and had a screen and some buttons under the cover."

"Oh, you mean this?" Venus held it up for Hotaru to see. "I made it disappear before I went after those muggers. Wish I knew why I did. Go after the muggers I mean."

"Good. Open it up and press the big button. Or do you want to stay here?"

"No." With only one hand, Venus fumbled open the device. Looking up, she found that Hotaru had disappeared. She frowned. Odd girl, and even weirder that Venus felt that she should know her.

She pressed the button.

******* Hotaru opened her eyes to find herself seeing the world through red crystal. Her head hurt and even through the visor the lights from the crystals over the bed were almost blinding. Letting out a groan, she closed her eyes again. Moments later, she felt Michiru's arms encircle her and moments later, the import of what she had seen came crashing down on her and Hotaru began to cry.

"Hotaru? What's wrong?" Haruka asked.

"She doesn't remember, Papa. She doesn't know who she is!"

#############

Seeking to further the cause of Justice, Minako Anio, ripped a hole in the fabric of space-time with untested technology....

And vanished.

She awoke in another world, her Senshi powers limited, her memories in fragments, and driven by an strange desire to change each world for the better.

Her only guide on this journey is Hotaru, a young girl who claims to be a Senshi like herself, and manifests in the form of a vision that only Minako can see and hear.

And so, Minako travels from world to world, striving to put right all the wrongs and hoping that the next time she presses the button on the transporter...

That it will take her home...

[siouxempirepodcast]

