#i’m just gonna suck it up and write about 200 more pages that couldn’t POSSIBLY compare to the MASTERPIECE that is ‘meet flourence’

[bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue]

XVI quill for the DA asks?

Sure! Thanks for the ask!

XVI - Quill - Longest work you've written? (whether academic or not)

This is a little embarrassing, but I think the longest work I’ve ever written was a novel I worked on between the ages of 6 and 8. It was called Meet Flourence and it was about the daily life of a third-grade girl named Flourence [sic], heavily inspired by the Clementine series, the Ramona series, the American Girl books, and—by the end—Harry Potter, which I had become obsessed with by the age of 8 so I just had all the characters read and become obsessed with it too. It was about 40,000 words long and 200 pages (in Times New Roman, size 18) by the end. Since then, everything longer-form that I’ve tried to write has stalled out pretty quickly, meaning my writing effectively peaked in about third grade.

If you don’t count that, the longest thing I’ve ever written and finished is probably something called The AI Avengers, a self-described “screenplay/fanfiction/novella” that I wrote when I was 11-12. It was all part of a longer email line I had with my dad where I’d respond to everything he wrote in the form of a sort-of screenplay describing all my favorite fictional characters saying things, getting into fights, and having adventures. (My dad is a saint for attentively reading and responding to all of that!) The AI Avengers was an arc in those emails, inspired by a lot of articles and books I’d read about AI and futurism at the time, about me going with some of my favorite Star Wars and Harry Potter characters on an mission to defeat several superintelligent AI, one of whom is literally Donald Trump. Yeah.… It’s about 27,000 words long in total.

And if we’re not counting that, then my Beboptober fics are 26,000 words long in total, and they might top 27,000 and be longer than The AI Avengers once I FINALLY finish Day 31.

The longest academic paper I’ve written thus far is a paper I actually just completed a few weeks ago for my Social Psychology class, on the topic of advertising. It’s almost 4,000 words long. Someday I’ll have to write an actual thesis, though, and probably break that record by a LOT. If I declare a Creative Writing major (as opposed to just English), I can write a novel as my thesis…hmm, maybe I’ll just submit Meet Flourence!

[Dark Academia Asks]

[drwcn]

maybe after today’s acls training i can finally write that chengqing ER oneshot. 

— “Patient male, mid-twenties, motor vehicle collision, eta 3 mins” 

— “What no vitals? No GCS? ETA 3 mins? Who’s on the paramedic team?!” 

— “No one….Dr. Lu hit someone with her car on her way out of the hospital.” 

【A Midnight Conversation in Your Local ER】- Complete

[1] 

The night hunt had gone to shits.

That much was undeniable.

Jiang Cheng heard the panicked shout of his disciples just as he saw the array that he had stepped on.

Fuck.

The ghost of an once mediocre demonic cultivator wanna-be was going to bring Jiang Cheng, Jiang Wanyin - the Sandu Shengshou - to meet his maker. The irony of the situation would be laughable, if he wasn’t so irrevocably screwed.

That was his last thought before his entire body was engulfed by a blinding light and the world he knew disappeared.

The ground beneath his feet gave away, weightlessness paralyzing his body though he did not fall. He felt…launched, his body warping and squeezing and stretching, the air sucked from his lungs into the endless black vacuum.

But just like that it was over. Jiang Cheng barely had time to make peace with his death before his feet touch solid earth again.

Or at least….he thought it was earth, this black, tarry hard thing striped with yellow and white. He stared at it dumbly, breathless and disoriented, barely able to react when a loud blare assaulted his senses and his world went blindly bright yet again.

This time there was pain.

Jiang Cheng clutched Sandu, ready to fight, but then his head hit the ground and everything went dark. When he woke up again, an indeterminate amount of time later, he was in a small tube and had a distinct feeling he was not wearing pants, socks or shoes.

How the fuck do you ‘scan’ a cat???  

[2]

Method actor. The nurse, from the other side of the curtain, mouthed silently.

“Sir, can you tell me your name.”

“Jiang Cheng, Jiang Wangyin.”

The resident paused, awkwardly contemplating how to continue. “Uh…..which is it? Jiang Cheng or Jiang Wanyin?”

“Jiang Cheng, zi Wanyin.”

“Traditional parents?” The resident tried to crack a joke, but it fell flat. The strange man stared up at him with a blank look in his eyes and a frown that was rapidly deteriorating into a scowl. The resident cleared his throat and cast his eyes back onto his clipboard. “Uh, ahem, just the name on your ID please.”

“My what?" 

"Your personal ID….like a driver’s license?”

“Cultivators of the gentry fly on swords or ride horses. We do not rely on carriage valets.”

“Eh… right. Uhm, can you tell me how old you are and what year it is.”

“I’m 39, and the year is jiachen.”

Lu Qi frowned from where she stood by the door, arms crossed, watching her resident and medical student work. 39? He looks like a college student. But he also thinks he can fly, so I guess age is the least of our worries. 

“Jiachen.…?”

The M3 fished his phone out from his scrub pocket pocket and typed it in. “Sounds like the ganji system, like an old timey way to record year used in the past.” He whispers clandestinely to the resident.

“….Right. And uh, do you where you are?”

The man scowled at him. “Am I supposed to?” 

