[Caelum's Scrapbook] Use Your Words.

[Legion]

Dear Thread Title Editor, You know who you are. My purposeful lower casing of thread titles has gotten under your skin. It has driven you to extreme measures, forcing you to don your super hero cape and swoop in through a wormhole in the message boards to right all punctuation wrongs. Yes, I see what you did there. And you totally cracked me up. I heart you. Now stay out of my titles or one day, without warning, when you least expect it, there will come a content editing reckoning. Or, I dunno, a whoopee cushion. xoxo, katie.

[Caelum]

This is half a cow. No, really. It is not cocaine. That clarified -- it caused a little bit of question on another corner of the intertubes -- it is half a cow and it is mine. Local, grass fed, organic, flash frozen day it was slaughtered which happens to have been Sunday. As in this past Sunday. We have a farm in the family. I don't live there, but I am often at it. Right now I am relishing living on an island and having a farm in the family. It means I get fresh seafood off the docks, fresh beef from a neighbor, fresh veggies from another neighbor and so on. On the farm we have an abundance and variety of chickens (both the layin' kind and the eatin' kind whom we name things like dumplings and cordon bleu), turkeys, guinea fowl, rabbits, cats, hives of bees and a pond full of catfish and bass. Oh! Amid all that beef somewhere is a nine pound rooster. Nine bloody pounds. My mother in law put it in my arms like a freakin' toddler. /end random ramble - katie.

[Gossamer]

Isn't this how everyone gets beef?

[Legion]

This is made of awesome. Sneak preview: Nathan Fillion throws cash and makes out in public. You're welcome.

[Legion]

And the vid itself if you don't want to read the article. (Lazy butts.) You're welcome. Again.

[Caelum]

This was on my media feed this morning. It was written by David McCullough in his book John Adams. Following a fascinating debate undergone last night, it struck a chord. We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

[Legion]

Just a note. I am retiring from staff and leaving the lovely Lhavit and what is left of Denval in the capable hands of Assistant Storyteller Quasar and Regional Storyteller Tabarnac. This was not a foreseen event and I apologize for the abruptness. I am stepping down from staff for personal reasons, but I will remain a participant in the Mizahar community as a player. At present I am closing business. If there is anything anyone needs from me before my staff account is officially retired, please let me know as soon as possible. I have churned over a couple of moderated threads into guest mod under Caelum and am attempting to swiftly conclude a goddess thread. Plot notes and what not are being passed over, loose ends tied up and I'm pretty sure I missed a spot on the floor over there in the corner... No? Oh, well. Okay then. It has been a sparkly good time on staff.

[Caelum]

I'm in the middle of a research cauldron bigger than Kalinor's cave and sort of splashing around through it rather like I imagine someone wading through the putrid pitch at said cave's bottom. However, I stumbled across this curious little thing by Joshua Ellis I forgot about somewhere between pouring crap into the research cauldron and diving in. If you enjoy at all scifi, post humanists super insane manifestos, or anything else related to grim meathook futures, google: "Josh Ellis Grim Meathook Future", select grinding.be or technoccult or anything mentioning the Internet Jesus (read as: Warren Ellis) and pour yourself a double whiskey tall. Worth it. (Just be sure to finish the drink.) The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another. Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

[Laszlo]

Ah, this. I don't really have a strong opinion on this type of outlook, but I know a lot of people who do. There's a comic I read that touches on this. This is to be taken in good humor. The comic features dark, often self derogatory humor. It's meant to be self aware.



Personally, the religious war/singularity futures are all pure fantasy to me. I think the trends of recent history strongly indicate where the future will actually go. Well have more touch screens, thinner TVs, more west world activism over ethics, more third world conflicts over gender and religious equality.

And we'll always have 9/11 truthers and end-of-the-worlders. Hell, we've had the latter for millennia. Somehow, we're still here. I don't think humans are as stupid as people want to think.

[Colombina]

Interesting stuff! Not with a bang, but with a whimper. I am more surprised many people don't ponder the future of their own life, the inevitability of age and death, nonetheless the future of the world as a whole. First world countries inhabit the Brave New World model of distraction fueled by comfort and chemicals. I think more of that will come faster than the anarchistic Road setting. It's like this great quote from The Screwtape Letters" “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Also, I went to a Fischerspooner concert, vastly overrated, but still fun to watch. One member spun about the stage and vomited fake (I hope) blood. This is my deep commentary on the matter.