Nothing much going on. Got a 'verse simmering away in my head for my man far away; have only written one scene in it though. Really need to sit down and write more. I miss my man . . </emo>

Also wrote small snippet storystarter for a Trek fic. Mirror!Spock!Prime goes into hiding after his empire is overthrown by the Klingon/Cardassian alliance; when Romulus is in peril, he thinks he sees his chance to rebuild his power base (saving a planet oughtta be worth some political capital with the natives, right?) Unfortunately for him, he fails and gets chased into his own red-matter singularity by some angsty rihannsu -- err i mean ROMULANS -- and ends up in a near-identical universe, jetlagged about a hundred years behind his own . . gee, sounds a bit familiar, yeh? **rolleyes** ANyway . . want to write what happens in the mirror of the rebooted universe. . probably I won't actually go anywhere with it, we'll see. Anyone seen any good reboot!mirrorverse stories yet?

Bleh. So tired. Finally going back to bed.

current pet peeve:

They are not alternate. fucking. DIMENSIONS.

call them universes
or realities
or realms
or 'worlds' (as distinct from planets)
but not.
fucking.
DIMENSIONS.
a dimension is not a place. it's a direction. you travel TO a place THROUGH (or by, or along) a dimension. you don't travel TO a dimension. Gah! get it right, scifi tv writers!


that is all.

Had just finished rereading Tales of the Questor and was lying in bed thinking about Lux, all the different things it could do (or, so it seems to me, all the different kinds of energy it can influence) and so on and so forth. This got me thinking about Sparky people in Girl Genius and how maybe they were subconsciously manipulating something like lux (I decided to call it a metaradiation but that term's probably already in use?) and 'etching' or imbuing their components with something like circuits for this metaradiation, thus allowing their creations to do things that seem to warp the laws of reality. Supposedly this metaradiation would, at different points in its spectrum and when manipulated in different ways, do things like strengthen or weaken the electromagnetic field or fiddle with the gravitational attraction between some mass and all other mass or amplify any already-present visible light, etc. etc. . . . It would be energy that manipulates the nature of other energies.

But this was all getting pretty weird to me and it occurred to me that I, who have usually tested out as pretty smart and who likes to hang out with a computer technician (yey dad!) and who enjoys things that at least SEEM logically consistent, didn't even have a firm idea of what electricity was all about, much less how stuff like EM radiation propogates or even what exactly that MEANS, i just have a knack for understanding enough of a technical discussion from the context to at least pretend to understand the gist of it, and maybe it was about time I started to correct my woeful ignorance and actually understood the full significance of sciency stuff and therefore be able to actually tell whether or not crazy theories like metaradiation are even remotely plausible or instead hackneyed enough to destroy the most basic suspension of disbelief and make grown physicists weep.

So I rush of to Wikipedia, not knowing where the nearest handy appropriate textbook would be, and I start relearning about particles and fields and waves and so on and so forth, and this time a bit systematically instead of just from offhand comments, and my head starts to hurt and I make whimpery noises like a dog trapped in a corner as I try to resolve competing impressions and to understand WHY different particles have different properties like charge (I can kinda sorta grasp that different molecules have different properties because of the way their different shapes hook into each other but that didn't require me to really understand fields and when you think about it why do fields exist' I mean why SHOULD all matter be attracted to each other? and why should certain subsets of matter be even MORE attracted to each other or even REPELLED? over a distance? without touching at all? I can accept that it happens but how? why? aaagh) and while I'm often pretty good at understanding some types of interactions based on defined properties of items (bet you can't guess my favorite type of programming! That's right, it's object-oriented ftw!) I just can't grasp why those things should have some innate thing about them that is PROPERTIES, I mean at least with programming things have properties because we SAID so, but who said up and down quarks have the property of (+/-)1/3e, I mean I believe in God so obviously I figure HE said it but still how did He even make it WORK and **gasp gasp** gyaaah!

And I was at the point where I was literally* about to go steal Dad's oil paints and paint a great big sloppy "WHY?" in big red letters on the wall next to my bed, and in neat blue letters "Because." beside it, and scribbles of thinks like properties and interactions and definitions, all just to express my frustration and head-hurty-ness, and I realized that maybe defacing a wall in my parents' house (and probably staining my sheets) was not the best idea and I reeeally needed to do something to calm down.

So I woke up dad ("Help! I looked up electricity and now I can't stop thinking sciency things!!") and he laughed and gave me a hug and I snuggled in bed with mom and dad for a few minutes and got some much-needed perspective. Namely, that it doesn't really matter to your heart if you don't understand the basic underpinnings of the universe, as long as you can get hugs from someone you love.

*This means not exaggerated, yes I really was about to go do this.

----
Oh, yeah, and my meds still haven't arrived.

[some of you - probably a lot - will find this is all so much preaching to the choir. this is hardly a new idea after all. but it doesn't seem to have occurred to some people, and it hit me extra-hard today, soo . . ]


Culture a la carte.

And why shouldn't we each have one? Pick and choose bits that we like best from all the cultures we see out there, all the naming conventions (why not rename yourself?), all the styles of dress, the manners we offer to others (this isn't an excuse to get offended by others mind you), the things we eat, the roles we play. Sure it's fun to dress up in a kimono (well okay it's actually incredibly frustrating but rewarding) but that doesn't mean that you have to copy ALL of the style of "traditional" Japanese dress and you're not any less of a person/fan if you mix things up. And you don't have to go completely roman just because you like some of their ideas about bondservice. Pick and choose what you like.

It's not like religion, which claims to explain the truth about the universe and how we are supposed to act/are most likely to benefit by acting. Some religions, if they were even partly true, it wouldn't really make sense to mix them with other religions . . you'd get something so self-contradictory that it doesn't seem like it'd be useful for discovering the truth with at all. But culture, that's doesn't have to be so central to your worldview, does it? You can enjoy the steampunk look, and even manner of speech and composure, without genuinely believing in Aether. Or you can believe in Aether without liking steampunk, I suppose, but that goes back to your worldview and isn't really what I'm talking about here.

I think you really ought to be picky about what you believe. After all, if you get it wrong, you might have some tragic consequences. No matter how strongly you believe you can fly, will you really be able to do it?

But how you dress, how you act, what kind of job you have, what you call yourself, what things you do with your free time . . not just in roleplaying, but in your everyday life . . if what you believe doesn't prohibit it, why not pick and choose your own personal cultural style? Why do we think we have to pick up things whole-cloth? Who gave us the idea that we HAVE to be hardcore?

Mom has been wondering what, if anything, she should do for NaNoWriMo this year, and I decided to show her those '100 theme challenge' lists that have been floating around the internet since roughly the beginning of recorded time. I managed to find a few, but so many are just the same two or three lists reposted again and again and again . . it would be nice to find a big ol' list of lists, wouldn't it? "this list was introduced in 2003 as an oekaki challenge! This list was created in 2005 specifically for fanime short stories!" You know, that kind of thing. And since most lists can be used as starters for just about any kind of art, you could browse them all and pick and choose the things you like . .

Now I kinda want to write a 100 Themes/Topics list of my own. (100 Internet Memes? 100 Shades Of Grey? [<--not that last one, that's just silly])

Anyone know of anyplace that compiles challenge lists like that?

Off to recreate the wheel . .