Climbing Rank by Default

You've been sitting at the stainless steel desk in the only private bunk for Army on the whole God ship. You're Captain - O3 -- just because you outlived everyone else who came in with you. They're all black tar floating in 0g somewhere. Somewhere far away. You probably breathed the bulk of 'em in your lungs during the two week slow-transport in the triple-duce which pulled you offa that rock before the bombers came in and laid nutcracker missiles into that tiny, airless, .3g world you spent the last four months fighting on.
But none of that matters now does it. You don't even know your senior NCO's. One look at them and you see yourself what, six months ago?
Your brain doesn't work right, all the chips they put in it after that explosion from a dragon gun ripped through your helmet. Yeah, instead of becoming a vegetable they made you a hard case autodidact. You find yourself saying words like "autodidact" like it was the most natural thing in the world. Well you ain't in the world no more. And ain't nothin about you natural neither.

So you look at the plan, the attack formation for the next day. It doesn't make any sense at all but it's what the computer is telling you to do. You don't do what the 'puter says then you get a court martial. They don't terminate you ... no, that'd be "cruel and unusual". They just wipe your mind, man. You come back a blank. Same rank just no memories. You're more a computer than Mother who puts you to sleep with her twilights and soothing words that lull you to sleep.
As you step into the drop capsule your heart doesn't even skip a beat. You're gonna stay at a calm 60 right 'till the door opens and you're in the air, dumping chaff behind you, looking at a screen that shows you where all your boys are ("boys" -- half of 'em are women in their late 40's with new "sleeves" or bodies of 24-year-old athletes on a good day but with unbreakable titanium ceramic bones and energy reserves for days). Your boys are all good. The jump is clean. Until you take fire from the ground.
It's mostly harmless. The chaff is there to confuse them. But a couple of the green arrows on your display go red. There's two more minutes 'till your platoon is on the ground. No corpsman can get to the red-status in your airborne 'till they hit ground.
+++++
After mopup, Mother decides to bring you all back upstairs to her hold. A robot plays a game of charades with you to see how psyops might have messed with your brain. Jimmy learned that if they transmitted the sound of a baby crying it really got on our nerves, so we were blacked out except for the screaming sound of an infant for 3 days on that rock.
It's prescription time. Your medibot makes a quick consultation and sends you on your way with an injection of nanobots to keep you smooth with your new post-traumatic stress. They've assigned a cat to your room. It's still in its box so you let it out. Your chit card has rations for the animal who mostly sleeps on your bed. That's how they practice active psychiatry on firebase Io -- giving you a cat.

My Punchlist

Anthony Jones is designing and building our space helmets. Here he is in his off-hours:

I love punchlists. Here's the punchlist for the audio fixes in Battle: New York Day II. Note that I don't have to agree with these notes, I just have to do them. We need one of those Foley floors in the vocal booth...

(18) 01:08:08  -     01:08:52………...lack of foot sounds

(20) 01:12:08  -     01:12:10…..…….lack of voice

(22) 01:16:27  -     01:16:30………...lack of woman’s screaming

(28) 01:33:54  -     01:33:56…………overlap and echo voice / lack of voice

(30) 01:34:29  -     01:34:33…………blur voice

(31) 01:35:03  -     01:35:05…………volume down of voice

(37) 01:48:04  -     01:48:07…………lack of sound

(47) 02:06:16  -     02:06:18…………lack of sound

(49) 02:09:38  -     02:09:40…………lack of screaming

(50) 02:12:29  -     02:12:31…………lack of voice

(59) 01:47:30  -     01:47:31…………lack of voice

Plus, we need someone to do post-production sound for us. I can teach you. I can't pay you. I just don't enjoy doing it myself. I'm too busy sitting in my hottub with my cigar and gold chains.

Drink Me

So, I'm on Pinterest. I have no idea what to do with it though. They have a "no nudity" rule. I have no idea why that is.

I'm blowing another $450 so that I should get myself a new i7 computer next week. The CPU chip I wanted ain't available, but there's another chip that is available and it's only $450 more expensive. Yay me.
There comes a part toward the end of my day where I look and see that there's no way I'm getting any more work done. Then this pig appears and smiles at me and tells me to come outside and play ball with him. Miniature baby elephants, like Mylar balloons, float up by the ceiling and giggle their collective way down the hall. It's at this point, shockingly, that I think to myself "Maybe I just need a drink".