The resident scribbled something on the chart, and then looked up with a plastered awkward smile. “Well, thank you Mr. Jiang for your patience. Wang Fei here is the medical student on our team. He’s going to stay and ask you a couple more questions if you don’t mind. Afterwards we’ll confer with our attending and the team will be back to see you shortly.”

As he turned away, the R3 grimaced and shared a look with Lu Qi, who was the youngest attending physician in their ER, but was not technically working at the moment and so was not on the case. And technically, as the perpetrator who hit Jiang Cheng with her car, she had a severe conflict of interest.

At least this Jiang Cheng dude didn’t seem keen on pressing personal charges against her for MVA or suing the hospital in general… but that being said…

Yeah, they’re going to need a psych consult. 

Unless he’s on acid. 

Well… okay, psych consult either way. 

[3]

"It’s okay, you can relax.” Jiang Cheng said, waving dismissively at the woman standing by his bedside. “I’m not going to take you to the magistrate for hitting me with your carriage - car. You didn’t mean to, and I just came out of nowhere.” 

“....Thank you.” 

“You’re not Wen Qing. I know that now. Your name is Lu Qi. You can call off those psychia - psych - psychics - head healers - or whatever, I’m not crazy. It’s not my fault, you just… look so much like someone I used to know."

"Wen Qing.” Lu Qi echoed. 

“Yeah. Wen Qing. She was a healer - a doctor - like you, but different.” 

“I see. What happened to her?"

"She died. Almost twenty years ago."

"I'm sorry... that's awful.” Lu Qi’s response rolled off her tongue so well, because she had said those word a thousand times during her residency. So much so that it no longer had much meaning to her. Tonight however, she meant what she said. “Were you two close?"

"No, well…yes, maybe. No we weren’t exactly friends if that’s what you’re asking. She...operated on me. Without my consent or knowledge. Took my brother’s golden core and put it in me and then lied with my brother to my face about it. So no we weren’t “close”, but Wen Qing saved my life - well the purpose of it anyway. Saved me from a life of ordinariness.” 

Lu Qi did allow herself to dwell too much on what the fuck a “golden core” was, because her gut response was almost instantaneous. “That’s shitty of her.”

She clamped down on her tongue. 

God, why did I have to say that? To his face?! He was obviously in love with this Wen Qing person and they were encroaching on some dangerous emotional territories, but Lu Qi swallowed down her caution and plowed on nevertheless. There were things she felt she had to say, and since she’d already hit him with her car, how much worse could this shit get? “What I mean is she shouldn’t have. Not without telling you. Besides...there’s nothing wrong with ordinary.” 

Jiang Cheng chuckled bitterly. “Maybe you’re right. Still...she didn’t deserve to die. What her clan did was not her fault.” 

Now that threw Lu Qi off. Did this guy...kill her? 

Lu Qi half wondered if she stumbled upon a Yakuza-esque member whose psyche finally snapped after years of murder and violence. And yet, he seemed perfectly coherent, no flight of ideas, no tangential thought, no hallucations. Even his delusions seemed...logical. 

I must be the one losing, damnit.  

Jiang Cheng scratched a little at his chest, as if palpating for the “golden core” that he spoke of. "She saved my life, but when she needed help, I couldn't save her. But, if I were to go back… I can't say I'll choose differently. My clan needed me, my clan who was almost cleansed by hers. No, no I wouldn’t choose differently. I don’t regret my choices, but I am sorry. Sorry to her, sorry to my brother. I'll always be sorry that she died, and that I failed her when she needed me." 

Jiang Cheng had no idea why he was telling this stranger any of this, but maybe after twenty years, he was finally ready to address this guilt that he lived with. I mean who else was he supposed to tell? Jin Ling? It was nice, to have that face as an audience, receiving his words of confession. 

"She would forgive you." 

Lu Qi had no idea why she was offering absolution as if she had authority in this matter, but when she said it, the conviction she felt was so real, it was almost as though some external force was acting through her.

Which was ridiculous of course, but... 

"How do you know? You're not her." Jiang Cheng shook his head. “I wouldn’t forgive me.” 

"No, but you said she was a physician. So she should know, more than most, that sometimes there is no choosing who gets to live or die."

Jiang Cheng fell quiet at that, and his gaze grew distant. Lu Qi thought perhaps he was no longer seeing her as she was in front of him - white coat, scrubs, stethoscope -  but someone entirely different. The tension he held in his shoulders slowly eased, and he sighed. In the silence that stretched between them, Lu Qi hoped that this strange man with his strange past could find a sliver of peace. 

[4]

— Did you love her? 

— I thought so, foolishly, but maybe I didn’t. Even if I did, it was not well enough. 

— Do you love her still? 

— No... I don’t know. It’s been too long...but sometimes, late at night when Lotus Pier is quiet, I think I do. 

...

— Are you ashamed of it? 

...

— No. No I’m not. 

[5]

The patient known as Jiang Cheng left AMA, that is, against medical advice. It was the term they used sometimes for people who just up and leave without informing the team. 

Lu Qi had gone out to check on his labs, which came back with bonker numbers (I mean really, a hemoglobin of 455, sodium of 200, and a HCO3 of like...3?), but Jiang Cheng was gone from Bay 6 when she returned. The nurse made the overhead page, a code yellow was called, but four hours later, Lu Qi was ready to admit that she was never going to see this Jiang Cheng ever again. 

Somehow, she was okay with that. She had said what needed to be said.  

