Category: random

Our dinner table, last night, was the scene of a lively discussion about UFOs.

The current term used is UAP–Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena–but I prefer the term UFO, as UAP makes me think of the upper peninsula of Michigan, rather than mysterious objects in the sky.

At any rate, I bet a large number of people these days are talking about UFOs due to the information recently released by the Department of War (one collection of documents on May 8, and a second collection on May 22). The DoW further stated that they will release more information in the future as “they are discovered and declassified, with tranches posted every few weeks.” I wonder if a lot of the conversations are similar to the one at our dinner table?

Our conversation, conducted by three sons and two parents over a dinner of spaghetti and salad which yours truly made, centered on what the possible explanations are for the UFOs. Fairly standard question, I would imagine.

Philosophical Boundaries?

If you set aside all philosophical preconceptions of the entire gamut, from atheism to various forms of spirituality, there are only four possible answers to the question: unexplained natural/weather phenomena, secret human/government technology, extra-terrestrials, spiritual activity. I might be missing an additional potential answer but I can’t think of anything else.

We didn’t spend any time on options 1 and 2. You could build a case for drone-pranks as part of option 2, but that answer doesn’t work too well with some of the sightings over mid-ocean by naval aviators, etc.

Instead, we focused on options 3 and 4. The argument careened into ad hominems from time to time, but it basically revolved around whether or not the behavior of the UFOs broke the laws of physics in any way (such as lack of observable friction), whether or not this simply means human understanding of physics still has a long way to go, and whether or not spiritual activity would have any reason to mess about creating UFO behavior.

In terms of spiritual activity, most of our conversation–which really had turned into a raging argument about halfway through–assumed malicious spiritual activity. Demons.

Mayans, Aztecs and…

One of the more interesting perspectives on the demons-as-UFOs argument is the parallel between sky activity now and sky activity back during the time of the Aztecs and Mayans. The Mayans, for example, had several sky gods they revered, such as Itzamna and Kukulcan. These gods were nasty pieces of work for the most part, despite the occasional good they were supposedly responsible for (such as Itzamna teaching people how to farm). The descriptions of human sacrifice common to both those civilizations are extremely unsettling. Not exactly the church you want down the street.

If I put on my story hat, it’s pretty easy to see a narrative of some dark god playing a long game. Get the natives running around several thousands of years ago, and then come back in the modern era and see about resurrecting the same behavior.

On the extra-terrestrial side of the equation, we can argue that human knowledge is quite limited, the universe is quite large, and it’s certainly presumptuous to think homo sapiens of Earth are the only sentient beings in the multi-galactic neighborhood.

Enter the Steven

In a timely fashion, Steven Spielberg is about to release a UFO conspiracy thriller movie called Disclosure Day. A rather fitting production for the same director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The two films almost serve as book-ends for his career. I’m not entirely certain, but it sounds like Spielberg’s new film will contain the theme of Concept Normalization (I think I just made that term up): that is, how do you introduce an extraordinary concept to a society in a way that does not alarm the general populace?

Angels, demons, extra-terrestrials… whatever the source of UFOs is, they all intersect with Concept Normalization. Or Mainstreaming Madness. Frog-in-Boiling-Pot. Or whatever you want to call it.

Regardless of the answer, I think we still have some interesting things to learn. I’m pretty convinced the answer is not Leroy and his buddies stringing Christmas lights on drones and then flying them around at night.

Free science fiction and fantasy in February

Another collection of free ebooks in science fiction and fantasy, including my Fury Clock. Please take a look and see if there’s anything that strikes your interest.

Etymology or linguistics? Specifically, which branch of science (if is actually is a science) governs the study of linguistic expressions? Off the top of my head, I guess it’s not etymology, as that’s the study of individual words–origin, evolution, meanings, etc–as opposed to the study of phrases. I think.

So I guess that means linguistics. Though, I’m probably missing some other obscure branch of language study that isn’t linguistics.

Regardless! My apologies for being pedantic, but a question just “struck” me. Why do we use the phrase “strikes your interest” as opposed to “hits your interest” or “taps your interest” etc etc. Why the verb strike?

Sorry. That question appeared out of the blue. As if it was the tip of an arrow that some Grecian language-Cupid fired away at me for sudden and no reason at all.

All the World’s a Stage

All the world’s a stage, as the bard remarked. That was in As You Like It, and the ironic thing is that the world truly is a stage, whether you like it or not, so that particular truth does not exist as you like it. Truth simply exists.

There’s no other way to argue existence. There are only two views when you peel back the onion layers, weeping copious tears over the futility of your individual power when it comes to determining truth.

“But, alack and alas!” you cry, “there must be sparkly unicorns in my world! I demand it, as I am the captain of my fate!”

Well, sorry, no. No sparkly unicorns for you. Thankfully, one saving grace is that you are free to write stories or draw pictures full of sparkly unicorns. Go for it.

Anyway the first view is that blind chance is responsible for the existence and various arrangements and rearrangements of atoms that comprise the universe. That’s a tough one, as blind chance cannot produce meaning and meaningfulness. So, best of luck finding validation if you subscribe to that view. This might be one reason why people self-medicate (one reason among many, many reasons); it’s much easier to deal with the concept of universal meaninglessness if you are sozzled to the gills.

The second view is that there was a universe maker of some kind — a prime mover. This can range from prime mover concepts like the Greco-Titans, the Hindu pantheon, etc., all the way through to the big monotheistic concepts of the Judeo-Christian God and Allah.

Interesting thing about truth is that it is binary at its core: something is either right or wrong. It cannot be both at the same time. Which means that one of those views above is correct, and all the others are incorrect.