Breathe In

You make sergeant but you didn't sign up for this crap. Next stop is LT and then things get even worse. Some robot goes 20-questions with you and you're tired and get pissy with it and all of a sudden they rotate you back to a fetid hole called "New Philadelphia" two thousand AU's out from the nearest fighting.
Nearest fighting? Jimmy is everywhere, man. You hear rail guns cracking down the streets of NP every day. The MP's here see more combat than some of the rocks you've been on where the Skinnys were dug in deep and you had to dig 'em out with backhoes.
You can't sleep without knocking on your HUD to twilight you. You hear someone outside your door and you just know its a Skinny ghost coming to get what's his. Your own nervous system goes from zero to a hundred in less time than it takes you to blink. You're out of bed, crouched in the dark, a knife in your hand as long as your hand (this is why they don't let you take weapons back to a civilian town.) You blow through the door, figuring that they won't be ready for you to be outside the door, right? They're coming for you while you're in your bed, in some rathole downtown New Philadelphia hotel overlooking the cesspool of a river that has so much bacteria in it they don't even let humans within a hundred meters of the thing.
And as you spring through the door thinking you're going to take a count of how many there are, kill the one with the gun nearest you and then kill another one before kicking the third (fourth?) Skinny in the head, you find yourself lying on the floor with your knife at the throat of a deep emerald-green female (female? Right? Who can tell when they have their clothes on?) She's the maid, delivering towels to the wrong room.
And the MP's come and you mumble your apologies and they nod like they've heard this a thousand times before until one of them takes you aside and says that she'll drop the charges for an M-note and "that's just how things work around here" so you hand the MP some plastics from your wallet and he slips them to her and everybody goes home.

Two weeks later the bar downstairs at the hotel is blown apart just after 2am and they say it was one of the maids. Was it your maid? Did you have your knife at her throat? Would it have even mattered? Jimmy would have just sent somebody else to do the job. It doesn't matter -- out there or back in the NP. Nothing you do will win this, lose this, or draw it to a bloody tie so anybody can go home.

Valentines Day Hound

This smiley dog says "Happy Valentine's Day!" She is Chien, my sister's dog, sometimes known as "Doggit".

New Coda

"In my demure barbie-doll nudity, I pick up the big gun, and a cigarette, which I light in the burning flames of the space shuttle. Taking my red wig off and tossing it into the air, I say, in a Marcus voice, "time to play human. " And I blast the red wig with my big gun like a Englishman shooting a clay pigeon, but creepier."

Right now we don't have a shuttle, all beat up and in pieces, in order to make this shot. We'll hopefully figure out something. By Sunday.

I suppose I could ask the writers about a new coda to Android Insurrection. But neither of them believe they actually wrote the movie at this point so it's a bit like kicking a dead horse.

Make Human is an open-source project for making 3D models of humans. Which is very cool. I don't have time to deal with it but it's very cool. Nathan Vegdahl turned us on to it.

A Coarse Grey Film

Late in '52 the Skinnys started getting issued dragon guns their techs had come up with. The self-detonating plasma shells would tear through our armor like water. Marines would joke about "a fine red mist" but the mist wasn't fine, and it wasn't red. Coarse and black. You carried more tar in the 'draulic system in your suit that you had blood. Between the lubricating oil, the solar-masticating sludge, and the coolant you were a mass of plasticized goo just waiting for a plasma hit on patrol.

They had to hit you close. So nobody would let Skinnys surrender anymore. No way you're gonna let 'em in the perimeter, right? Command hated that. But sometimes they got in. Command hated that more. Sometimes they got in and they got out, nobody know how. Like ghosts.

Mittent

Here's some information I need intermittently.
My primary DNS on ivhosting.com is:
http://ns40.anyservers.com/
My secondary DNS is
http://ns41.anyservers.com/

This is a bunny. Apparently you're not really supposed to wash them.

Kompozer is an open-source web editor.