Her chief had given her a call on her cell and told her to go home and sleep. The guy didn’t look like he was gonna press charges, let’s count our blessings and move on. But the night had just been too damn strange that Lu Qi was all wired up from it and couldn’t possibly fall asleep. She had handover at 10 anyway. There was a change of clothes and toiletries in her bag. She could always take a shower in the anesthesia staff’s on call room and sleep until then. 

Dr. Sun was the anesthesia staff on-call tonight and was currently stuck in trauma OR. They were buddies since medschool; she’d understand.

Sighing, Lu Qi took a seat on the bench across from the bougie cafe in the lobby of the hospital. At this hour, it was the only one still open in the entire facility. The drinks they sold cost an arm and a leg, but Lu Qi needed the pick-me-up after the night she had. 

As she nursed the last bit of her matcha latte, two bickering voices pulled her attention to the front entrance. 

“Aiyo, A-Liang I already said I’m fine! I don’t need to be here!” 

“Fuck out of here with that bullshit, Chen Zhaoxi. You fell off the fucking roof! If Wu Kun hadn’t called me, you’d have gone on -”

It was him! Lu Qi shot up. It was Jiang Cheng! 

But no...no it wasn’t him. The well-dressed man dragging the second man (dressed in red pajamas) into the hospital was not Jiang Cheng. He had the same face - chiselled, handsome, scowling - but it wasn’t him. For one, his hair was trimmed short and neat, unlike Jiang Cheng who looked like he walked straight out of a BL xianxia tv drama. Secondly, his face was softer, eyes younger, and he couldn’t have been older than Lu Qi herself in her early thirties. 

“I was just trying to get to the litter of kittens trapped -”

“Yes, yes, and it was very heroic and I’m sure it would’ve made Wu Kun very horny, and you morons probably would’ve fucked once he got home had you not made a valiant attempt at breaking your neck -” 

“Excuse me,” the security guard manning the information desk chastised sharply. “It’s 4am. This is a hospital! Lower your voices, sirs.” 

“Sorry.” The men apologized sheepishly. 

Then, A-Liang, Jiang Cheng’s doubleganger asked, “Could you please direct us to the ER? This is my brother, he fell off a roof.” 

Lu Bin had no idea what possessed her to interject. “I can take you there.” 

All eyes fell on her. She walked towards them, heart pounding. 

This can’t be happening, this kind of thing just can’t happen... 

A-Liang’s face broke into a grateful smile. “Thank you, Miss -” Then his gaze trailed to her badge, and he corrected himself, “Dr. Lu. I’m Shen Liang. This is my brother Chen Zhaoxi. I think he fractured...well multiple things, please help him.” 

“Of course, come with me. Let’s get him a wheelchair. If he fractured is leg, he probably shouldn’t be walking.” 

“I didn’t fracture -” 

“You, you shut up.” Shen Liang rolled his eyes. “Don’t listen to him. He can lose three out of four limbs and say ‘ t’s but a flesh wound’.” 

Lu Qi couldn’t help but chuckle as she put an arm under the complaining Chen Zhaoxi and helped him towards the wheelchair. 

Shen Liang’s smile widened. 

[Extra]

“Holy shit, took you long enough!” 

When Jin Ling and Lan Sizhui finally dragged Jiang Cheng to their portal site, Jiang Cheng realized that the transportation talisman had created a channel through realities between what looked like two metal garbage dumpsters in a back alley behind a food establishment marked by giant yellow bunny ears.

Standing guard there, Lan Jingyi and Ouyang Zizhen were each munching on a strange layered bread and holding tall drinks contained in...what was it called again? Right. Styrofoam. 

“What is that?” Jin Ling wrinkled is nose at it. Brat. 

“It’s a Big Mac.” Replied Lan Jingyi as if Jin Ling was stupid. “And this is a milk shake.” 

Jin Ling scowled. “I said the bag of gold I gave you was for emergencies.” 

“Yeah but we were hungry.” Ouyang Zizhen defended. He neglected to tell them that the cashier had refused to accept the gold and instead asked for “cash” or “card”, neither of which they had, so Zizhen used a liiiiil confounding talisman he learned from Wei Wuxian. They did leave more than enough gold though...and that ought to cover the restaurant’s cost for their “burger”lary . Reaching into the brown paper bag he held under one arm, Zizhen pulled out a little box that opened to show pieces of... something. “These are chicken nuggets. They’re delicious! Try one! They’re really good with this sauce....hold on...” 

Lan Sizhui sighed. “We don’t have time for this. The portal will close soon. Let’s get Jiang-zongzhu home and we can sample these exotic food later.” 

The boys agreed. 

Jiang Cheng shook his head and huffed. 