Art in the Darkest of Times

I didn’t expect this to be a dark time. As I approached the end of my 5th decade of life, there was a certain assurance of good ahead. I had overcome many struggles and had worked hard to better myself, to enrich myself of experience and to share the wisdom of that experience with others. My personal evolution seemed to mirror the progressive and positive change I saw in the world, as well. The most formative part of my personal experience and self-identity started with music. Punk Rock was the big galvanizing force of my young life, the influence that would determine the kind of adult I would be. I bristled under authority (and still do) and recognized the efforts of people who acted independently. In the early and mid-1980’s most of pop culture seemed to reflect the “norms” of our society. White, middle-class, picket-fence, Reaganomics, the Christian Coalition, “Greed is Good,” Billboard’s Top 40. None of that resonated with me in the slightest. Give me a barely-lit hole in the wall club in Hamtramck, Michigan with dollar Rolling Rocks, LOUD music and a crowd full of people all dancing together. The punk clubs were a melting pot – predominantly white, but not exclusively so. Ostensibly heteronormative, at least on the surface, but in the dark who knows (or cares) what went on? Punk had a decidedly F-you attitude that resonated for this chick and those I associated with. Weird? Good. Different? Well, okay. This was the counter-culture, after all. We didn’t care if you had a Mohawk, black or white skin, piercings, money if you lived in a nice house out in Rochester or you slept in your car down in the seedy Cass Corridor. We weren’t necessarily all equals (gender norms were still in swing, for instance) but it was close. Sure, there were also dark moments during those punk years. There were those who took excess and experimentation too far, and never came back. There were those who burned out, faded away and now live in some unknown small town in Arizona or Ohio or the Far East. But you got through those dark times with your friends, and whatever talent you could cobble together. For many of my friends, it was music. Sharing whatever raw space on a late weeknight to practice and whatever bar or tavern or club would let you play live on the weekend. I wasn’t a musician (although I did briefly sing in an all-girl punk band when I was sixteen). Nor was I an artist, but I had many friends who drew and sketched and sculpted. No, I was a writer. I wrote and edited a local fanzine, all about the local scene, and I dreamed of being a successful author someday. I had lots of ideas, but it’s hard to get focused when you’re hitting the clubs, hitting the Rolling Rock and trying to be “cool.” It took a long time in life to get serious about my writing practice. But I got there – I’m working on my fourth book now. I’ve long identified with the artists, the weirdo’s, the “others” in our society. I’d rather have a smaller house and a bigger travel budget. I have forsaken corporate work in favor of PBJ sandwiches and a sense that my destiny is MINE. The compromises I’ve made are still acceptable to me and would be even if I hadn’t finally broken through those roadblocks to writing. And I recognize that artists are often the saving grace during times of trouble. Until this past November, I had reached the place I was freaking happy. I mean, HAPPY! Not just content or satisfied or resigned, but truly happy. Life wasn’t perfect, and the world wasn’t perfect, but I said to friends last year that it felt like I was in “the home stretch.” Now, it feels like I’m sitting at the bottom of a massive hill and I can’t even see what’s ahead, let alone how hard it’s gonna be to get there. This made me think about the other times in history when chaos came along and tore up the plans that our ancestors made in their personal journeys. What becomes of society when you can’t make sense of what’s happening? You make art, that’s the simple answer. You paint or your photograph, you dance or your design. You write your way through that nonsense like your life is at stake because of my friend – it is. If you look back at the bleakest and most chaotic times in history, you’ll see that what remains, what is remembered is the beauty that somehow managed to slip through the cracks. You’ll find the desperate souls that fought to write their little stories, songs, plays and performances and then fought to share them and preserve them. If we examine some of the darkest moments in history, you’ll find that what rose out of the ashes of those times were the powerful creative efforts of those who survived. Often, they were those who had to hide in the shadows because they faced imprisonment, banishment or death. When you talk darkness, it’s natural to default to the Holocaust. The years of Nazi oppression, the concentration camps, the brutalities, and atrocities seem to be present with us these many decades later. Not just because of film reels, but by what was left behind. We know and understand the Holocaust interpretively through art. We understand the Nazi uprising as it responded to the earlier Weimar Republic years – the Gay Thirties of Berlin, the era of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” and of Marlene Dietrich, flaunting and tormenting through “The Blue Angel.” We understand the brutality when compared to the Bauhaus art movement, through Dadaism, through Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop. We understand the seduction of Fascism as viewed through the lens of the works of Paul Klee and the operas of Kurt Weill (“Threepenny Opera”) and Alban Berg (“Lulu/Pandora”). We certainly understand the Holocaust through the prism of the art that was created during the War years – Picasso’s “Guernica” alone speaks volumes about man’s inhumanity to man. But we also understand the Holocaust through what came in the immediate aftermath. After that, the world began to process what it learned about mankind’s ugliest extremes and our ability to survive those extremes. In fact, composer Bertolt Brecht wrote, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” World War2 was followed by a period of unprecedented cultural impact by Jews. Writers like Philip Roth and Elie Wiesel, artists like Marc Chagall, entertainers like the Marx Brothers and Bob Dylan. It wasn’t just that Jews were valued, in our society, after having nearly been obliterated. More importantly, it is that they had something incredibly valuable to share, having survived that experience. When you survive the unthinkable, you are poised to become one of the great thinkers. The Holocaust was a striving for perfection. The Great Leap Forward in China was more about uniformity. Historian Frank Dikotter explained that “coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundations of the Great Leap Forward” and that it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings in human history.” It is believed that somewhere between 18 and 55 million people died, including during the years of the terrible Famine that plagued China (1958-1962). During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communist Party did permit criticism of the government (including the infamous “Gang of Four”). A tsunami of Chinese literature emerged during this time, including painful accounts of life under Chairman Mao. These included short stories that appeared in official government publications. The Maoist system, like the Nazi’s before, believed in a policy of agrarian reliance. The images, in both totalitarian systems, publicly presented include robust farmers and plump housewives, darling children and industrious teens –all working toward the greater good of self-reliance and integrity of resources. But the Great Leap Forward pushed agricultural reliance to the extreme, resulting in the failure of crops across the countryside. After the famine had ended there was a period in which the Chinese leadership embraced a cultural wave known as “Scar Literature” in which the people of China were able to write honestly about their experiences. Scar literature was cathartic and depicted truly horrific accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution – of persecution and violence, including the state-sanctioned executions of their loved ones. Examples of “scar literature” include “Red Azalea” by Anchee Min, “Mao’s Last Dancer” by Li Cunxin and “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” by Jung Chang. In “Wild Swans,” author Chang relates “Father said slowly, “I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don’t think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquility River and think, just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I’ve tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end, I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly, you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I’ve done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…” Today’s current literature trend of purging the soul owes a great debt to those Chinese writers, many of whom wrote their true stories under the most horrendous of experiences, often hiding their works until they could be free, or defect, and share them with the world. This included stories of forced labor, brutal rapes, and cannibalism. But perhaps no time in history had as great and as long-lasting a cultural impact as that of the years of the Great Plague. The “Black Death” raged from 1346 to 1353 and claimed the lives of as many as 200 million humans. Our cultural understanding of Death itself, from the image of the Grim Reaper, of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, stem from those years. Dante’s works bear the marks of the plague all over them. The artistic descriptions of fair maidens languishing away and the bird-beaked plague doctors, aromatic herbs warding off the bug. In fact, our very understanding of the nature of insects in the lives and health of humans came from the Black Death. Whatever would Kafka and Burroughs have written about without first the concept of the insect as the enemy? With every tragic and terrible moment in history, you’ll find a creative burst that enlightens and entertains. World War I brought us Jazz. The Crusades gave us Islamic art. The Depression gave us the works of Dorothea Lange. The Slave Trade gave us Gospel, and later, Rock and Roll. I didn’t expect this to be a dark time in my life. As a writer I understand that my responsibility is to document, to chronicle, to “bear witness” as Victor Klemperer (the German Holocaust-era journalist) wrote. But as a creative soul, a left-brained, punk rock weirdo, I have to find an outlet for my despair and not just an inlet. There’s a tiny part of me that is fascinated by what may emerge, in our future. Like other darker moments in our history, I know that it is because of the determination of our artists, that the future can be brighter.

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