At any rate, what I really wanted to muse about is the stage and what’s the role of AI in terms of that stage. Is AI going to be doing some of the scriptwriting? Or will AI itself start acting on the stage? Perhaps it’ll start writing some of the soundtrack?

I recently started experimenting with Gemini. It is powerful, to say the least. Somewhat unsettling. I expect, given the rate of AI evolution, much of our entertainment content will be either completely AI-generated or AI will have a significant role in it.

One of my experiments was asking it to draw a rabbit dressed in a suit. Because, why not? Also, I have an affinity for rabbits as my family’s farming company lettuce label is Bunny and features a rabbit sitting sedately on the ground. Dreaming of lettuce, no doubt.

I then asked Gemini to take the rabbit drawing and animate it. Specifically, have the rabbit walk off-screen. Off the mini world stage that it found itself on. You can see the result here for yourself.

Of course, one of our goals now will be to avoid the Wall-E scenario.

October

…and the fields are stripped bare of all they wear.

“October” October–U2 1981.

I’m not much of a fan of the more recent U2 albums, but I do like their first five albums, from Boy through The Joshua Tree. After that, not so much. Rattle and Hum was their sixth album, and it felt like to me that they lost their raw, earnest soul from that point on. It’s hard to say exactly what happened. Perhaps a mixture of the more poisonous effects of extreme success combined with a change of perspective about God?

Pure conjecture on my part, of course. None of us have the ability to peer into someone else’s soul and definitely diagnose what’s happening within. True, you can make some pretty safe assumptions based on an individual’s fruit. “By their fruit you shall know them,” and all that sort of thing. On the extreme end of behavior, if someone is rushing about beheading people in the name of their religion, you can probably make a fairly dependable diagnosis of the state of their soul and where they’re ultimately heading if they don’t make an abrupt u-turn.

However, most people don’t behave in ways that, from the vantage point of others, precisely and irrefutably correlate to the state of their soul.

Frankly, I’m relieved that I’m not the Judge.

I’m just an aspiring writer with very little time to write. And getting older. It feels like I’m in the October of my earthly existence. If one believes in eternity–and I do–then the earthly stretch of years is quite short, and there’s really not much of a difference between January and October, let alone December. But, while we’re here on Earth, the months feel heavy and valuable with potential. Time feels important, as if there are many things that still can be done and should be done.

Speaking of that, a few writing updates.

I’m almost done with my six-year-long book project. Actually, I might’ve started it seven years ago. I can’t exactly remember. It’s basically done and I’m avoiding publishing it by spending some of that precious time fiddling with characters and details and trying to settle on a map that shows just enough but not too much.

This one is another epic fantasy. Not as serious and as deliberate as The Hawk and His Boy trilogy, but definitely not as madcap as The Fury Clock, though there is a slight bit of cross-over with The Fury Clock in terms of some similar geographical locations, a few very quick references to several characters, and some threads of shared history.

Average Hollywood Executive

I also recently finished a job for an NBC/Universal project. A film script co-written with a small team for a pre-existing Universal property. We were paid for the project (always nice) but the powers that be ultimately decided to kill the project. I’ve been told that this is quite common in Hollywood. Studios will happily throw money around commissioning scripts and then just as happily kill those same scripts when finished.

I suppose there are many reasons for that, ranging from script quality to mental health issues on the part of studio executives, etc, but let me quite humbly say that script quality was not the issue with our particular project. No. I think the reason why they killed it was more off in the realm of the Bermuda Triangle, belief in a flat Earth, too much soy in one’s diet, and/or having had one’s brain harvested by space aliens.

Happily, I’ve been pulled back into another script project, so that’s good. What’s not good is that this means I have less time for my own projects, compounded by the fact that I’m still working a full-time job (feel free to ask me about California water policy and regulations and I will bore you to recyclable tears that must be first cleaned to drinking water quality standards before being injected into an aquifer that has any nexus with potable water supply).

 

yogurt daze

I occasionally eat yogurt. I sometimes make yogurt from scratch. Quite easy, if you’ve never done it before.

Anyway, speaking of yogurt, a slightly puzzling thing happened yesterday at work. My office is in a renovated farmhouse on a ranch in the unincorporated area of our county. It’s a great old farmhouse, built in the 1890s and possesses all the original trim and architectural touches of that era.

Someone rang the front door in the morning. It was a pleasant enough lady who explained that she was working with a documentary film crew shooting just down the road on a strawberry ranch. She asked me if her crew could use our bathroom to satisfy the expected biological and digestive imperatives of life. Furthermore, she asked if they could use our office outlets to charge their various batteries.

The dual-questions caught me off-guard. Our farmhouse office is a private business that does not involve any interaction with the public (unless they’re stopping in to buy pies from our bakery in the off-season of winter).

I’m not a fast mental processor. In order to give myself time to think, I asked her what the crew was filming. She said they had come down from the San Francisco area and were filming a documentary on behalf of the Chobani yogurt company. Strawberries, you see.

I declined her request after she explained their reason of being. Cruel of me, yes? I don’t think so. Consider it tough love. There are plenty of porta-potties on that ranch for the strawberry harvesters. What’s more, the porta-potties are typically cleaned every day. Did the crew consider the porta-potties beneath them? As far as batteries, it’s simple enough to buy or rent a small generator if necessary for charging batteries. Or just bring extra batteries. Plan accordingly.

I don’t consider this kind of situation a Good Samaritan situation. Nope.

Yogurt daze. Sometimes I think most of California and half the country is in a yogurt daze.