[igumdrop]

:OO WELCOME EVERYONE!!

okay okay, I know what you guys are thinking -- Jaime, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?! HOW CAN YOU MAKE THE SUB-BLOG GO PUBLIC?!?! WHAT HAPPENED TO *THAT* LIST... THE *YOU KNOW WHAT* LIST... 

and my response is... I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never had such a list. 

okay, real talk though, I decided to let my sub-blog go public for multiple reasons: 

♡ no one wants to enter a password that I change constantly

♡ most of what I say I would love to share with my regular viewers who can’t afford to sub, and this is my main source of updating you guys on a more personal basis for those who follow me more on social media and not my stream

♡ I’m incorporating a lot more sub-only things into the community, so I figured I could let one go! 

we’ll see how it goes and if it does start to feel uncomfortable, we can always bring it back :) but there’s little to nothing that I can think of that would make this weird because I don’t overshare that much... I think... HAHA we’ll see

ANYWAYS, REALLY GOOD NEWS! for the past few months I’ve had a little team of subs working on our community Minecraft server! (SO MUCH THANKS TO GOLDEYE, WATTEHMS, MATTY, MAXWELL, BRADLEY, JOSTER <3) I’ll try to log on everyday and just have a habit of keeping it online. I think it’d be cute to be able to log onto something and see everyone in the same world! 

if you’re a sub, please fill out the form that I linked in the discord! it’s also the same form you use to join the gummie gang stream team, and also for me to know what your discord usernames are (a lot of times when you guys message me, your discord username is different from your twitch and I have no idea LOL) there’s also a little response section where you can give me any suggestions you want! (stream ideas, sub emotes, etc) ~ HAVE FUN! 

AND EVEENNNN MORE GOOD NEWS!!!  

WE’LL BE ON FRONT PAGE OF TWITCH THIS THURSDAY!! WEEE!! 

I’ll probably be doing a sit-down cooking stream into a mukbang :) TIME IS TO BE ANNOUNCED BUT IT SHOULD BE AROUND THE TIME FRAME OF 12PM - 2PM OR 2PM - 4PM! I’ll let you guys know as soon as possible on discord. I’ll also be streaming tomorrow/Tuesday and Wednesday so I’ll let you guys know on stream too! 

OK THAT’S IT FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS!~ here are my own personal lil updates

BENJI HAS GROWN SOOO MUCH! okay not gonna lie, he was kinda dying for a bit during the winter, I don’t think he really did well in the cold... his leaves would fall off sometimes and yellow at the ends. I was getting really scared and to be honest I’m so attached to this god damn plant that it was taking a sad mental toll on me. LMFAO. WHY AM I LIKE THIS. anyway, I gave him some fertilizer and stayed consistent with him, watered him whenever I needed to and tried to keep him in warm yet sunny areas of my house. and YAY, SPRING ROLLS AROUND AND HE’S GROWN BIGGER THAN I HAVE EVER SEEN HIM GROW!!! 

before (when I first got him) and now! I’m so proud... only I can write a paragraph raving about my pet plant... jeez it’ll be crazy once I get an actual cat or something... 

there was a really busy week in march where I spent all my leftover time planning Aria’s birthday. it was honestly the cutest thing ever seeing all her friends get together and work on stuff for her. I remember being insanely tired during it but once I saw her reaction for her surprise party, my heart melted and I just told myself wow that was soooo worth it LOL. here’s some pictures from my end <3

we got these GIANT balloons that spelled out ARIA and it took forever to get into the car and out LMAO... excuse my janky no makeup face but it was so funny seeing us struggle so hard with the balloons T_T LOL

we spent hours late at night working on her scrapbook and baking stuff for her. I was working on strawberry cheesecake shoots and I remember cutting 10+ strawberries and thinking, “wow, it would suck if I dropped these,” and then guess what happened... 

I dropped them lmao 

anyways it turned out so wholesome and cute <3 

I found the airbnb on this website called peerspace and when I saw it, it SCREAMED ARIA...

you’re welcome for me blessing your eyes

we seriously worked our *aesthetic* muscle for this because we knew aria would appreciate the heck out of it 

OKAY ANYWAYS MOVING ON!! yesterday I went to h-mart and got a shit ton of groceries. and I realized it’s STRAWBERRY SEASON!!! there’s still a lot of stuff that I want to buy that isn’t available here though, so my mom tries to send me all that she can :D 

I love her so much I miss her so much wahhh I can’t even talk about my parents because I’ll just start crying because I miss them so much ... ok also I was supposed to stream yesterday but I took a nap... and... didn’t... haha... jaimewhatswrongwithyou.exe.... here’s a post-nap selfie though... 

I looked heckin janky but snow saved my ass 

ANYWAY I spent the rest of the night just reading and I finished my monthly book read! here are my two recommendations for you guys :) 

I absolutely love love love this book! it will really help if you’re an overthinker like me. tl;dr, it talks about the inside voice in your head that constantly battles with itself and refers to it as an “annoying roommate.” with consistent reading (a chapter or two before sleeping at night) it really helped me clear my mind and become super aware of how the voice in my head could be more harmful than helfpul. if you’re new to reading it is quite a bit to read though so if you want something easier then I suggest this: 

gosh, my life became so simple when I read this book consistently. it basically shares four simple agreements that you should always be conscious of in life. this book just really helped me not take things as personally, to not make assumptions, and it just gave me a much more simple and clear perspective on things and issues. SUPER SUPER EASY TO READ!!! downfall is, it kinda talks about religion a lot at the end, which might make it uncomfortable for some of you guys. I couldn’t really enjoy the last bits of it that much because of that sole reason but it’s still a great read and taught me lots of fundamentals I never knew I needed for my own mindset :) 

I went to LCS the day before yesterday and it was really fun because I brought a portable cut-out of scarra LMAOOOOOO the thread is really funny so you guys should go read it: https://twitter.com/iGumdrop/status/1114687260434124801