Easy Company Takes a Breath

The worst though is when you've taken a mortar round or a laser cuts into your armor. The armor seals itself up -- by injecting you with a twilighting morphine substitute and chopping off the offending limb where the breach is. So now you're a paraplegic and lying on your back in some kind of bio slop the suit juices up for you -- settled deep in a pile of armor that's the other guys in your unit, some better off, some worse than you -- in the cargo hold of a landing craft on its way back to a medical ship.
But this won't be your ride home. No. Even if the phosphorus cracked through your helmet and took away half your brain: your armor sealed you up good and stiff and "you're in the Army now boy - we just need you breathin'" and you know that's not even true.
So the robot docs back on the medvac ship patch you up and they make sure your skin tone is the same on your new arms and legs because if it ain't that just freaks guys out. And they put a couple organic chips in your brain complete with solid organic armor plating and tell you you're better than new and because of that -- because of how you suddenly know how to work your Advanced Weapons Systems and can even do a rudimentary job of piloting one of these little drop boats -- they give you a promotion and now you got fresh meat under your command. Fresh kids who haven't been in zero gee for more than a week and bumping off walls and throwing up their lunch 'till they learn to take their greenies before chow time and they don't know anything about AWS or how to get out of a drop ship in less than 12 seconds but now you do so you gotta explain all the stuff the robots back at the hospital just injected into your mind. Teach it.
They got you. There's only two ways you're getting home, boy, and that's either by winning or getting blown into such small pieces even the 'droids can't put you back together again. You wonder which is worse.
You don't need shark anymore. The biomech in your brain will do that for you. You crawlin' up the walls, so amped up on fear and adrenaline that you wanna open that hatch -- just blow open the bolts and say "sayonara" to the idiot robot they'd send after you in cold, dead, space? You just make a selection on your new HUD. Just roll back your nerves so you're smooth.
Then you start to like it. No black-market mack for you anymore, boy. You want to get high? It's right there -- just roll up the HUD, sit back and relax. You gotta be awake and tight and ready for whatever the jimmies want to throw at you, just hit the button and you're ready to go.
Now they really do own you. Because if you go back home you won't have this. How could you go home when you could live like this?

Listing My Problems

I like the term "Imaginary Opera".

I'd like to start an imaginary opera company.
The "inverse square law" as it applies to lighting.
I need someone to run my opera company. And to run a record company with Tyrannosaurus Mouse.
Maybe I need some viral videos.
Yeah. That's the ticket.

That might work but I keep looking dorkier and dorkier all the time.
Plus I need a full-time animator and compositor. And I need money. A lot more money.
Where did I leave that Lotto ticket?

Europa Firebase

You're blacked out now. They always do that before a special op. You can feel it. But your motor coordination is just perfect. They dial back the high so you aren't loopy. But you're not allowed to take notes once you go into the operations room -- that's the whole point. No witnesses.
This way there's no way for you to remember the mission. They'll keep you popped, feelin' good, and ready to fight. But you won't remember. You won't remember if you live. I guess if you die you maybe remember but who are you going to talk to?
Some of the guys look at you with eyes rolling into their heads. They're gonna need more shark to stay awake for the op. A medic will be by to set them up. Everybody will be sharp and frosty by the time the bay doors open. Cool and crispy.
So one day you do something really stupid. You bring a memo into the ops brief. And you write down the nonsense they tell you.
You'll be flying thirteen meters off the surface for over 2300 clicks. You can't use computers, gotta fly it all manual. But hey, you're not a pilot and right now you're feeling so good from the good stuff flowing in your veins and up in your brain that you don't care. You're just loading munitions and keeping it tight.

They give you a taste of shark. The replicators in your brain will only last for about 13 hours -- not the permanent kind. But they keep you going good behind your 80mm guns, all lined up nicely.
And you can wait. Suddenly you have the infinite attention span of a computer. You'll learn French. You'll take courses on Calculus with your buddies. But you won't remember any of it while you're in blackout..
But you sneak out the details of your mission. The stuff you wrote when you were in the black.
You look at this crap and you say "This was me?"
Did I do these things?
And when you've read it four or five times you say "Is this the kind of man I am?" Could you really have done those things?
Because you had. You had.

I don't want to hear any of your nonsense

about this being a bear with a fish in its mouth.

It's a WOOLLY MAMMOTH!

And that's all.

Fidelis

My little brother Greg produced this video for Fidelis. It's pretty brilliant.

Tears at the heart-strings.

Gloves and Boots

Not Puss and Boots. Totally different thing.

This was a toolbox which I used to use with my location sound setup. And now you can look at the mess on my desk too.

Here are the small version of the gloves. I don't know whether they'll be the right size on Rebecca Kush:


Here are the medium and large versions of those gloves:



I might just get a pair of medium and two pair of large and tell people "If the glove fits, you must commit" to being cast in the picture.

Now. Boots. There's these things called "Mickey Mouse" boots which the military use. I dunno.