I also did my taxes yesterday (well I finished up what was left of it) during the games LOL and then I went to annie’s place afterwards because her mom is an accountant and she helped me file them. I’m soooo happy I got them over with because I feel so free now! 

hm ok ending these are always hard because it always seem so abrupt, mainly because even my 200 WPM fingers get tired of typing. I guess all I have to say is, hello new readers of my sub-blog, I hope you enjoy your time here! and thank you so much to everybody who supports me. it really means the world to me and I never go one day without insanely appreciating you guys. this month I’ma hit you guys with that dudududuududud GOOD CONTENT! <3

and alas, a few of my favorite cute lil drawings this month from chibird~ 

(+ my community) 

WELL, FAREWELL FRIENDS! TILL NEXT TIME <3 

[ayearofpike]

The Starlight Crystal

Pocket Books, 1996 195 pages, 49 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-55028-4 LOC: CPB Box no. 327 (Stored at Landover) OCLC: 34074707 Released February 1, 1996 (per B&N)

Paige Christian knew she was going on the anthropologist’s starship that would use near-lightspeed travel to jump ahead generations. But that didn’t stop her from falling in love before she left. It’s that love that keeps her going — through ship problems, interstellar war, the end of the universe itself — because of a promise she made. She can’t stop and won’t stop until she gets there, because Paige’s love exceeds the boundaries of space and time.

That one-paragraph summary sounds existential and metaphorical, but actually Pike is being painfully literal with these devices. It’s maybe the first hard sci-fi he’s given us since The Tachyon Web (which, by the way, would be re-released a year after this one). And now that I look back on what I’ve read, for someone who named himself after a Star Trek character, Pike hasn’t really done much in the hard-SF realm. The aforementioned two, Eternal Enemy (the second half, at least), maybe See You Later and The Visitor (both of which probably have too much spirituality and mysticism to qualify, even if there are spaceships) and The Star Group coming up (maybe, let’s see — I don’t remember it at all). Interesting how half of that output comes during the Spooksville years. Maybe he had enough supernatural horror going on in the kidlit division and needed to drop some science on teens to balance it.

We’ve seen this title crop up a couple of times before. It’s Mark’s video game in See You Later, and Shari Cooper wrote a short story with this title as the bulk of Remember Me 3. (I feel like it might be in another one, but I don’t want to dig through this whole blog for it.) This story has more in common with the latter than the former — vindictive aliens who only want to wipe out humanity, a universal presence that we are invited to join — but it does take Paige (as Mark indicates the size of his game) “to the ends of the known universe” (SYL, 10). In more ways than one. But let me not get too far ahead of the recap.

At any rate, I liked this one more than I remembered, and then I remembered liking it back when it was released. Yeah, it’s kinda sappy — one girl’s love pushes her farther than any human has ever dreamed of going! — but it hit me at the perfect time, having just started college and being a romantic in general and trying to figure out my own relationship status. Isn’t it worth it to pursue true love across the distance, when the reward upon reunion will be so sweet? The truth is that for me it wasn’t actually true love at the time, but the idea of it, the concept of sharing my life with one who could share my heart forever. But don’t try to tell eighteen-year-old me that; I wasn’t ready to grasp the difference between loving the idea of being in love and loving an actual person I wanted to spend time with. I’m not sure Paige does either, but maybe that’s why it resonated with me then.

Let’s jump into the recap and you can decide for yourself. It starts the way so many early Pike first-person novels started, with an acknowledgement that this tale is being written or told after the events we’re about to see. And again, the narrator conveniently forgets this frame as soon as she starts telling the story. In fact, the only place this has been fully effective was Remember Me, because Shari never forgot she was telling a story from the end. Ultimately I think what it’s there for is to impress upon us the enormous span of Paige’s life (nine billion years!) and the vastness of her experience, but it’s less foreshadowing and more straight up telling (and in some ways, misleading).

Oh, I should mention before we get too deep: the protagonist of this story is named Paige Christian. The book itself is dedicated to Paige Christian. I can’t find any evidence that Pike named his character for a real person, but it wouldn’t be that weird. Like, look back at The Midnight Club, and how he said it was inspired by a storytelling group at a hospital, and how specific he was about his main character’s origins and ethnicity when he’d never really done that before. That’s a clear case of trying to respect and honor a source. It’s not really that big of a step to just using their name.

So anyway, Paige kicks off her story by talking about the day she met her true love. She was coming out of a library and met some weird lady wearing sunglasses but who otherwise seemed familiar, who suggested Paige go check out the pond in the park across the street. When she gets there, a dude suddenly emerges from the water. This is Tem, and Paige feels an instant and inexplicable connection to him, as he does to her. Unfortunately, they’ve only got a week together, as Paige is set to blast off with her dad, the captain of the study vessel. So they promise to exchange letters once a month for the rest of their lives, which for Paige sucks because she’s gonna be writing to a dead dude before a year is passed for her.

So she gets on the ship and works in the gardens and writes her letters, but quickly starts to regret her choice. She asks her father to please stop and take her back to Earth, which ... have you ever tried to get a bureaucrat to listen? He can’t compromise the mission for one person’s feelings, even if that one person is his daughter. Plus, this has been a problem for him before: he was captaining another ship where the engine went haywire and they had to abort the mission then. So obviously he wants to have a successful one, never mind that it will throw a wrench into his daughter’s true love for a dude she knew all of one week. What I’m saying is I’m having a hard time sympathizing with Paige right now.

They get through their time dilation, spending two weeks at a speed sufficient to observe 200 years passing on Earth. Which: I don’t actually know how this would work. When the engines are on, they can’t receive transmissions. When they get to their target speed (99%+ the speed of light) and are coasting, wouldn’t they be going TOO FAST to receive transmissions? Let’s gloss over that and get to the important part: the attack! Yes, Earth is attacked and destroyed just as they are starting to decelerate. These alien warships have the technology to keep up with Paige’s ship at its high speed, and they catch it and send a boarding party. Paige’s dad plans to blow up the ship so that they can take out the alien commander (like in Shari’s story), but she (the commander) kills him before he can trigger the explosion and takes Paige hostage.

However, the guard who is supposed to take Paige to their ship instead takes her to the engine room, where he says he has a power source that will accelerate their ship away from the attackers. He climbs down and inserts a green crystal into the power core, upon which he is killed by his captain. She levels her weapon at Paige, but the ship’s first officer cuts her down before she can fire. Then they check their instruments, and sure enough: the alien warships are gone, and their ship is infinitely approaching the speed of light, and their engine can’t produce the power required to slow them down, to the point where they will simply outlive the universe. (I’m also not sure that this is factually possible, but I don’t care to do the math.)

It’s time for Paige to write another letter to Tem, but she doesn’t see the point. (We’ll learn in a little bit that he only wrote to her for five years.) She’s talking about it with her friend in the garden, when all of a sudden her friend is ... possessed? a channel? At any rate, she starts talking from a larger group consciousness that wants humanity to unify with it, to drop its illusions of desire so that it can truly find love and joy. Sound familiar? This is the primary tenet of the Eastern religion that Pike loves to scatter around his stories, or at least his version of it. But they also say that there is another ship of humans nearby, one that this crew will have to assist in decelerating so that they can then start a new human colony. The new captain is adamant that there’s no way there could be another ship of humans, which, like ... fucker, there’s been 200 years of progress on Earth since you left, you seriously disbelieve they could have made ANOTHER spaceship?

But anyway, they scan for it, and they find it, and then the presence comes back and tells them how to manipulate their technology to slow down and dock with this other ship. Specifically, they tell the scientists to clone the dead alien and have Paige interact with it, and then she will activate its genetic memories and remember herself. (More greatest hits!) So they go through the contortions to put a cloning womb in a shuttle fired at a slightly lower velocity and recapture it after enough time has passed for the clone to be an adult. (Time out: if there are shuttles on this ship, why couldn’t Paige just have taken one back to Earth instead of trying to get the captain to scrub the whole mission?) Under the guidance of the other, Paige takes the alien’s hands and concentrates on the connection between hate and love (yep, it’s back) and suddenly knows how to make the green crystals that will help control their engine. Along with a whole host of genetic manipulation techniques that will come in handy later.

Meanwhile, this universal presence is trying to teach the humans how to become one with it. It talks about understanding the difference between truth and illusion, and about the importance of love. But it won’t tell them the rest until after they recover the other ship. It turns out to be a colony in extended hibernation (with the propulsion end mysteriously missing) and check it out! Tem got on! Huzzah! Only he’s not waking up. In fact, out of more than 20,000 colonists, only two didn’t survive: Tem and one other woman. He death-cheated on Paige, that bastard!

But so the upshot is that Paige still isn’t satisfied, but her desire for this physical love with one human person that she can no longer have is getting in the way of her ability to achieve otherness. They’ve come back into real time now (this is the nine billion years she spoke of at the beginning), and they’re planning to colonize the dying Earth and live it out, but Paige wants to bury Tem first. Only he sits up and starts talking to her once they’re on the surface. Of course it’s the universal consciousness channeling through his body, and it tells her that everything is destined even though we’re not supposed to feel like it, and her destiny isn’t over yet. Paige is supposed to get back on the ship, empty it out, and take off with more green crystals, wait out a cycle of death and rebirth in the entire universe, and then come back to Earth the way she left it the first time.

So she does.

So if she went on and watched the universe start over, a span of who knows how long, why at the beginning did she say she’d been alive nine billion years? It’s never addressed! Let’s move on.

Her first thought, upon returning to Earth, is to break the cycle, to say fuck you to destiny and keep herself from having to suffer. So she gets a gun and some sunglasses and finds herself outside the library. But she can’t pull the trigger. Instead, she directs herself to the pond, just as before. Then, six months later, she goes to the pond, where Tem is diving again, and she befriends him and tries to start a relationship, all the while hoping that he won’t give up on Paige-on-the-ship for hiding-older-Paige-on-Earth. And he doesn’t. So she tells him something that only they could possibly know, a promise that she whispered to him on a deserted beach before she got on the ship. And now he knows that even though she’s got a different name and is older than she’s supposed to be, she’s back for him.

But Paige also knows that she’s got another responsibility. An awesome and terrible one. And it goes along with the genetic memory thing from earlier — how could she remember what the aliens knew unless somewhere along the line they had a gene in common? In fact: it’s hers. Part of her cycling around through a new universe was so that she would know that humanity needed a calamity to kick them forward toward the universal consciousness. And so she genetically creates the aliens. But that’s not all! She clones herself and Tem, in her own womb, and then when they all get on the colony ship and drop into hibernation she sets herself to wake up early so she can do what needs to be done. First, she disconnects the propulsion end of the colony ship and shoots it off into space to evolve its “aliens.” Then she wakes her children and joins hands with her daughter, who is actually her, and gives her shared consciousness. (No, she hasn’t accomplished unity, because it’s still just her and not the universe.) She can’t make her son into her partner, so he’ll always just be her brother ... another cockblock. But she does put them into a shuttle bound back for Earth, and then kills off this iteration of Tem and herself, because it is necessary for her growth.

A lot of tragedy going on here! Don’t worry — even though this is the end of the numbered chapters, it’s not the end of Paige’s story. As soon as she’s an adult, she and Tem enlist in the space army to try to track down and kill the menace of the aliens (which didn’t exist yet, but remember she already knows it’s coming). She uses her billions of years of smarts to work her way into command of a fighter, and then puts it into position to be captured by the aliens. But she’s got a radio in her pocket that basically EMP-bombs the aliens’ genetic code and kills them all. Then they fly the alien ship back to where Paige knows their home planet is (the one she sent them to in the first place) (and yes, she needed an alien ship to make it through their defenses undetected) and plants a bomb made of green crystals on the surface, one strong enough to destroy the planet itself. She intends to set it off herself, but surprise! Tem stowed away in her shuttle, and here he cuts off his foot so that she can’t make him leave, so that he’ll save her life and be the one to perish when the alien planet explodes.

Obviously this is the end of Paige’s career in the military, as well as the end of her hanging on to a love that wasn’t ever supposed to be. She finds a home with a primitive people on a distant planet, where she learns to weave rugs with such clarity and scope that the local shaman asks for a meeting. To get there, Paige has to hike for six days, each day overcoming another step on the journey to universal oneness. When she gets to the elder’s house, no one is there but a ten-year-old kid, who slowly reveals himself to be the elder, one with the universe, and tells Paige that she’s almost there if she will just accept it. And she starts to feel it, more strongly than ever before, strongly enough that she does finally believe him. When she leaves, the wind kicks up the surrounding dust, which forms into the shape of Tem, and they leave the physical realm hand in hand, together in love at last.

I know, it’s pretty sappy. But The Starlight Crystal is a solid synthesis of everything I liked about Pike’s early years, brought back with the skill (and, yes, some of the tropes) he’d develop over a decade of writing. It’s the love story I liked about the earlier lonely sci-fi novels, enough mysticality from the later stuff to make it feel more heavy and more real, and it ties together better than a lot of his other recent work. Maybe the math doesn’t hold up, but the feeling of want, of love, of a need to belong, does.

[d00dt00nz]

Obligatory promo stuff at the top because it sucks and I hate it and let’s get it out of the way! follow me on twitter where I’m active, check me out on spotify for music, or like my facebook for sparse updates on music stuff. Thank you. The Cover art is by Ellie Tison

This one’s a lil bit long so I’ll put it behind a break

A while ago I posted about a song that was called The Howl that Lay the Canyon Bare. I mentioned that there were a few false starts on that song. One of those songs was a ripoff of Jackson Browne's The Pretender. Basically, while I didn't like the song, it became some kind of freakish mushroom creature. It budded its spores and they grew into their own creations. There was another song that came from it but it's not very good and I didn't use it. This song, however, did.

Basically it came from me wanting to write like, a fast paced and kind of old fashioned rock song. Not necessarily a standard blues rock structured song, but maybe something that was had the same force and power. My old song had some lyrics that I liked “I'm gonna get a good job in the city, I'm gonna buy a big screen tv/I'm gonna make a lot of friends and forget their names, 'cause they don't mean much to me”. Sometimes I think it's a shame for lyrics to go to waste because I always have a pretty tough time of writing them. A lot of times I'll just pluck lyrics from unused stuff, which is a little annoying because then I can never use that unused thing.

That lyric was written while I was still working at the RESP place and I was feeling pretty miserable and gross. I felt evil. I wanted to write something gross. More recently when I actually wrote this song proper, I was feeling a little less evil, but still very aware of those same evils. This was back in Febuary when my boss had recently laid off everyone except me. The amount of work hadn't reduced. He'd essentially used Coronavirus as an excuse to save a few bucks on his business. To this day, we don't have any masks, sanitizer, or gloves. The car the company gives me is literally falling apart. I have no right rearview mirror, the transmission is broken so that sometimes the engine just revs but the car doesn't move, the AC is broken, the winter tires are still on, the entire car shakes all the time, and up until recently it'd stall if you took a turn too sharply. If you can recall that time in Febuary, it was also when there was a whole asinine debate in the media about how many deaths were “acceptable” to keep the economy going.

Obviously I know that capitalism is “evil”. We all know that somewhere in the back of our minds, and saying it in that way (especially online) is pretty trite. At some point I started reading books about socialism in my spare time. I don't claim to be an expert, I couldn't make it through Kapital (that fucking thing is like a thousand pages and he spends the first 200 talking about a coat). I just want you to understand that it is something that I don't just invoke for cheap jokes. I think it'd be a good thing. Anyway, the evils that capitalism is based on really started to show their faces around that time. We had to let people die because we couldn't let the system slow down. A lot of liberal leaning people like to begin and end the conversation with “greed”, as if so many problems could be solved if we fixed the individual, personal problem of greediness. Maybe that'd go a long way if we could somehow magically shame people into good behaviour, but the way things are set up means you'd have to convince the people who make the rules to act against their own interests. The whole idea is silly.

The entire idea behind a neoliberal model of capitalism is a lack of true accountability. Kurt Vagnathghet (note to me, fix this spelling later when you have internet. Or don't and leave it in as a dumb hilarious joke) has a little part in Cat's Cradle where a brilliant engineer relinquishes his position as president because he is uncomfortable with authority – he'd rather be told what to do. The narrator wonders why until he begins delegating tasks to the engineer and realizes that the engineer has now managed to detach himself from his own humanity. He simply has become a cog in a system that sustains him. He is free of any real accountability because nothing is his own decision. He simply carries out orders because he must in order to maintain his own place in the world. That's kind of like the model we have today. Everyone is beholden to someone. Even CEO's are beholden to shareholders. Even shareholders are beholden to other shareholders. They cannot act against their own interests because there will always be somebody to replace them waiting in the wings. Yes, they make the rules, but they don't make the rules collectively, which means that if they stop “playing the game” then they'll lose what they have to somebody who is. I'm not saying I have sympathy for these people, I'm just describing the mental gymnastics that this system demands. I don't believe that people are inherently evil or selfish, but I do believe that we have a system that benefits those who are selfish and punishes those who are selfless. It's a self sustaining system where nobody is really in charge of their own life and the only real way to feel any control over your situation is to become vile – and the more vile you become, the more control you feel. It's not a question of staying true to your values, it's a question of how evil will you allow yourself to be.

Of course this only applies to people with that ability in the first place, as in people who are white, from a wealthy family, live in the western world, that kind of stuff. In my more unhinged moments I consider this about myself. I don't know if I could ever be in a position to take advantage of people, but what if I could? How much would I be willing to screw people? How immoral and wrong would I act if it meant a life of comfort? What if I just started scamming and hurting people? What if I “played the game”? How amoral would I allow myself to become before it wasn't worth it? These are questions I don't know if anyone can really answer. It's disturbingly easy to take an opportunity when presented with one. I'd like to say that I would stay true to myself, but would I? Would anyone?

Over the course of history, our ruling class effectively managed to replace the task of governing with a series of complex and often injust or imperfect systems. Over time, even the highest powers in the land have become beholden to something – something that is no longer even human. Something incapable of moral judgments because it does not think. It turns out we were living in the matrix a long time before computers were invented (That's really corny but let me have this one. I want to feel cool okay?). They created this system to absolve them of responsibility, and in doing so have rendered themselves powerless.

I wanted to outline this grotesque reality and my own personal worries in the most grotesque way possible. I didn't want to create nu metal, so I went to the second most grotesque form of music: 70s rock and roll. I wanted to have this angry frantic energy. It was really fun to record because I rarely get to just have straight aggressive 8th notes like I'm some sort of punk. It's also nice to just crank up the volume and the compressor and have a good time with distortion and different guitar tones. I love the dry sound that I was able to get. I do have to say, it's tough to keep that tempo and energy up for an entire song.

Vocally it's not the most difficult song, but a bunch of fun to sing. You get to be really aggressive with your delivery, and there's a bit of a showiness to the melody. For better or for worse, it's got that musical theatre kid energy to it with some old fashioned sounding musical phrases. I kinda like it for that. The lyrics are really unpleasant, so it adds to the fun where I can just say all this ugly shit and have this frantic energy behind it. At one point the compressor I was using did something weird on the vocal take, and it really jacked up a particularly deep breath I was taking. I decided to leave it in because it added to the vibe. I thought it'd be a weird quirk. Like the sound of somebody doing a big fat line of coke. Just getting fucked up.... Real twisted shit.

On the chorus I decided I wanted to add a little bit of variety and put in some sax backing. It was supposed to mingle with some vocals, which would have been a cool effect but the effect never really came through. I'm still not 100% on how to get a good sax sound out of a recording. At any rate, it does give this big echoy chaotic sound which I was pretty satisfied with so I left it in.

The solo section, I'm not so much a fan of. I think the guitar solo I did was pretty bad and amateurish sounding. There's this big buildup and then it's like this stupid meandering guitar solo that sounds like a 14 year old did it. I got my brother to record a guitar solo, which is technically a much better guitar solo, but honestly I wasn't a huge fan of the feel he went with in the context of the song. It felt a little bit too surf-y, and he didn't use any distortion. I kept it in and combined the two, which helped make things feel a little bit better, but I'm still not big on the part. There's also a harmonica bit. I kinda broke down and went back to my old standby of “well let's just make this part really noisy” which is a little bit of a crux, I admit.

In general I like the song. It's fun. It's fast, it's mean, and it breaks up some of the more introspective stuff. As well, I've just been feeling really uncomfortable with releasing an album of introspective naval gazy music. Like, I get it, I don't really have a platform. It's not like many people listen to me. Still though, there's so much awful shit going on in this world right now that I'm fortunate enough to be mostly sheltered by. I haven't participated in any protests either. I feel like I have to talk about it. In the end though I'm just busy with this self absorbed bullshit. I'm glad, then, that there's something political on this album that captures that feeling. I hope to be a little bit more worldly with my songwriting. I've done at least two very personal albums, and two high concept albums, I hope to maybe turn my focus outward into the world next time.